Women and Men (187 page)

What followed wasn’t "in" either of their minds. Still doing workshops? seriously thinking of running for President? Yeah, yeah, on an orgasm platform, you know me, right out there in Macy’s window. But did Grace mean a single-issue platform? Oh an everything platform, an abundance platform, we’ll even include a department of patriarchy, and Rima could be assistant media secretary while we give the fields back to the people so
we
can do the grazing, and we’ll bring Maureen back into public life to be commissar of agriculture. "Listen, I got some guys here."

"Is it true you’re going into men’s workshops, Grace?"

Coming close now, and what was Rima’s new
last
name? Grace was supposed to be good at names. "That’s right, wall-to-wall: tonight’s the night."

"Aren’t you making problems for yourself?—I mean with nudity and the emphasis on sex."

"It’s 1977, dear. Can’t wait. Body-Self, remember? The men have more problems being with themselves than
we
do."

"Does this mean that you’re reversing your ground on segregation of the sexes?"

"Hey man," Grace heard the younger black man in the next room say softly and knew he was pointing.

"That was never my trip," said Grace. "Just a nationwide moratorium on relations, that’s all. How are
you
doing, Rima?"

Everything was wonderful, she heard Rima say.

"Every one of them is different," said the younger black guy in the next room, and Grace heard chuckling.

She should have this woman in front of her, she sounded about as orgasmic as her neighbor with the lonesome dog who couldn’t let go of the leash when the elevator door closed abruptly, leaving the dog on the lobby marble pointing (the
right
direction) toward a fantastically thin-bred gray monster-beauty leash-less and masterless and at the ready, while the leashed dog began to strangle and the elevator alarm went off. Pets needed to be jerked off
too
—but
off,
that is.

"So what are you doing with your spare time, Rima?"

"Oh you know me, Grace."

"Oh shit, Rima."

"Grace, I’m glad I’m a woman; I wouldn’t want to be a man."

"Well, whatever it is, I hope you’re doing it every day."

"I never know what’s kidding and what’s totalitarian."

"Oh, you’re either a top or you’re a bottom, dear."

"When’s a new
women’s
workshop starting?"

If she had this woman in front of her, she could lay a gentle hand on her, for God’s sake. "Next week. It’s not full. I’m broke. Lucille’s helping out. You don’t know Lucille; she’s got more brains than all of us."

"Is she in with you?"

"No, she can’t handle that. She’s a hospital administrator. I’m working on her."

"But what happened to the nationwide women’s bathhouse idea?"

"I decided to be President instead. I’m going into consultation at a decent hourly rate, Rima. We don’t get paid for what we know."

"Hanging out a shingle?"

"Sex consultation mainly. You know me, Rima."

"You don’t need a degree, Grace. Therapy with demo."

"Any information that needs to be shared, Rima; you can understand that."

"How’s Maureen?"

"She’s doing fine."

"That’s what I heard. I heard Cliff’s working with you?"

"For me," Grace said, and the hammering resumed, and she thought, Of course. Cliff standing nude except for a Nikon, like nose-box binoculars, taking photos like his own life depended on it—the long gray page-boy streaked with brown, her oldest New York friend and still a ram (ask him) especially when he said he wanted Grace to wear the pants and what ram ever went around wearing pants, he inquired, with words, words, words.

"I’ll let you know about the workshop, Grace. How many men are coming tonight?"

"Nine brave men, one of them a part-Sioux Indian
he
says—plus two reluctant flashers who are on the fence but may go the limit."

"How do you feel about a woman running a men’s nude workshop?"

"I’m glad it’s me."

"Have you checked them all out? Is it the Anvil Chorus?"

"You’ve got me on the chorus but we don’t divide the rodeo stars from the fence sitters."

"I meant the Anvil downtown." Rima just wondered if Grace knew what she was getting into. "Thanks for talking to me, Grace."

"I’ll send you a bill." Grace saw Rima lying down, a naked horizon, but it was Grace’s.

RENT IS THE PRICE YOU PAY PER UNIT OF TIME

FOR THE SERVICES OF A DURABLE GOOD.

"Do you think swings are consistent with socialism, Grace?"

"You mean you think the state should be running them? I’m pretty well orgied-out."

"I mean in their emphasis; that’s what I meant. I mean it isn’t exactly one big happy
family."

"Swings are anti-acquisitive. No one belongs to another person, O.K.? That’s why you need a space that isn’t bound by furniture. But I think we should hang up before we start a new interview."

She felt the woman’s fighting breath. "You sound like that woman in your workshop who’ll insist on two minutes of silence in the middle of a
conversation?
—it’s embarrassing."

"I’m ready for two
lifetimes."

She had to speak to these two dudes laying the carpet, only to
them;
but Rima went on, There was one other thing . . . and Grace knew its dynamic, which was all that mattered; she was braced for its content.

In the next room the hammer duet stopped and energy rose into her ears like a heat binding the beats ("One more thing, Grace . . .") of some future-size bongo or possible flashing of the menopausal current she was readying herself one day to ride: a new trip, after all, maybe on a blue mare by some reports ridden by her incarnation as that Navachoor love-addict energy-scientist hero of the buffalo tongue’s power, in the finest dried portions, to fuel change or so a number of people divined, including the Prince himself, who had grown in her heart since Lincoln had touched a power or a story in Grace that had been there all right, native Paiute as she surely was at least a small fraction to her fingertips or, the label came out of nowhere if there were such a place, Far-Orient Mountain-Tribe, air-expressed (as fast as credit-card payments by telepathy get through the mails) into her (no matter the distance) just as fast as her own sixteenth or thirty-second blood from the southwest territories of old America or other continents in her flesh—and as fast as Rima’s real reason for calling from behind the (of course closed) John door of Rima’s straining little spirit that was getting it on with the business trip, give her credit.

"Maureen said you ran a workshop at a prison; is that true?"

"Oh it’s very true, it’s so true—it was probably an all-time organic high."

"Orgasmic, Grace?"

"Money in the bank, dear."

"You had trouble with one inmate?"

"Yeah, yeah—one guy; don’t we all."

"Yes I
knew
it was a
men’s
prison. One wouldn’t necessarily assume it was, I mean in your case; I mean, just hearing ‘prison.’ "

"I like men, too. I just believe in segregation for the time being."

"I gather it was a masturbation workshop."

"We gathered information and exchanged it. We rapped. You can imagine all this from your experience. I told them weeping is like sex. You know those guys can’t put a curtain up, so they
gotta
go public. Energy level up to the rafters, Rima."

"I don’t really know what that
means,
Grace. But it was through Clara, right?—the wife of that Allende economist?"

"That
which
economist?
Maureen
didn’t tell you that. I found out I knew the legal liaison woman who goes up there twice a week; she got me in."

"How did you manage a masturbation workshop at a men’s prison?"

"We rapped. We exchanged information. It was beautiful."

"Who’d you have trouble with?"

"We reached an understanding."

"Thanks, Grace. I’ll call you about the workshop next week."

"Do what you want to do, Rima."

"I always do, Grace. Oh, one other thing ..."

Grace was glad, oh so glad, of the men’s experimental starting. She would handle it. It would be great. It would be tense and explosive. It would be strangely loving. Some of them didn’t
know
how to masturbate. They stroked too far down the shaft. And some didn’t know how to brush their teeth correctly. She wanted to say to Rima—but then did, "Sometimes I can’t stand women. Did you ever take that trip?"

"I don’t get the vibes on your ‘sometimes,’ Grace. But, you know, my mother—"

"I can’t hear about mothers and daughters any more. Oh shit, baby, you’re not all women." She was getting everybody else’s shit short-waved direct but not her own.

"What do you mean,
I'm
not?"

"Don’t quote me, Rima, I’m experimenting. That’s where the surprises are. Women never had the chance to just experiment."

The hammering resumed. Energy breathed away into the clammy phone, and what came back? Someday she’s gon’ be not
there
for some of these people.

"One other thing, Grace ..."

A fat woman loomed—perhaps an obsession of some of Grace’s workshop daughters—and Grace had encouraged this fat woman to take off her clothes and the woman said she never took her clothes off even in front of the television, which she watched four weekday afternoons, and had long ago given up expecting her antique-dealer husband to
tell
her she was fat.

": . . . I hesitated to ask . . ." said Rima, and it was part-Grace, part-Rima clogging the phone line.

A thin, athletic woman Grace knew was an as yet unknown woman who in future would come for help (validation, support), sat cross-legged and leaned toward a great dark-peach-colored goddess-candle and put a hand on her Romantics Anonymous tummy and groaned and cried like the gripe was in her gut; she said she rotated upside down sometimes, dizzy like pre-meno-pause, but she’s too young—and told Grace O.K. she had a smashing job now and was split from her documentary-director husband who needed her but needed her to be there because otherwise he couldn’t ignore her and she said Grace had helped her see that his way of having her was inside him, inside his chest, so he and she would live together but all she—God, all she could seem to want was to go back, she’d even had a fine, upstanding lover to give her a sendoff back to Hobby, her still not legally separated ol’ man (ouch, ouch, ouch)—so this must be the first time she had come to Grace. Had Grace forgotten her? Was she to come?—

"... one other thing," Rima was continuing, "since I have you here on the phone and you’re going to run for President: you gave your bike to a black kid, right? a messenger? autistic? retarded?—"

"It wasn’t my bike but that’s right I gave it to him. He’s retarded like Paul Revere was retarded. He’s right out there, thinking it through step by step as good as any feminist. He has trouble getting the words together, but you should read his notes. I love him."

"And he works for one of these reader-advisor spiritualist women who has a sister in the same racket up in the Bronx who just happens to be the one who was consulted recently by one of the doctors associated with that clinic Lucille works at because she told me he went because an opera-singer friend of his went to this woman on the advice of that woman Clara, the wife of the economist, who was in your workshop."

"You lost me there, Rima, but anything my people get up to is their responsibility, just like their orgasms, and it’s all orgasm anyhow."

FEMALE SEX PROSTITUTION FOLLOWS MARKET LAW

LIKE ANY OTHER PROSTITUTION EVEN [ . . . ]:

MANY BUYERS AND FEW SELLERS MEAN HIGH PRICES.

"Well, I only wanted to ask about this guy Santee, who’s in your workshop tonight, because you know he calls himself
Spence
when he’s at the prison talking to that con who didn’t dig your masturbation trip? and
Santee
when he’s renting your space to the messenger boy for his bike right next door to—if you can believe this—a warehouse theater that’s rehearsing something with music that no one can find out anything about except there’s a sign under the bell that says
LET IN
or something—
LET IN
because a piece was torn away—and Lucille’s doctor friend was seen coming out into the street arguing with this guy Santee, and if you can believe it this aura reader in the Bronx whose sister is your bike boy’s employer was seen going in and out of there, too."

Oh yeah, they were putting on some gay opera, Grace thought she had heard, so maybe she could dig opera after all if they only would not take it so seriously but she didn’t like sitting in a theater basically. "Listen, dear," she told Rima, "I know what’s going on, O.K.? Let me see it, when it’s finished, O.K.? No hard feelings. Everyone doing their thing. And by the way, Jimmy Banks isn’t
my
messenger boy; he’s his own."

The rug installers had not made a sound for minutes. Rima was saying she would be in touch. (Rima was lying that she would be in touch. A double lie—because she would!) Grace was hearing, like a word "We," a hollow noise in her words
Glad I know where you’re at
—knowing it was potential death she was passing through, and no words for it and no regrets; and through that hollow came such a heat of uncertainty she said the Prostitution Supply/ Demand formula again and there was still a blank in the middle of it—she reached one hand out to grab the cool chin-up bar in the doorway near this hall phone; the blood was going right out of her, but who could see it?, and Goddess-blood coming in at once but the deed was done and she’s hanging by both hands, and the older rug guy, gray of hair, brown of eye, appeared before her to report they had to go finish another job from last night that they didn’t get to do this morning and would be back sometime in the afternoon, and . . . —she doing some chins? Grace let go, she put a hand on his arm: "I got the men’s workshop coming in tonight, I absolutely got to have an operating carpet by six."