Women and Men (23 page)

Which she was already telling to one whom she had always told herself she would show oh she would show him, but it came out "someone
else."

But she was right on, right out wrapped in a garden of fingers that sluiced in and out of the total awareness of the cosmos she was sure: fine tips, fingers with tongues, was that it? fingers tipped with clits right on target.

She knew where she was coming from and it was all the breathing spaces, each breath-pulse point: she was coming from what found her! Someone had said, doubtfully,
Consciousness.
Who was it?

The meaning of the day she had come through to this cloud of candle fire. And an I-told-you-so told the meaning of her day to the man she had vowed she would show, and this came back to her as if she had already told it—to be through with talk, with words, words, words (she heard the homework voiced apparently by Cliff in his car passing through Ontario toward Superior powered by housework of her own true vacuum cleaner in a room without furniture).
Consciousness,
was what her visitor
Clara
had said with sex-negative doubt in her head. Grace was helping her help herself, for she had come to Grace.

Grace saw this day of hers all at once at the moment when she knew what the goddess in the bottom of the mirror across the room would do before she did it; saw the knee drop and lift and the sigh open the mouth. She’s there and she’s here, back rubbing the fur of the carpet.

The buzz did not let up, someone telling her what she knew with the words all changed into someone’s words-to-be, universe-orbit of infinitesimal cunts that hers was if you blew it up to find smaller and smaller stretches— not
her
words, she didn’t know these: the buzz loosened into its cycles and met the music from her sound system in this room and the next, and the friendly machine’s low song going on as long as she wanted made spaces of a grand cloud that was like her becoming her—and the cloud lost its shivering buzz as she came, and at every spread breath-fork the cloud really got into her and was her, and the tips kept coming, rips of grip in passing, dear, in passing—beyond applause, for who was here to applaud? They made her laugh at herself, this was all there was to it—not even a young male secretary thrown in (she had old friend Cliff anyway). From the interior of her feet haired in the expanding carpet that her heels and toes pressed hard into, crests walked up through her knees, down through her thigh-thighs like a lightness to meet themselves tiding from head and shoulders, scalp and eyeballs, like parts of her that didn’t tie off at the end, bunches that, with some rocking happy fuck-ya that she didn’t quite put her finger on, didn’t end.

And then what? "The present," said her Sketchbook (her Sketchbook/ Notebook, her standard not racing handlebars, her hands gloved with feeling, one on the soft velva of her shorn haid, one on the velva of the Panasonic’s cushion of world sound, a long extra hand,

the present. The Future. Cliff in a flap, volunteered to drive me out to Sue’s coming out love-nest for my gig and so getting his car a tune-up because it was "missing" (he
said)
and then after all not knowing if he
would
have it in time because they had to work on it a hundred bucks worth. Self-sacrifice means that the future is worth less and becomes Your Present, which then turns into Fake Future. Saint Joan of Arc was actually taken in by Church with its male hierarchy glad to turn her from an embarrassment into a permanent attraction. To go through with it, she had to have been turned on. They didn’t have prolixin, which Sue’s great son Larry, who is taking Sue’s coming-out very well, said they use today for pre-execution jitters, the ultimate male lockerroom hands on/hands off. Capital punishment = Sex negative. How many women have been given the chair? What has this to do with clearing out furniture?)

What was at stake? Clara came back to mind—was this an answer to the question, or Avoidance? Clara would not know yet how to put her finger on what’s wrong. (But things
aren’t
wrong or right, stormtrooper Maureen baby’s breath will say.) Something
else
about Clara was
not
sex-negative, like she knew something powerful Grace didn’t and in her own terms could get it on with herself. Whatever was at stake did not end. But the meaning of Grace’s day which came to her alone as she plummeted all over herself, was what had found her all at once, clustering round her, and to the man who was only a few miles away (though urban distances strangely varied) even if he would not lick her shin this sudden meaning of her day was to be told by her and with love, she noticed, for in some span when she had at last
shown
him, it had already been told: it’s coming back to her in a changed voice other if not larger than her own, like two people she had been made into out of just her own self—for the meaning and unheard-of story of her day turned out to have been told in future and with some love to another man she didn’t see; who was familiar but unknown, a lost brother, not the man who was her former husband charming stocky Lou who with his now three kids and Hungarian Catholic wife the Lou whom she had wanted to show once and for all, no not that man but another who would appear and feel her radiance, her power and "glo" and not the man either whom she had once in her thought and body-cup heard saying to her, "I wish I had six arms"—how they had
adapted
to that thought—and not the bald Olympic back-(therefore 5-position)-stroker either, whom she once had taken to a swing but he got cold feet and wrapped up in a beautiful yellow blanket and spectated, and for weeks when she was seeing him he never knew that he was a healer even when she told him; and not the tattooed writer (one of her dreamers) who walked in his sleep and woke up to find he’d moved a blanket chest heir-loom up against the door of his and his wife’s bedroom because something was threatening to come in, he had dreamt it—dreamt he had
thought
it: when the
door,
which opened inward, was stopped against
him
too, the meaning which Grace had told him sitting around long ago, laughing crazy as if for inspiration both looked for a lover (who had never
dreamed,
it came to her)—"or was it a chest of drawers?"—oh doubled up laughing—"in the dark they’re all the same, honey"—he crying too with (she couldn’t stop awfully laughing) giant black eyebrows then yelling into this furnitureless Body Room of Grace’s laughing again and again at her, for she called herself (had he never heard this one? she did
not
have a million of ‘em but that was
her
secret, but she liked this one, the line came out always like openers for audience-warmers, was this one-liner maybe the truth? just that she called herself) a nun who had kicked her habit: until eventually she gave him a massage, which settles everything including his hash: what was his name? weirdly only his last came back.

But what found her now as she came down let down by the sky into low waves of the mirrored room must be more than this meaning of her day that had seemed so clear during the grip and spit-flo-
here
-I-am of cum fed back to cosmos.

So clear it had brought together her out-of-the-closet friend Sue’s busted husband Marv, who in good anger but bad hate for once wasn’t thinking twice about (nor secretly aiming at defusing or "forestalling") what his opposite number would feel, in this case Grace, in his office this morning where she had for some reason in person gone to pick up the tape of herself; and brought together streets going and coming spun together with sun made brighter by the filter of the old city; and had brought that
old
couple who were not a couple but looked alike across the street, like everybody’s strange
old couple:
you think,
they don’t want any help;
and brought together the black dude with the alligator hat she knew she would meet, pusher, pimp, parking-lot attendant, business person; and brought together her own sounds she had actually played off the tape when she got back home:

Herself speaking to a group in Long Island, or
making
them a group, last night and the phone ringing below the sound of the vacuum crossing the free, earth-brown, empty carpet of her Body Room. Meaning of her dayful so clear it had brought together also calls left with the answering service and some taken when she felt like it—and she’d heard in the rise and fall of the ring as she came in her front door the call from her mother nineteen hundred and some year-miles away, a ring she did not answer until later when she had played her tape, then came her mother again, who phoned to say that she had a Date, this lady in her late sixties, granted prodded by her daughter longdistance, maybe less Grace’s Mama than a Woman, with a spacious white porch out there on a wide street and a relation to each stick of furniture like meditation if not jerking off by a long shot, her daughter told her in no uncertain terms long-distance, so that daily dusting (once upon a time the dust of others’ haste leaving the house—but coming back
in
the house, too) was like the singing her mother did at an upright in the living room. "Deep Purple" and "Love
Divine
All
Love
E-ex
cell
ing" and "Oklahoma!"—dusting like a lover of antiques who will never sell; dusting free of charge like zipping down to the supermarket driving these days without a license which she let expire because the duster of tables and washer of dishes even only her own now and launderer of dish towels and cooker of days should be beyond the law, as beyond freedom and—and she had a happy talk with the man down cellar whom she had called to fix the timer and the baffle on the furnace.

Streets of New York spun together with sun converging in an underwater fire (where was it coming from, the bottom of Grace’s mirror? the double glo from a giant candle? words a boy had read to her once?) the meaning of her day out of her hands then coming from where she lay on her cushions and beyond this small risk like some foreign hand gently joining her own on her breast, the risk in the person of the woman named Clara this afternoon with almost an English accent who said she was not English who claimed to have phoned earlier and got no answer, and had come here anyway to speak face to face apparently about the workshop, and who
could
not have got no answer if she had phoned because the service always picked up; and who had therefore (Grace concluded) not phoned at all: a human fib from this light-haired, light-boned, bone-strong, will-strong woman with amber eyes and a mole above her lip; in some
measured
way alert—but only in her whole
person
looking over her shoulder at what would happen, while seeming wise, and so, seeming in some fascinating (yes)
public
way
not
to care what happened behind her back. What
could
happen?
Maureen
coming in suddenly? she didn’t know Maureen. Clara was not liberated, but the words, while accurate, scattered inside your head with a not-mattering quality. Was it simple gross danger she had brought into Grace’s Body Room? Was Clara human? Grace could ask the question to herself seriously.

Clara was important, and to Grace, as the meaning of the day formed: but so that when the day ended this evening on her cushions, she had already told her day and it was feeding back to her the teller from someone she had already told it to: not the man she would show, but another: so that it was part of that unheard-of story beyond celebrity-gossip being told back to her, her own story (wasn’t it?) reported altered—through water so it swayed and slackened getting to the point and wasn’t so bright as it could be, and not only her own story as big as the cloud that came buzzing over her and became her like a void that reached her as she reached it. ("Void oid," comes the deep voice, "just so long as you’re Cunt-Positive," comes Brother-Sister Cliff’s chest-cold-type voice (from where? from vibrator waved into sound system? from phone-showerhead, notebook, combination pen-mike? from Grace herself, her phrase taken by him but not her void that found her as she found it, at day’s end thinking tonight how well-known was she, and once well-known, did this maybe not change at all but other things about you did change?).

She arched and farted like Mona Lisa if you really looked at her and moistly for good fruitarian measure. And she sighed and yelped small welcome to little last nitwit licks that buttered through her hips, for the vibes of the buzz converged in the old hum that that same busted double-knit husband Marv on Long Island last night had said got really in the way, Grace, for him when she had made him try it upstairs although he locked the master-bedroom door (but she heard it going even when the toilet flushed and bathroom door down the hall opened). She laughed for the unknown familiar man now down the hall whom she couldn’t quite see now (not the man in her mind, Lou, whom she had to show, who’d been her
husband
—she breathed the word harshly—but) another man, unavoidable, who had been telling
her
the sense of her day and the unheard-of story she had now lost all but the sense of. They were talking it all out at this end of the day. She had herself, she was not alone. The goddess in the high mirror cemented to the far wall dropped her knees. And this whole day that she saw, she had seen at once all around her, round and round, as she came, while the phone went softly, tinkling in two places at once simultaneously reincarnate she suddenly knew, though she had two phones, one in the H.O.A. hall, one in bedless bedroom.

But one also in an office hours ago that smelled of ink, smoke, coffee, and indirect lighting that never got turned off and had aged to an impermeable tint that stuffed the place and made smoke and coffee smell alike; phone ringing in a busted husband’s office just before she had gone away into the street. She liked the street. It was where high boots did best, alligator skin around her calves. And the street was where she saw the beat-up old guy and the strangely Jiof-quite-pair-bonded old woman on the other sidewalk at the instant she knew in another vein that the stars shone out of the day sky too, right down to her without interruption. She had last night’s tape cassette in her bag slung against her ribs and she had been good, she had been good last night in a house in the suburbs, electric-eyed Sue’s new out-of-the-closet Love-nest, where else, which could almost have been Grace’s home were it not for the goddess, though not with the man who was still somewhere her husband one of these days, and Grace saw a future in which she got his Hungarian wife learning to breathe in a workshop.