Women and Men (190 page)

The old man clasped her hand tight and raised it with grim affection. "Never heard of Navachoor." This time he nodded goodbye and they turned, and when Grace called after him, "What were you doing at the TV station?" he turned to his companion, who turned to him, and they had words and Grace thought she heard the man say "Prince" and the woman say "Trace
Window"
and he said, "You’re mistaken," and she said, or Grace imagined she said, "I thought we did."

They were there ahead of her. Why did she not recall telling Manuel to let them in? She had kept him from losing his job for being away from his station in the lobby helping an old lady on the second floor put in a fuse and the guy with the rare dog had picked that time to check security. She could not remember, she tried. The job was all done and she spotted a smudge on one wall low down and a handprint over higher beside the bookcase of books she would get rid of. The men were standing inspecting the great plaque full of to-scale cunts, individually sculptured from life, silvered by the maker, a cluster of real women proud and sex-positive. The older, lighter man had heavy eyebrows she hadn’t noticed and was puffy around the eyes so his recessed eyes came out more friendly. People took off their shoes when they came into Grace’s apartment. The younger, darker man looked at her and smiled and looked around as if for something to sit on. The men had been here once and in their familiarity acted more distant. The older one with doubtless a less durable bladder at his age went to the bathroom; she heard him targeting the porcelain above water level, allowing for the lack of a door. Days multiplied and she knew that in a few minutes she would feel happy about the rug again. She knew they hadn’t had another client, but then again a women’s painting crew had let her down. "I had four women paint this place last month," she said as the older man returned—she was feeling quiet, she wasn’t chattering, she was coming down. The men said they had seen a mouse. "My friend," Grace said; "he gets his bread in his own little container, nothing but whole-grain, the only bread-eating that goes on in this house." The young man told her—he was relaxed and gently, affordably distant, like a friend—of some new traps they had: one was heavy glue and mice can’t see too well so they run across and get stuck but trouble is you can’t pull them off without tearing their legs off and then the trap’s hard to use again at two-fifty per; and then there’s a trick cage and they step onto a trap and slide down into the back and their friends come by and hear them and follow the sound and you get a cageful; and then there’s a little private swimming pool of chemical and they fall into that and it dissolves them better than a school of piranhas. The older man said it was a good paint job. Grace said they stood her up twice and then charged her a dollar more an hour for the labor than they had said. The younger man said they had to get paid for their time. The older man asked where the mouse got fed. She decided not to bring out the little wood-whittled cunt near the garbage pail. She asked if they liked the work. The older man said you could get into it; time could fly sometimes. Grace wrote them a check and got four five-dollar bills out of a large bowl on the mantel. She figured they would sit and smoke a joint with her if she asked them. The younger seemed to respond to what his co-worker had said about really getting into this work. He said he had had a dream his wife died. He had heard she was dying and he took his time getting home but had the sense he was rushing, and she was dead when he got home, but no kids around in the dream; then he saw she was right next to him in the bed sleeping. Grace told how she had helped someone die. It was one of her workshop people who had cancer and came home from the hospital. Grace and some friends had been with her during the days when she went off drugs completely and they held hands and celebrated the growth of people in each other’s hearts until one of the women who had never at that time been in a workshop said, "Don’t plant me in your heart. I’d grow too fast," and they all laughed, and after they spoke to the goddess, who was there with them, the same woman —it was a friend named Lucille who did later on come to a workshop— invoked a magic man who could "mingle" the "look" of the dead with "all that can be seen," and later the dying woman had to go back to the hospital and back on pain killers but death had been admitted into life where it belongs, and her death was a joyous one. The older carpet man said that that was being a real friend beyond the call of duty.

The younger pointed at the great churchly plaque of wavy-lined, flowering vaginas (to-scale) and asked if they were what he thought they were. Grace said they were a recent acquisition done by a friend of hers and each vagina was one of her workshop women—had he seen the coat hooks in the hall? The men laughed politely. How many women had been through her workshops, the younger man wanted to know. Grace guessed a number; it felt like an object she couldn’t get out of her, meaningless and sort of metal. It hadn’t really gone out to him in answer. The men were going, but the older man had something to say, and Grace, touching his arm as he went past toward the hallway, didn’t know if he would get it out. She said, "You should know some of them," and felt instantly better. To prevail not by number but by voices. Over what?

Out by the coat hooks, she put a hand on the shoulder of each man, a good black body she could know a whole anatomy of from the firm flow of the shoulder, the chest and arms were what made her a happy racist. She gave each man a hug, which they bent down embarrassed to receive. "I still don’t remember telling the doorman you could come in without my being here."

"He said you always did that so he didn’t have to ask you."

Yet something she doesn’t remember. And they go, but turning back toward her after he has crossed the threshold, the older man asks how much the workshop costs, and she knows he means the women’s, though it’s all the same, and she tells him, and feels that in the midst of the abundance philosophy she would never flinch from stating her value in money terms, no shit, no guilt, no apology. "Cheap at the price," the younger man observes, shaking his head, uneasy, kidding. "Bottom line," Grace hears herself affirm.

Well, everyone knows about the void. It’s late, and she lay thinking on the new carpet, her sweatpants peeled off beside her, the only object wall to wall besides herself; and the color of the carpet forgotten behind her eyelids and become its cushion of texture. She would have reached into the void for her sketchbook to record "The Void is the nothing you may assume about your future" and "The Void is Divinity—which is the shape of that space that asks change of me and gives room for it," but to let in these voids, she had to be one throat from head to toe holding all her get-up-and-go here prone for them to voice their angels gently fucking with her, winging into bodily form through her so she lets them do a bit of the running of the fuck, for "The Void is the phone’s ring now going on and on for the moment," which it did because she had not activated Call Forwarding, which was "The Void when it’s ‘On’ and yet you’re Tn,’ ‘" knowing that "The Void is the friends you hear a woman proudly say she
keeps,
where pride is really anger that her new ex-marriage tells her that keeping old friends isn’t the only thing in life," yet granted "The Void is Sunyata—the depending of everything on everything else." The men tonight—coming for a freebie? mother-fuck? coming to look the others over? coming for feedback. A man (with a good body) still in love with his first wife but just married and with a new baby coming; a gay man in love, he imagines, with
his
former wife; a gay man who wants to compare notes by non-stop talking; a department-store window dresser with boils all over his back (so he’s told her); a young minister; a painter who supports himself by doing horoscopes for artists; a man who wants his small daughter to live with him and is gay; this man Santee who said only that he would like to get in some fine-tuning; also a young musician, sassy and spoiled and darling, a friend of the opera singer Ford North who always embraced Grace and was always in process of moving out of that overstuffed old rent-controlled apartment of his. But not Larry, whom Spence had said he thought he knew and who had just this morning bowed out, no doubt thinking this was some new type of swing with a mother superior telling you how to brush your teeth and let yourself take a shit without forcing it and get cheerful without jerking yourself off into being some old leering predator like Henry Miller locked into genital sex—and eat what your body would thank you for until you found you were all one.

The mugs for herbal tea. Bowls of dried fruit. Some apricot oil. Panasonic consciousness full of rest-energy tactically positioned around the Body-Room. The sound of her vacuum going on under her hand draws the phone into it, and she’s picking up in a second, hoping no cancellation, though la-de-da she is quite able, thank you, to T.R. (Take Rejection, or, by Cliff, Transcendental Rotation) which might be what she is doing as she listens for a moment of agitation (as opposed to energy) to Rima (It’s me again) demanding to know why Grace mentioned her to a sleazy Cuban fortunedealer (One turn deserves another, Rima) (And what
was
Rima’s last name?) until she said goodbye against the dark shrillness of the wiry voice that would have to be consigned to Grace’s answering service—it was forty-five minutes to the Men’s Group anyway—Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, Rima, say what you will, do what you will, love ya body, ‘bye! and the dark shrillness ("So who is under house arrest, Grace? that woman Wing is dangerous!") turned off here yielded some dark blank there at the door, which had buzzed—with no warning from the lobby—asking for her light and the goddess’s to bend inside someone who had come early, and the vacuum standing in the middle of the new brown carpet.

But the face, the familiar head of Santee/Spence—whatever the last name of this Ray dude proved to be—greeted Grace in the peepscope and she knew she had been getting set for this unknown, wherever his body was.

"Hi, Ray!"—the opening door brings him in moistening his lips, blinking his eyes, taking off his clothes as if rehearsed, and talking as if he has been here a dozen times. Light-brown hair and thin beard, body lean but soft, and darker than his narrow face. "We have friends in common," he is saying, hanging his suede jacket and pants on a hook, lining his boots up, displaying a curiously arresting and confident design on the back of his western shirt as he turns away to raise his knees out of his underpants. And on impulse picking up his manner, Grace says what’s only impulse as unexplained as light, "Yeah, one of them won’t be here tonight," while "You don’t say," said the man, turning his persistent face toward her and ripping the snaps of his shirt open and seeming to reply before she feels finished with her words yet she knows in the midst of this unknown man who doesn’t belong that he won’t demand to know who that is—and she might not volunteer "Larry," the former owner of a bike in the employ of Ray
and
Turnstein, supposedly, though Turnstein is in Senora Wing’s pocket obviously and the two of them are ready for membership in the Til Eulenspiegel Society who, after all, might well be rehearsing that reputed opera where the
LET IN
sign hangs if Grace cared beyond slight fear, only slight fear. "Just as well—it might be my alter ego," Spence/Santee observes, and Grace, as the buzzer rings in another much-too-early member of her first men’s group, asks, "So which is it? Spence or Santee?" only, hearing the silence behind her, to find staring through the peephole at her the young minister Ave (for Avery—the nickname is important to him) and suddenly there with him two others of the group like twenty or
thirty
others; so that to know what it is like to be them she might have to be just herself here where the thermostat for obvious reasons is kept high, and leave to his own resources that Prince, that Navachoor or Navajo Prince she knows she also is, wherever he is, approaching, pausing to experiment with the resting energies of the northern buffalo tongue, continuing among all and sundry, welcoming them when
he
was the one arriving: until, as she hauled open the door, she heard Spence with that insidious cheerfulness say, "You know Jim Mayn, I think, don’t you?"

known bits II

j. Logged in at nine
A.M.,
concerned about answering machine bought and provided by Santee/Spence. Concerned about risk in lying to mother that phone # of Independent Messenger Unit = Turnstein Messenger Service new number. Concerned about breakdown of negotiations on Messenger Union due to Maureen leaving for Bonita Springs, Florida, plus freaked at George’s stated intent to take over organizing and enroll so-call normals as well as so-call retards (who are now said to know something going on in City nobody else does), while Maureen did not threaten to come back from Florida but sent postcard via Miss Kimball to the effect that any union confined to retarded messengers discriminated against them. Concerned (What do you
mean
"concerned"? asked Gustave later) that Spence/Santee get hold of log with these records, because silence is golden as mother said. Concerned that messages and/or other materials to be transported by messenger run by Gustave from foundation to opera singer Luisa and from her to dirty old warehouse-theater next door are watched by Santee/Spence.
(Why
are you "concerned"? said Gustave; maybe we take on another non-bike messenger since you do the biking.) Still little space to breathe. Here at 8:10
A.M.
to board bike; then to Turnstein & Wing’s picking up two job-destination to-from pairings—to be fast-slowed by sandwiching with own up here at log H.Q. to be split with Gustave who’s late again in subway rush not reading correctly a single-door opening. Build on knowns always. Mother and social worker will rescind work and bike if they learn of same. Build on this risk. Build on known contacts. Take messenger-related materials from place of origin to place of destination along known routes. Deal with known obstacles arising in lane-related routes. Spence/Santee is friend to Independent Messenger Unit, but is known to deal with Turnstein & Wing, who deal with Jimmy B. like he is messenger bringing bad news unknown to him when really he’s picking up information so he’ll go someplace else and pick up messages or transit materials to take to someplace else, good news
or
bad.