daughter of the revolution
In the old sense of the word, Maureen seemed so sternly "gay" when we met at a swing in my building in late ‘75, so determined to say what she wanted you to do, and how and where and how fast and for how long—and again exactly how—for even moment-to-moment sex, let alone parenthood, takes planning nowadays—that her quite real tenderness hid itself away somewhere. It was like a spray of baby’s breath that at first you hardly notice in a white room I remember—you, I—in a white china vase near white curtains, and in summertime. Her tenderness strangely rested inside the seeming strength of all that up-front explicitness and the strict feminist management of personal power equaling the discovery of personal power—isn’t that how her Leader’s doctrine went? A spray of baby’s breath was what she had in her hand in the elevator one morning, sconced in dark-green tissue, and I didn’t yet know this lovely girl with a beautiful leather knapsack on her back; and though she stood four-square, doctrinally balanced on both feet—for as I learned she was into kung fu two evenings a week—her airy way kept her very light and she was scarcely in touch with the floor of the elevator rising, but "it" promised tenderness, whatever "it" was. She must have been taking those tiny buds of white bloom to her Leader, unless she was taking them for herself, to be with her while she was with her friend.
No doubt about how she came into my apartment the first time, the tenderness at last if not at first. She asked if my body was anesthetized. She found my giant Spanish table with the abandoned treadle built into its lower structure; and she found the brass bed (worth twelve hundred dollars) halfway polished as it stayed for two months; and she found the barstools at the breakfast nook, and found "all these books, Luce!" and found a square, delicate Harvard chair my father bought years after he had graduated and six months before he died, and a tall, noble Windsor chair my mother when she visits from Santa Fe sits in resolutely as if she would take it back, instead of me. Yes, Maureen came in and found my whole godawful history wound up between my shoulder and the root of my strong neck, when I was "dying" of cigarettes, first smoking them, then now not smoking them. Tenderness? It lived in her fingertips when her mind was dreaming. Other times, hardly to be seen when she was talking power, her tenderness might have been nestling in the arms of her Leader.
Oh well, the German word is too close, and her Leader was even less fascist than some of those who are casually called fascist nowadays. When you’ve had a lover who was a political economist—a real love—you get fussy about such things. But who was more fussy than Maureen?—though I don’t mean the sound of her voice coming, nor her saying not quite softly, "Go round and round in a very small circle, that’s all, and then I’ll tell you what happens after that." I mean about words: like "discrimination" could never mean deciding subtly between ideas; and "energy" could never be questioned, I mean as a word, because we all knew what it meant.
She showed me all over again that I had nipples. She found my feet as if I had lost them in their charge of tension. She told me how she had felt at ten wearing a T-shirt to school in Florida and getting sore. I mean she would talk endlessly about her body, the quality of her gums if she went a day without eating a grapefruit, the number of days she might go without taking a shit, how to brush your teeth (though one day when I thought What the hell, we’ll talk about this, then, why she closed the subject as soon as I opened my mouth), the hint of past surplus along her lower back, the exact feel of pubic hair growing back in, how her insteps felt when she came with a man, with a woman, or alone, or—but orgasm was good or better because of how you managed things. It came from the Leader’s talk, though Maureen always went a bit further. I had known that I had nipples and in a sense I did not need to be reminded, and I speak of it here because sex for all the talk and activity in those years when the War was winding down and our aging parents, retired beyond climatic change, would rather not think about what was going on in our lives, and Mr. N. (wasn’t it?) was in the Situation Room taping crises (though I have been told there are no situations, only people!), what I found coming for me from Maureen was not mainly sex, and so the lullaby of her hand on my chest—my breast—seemed mostly deeply loving, though I would add that it also turned me on.
I put this down in a notebook helter skelter like a letter, and why write words after all if not to somebody?
And if you believe, and even if the revolution had already happened, why not take your position with regard to other people: it may not mean they will take your advice, but they won’t go running all over you—right, Maureen, dear? And so Maureen, in the last days of this that I am getting to, would urge me to take a workshop; would even tell me her adored Leader had advised the same, while I added that there are no neutral messages and why was Maureen carrying messages from that star-quality teacher (whom I already knew) to me?
Once I stayed in Maureen’s apartment overnight—not what she wanted from me or from sex—and when I left early in the A.M. finding brief instructions on where to find a bag of whole-grain cereal and to drink from one of the jars of juice in the refrigerator rather than operate the juicer myself (as if I ever would have), I gave in to some silly tenderness of mine and left Maureen a note saying just, "Thanks, Maureen. You’re lovely. I loved being here." And later in the day wondered if that was going too far.
In public the twice I involved myself in all that supposed openness, she was so noisy when she came, so joyfully hard in her spasmodic calls that she could have been being raped—it was like work, or it was too much like the high of a lunatic hooked onto what wasn’t in the end known, though not the wftknown. But then with me one time she did come, and in all those quick breaths like contraction control, then some soft long breaths even before she let go that last private wonder and laughed and I did, too, but I knew it was real and I had felt it in the muscles of her buttocks that must have been drained of all fatty tissue by lecithin or God knows what recent compound. But it wasn’t me supposedly; it was her being (as the Leader said) responsible for her orgasm. Yet the Leader was something else, and I would not pretend to sum her up except that she enjoyed her life enormously and if she, as she used to say in her own famous words, "ran the fuck" (with whoever), and if it was a little on the Olympic side of lust, she was fun and preferred a longdistance variety of body trips to the usual.
I put this down in a notebook but why write words after all if not to someone? Which is anesthesia? Which is waking truth? There came a day when I thought all I wanted was Maureen’s well-being. She came in to see me on her way home, for she was by then living in the building—but not because I lived there, rather because her Leader did. And she said she had had a date with this guy out in Brooklyn—well, the Heights, which is not "out" so much as over the bridge—and he had lived there since his mother had dropped him out of the carriage on his head on a curb of Garden Place in about 1935; and when I said, Did it go O.K., and Maureen said, I gave him what he wanted, and he gave me what he was able to, I laughed and said, But that happens with women, too. But Maureen said, Oh Luce, you take things too personally, you work too hard, you’re afraid of pleasure, you’re work-addicted, you go so far but not far enough into freedom.
I know, I know, I said, I’ve heard all that before, but you can’t think that work’s a chosen pleasure because you and your mother-superior have discovered that some people get baffled and anxious when they’re having a ball.
Maureen got mad, called me compulsive, work-addicted—
—That’s you, I said.
—compulsively lazy, she said—and I felt that I was her other parent, then. And it came to me as if I had left it and come back to it—an idea as solid as a silver money clip (we do not—we have decided not to—carry bills in our wallets any more)—that what I wanted from Maureen was not her passion but her well-being.
But in the excitement of those days, I did not shrug off all that blind talk of addiction, and though Maureen might say I was work-addicted and as with my nipples and my recently very ha
rd-rubbed scalp had not yet begun to discover my body, I would hook into the provincial evangelism of their thinking and remonstrate angrily that addictions were all the same, and being in love was not a cocaine habit which Maureen’s Leader did not have but used—can you use a habit?—experimenting with that eight-foot-tall snuff ground out of that particular hard-to-capture mountain of our mind first thing in the morning to test its effect on her work, which, I tried (pissed off) to point out to Maureen, apparently did not come under the category of addiction. And before she could take the chance to speak, I went on, as if I didn’t want to keep her on the spot, and said Freedom was the issue of course but addiction was such a third-rate, banal way to reduce it, and she should let some of the poets tell her "Isn’t it time our loving freed us from the one we love."
Because there had to be some use in my having had a brief horrendous affair with a young German writer who wrote obliquely about New York City, taking liberties with the street geography on the north margin of the Pan American Building, but spoke to me unforgettable lines of German poetry as courteously in translation as generous toward the English translators; amazingly generous, if you think about it. Meanwhile, Maureen told me that I should not put myself down calling my talk confused except that sometimes I did not answer the question with the information asked for, which was partly not Sharing (I capitalize it in my mind), and partly not loving myself enough to keep my attention on the thing asked for.
But once I found in a scrap of diary of Maureen’s those very lines written as prose and ascribed admiringly to me, so that I would have added what "happens" next except I would have gained only the honesty of admitting I’d been here reading her stuff, which was mostly second-hand from her beloved workshop Leader who had changed Maureen from a buxom Miss America catatonically walking through boyfriends and boozy hotel clubs with dark rustling dance floors to anyway someone who was physically a marvel and mentally at least determined to save herself, if side by side with her Leader, who was herself changing before my eyes though I could never easily speak of that woman to Maureen—except admiringly.
I have written down what she looked like, and my words are surprisingly good, though no more worth recalling than a hundred details attended to in the course of a week administering a hospital, at least a vital part of its work, going round in circles yet despite the relation of nurse to doctor a strong feminist fiber there in the strength of the women, so many women, working there, even if too often administering dubious medications prescribed as simply as a springy intern-priest accepts his relation to a tough, middle-aged nurse-nun—nephew to aunt in the ongoing patriarchy.
Maureen was definitely beautiful in the clothes she made for herself— right down to a lovely pale suede suit (almost western) and linen shirts sewn so invisibly you could find the patterns of that instinctive knowledge in the thoughtfulness of Maureen’s hands touching yours or folding together to brace herself when she did a magical headstand that made the room all except me fall away, the walls opening but not into the other apartments of the building.
Her face, even when some blood beneath it paled, could carry forth saffron perfume of color, half faintly tanned, half flowering coral, half in turn recalling childish freckles that might have begun beneath the light of one summer’s sun but scarcely took hold. The eyes were like the cheekbones, don’t ask me how, some width of hope and freshness stunned toward a fixity of purpose adopted from outside herself. Tall, narrow, leaner and leaner, with the softest wide mouth and the most dynamically drawn feet, arched inward and upward, toes somewhat spaced as if she went barefoot, and she would ask, actually, to have her big toe rubbed and rubbed in a circular motion and reported, once, that her model and guide and Leader used other people’s big toes to give herself an orgasm.
I have written down what Maureen looked like. Her eyes were brown with blue flecks; her hair brown, never dyed like that of her Leader, but for months shorn to the bone so it reminded me not of someone getting into touch with a living and beautiful head but of a model I saw strolling the autumn streets of Napoleon’s birthplace in Corsica totally bald with, evidently, a lover, who looked like a male model, yet in that sculptured skull a victim and later I thought "a victim of the century" no less.
Maureen said, "Power," when I asked her what she wanted. Power over whom, I asked—over which Indians? I asked, cornily remembering her Peace Corps work and her trips back to the Southwest where she had once been— "once"?—an army child and might speak now of how the padres had practically halved the population of the Pueblo Indians by bringing in measles, no wonder they needed those mission churches to get those poor, measles-ridden, smallpoxed native Americans in out of that powerful light.
I knew Maureen when she worked for a bank, a giant bank, the bank (if such a structure has a name) (Oh Luce, you’re living in your head again!) (Oh God Maureen—) (Oh Goddess, Luce, O.K.?) (O.K., oh Goddess, Maureen, you’re the one living inside your head, I’m just a person) (Oh, there you go again, Luce, saying "just" to minimize yourself). And her immediate superior, soon after she was promoted to a position of considerable responsibility for handling Eurodollar accounts, called her in to "discuss" the garlic smell that came like smoke signals all morning from her breath. Garlic therapy, garlic therapy, and did you read about the old nut whose five-mornings-a-week bus driver wouldn’t take him any more though then he sued the company, it was in New Jersey, so it isn’t just women.
And in not quitting for twelve more months Maureen later said she had not been in touch with her anger (I smiled) or with the fascist implications of (Listen, dear, the garlic is Good, but your problem is, you’re not high enough up in the bank and probably not even a man could ever be that high) (You’re doing a smoke-screen number on me, Luce, did you know that?) (No, honey, you got to get up into the abstract, that’s the echelon where garlic don’t matter no more) but a tear came into my eye because I thought, People matter, and the clients matter even if they turn away and don’t dig the odor of garlic because their nosebuds have spent too long in the smokehouse and never felt deep earthsmoke, and Maureen matters, Maureen matters.
She was the girl, the woman, I had stood with coming up in the elevator more than once—months in fact before meeting her (for such is the intimacy of apartment houses)—hearing the elevator coming apart until the current super told me one day not to worry, it was the slack in the cables rattling. But that day it rattled like wind in a house and Maureen, whose name I didn’t know, had a spray of baby’s breath in a cone of green paper in one hand, a knapsack on her back, an odd sweet smell like a foreign food that could never go bad—and I said, "Baby’s breath, aren’t they?" and Maureen smiled like a Midwestern girl and nodded but didn’t say anything, perhaps feeling me too close or finding nothing in the way of words demanded of her at that instant. Baby’s breath delicate flourish of snowdrop flowers.
I wanted to hold her, just as at later times I wanted to hold her down or shut her up—oh damn me, did she really talk much except in dogmatic speeches at intervals? And later I wanted to hold her back, because she followed her beloved Leader but always went too far. To where she wasn’t following her beloved Leader any more, but herself, however you do that. Yet still purchased baby’s breath, for that day in the elevator while she was going to see her beloved guide she was bearing those flowers for herself as well.
Later I heard that a small group of workshop friends, initiates, some strong hilarious resourceful women, who had long since seen that complaining in words establishes a historical record that can stand in place of doing something, planned a fairytale game of sorts which would subject the next man who entered that famous apartment to rape—"light rape," but overwhelming and thorough but "good" rape.
I did not ask what this would amount to, because I saw the apartment in question visited for so many hours a day of every week by the friends of the Leader. This person ran around like a child doing somersaults usually with nothing on, listened like the most shrewdly attentive mother to
the person behind the story, and made tea but had long since stopped making meals and bringing them out of that kitchen into her large furnitureless salon.
Rape? I thought, participating in some distant part of my body. And imagined that Maureen was taking too far some trial balloon raised by our friend like energy levels of a roomful of loving friends rapping or massaging—for that woman was my friend, too.
Rape? I thought. "Rape?" I said; "I don’t believe it." "You’re thinking just like a man, Luce," said Maureen. "Thanks," I said; "wouldn’t our friend take that as a compliment?" Maureen blew up at me in some confusion and left me where I stood—not really on two feet the way you were supposed to stand, rather slouching a little on one hip, but frozen in my maturity by her exit.
Women and Men Page 147