Wall-to-Wall High Reaching for the Ground

The black voices did not dispossess her in the slightest—

THE LEADER INCULCATES IN THE TROOPS FIRST AND LAST

SELF-RELIANCE WITHOUT WHICH THERE IS NO HIERARCHY

and she felt them part of her home, their shoes, the bluejeans of the younger, darker one, the dark green chinos (near prison-green) of the older, lighter one, their friendly beef-acid bellies, the lumbering low-energy-seeming vibe-rest of their courtesy across her Body-Room bending to rip up the old carpet, lay out the new: lay it out so snug at the edges that the carpet in its slight abundant rise at the margins had to be restrained—tamped down—before the tacks were hammered in, along the mirrored wall, the bookcase wall (gotta unload them books, written by men, women, some who didn’t know who they were), the window wall, the sculpture-and-photo wall, all this behind her as she passed under the silver chinning bar to answer the hall phone as friendly as, well, her own mother alive in her and well also in the middle of America surrounded by furniture and sheet music, bottoms-up Revere Ware and a whole family of table lamps, but having at last some Pleasure. But this call wasn’t her mother, yet wasn’t just the person who’s talking.

The wiry voice was Kate’s friend, Rima, a learner certainly, with a lot of balls, who would never give a guy the worship that would take him out of circulation on a permanent basis so he would never know if he had a personality or not, and who had come to three sessions of a workshop and dropped out because she had to check out some similar operations and the Esalen trip on the Coast. Rima was phoning like every week to ask Grace’s opinion. What was the real, bottom-line, everyday effect on "one’s" sexuality of one’s parents (like, what had gone on in Grace’s home?); or, what was the breakdown of activities at swings in terms of preferences (well, Grace had begun to orgy-out, desiring regular hits of solitude, one day a week of silence, for, you know, Silence = Rest, if, as the Chilean woman Clara had said weeks and weeks ago, Rest is Silence—wasn’t that what she had said? although the A. A. friends still got together—yet more for raps than sex); well, was it helpful to the women in the workshops (that is, was it really sharing information) to have heterosexual demonstration as part of the format? (you dropped out too soon, honey!)—and did "self-sex" as Grace called it, as versus either s-s in company (you mean jerkeen off with others?) or one-on-one, conserve energy for someone on the way up in a demanding executive position? But what was Rima’s new name, it was sort of feminist-literary as if she had gone Muslim, but it was a real pen name. But she was asking all these questions, she’s in some crisis but maybe inviting others in. The crisis didn’t feel so personal. Awkwardness bled into Grace from somewhere.

Now Rima had surfaced after a month, etcetera—obviously O.D.’d on work like Maureen O.D.’d on the science of sprouts, catching them at their life point to maximize duodenal flow to make the body feel concept. When Grace said, "What’s going on?—how was the Esalen trip?—are you taking time for self-love?—I’m planning on a rich Arab once a month who knows his place," she sensed in the easy breeze of her own words that this call was different, and knew another self or body had come into her to warn her that this Rima might be O.D.ing not on work but on good old patriarchal-facsimile exploitation.

THE PROFIT SYSTEM MAY LEAD INEVITABLY TO WAR BECAUSE

MEN SEE BUSINESS AS TOTAL VICTORY OR NOTHING. HOWEVER,

TO GIVE THE SYSTEM A CHANCE, WOMEN MUST NEVER DO ANY WORK

WHATSOEVER

EXCEPT FOR MONEY.

"Can I ask you a personal question?" Rima asked, and Grace knew that some trip for herself was just around the bend and wanted to be off the phone and watching the black dudes sling their hammers at the new carpet.

"What if I say Yes I do mind if you ask me a personal question?"

"I would understand, Grace."

"Why would I mind when you’ve been doing it for weeks?"

"It was sharing information, I thought."

"It’s definitely information, dear. Listen, I got some people here."

What followed wasn’t "in" either of their minds. Still doing workshops? seriously thinking of running for President? Yeah, yeah, on an orgasm platform, you know me, right out there in Macy’s window. But did Grace mean a single-issue platform? Oh an everything platform, an abundance platform, we’ll even include a department of patriarchy, and Rima could be assistant media secretary while we give the fields back to the people so we can do the grazing, and we’ll bring Maureen back into public life to be commissar of agriculture. "Listen, I got some guys here."

"Is it true you’re going into men’s workshops, Grace?"

Coming close now, and what was Rima’s new last name? Grace was supposed to be good at names. "That’s right, wall-to-wall: tonight’s the night."

"Aren’t you making problems for yourself?—I mean with nudity and the emphasis on sex."

"It’s 1977, dear. Can’t wait. Body-Self, remember? The men have more problems being with themselves than we do."

"Does this mean that you’re reversing your ground on segregation of the sexes?"

"Hey man," Grace heard the younger black man in the next room say softly and knew he was pointing.

"That was never my trip," said Grace. "Just a nationwide moratorium on relations, that’s all. How are you doing, Rima?"

Everything was wonderful, she heard Rima say.

"Every one of them is different," said the younger black guy in the next room, and Grace heard chuckling.

She should have this woman in front of her, she sounded about as orgasmic as her neighbor with the lonesome dog who couldn’t let go of the leash when the elevator door closed abruptly, leaving the dog on the lobby marble pointing (the right direction) toward a fantastically thin-bred gray monster-beauty leash-less and masterless and at the ready, while the leashed dog began to strangle and the elevator alarm went off. Pets needed to be jerked off too—but off, that is.

"So what are you doing with your spare time, Rima?"

"Oh you know me, Grace."

"Oh shit, Rima."

"Grace, I’m glad I’m a woman; I wouldn’t want to be a man."

"Well, whatever it is, I hope you’re doing it every day."

"I never know what’s kidding and what’s totalitarian."

"Oh, you’re either a top or you’re a bottom, dear."

"When’s a new women’s workshop starting?"

If she had this woman in front of her, she could lay a gentle hand on her, for God’s sake. "Next week. It’s not full. I’m broke. Lucille’s helping out. You don’t know Lucille; she’s got more brains than all of us."

"Is she in with you?"

"No, she can’t handle that. She’s a hospital administrator. I’m working on her."

"But what happened to the nationwide women’s bathhouse idea?"

"I decided to be President instead. I’m going into consultation at a decent hourly rate, Rima. We don’t get paid for what we know."

"Hanging out a shingle?"

"Sex consultation mainly. You know me, Rima."

"You don’t need a degree, Grace. Therapy with demo."

"Any information that needs to be shared, Rima; you can understand that."

"How’s Maureen?"

"She’s doing fine."

"That’s what I heard. I heard Cliff’s working with you?"

"For me," Grace said, and the hammering resumed, and she thought, Of course. Cliff standing nude except for a Nikon, like nose-box binoculars, taking photos like his own life depended on it—the long gray page-boy streaked with brown, her oldest New York friend and still a ram (ask him) especially when he said he wanted Grace to wear the pants and what ram ever went around wearing pants, he inquired, with words, words, words.

"I’ll let you know about the workshop, Grace. How many men are coming tonight?"

"Nine brave men, one of them a part-Sioux Indian he says—plus two reluctant flashers who are on the fence but may go the limit."

"How do you feel about a woman running a men’s nude workshop?"

"I’m glad it’s me."

"Have you checked them all out? Is it the Anvil Chorus?"

"You’ve got me on the chorus but we don’t divide the rodeo stars from the fence sitters."

"I meant the Anvil downtown." Rima just wondered if Grace knew what she was getting into. "Thanks for talking to me, Grace."

"I’ll send you a bill." Grace saw Rima lying down, a naked horizon, but it was Grace’s.

RENT IS THE PRICE YOU PAY PER UNIT OF TIME

FOR THE SERVICES OF A DURABLE GOOD.

"Do you think swings are consistent with socialism, Grace?"

"You mean you think the state should be running them? I’m pretty well orgied-out."

"I mean in their emphasis; that’s what I meant. I mean it isn’t exactly one big happy family."

"Swings are anti-acquisitive. No one belongs to another person, O.K.? That’s why you need a space that isn’t bound by furniture. But I think we should hang up before we start a new interview."

She felt the woman’s fighting breath. "You sound like that woman in your workshop who’ll insist on two minutes of silence in the middle of a conversation?—it’s embarrassing."

"I’m ready for two lifetimes."

She had to speak to these two dudes laying the carpet, only to them; but Rima went on, There was one other thing . . . and Grace knew its dynamic, which was all that mattered; she was braced for its content.

In the next room the hammer duet stopped and energy rose into her ears like a heat binding the beats ("One more thing, Grace . . .") of some future-size bongo or possible flashing of the menopausal current she was readying herself one day to ride: a new trip, after all, maybe on a blue mare by some reports ridden by her incarnation as that Navachoor love-addict energy-scientist hero of the buffalo tongue’s power, in the finest dried portions, to fuel change or so a number of people divined, including the Prince himself, who had grown in her heart since Lincoln had touched a power or a story in Grace that had been there all right, native Paiute as she surely was at least a small fraction to her fingertips or, the label came out of nowhere if there were such a place, Far-Orient Mountain-Tribe, air-expressed (as fast as credit-card payments by telepathy get through the mails) into her (no matter the distance) just as fast as her own sixteenth or thirty-second blood from the southwest territories of old America or other continents in her flesh—and as fast as Rima’s real reason for calling from behind the (of course closed) John door of Rima’s straining little spirit that was getting it on with the business trip, give her credit.

"Maureen said you ran a workshop at a prison; is that true?"

"Oh it’s very true, it’s so true—it was probably an all-time organic high."

"Orgasmic, Grace?"

"Money in the bank, dear."

"You had trouble with one inmate?"

"Yeah, yeah—one guy; don’t we all."

"Yes I knew it was a men’s prison. One wouldn’t necessarily assume it was, I mean in your case; I mean, just hearing ‘prison.’ "

"I like men, too. I just believe in segregation for the time being."

"I gather it was a masturbation workshop."

"We gathered information and exchanged it. We rapped. You can imagine all this from your experience. I told them weeping is like sex. You know those guys can’t put a curtain up, so they gotta go public. Energy level up to the rafters, Rima."

"I don’t really know what that means, Grace. But it was through Clara, right?—the wife of that Allende economist?"

"That which economist? Maureen didn’t tell you that. I found out I knew the legal liaison woman who goes up there twice a week; she got me in."

"How did you manage a masturbation workshop at a men’s prison?"

"We rapped. We exchanged information. It was beautiful."

"Who’d you have trouble with?"

"We reached an understanding."

"Thanks, Grace. I’ll call you about the workshop next week."

"Do what you want to do, Rima."

"I always do, Grace. Oh, one other thing ..."

Grace was glad, oh so glad, of the men’s experimental starting. She would handle it. It would be great. It would be tense and explosive. It would be strangely loving. Some of them didn’t know how to masturbate. They stroked too far down the shaft. And some didn’t know how to brush their teeth correctly. She wanted to say to Rima—but then did, "Sometimes I can’t stand women. Did you ever take that trip?"

"I don’t get the vibes on your ‘sometimes,’ Grace. But, you know, my mother—"

"I can’t hear about mothers and daughters any more. Oh shit, baby, you’re not all women." She was getting everybody else’s shit short-waved direct but not her own.

"What do you mean, I'm not?"

"Don’t quote me, Rima, I’m experimenting. That’s where the surprises are. Women never had the chance to just experiment."

The hammering resumed. Energy breathed away into the clammy phone, and what came back? Someday she’s gon’ be not there for some of these people.

"One other thing, Grace ..."

A fat woman loomed—perhaps an obsession of some of Grace’s workshop daughters—and Grace had encouraged this fat woman to take off her clothes and the woman said she never took her clothes off even in front of the television, which she watched four weekday afternoons, and had long ago given up expecting her antique-dealer husband to tell her she was fat.

": . . . I hesitated to ask . . ." said Rima, and it was part-Grace, part-Rima clogging the phone line.

A thin, athletic woman Grace knew was an as yet unknown woman who in future would come for help (validation, support), sat cross-legged and leaned toward a great dark-peach-colored goddess-candle and put a hand on her Romantics Anonymous tummy and groaned and cried like the gripe was in her gut; she said she rotated upside down sometimes, dizzy like pre-meno-pause, but she’s too young—and told Grace O.K. she had a smashing job now and was split from her documentary-director husband who needed her but needed her to be there because otherwise he couldn’t ignore her and she said Grace had helped her see that his way of having her was inside him, inside his chest, so he and she would live together but all she—God, all she could seem to want was to go back, she’d even had a fine, upstanding lover to give her a sendoff back to Hobby, her still not legally separated ol’ man (ouch, ouch, ouch)—so this must be the first time she had come to Grace. Had Grace forgotten her? Was she to come?—

"... one other thing," Rima was continuing, "since I have you here on the phone and you’re going to run for President: you gave your bike to a black kid, right? a messenger? autistic? retarded?—"

"It wasn’t my bike but that’s right I gave it to him. He’s retarded like Paul Revere was retarded. He’s right out there, thinking it through step by step as good as any feminist. He has trouble getting the words together, but you should read his notes. I love him."

"And he works for one of these reader-advisor spiritualist women who has a sister in the same racket up in the Bronx who just happens to be the one who was consulted recently by one of the doctors associated with that clinic Lucille works at because she told me he went because an opera-singer friend of his went to this woman on the advice of that woman Clara, the wife of the economist, who was in your workshop."

"You lost me there, Rima, but anything my people get up to is their responsibility, just like their orgasms, and it’s all orgasm anyhow."

FEMALE SEX PROSTITUTION FOLLOWS MARKET LAW

LIKE ANY OTHER PROSTITUTION EVEN [ . . . ]:

MANY BUYERS AND FEW SELLERS MEAN HIGH PRICES.

"Well, I only wanted to ask about this guy Santee, who’s in your workshop tonight, because you know he calls himself Spence when he’s at the prison talking to that con who didn’t dig your masturbation trip? and Santee when he’s renting your space to the messenger boy for his bike right next door to—if you can believe this—a warehouse theater that’s rehearsing something with music that no one can find out anything about except there’s a sign under the bell that says let in or something—let in because a piece was torn away—and Lucille’s doctor friend was seen coming out into the street arguing with this guy Santee, and if you can believe it this aura reader in the Bronx whose sister is your bike boy’s employer was seen going in and out of there, too."

Oh yeah, they were putting on some gay opera, Grace thought she had heard, so maybe she could dig opera after all if they only would not take it so seriously but she didn’t like sitting in a theater basically. "Listen, dear," she told Rima, "I know what’s going on, O.K.? Let me see it, when it’s finished, O.K.? No hard feelings. Everyone doing their thing. And by the way, Jimmy Banks isn’t my messenger boy; he’s his own."

The rug installers had not made a sound for minutes. Rima was saying she would be in touch. (Rima was lying that she would be in touch. A double lie—because she would!) Grace was hearing, like a word "We," a hollow noise in her words Glad I know where you’re at—knowing it was potential death she was passing through, and no words for it and no regrets; and through that hollow came such a heat of uncertainty she said the Prostitution Supply/ Demand formula again and there was still a blank in the middle of it—she reached one hand out to grab the cool chin-up bar in the doorway near this hall phone; the blood was going right out of her, but who could see it?, and Goddess-blood coming in at once but the deed was done and she’s hanging by both hands, and the older rug guy, gray of hair, brown of eye, appeared before her to report they had to go finish another job from last night that they didn’t get to do this morning and would be back sometime in the afternoon, and . . . —she doing some chins? Grace let go, she put a hand on his arm: "I got the men’s workshop coming in tonight, I absolutely got to have an operating carpet by six."

But, no problem. And when the younger man with his long fingers and long nails asked what was that workshop, what were they into, Grace thought, Getting it together, but it came out "Dreaming others’ dreams for them right then and there in the group."

"I had one just last night," one man said, but Grace, who thought to say, People have such potential, said, "Dreams of power, dreams of glory, dreams of hang-ups." "Getting it together," the younger man said.

The older man said he had a workshop in his basement, and they all laughed. "Get it on with yourself," Grace said. "That’s right," said the older man.

She heard, Help, but not as a cry for help but filling something up that had been void; and she said, "I think I dreamed a mountain was coming."

"Far out," said the younger man.

"And you know it kept me from knowing it was coming near me and was right in my vicinity."

"What’s in that mountain?" said the older man.

"It was wide and very, very heavy," said Grace.

"That’s gonna end all dreams, man," said the younger man, and the three of them agreed, laughing. "You know, that was it," said Grace; "the mountain coming meant we didn’t have to dream again."

The younger man asked how come all men in that workshop.

"Men have problems with each other, their bodies, their touching capability; you see them walk around and shake hands and they want to keep holding hands, you know, but they’re not in touch with their bodies, not white men anyhow," said Grace.

"Is that you?" the younger asked, pointing at two impeccably shave-cunt-positive headstand shots Cliff had taken of Grace. She beamed. "Yeah, that’s me."

She asked to look at the nails of the younger one, and took his right hand in her hands and smoothed the back and peered through the delicate paleness of the nails to the flesh beneath, and she turned his hand over and stared at the little map printed in each fingertip. He asked her if she could read palms, and she said she could read fingerprints. The older man said, "Every one is different." Grace said, "Yes, I have a different type of fingerprint than yours." "They’ll catch up with you," said the younger man.

She went with them, when they went. They dropped her on a windy street below Union Square, and all the time she knew that at that moment, when she had become Rima and saw what was coming she couldn’t do anything probably about it; but what the fuck, pre-menopausal, why blame it on the "men"? go with that blue mare she had heard of even if it took her into the evening skyline, she knew she must have dreamed it, though she would not say so. But then she knew, though she did not tell the men, that she had not had that dream about the mountain, it had come some other way.

It didn’t matter, but she didn’t believe they were finishing a job left unfinished last night. But she knew she was going where she had been before and knew that the old man and the crazy old beautiful woman would be there like once before, and weeks ago that seemed so little time, littler and littler, that it might have squeezed right down into being a future the goddess gave her a glimpse of.

A block from where she was going and near a shop window crammed with madras skirts and brass implements from which a fat Middle Eastern stud contemplated her, she stopped a gray grunge of a derelict. He didn’t remember her. He put his hand to the bulge of his pocket. She gave him a dollar and wasn’t going to buy him a shave or bring him home for a bath and shampoo included, old female-hormone head of mop hair tangled all over old scarf ace but shagged soft as cashmere. "What are you doing?" he asked as if he had been interrupted. "There’s an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on Bleecker Street—A.A., you know? Why don’t you go?" she said but with her own secret pace carrying her past him. "I’m not dressed for it," he said; "you got some haircut, lady."

He frowned sharp blue eyes out of the dirty, dim goat face. How to stay thin on pre-processed carbohydrate. He yawned his awful mouth at her like he’s breathless or laughing his way toward sinking a few teeth in her heart. She holds his arm, his good tweed sleeve. "Goodbye," she says. "Why not," he responds. The thick-faced man in the shop window nods at her, smiling.

So it’s a fairy tale or she’s out of her depth. Yet she never is, so long as she remembers that old higher power; but which one, because Rima is beyond her, and unimportant, but leading her into some emptiness Grace might not be equal to: trivial and terrible and a consequence of all words used so largely in workshop as if for the universe casting for each of us our own goddess-shadow that’s bright as we’re dark (and enough to go around for all our individualized auras)—words used very largely, etcetera, but rather used for home (-is-where-the-heart-is) where politics is rampant in the ripest guilt and manipulation while some few people like Rima she helped now cast her on some asshole other-people’s trip which maybe was real politics, Man-type Washington-smelling power Grace had said was any woman’s right and not corrupt except in the use that people made of it, but as far from hearth and home meditated-on by Body-Self self-content taking a solitude trip as Power which she knows she sometime has can’t maybe be; and she needs Cliff but is drawn on to the Messenger-Service/Psychic-Consultation storefront because she was living she knew where other crazies’ dream worlds need acting out, though if this be alternative gross feedback then what’s there to be afraid of? Yet, preceded by her eyes—suddenly seeing ahead that Burmese woman with one leg whom she could help who is not a memory of a workshop but a divinity before her with on one side nothing below her coat, and who’s yelling laughing to a beautiful Occidental guy, "Get over here!" yelling the rings off his fingers—the clear power route broached by Body-Self and the exposure of patriarchal poison-gas-type underground warfare centuries old to subjugate sharing of information to sex-negative male sharing of sisters (the world is your igloo) who are asking not to rule the world but only to experiment with self-image, mutual work, and in-your-own-body love, now seems destined to enfold an only seemingly unknown-type corporate-conspiracy-constipation linking like some unreal science Clara’s opera star whom Grace hoped might join a workshop, and the wonderful (newly spelt) Feaulie who from his maximum-security castle-retreat up the Hudson rejected self-sex (so he said) for astral intercourse with some girlfriend in Manhattan Grace bet didn’t know about it which, though astral, was the physical sensation of telepathic beaming back and forth between two screens like an eyeball of light bounding between interferences, roadblocks, men-type misenergized anal glop when what he was really onto though not yet into was in Grace’s opinion (of telepathy) a communicating by whole body (not its mere insane brain) and as telepathy could get boring if you didn’t keep up your end and be getting it on or about to constantly (and you might get droned-out on Maureen from Florida measuring time-of-digestion of hard-boiled free-range eggs against time of usable energy derived from yolk and/or versus white), so the obstacle to keeping the inter-void tele-rap interesting was not just seeing that each center of the whole-body had its own flow thing (forget the chart!) and the intercourse started high and stayed high like where her sculptor friend Raya (with the husband who three times burnt down the house in Westhampton) began in order to work toward the ground but here with Grace there was no ground, but when whole bodies got in touch either liver to liver, lung to lung, shoulder to shoulder, heart-focus to heart-focus (where heart’s specially noise-prone), or, on the other hand, person A’s (say) ear-focus to person B’s (say) lower-back (an interchange where all that the mouth would not at the moment speak and was being heard growing greater but in these scarily narrower and more and more compact zombie-bombies of "I’m your mother if you want and I’ll lose you if I can just get you inside me" and "Your inner thigh smell mellow-yellow and I own it ‘cause the rest of you don’t catch on," drew to the brain-side tiny bone-faces of the earworks to pulse through them such scoopograms out the other side to the other’s miles-distant, territory-distant lower-back anxiety-knots (potential-knot or cartilage-real) as were so fast answered as to have gotten back before the A-messages (not to be mixed up with the Alpha position) were finished (as at toilet) for she knew these B-cushies, launched from knots of tension to blow so big and soft it takes A’s whole-body ear-mouth to receive that kiss-of-breath message, and no buyers and no sellers but not socialism either, nor even whatever one of her uncles in his cups used to think he meant when he said the word "socialism" (she saw him stand up out of his easy chair with his glass balancing in his grip his whole, pelvis-locked body and knew that this was past and not future but the gap in her demand-supply prostitution cliche was to be filled, was to come, and so were many women and men, and so was, apparently, the athletic, anxious woman with the potential ex-husband named Hobby, so clearly testified to), and the larger set of words might as well be voices but she wasn’t at all sure, now that it’s the goddess on her lonesome we give credit for this wonderful new cross-organ system like wind blowing like constant future answering messages before received so long as it ain’t heart-to-heart or pancreas-to-pancreas but cross-organ, and such a high she’s glad to come down off it to cope with Santee-Spence’s business trip with one or both of these south-of-the-border Reader-Advisor Psychic-Consultation bullshit artists, one of them located where the wonderful old couple passed by, as pair-bonded as their separate lunacies might shape.

The storefront hasn’t moved. Grace is nowhere else but here. And Jimmy Banks worked out of here and still does part-time, she knows so he can cover himself and his bike in case mom and the social worker compare notes and determine he’s nuts or a Mongolian hard-on and force early retirement on him and that giant jaw of his, so poor little cock he can’t quite go public. Yet here they really are, the old couple, still together after a century, and she hails them.

"Oh we are ready to begin again," old lady calls, and a broom comes sailing end over end out of the third-floor window of the building downstreet just missing a hill of fruit-and-vegetable trash part of the Korean landscape at the end of a row of garbage cans; a high-chair follows, vegetable to vegetable, thank God baby not in it, and lands on the hill.

"I came," says Grace, with tears in her eyes, as if she weren’t in fear.

"We could see that," said the grizzled old growler-man kindly reporting a fact worth reporting.

"That silly pair, where are they?" the old girl lamented, so beautiful in lavender dress showing beneath old gray coat with animal fur at top.

"I’ll go in and see," said Grace.

She wanted to bless the old lady, the mole on her jaw, the darkish eyebrows, the prominent nose, a woman maybe not mad or senile after all, just eccentric visionary like a million women whose visions don’t get cared for.

The interior is weird. A gypsy bullshit side. And a counter with small file drawer and telephone and coffee container over there. Senora Wing in gold and red and black sitting at a round table with a sign on it saying "Senora Wing." At the counter a guy who must be Turnstein: vain about all that piled kinky hair shaped like a second head. A man with weight of worlds still untapped on his broad, jammed shoulders, he’ll have a hunch before he’s forty, having been over forty since he was a pube to his mom’s dictator-martyr. But also an inset bunk area where these utterly juicy and fascinating androgynes—great Goddess, Grace would like to be nude with them, their coming awake there, they love each other, what is this window-performance shit? Grace is not still out on the sidewalk where high chairs rain down on Korean fruit-and-vegetable landscapes but she would like to be there with the old lady and gentleman, figuring what’s their trip, what’s going on, such a live pair; something going there, for sure, and she almost needs their story but Rima’s bullshit is like a problem at the bank that, you know, won’t go away, though when will the rug guys return?, and thank God the men’s workshop’s tonight.

Turnstein’s hopeless in the flick of the big eyes everywhere. The dumbly, accidentally sculpturesque detouring line of fluorescent light overhead turns this story away under the table or into Grace’s head, she’s aware of her blue peacoat and her purple sweatpants and high alligator boots. Is this place real, and she’s got things to do. And who cares a shit if Rima exposes Grace for a sex-fiend therapist-without-antiobiotic-conceptual portfolio, and yet:

"Yes?" says Senora Wing, looking her up and down, especially down.

"Yeah," Grace says, waiting to get equality by sitting down across from this heavy-duty bull-mother who gets Grace into contact but where’s that wholeheartedness you need in war and love, and the Goddess, where’s she?, Grace knows she’s into a tricky transaction if not dreadlocked to the ultimate stranglehold. A broad-shouldered man with stud-gray hair should walk in here now, but won’t—but where’s he froml, he’ll come to her, he is in this someplace, and the Santee character, not big but aura-affirmative, something long-distance about that dude, the fringe jacket, get it off him tonight, he might not just be inside: so, is a very large number being done on her for bucks, for expose city? for some higher power?—but all she ever wanted (poor little Gracie!) was ... a blank that cuts in like before, and she’s kidding self (though not Body-Self) kidding herself she knew just what she wanted with workshop celebrity cum taking economic and spiritual responsibility for her life.

wing: I knew you would co’m. What is yr name?

grace: Are you a sister?

wing: Yr name, madam?

grace: Grace Kimball. Are you a sister, dear?

wing: We find out. Cross my palm with your forearm.

grace: (Doing so, so she leans close to Wing) Hey, far out: cross-limb communication. What’s going on, Wing?

wing: You came from the West, some years ago, and you are looking for something.

grace: What can it be?

wing: Your friendship vein is your strong suit. You have many women friends from many lands. They tell you their lives. This can be risky for you. You are looking for something they have not told you.

grace: You are looking for something they have not told you. You have a sister. So you are one.

wing: (Smiling grimly—definitely not non-orgasmic, but . . .) No, Madam Kimball, you are looking for something they have not yet told you.

grace: No, you are, but you’re getting mad and I’m your client. Tell me more, Senora. We’re sisters somewhere down the road.

wing: You have a gentleman coming to see you soon who knows people you know, and you must beware of him because if you let him in on your knowledge of a person from across the water that you know, he may use this so that others will come down on you very hard.

grace: Is that a promise, honey?

wing: (Seriously ignoring Grace s implicit acknowledgment of threat) You came from the West with Indian blood in your veins. You have a father who have a problem. Your mother plays musical instrument. You worry ‘bout her. You had a dark man in your life and he went away someplace I am not sure—change arm (points to Grace* s other forearm, which Wing now receives in her palm)—Long Island, he lives there now, I think—never mind. There is another man but he is married to a woman you know and you hear about him but you need to hear more, because he is in danger and you could help him if you get his wife to tell if he is planning a trip—

grace: (Humorously) With me?

wing: (Seemingly uninterrupted)—and if you help him you help yourself because you have a career and it is at the turning point, it can go either way, you can get into big money—

grace: (Laughing) Never!

wing: (Seemingly uninterrupted)—or into trouble. I see a bicycle racing through the rush hour and instead of a rider there is a blank space, no rider but the bike is racing through the City of Manhattan and it is looking for you where you should be—now no arms but heads (she leans way forward over the table)—

grace: Eyeball to eyeball, far out! (leans to press forehead)

wing: There is another man, he is your age, he is the right age for you—

grace: A traveling man from Saudi Arabia?

wing: (Seemingly uninterrupted) I feel him coming here between us; he may visit you, he may not; he is close, I can feel it—

grace: Is he clothed?

wing: He is well-dressed. I don’ know where he is coming from.

grace: Prison?

wing: Who would that be, Grace?

grace: Or out of a theater? I can’t quite tell.

wing: Someone from prison? I feel that you were in prison, there’s somebody there that doesn’t understand you like I do and you can be in danger if you go to prison again.

grace: Got a workshop date there in a week if they don’t cancel it.

wing: You need information from a foreign lady about the possible trip of her husband and I see that when you receive this information you must not tell it to anyone especially one who will come to see you tonight.

grace: Describe him.

wing: He has taken off his clothes, I cannot see him except his face, which has a thin, light-colored beard and he licks his lips when he listens and when he speaks he smiles and listens a lot but the rest of his body does not exist for me. We change contacts now (Senora Wing draws away and extends her index finger to touch Grace under her jaw).

grace: I see a woman named Rima in your cluster somewhere. I have many sisters. You have only one. I don’t know what is going on with you and her and I don’t want to know—

wing: Good! Let’s keep it that way for friendship’s sake.

grace: For the goddess’s sake maybe ... but Mr. Turnstein over there looks freaked out; are you armed?

wing: (Raising her palm) Hand to hand now. (Grace meets her, palm to palm.) You do good work, Madam Kimball. You have to understand the limits of your powers.

grace: Listen, dear, my power is from the goddess and takes the form of the responsibility my people learn to take for themselves, their bodies, their trips. My power is unlimited because the future of the people I encourage is unknown and unlimited. You couldn’t really predict how far some woman will go, once she is free of the mother-provider kitchen-trip or helping her invalid husband get his penis into her before it wilts and then taking her own happiness in his coming after three and a half minutes and thanking her; you could not really predict how far a woman will go when she walks out on her family, her furniture, her vanity about her hair, her belief that he has all the things to say; walks out on house arrest that’s lasted twenty years, knowing that the orgasm that puts her in touch with her Body-Self and with the peace that passes understanding might not have to depend on a man, on a man or another woman—she might be able to make a gift of it to herself. There’s no predicting these things, but you take responsibility for the unknown by entering it. It can be more violent staying in it than getting out of it and the tyrant suspects that you’re murdering him, but he’ll survive.

wing: You say things that will get you in trouble. What I tell you about your future I take responsibility for. Remember the man who licks his lips; if you have information about a trip to be taken by the man who is husband to your woman friend from across the water, do not give it to the man who licks his lips and has a small beard, he does not understand how to use it and neither do you.

grace: This is gossip. This is unreal bullshit. This isn’t energy.

wing: If you have such information, you can use it to control your own future by tellin’ it to me and about house arrest and murdering the tyrant.

grace: (Rising, giving her interlocutor a sunny grin) We’re both encouragers; you do your part, I do mine; you could afford to lose some weight around the hips and the triceps, you come to the workshop next week, I’ll give you a good rate.

wing: I give you this for nothing.

grace: What were you giving me for nothing? Maybe I missed it, and what was the nothing?

wing: Advice, baby.

turnstein: (Bursting—slowly, if possible) You know those old folks out there. She said she watched Jimmy’s bike for him. Where’s he go on his bike?

grace: I don’t know them personally. I guess Jimmy runs messages on his bike. (To Senora Wing) Did Rima get more than she gave you? Does she like your politics? Does she know your sister? Are you into gay theater?

wing: (Smiling widely, speaking softly) You think these things are gossip. They are real. Who cares if a woman leaves her husband, who cares what they are doing in bed? That’s their business. Big deal if the woman goes out to work. When the family goes hongry, who the hell cares if the doctor don’t warm up his speculum? I don’t know any Rima. You got nothing to tell me now—maybe later, maybe sooner.

turnstein: (Seeming to be on the verge of stammering) You see Jimmy tell him I can’t cover for him indefinitely.

grace: You should tell him yourself.

turnstein: He says it takes him longer to do a job than it used to, but he’s got a bike now—he says he doesn’t have a bike but we know he does.

grace: "We"?

Senora Wing snaps her fingers at the awakening androgyne twins, who tumble out of their bunk nook and stumble humorously toward the storefront window to clamber onto the stage-like shelf and do their thing.

The old lady seemed to stare at the window but welcomed Grace. "They’re not so funny any more, not so funny at all. They don’t want to be there? I better leave them before they leave me."

"I found out what I went in for."

The old lady took Grace’s hand: "I knew you would. But I don’t have anything to go in for. And I have no money." She nodded at the tough old man. "He has our money. But he works."

"Not recently," the old man said. "I feel like I’ve been unemployed for about a century. But I have my own work that I do—just as well."

"Listen, do those people in there want you two to come here every day? Is that it? Is that why those nitwits put on a show in the window?"

"I wouldn’t know," the old man said. His lean, worn face kept its young strength in the full, firm mouth and the clear, ready forehead. "I worked in New Jersey but they let me go."

"Oh, we were in New Jersey for many a year," the old lady beautifully said.

"I was the one who worked there," the man said. "She wasn’t there recently so far as I know."

"Sad but true," his companion said.

"Forced retirement?" said Grace. The city had retreated from them; the hill of fruit-and-vegetable truck had disappeared and with it the high chair as if it had been sucked back into the window it had been thrown from.

"I felt like a friend of mine out West years ago. One day they came asking questions about him; the next week he went to Uruguay. Broke up his family."

"He did?" asked Grace. "No," said the old man, "it did."

"People came asking questions about you?"

"Oh some free-lance gypsy."

"Political?" "Oh I wouldn’t think so; a matter of convergence—I’m a maverick to begin with."

The old lady spoke up. "We worked there in New Jersey for many a moon." The two of them laughed at that.

The man didn’t want to talk about what had happened. They were moving off down the sidewalk, and the wind picked up, and Grace didn’t feel they had snubbed her by not saying goodbye.

Grace called out to them. "Do you know the fortune teller in there?"

"Yes, yes," said the old lady. "No," said the old man; "she hasn’t been there long."

"She said she took complete responsibility for what she was telling me about things to come."

"Did she describe them?" asked the old man, who was looking at, more than into, Grace’s eyes. "Not in detail, really," said Grace; "I guess I filled in the details, like some guy who licks his lips and has a light-colored beard and I shouldn’t talk to him. I suppose she tells everybody that one."

"Yes," said the old man, and stood there narrowing the distance between them, his companion singing a little song. "Yes; it sounds exactly like the fellow who came asking questions about my past connections as if he had been there."

"If he feels he was, maybe he was," said Grace. "I feel that, too, but then I have Indian blood, or my mother always said I did." She would be back in her own space in a second if she could; the men would be returning to finish the carpet; and that unknown Santee and the others would be displaying a full spectrum of excitement and sheepishness arriving and—"hang up your hat and stay a while," Grace heard her mother say to someone, past becoming future if, now that she’s a widow, she is having some fun with the old electrician who fixed the timer on her furnace.

"Yes, if you can describe it, you’re responsible for it," said the old man; "my uncle said he had heard that from some natives he once knew."

"And if you have a trace of something in you . . . ?" said Grace.

"Someone will find it and find a use for it. It’s human nature."

"I used to think I was a Navachoor Prince, you know, in another life," said Grace to both of them. "But then I began to think it’s all this life."

The old woman seemed all there for a moment: "You mean the Navajo Prince. We know him."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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