Women and Men (21 page)

His body’s cleansing high got Jesus what he went for, which was to run the show: and so as it came after her, she knew that what came after would find her without quite looking for her in its own sweet-yeasty time, the goddess being taken and by force that was her own feed-back that was all over up till the last converging grips, helping self or friend find self or just old words to get truth said. Or fucking self or friend.

Then it was still all over but out of sight and words, which were bullshit always.

Her full, shoppingcart day was coming to the point, and so now the hall phone going once crawled up her shin so far as her knee (the knee inside which her mother what a great talker sat in a faraway kitchen) and it could be anyone phoning—that’s what we love about the phone!—but Grace would sense who it was, it was her own baby’s-breath stormtrooper Maureen who’s hearing not Grace’s voice but "Grace Kimball residence" from the sassy black sister at the phone answering service): which can only make more abundant the bend of the approaching cosmos coming to her point so she has her way with (thankfully) herself, her fingers, her whole hand; and ‘twan’t her 1976 late-model Danish phone-shower-head dial a fine-tine/hard-prickle for there’s no privacy like a one-on-one shower, and ‘twan’t a flow of magenta from her felt pen into the big fat sketchbook she wrote things down in just like when she drew knuckles and muscles, cunts and cheekbones or the latest dream: so she also’s finding out how her unconscious is doing—how ya’
do’m’l
—and ‘twan’t her cassette-recorder mike (neat smooth black-cockhead princess mike) she had in her hand.

She had it almost, her day-load cleared/vacuumed of words words shitfall of them coming down to one point alone. And if the phone’s being answered across the city at the answering service by the sassy and (Grace would swear) long-tongued black sister, baby’s breath friend workshop-assistant Maureen stormtrooper might still enter here using her own key coming to show Grace her newly done velvet head and Grace was with herself in her Body Room and could not be turned by Maureen even if Maureen stood right over there stretching on the chromed chinning-bar lintel at the threshold looking into this all but furnitureless space and fully mirrored nest of the abundant Body Room reserved for the Goddess, the outer entrance hall beyond and behind with its bakers dozen soft silver (painted/plated) cunts for workshop women’s clothes to be (H.O.A.) hung on arrival.

But Maureen can’t come here yet. The dayful was coming up to one point alone, and Grace would not quite bear down, she had the idea, the whole thing of it this time not spurred or oiled by thoughts of other hands or a little big toe working her over or the soft line where someone’s tan began.

How did it happen? Was it a Body-Self breath loose from words dragging at it? Her unlocked pelvis called aloft, and, in the old faith that so linked-up her lower back to her knees, but many knees getting ready globally to come together and take over, and her shoulders to her waiting voice and non-metallic (because non-carnivore) scent of her coming into its own (for women according to scientist Maureen smell and taste more truly than men), Grace had it all before her and she saw she had had it.

But say what it was.

What else but a bunch of lives who, in contact with your Body-Self love, are right here feeling you’re taking too much time: and then’s when you might accelerate or (even with
yourself) fake
coming, or just get up and go answer the phone, the door, the letter that’s easier to answer you think than holding yourself so dear you can flirt with yourself in the almond-oil bathtub and never forget the power not to be judged Good or Bad but waiting, which our female
history
has too often grabbed, so it is up to us, as if we were not our history, but—

Say that again, Grace . . . ?

A dayful bunch of lives turning each day secretly a great minute and a little year, secretly same shape but all you can do is know it, you can’t put it down, it’s the tip of the yelp, the coastline of your receding—

Your what, Grace . . . ?

A bunch of lives she has—

What, Grace . . . ?

Internalized. All her people, like she’s some newspaper. A friend’s gone-to-seed body. A suddenly-out-of-the-closet friend’s busted husband. Or faraway milk bottles with an upper stripe of cream hundreds of miles
(years)
west clinking cold moist rounded potential weapons in your forgotten dreams where there were now red-and-white waxy containers of homogenized if you’re into dairy products, which is a small outline of the larger, it comes to her.

Is it the shoreline of our mind, our consciousness? Is that what you mean, Grace? Who was it said, "the yeasty sea"? Some man putting in man-hours on words.

Goddess be with me but she feels others, like angels trying to get in on her act, trying to catch up, speaking like her language, speaking
her,
but angels are special, aren’t they?

Dayful bunch of a black dude on the street in an alligator hat murmuring, "MAma" as Grace swung past in alligator-booted breeches.

Add one cassette-ful of herself: it’s in her knapsack, her live-recorded speech—Her,
live:
we mean last night’s gig by a figure in the history of her time: Grace Kimball, her shaved, velvet-headed, get-in-touch-with-your-pelvis-headed-thigh-high vision of all women gathering underground turning their slow and
oh
yes constipated struggles into self-auras available freeze-dried they’ll come to life centuries later, be reconstituted like orange juice—will it work for carrot?—tho’ once taught not to believe in own existence by the same guys
(doer-dudes
but with a little help you know closet self-crucifiers—) who could make your asshole cream in its own unrefined sugar so you’d never know it can think for itself:

While a burglar breaks into Maureen’s little baby’s breath apartment while, down on Twenty-third Street, she is doing kung fu in a second-floor plate glass window, and, having swiped Maureen’s stereo tape deck (stamped with the local police precinct’s owner-ID imprint so if the cops catch up to the unit they can quarantine it in their widows’ and homeowners’ domestic reserve) and swiped her checkbook (she knows it by heart, stub by stub), and swiped by mistake her American Express credit card bill
and
Maureen
’s florist
bill for standing order of baby’s breath as well, this paternalistic burglar the following day takes responsibility for delicate, power-seeking Maureen by paying her Amex with one of her own checks she has instantly stopped payment on yet burglar-boy pays
her florist
bill with
his
own
cash
—so her fatherly florist phones up, oh honey he didn’t want her paying
that
bill, that one was on the house he thought he had told her last week and she should never never send cash through the mails; so Maureen winds up less mad at the thief-god than at the overweight florist who will lust after her pussy-willow head which receives more load than she can handle some days which is the problem with all women uniting down the ages.

"What will happen has happened" stands out on the soft page of the large Sketchbook . . .

Suicide alert for Cliff; his hands and fingers deeply touching to me when they touch the wood they will cut, shave, turn, and mold like something soft. "Words, words, words," Cliff my old friend says so honestly—all that page-boy hair, and at the down-corners of his talker’s mouth a tiny curve of self-destruct if not in ever-ready potential for flesh-surplus between hip and rib-cage:

firm at fifty, unloading the white Cadillac still panicked him, old friend, he owned it too long, once garaged in Maine, driven to Nova Scotia, paraded through Ontario and two Shakespeare plays—postcards to prove it: stolen, she recalls, in Mackinac, Michigan by the son of a lighthouse keeper on an island in Lake Superior; returned like at the end of dreams Cliff’s had about it with a full tank of premium; driven to New Orleans where Grace joined him for the Alcoholics Anonymous Reunion Hop (what a pair!)—

to dance in the street at Mardi Gras surrounded by Ham and Romance junkies which we didn’t realize they were because they had kicked booze and some even pleasure anxiety—

now selling the grand old white Cadillac gave Cliff a huge grant of time free of that moving space/furniture he had had to worry about, like making meals for members of a family in one dream he had about the car, changing their oil, greasing their bearings, fly to Maine instead, rent a compact, put in a phone call, clean break:

but now another suicide alert: what is at stake? is it serious? Cliff thought what did it was standing in line at lunch-hour at the Motor Vehicle Bureau to get owner-transfer forms when he didn’t need to: not that he’s ready for the flight deck at Bellevue where they wouldn’t let him have his carving knives though the bedposts aren’t exactly made of maple there, must ask Cliff if maple is too hard to carve:

she had told him she didn’t
want
to eat at Nippon Nosh tonight, was going to jerk off and talk to whoever came out from within

me, Goddess or her adopted loves and children through energy-abundant roof or through door, though knew my periodic cluster would send me uncaused something greater later and I said Cliff better jerk off the way I showed him, preferably
with
someone. I did not add (though felt enough the Goddess to) that Cliff has carved enough cunts for one month and it was turning into work (Manhattan cottage industry). Who was it said suicide is the white man’s disease? "Brother," I would say to Cliff. Brother? What about "Sister"? "You’re a good man, Sister." Now Cliff complains this friend Dave he’s keeping from me can’t go on

living off his wife, who cooks him gourmet animal protein, picks up the baby from sitter’s on way home, where Dave’s been making all-day sculptures he doesn’t sell that look like lungs, hearts, enlarged livers

and my kidneys after a motorcycle trip to the Finger Lakes, take your lumps and if they harden on you shrink them with concentration, while last year Dave Shea was of some "school" making mockups 3-D diagrams of vertical traffic Cliff calls inhuman. I agree this Dave is spoiled for the mid-1970s, though recalls according to Cliff natural childbirth like it was his own. I think, Why does Cliff get his ass in a splint, but he doesn’t pick up on my thought, must have been bent right around it by the kind goddess who knows when you’re not ready. Historian always more
feminist
than me, he’s not feeling so suicidal now: says isn’t it great Dave was there when his kid was born. But where was Dave afterward? I asked and Cliff agrees; yet, "Male plot to take over world," he chuckles, not so sure what he himself meant—did he mean—

—give yourself back your head, a dayful of head coming to a point of nothing but Love / Power cluster: which drew in along her Black-Dude-street-walk an interesting
Old
Couple, and not married, she was certain, but deep —and they had a story—
what is your trip?
(Grace went), projecting her mind to new people—so different from each other, he skin-and-bonesy, ravaged, rangy, the old lady so pretty (and nuts) and charming, and
old
—not cunt-old and maybe not cunt-negative, the beat-up man still in his late sixties gaunt-pocked navigating irritably/kindly along the sidewalk this soft-faced, half-gone old lady. But they had given each other their looks right before Grace’s eyes, like the light off each other’s face and you felt they were not on fixed income but into some other trip.

And later—later—not last, though; never never last (for there’s your sound system, and there’s always the phone . . .

—which now rings as Grace thinks it—to be picked up by the dark-cream of the Answering Hand somewhere in the decentralized system covering the city) . . .

—but
later
—after the businessman who kept vowing to put a cunt-positive drawing of Grace’s into T-shirt production but declined the bunch of orgy-swarming fruits in purples, silvery reds, and persimmon orange as too artistic, a fat-sounding man—and after a visiting sociologist (dear Sketchbook) on a week’s whirlwind from Denmark ("advanced sexual company hopefully") whom she will describe to

Maureen with her baby’s breath (cut flower) problem which is all Maureen’s got left to come off of except the one biggie, Grace herself though some days Maureen is turning carrot-orange—yet can compare notes at two in the morning like no one anywhere,
scientifically,
softly, reporting she has bettered her orgasm endurance record earlier in the day only to recall from years ago being home in bed with flu—whereas in Denmark shit they do what we do here, it’s obvious from the Dane, the sociologist very interestingly bald shave-cut with three lateral strips of shortcut sprouting—a man with three degrees

was studying American group sex in relation to and as support capability for the bottom-line pair bonding of couples that attended the group swings: which Grace is phasing out for a primarily open group-future while this sociologist-drone with a long but foreignly supple hard-on he was coaxed to bring forth so they could compare hard-ons still turned her on to herself in terms of historic fantastic break-through (gotta hand it to him) for he, after an international pause, consented to pay a fifty-dollar-an-hour
consulting
fee Grace spontaneously heard herself request because who was this guy to use her time for his thing, so that when she put his cum-towel in the hamper and later powered her Electrolux over the field of her mirror-to-mirror carpet she found herself unexpectedly in the sweet, not-overweight but posture-impeded/shoulders-forward body the actual body of the Danish sociologist’s wife houseworking a minimum half day pausing while dusting piano to peruse a
Forum
her husband left on top of his opera album, the night before he left amply equipped with traveler’s checks in denominations of twenty and fifty to visit the equally vacuumatic Kimball.