Women and Men (186 page)

There came a night when Maureen and I were supposed to get together. I was so near her now that I entertained some insane idea of moving out of this building that I basically loved. I had sensed the day before that Maureen could call our evening off. I had so braced myself for this that, neck-knots, instep-tension, pelvic lock-cramp aside, I was worse off than if I had been a militant Lesbian nonetheless doctrinally devoted to no-attachments, which would be pretty hard in an already terrible world.

I had thought there was something between us beside the void. Within twenty-four hours it was distance.

No response from Maureen’s apartment. Phone, doorbell, house phone (though I did not tell the doorman who it was I was buzzing).

Meditation? I wondered. Something gentle. An unplanned fast. A sprouts study weekend in Massachusetts with the Leader. But I received a call, then, from the Leader, which wasn’t too strange but was part of what had happened.

They had become too close, she said. Maureen had turned our mutual friend into a priestess or mother; and separation was indicated. She sat near me, her legs crossed, a sheen of body glow lifting free from the curves of her excellent skin, the eyes friendly and attentive to me while it was she who spoke. Maureen had bonded. She had to go. She knew it but had to be told. She nodded and nodded, the Leader reported, all through the announcement, nodded and expressionlessly wept. There is a gap here—but who is it between? It must have been sad for both of them. She had been a sister-lover, then a mother to Maureen, who would always go purely too far like a scientist doing basic research around and around the clock. The Leader had been all things to Maureen, with whom she didn’t like to, literally, "sleep" though spent many a night with Maureen in rap, illuminated by the goddess and her messages to all who had learned true history: which is feeling repressed underground to flow in circles or into others unknown to it or them maybe; the repression of feeling, hence fact, and invitation to addiction, hence imprisoning fantasy—a patterning of habit (the words mine or doubtless someone else’s maybe—do I not make sense?—or not originally anyone’s)—the escape from which (I’m boring
myself)
is both the periodic revolution in your life or, for the Leader, "hopefully" to find a habit of constant self-loving evolution (her words!) that is pattern each time until you almost see it, and right then it shifts: a drug analogy, I thought, as if the Leader were addicted to Change.

Maureen, I saw, had opened the door thinking to adventure into some earth of science, of agriculture, of healing; but at the last moment she turned around (if not back) for Grace Kimball, our Leader, a pretty well-known name by now. But she was asking—as she never asked of me—only to see if Grace was still there. And she
was.
And in the same apartment that she and her ex had lived in until once upon a time she "left"
him.
And she is there, when Maureen turns. There like light. There, though, only to then say to the poor follower who thought she sought power, "I am not here for you. You were going out the door. That’s good, dear. Really good."

"I gave you what you were able to ask for," Maureen said one time— because (as I tried to tell her) I prefer body or deeper signals to voicing my heart-blood’s asking via the short-order sex-by-menu that turned honest lust into a strange fashion of honesty. "You gave me what you could," she concluded. As if I were that person she said the same thing to in a brownstone in Brooklyn when he invited her over to view from his windows those national celebrations in the harbor during the late summer of last year.

But I had found with her that I needn’t be a cynic, and not even after she left me, having probably never been with me; for I had not even thought to be sour about prospects, life, and so forth, while I was for a period of months turned toward Maureen. What did the poet say?—Grace and her crowd do not trust old or new books of passion, they make up their own something or other. And what did the poet say? I know he was not my lover but I know some words of his all over me yet even as I set out to say them and am struck dumb and can only point to them because I have really and truly (believe me) come up to those words but as I say can only point to them, meeting them, and having made them mine, say them in my own way: so whatever I do I have the look of leaving. Living is leaving. For
work,
say!

Is that too sad to be anything but romantic-addictive-ultimately-sex-negative? I knew a prostitute who would not name her price ever, but would take what she was given. Is that sex negative or sex revolutionary? S.N.? or S.R.? Abbreviations recall the hospital newsletter I create each month.

I decided on a certain new type of workshop Grace Kimball told me she was starting. She said she would go back to the other workshops with regret because Maureen had helped her so much and often taken them on her own, though some of the women said it wasn’t quite the same.

Maureen had a mother in Florida. A father, too. She went to Florida and lived at about equal distances from her parents and from her brother, who was the most agreeable soul in the world and would sit with Maureen for hours, or do a yoga trip; they explored enema therapy by the book, by the machine (which might be like a Hollywood chocolate factory for all I know), and by life/sibling experience, and I heard through Grace that for a while it was nip and tuck whether Maureen would go into enema professionally instead of that other amazing land of foot massage that made even me a believer right down to my toes through one of which a Japanese "sister" once divined that I had had a persistent kidney infection when I was younger and more vulnerable.

Maureen returned to me by parcel post my notebook, with all these things in it.

I get abstract and vague. I didn’t so much find something out as found myself
in
something. Well, there’s a lot of this kind of talk going around these days and I kept it to myself.

You can’t give me what I want, she said in the honesty of these recent days; but that’s O.K., Luce, she said.

What I never knew quite well enough, even in the honesty of our arms freely finding each other, was that her need was not for what she said: and my desire, if it had passed into her life easily and received, would have given her what she hadn’t known she wanted or was it at that time a turning?— some slight curve of a long turning from that life she had found away from the mother who ruled without ruling and, I gathered but only from Grace’s hearsay, did not much love Maureen but did not let her know; and turning from her life in New York—which had ensued upon her tour with the Peace Corps in South America in the late sixties (never talked about except as wonderful harsh landscape, and only if I insisted on Maureen sharing some information beyond the foreground of her abandoned banking "trip").

But her love for Grace became the power behind what we would discuss. And I could get puzzled—even by what Maureen said about my notebook when she sent it back—puzzled by having seen the Leader she followed in her and through her, when in fact that very visible Leader was between us: until I saw that it was me blocking the view and the view was of my future. And in the middle of one night, with Maureen’s words working in me, working away by dark, I found myself imagining that man they had known of who was supposed to have never had a night dream (what was his name? it went unmentioned), while Grace advanced the theory—but I was not awake . . . I was dreaming pretty accurately stuff I already knew.

I had this letter from her. Not worth salvaging. From Maureen, that is.

I had a dream of being a merman. And in it that man reappeared, who does not dream, and I thought I once knew him or his wife. I woke knowing it to be true. And that dreams are what they lead to.

Of my notebook, or the part I asked her to read, knowing she would read only that, she said, "Luce, you could see both sides. The man’s and the woman’s. In fact a million sides sometimes. That’s a problem."

It occurred to me that she might not have read even what I had asked.

I pointed out to Grace Kimball that in wanting to be a "top," a business, a (God! a) vagina that is much more than a subtly hooded cock and its patient balls (lower extension of, i.e., shape of, outer lips), and its claims to ejaculate, and in sashaying around like a boy trying to look like a man or whatever I am trying to say, Grace was further confusing what a woman is. She said I might be right, but so what?, she had seriously considered how she might have a child by Maureen. She laughed, then, and disappeared into her kitchen to bring me some tea. She was talking about the neglected asshole and how she would like to raise its status. She said she felt more comfortable with some gay men than some women she could name. She had a habit of listening that made you feel she was right there with you—closer still—beyond closeness—and eyes much warmer than all her absolute talk re: eye contact could do for me. She emerged with my mug, her warm, wonderfully healthy body somehow covered, though not by the mug and not by sweatpants or sporty camisole, not a stitch. ("Mother provider, hostess house-mouse, that’s me!") She asked if I wanted to go into business with her. The phone was ringing and it was her mother hundreds of miles away, oh more than a thousand, who was speaking to Grace again after not speaking for several chilly months—and they were laughing and hollering—at least I assume her mother was, too.

One day, Maureen phoned me and I knew who it was before I stepped free of the bluejeans I was getting out of when the phone rang; and knowing who it was, I knew I would never be bloodless and so never without whatever was in that bloodstream, whatever smoke or worm or liquor of future. And taking the receiver and drawing it close to my ear and my mouth, I realized that I didn’t see Maureen as a victim any more.

Wall-to-Wall High Reaching for the Ground

The black voices did not dispossess her in the slightest—

THE LEADER INCULCATES IN THE TROOPS FIRST AND LAST

SELF-RELIANCE WITHOUT WHICH THERE IS NO HIERARCHY

and she felt them part of her home, their shoes, the bluejeans of the younger, darker one, the dark green chinos (near prison-green) of the older, lighter one, their friendly beef-acid bellies, the lumbering low-energy-seeming vibe-rest of their courtesy across her Body-Room bending to rip up the old carpet, lay out the new: lay it out so snug at the edges that the carpet in its slight abundant rise at the margins had to be restrained—tamped down—before the tacks were hammered in, along the mirrored wall, the bookcase wall (gotta unload them books, written by men, women, some who didn’t know who they were), the window wall, the sculpture-and-photo wall, all this behind her as she passed under the silver chinning bar to answer the hall phone as friendly as, well, her own mother alive in her and well also in the middle of America surrounded by furniture and sheet music, bottoms-up Revere Ware and a whole family of table lamps, but having at last some Pleasure. But this call wasn’t her mother, yet wasn’t just the person who’s talking.

The wiry voice was Kate’s friend, Rima, a learner certainly, with a lot of balls, who would never give a guy the worship that would take him out of circulation on a permanent basis so he would never know if he had a personality or not, and who had come to three sessions of a workshop and dropped out because she had to check out some similar operations and the Esalen trip on the Coast. Rima was phoning like every week to ask Grace’s opinion. What was the real, bottom-line, everyday effect on "one’s" sexuality of one’s parents (like, what had gone on in Grace’s
home?);
or, what was the breakdown of activities at swings in terms of
preferences
(well, Grace had begun to orgy-out, desiring regular hits of solitude, one day a week of silence, for, you know, Silence = Rest, if, as the Chilean woman Clara had said weeks and weeks ago, Rest is Silence—wasn’t that what she had said? although the A. A. friends still got together—yet more for raps than sex); well, was it
helpful
to the women in the workshops (that is, was it really sharing information) to have heterosexual demonstration as part of the format? (you dropped out too soon, honey!)—and did "self-sex" as Grace called it, as versus either s-s in company (you mean jerkeen off with others?) or one-on-one, conserve energy for someone on the way up in a demanding executive position? But what was Rima’s new name, it was sort of feminist-literary as if she had gone Muslim, but it was a real pen name. But she was asking all these questions, she’s in some crisis but maybe inviting others in. The crisis didn’t feel so personal. Awkwardness bled into Grace from somewhere.

Now Rima had surfaced after a month, etcetera—obviously O.D.’d on work like Maureen O.D.’d on the science of sprouts, catching them at their life point to maximize duodenal flow to make the
body
feel concept. When Grace said, "What’s going on?—how was the Esalen trip?—are you taking time for self-love?—I’m planning on a rich Arab once a month who knows his place," she sensed in the easy breeze of her own words that this call was different, and knew another self or body had come into her to warn her that this Rima might be O.D.ing not on work but on good old patriarchal-facsimile exploitation.

THE PROFIT SYSTEM MAY LEAD INEVITABLY TO WAR BECAUSE

MEN SEE BUSINESS AS TOTAL VICTORY OR NOTHING. HOWEVER,

TO GIVE THE SYSTEM A CHANCE, WOMEN MUST NEVER DO ANY WORK

WHATSOEVER

EXCEPT FOR MONEY.

"Can I ask you a personal question?" Rima asked, and Grace knew that some trip for herself was just around the bend and wanted to be off the phone and watching the black dudes sling their hammers at the new carpet.

"What if I say Yes I do mind if you ask me a personal question?"

"I would understand, Grace."

"Why would I mind when you’ve been doing it for weeks?"

"It was sharing information, I thought."

"It’s definitely information, dear. Listen, I got some people here."