Women and Men (38 page)

Yet thus our demon interrogator has given his torture that old mnemonic twist after all, so we, wishing to be free of the new torture of painlessness, find we absolutely cannot forget Grace’s lanternslides (as they would have been called in her parents’ day) projected now in the eighth decade of the century in question up onto a screen for five hundred women to believe. The message of these slides paired side by side so it looks like two screens, is that—in this hotbed of biology and cure (the auditorium of a hospital)—see for yourself, sisters, the hard-on you’re getting right now proves it, look at the penis then look at the clit, trace your vagina and that scrotum is it, these are the same organs, ladies, which is why you knew you had balls and why men in business and men in bed forget they evolved from
Our
life.

She didn’t hear the rhyme till later. She didn’t ask whence came it. She said the goddess sent it to her, though if she’s a myth in her own time Grace (who for a time is all things to her intimate Maureen, who calls her Kimball) would not find in any rhyme we carried into her the answer to Where, who, what was she?

Who and what
was
she?—that sounds like a Lesbian question, she says—heavy duty, heavee—’cause Lesbians
(if
there
are
Lesbians) some of them her best friends, are into Romance, the Devotion Trip, and Relationships, though Grace will call herself bisensual and at an orgy good-naturedly swing both ways getting bulletins, my dear, against the warm inner thigh of Other space in her days of swings which one newspaper with her in its mind called group sex, which swingers of her acquaintance might some of them call "orgies," and where in the clean, deviant funs of three-on-one almond oils, laurel incense, pear or apple juice, a supple supply (and friendly!) of small-of-the-backs and hips and supportive parts, plus a less than at-large ratio of kissing to other acts other hugs other moists and ins, room could still be found at Grace’s for shy non-participant members who’d traded their underwear for Swedish blankets, their forethoughts for a fleshed-out evening with people, hear the noise, it is music from the wall, music to our rear, our vaunted groin—it’s breathing to music which drowns out history if you want—and across the openness of our frank rape-safe room see a bunched towel, two towels, yr prayer rug, yr bowl of apricots, yr plastic bag of grass fridge-fresh, a naked hand flat down on the carpet wrinkled at the wrist (a prop), freckles across a shoulder, a massage waiting for a back, all this across a thick and mirrored room-to-room carpet, a band of healthies, a party to fuck, kid to kid, even man to man, to swap experiences, to shed a good tear if it happened, to lay around, to reach, to reach and accept a No thanks if it comes—and to put peer bandhood before pair bonding in order to—to save us a chance: but a chance to do what? to demarry but keep it secret, or remarry our true friends with whom for too long we’ve been one times one, to make a bisexual capitalism to replace war?

She once learned, having said No (but this time not at a swing), that when it comes to real sleeping she likes to do it alone, and in those days she still maintained a bed (the bed), but found she had stopped crying, the little crying she ever had undertaken.

She learned what it was like to fuck someone before she knew him, to fuck on very first—and
as
the first—acquaintance, and much later, after playing with two or three others, find who this was when she left the easygoing orgy with him, and talk to him now sister to brother on the sidewalk. In a cab, beyond sex, and be properly introduced to each other and to a long talk in that diner that once existed—now mere history!—in the quickening and multiplying overlook of the century in question at Sixth and Twelfth, remember?

There he drank two heavy glasses of buttermilk and ate with magic speed (however slowly he chewed) two toasted BLTs; and she learned what he did and what he was coming off of and again what his last name was.

They had fucked around on a first-name basis back at the mutual friend’s swing and she had heard herself let go with all the regular party noise from her raucous years (high school and other) embedded in the West—"your infinite Southwest M/dwest," the guy drinking buttermilk softly said, who was very very quietly high on her or the night or the music or the imagination of a continent that’s not New York.

Upon which their laugh merged with her ongoing life story told like the wondrous confession of a once upon a time (if you believe it) inhibited American gal—or one of
his
confessions at his regular Alcoholics Anonymous meeting—well you can see they both of them laughed at his friendly three-o’clock-in-the-morning compass putting her on the map some lapsed, marginal map of mood-"infinite Southwest
Midwest."
And they held hands across the waitress’s Formica finding that in their respective marriages they had felt to blame and had assumed for ages that the about-once-a-month commemoration of their vows was like the way it was supposed to be even if there were better ways of doing things in poor urban Hispanic families or in Hollywood, Malibu Beach, or anthropologists’ tribes.

Until, like making love after breakfast, poached eggs, coffee, stacks of toast, cigarette smoke, apricot jam in the fridge, Grace and this guy’s long night’s swing wound down with a one-on-one at Grace’s place and such inflamed joy in him that, observing over his furry shoulder a Plains Indian print on her dusky bedroom wall, she might not have found her recently discovered No, had he wished at four
A.M.
to spend the night; but before she knew it he was gone and she was staring at the Kiowa baby carrier, its hooded purse on the wall a shape seen anew, until she didn’t know she was asleep and didn’t know and didn’t know she was asleep when in daylight she became aware of her hand reaching for the phone receiver to phone that guy with whom she was rehearsing her life and still in sleep laying out to him her new vista of sex-positive economic history.

But she had had this new vista in her anyway; but he got her started on the way home by quoting the philosopher who asked what would you do if you found you were going to repeat your life from start to finish, every fuck-up, with every pain, every downer you’ve endured already, what would you do? And so with a pang unusual in that it seemed to come also from someone else, she halted in mid-roll as she moved to extend her other hand to dial the number she’d anyway have had to get up on her elbow to see on the bedside pad where he’d written it: for she had learned this very little bit so far, which was as real as knowing—with a No—that she liked to go to sleep alone, and it was that this guy she’d gotten it on with at the party and later (harder to recall), here at home after her tea and peanut butter and English, and his buttermilk and BLTs at the diner, was doing that same old winged thing in her head that she knew so well, right? And her own leaden wrongness—she saw it from one half sleep to another—seemed to hold her hand back, that leaden wrongness, as the hand’s fingers went for the phone dial knowing his number after all
without
looking at the pad, until this leaden drag passed and she fell into a feeling like she’d had after she said No about sleeping and at once had seen that even more than she’d known it was what she had wanted just to say, and perhaps with all our help she found her younger brother absent from the life she had told that guy last night, and as she thought and thought and thought, and the bed drifted to where she recalled last night’s quite magical carpet, she caught herself hoping this two-way phone of hers would ring with the voice of the guy, who had not asked, "When can I see you?" but the phone silence got into her Sunday breathing and she was elsewhere—not (or not
yet)
Aphrodite dispersing herself far from where Emperor Theodosius’ temple-demolition crew could reach her—but in her very own breathing, which she’d discovered sometimes just stopped like her former husband Lou’s breath, and she would correct this.

And in that breathing with our help she heard her and her little brother’s silence amid the interrupted silences of their parents’ morning bicker. Her brother at that moment not so big as when we saw him previously. But now arising out of maternal fixity amid his parents’ purely verbal but sticky inquiry into whether the owner of a local auto-repair shop had taken up flying to get away from his wife who worked with him and answered the phone and did the paperwork. This issue between Grace’s parents was as outlandish as the earliness of the hour, for they were all of them too damn early that morning. As if by some accident of independently planning to do something private. Meet someone or something. But they must have made a mistake and communicated, and were in the kitchen, battling spouse-parent versus spouse-parent; and Grace’s little brother, when his mother saw the milkman out the window, got told to take two empties out before the man got away, bolted, but Gracie ran after him though mainly into the empty release her mother had created in saying to the boy, put on your jacket, mister!

And Grace imagined him with the empties soaring three steps at a time down the four-step front porch, dashing down the walk, calling to the motionless milkman and so she followed her brother out of the kitchen and through the living room the way he went, to the front door: so that he may have heard her—she never knew afterward to ask—but he turned his head as if to overhear a word of warning never uttered or some news behind him that then
came between
him and the milkman, whose elbow was on the edge of the delivery truck’s rolled-down window and he’s watching through the windshield what Grace saw from behind—namely, her little brother fall forward like tripping your skate over a rooty hump in the ice so at that instant of soft chipping you are leaving one element for another.

He was stretched out with flakes of one bottle under one outstretched hand unemployed and the other bottle in some form under him. She saw red, but before she saw it and before, with blood facing him, he lifted his backside painfully to get onto his knees, the picture on his little (what’s she saying, "his little"?) his little jacket, the design of the great superchief of the Cherokees on the back that he was proud of, it wrinkled like a slit across his back when the lower half of the jacket rode up skewed, and the legs and leggings of the awesome Indian were for an instant displaced sideward, these crazy legs, so they half came not from the glittering torso with the feathered face glint-boned in her memory but from the blue ground the Cherokee was stitched on.

Clean break, babe, the past is over, it’s history, don’t get drawn back in. Over there is the beaded baby carrier, the Indian papoose purse with the little hood-window blooming dark-pink-lined, standing on Grace’s New York wall one year, gone the next, though into a closet of memories, against the closet wall caged by the collapsible steel shopping cart she still uses even on her new food trip. Expensive, that papoose carrier, that authentic buckskin craftwork: was it women sewed those Kiowa babies up or was it craftsmen? no zippers no buttons no snaps so it must have been loops and pegs, hooks and eyes, but the shape Grace saw from her bed that Sunday morning having thought better of dialing her friend of the night before never revealed itself until she took it off the wall and stuck it in a closet and it had been so long in a closet that it had disappeared even from the closet eventually, the papoose carrier’s little hooded place at the top, the pursed closing down the front—while the evolution of the papoose carrier in her mind wasn’t single many of us could have told her, wasn’t only (since it looked like) the ancestral vagina that yields the future male member, it was the sun shining upon the middle of America where her kid brother and she lay by a public, a man-made lake across which as if on it three horses and riders could be seen passing one by one, and though he loved her he stopped talking and she in her two-piece bathing suit had to roll half-over toward him to look at him and say,
listen, bud,
demanding he answer her but what was the argument about? she recalls only the scene, their flesh, her orange bra, his bright brown, hairless chest, all told one night in New York like a huge laugh—told to Maureen or Norma, can’t recall, though Norma passes it all on to her husband, and then Grace told Sue perhaps too, whose husband listens and listens while their eighteen-year-old son hears.

"You see," the interrogator adds half-silently behind the potential apparatus, the charged vessel of our riveted chair, "you tried to non-answer our question re: Mayn’s being armed but you betrayed yourself."

Betray?
we ask ourselves
(betray?)
into the area around our chair. Did you mean
reveal
ourselves or
deceive
ourselves? we ask, making allowances for his second language, ours, which gratefully lacks those no-no’s his has. And doesn’t the inquisitor who’s behind us pushing know what’s going to happen no matter how we answer?

We ask in the end ourselves, isn’t that our way?, and under this type of interrogation, as James Mayn himself said, we’re human, we’re a survivor.

But the interrogator (in uniform? in mufti?) speaks: This putative woman, he replies to our "Betray, reveal, deceive?"—this womanist nicknamed Grace Kimball has a younger brother, so does Mayn; she has or had parents who fought in private, so did Mayn; she’s divorced and so is Mayn; her genital apparatus is alleged to be in terms of evolution male-oriented; both had grandmas who supported Coxey’s Army of the unemployed marching on Washington Easter of 1894—
plus
(and our breath is taken away by how the interrogator has saved to spring on us however inaccurately now something largely said so very long ago that it’s just about believed) Kimball left her husband Lou yet
he
was the one who
went:
is not this like the mother long ago who sent her son away yet left him with the impression that it was
she
who’d left:
plus
the grandmother (breathes the voice behind us distinctly, and racing back over what we all have said, we hardly think but to condemn this totalitarian hireling who may have had the diva’s outspoken old father in the next room or in this very interrogation chair as recently for all we know as us but damn we are saddled as well with the suspicion that this after all non-native user of our language has so ignored the words of our query—"Betray, reveal, deceive?"—that he’s had humorous buttons created out of those words one for each day of his week, but we fight back). But that was Mayn’s grandmother what
about
her? we retort from our chair seeing nothing before us.