Women and Men (30 page)

"That was Sue?" asked Grace, as if Manuel knew.

"Nice-looking lady with light-color hair, green sweater. She was looking at the names by the house-phone. She waited for the elevator. She look at her watch and smiled at me. T don’t have much time,’ she said. I say, ‘Super’s coming right back.’ Elevator came and she went up."

"Yeah, that’s right," said Grace. It was going on again, her story being told back to her. When me they report to, it is me they report. She did not tell Manuel Sue had dark hair. People, it came to Grace, disappeared into people. Were they people? Someone arrived in her, but ancient or future, who knew?

"Nice-looking lady," said Manuel, his own trouble not forgotten. Not lumpy till you got their clothes off and hung up on silver hooks, inner thighs with not
Indian
writing on them but good old American, lower buttock, pockets of trouble in the undefended and deceptive flesh of the back. The elevator came. "I got to go. I didn’t eat yet." Up front. Bye, babe.

But which story was coming back? Sue and Clara lumped together. In the dark, heavy articles of furniture are all the same, she had said to the man who labored in his sleep. Not the same if you’ve seen them by candlelight. Each one is different, each convolvulus unique. She had a hundred and fifty color slides to show this astounding truth. Dark lips, pale lips; rich petals swaying in the breaths of desire; or fine, long narrow neat leaf-edges; the hooded point secret, growing through the whole body yet still, though distended, the same; or a pendulous pinkie half out of its hood like a cock with its own shaft that you’ll see even better coming downward to the hood if you shave. Get a one-thirty-second-Pawnee hard-on just thinking about it, about each and every one, all there on slides whether the male-designed Carousel projector worked or not. Plug in, turn on; the vibrations are light but right, the underground waters are felt faraway and the right hand guides the wave length in its grip toward those faraway waters. Find what is right for you. The soles of your feet together. Let power find
you,
if you have to play hard-to-get. Sometimes she thought there would be peace on earth if we would just learn to breathe. All alone we have to invent even that.

But the story was coming back, told back to her, and she didn’t know which it was. Prophetic meaning beyond words and in future so told back to her it came in a changed voice: hey get your bull voice gone public, had she become a man flown back in future to tell herself her bullish prophecies had been right on?, yet the voice telling her back her own story—do voices hear?—was hers but a person she’d mistaken for Lou the husband man she wanted to show who was really another and she and this other are not quite facing each other deciding whether to get each other’s attention and her story being told back to her is so unheard-of and astounding she cries out, "You see! You are what happens to you." But, crying
"Abundance
," she has to ask, Doesn’t what happens come
from
you? and if incredible energy-levels grow from cleansing and mental attitude/intuition that will
not
be brain-washed into turning thought/feeling into some legal/logical analysis headtrip, are these strong, changed women coming toward her (who are thanking her, exchanging information, letting the patriarchal wars go on in the jungles and up against the Wailing Wall), yes these women
are
what happens to
and
from Grace, let’s not get into heavy argument, though new thought regarding how a natural female up-front aggressiveness can love and really change competitive
male
aggressiveness, is what’s needed now. But this story told back as if she didn’t know it already proves familiar like the stranger telling it to her in future: an elite Indian healer who stood with her and they saw a mountain lean toward them; a story with an old couple chatting not quite communicating; a brother delivering milk, entering her cocoon bedroom one Sunday morning to compare what they called "Indian writing" where the bed had impressed soft warm cuneiforms on tummy and ribflesh, or entering her bedroom at one
A.M.
once to tell her everything, leaving on his motorcycle, coming back married, becoming someone she didn’t like anymore but then becoming a father weeping at her face-to-face so he almost truly saw her his sister and that her grief over the death of his boy her nephew on a motorbike was also great; a story including a woman escaped, a marriage that did not quite speak, the threat of Nothing-Happening/Death, the message of life lived by the bearer but with something missing so her being known to a thousand half-known people was a story she couldn’t ever tell, she was what all these other people had of her: her dayful coming to a point (like your
head,
she would say to her brother cuddling in bed, joking) while the old reliable hum—Fly me—rests against a corner of her, spreading her
and
bunching her as she knew it would—why, be my guest, why just come on in, why you just have me.

But all these people in the story just now retold through Manuel wanted apartments in this turn-of-the-century building, all coming toward Grace Kimball as if she had asked them? You and only you made your home, and mucus could be an amazing building material, we produce enough of it, don’t be squeamish, and she wasn’t getting into some discussion with Maureen about these zooplankton Clara called appendicularians.

But
which
story now retold through Manuel? Not
this
story quite: for Clara was not Sue, she was frightened and let herself be posed as Grace’s potential friend. Which Sue would never have done, the vibrator’s hum almost said. For Sue
was
her friend. But Clara might be, too. Grace was much taken with her, she knew things, she kept her own counsel which still wasn’t good enough. For she had come to Grace Kimball for more, and, when taken for Grace’s friend, didn’t deny it—it might come to be true. Yet she had a home and had said nothing about moving into this building. And, observant as Clara was, hadn’t she noticed the Superintendent with "Super" on his pocket? Well, the answer, hummed in its own body tongue by the microphone with its ear that doubled as a mouth bearing on her flesh-and-bone Gaiete Parisienne, acid Rock, My Old Kentucky Home, in its own sweet time, was that Clara was in Grace’s periodic cluster and, shy of phones, maybe afraid, had come here drawn not just to eye-contact with Grace but through Manuel, who would by coincidence see Clara as Grace’s friend, so Manuel, who had at another time today left his post at the door and for whom three men tenants, Mr. Goody and the other two, would go to bat tomorrow with the landlord, had joined the convergence of her periodic cluster until the meaning of her day approached, and she almost had it, Take me as I am—still, words in another mouth that was distinctly fleshly. It was coming toward her and going away from her, but nothing she would tell the women in the workshop.
They
needed to hear about give and give/take and take—needed to hear
themselves
—marriage
con came:
and between the coming toward and the going away was a nothing which (something like
We Are All Just Voices
was retelling her) you had to keep trucking until you saw that this void where everything was happening in her life yet nothing, was nothing; so, like the heavy set gray-haired dude with the curving look today that was between Surprise and Recognition, there was really Nothing standing between the coming toward and the going away. But she didn’t quite have it, didn’t quite get what it was that came after her—she the future—orgasm peace. Until, coming or on the point of it coming, her softening eyes moistened the tall pier glass (my dear) across the candle-lit room, so it was wings taking her away—but her own—one throb, but that didn’t quite end—a woman-minute of her constant self: which was not enough: she saw that her day was lived, and this was as far as she could go, meaning coming to the point, and, given by her, not wholly in her hands, like the glimpse of the heavy set man in the street who didn’t turn toward her, or the woman Maya who published a book and brought it to Grace and when Grace said, "Join the ranks of successful women," Maya in the heart of her eyes didn’t really like the words but couldn’t come out with it, a meaning happily out of Grace’s hands, like the life of the stranger-woman Clara who had stood at Grace’s threshold, the light coming off her face and the light itself saying, Listen, my life is at stake, can I speak to you of it?— and didn’t speak till Grace asked if it was about the workshops. For Clara, whose address was upper
West
side not upper East, had come to this large apartment building looking for someone else, who had been turned by Convergence and the Goddess into Grace Kimball.

dividing the unknown between us

He was not waiting for her but he looked forward to her coming home. His whereabouts were well enough known no matter what he did: a New York apartment for him and his wife, for the time being theirs. He was reading the inmate’s letter by the living-room window and listening with his one open ear to the voices of the Saturday-afternoon opera. They were richly preoccupied with themselves and came from far enough away off there in the otherwise deserted bedroom to be at a nice distance. The telephones were in the bedroom and kitchen, which was the American way of consolidating atmosphere and action and privacy. Here where he was, bright-honed window panes shivered and warped, bashed by Saturday winds old and seagoing bearing endless light, and they seemed to come into his plugged-up sick ear from his good ear. He felt not quite alone. He had a force in mind, but he could not quite have identified it even if someone had offered to torture him. Private life in some unexpected simple way was what it was, and he was willing not to betray it. He was reading the letter from prison when he felt the gloved hand upon his head.

It was nothing he would own up to—this private life in all its power— certainly not testify to. But he knew it well when he felt the surprise hand familiar on his head; and had known it before the two phone calls, but especially while he had let the second one just ring. Knew it like an over-slow, a
lifelike
event rereading some of this letter on ruled stationery from a prison inmate who was not the one he had gone to visit but who had leaned over and said hello and started something there in the smoky, overclean Visitors Room, to the darkly uncertain amusement of the Cuban inmate that he
had
gone to visit. On a weekday without telling his wife. In a rented car driving sixty-five miles up the parkway and into hills.

Here at the window a block from the North River (as he liked to hear it called), the winds got neighborly and practically sacred banging away like irregular song against the rotten, high-tension system in his ear that an expensive doctor had a French name for and that struck him now in its panic ringing as the American city phone internalized with mechanical flow intact, the sign of it a light in his eye that would be instantly noticeable to the interim owner of this hand upon his head should he turn around, leaving the sentence he was rereading typed on schoolboy-ruled lines of prison-issue writing paper about a jailhouse lawyer who would handle your injustices for the experience, if not rid you of them.

But his head, his single great immigrant brain cell canaled with sounding ire like trapped light, had been spinning prior to the hand. Not with this half idea about private life he could not identify even under torture. And not with the local will, now, of a woman’s movement as near as the philosopher’s cue proving its power on the philosopher’s billiard ball flesh-colored but as yet unnumbered. And not with the history of opera, though on this workingman’s day off to crashland or hit the chocolates (knowing as we now do the truth that the expectation of them was half in the caffeine) or close the eyelids half trusting their pale-rose-filmed insides not to display boringly ancient scenes he knew too well, or have a secret from his heretofore absent wife—he had entertained just now while reading this inmate’s letter an alternative life for exile-Prince Hamlet: arrived in England; on impulse determined to stay; ensconced now in London no longer melancholy making a clean break with all that toxic family history back home in damp Denmark; and, taking responsibility for his life, being surprised and inspired and liberated by the new Italian-import drama-by-means-of-music with its song-soliloquies on plain firm chords like majestically shifting stages, forget your madrigals, homophonic
si,
polyphonic
no
—
Euridice,
the first opera, followed dazzlingly (this soon? and did it come to London?) by
Orfeo
—the
Euridice
of Peri followed by Monteverdi’s
Orfeo
—these Greeks! the latest Greek connection, for Hamlet had in effect more Greek than his businessman sponsor who when Hamlet arrived and decided to stay, was out of town on a trip, some said in Stratford, some said vacationing in the New World.

Which stopped the spin in his head no more than the hand materializing behind him on his bald welcome mat, or the Saturday-afternoon opera continuing like an actual production in the bedroom. His head spinning off the ringing visiting his ear that a doctor had discussed as if it had been his; spinning like final force off the dizzy discharge in the head, a mineral-smelling echo of vicarious death, his, here in this land of sport while disappearances if not traditional deaths of people far away whom he did not know, most of them, except as countrymen were possibly what was making him sick, or at least ring. The crowds that were gathered in a soccer stadium: it reversed, he thought (with the now ungloved hand settling slow onto his head like some limb-substance), the relation customary between locker rooms, underground runways, and so forth of a stadium, and the great visible central white-chalked playing field where the match took place that people came to see.

Yet why labor against love? For if his head was spinning, the hand out of nowhere upon it must be the distaff hand!