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?"<
br />
"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 recor
d "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.
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