Women and Men

daughter of the revolution

In the old sense of the word, Maureen seemed so sternly "gay" when we met at a swing in my building in late ‘75, so determined to say what she wanted you to do, and how and where and how fast and for how long — and again exactly how — for even moment-to-moment sex, let alone parenthood, takes planning nowadays — that her quite real tenderness hid itself away somewhere. It was like a spray of baby’s breath that at first you hardly notice in a white room I remember — you, I — in a white china vase near white curtains, and in summertime. Her tenderness strangely rested inside the seeming strength of all that up-front explicitness and the strict feminist management of personal power equaling the discovery of personal power — isn’t that how her Leader’s doctrine went? A spray of baby’s breath was what she had in her hand in the elevator one morning, sconced in dark-green tissue, and I didn’t yet know this lovely girl with a beautiful leather knapsack on her back; and though she stood four-square, doctrinally balanced on both feet — for as I learned she was into kung fu two evenings a week — her airy way kept her very light and she was scarcely in touch with the floor of the elevator rising, but "it" promised tenderness, whatever "it" was. She must have been taking those tiny buds of white bloom to her Leader, unless she was taking them for herself, to be with her while she was with her friend.

No doubt about how she came into my apartment the first time, the tenderness at last if not at first. She asked if my body was anesthetized. She found my giant Spanish table with the abandoned treadle built into its lower structure; and she found the brass bed (worth twelve hundred dollars) halfway polished as it stayed for two months; and she found the barstools at the breakfast nook, and found "all these books, Luce!" and found a square, delicate Harvard chair my father bought years after he had graduated and six months before he died, and a tall, noble Windsor chair my mother when she visits from Santa Fe sits in resolutely as if she would take it back, instead of me. Yes, Maureen came in and found my whole godawful history wound up between my shoulder and the root of my strong neck, when I was "dying" of cigarettes, first smoking them, then now not smoking them. Tenderness? It lived in her fingertips when her mind was dreaming. Other times, hardly to be seen when she was talking power, her tenderness might have been nestling in the arms of her Leader.

Oh well, the German word is too close, and her Leader was even less fascist than some of those who are casually called fascist nowadays. When you’ve had a lover who was a political economist — a real love — you get fussy about such things. But who was more fussy than Maureen? — though I don’t mean the sound of her voice coming, nor her saying not quite softly, "Go round and round in a very small circle, that’s all, and then I’ll tell you what happens after that." I mean about words: like "discrimination" could never mean deciding subtly between ideas; and "energy" could never be questioned, I mean as a word, because we all knew what it meant.

She showed me all over again that I had nipples. She found my feet as if I had lost them in their charge of tension. She told me how she had felt at ten wearing a T-shirt to school in Florida and getting sore. I mean she would talk endlessly about her body, the quality of her gums if she went a day without eating a grapefruit, the number of days she might go without taking a shit, how to brush your teeth (though one day when I thought What the hell, we’ll talk about this, then, why she closed the subject as soon as I opened my mouth), the hint of past surplus along her lower back, the exact feel of pubic hair growing back in, how her insteps felt when she came with a man, with a woman, or alone, or — but orgasm was good or better because of how you managed things. It came from the Leader’s talk, though Maureen always went a bit further. I had known that I had nipples and in a sense I did not need to be reminded, and I speak of it here because sex for all the talk and activity in those years when the War was winding down and our aging parents, retired beyond climatic change, would rather not think about what was going on in our lives, and Mr. N. (wasn’t it?) was in the Situation Room taping crises (though I have been told there are no situations, only people!), what I found coming for me from Maureen was not mainly sex, and so the lullaby of her hand on my chest — my breast — seemed mostly deeply loving, though I would add that it also turned me on.

I put this down in a notebook helter skelter like a letter, and why write words after all if not to somebody?

And if you believe, and even if the revolution had already happened, why not take your position with regard to other people: it may not mean they will take your advice, but they won’t go running all over you — right, Maureen, dear? And so Maureen, in the last days of this that I am getting to, would urge me to take a workshop; would even tell me her adored Leader had advised the same, while I added that there are no neutral messages and why was Maureen carrying messages from that star-quality teacher (whom I already knew) to me?

Once I stayed in Maureen’s apartment overnight — not what she wanted from me or from sex — and when I left early in the a.m. finding brief instructions on where to find a bag of whole-grain cereal and to drink from one of the jars of juice in the refrigerator rather than operate the juicer myself (as if I ever would have), I gave in to some silly tenderness of mine and left Maureen a note saying just, "Thanks, Maureen. You’re lovely. I loved being here." And later in the day wondered if that was going too far.

In public the twice I involved myself in all that supposed openness, she was so noisy when she came, so joyfully hard in her spasmodic calls that she could have been being raped — it was like work, or it was too much like the high of a lunatic hooked onto what wasn’t in the end known, though not the wftknown. But then with me one time she did come, and in all those quick breaths like contraction control, then some soft long breaths even before she let go that last private wonder and laughed and I did, too, but I knew it was real and I had felt it in the muscles of her buttocks that must have been drained of all fatty tissue by lecithin or God knows what recent compound. But it wasn’t me supposedly; it was her being (as the Leader said) responsible for her orgasm. Yet the Leader was something else, and I would not pretend to sum her up except that she enjoyed her life enormously and if she, as she used to say in her own famous words, "ran the fuck" (with whoever), and if it was a little on the Olympic side of lust, she was fun and preferred a longdistance variety of body trips to the usual.

I put this down in a notebook but why write words after all if not to someone? Which is anesthesia? Which is waking truth? There came a day when I thought all I wanted was Maureen’s well-being. She came in to see me on her way home, for she was by then living in the building — but not because I lived there, rather because her Leader did. And she said she had had a date with this guy out in Brooklyn — well, the Heights, which is not "out" so much as over the bridge — and he had lived there since his mother had dropped him out of the carriage on his head on a curb of Garden Place in about 1935; and when I said, Did it go O.K., and Maureen said, I gave him what he wanted, and he gave me what he was able to, I laughed and said, But that happens with women, too. But Maureen said, Oh Luce, you take things too personally, you work too hard, you’re afraid of pleasure, you’re work-addicted, you go so far but not far enough into freedom.

I know, I know, I said, I’ve heard all that before, but you can’t think that work’s a chosen pleasure because you and your mother-superior have discovered that some people get baffled and anxious when they’re having a ball.

Maureen got mad, called me compulsive, work-addicted—

— That’s you, I said.

— compulsively lazy, she said — and I felt that I was her other parent, then. And it came to me as if I had left it and come back to it — an idea as solid as a silver money clip (we do not — we have decided not to — carry bills in our wallets any more) — that what I wanted from Maureen was not her passion but her well-being.

But in the excitement of those days, I did not shrug off all that blind talk of addiction, and though Maureen might say I was work-addicted and as with my nipples and my recently very hard-rubbed scalp had not yet begun to discover my body, I would hook into the provincial evangelism of their thinking and remonstrate angrily that addictions were all the same, and being in love was not a cocaine habit which Maureen’s Leader did not have but used — can you use a habit? — experimenting with that eight-foot-tall snuff ground out of that particular hard-to-capture mountain of our mind first thing in the morning to test its effect on her work, which, I tried (pissed off) to point out to Maureen, apparently did not come under the category of addiction. And before she could take the chance to speak, I went on, as if I didn’t want to keep her on the spot, and said Freedom was the issue of course but addiction was such a third-rate, banal way to reduce it, and she should let some of the poets tell her "Isn’t it time our loving freed us from the one we love."

Because there had to be some use in my having had a brief horrendous affair with a young German writer who wrote obliquely about New York City, taking liberties with the street geography on the north margin of the Pan American Building, but spoke to me unforgettable lines of German poetry as courteously in translation as generous toward the English translators; amazingly generous, if you think about it. Meanwhile, Maureen told me that I should not put myself down calling my talk confused except that sometimes I did not answer the question with the information asked for, which was partly not Sharing (I capitalize it in my mind), and partly not loving myself enough to keep my attention on the thing asked for.

But once I found in a scrap of diary of Maureen’s those very lines written as prose and ascribed admiringly to me, so that I would have added what "happens" next except I would have gained only the honesty of admitting I’d been here reading her stuff, which was mostly second-hand from her beloved workshop Leader who had changed Maureen from a buxom Miss America catatonically walking through boyfriends and boozy hotel clubs with dark rustling dance floors to anyway someone who was physically a marvel and mentally at least determined to save herself, if side by side with her Leader, who was herself changing before my eyes though I could never easily speak of that woman to Maureen — except admiringly.

I have written down what she looked like, and my words are surprisingly good, though no more worth recalling than a hundred details attended to in the course of a week administering a hospital, at least a vital part of its work, going round in circles yet despite the relation of nurse to doctor a strong feminist fiber there in the strength of the women, so many women, working there, even if too often administering dubious medications prescribed as simply as a springy intern-priest accepts his relation to a tough, middle-aged nurse-nun — nephew to aunt in the ongoing patriarchy.

Maureen was definitely beautiful in the clothes she made for herself— right down to a lovely pale suede suit (almost western) and linen shirts sewn so invisibly you could find the patterns of that instinctive knowledge in the thoughtfulness of Maureen’s hands touching yours or folding together to brace herself when she did a magical headstand that made the room all except me fall away, the walls opening but not into the other apartments of the building.

Her face, even when some blood beneath it paled, could carry forth saffron perfume of color, half faintly tanned, half flowering coral, half in turn recalling childish freckles that might have begun beneath the light of one summer’s sun but scarcely took hold. The eyes were like the cheekbones, don’t ask me how, some width of hope and freshness stunned toward a fixity of purpose adopted from outside herself. Tall, narrow, leaner and leaner, with the softest wide mouth and the most dynamically drawn feet, arched inward and upward, toes somewhat spaced as if she went barefoot, and she would ask, actually, to have her big toe rubbed and rubbed in a circular motion and reported, once, that her model and guide and Leader used other people’s big toes to give herself an orgasm.

I have written down what Maureen looked like. Her eyes were brown with blue flecks; her hair brown, never dyed like that of her Leader, but for months shorn to the bone so it reminded me not of someone getting into touch with a living and beautiful head but of a model I saw strolling the autumn streets of Napoleon’s birthplace in Corsica totally bald with, evidently, a lover, who looked like a male model, yet in that sculptured skull a victim and later I thought "a victim of the century" no less.

Maureen said, "Power," when I asked her what she wanted. Power over whom, I asked — over which Indians? I asked, cornily remembering her Peace Corps work and her trips back to the Southwest where she had once been— "once"? — an army child and might speak now of how the padres had practically halved the population of the Pueblo Indians by bringing in measles, no wonder they needed those mission churches to get those poor, measles-ridden, smallpoxed native Americans in out of that powerful light.

I knew Maureen when she worked for a bank, a giant bank, the bank (if such a structure has a name) (Oh Luce, you’re living in your head again!) (Oh God Maureen—) (Oh Goddess, Luce, O.K.?) (O.K., oh Goddess, Maureen, you’re the one living inside your head, I’m just a person) (Oh, there you go again, Luce, saying "just" to minimize yourself). And her immediate superior, soon after she was promoted to a position of considerable responsibility for handling Eurodollar accounts, called her in to "discuss" the garlic smell that came like smoke signals all morning from her breath. Garlic therapy, garlic therapy, and did you read about the old nut whose five-mornings-a-week bus driver wouldn’t take him any more though then he sued the company, it was in New Jersey, so it isn’t just women.

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 . .

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.