Told Maureen, take your colonial ladderback = part of your coming-off-Marriage trousseau, and lift it and put it over there to the right; then step through where it was. She smiled sweet stormtrooper’s baby’s breath smile, said it wd take less energy to go around the chair and leave it where it was. But in that case, I said, she would have to go around it whether it was a Colonial ladderback seated with that pale, crickly-sounding caning, or an ugly armchair overstuffed and undersprung, because, I said, "Furniture is furniture." And good old Maureen replied as if in touch with my body more than her own: "I understand." Maureen is ready for another clean break, it feels like.

At ten-thirty this morning Grace visited the offices of her last night’s hostess Sue’s semi-busted husband Marv to pick up last night’s tape. Where his aunt-secretary, permed and nonorgasmic, got up and moved because her desk would not, yet because she had been a part of it while sitting. She was indeed a wonderful woman, as Grace had heard him say. "She’d do anything for Marv—money in the bank," Sue had said and here she stood in a doorway frame as bonded as a Wall Street messenger and treated to a Chinese lunch on her unnumbered birthday ("odd-numbered" birthday she would sweetly say, reported Marv to Sue, who told Grace, who for a terrible instant could not visualize Sue), a woman knowing every inch of his office there in the communicating doorframe behind him twelve hours after Sue’s remark and now gaping at Grace’s velvet head given her if she wants to do something with it, sit on it, blow on it, touch it tenderly/experimentally, till she turns into a person Grace knows and likes her and would touch her wrist or non-orgasmic arm or shoulder or the small of her back, and say, Listen, sugar, it’s O.K.

Marv would not send a messenger to bring Grace the tape this morning, having been one himself by commuter train early this fine day from the home where once he had been chief-bottle-washer, down the Long Island tracks to these two Manhattan business rooms of his with key-protected outside John where he still was boss. From the house in Port Adams, he had brought the tape that had been left in the tape recorder. Grace will someday have a Men’s Workshop, too, and betcha life with Marv in it. And then as last night and last year she will always trust herself to speak the words that come to her.

As this man, a gold band bonded to his finger, did not. She smelled vitamin pills in the blood of his breath while she absorbed without trying to understand the bitter, bitter words as he handed her the tape she had left in what had been but now was not his and his son Larry’s (though still maybe Larry’s) home in Port Adams, just moved out of to an apartment in Grace’s building, a fact lost to Grace’s mind when the tape-delivery had been discussed: the truth behind his words now worked away in his neck bent toward her: "You have your public, Grace, but you should try listening to yourself."

"I hear myself, I don’t listen," her eyes watering, her toes out, her hand now on his hair-darkened, warm arm, for he was in his shirt-sleeves and one sleeve was rolled up.

"That’s right. You always go too far," said the shaking voice. "I try to," she said, "it’s how people know me, it’s how I’m public." "You fucking little corporation," Marv breathed just between the two of them, "now you finagled a place for me in your building."

No use telling him that his out-of-the-closet still-wife Sue (who Grace very privately thought would not last six months with another woman but would not get back with Marv) had done this directly with the landlord’s agent, whom she knew; and no one had told Grace (it was a surprise! and, for her, not a bad one, because she liked Marv and Larry both) but then it came to her that Sue had said she had a surprise for her, and Grace at once had thought of their eighteen-year-old Larry, who stood with hands clasped behind his back, so aloof, alone, and funny/friendly, thinking always into the communal gig-bank. The phone rang then in Marv’s office and Marv’s secretary had her sex-negative arms crossed over her chest pushing her breasts down and turned away without uncrossing them.

Marv—what had he said?—"I think I hate you."

"Don’t hate me if you don’t really want to," she said. Her eyes watered warmly, she had felt hit all over her but inside in her blood. She thought of her Sketchbook-Notebook, old talk-converter: she was going to have one day a week of silence hermetically sealed.

She knew Marv couldn’t get going and let her have it. "You’re such a string of ..." He didn’t finish, and she took the words as eye-to-eye as he let her—he was looking just past her cheek—he told her how she had undermined his life with Sue, supporting all people seeking exit from relationships. Last night he had had that fixed smile hosting a rainbow buffet of live food with the teenage son Larry, while the hostess Sue mingled, and once late in the evening they had seemed to arrive at one spot in the room at the same moment and Marv hugged Sue and said, "Atta girl" and "Good lady," and Grace had heard heavy-duty Kate say, "He doesn’t mean it."

So everyone agreed, Marv had a long way to go in the mid-seventies of these United States, as Grace’s father had used to refer to them. So Marv had been kicked by true love before he could kick it.

Did he know how to properly brush his teeth? At least he had learned to eat. Decision Therapy could surprise him: you have nothing to lose but the people bugging you.

She really liked Marv, and he really liked his sharp, quiet son Larry, and he was trying to work with Sue without knowing any rules, that was what he looked for, too bad.

She had left the stale light of his office, turning to wink at the secretary with her bib and her heels, who had answered the phone and reappeared in the doorway to the other office as if she had never moved from that doorway, part of a set of furniture that they had forgotten to move and that was missing someplace else. Grace was ready to feel different.

Grace was in the street in her hundred-thirty-dollar abundance boots. She sensed that the office had been not long, as she’d felt while there, but squarer. And the secretary woman, upright as they came, maybe her alertness to Grace was the basic business welcome she knew, quite respectably animal, don’t knock it. Grace felt back there with her, getting closer and closer. But she had to strut past six hundred pounds of overweight, overpaid male silence now mainlining beer at ten-thirty in the morning (so who’s this dyke-cock-suckin’ hooker circus?, came the two-to-one white-over-black majority) leaning against their parked truck. Yet bearing down on her and employed at least in a flashy up-and-down-shouldered style of walking came a black dude with his high ass in a swing who said (up front) softly, "Mama!" as she said, "Daddy!" signing equals all the way deciding she didn’t have the time to exchange phone numbers because she had to get home to play the tape and because this real free-enterprise West Indian coming on to her own one-eighth Pawnee (according to family lore) had to be in her periodic cluster though she only vaguely thought she had seen him, and so he would appear again soon anyway, as physically fit in his late twenties as she in her early forties.

Beyond him Grace saw a girl’s hand in her boyfriend’s back pocket, thumb free to move, above the four fingers. But across on the other sidewalk moving the other way, there was the beat-up old guy again and the beautiful old woman: he was having trouble with her, did they really have anywhere to go?, Grace started across and the passing alarm-siren of a wide long van rolling away on its rear wheels behind a police tow truck passed under her nose and she could have been hit by this hysterical men’s world where they hadn’t turned off the van’s burglar alarm, and then she sidestepped a whirring red bicycle, it whipped around her, seemingly on both sides of her and she thought, I will be as old as those people I am going toward, because the clink like armor worn by the bicyclist was milk bottles moving toward a porch not to be found within miles of the old couple here in Manhattan: a porch more like nineteen hundred miles away. Did anyone sell milk bottles now?—weightily balanced and already in the glass if what you needed was a quick hit.

The man, as she reached their side of the street, was pretty beat-up, wasn’t he? Like his face had been swung around to either side of his high skull and the skin had fought back and sort of won. His companion the old lady—she’s fabulous for maybe seventy-seven though perhaps babbling— drew them all together. Did Grace know her from somewhere? His hand on the old lady’s arm, his thin arm tense, handling her—he liked her, knew her, and yet he had had years of separation from her or predecessors, some helpless history she had shrugged off was for him almost a danger that made him rational crazy. She moved her head softly side to side and had a white, plastic-looking rose pinned to her sky blue cardigan, talked at the same time fast, they overlapped each other like excited strangers, interested shadows, Grace felt. "Fly me . . ."—surely Grace had heard the words, as in the unspeakable stewardess gig for one of the male-run, financially shaky of course airlines, "Fly me," the old lady said, "fly me—they wind up in that window, for crying out tears." Oh she was making up for lost time with all that talk. And then as Grace gained the sidewalk, the man, his stubbled face mysteriously dark-scruffy-moustached and from the temples a fan of spider threads every which way unchecked even by his strong, faintly twisted nose—he so thin and straight—turned to the beautiful old lady—what’s he doing to her that she goes on like this?—and she (saying he should really keep that moustache, it came out a different color from hair, as if she had received Grace’s projection-thought) turned away toward the shop window hopefully, and he with her; and Grace saw that with the two of them she was standing watching a show. But at first the empty window held nothing more than a gray sign, messenger service, and a rainbow star and across it, readings—psychic consultations, also then the lurking reflection of the old man.

Then a pair of twin-like people appeared and flew at each other: pummeling yet silly: yet Grace wanted to be there mixing it up with them. Their mouths were open not just for breath but for receiving, she thought; and they laughed and grimaced, but kind of hurt each other, wore a lot of rings; and the thing was, you almost didn’t know if it was girls or boys or one of each —far out!—and granting the difference between the two you felt they were warped twins with a new twist. One of each, Grace decided, as she moved up on the old couple, for the long-haired young pummeler in an old suit, no tie, had frail shoulders but stubbly cheeks and misshapen head while the short-haired one in a blue-and-gold-sleeveless jersey with an insignia had good chest development and biceps like those of Grace’s heavily-into-anesthesia dentist but soft, creamy skin. Now they hit hard, they bumped the broad window glass of the storefront, rings glinting off their knuckles, here we are, here we are, this is where we are, this is where we all are. Then the smaller, queer-headed male dropped his arms, dropped them and stood open: but was it wanting to be hit?, a little M to S?, but no, open to the other, his twin sister (Grace believed), who shied away, put up an arm to shield the face toughly as if to throw a punch, then faded out of the window destroyed. "Fly me, will they!" said the old lady; "why I am their rings!" But the one Grace thought was twin-sister returned and raised her bicep’d arms, brought hands together like a prayer, split them apart so Grace saw the Zodiac-like sign on the strongly breasted chest, the sister (if it was sister) turning out of profile, and what looked like smoke or some quickened reflection in the glass shot from this kid’s body in a puff of cloud, and the other, drab in the old suit as misshapen and large of head, fell forward, stricken dead, into the spell of its sibling and fell down below the level of the window only then to rise so the two of them could turn to the old couple smiling and Grace said, "Far out." The old lady clapped and clapped—"I am their rings!"—"You mean wings, honey," said the man—and she wanted to go into this place but was held back by the man who in holding her turned toward Grace whom the old lady now turned to see as if she remembered her (which was what Grace truly understood, for Grace for that moment was that old lady, jerking off into the future or reversed into the alligator abundance boots where Be crazy is Giving away in order to have what you give).

She was on her own free carpet for a long moment then not entranced by the sound of her voice on the tape of last night, remembering girls’ basketball when you got one dribble after which you had to glue one foot to the shiny wood floor like charming prisoner stretching and how the legs spread —no, she was here on a street near the bike shop, she was in two places or minds at once as she’d been seeing and freeing the old lady who seemed now to forget the show put on for her in the window of the Messenger Service/ Psychic Consultation place.

"Been a long time," said the old lady. "Martha," she said, offering her hand but cutting off her word very sharp, maybe remembering she had forgotten her last name. Grace introduced herself and ran "Martha" through hundreds of named people she’d talked to and when the Hermit-Inventor as Martha called him tried to draw her away, Grace told him to lay off, Martha could take care of herself. "Martha," said Martha, "is only one of my two given names and I’m giving it to you; the other one I gave back." "To the Indians," said her protector who now burst out laughing at what Grace had said. But he laughed so at this he seemed not to care, at the same time as he dropped the old lady’s arm—maybe her name wasn’t Martha—and said to Grace, "This is not a good place for us to be, by this window, those people in there are out of their minds."

"Which people?" said Martha, her eyes filmed with depth.

"See?" said the hermit running a hand along the angle of Grace’s arm bent at the elbow and unmoved by his touch.

"Why don’t you let her do her own thing," said Grace, wanting to be on her way.

But the old man said, "She’s much taken with you." He said it softly but the old lady Martha said, "He always does that." She shook her head. "Can’t explain. I have another name."

"I know what you mean," said Grace. "I think I have another name, too. Maybe it’s Martha."

The man said, "She wants to drink a beer now." "Morning, morning, he always does that," the old woman said. She shook her head, opened her mouth, couldn’t find the words. "I can’t explain."

"Much taken with you," the old man said, a bit curtly. "Wants to drink a beer now."

The black dude in the alligator hat reappeared from behind the van across the street where the men of the van had been having their beers; the black dude whom, it came to her, she would have her way with, was reappearing, and the van moved away from the curb in the opposite direction and Grace needed to go and the black dude was not to reappear until later, she was sure.

"But what was that show in the window all about—the brother and sister?" Grace looked from one to the other, back and forth, eye contact, bring them both in.

The old woman shrugged, it didn’t look right on her but her face clouded together and she didn’t know. Not even quite how to shake her head. The man took her arm as she turned back to the empty storefront window. "Brothers, they’re brothers, they kill each other and get up again, the man inside doesn’t know what to do with them." Her companion looked over his shoulder at Grace, shook his head in jerks as if to say, harassed, that Martha, if that was her name (it seemed to have an r and an a in it) was "out of it." He said, "Another time, kid," and the old lady said, "Old hermit crab," Grace thought, but to Grace she said, at impressive length, "He makes me out to like things that it’s really him that likes them," while her escort/old friend bending toward her caring for her (Grace knew) kept saying, "Like what, like what, like what?" and at a distance words came to Grace, a curtain opening and closing at the same time, "Well, sometimes we like the same things." And right then, Grace actively put from her mind the fact that her cassette waiting for her but on her person was a portable headache she could get rid of if she would. Like she almost couldn’t help going into the Messenger/ Psychic Readings storefront behind the empty, unfurnished window and see what weird business trip they were advertising in the window grab-ass she had enjoyed watching.

Was Marv’s fury ripping her to shreds? Did she not know what she felt? The tape in her bag had been drawing her home, but blocks and blocks of the city waited in the way. A bus appeared and she got a radiator seat at the rear where she could look at how the black dude in the alligator hat came past on the sidewalk going uptown and suddenly eyeballed her right on through the window. She could not get out of her mind her own taped words she was going home to play. They were live, they were her own, and when she got off the bus and bought one small white sweetheart rose at the florist and stuck it through a button-hole of her shirt—and later when she was jerking off to the goddess in the mirror as she had known she would—she had known she was being drawn home to know later what she knew already.

But on the bus’s hot seat and in the florist’s and alone in the mirrored Body Room, she heard the clink of milk, pieces of her bike, forks on Sue’s plates last night, and she heard a deeper, longer milk clink. But they were Marv’s plates, knives, forks, cups, saucers, embroidered tablecloth, and bottled pure Garden of Eden apple juice just as much as they were Sue’s or young Larry’s, who with tender shining forehead sat in the kitchen reading a book about chess but toward the end of last night’s evening figured out how to mix and was much in demand discussing the space program (manned versus unmanned, got heckled, shrugged it off) and chess, which he might be outgrowing at eighteen. While Sue gave the mother-provider trip a twist reporting that she had told Larry he ought to get laid. It was about time, he was almost eighteen, and, even standing over by a window trying to understand a tall political woman you knew would phone the next day who spoke painfully and too fast or too slow, Grace heard Sue through the noisy talk in the large room saying it—it had been what Grace had told Sue, that Larry should get laid, and now she heard it come back through the room to her, family history.

And even these you must empty your hands of, as she had not quite been able to show Sue, who was changing her life but maybe into new Habit Patterns that would grab her just like she grabbed what Grace had to say about Decision-as-Necessary-Shorthand, about Siamese Marriage, about carbohydrate hits: but prophetic, Grace had been called—by Sue, come to think of it—when Grace had said, You will walk out someday.

So why should Grace not find the meaning of her day sloping back to her? But in a new voice, not the silence of the burly driver of a bus that fell apart and back together at each dip so the man up there behind the bar with his walkie-talkie (while women communicate directly, she found herself adding to future gigs), the driver here wanted to finish off three non-orgasmic senior citizen ladies who had boarded the bus but not reached seats and were holding on as if this was tomorrow spelled backward like the letters on the front of an ambulance that’s not free, God as if this was tomorrow and there was no bus, only a loop to swing on, they were not quite making it into orbit. He knew what he was doing, floored his pedal, flipped the huge wheel, job-secure in the picture of his wife bent over the obstacle course her vacuum led her orbiting her kitchen while attached by a long cord to a plug in a socket, the noise all but overcoming phone, future doorbell, and other sounds but not the aroma that added up to three American cheese and sweating bacons she had grilled for lunch one after the other, yes, leaving the oven on after the first grilled cheese and bacon in case she had a second: foresight guaranteed: but why was she vacuuming in the kitchen? how had Grace seen that? Switch scenes and see the husband of Clara tall and thin with a foreign moustache levering the cork out of the bottle like pumping water, he like the busdriver’s wife proved to be with appetite as Clara had foreseen rising awkwardly from her mermaid folds on Grace’s famous carpet, didn’t have time for a cup of tea, saying she had to think about her husband’s dinner he would be hungry after his trip. Was he a traveling man? Not now, not now; just someone he knows who was unable to come to the city.

This woman Clara respects her husband and this is everything to her, she thinks; his words are her words coming to her like her own. He is tall and moustached, for I saw around her to him standing behind her, there he was, and Clara says he is thin no matter what he eats, potatoes, beefsteak, fried bananas, chile, a loaf of fresh-baked bread. Funny, her nerves are showing and I thought nerves of sprung steel, not meaning like when they say it of charismatic male criminals, also revolutionaries with bombs, Clara’s fear seems made of steel. He has many worries, she said; well, so has Clara herself. Her share and unshared. The tall woman in the window at Sue and Marv’s can speak on the politics of Worry—share his to forget your own—she’s into Power Margins, what you leave potential for yourself resting assured that your treasury is on tap if you know that you take him as an equal however he sees or fantasizes you.

And this dark argument of a woman, thin but without muscle tone, awesome, waiting politically to be said No to, waiting outside if Grace (who, comparatively untechnological except for phone showerhead and Acme Juicer, had been impressed by young Larry’s report on nerve gas) needed a ride back to Manhattan: Sure, can you take me and Maureen?—for burning fuel should move as many of the people as possible: Which one is Maureen? the woman had asked vaguely.

But the man introduced into the system today by his lady Clara, this tall-ly metabolized mustache of a business-trip-upstate husband—brings home worries (to Clara), "up the river," Clara had said, like a tourist visitor, meaning the Hudson—had she smiled?—and is much encouraged by the homemaker of his home if not to handcuff her to the bedpost later on, at least to leave his worries on the doorstep—when these worries might have forced her, his cook and live-in lay (haloed by the odoroma of guinea hen enchiladas from a supermarket top-loading freezer as he with his one-and-a-half boring sex fantasies enters their hallowed living space, to let fly with her worries, which may not concern the long, narrow world at large like his worries which are important and therefore at rest because powered by dollar continuum though his secret anxiety about having this "Sure Thing" status tunnels into that Rest to siphon out the underside-rear-spout emptying the dollars-continuum of all but its nerve-gas buying power: his worries may not be about sales volume and what the Johns in Washington say about inflation, but which still matter, because if a revolution in a foreign country is holding up a delivery of a system, can you really get into that like you get into how a husband gets irritated?

Well, in a workshop we do a bit of everything: I’m open: we share sexual information, we talk about Body-Self image, we do some yoga, I demonstrate massage, we explore masturbation, diet, alternative energy-bases for self-love because even in a regular sex life so many women put a man’s orgasm first. We feel that—

We? the question came, but who had Clara come looking for?

Yes, economic power isn’t enough by itself, after all it gives us a heavy-duty matriarchy which is just as sex-negative as this number the men have been doing on us for centuries.

It’s not easy.

Who’s talking to Grace besides Clara? Is it Grace herself?

The world has become awfully complicated.

So do we leave it to the guys to understand?

Too complicated to beat.

Fly, thought Grace, while the flying is good. What was it the beautiful old lady had said? they fly me, but I am the wings. Write it down.

What does your husband do? I asked Clara, and then knew I had felt I was flattering her in advance. She started to say, "He is." And "an economist" came to me—her talk-converter isn’t like mine. "An economist," the words she would have said (and if I am supposed to be so prophetic maybe that is what he will be). But she said, "He is a consultant." "Is your life his?" I asked. "He would never take advantage of that." I wanted her to come to the real point. "You have to learn to live," I said. "Maybe that is a way of putting it," she said, as if she knew literally a world I did not, and again I thought, Danger: but could it be something other than the real danger of losing your self? "Putting what?" I said. Then like a man, almost like Cliff, Clara got her words out too fast—

The words came back to Grace, I mean I want to (her accent thickened for the next word) survive—to leave.

I reached for her arm and she let me touch her. I thought she would cry but she’s tough: but then I got it: leave was what came out, our American word that rhymes with give was what she thought she meant, and she wanted to leave. Not go public. But if she is brought along gently. Nurtured, for how she needs women now. To share with the goddess in her. To share information and break the old self-esteem barrier. But she is no breadbaker.

And there was something funny about her respect for that distinguished husband: so he was not interested in being tracked down by journalists, Grace was happy to give interviews, her life was to be shared, just let them quote you accurately.

But look at me going back later to the Messenger Service/Psychic storefront when I told myself I needed to get my bike now that they’d tuned it up and added a link to the chain due to worn-out derailleur (male-designed).

Grace had by then (but it was way past noon, why had she not sooner) played last night’s tape all by herself, Maureen was busy, played it denying herself nothing; taking it as she had given it—National Orgasm for Women, but not her N.O.W. quoted as a joke by Cliff when not on his monthly suicide alert: seriously a national orgasm: but so was the past crossing a street toward Martha and the lone guy taking care of her, only to be just missed by the whir of a red bike as oblivious of her as the jock in the saddle, but inside that wheeling whir was a clink and, though of chain, bolt, kickstand, or fender, it was a milk bottle delivered out of the past on that route a single milk bottle can clink all by itself as easily as be spilt: she felt the neck and the stripe of cold pale-yellow cream below her thumb and forefinger nineteen hundred and more miles away and the cool base of the bottle’s heavy glass in the palm of her right hand for a while: while, as she looked hard for the boy she loved who was her brother who had come and gone who got up before dawn dutifully and with an underlying mischievousness, too, that only she knew in him, left and along his route came back with the family’s milk and left again—she smelt behind her the breath breathing right through her as if to find something better beyond, when it knew too well: the hoarse breath of her unwashed father who was the living and half-blotted-out memory of last night’s moderate controlled drinking when you did not know where you were with him, for he could get courtly/serious, which might be worst, or most near to threatening, swinging his head and eyes slowly around so his perspective felt curved to her while he, up early, at the top and bottom of the midnight barrel appeared to know that there was nothing out there across the clear porch of morning beyond his daughter and the white misted bottle in her hands, upon which, she would turn, turn, turn (through his—she knew without looking—averted eyes) and step away holding the milk to her, leaving her father to bend just over the threshold for the other quart likewise delivered an hour or so ago by his son, who drank a quart first thing in the morning on the job and another at home during the day, good for missy’s milk-white skin, it was said—always the wrong information authoritatively shared, wrong if she had had pimples which she had not, but the wrong scoop period, but she made up for it now in her forties telling an echoing cassette-ful of mainly women (in a hospital-auditorium in Connecticut, in New Jersey a redone horse-barn, a north-shore Long Island home) how to survive. A good bunch! Did she make them good? And in the midst of this replayed spiel, eyeing the four shelves of art books, sex books, food books, and self books, and, feeling in one shin—why? that she ought to throw some of the books out, she had had the urge to be on her bike; more, have it. The tape ended with the warm, dry crash of clapping which got abruptly breathed back into the waiting silence of the small machine. Her mother phoned across the country. The abundantly dark-haired super stood at Grace’s door talking too long; well, she would talk to anyone who wanted to, but he talked too long as if even if it got abstract about obscure storage space being created in the basement out of nothing by this super, and about Respect—a commodity, he heard himself saying, hard to come by when you had to deal with some of the older tenants—still he figured she might like him well enough to, at the ultimate moment, flash: wasn’t this what all his talk meant?, he imagined that Grace possibly flashed for Manuel (now the doorman, once the handyman, who raced cars somewhere out of earshot in New Jersey) and for Spike the spick-and-span porter whom she liked to bullshit with and would never cover up for necessarily if he rang her bell alone. These blue-collar types shouldn’t have known how to take her but they did, and didn’t even sense they got an education, she was in a separate class. (By the time she was a hundred and twenty would New Jersey mean anything to anyone?)

And then came the voices of the T-shirt operation’s representative and the woman with bad posture (political woman, Grace recalled, heavee, with a touch so serious and urgent she would be serious and urgent making love yet hopeless and noisy)—who wanted to be Grace’s secretary but was into relationships not pleasure, and then a number of other Items as if the day existed in advance.

In the form of a list.

Whereupon some overheard words drew her in reverse to hike downtown, she needed that bike.

So it was that she again passed the storefront she had put out of her mind with the black dude in the alligator who had more important things to further than see signs in storefronts.

Messenger Service/Psychic Consultations, Readings, it said. Another New York operation, yet a play front for what male-female mystery?

She had come back downtown because she’d been driven from her apartment. Maybe by what the tape told her? Maureen would have known but Maureen was painting her kitchen today, controlling her environment, planning to leave it for an apartment in this building, caching yogurt behind an overwhelming sack of stubby carrots in the bottom of her fridge: so much tougher than before she had met Grace coming off marriage in danger of being restored to her now retired nuclear parents where the sun always shines, before she had gone on her power trip which was really turning her toward science, toward cleansing, toward a balance of nature where everything was related to everything else, sprouts on the sill to high colonic enema therapy with the bull Mama in the white coat who turned the dials on the machine and filled your belly to orgasmaximum—to science, yes, to juice cleansing, carrots, celery, oranges, to changing American fields from grazing to grains, from animal to vegetable; and Grace had got her started, just as, coming from someplace else, Sue was getting started now; the workshops and talks were always new starts, this was the timeless factor, she would write that down, she liked being heard, which was why at the end of last evening at Sue and Marv’s Grace had, at the door, responded to more compliments by recalling Cliff and saying suddenly to Maureen, who was at her side of course, "Cliff should have come tonight, you know that?" and Maureen had looked her quite lovingly in the eye and said, ‘That woman who’s driving us home is a creep," and it might have been then that Grace had wanted to be alone and had forgotten to rescue the evening’s tape from Sue’s machine.

So she’d had to visit Marv this morning, bring it home—and play it and be affected by it. It certainly was not dynamite.

But the tape was behind her, but she had let it into her day as if it could add to her the next time she made an exhibition of herself, when really she didn’t rehearse, everyone knew she didn’t, and the pleasure of laughing at her own jokes and the gig of growth was like the ultimate private personal high of her going public, she could not quite say all this. Yet knew her life felt edged near a blade that all her words ignored. And someone knew this about her. Who?

Driven, though, by some words in last night’s talk certain as a mantra, undeniable as your bullshit really could be. Driven back to this storefront in Greenwich Village.

There was a heavyset, gray-haired hombre in a suit looking into the storefront so close up that the two signs up against the other side of the glass looked out at her as if they’d been missed by him—she saw them while he saw inside.

He meant to be there. How did she know that? Because he looked into emptiness, and kept looking. Her gaze fell upon his shoulders; they were set back square though he leaned "into" the window. In the corner of her eye the same black dude in the alligator was sloping close, and this gave her a sneaking sense of neighborhood, he seemed to have been on the move along these few streets all day—not prostitute corners (the women turning, looking uptown, downtown, crosstown), especially not this morning and now at two he wasn’t in the vicinity of anyone resembling a hooker, though she had felt somewhere in his "Mama" this morning that he was friendly enough to be a pimp. Yet more close and free. Someone could give her more information, she knew only what she felt.

The black dude did not speak, passing her, she recognized from somewhere a very blond, short-haired girl all in black standing in a doorway with her boyfriend passing a joint. She had turned to face the storefront window across the street and the heavyset man in the suit who turned and saw her without looking, glanced back into the window, then the other way almost toward Space so she caught a glint like a piece of mirror on him somewhere, and he moved on, paused at the corner, which he reached just as the black guy on Grace’s side of the street reached the corner. And at this point ("At this point’n time," her father once would say) the heavyset man turned directly to look back diagonally across the street at Grace who managed then to be looking at the storefront window but though feeling that metal glint again not seeing anything: so she got this bad sense of being pushed, which was coming really now from the words that she now understood had driven her from her apartment.

On tape she had been through that unspoken private life of her marriage, "thru" her wife-provider trip, her Freud trip, her still ongoing Art trip as life was art; then, There Was Sex After Marriage or The Resurrection of the Nude Body; then, food trip, body trip, letting go, then breakthroughs and corners turned, through to discovering your hands through carrying a knapsack, your head through letting go of our greatest source of Vanity, the hair—to the great and memorable idea (probably a gift from some dude, but it’s what you do with them) To earn what you have had, empty your hands of it.

She found in her chest a kink of nausea, a lid afloat on what wasn’t quite there, and she wanted to vomit in the gutter but she couldn’t. ("I’m going to purify my system so that eventually I will be able to eat even shit." Laughs and embarrassment in audiences past and future—belief, wonder, recognition, and conversion.) And then she was glad she had not vomited, because, as she said to herself, suddenly holding back a flash of someone else’s (whose?) degeneration and madness (whose? her ex-husband’s? some future person’s? Cliff’s?), I know that I am feeling pushed and I think I don’t know why but I know it’s what I’m feeling.

Also, the heavyset man had turned to look back. Well, what’s wrong with women barfing, belching, farting?, they’re not goddesses on pedestals, ancient maidens playing girls’ basketball that allowed you two dribbles before you had to stop running and look around for somebody to pass to with your foot stuck to the floor as if you were paralyzed.

This time, though, would not have been free vomiting. The cornered feeling that she of all people now felt came not quite only from the taped words that had been around her from morning till night. Her hands were free.

No, and she knew it all the way back home; knew it bending her silver gear levers (as if she needed the two of them and ten separate speeds) bending them up and down to test the tune-up she had just paid one man for that another much younger man had taken much too long to do probably too quickly; knew it as she pedaled suddenly between pedestrians who crossed against the light; knew it coasting the fenders of a double-parked car as the door opened, raced the light at the wide Twenty-third Street crosstown intersection through a field of potholes; knew it and almost lost it at last near home seeing a woman named Jane who regarded Grace as a celebrity, thin, red-haired, round-shouldered Jane knocking on the glass door of the bank while two small kids ran away from her around the corner of the building—knew it, knew no obstacles to it (except its own sweet time it had taken her to see) what she’d seen well before she’d reached the bike shop (for the second time today) and paid ten dollars and rolled ahead down a sidewalk, no pedals, no feet, a track laid out by the wheels—no: the cornered feeling was in what had been seen before she reached the bike shop: seen when the heavyset gray-haired dude had turned from the storefront: and, apparently not looking across at her but mentally continuing to turn as if he saw her, he moved off down the street: for this was it: his turn. But then, when he came to the corner and looked back, her turn came. And the goddess of good old eye contact had turned her eyes away. There was the empty storefront and she had meant to be here but now she didn’t concentrate.

Where was the black dude from her periodic cluster? She now thought she wanted to follow through—or, bike or no bike, have him trotting along beside her. But he had vanished round the corner and she saw around that corner for a second but it faded: she faded, leaving her sight somewhere round that corner—but she did not think like this (coerced, nauseous).

And the curb right across from the point where the black dude had been was occupied by this heavyset prematurely gray-haired gentleman who had turned for a look back: and she had a spinning sense that he had known she would be there, near the storefront—a tough, square man, businessman but what business trip was he on? without a hat—a restaurant-owner, whose place was near here, or a lawyer with the habits of a senior jock, how he walked, but his mind she could blow if he gave her the chance, she a lady headed for the bike shop in running shoes, velvet head, O.K. said Larry, when asked to run his hand over it. But nothing might be the response of this cool, worn, heavyset, gray-haired guy, calm at the corner, a private eye maybe. While she looked at the storefront without really looking at it or its two signs, until she thought if he was so curious why hadn’t he gone in to that Messenger Service/Psychic Consultation storefront? He had instead thrown first that curved look out of some part of his eye (not sizing her up though at all, no visiting fireman with a flag in his button-hole drifting toward an afternoon bar): then at the corner he looked again, this time straight at her so she felt she was waiting for the afternoon show in the storefront window, and in the corner of her eye she saw him light a cigarette, which was extremely important information to have. She was on her way to the bike shop, the past was past, and there is no future.

But this time a motorcycle buzz-sawed into the block across her vision. So the spell was broken. She was game. The heavyset guy was one of your nice middle-distance Position-A humpers with a metal taste of meat oxide in his cum and a kinda nice, brawny-sad politeness and the booze lightly airing like aftershave toothpaste from the broad bones of his lean face and from the hard, secretly ruined stomach, though she was game. But as she went on toward the bike shop, the two pieces of spell hung near, and one was his turning, his strange curved look that continued to turn, she found herself too angry to explain the curved, nauseating look except it was his awareness of her like a mental turning that had this slow, sweeping, not-stopping quality, when really all she wanted to see was that he turned away from the storefront finally and caught her in the mere corner of (or cornered twinkle of) his eye; and the other piece of the broken spell was words she had known forced her to leave her apartment again, she need not repeat her gig word for word, words were strictly in your head unless coming way up from stomach like throat was a brain, to be spoken to a turned-on audience when the time came. But it was all there in a very few separated words that could call forth the whole thing between the heavyset man’s first, curved, turning look across the street including her, and then a minute later his second long, straight look at her diagonally from the far corner he had reached and occupied as the black dude reached the corner on Grace s side of the street but then slipped around the corner: words like all words shit substitute for action, for Body-Self, but breath comes through even so, when it is pure breath: true love junk tunes UP DAIRY PLASTIC, MOTHERS GUILT, BROTHERS SISTER.

She had bent her bike into the elevator before the door slid shut and before she remembered that she hadn’t returned her mother’s call this morning that the service had taken. She had locked her bike in the stairwell hall next to the elevator entrance on her floor which was the top floor of the building with only the penthouses above it.

She took her clothes off; the white sweetheart rose she put in a vase on a window sill. Her clock which she read by letting it be a shadowy design in motion somewhere in this room, said 3:20. She rolled her stomach and abdomen muscles back and forth in front of a mirror, like self-kneading, no hands. She stopped and turned on the radio; rolled and shrugged to the music, a moment later turned it to the falling, waiting silence of Phono and put on a stack of records.

Now why (she struggled) was she coerced into going downtown to get the bike then and there and on the way coerced into almost but not quite throwing up in the gutter like a bum? It was the cleansing process, she’d given up cigarettes, the cleansing gripped your joints, or fattened you, or, obviously, could make you feel ill.

Be all by yourself. In your own head. She liked the words, they gave her back herself. If she’d be lost without people, what was she doing all alone on a rug like a cat? Did anyone know where she was? All the people who had incarnated and incorporated Grace K. into their systems. But was she sure?

That curved look from the man: she directed her thought to the tape, the part she’d been hearing when suddenly she had felt she had to go downtown to collect her bike, but didn’t phone the bike shop. Her tape was not her child: but instead of the tape with all the clapping, cheering, the wings of laughter, Grace felt in her Cliff apologizing: because he had had to renege on his offer to drive Grace to Long Island last night because his car probably wasn’t going to be ready: but this morning he was on the phone telling her it looked like he had a buyer. She tired of thought: why had she made her second trip downtown to pick up her bike and without phoning! that she had already called for unsuccessfully? But she encountered in her thought Cliff’s rhyme written after an appearance she had made at a college and he had come:

Father, bother,

Mother, brother,

Tune up the absent bike.

In sharing inde-

Pendences give

Only what you like.

That neatly folded piece of paper was beside the tall white book down at the end of the diet shelf next to a speaker. She had inspired a poem. She had written off to California to a place where, with life credits alone in this year of 1976 in these United States, you could get a Ph.D. for fifteen hundred dollars. Cliff asked, In what? mucus research?

The phone rang in two places and the service picked up. Vibrators lay like mikes or hair-dryers at two far strategic corners of her Body Room plugged in beside softly overflowing clusters of brown, orange, purple, and gold cushions and ceramic trays she had made—in another kind of workshop once, and painted rainbow vaginas on—which held carved pipes of wax or wood, double-ended for mutual toking, a cock’s peeled bulb, a cunt’s deepish flower, the chimney-bowl midway between.

Henceforth, she would have one day a week without talking, and this might be more helpful and cleansing than being off the weed. Push Rewind, let ‘er rip, push Stop, push Play, push Stop, push Rewind: she had found her place, remembering the day Cliff drove her to the college in New Jersey at noon and had reduced her spiel to his verses at suppertime—he said her body was what had put over her speech, pelvis power, those little abrupt struts and shuffles of the alligator boots—she had never had an audience of fifteen hundred! It was a university and they had laughed, they had loved her. And in this carpeted room where she now got a very odd division of temperature between outside and inside like swallowing ice cream and throw in a ‘frigerated thermometer up behind, steely speculum up her front, she had said to Cliff and Maureen that talking to that audience was fucking them, ‘cause that was what you did to an audience.

And it came back to her, as the curious passage from last night began to replay, and she thought she needed an enema or a joint, she had a little hash in the fridge—a break-through hash-enema she realized she had already discussed with Maureen—it came back to her that Cliff had answered, "You can say that again, Grace," while Maureen Baby’s Breath, thinking of God knows what—maybe what she called the "proof of reincarnation" in her own Grace Kimball—maybe currents of carrot juice freed of pulp, messengering with overwhelming news a city of mucus hawked up from the collective throat brain, for Maureen was a scientist, a new woman-kind of scientist sweetly smiling—and now to her leader saying, "Right on," though she had not attended the audience fuck at the New Jersey college.

So Grace with all this on her mind surrounded by true love junk tunes up dairy plastic, mothers guilt, brothers sister, didn’t think until quite a while after the foreign woman Clara had come and gone, that Clara had not been announced by the doorman Manuel on the intercom.

Father, bother,

Mother, brother,

Tune up the absent bike.

In sharing inde-

Pendences give

Only what you like.

TRUE LOVE JUNK TUNES UP DAIRY PLASTIC, MOTHERS GUILT, BROTHERS SISTER. It wound on . . .

My mother. Right? O.K. My mother. She was always there, you know? she was always getting ready to sit down [laughter], getting heavier and heavier but, in my insane memory of it you know, always not quite making it down into that chair, that straight chair that made her look as if she was taking a two-minute breather on our time not hers but it was hers [laughter] a two-minute breather from dusting the other chairs she didn’t sit in, if she ever got her behind down onto it, no arms—because y’know, as she’s sitting down she’s asking can she get someone something to eat. [laughter] Well, not if it’s any bother, Mother (I think that’s my Dad speaking); not if it’s any bother, Mother. Oh it’s no bother, [laughter] Sure? Sure. Have you been there, have you been there? [applause drowns out Yes yes yes yes] Where was I? [an enthusiastic wisecrack from audience not quite audible] Where was I? Jerking off under the covers? Don’t kid yourself, I didn’t know where it was [laughter] and anyway I’m saving that secret, guilty pleasure for the middle of the marriage-night ten or fifteen years after this little family scene [laughter] that I’m giving you which you recognize even though the North Shore of Long Island is a long way from a little American city in the middle of a cornfield, [laughter] Where was I? Talking pedal pushers—remember those below-the-knee pants that exposed the calves, the shins, a supposedly feminine neither here-nor-there? [laughter] And I’m talking about my mother, thinking about my father [hush], thinking at the age of twelve, thirteen, fourteen, that this is the way people live, right?, this is right and normal, O.K.?, this is my working model, the four of us, mother, father, brother, myself junked out on Habit Patterns, staying on instead of getting off, and that’s staying power for you. Like after five beers my father saying I think I’ll have a drink now. Or like Dad going up to bed an hour before Mama because Mama wants a chance to read the paper: wait! question! How many people admire their mothers? [silence, applause, drifting into some kind of laughter] How many I ask you? and why is that? Is it that she was the one who said, . . . No bother. Whatever happened to Mama? and is she still on your back because guilt perpetuates itself? overweight, non-orgasmic, creaking with varicose pains from the new linoleum in the kitchen clear up to her locked pelvis. Well, I got a knapsack to keep my hands free, and I got a bike so I can skip cabs that the man can’t fix if he knew what was under the hood, which he doesn’t, he doesn’t dare think what Henry Ford and Co. put under there, and that’s why he gets uptight when he loves his car, you live with him and you know, right? [applause, "Right!"] But he hates it and he pours your money into it that you never saw for your housekeeping except as an allowance you get from his real paycheck no matter if it’s out of a nice unspoken balanced joint account or like Dad doling it out on Fridays. [Pause, in which nothing is heard] But you never know what those men are doing under your hood [a loud lone laugh cuts short followed by a burst of brief laughter] until you get the bill and then you know [titters], so when a friend tells me he’s getting his car a tune-up and then they find problems they’ve got to work on I am glad to know every part of my bike because this way I can put it out of my mind like when I hit the street keeping my hands free by carrying a knapsack, you know?, full of sex-positive thoughts [laughter, applause], knowing every part of your body whatever your male gynecologist tries to lay on you in a little bottle that’s half full of cotton or a cold-handed metal speculum that feels like a computerized abortion when you could do it yourself with good old American plastic [applause, cheering, interrupted by someone calling something], the smallest example of sharing information, like that your doctor doesn’t know any more than you and can’t begin to know your body like you do even if you let him try. Flee, my dears, you don’t have to explain to him, just get your ass out of his office, it’s your ass and it will fly if you let it. Yes, dear sisters and brothers of the Goddess [laughter, cheering] the smallest example of sharing information in order to belong to yourself. To learn how to love your body. Friend left her husband, went to a room she rented and took a nap, woke up suicidal—we could have told her, Recharge with meditation or yoga, sleep is too much like sleeping it off’. Know what goes on in you. Have you ever gotten off on an enema? Sometimes the sharing is a simple comparing of notes to find out that you aren’t alone [applause, prolonged], you’re not the only woman in your apartment building in 1976 who doesn’t know quite how to share with others the absence—

"Absence"—what she had gotten wrong recalling Cliffs poem. Same old material but unrehearsed: on a fresh track but you’re the same person: track to one side of where she’d been: or a new person on an old track. As the door buzzed, she thought she was content for Maureen to believe in reincarnation, but maybe the whole thing might be updated. She got up, pressing Play, the old stuff suddenly word for word the same, an external memory; "to share with others the absence" started to follow her to the door: bullshit, she heard herself feel: the voice telling her back her story snuck up behind her, and "absence" was alone there and all the words fell away from it . . .

absence you can’t quite put your finger on [a pause, a silence] the fact, the human fact that you can’t quite remember when you had an orgasm and you assume you don’t need to because you can get off on feeling a little guilty you know about not wanting to screw last night, then angry over feeling guilty, then confused, which is a good feminine state to be in when he walks in the door and you sweep everything under the mat [laughter], guilt, did I say? guilt over taking a nap after lunch, and the guilt is your gift to yourself to get over feeling not guilty [laughter, applause], of being, O.K., not quite there when you were in the car with your two kids and your certified husband or of not, you know, doing anything worth spending all day today—Where’d it go? Today is missing. Because you’re busy and your loved ones need you and you’re constipated and have lower back pains to pity yourself for, and if anyone asks you, it’s no bother to carry this guilt, it gets to be like two-piece outfits the stores choose for you, no bother, but I mean really what do you have to give anyone unless it’s your independent self, and that could please even your family—

She had run back to turn off the voice and heard her mother’s vacuum running, her mother who, in incredible shape for her age, had let go of widowhood and came up sex positive, though basically anti-enema-cleansing. Grace was in the carpeted hall, a pair of sweatpants on one of the cunt-hooks; and just as she had known that the word family was the word that went with bike in Cliff’s verses, family bike not absent bike, she had opened the door to a half-smiling woman in a green sweater and a tartan skirt who couldn’t speak when she saw Grace all there in front of her and to whom Grace said, "Is it about the women’s workshops?" So the day’s periodic cluster had sent Grace away a couple of hours early to collect her bike so as to wheel her back on a fresh track as close to where she had already been as the cool, gray-haired, heavy set man was surprised to recognize her (and kept from looking her in the eye).

A track as close to where she had already been as the man with the curved look was surprised to recognize her.

Thinking not hers: then due to the Goddess, who said, Never argue: only assert. Whose voice is not the voice charging a very special cone of her body-mind with the cluster heats of convergence, but it’s the Goddess who gave her knowledge of the two cones making up her Mind-Body, so she can just about identify this voice—she’s already told her story to it in future though there is no future—familiar voice with a difference which is a lot of Space among the words, to breathe, lay back into: so she finds, like waking, a new Her evolved through all this work she has done on herself for so long. So when Sue’s teenage son Larry the expert on poison gas and chess listened with downright affection to her interpret earlier remarks by Maureen on reincarnation groping to tell the new kind that was coming into existence, Larry said he did not think there was a future but asked—asked—if what she would be reincarnated into wasn’t already in her—into her, he added. Girls aren’t used to doing all this kind of work on themselves, she said, feeling she was the same old person she had always been in her eyes and lips and hope.

"Girls," her brother said, out of breath putting down a half-drunk quart bottle of milk on the table beside a yellow mixing bowl, "always think you’re looking at them."

"They want you to look at them," said her father from the living room, huskily, absent-mindedly.

"Only if they like you," said her mother from the screened back porch where she had been humming—as if of how newbaked bread smelled like sweetened ironing.

"Maybe they want to be left alone sometimes," Grace said to all of them and wanted to get away at least to her room upstairs, at least to the bathroom to smile in all possible ways in the mirror; she heard the cushions of her father’s leather chair crack and she felt his body rising and unbending out there in the living room in a small city in the middle of the cornfield, to come to her mother’s proud icebox and "steal" a beer—who knew, as Grace’s mother said, where his bread was buttered even if he was apt to knock the toothpaste into the toilet bowl on a bad night and leave it there faraway.

"He kissed you at the train station a little wetly when you left for New York, and you never looked back," Maureen said: maybe at five p.m. for a quick rap or at eight on the far side of the salad bowl fingering the sprouts and green leaves and flowerets of cauliflower or living bright orange trails peeled lengthwise from the inner carrot—or at midnight or three a.m. when Grace worked. And " Right on," was what Grace said, as if she were Maureen, but had told many listeners many times. Told them that that particular trip of hers signaled by the corsage on the lapel of the suit was almost less toward professional school and career than toward marriage kept quite as secret from herself as from the parties involved in those old Life magazine specials, "Life Goes To An Elopement," although her unavoidable destiny with a smart, reasonably hard-drinking salesman named Lou three or four years later was just as much with others as well—her family and Lou’s so simply and smoothly swinging golfer father; and the public rendezvous, the nuptials, though only two days long back at the bride’s home nineteen hundred miles from New York, was carried off jovially—a little history in bright clothing—and, for a while that then lasted, New York was a break you joined yourself across so oppositely to its noisy ways that it burst into silence like terrific photographs.

What was she thinking of ? The only real reincarnation? that when it was discovered would be discovered by Grace Kimball? She phoned Maureen to tell her one thing and told her another, the sweep second-hand of her Body-Room’s office-style clock turning all the time. She phoned to share with Maureen why she’d almost been sick in the gutter but instead told her "about" the black dude with the alligator hat that nearly matched her Abundance boots who was "in all probability" in her periodic cluster—come on up later because he absolutely will appear.

But Maureen ("Far out!") was thinking someplace else, Grace knew her well enough to pick it up threaded down the phone connection, Maureen’s chronic ongoing internalization arguing like an icepick point by point that the body’s a conduit for the inevitable future of vegetables: yet she was saying, Did Grace know Sue and Marv were taking an apartment in this building as a second residence, they were keeping the Long Island place, but Sue was kidding herself, she was having it both ways, you can’t be in two places (—"unless": and Grace heard Maureen suddenly think) and how could Marv with that fixed smile last night, passive-aggressive, compulsive-defensive, not set himself up for feelings of retaliation (Maureen could suddenly take off with words) slaving in that glittering farmhouse of a kitchen all day for the party. Served the food, detested the scene. Wait a second, Grace said, he’s always liked cooking, they’re on a food trip, that’s all they used to really talk about—recipe books, mucus pie, where’s the fucking meat thermometer, fresh fennel; last night I got him upstairs to try the Panasonic: he’s a learner, I’ll have to give him that, but he hated me today, he doesn’t know how much he’s a feminist already, he’s got too much on his plate.

Well, he was ready to stick a meat thermometer into me, Maureen said.

They don’t eat meat any more, said Grace.

Marv waylaid me over by the window, said Maureen, next to that insane gigantic bookcase, so the other forty people slid down to the far side of the room, it was weird, he was sort of hitting on me—he was excited, he asked if the vanilla yogurt was really true because he’d heard me say you’d mainlined it out of my fridge and there you were publicly claiming you’d come off Dairy: I told him to fuck off, he said it was his house, I said tell Sue that and then he said, Sue thinks she’s in love with Grace, did you know that, Maureen? I looked at Marv and said, Love.

Maybe they’ll leave all the furniture out there, said Grace.

Furniture is heavy. It can’t move by itself. You have to move it. It’s full of unknown past and future people who are an environment you have no control over. Space is freedom if it is free space. So-called easy chairs are carted into your space to fill a void. I passed this on to Maureen, who I sense understands this better than I. Her antique expertise during her marriage was deeper than anything. The space you put furniture in is yours only if you stand in it. You put a dining table into a space because you can’t move the space while you can move the table. So what, Kimball? What was at stake? Empty your hands of it to see what it was.

She stacked some Forums to throw out. Give the neighbors a thrill when they visit the trashroom. She paused over one with a photo of a blonde kneeling behind an Italian-looking stud on a carpet somewhere, side-frontal but discreet. She felt hungry and had a handful of nuts and raisins. She would phase out the raisins. To the music she trotted into the sleeping room/office to check the project items on her wall chart, she was sending the Pitney-Bowes mailing machine back to the people in Stamford when she got up courage to tell them she was not satisfied. These are really just vulgar details, Cliff said jokingly, but he meant it.

Her business trip had left her looking younger after six years. In the Body-Self workshops, her own trip had gathered like the story it was—she wasn’t trying to prove anything—she didn’t have to—all she had to do was tell her trip to the women whose ignorance about themselves and their inner, untouched freedom was no more sad than their insights and sudden group laughter—and new hope through eating live food, speaking out, taking responsibility for their orgasms; instead of hitting on obstacles that made it easy to not get what you need, finding a seed in you that belongs only to you and was always there waiting to be slowly moistened, not pried at dry. Power was where it was at: but power to change to what? She smelled raisins and three sorts of unsalted nuts around the corner in the other room forty feet away like smoke. She dialed the answering service to sample the action. It was the division of labor, these separate tracks. They got back to her, she got back to them. Those other tracks kept going—to get to them she would turn to them. Each phone call a whole thing, an operation, someone’s unparalleled story now including Grace. Dial that number: in came the track. What was this Politics?

She let the light settle onto the carpet and walls, and lens the window panes until she thought she could see in less light minute careless crumbs, crumblets, like crumblet shadows made of light, not noticed before on the barely shining little piece of mirror lying flat on a low low table across the room. One morning a week she would let herself be two feet taller right after breakfast. One more thing to come off. But boric acid was what she thought ecologically of because it could give poor big-little roaches tiny white grains of gas but she had never heard them pop, they went away like perhaps the city pigeons to vanish in secret. Come off killing, too. And what really was this Politics? Group power, O.K., to be grasped and divvied up. It felt Sex Negative, but it meant women and maybe mind/body attached to earning power. The political woman who had driven Grace and Maureen home— Kate—laughed loud, like how some of the workshop women came. And last night in the dark of the car lighted by a deli open late and a street light and in a silence at a stop light, she said she had never masturbated. No real surprise, yet also here was another kind of applause, coming out of years of silence, eyes straight ahead watching the traffic light. Your need and his need on separate tracks: that’s why you get a hard-on for yourself, honey. Masturbation no obstacle to anything else you want to do. Or want to give up—like killing roaches. Hadn’t there been a twenty-dollar bill rolled tube-tight on the mirror on the table? Abundance present here or present elsewhere was what absence meant. All alone you can invent it. Sue had wanted her son Larry to hear Grace:

Yes that’s how I see myself at eighty, eighty-five, ninety-five, a hundred in my wheelchair at the home with all the sisters, we’re all in our chairs in front of our TVs, good TV porn funded by a government inspired by the Goddess, a Body-Sex government decentralized all over the land, California, Florida, and here we all are, a bunch of happy old ladies in our wheelchairs, our vibrators plugged in, happily jerking off.

She had designed sessions with fifteen women and men around the edges of her Body Room: fifteen vibrators at once, with Grace in the middle, that’s sixteen, until the collective energy rose peacefully from the group, and some people made noise, Cliff always, but not Desmond, who was all legs with thighs of a bike racer and later asked Maureen to tell him her trip again and asked Grace if his fruitarian diet might be why he was ejaculating a foot further than before, beyond the small towels Grace had distributed, beyond the small, woolly rug he himself was on, and onto the free spaces of the brown carpet: Grace said she would have licked it up wet if she had known all that protein was going to waste on her rug. Masturbation opens a menu of life-style choices, though the rug fibers might be carcinogenic though with months of charge built up from vacuuming. Her neighbors up in the penthouse felt their floors bowing and their roller skates rolling down to all the corners of their home. All coming together roughly to some point. Each making a contribution. Turning to each other and away, knees up, knees down, breath rising in praise, turning ahead. The unheard-of story that was being told back to her might be her own but it was coming from the future in a changed voice. She was evolving into a new type of person, wasn’t she?—and from outside in as well. The world, it equals Love—but she was being invaded vividly sort of and not by the Goddess just now—by those Grace had given herself to. Or invaded by just these—hmmm, well, angels she had to reckon with because she had heard them talked of lately, she had never feared angels—she thought that’s what these humdingers might be, for they felt like more than one. The puffiness by her nose and around the eyes at Christmastime had been the cleansing juice diet: it was convenient that she and Maureen each had their own Acme Juicer and had done juice alone for two weeks once until a case of free-range pineapples from downtown overloaded Maureen’s machine and burnt it out. What if there was an angel in the pineapples eager to be in her and Maureen, but she had not told Maureen. Coming off pot the first time gave Grace a rheumatism that was the body’s natural cleansing, and congestion in the chest so if she’d saved her snot she could have gone into business. Maureen agreed with Grace that work was an addiction; did Grace now agree?

She phoned Maureen, who did not pick up—then did, to say she had washed out her roller and her brush and was just about to have her enema, and would it wait. Grace felt grateful, then, and to the Goddess, that the intervention of Maureen’s at times almost invalid-like health-and-cleansing number had kept Grace from speaking of what was, she saw now, better not spoken of. The nausea today, the shorthand models of her talk, her gig, her repeatedly unrehearsed life publicly given from her own self to others, into others, her own distributed (that was it) person, an unlocked pelvis flying above Murray Hill.

The nausea from cleansing. Her shorthand memory. Cliff’s bitchy verses.

And the two looks of the heavy set, straight-spined man who had peered into the storefront window: the second look from the corner that Grace had turned away from, the first turning look that curved out with that outrageous male commandingness and included her: with nothing in between the looks except their awareness of each other, the glint in his button-hole, a street-singer somewhere thumping out that old Afro-ethnic "Wimoweh" that made her feel old, as old as the folksinging of the late late forties and early fifties, and in a doorway (she now placed her in memory) a young mime in a tight sports jacket with elbow patches Grace had seen working the New York Public Library steps and now she’s down on a sidewalk that the gray-haired, heavy set man’s first curving look had swept through without occupying.

A passing thought arrested by the sight of her velvet head. But he didn’t seem to pick anything up. How he would enjoy walking around naked!

The phone rang and Grace took it: it was Cliff complaining that Maureen had given him hell for interrupting her enema to ask her if he should get his head shaved. Grace told him more about last night. The dude in the western shirt and the gambler’s moustache who had talked highfalutin: was the point of sex only pleasure? and wasn’t the old idea of reproduction and evolution evolving itself to where how we grew into sex pleasure was evolution now rather than later? She thought that was fantastic, but she didn’t think of anything to say except this would be an evolution worth passing on to the kids, and Cliff said with slight jealousy did she mean you could inherit acquired pleasure, and chuckled, she thought dirtily. She repeated herself to Cliff, but he told her. It was her own feedback to herself.

New workshop sessions began next week: in sharing independences, give only what you like. Colonel Gibbon’s cassette fresh from San Francisco lay by the phone still in its package, the groans and guffaws of ecstasy coming through nonetheless: did Cliff want to take it home and play it? he ought to hear one of those northern California orgasms if he wanted a laugh.

Safely past the threat of earlier-in-the-day suicide, Cliff listened as she told how she had talked to Sue’s about-to-go-to-college son, Larry, who wanted to go in the city though his dad wanted him to go away. Larry had this severe late-teenage kindness which was condescension to his elders in flux plus passive curiosity. Kids shrugged like no one. The old lady on the street had shrugged, but she was crazy, but beautiful. Did Grace—Aunt Grace—want to have her way with Larry, slender, dark, quite pretty, shy, sharp: why not, said Cliff, it’d be good for him.

Cliff could keep her honest sometimes while he made himself mad, not her: were they two married? yes, to a friendship that was outside of them lest they get so alike they grow to that special homosexuality of marriage (write that down) (not very gay, dear).

She felt Cliff wanted to hang up. "It’s your body," she had said to Larry when they had heard his mother say across the room that Larry should get laid, it was what she had said. The kid’s brown eyes were troubled, or his molar had hit a pebble from the Port Adams deli: he was in flux. He had Sue’s dark, thick hair. Someday when he was fifty he would have a twenty-year-old girlfriend. Maureen at that moment had gripped Grace’s arm; Maureen’s eyes were (—"Maureen gets epileptic or mystical," said Cliff). Her smile had gotten fixed. Was Maureen crazy? It had been the incoming group at Sue’s front door, women excited at being at home together for something better than a shower or stitching flags.

Cliff now was calling to say he felt better, and to complain about Maureen, and not to again apologize for not driving Grace out last night but to say he had a buyer for the old white car, the buyer had a daughter in Washington, an impulse purchase. Manuel, the doorman in Grace’s building, knew him, and Cliff was paying Manuel a little commission. "I don’t know why," Cliff said, "but a nice guy you felt was judging you." The buyer—was this the point? "Had an insignia in his button-hole, military maybe; silver, a star, a circle with points coming out of it not all the same length. I asked, and he said, Wind directions."

"You’ll save money taking cabs," Grace said. She felt sick again and they hung up and something had been engineered around her that she didn’t quite get, though the Goddess does not need to understand. "We are the future," she had said to a couple of excited women, feeling sucked out of some place and toward them but there was nothing to see. She had noticed Sue’s tape recorder through the living room door and Marv there, fetched up high and dry in the other room staring at her as if she were the only person in the front hall crowded with people leaving, and he put his hand absently on the bookcase shelf where Sue’s tape recorder was, in fact on the black oblong thing with the silver handle sticking out: but Grace, having told Larry to come visit her sometime, they would talk, heard Larry say, "I’m going to college," and Grace said, "Oh, you’re going to college"—she was high but bushed. She was coasting, and he said, "I’ll drop up some night." He was shy—shy people were open—and he was funny and he liked talking to her —didn’t everyone? The Chilean woman Clara had said things that didn’t really tell Grace.

She registered—that Larry would be living in her building. Well, this was Change. If she was the future, she would come after herself. But, sliding away into Marv’s eyes faraway in the other room where he was apart from the departing crowd of mostly women (all women) in the hallway, and into Maureen’s tense grip on her arm, Grace turned to Maureen who seemed to come to the point: "You know Cliff could have driven you out, the car was ready this morning, he didn’t want to, that was all." And all this cluster of words and touch and sight was why the cassette had gone out of Grace’s mind at the last minute.

She now saw this, walking into her Body Room with Colonel Gibbon’s recorded orgasms in her hand (she’d never seen him but he had put on an inch and a half in height after ten rolphing sessions), and saw under her clock the white rose she had worn this afternoon surprising her straight ahead of her in a small glass vase on the bookshelf counter against the wall where her own recorder was on top of the box containing her Carousel slide projector she used in the workshops and there was something wrong with the drop mechanism and she was going to throw the projector out and get a new one.

National Orgasm of Women. The continent buckled upward, it bowed and shifted and waved. Arrived through her in order to belong to others.

She thought she ought to shout. She and Maureen sometimes did baby talk, nothing wrong with that. Don’t even say the word "wrong," said Maureen.

She veered off to her right through unfurnished free space to the high mirror. She lighted the big candle that came to her thigh. One day when she was fourteen she looked her father in the eye, they were at last within range, she was now five four but wearing heels, he five nine but a slouch. He smelled of drink the way he did when he hadn’t had any, like he used bourbon-flavored tooth soap, and she hugged him and her eyes watered and she didn’t say a damn thing, she was feeling they were about the same height. And she told this to the woman Norma here in the building who was going to be in the workshop, but it came out different from what it was, though Norma was a dear person and had a gift for listening that she didn’t put a high enough value on.

The Sketchbook talk-converter could also be a silence-converter, for to Clara (who after the strange tone of voice when she said, We are political refugees, said, I am happily married) Grace had not said what had come to her about Clara:

Someday [the fresh page read] she’ll just up and leave. It feels like someday soon. But she is resisting hard—microscopic sea-creature capturing food in a mucus balloon which is the dwarf house it lives in. But I had this crazy idea this afternoon that Clara has just found out she’s pregnant and it’s someone else and she doesn’t know what to do. She sees herself as the last person in the world to separate and go away and live on her own—plays cello—and disappear from the life she has lived. But maybe she can come with the Goddess’s help (Marv said to me: Isn’t anything sacred to you?) to see herself as the first woman ever to do it, which is always to some extent true, you’re deciding alone. But also hundreds of thousands of women have already done it and they have their stories to share with Clara, who looks like she can argue more than "tell" and she is like a person from a small, narrow town coming to the city. She does not see how masturbation opens new varieties of life-style choice. One thing is certain: she should not have another child. Why did I think she was secretly pregnant? She looked away from me and when I followed her eyes I was looking at my white rose in the vase and had the idea.

Grace’s new friend Norma listened and listened to Grace’s story of her family light years away from here and would probably tell her husband. They sat in Grace’s sleeping room/office where her sleeping bag lay parallel to the wall under her fresh-air window that on a rainy night mirrored her face. Well, Grace had gone public. Did she even know how to hide stuff? Cliff called her an exhibitionist. An example. A model. Could be diet mattered more than psyche, Cliff said, headed for another suicide alert, but when menopause comes, go with it, the electricity of it, the converging messages that are wonderful patterns coinciding into good old cause-effect.

When it happened once in a blue moon that putting down the phone she felt like shit, she would ask herself why and look around her clean, warm-colored space. She would take a deep breath and find out always. A couple, for example, whom she’d gotten it on with after they’d all sampled a weekend Decision-Therapy workshop along the Manasquan River in New Jersey who wanted her to help someone they knew because she had told them about her own workshops and her trip. It had been, she decided, their two phones at that end that left her feeling like shit when they all hung up. Or the man who moved dressers in his sleep phoning the morning after to ask her to come to Washington on the spur of the moment, he had business there (she had longer hair that time), and she’d "had to" say no, she’d hung up, felt like shit, and decided it was because she wanted to make him laugh and cry and yell again. Or her mother—who’d asked for news, and gotten it with bells on like riding nude on a cop’s white horse down Fifth Avenue on Easter Sunday; and her mother after all Grace’s news had said, "Grace you go too far." Relapse-ville—but whose. "Of course I go too far. That’s how I get known."

Picking the phone up, though, now, she’d no time to ask herself why she didn’t feel good about the voice in her ear because the voice in her ear (which she’d heard so recently she didn’t recognize it) was saying, "How’s your head," and she was answering this woman’s voice that did not know her (and threatened never to go away), "I’ve been into it all day, and I haven’t accomplished a thing."

"Oh I wasn’t sure how you were this morning, you know," the woman’s down voice nursed and coaxed. Or was it a man’s, a young, soft voice getting at her, around her?

It was Kate the political woman, or was she a politician, ride home last night, call this morning, need a ride, need an assistant to handle your mail, your mailings, your phone, type seventy words a minute, sin (joke).

"Oh I’m just opening like a flower all the time, Kate, how are you?"

"Oh I’m O.K., I guess. I woke up this morning and heard a man saying out of some magazine article, ‘This is a post-feminist era.’ Am I being a pain in the ass?"

"Yeah, yeah—did you get it on with yourself last night?"

"I will, Grace; you’ll see."

"Listen, dear, I’m in the middle of an enema, I gotta hang up. Be talking to you."

"What, do you have your phone right there in the John, you picked up so fast."

"Yeah, yeah, phones all over the place, hanging from my shower head!"

"Sounds like music."

"I got rid of my bathroom door. It’s sociable. Be talking to you, Kate."

"Do you know if there are any apartments in your building?"

"You could phone Maureen she knows the landlord’s agent in the building."

"Not sociable today, are you?"

"Got this enema trip, Kate. Be talking to you."

"I think you always are, Grace."

She gave a friend a send-off so the friend came back. Was that it? She almost had it. She would buy some flowers for Maureen. No she wouldn’t. Don’t try to justify your life. It’s up to it to justify you. (Write that down.)

The phone rang, seemed to stop, then started. She turned both phones down so that from the living room she could just hear the near phone where she sat against a wall, and the one in her sleeping and work room not at all. The mirror grew around the candle.

More you give, more you have to give were old words she suddenly didn’t understand, but pointing ahead, pointing forward. This microscopic sea organism Clara described—"our country has a long coastline"—made its house of mucus, but the wall did get clogged eventually and then it blew a new house out of the mucus skin it had already secreted for a rainy day.

Just when she saw what the mirror was doing, it started doing something else, an illusion she had, let’s say, painted on the wall to make its length look higher, this floor just below the penthouses had lower ceilings than the rest of the building.

She almost had it. She was against the cushions. She was going to love herself. The periodic cluster would bring the black dude. She didn’t want him yet, he could stay behind the moving van.

Her right hand lightly touched the vibrator, her heels began by touching each other and then the balls of her feet—the bottoms of her feet were flat against each other, her knees lowered outward to celebrate the double cones of the mind as it united with whole stretched heart and flower-lipped ear and clitoral shaft and the receding lights and slow waters of vagina. One knee eased upward and she might rock if she wanted. Her finger rubbed the switch almost on, but a sound came nonetheless. She had almost seen the meaning of the old couple different from each other but approaching each other in looks, and the milk bottles clinking like a rapid, too rapid bike with something loose, and the calls coming in with offers and demands, and Sue getting an apartment here, and Sue’s busted husband Marv bringing Grace her last night’s tape—having to—and the voice telling her back her own unheard, unheard-of story, and almost but not quite most of all the heavyset guy with the prematurely gray hair whose looks like her own had the strange power to curve and to go on and on.

But the sound she had heard like imagining her vibrator’s secret soul that never stopped running on its abundant (AC-DC!) potential that she had told about and told about, was her door, and when she reached her door she knew it could not be the black dude fulfilling the periodic cluster because he would have been announced from downstairs, they would never have let him up.

But it was not Maureen but Manuel, the day doorman; she heard him on the other side of the door and opened it as she was.

They’d taken him out of the basement and put him on the door, days. He’d been replaced "in the basement" by only a part-time handyman, who Grace thought could be a real presence only if he was really and truly as invisible as he seemed.

"When you coming up to fix the leak under my basin, Manuel?" They smoked an occasional joint, and Manuel gave her a hug but she never had her way with him and always said so to him those very words.

He wasn’t smiling. "I didn’t buzz you this afternoon; I figure it’s O.K." He had his blue windbreaker with the autoracing patches on the sleeve and he was small and strong, he could do anything in the building. He smiled at last, he couldn’t help it and wouldn’t want to help it, and Grace felt the whole congregated weight of all the tenants in the building caught inside because Manuel was outside, she got this clearly, as clearly as the mysterious importance of the storefront for the beautiful old lady and the heavyset man who appeared later.

She wanted to joke him out of what was the matter. She was surprised when Manuel said, "I’m not here any more."

"You’re what?"

"I was away from the door for two minutes helping Miss Rail into the elevator and I went up with her and helped her out of the wheelchair in her apartment, and the Super come and we had a big argument and he phoned the office and I’m fired."

Manuel was there but he wasn’t there. Grace was saying it was terrible, she’d call the landlord tomorrow.

4’You don’t have to, Grace. I got some people. Mr. Lustig, Mr. Goody, Mr. Mayn, you know they’ll go to bat for me. Hey, listen, I don’t buzz you this afternoon because it’s your friend coming up, O.K.?"

"You want a smoke, Manuel?" Grace didn’t have a picture of any of the three tenants mentioned.

"No, I got to get out of here. I just want to tell you, you know."

She wanted him to come in. She was glad he didn’t want her to call the office. The union’s going to protect him, get him in someplace else. So "whatever you hear, Grace, you know I want to tell you first because some people in this building they don’t like me, I don’t come running when they yell at me the sink’s stopped up, you know."

"Maureen and I, we’ll picket the building."

"No," he grinned, "no, you don’t want to do that."

"You won’t stop Maureen."

"You got another friend moving into the building, Maureen said."

"Yeah, yeah, that’s three down and a hundred and twenty some to go, Manuel."

"Yeah, that’s how I know her. She nice."

"Sue?"

Manuel shrugged. "Sue? I don’t buzz you when she came. She’s nice."

"Yeah, she’s getting there."

Manuel was going away, pressed the elevator.

"I bet you’ll be on the job tomorrow."

Manuel poked his chin out. "Super," he said implicitly, and shook his head.

"When was that, that she came?"

"This afternoon. You wan’t in? She’s looking for the Super, he just stepped out as she came in, she couldn’t miss him, he got Super on his shirt"— Manuel was grinning and shaking his head—"I never see her before, and she say she never met the Super, so I say Oh you’re Grace Kimball’s friend, you moving in. She’s nice, she’s O.K. She speak good Spanish to me. Keep looking at the names by the house-phone."

"That was Sue?" asked Grace, as if Manuel knew.

"Nice-looking lady with light-color hair, green sweater. She was looking at the names by the house-phone. She waited for the elevator. She look at her watch and smiled at me. T don’t have much time,’ she said. I say, ‘Super’s coming right back.’ Elevator came and she went up."

"Yeah, that’s right," said Grace. It was going on again, her story being told back to her. When me they report to, it is me they report. She did not tell Manuel Sue had dark hair. People, it came to Grace, disappeared into people. Were they people? Someone arrived in her, but ancient or future, who knew?

"Nice-looking lady," said Manuel, his own trouble not forgotten. Not lumpy till you got their clothes off and hung up on silver hooks, inner thighs with not Indian writing on them but good old American, lower buttock, pockets of trouble in the undefended and deceptive flesh of the back. The elevator came. "I got to go. I didn’t eat yet." Up front. Bye, babe.

But which story was coming back? Sue and Clara lumped together. In the dark, heavy articles of furniture are all the same, she had said to the man who labored in his sleep. Not the same if you’ve seen them by candlelight. Each one is different, each convolvulus unique. She had a hundred and fifty color slides to show this astounding truth. Dark lips, pale lips; rich petals swaying in the breaths of desire; or fine, long narrow neat leaf-edges; the hooded point secret, growing through the whole body yet still, though distended, the same; or a pendulous pinkie half out of its hood like a cock with its own shaft that you’ll see even better coming downward to the hood if you shave. Get a one-thirty-second-Pawnee hard-on just thinking about it, about each and every one, all there on slides whether the male-designed Carousel projector worked or not. Plug in, turn on; the vibrations are light but right, the underground waters are felt faraway and the right hand guides the wave length in its grip toward those faraway waters. Find what is right for you. The soles of your feet together. Let power find you, if you have to play hard-to-get. Sometimes she thought there would be peace on earth if we would just learn to breathe. All alone we have to invent even that.

But the story was coming back, told back to her, and she didn’t know which it was. Prophetic meaning beyond words and in future so told back to her it came in a changed voice: hey get your bull voice gone public, had she become a man flown back in future to tell herself her bullish prophecies had been right on?, yet the voice telling her back her own story—do voices hear?—was hers but a person she’d mistaken for Lou the husband man she wanted to show who was really another and she and this other are not quite facing each other deciding whether to get each other’s attention and her story being told back to her is so unheard-of and astounding she cries out, "You see! You are what happens to you." But, crying "Abundance," she has to ask, Doesn’t what happens come from you? and if incredible energy-levels grow from cleansing and mental attitude/intuition that will not be brain-washed into turning thought/feeling into some legal/logical analysis headtrip, are these strong, changed women coming toward her (who are thanking her, exchanging information, letting the patriarchal wars go on in the jungles and up against the Wailing Wall), yes these women are what happens to and from Grace, let’s not get into heavy argument, though new thought regarding how a natural female up-front aggressiveness can love and really change competitive male aggressiveness, is what’s needed now. But this story told back as if she didn’t know it already proves familiar like the stranger telling it to her in future: an elite Indian healer who stood with her and they saw a mountain lean toward them; a story with an old couple chatting not quite communicating; a brother delivering milk, entering her cocoon bedroom one Sunday morning to compare what they called "Indian writing" where the bed had impressed soft warm cuneiforms on tummy and ribflesh, or entering her bedroom at one a.m. once to tell her everything, leaving on his motorcycle, coming back married, becoming someone she didn’t like anymore but then becoming a father weeping at her face-to-face so he almost truly saw her his sister and that her grief over the death of his boy her nephew on a motorbike was also great; a story including a woman escaped, a marriage that did not quite speak, the threat of Nothing-Happening/Death, the message of life lived by the bearer but with something missing so her being known to a thousand half-known people was a story she couldn’t ever tell, she was what all these other people had of her: her dayful coming to a point (like your head, she would say to her brother cuddling in bed, joking) while the old reliable hum—Fly me—rests against a corner of her, spreading her and bunching her as she knew it would—why, be my guest, why just come on in, why you just have me.

But all these people in the story just now retold through Manuel wanted apartments in this turn-of-the-century building, all coming toward Grace Kimball as if she had asked them? You and only you made your home, and mucus could be an amazing building material, we produce enough of it, don’t be squeamish, and she wasn’t getting into some discussion with Maureen about these zooplankton Clara called appendicularians.

But which story now retold through Manuel? Not this story quite: for Clara was not Sue, she was frightened and let herself be posed as Grace’s potential friend. Which Sue would never have done, the vibrator’s hum almost said. For Sue was her friend. But Clara might be, too. Grace was much taken with her, she knew things, she kept her own counsel which still wasn’t good enough. For she had come to Grace Kimball for more, and, when taken for Grace’s friend, didn’t deny it—it might come to be true. Yet she had a home and had said nothing about moving into this building. And, observant as Clara was, hadn’t she noticed the Superintendent with "Super" on his pocket? Well, the answer, hummed in its own body tongue by the microphone with its ear that doubled as a mouth bearing on her flesh-and-bone Gaiete Parisienne, acid Rock, My Old Kentucky Home, in its own sweet time, was that Clara was in Grace’s periodic cluster and, shy of phones, maybe afraid, had come here drawn not just to eye-contact with Grace but through Manuel, who would by coincidence see Clara as Grace’s friend, so Manuel, who had at another time today left his post at the door and for whom three men tenants, Mr. Goody and the other two, would go to bat tomorrow with the landlord, had joined the convergence of her periodic cluster until the meaning of her day approached, and she almost had it, Take me as I am—still, words in another mouth that was distinctly fleshly. It was coming toward her and going away from her, but nothing she would tell the women in the workshop. They needed to hear about give and give/take and take—needed to hear themselves—marriage con came: and between the coming toward and the going away was a nothing which (something like We Are All Just Voices was retelling her) you had to keep trucking until you saw that this void where everything was happening in her life yet nothing, was nothing; so, like the heavy set gray-haired dude with the curving look today that was between Surprise and Recognition, there was really Nothing standing between the coming toward and the going away. But she didn’t quite have it, didn’t quite get what it was that came after her—she the future—orgasm peace. Until, coming or on the point of it coming, her softening eyes moistened the tall pier glass (my dear) across the candle-lit room, so it was wings taking her away—but her own—one throb, but that didn’t quite end—a woman-minute of her constant self: which was not enough: she saw that her day was lived, and this was as far as she could go, meaning coming to the point, and, given by her, not wholly in her hands, like the glimpse of the heavy set man in the street who didn’t turn toward her, or the woman Maya who published a book and brought it to Grace and when Grace said, "Join the ranks of successful women," Maya in the heart of her eyes didn’t really like the words but couldn’t come out with it, a meaning happily out of Grace’s hands, like the life of the stranger-woman Clara who had stood at Grace’s threshold, the light coming off her face and the light itself saying, Listen, my life is at stake, can I speak to you of it?— and didn’t speak till Grace asked if it was about the workshops. For Clara, whose address was upper West side not upper East, had come to this large apartment building looking for someone else, who had been turned by Convergence and the Goddess into Grace Kimball.