Women and Men (185 page)

And in not quitting for twelve more months Maureen later said she had not been in touch with her anger (I smiled) or with the fascist implications of (Listen, dear, the garlic is Good, but your problem is, you’re not high enough up in the bank and probably not even a man could ever be that high) (You’re doing a smoke-screen number on me, Luce, did you know that?) (No, honey, you got to get up into the abstract, that’s the echelon where garlic don’t matter no more) but a tear came into my eye because I thought, People matter, and the clients matter even if they turn away and don’t dig the odor of garlic because their nosebuds have spent too long in the smokehouse and never felt deep earthsmoke, and Maureen matters, Maureen matters.

She was the girl, the woman, I had stood with coming up in the elevator more than once—months in fact before meeting her (for such is the intimacy of apartment houses)—hearing the elevator coming apart until the current super told me one day not to worry, it was the slack in the cables rattling. But that day it rattled like wind in a house and Maureen, whose name I didn’t know, had a spray of baby’s breath in a cone of green paper in one hand, a knapsack on her back, an odd sweet smell like a foreign food that could never go bad—and I said, "Baby’s breath, aren’t they?" and Maureen smiled like a Midwestern girl and nodded but didn’t say anything, perhaps feeling me too close or finding nothing in the way of words demanded of her at that instant. Baby’s breath delicate flourish of snowdrop flowers.

I wanted to hold her, just as at later times I wanted to hold her down or shut her up—oh damn me, did she really talk much except in dogmatic speeches at intervals? And later I wanted to hold her back, because she followed her beloved Leader but always went too far. To where she wasn’t following her beloved Leader any more, but herself, however you do that. Yet still purchased baby’s breath, for that day in the elevator while she was going to see her beloved guide she was bearing those flowers for herself as well.

Later I heard that a small group of workshop friends, initiates, some strong hilarious resourceful women, who had long since seen that complaining in words establishes a historical record that can stand in place of doing something, planned a fairytale game of sorts which would subject the next man who entered that famous apartment to rape—"light rape," but overwhelming and thorough but "good" rape.

I did not ask what this would amount to, because I saw the apartment in question visited for so many hours a day of every week by the friends of the Leader. This person ran around like a child doing somersaults usually with nothing on, listened like the most shrewdly attentive mother to the person behind the story, and made tea but had long since stopped making meals and bringing them out of that kitchen into her large furnitureless salon.

Rape? I thought, participating in some distant part of my body. And imagined that Maureen was taking too far some trial balloon raised by our friend like energy levels of a roomful of loving friends rapping or massaging—for that woman was
my
friend, too.

Rape? I thought. "Rape?" I said; "I don’t believe it." "You’re thinking just like a man, Luce," said Maureen. "Thanks," I said; "wouldn’t our friend take that as a compliment?" Maureen blew up at me in some confusion and left me where I stood—not really on two feet the way you were supposed to stand, rather slouching a little on one hip, but frozen in my maturity by her exit.

For a few months, in those days of ‘76, the answer to the "power" question was money. As it still is, a year later, and was in the days of those great castle-women of Europe Maria di so-and-so, Marguerite of somewhere, who handled such power in their hilltown bastions with or without a consort that I would have worked for them in a minute, and gave orders with an ease that Maureen’s Leader might approach only with humor, standing in her fantastic plastic boots at the advent of a taxi and ordering Maureen and Cliff—a curious assistant
he
was—to get into the cab first. Then the answer to the power question proved in other days quite steadily to be "Self-sexual," where even without a job’s money or success (but don’t assume you ever have one without the other) you can work on your body and be whatever you want to be sexually and find that the goddess was always in you (even, as I pointed out to Maureen, in that part of you that persisted in not knowing the goddess was inside you because where you’re coming from is very important to where you wind up) (No, said Maureen, that was not correct because to dwell in where you came from was to get back into the past, and who cares if you thought when you were a kid that you didn’t have dreams when you were asleep?) (To which I responded that I didn’t know where
that
was coming from but . . .) (Maureen said it was some friend of a friend of our mutual friend the Leader, who had told Maureen that she was convinced it was possible
not
to dream asleep but that something had to give somewhere and this man might have unusual powers flowing out of or into the void of those dreamless nights. Some such bull, I didn’t say.) And yet a lot of outside information was making life quite interesting in those days of late ‘76, early ‘77 when I found myself loving Maureen, wanting to hold her, to rock her (which she liked), knowing though that I must also not lose myself in this love for her, loving the charm in how she talked the helpful, oversimplified dogmas of her guide, whose own attitudes seemed less extreme—she sometimes liked men, I mean; she sometimes shrugged off her own rigidity about blocking the transverse colon and blocking the labyrinthine (my word) progress of the goddess in the circulation of the soul, or about the locked pelvis vis a vis our capacity to manufacture self-negative meat acids within our systems even when we were good, upstanding vegetarians (though fruitarians—interestingly the position Maureen arrived at just before her departure—was going too far). Information, did I say? Its flow among us larded surely by mystical fictions put us more on the lookout for it. But the Leader, herself by various accounts one-sixteenth, one-eighth, and one-thirty-second Indian, had a list of women chiefs back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and a goddess known as Our Grandmother who really had created the universe and had told the winds to treat Indian women as if they were the winds’ sisters and if the women pulled their skirts up to their waists to frighten clouds away, the winds must not stare at their naked nethers; but the Leader had once humorously told of dreaming a reincarnation of herself as a Navachoor Prince who had actually met Our Grandmother and dickered with her about obtaining for men a standing with her like that she accorded women.

But what was happening? There was the Leader’s career, shifting from week to week, not so much in those public appearances and visiting workshops where she helped women to understand that they were not isolated or freaky or ugly or mean in their needs, as in projects and ideas that came and went, an article in a magazine here, a newspaper piece there, and of course misrepresentation as a sex fiend or female segregationist or male impersonator by the mainly male press even when the piece was by a woman. Shit, she liked people.

And Maureen? Why what was the matter with me that I fell in love with that girl? that legionnaire, that nutritional scientist of the Great Change (let’s not say "revolution" because the corporations go on pricing us up, up, into the echelons of their abstract intuition of American futures), that handmaiden of the goddess whom I of all people (because the Leader was not available that day) had taken to the clinic where she had her first abortion (feminist in clarity as in its experimental source) and it went from her with that distantly gross plummet of flush, that explosion so that any person, man or woman, might be afraid, hearing it from the next room—as if something else got sucked out, too, like your last ovary or your Little (i.e., lower) Heart or five laps of lower intestine, sucked out maybe more subtly as in a promising new trick of cataract removal, and as scientifically as Maureen had experimentally concentrated, at a swing, on controlling the accessibility of her ovaries by pleasure-committed breath-transcendence or a self-induced temporary infertility,
pill
-free of
course
but no diaphragm, which is not for beginners! Maureen? She left the bank, of course.

And she left her apartment (clean break, not even a legal sublet) in Greenwich Village, and now when you saw her in the elevator she was traveling to or from her own apartment, often from it to her Leader’s with a large cloudy Mason jar or a wooden salad bowl home-covered with foil. She had given her Leader all her savings becoming thereby for
her
sake a partner (I hoped in enterprises both multiplying and amalgamating under the Leader’s name— therapeutic, media, even clothing).

Maureen became a leader of the building when the landlord had dragged his heels. There were interesting chips of the upper brick facing that had begun to fall down onto the street and sidewalk first thing in the morning and late in the afternoon and a newspaperman I had known some years before who had moved back into the building was reported to have told a fellow tenant who announced classical music on a small but surviving radio station who had told it to his wife’s lawyer also living in the building who had told it to
his
wife, who told it to me in the incredible basement laundry (with its underwear-shredding dryer) and back to its
original
source (who told
my
source that it was better than what he had originally said) that the Housing Authority (postponing for a week its inspection visit) agreed with the landlord in the theory that somewhere between those upper facings of the building and the sidewalk that was in danger of coming up to meet the aforementioned chips the chips had become arrested in mid-air and would continue so until the landlord received word of Housing Authority action on the tenant report.

Also, the boiler had gushed oil, driving into the normally foodless laundry room two or three (unclear) rats the size of large weasels. Maureen held a meeting, then another. I loved her. There were deranged ladies who had so little surface left in their anciently rent-controlled apartments they had to live on their upper walls or on the ceiling, and they came to one meeting or the other to ascertain whether they could be evicted, and one out of four of them was willing to withhold rent. Maureen retained a young woman lawyer we both knew who would not take a fee at first; and Maureen established an escrow account at the nearest branch of the giant bank until recently her employer. She had about one quarter of the tenants with her.

Her Leader was for buying the building and turning it into a self-healing, self-supporting community; but the building was not for sale. The Leader promised that the following month she would begin withholding rent but had heard that our landlord had introduced rats into another building on the other side of town to get rid of his almost exclusively elderly female tenants. The radio announcer’s wife’s lawyer, commenting on the radio announcer’s "rats the size of weasels," said weasels were what we
needed
since they
ate
rats. A leak days after a snowstorm descended down one "line" of apartments from the top floor to Maureen’s and stained a magically colored Near Eastern woven mat during the night and when her bathroom ceiling came down one afternoon while as if by the same token five tenant-complaint calls from unemployed elderly female tenants were recorded on her machine all while she was out picking up four crates of small, dark, non-toxically grown oranges shipped from her native Florida to an organic outlet practically next door to an Italian restaurant where our landlord was a known patron, she handed over the chairpersonhood to a young man with a rare dog on the second floor who checked security twice each night and had found the doorman once across the street at a deli waiting for a western sandwich; and Maureen withdrew her escrow rent money and spent it on redecorating her bathroom and withdrew from the tenants’ association at a time, incidentally, when a real-estate broker living in the building had found out that two, maybe three apartments had been sold to their mainly absentee tenants through some loophole that did not entail co-oping the building or not as yet, and one of these new owners worked at a foundation housed uptown in a French Renaissance delight crazily encrusted with terra cotta mazes. Maureen was up front about all these things that she did.

As about organizing the messengers: When this unofficial union proved to include only one woman, a Cambodian aristocrat who did secretarial work on a hot typewriter and other business in a mainland Chinese haberdashery surprisingly near the aforementioned foundation plus her qualifying messenger stints on a hot bike that was less of a liability since serial numbers don’t function in the bike-turnover world, Maureen wished the group well and excused herself just at a time when the original inspiration for this group of primarily retarded messengers, a black kid with amazingly large, out-of-control teeth, had discovered that he was being exploited by a man who had infiltrated a small theater group because he believed it was a front for some bloody escapade to do with Latin American politics and the clandestine history of a Middle Atlantic newspaper family, and the black kid had tried in vain to get free of this entrepreneur, and did not speak easily but communicated with Maureen.

The night she ended her affiliation with the messenger union, she and I sat all evening in my apartment. I was happy knowing she was content to sit and read. I looked up from my chair and she did not raise her eyes. She was reading, not meditating. And it was not just the book that kept her from looking up to meet my look. It was me. And at first I thought it was a me she took for granted as a sometime lover. Then I guessed she did not look up because she did not have quite enough faith that I had become the person she loved. I did not believe, like her Leader, that most men secretly wanted to wear garter belts and black silk stockings; I did not believe that the sins of the Catholic Church stained the glass at Chartres, I did not believe Saint Joan less or more a woman for having waged war, I did not believe that medication was a global male-doctors’ plot, I did not believe that women ejaculate the same way as men, or that a fruitarian diet lengthens a man’s ejaculatory range if range is what one is after; I did not believe there was a Goddess but I did not say so to Maureen, in whose very body and feelings I sometimes felt myself so firmly lodged that I couldn’t tell if I was stalled in some place of romance where to stay is to be nowhere, or was doubled or reincarnate in her, which I also would not announce to her except as an impersonal principle, and she agreed, convinced the miracle was open to anyone who could participate in the Goddess. Freedom is not sobriety but sobriety is freedom, the Leader had said after an all-night body-trip with parallel—in her "case" multiple—orgasms for both but without penetration by her one-on-one visitor, an Irish monk touring American population centers in quest of funds for his remote foundation, trouble-shooting too: sobriety itself might mean no highs; but booze went down not up, and there were potential highs non-addictive-related, said the I have to confess luminous and warm-hearted Leader to the workshop-ready Eirean—so the Irish certainly weren’t
wrong
. . .