Eight

AFTER PERSONA, I was standing at the mirror and Dotsy came up behind me, swept up my hair, and kissed my neck. I gasped.

“Does it make you nervous?” she asked me, steadily, as if she were the daughter not of Mr. and Mrs. Schuyler T. Maven III, but Mr. and Mrs. Man Ray.

“No, no! But it might make Sid nervous!” I laughed, skillfully deflecting the blame, and accepting a cigarette from the slim silver case Dotsy had bought after seeing Notorious.

The film series was a success, and from then on it, like my scholarship, was built into the Sweetriver budget. Every winter, as the snow damped us into quiet, we would gather in the auditorium to fall deeper into Philippa’s black-and-silver world, infected with an erotic miasma which caused us to helplessly fill vases with calla lilies, wear tuxedo jackets with nothing beneath, carry whiskey in flasks, and gesture with ebony cigarette holders. How lovely we were, in our disaffection! We didn’t want—not men, not anything. We were subject to no one. We drifted across the campus like so many smoke rings on the air, wearing the white silk scarves called Isadora scarves, twenty dollars apiece as advertised in the back of The New Yorker, and so long that you could wrap one thrice around your neck and the other end of it was still back there in Paris at the dawn of the modern age.

Esmé, the film projectionist, became fascinating by accident. Seeing her skillful fingers thread the film, we all fell in love with her. She could do something that kept us in thrall. Tall and certain, broad-shouldered, her thick dark hair cut like a man’s, she had all the glamour of an RAF pilot, and it was hard to keep facing forward during the film.

Very early, the morning after Salome, the dorm phone rang and I shuffled out of Sid’s room to hear a very husky-voiced Philippa, laughing and saying, “Well, Beatrice, I’m afraid the unforeseen has…”

“The Unforeseen” became our code name for Esmé, whose moods no RAF pilot could imagine, and who bedeviled Philippa for the next two years. Esmé had style, which is to say that about some things—her jeans, her boots, her slicked-up hair—she was enviably certain. About other things—her feeling for Philippa was one—she changed her mind every minute, but this only sharpened her allure.

“She’s like Joan Crawford,” Philippa would say to excuse her. If you were like Joan Crawford, you had license to transgress, because with every transgression you created a new story, you lifted your mistreated lover up with you onto the silver screen, and the thing would last, it wouldn’t just evaporate like ordinary loves and angers.…

I, styleless, had to rub angry shoulders with the little people, in the cheap seats. Even if it was possible for me to become like Esmé, it would have meant treading perilously close to becoming like my mother. So I was not sorry when Esmé went to New York for the weekend and returned wearing a wedding ring.

“Back to her high school boyfriend!” Philippa sputtered. “This is regression, Beatrice, and I do not intend to be tormented by someone else’s regression. Some of us do not allow romantic troubles to stand in our way. I mean, one is reeling, one is seeing double. But, is one weeping?”

She was not. In fact, she was rereading The Importance of Being Earnest, because she was my thesis adviser and the subject was Oscar Wilde. I loved him because he made sense of life by turning it upside down, and Philippa agreed that given the times we lived in (how the Puritans must have smiled, looking down to see their efforts bear fruit in the seventies: all the tight-lipped, denim-clad goodwives, pious about recycling and whole grains and sex!), Oscar was the right guiding star. Philippa was impatient with him for wimping out and becoming a Christian during his years in prison, but she could quote him, chapter and verse, and as the year went by, we could slap lines down on each other like kids playing cards.

I was still with Sid, still trying for some kind of purity in myself, a full openness to the world which would atone for my parents’ withdrawal from it. At night, when Sid had put his guitar away, finished his quarks, and just wanted to swarm over me in the dark, I tried to offer myself wholly. He adored me in the dark, when his face couldn’t betray his need. He was cold, so I redoubled my tenderness, determined that his strangeness would dissolve in my warmth, if only I could let him in deep enough. This had not, and would not, happen, but as long as I was narrating my quest for Sid’s inner self to Philippa, it seemed within reach. She laughed about it—her own quest was to impose her will on Western civilization, and she’d never once thought about Esmé the way I did about Sid.

“But she’s a woman, her essence is available,” she said. “I mean, was available…” She laughed a little, and banished the thought. “She’s already aging, losing her edge,” she said with a shrug. “She’s not what she was that first night.

“Wilde engineered his own fate,” she said suddenly. “He had a thousand chances to avoid it and he let every one go past.”

We were driving into Troy, New York—home of Boxers and Briefs, the nearest gay bar. Things are rough when your idea of excitement is going out for a drink in Troy, New York, but there it was.

Boxers and Briefs was up a back staircase above a pizza joint, a huge room with all the necessities: mirrored ball, a few plastic tables and chairs, four speakers, all larger than I was, and a few men and women scattered in small, awkward-looking groups around the sides of the empty floor.

“Predation is a part of gay culture,” Philippa explained. “Yours is an agrarian attitude. You want to farm a love, grow it, tend it, and finally, pluck it. Not surprising, considering your background. I am more of a hunter-gatherer. I swoop down at midnight and return with my prey.”

I nodded.

“Now,” she said, “Have you ever cruised?”

“Cruised?”

“Yes, you know, cruising?”

“I think of it as kind of a man thing.”

She drew back, one eye wide and incredulous, the other narrowed and calculating. This was her characteristic expression—a thing was only allowed to surprise her for a second before it went under the microscope, to see where it would fit into her theories.

“A ‘man’ thing, exactly. Because it’s an eye thing. A woman’s eye is the window of her soul … a man’s is a crowbar. Do you see?”

She stood up and rearranged herself, adjusting a bra strap and pulling up her corduroys. “Watch closely,” she said, and tromped off around the dance floor, stopping every few steps to cock her head like a robin listening for a worm. The only people dancing were two women in late middle age, both done up in perfect high-cowboy style, with brass-tipped boots and wide belts, doing a careful, slow swing to Donna Summer. The women our age looked wretchedly awkward, either gawky or massive, clinging to each other in the shadows.

“Nuns!” Philippa said to me as she passed. “They’re a bunch of nuns.”

We watched a woman in a shiny polyester shirt as she crossed the floor to the bar, looking so self-conscious she seemed to have forgotten how to walk.

“Dowdy. Aggressively dowdy,” Philippa cried. “Why?”

“Well, it’s not exactly the Champs Élysées,” I said.

“It ought to be the working-class version,” she said, taking a long and morose pull on her Scotch. “They’ve been in the factories all day. This is their chance to express themselves, and look … Honestly, I think women become lesbians to get away from sex. I am not going to be able to demonstrate hunting and gathering here tonight.”

A poignant slow song came on and the Westerners held each other like kids at a waltz lesson and box-stepped conscientiously.

“Straight out of the fifties,” Philippa said, rolling her eyes.

“It’s sweet,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, as if I had just tapped the definitive nail into some coffin. “Ready to go?”

There was a strange sort of claustrophobia in that room, the feeling that no one of real interest was ever going to walk into it, that nothing would ever change there. I felt crazily restless. What was happening back at school? Suppose Esmé had changed her mind and was sitting on Philippa’s doorstep right now, or Dotsy had gotten a buzz cut? What if Sid had finally conquered the Chaconne?

We slouched away down the stairs. Even the fluorescent glare of the pizzeria looked cheerful now.

“Is there any hope?” I asked in the car. “Is it just foolishness to even imagine some deep, whole love?”

“If it is,” she said, “everyone’s a fool.”

She sounded exhausted and resigned. “Work, you can rely on,” she said. “Love … fffft.” She sounded too tired to lecture me. I almost felt like patting her shoulder, though I knew that if there was one thing Philippa hated, it was consolation. Dissolve the grain of sand before she had the chance to make a pearl of it? Certainly not.

“There are many feelings that take the name of love, but once you give it the name, it’s no more than an idea,” she said grimly. “You have your pastoral thing—you’re infested by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Which puts you in step with the rest of the country, God knows … it’s not a bad thing. But…”

“But I’m trying to make a dream come true…” I said. “Without a wand.”

“You do expect a lot,” she said. She had too, once, and I was furious to think she’d been disappointed. Sweetriver had been one long ordeal for me—from that first day, it had been clear I would never be chic or bored enough to fit in. I wasn’t yet a modernist, and the rest of them were postmodern already. I should have realized the night I dreamed I was spooning up a revolting bowlful of Jackson Pollock (turned out to be a stomach flu) that I’d always be on the wrong side, the naive side, of everything. But Philippa had looked so closely at me, and where everyone else wanted to see how small and dull I was, in order to feel bigger and shinier himself, Philippa had looked for exact, subtle truths. There was more in her than in most people, so she had seen more in me. And a ray of her intellect had glanced off the jewel of my ambition, lying there where I’d left it so no one would guess how it mattered to me—and in that light, I saw it, possessed it again.

“I’m going to find you a girlfriend, someone really wonderful,” I said.

She checked the rearview mirror and turned. A fine rain was falling and the reflection of the stoplights ahead of us shimmered in the road. It was late and we were alone in a hopeless city, and she sounded almost wistful, as well as skeptical, as she asked, “You are?”

*   *   *

BACK AT Sweetriver I let myself into Sid’s room, intending to slip into bed without his noticing, and found a stranger sitting there, reading Nietzsche. He looked up, throwing his wild curls back so I saw wild eyes glittering, a mouth whose deliberate curves made him look almost cruel, and—

“Don’t tell me,” Philippa said, “You recognized your celestial twin.”

“In a word, Philippa, yes. I mean, there’s this dark-haired stranger, sitting on my bed, and he looks at me as if I’m the intruder. And with this cool, appraising look on his face too. I couldn’t let him get away with it.”

“And, you just had to go to bed with him.”

“I don’t like to be dismissed, Philippa,” I declared with a haughty wave of my cigarette holder, and settled one haunch on her desk. I sounded like Philippa herself, and this was a sound she loved to hear.

This guy whose arrogance permeated every gesture was Sid’s old friend, Ross Symkowicz, who was transferring to Sweetriver. He looked up at me, his suspicion resolving into curiosity, and I saw some question rush across his face, which was not the question he asked—

“Is there a coin laundry?”

I took him over to the basement of Arbuthnot House, helped him get his laundry in, and then …

“It just happened, Philippa, everything was so beautiful. We walked up on the woods path and the leaves are just coming out—lit from beneath—you know, birch leaves are like little fans, and they’re completely translucent, they were the tenderest green…”

She tapped her fingers: last night, we’d been world-weary and battle-scarred and everything that Troy, New York, inspired, but we’d been together. Now I was starry-eyed and she was still rooted—in her very hip and very heavy Frye boots—to the earth.

“It was the first time this year I could really smell the earth, you know what I mean, that real first day of spring? And we were just mesmerized by it, I don’t even know what happened.”

“No,” she said irritably. “Birds don’t know, bees don’t know, why should you? But don’t stop, not right there. What happened then?”

I went back and explained exactly—she didn’t want rapture, nor theory, she wanted to know how each movement led to the next. I’d slipped on a mossy stone, and he put his hand out to steady me but I caught myself. After that it was impossible not to feel what we lost by not touching each other. Something went through me, coloring every cell; the gesture was uncompleted, and it was like Sid’s Chaconne, my entire being wanted to see it fulfilled. We said not another word, for fear that speech, with its attachment to reason, would wreck it all.

“You know how it is—you get caught in this spell.”

“You do?” she inquired.

“You know what I mean,” I said, or squealed, coy as a teenaged girl. Which of course, I was—I’d forgotten.

“I mean, the moonlight, and the peepers calling, and a little splash on the surface of the pond, and you just want to throw yourself into it, become part of it somehow. Oh, Philippa, he smells so good!”

I sighed, swooning into her confidence, grateful to have the chance to go back over it all and solidify it in words. There had been the inkling, in the dark, that life was finally fulfilling its promise, sweeping me into the embrace I’d been waiting for. All that feeling I had to keep back from Sid for fear he’d hurt me again had surged toward Ross.

“Instinct took over, that’s all, and we just … Oh, Philippa, to feel him inside me, I…”

“See,” she said, “you remember. Women always remember. Think, just try.”

“Well, Philippa,” I said (with a giggle), “I wasn’t taking notes!”

“And why not?” she asked, in a parody of the stern professor.

“I was otherwise engaged,” I replied, gazing way down my nose in a parody of the sophisticated boulevardier-ess.

“Oh, Philippa, if you knew how it felt…” I went on, determined to give her a fuller, truer picture.

“With some small assistance, I might be able to form an image, partial of course, but still…”

“Making love to Sid, it’s like he’s doing some careful experiment on my body.”

“I do not find this entirely unerotic.”

“But with Ross…”

I looked over at Philippa. I was feeling awfully indiscreet.

“Yes? Complete sentences please, Beatrice!” she said. “But you might take a deep breath first. Your bosom is heaving!” She laughed, at herself—she wanted to know, and oh, how I wanted to tell her—we were girls together and any minute there would be a pillow fight. The subject of love was a kind of meal we were sharing—and Ross was a rich morsel, we couldn’t wait to suck his bones.

“Oh, he touches me like he wants to know me,” I sighed. But remembering how good it all felt, I had to remember something else. “I’m an adulteress,” I said, with stagey contrition, hoping it would sound glamorous, but no. The smell of coal-tar shampoo made me want to cry. I knew Sid and all that troubled him; I couldn’t make him suffer like I had when he hurt me. But to make love to him now was to sense the shape of some great void, which it seemed only Ross could fill.

In the light of day, Ross despised me. He couldn’t believe I’d betrayed Sid so easily, my mind didn’t have that edge he was looking for, and incidentally, my thighs were too wide. Around midnight, though, he’d forget all this and let himself into my room (I’d stopped sleeping at Sid’s, saying mine was quieter). He’d slip into bed behind me, push his hand between my thighs to pull me in, with absolute authority, as if when he touched me, he turned into a god. Everything was there between us, in silence, until morning brought his reproaches and my tears.

Sid was bound to find out. A thousand times I imagined, with the deepest satisfaction, how he would ask: Are you lovers? I’d have to confess it, and the pain in his face would prove, finally, that Ross really loved me.

But Sid refused to notice. When I mentioned Ross, he automatically reached for his guitar case and, note by careful note, he crowded us out of his mind.

I dreamed John Updike tried to kiss me, but I pushed him away.

“That’s out of character,” Philippa observed.

“Oh, he strains the rapture out of everything. He makes adultery sound like a logistical problem, he never says how you feel as if you’ll die if you can’t make everything right for them both, that you need to spend your full heart on each of them. He doesn’t say how wrong it feels, how sad you feel, and for all you’re being greedy and stealing two people’s love, you still don’t have enough. I think Ross loves me … but it’s like its a secret he keeps from himself, so I have to pretend I don’t know it either. And Updike, he was supposed to be the Great Man, I trusted him!”

*   *   *

LATE THAT night I woke up and saw Ross standing beside me, wearing the velvet pants I’d taken off when I went to bed.

“Très piquant,” said Philippa.

“And they fit him exactly, that’s the weird thing … I’d never have guessed we were the same size. He was standing there so proudly, like a statue of Aphrodite.”

“Wait, what statue of Aphrodite?”

“Unlike you, Philippa, I don’t have a catalogue of Aphrodite statues in my head. I mean, he looked like he had a woman’s pride, he carried himself that way.”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “Because they don’t have it, no man feels that way about his body. They know they’re lacking. A woman’s body is a vessel in which a miracle is about to happen. I mean, a child is going to grow there. It’s like being in possession of—”

“A crystal ball—”

“A volcano—”

“A nuclear reactor.”

“You can see why a man would feel sort of intimidated.”

“Yeah, I thought he was trying to get inside my skin.”

“Like one of those serial killers,” Philippa mused.

“Exactly.”

“Men focus on things, like enigmas and women. They penetrate them, figure them out, which is to say, they’re always just slightly behind us. We are, and they want to know why,” Philippa cackled happily. Above her head, Matisse was squinting—he hadn’t quite got the curve of the breast, the weight there.

“It was touching in a way. I did feel like he was trying to know me.”

“So touching … he’ll be getting out the chain saw next.”

“Okay,” I said. “I admit, when he realized I was watching him, he looked at me so coldly, it didn’t seem touching at all. It was like I’d caught him stealing.”

“I can see it exactly,” Philippa said, shaking her head. She had worked her mind into synchronicity with mine, had tried to see the same image, even feel something similar. A man works to keep apart (until you fall asleep—then he runs to the mirror to see how he looks in your clothes), but women are always divining the common stream. The relation between a man and a woman seemed to me a pageant, a feat of choreography, but I wanted real love in all its organic peculiarity.

“Oh!” I sighed. “If only he had been a woman!” Then we’d have swum away together like a pair of dolphins, been happy all our lives.

Philippa smiled …

“I mean … not a woman, a physical woman.” But the phrase “physical woman” made my cheeks blaze. “I mean, you know, just, less like a man.”

“Of course, of course,” she said, tapping her pencil. “Less like a man.”

*   *   *

SHE WAS in the air, she was making me dizzy. She would know just how to touch me, she’d have that sixth sense that hears more than what’s said, sees more than what’s shown. The looks exchanged by the schoolgirls or religious novices or lonely young wives in Philippa’s recommended films were rapacious and yielding at once: women have that full range of feeling, a harp with a thousand strings. Men need that music so badly! Sid and Ross had a rich source in me, but I lived in silence somehow.

I stood at my window, watching my classmates cross the common through the cold spring, and heard one of Ross’s heavily inked sheets of notebook paper slip under the door. A love note, or a threat, it might be either. I threw it on my bureau; I’d get to it later. My thesis was nearly finished, the apple blossoms were opening.…

That night I dreamed of a woman, a pink-and-white woman from whose amplitude I would take the kind of satisfaction Ross had in me. Her heavy breasts and rough nipples, her sex so luxuriously swollen, I drew my fingers through it like a pot of thick cream. I woke up and ran my hands over my own body in amazement.

“Sid,” I said. “Wake up!”

One of his eyes opened, incredulous. “What?”

“You’ve got to stop working at the guitar the way you do!” I said.

“Why?”

Because you’re wrecking the music, was what I wanted to say. “I think it’s counterproductive. I think you’re sort of—squashing the impulse, the feeling—by being so careful to follow the script.”

“It’s not a script, it’s a score,” he said into the pillow, “and it’s there to translate the music so a musician can reproduce it.”

“It’s there to suggest the feeling the composer intended,” I said, “and give you the notes and tempo, but…”

“Beatrice, I’m asleep,” he said piteously.

And I’ve been having an affair with Ross. He’s cold and critical in life, but in bed he touches me as if he were blind and could only know me that way. With you—I’m like that damned guitar.

“It’s important,” I said. “Hold it with feeling!”

He put the pillow over his head. I had to get out of there, to find the thing I’d dreamed of. I looped my Isadora scarf around my neck and rushed down the hall toward the future, and as I passed the pay phone, it began to ring.

“Clearly, you’re on a quest of some kind,” Philippa said carefully, after I reported my dream. “And these things always have an erotic component. Now you will go to your own room and sleep because we have to go over the thesis in depth tomorrow.”

*   *   *

THE KNOCK at my door the next evening was so tentative, no one would guess it was made by the fist of Philippa Sayres. “I just have a few suggestions here, for your final revision,” she said, and held out the recent draft of my thesis, annotated in huge red letters with remarks like: “This ought to be much more lurid,” and, “You are missing the vampirism here.”

“Oh, God, I thought I got the vampirism in pretty well,” I said, sitting down to look the thing over, irritated to be diverted by this from my obsessive examination of the vicissitudes of love.

Philippa sat down beside me. “Beatrice,” she said suddenly, “this dream, do you think—”

“Do I think what?” I asked, stalling, because suddenly everything was crystal clear to me and every moment of my life was strung like a streetlight, leading up to this.

“Do you think that—if such a reality were to occur—do you think—?”

I had never known words to fail Philippa. Neither of us could really differentiate between thinking and talking, we just babbled along like a couple of torrents coursing into a common pool. There were times when only one of us was speaking (say, when the other was about to sneeze), and times when, having accidentally come out with the same idea in unison, we’d gasp at the spectacle of ourselves for a second before speeding on ahead. This, a real pause, was a first.

“I mean to say, you’d have gone through with it?” she said finally.

I couldn’t bear the suggestion that I didn’t have the courage for something, especially something in the way of love.

“Of course, I would have ‘gone through’ with it,” I declared. “I always follow my instincts, you know that.”

She looked down, shuffling her feet a little like a pitcher readying his curveball, and suddenly, in a voice as gruff and husky as that pitcher’s, asked: “Well, what about it? Wanna fool around?”

“Oh, Philippa—I don’t think … I’m not sure…”

I was surprised to hear myself demur, more surprised still to see my hand reach out by reflex and close around her wrist, as if she were a tuft of cotton, or bread, or cloud I was pulling off for myself, from the world of soft and beautiful and nourishing things. She was still arching an inquisitive brow and I was still shaking my head solemnly no as I sat her on my lap and kissed her.

But as our mouths met, she remembered which one of us was the teacher.

“Not like that!” she said. “No! You can’t kiss that way right off, that’s for later!” Her imperial confidence had returned and she pressed her lips tight together and gave me a hard little smooch.

“Have you had anything to drink?” she asked. I had not. She rummaged in the depths of her purse and pulled out a beer bottle—everyone should have a light sedative before lovemaking, she told me. She herself downed a little bottle of Bombay gin left over from her Christmas flight home, as if it was a nasty sirop prescribed for the nerves.

“There,” she said. “Now we can…” She was on top of me, and I was wondering what on earth I had done. I reminded myself that I adored her—no matter how numb I felt lying beneath her. I kissed her again.

“No!” she said irritably. “This is not the time for that kind of kiss!”

I tried to sit up, but it wasn’t possible. “It is so!” I said. “I understand perfectly what you mean, it’s horrible the way men try to stick their tongue down your throat and grab your breasts and claw their way into you right off the bat, but this isn’t that way, it’s a soft, longing kiss, a kiss of yearning, don’t you see?”

“Lie back!” she said. “I am six years older than you are, I think I’ve learned something in those years, and the time for that kiss has not yet arrived!”

“Talk wrecks it, Philippa,” I said plaintively. Then I remembered that as a child she had enjoyed reenacting Napoleonic battles. I decided to follow her will. Trust in the physical, I admonished myself—the simple warmth of her body against mine would counteract my discomfort, I thought, if only she could stop lecturing.

She could not. It was like making love to an owl—great wings enfolding you, brilliant eyes spying out every thought—and the beak and talons to contend with. When I finally got her on her back, kissing her neck and her breasts and brushing my lips down the center of her, she sat up suddenly, and said, “No, no!”

“Philippa? What?” I laughed a little and traced my finger along her thigh.

“No,” she said, with finality. “This is your first time. That is not appropriate for the first time.”

But I wanted to transgress, to declare that I was on a mission and would go where I pleased, that nothing would stop me. There were things I needed to know about love, and I was going to discover them. I had to. “I want, I want…” I took her shoulders and pressed my hips into hers with clumsy fervency, as if I could break into her and steal what I needed.

“Now there’s something,” she said, “that is quite enjoyable.”

Afterward, as I tried to slip into a dreamy postcoital satisfaction, she plucked a tissue from the bedside and blotted her lips as if she’d just enjoyed a rare delicacy. I couldn’t keep from laughing: such a gesture is unusual in a bird of prey.

She sat bolt upright.

“This is what those bunnies are like!” she exclaimed, pulling the sheet up to her shoulders, which left me completely uncovered so she could look me up and down.

“What bunnies?” Having just compared her to an owl, I felt strange being thought of as a bunny. I tried to sit up too but she pushed me back down.

“Playboy bunnies! You know! Like, ‘Here she is, watering her plants!’ and they’d have you bent over.” She giggled lasciviously. “‘She loves the warmth of the sun on her bare skin and goes through her yoga positions every morning to be sure of full exposure to the healthful rays.”

She ran a hand over me, starting with the arch of my foot and going up over the whole moonlit landscape, fitting her palm to every curve, in wonder, as I looked on in even greater wonder. I thought she must be mad, but it was a madness I didn’t mind submitting to. I’d never had any real idea what I looked like, in spite of the hours I spent at the mirror. Maybe I was ugly, or maybe … I stretched and reflected on my own beauty until, as she dusted down the side of my breast to my arm, she found a sticking point.

“Beatrice,” she said, and I recognized the irascible humor she showed to a tardy or unprepared student. “Beatrice, there is hair under your arm. Why?”

Because we lived in a world that considered shaving one’s underarm as the first misstep on that slippery slope that would eventually land one in the suburbs, barbecuing enormous steaks for some enormous husband, waxing floors, shaking martinis, and probably in the end even voting Republican. So this question came as a shock.

“Philippa!” I said, sitting up again.

“Lie down,” she replied. “Lie down. A woman is supposed to be smooth, Beatrice. Sweetriver lacks depth in the art history department, so it’s unfair to expect you to know this, but from the earliest days of classical antiquity, the smoothness of women has been one of the keys of our civilization.”

So there, in the same moment that she was examining me with all the greed of a thief with a stolen jewel, she spied a flaw! So began the book of her disappointment in me, which, like everything of hers, was long and complex and comprised of thousands of details.

Well, I wanted nothing more than to be made over. I knew the ways I’d learned at home were wrong, that I’d have to shed them if I wanted to escape. And here she was, my teacher, and my lover, a woman who stood above the world, looking over it, into it, seeing it whole, instead of cowering in the crevices, weeping and raging by turns.

She was my inspiration, provenance, and terror. And I remembered how shy she’d seemed, knocking at my door. She was absurd, talking and talking, her mad firefly intelligence lightning now against this leaf, now there, and there, until the pattern of illumination, more vivid than the firmament it played against, was all that seemed to matter.

Of course. I was a lesbian, why hadn’t I seen it before? The strangeness, the separation from the world, the bottomless yearnings—it all made sense now, as did the fact that I’d spent four years crammed into a dormitory phone booth, ruminating with Philippa. I’d be safe with her; she would school me until I was truly able to please her. Ross wouldn’t be able to hold me in his arms and slash at my heart with his qualms anymore.

And I could leave Sid without seeming to do wrong. I made the devastating announcement the next morning. I have, I said, discovered my true way. Not the cruel, “I’ve fallen in love with another man,” but “I’ve fallen in love with another species.” It was a fact of nature: the climate had simply changed.

*   *   *

COMEDY, AS Philippa had explained in that freshman English seminar so many eons ago, is what happens when the body tries to follow the mind. Her mind was on the move between Aristotle’s Athens, Paris in the twenties, and the Hollywood of Yvette Mimieux. Her body was stuck in the seventies in bed with mine. This ought to have been perfect: I was twenty-one, I had that fleshly springiness one wants in women and muffins, and I was her own creature, fed solely on her wisdoms these four years, bathed in the light of her favorite films, shaved by her own chosen razor, offering her exactly the type of kiss officially sanctioned by herself.

So, what was it that grated, that didn’t quite fit? Twelve nights after our first, she came in through the doorway and some anxiety overtook her. “I don’t think I’d better stay,” she said. “It’s that parking lot—someone’s going to scratch the car.”

“You park there every night,” I said. My thesis, lurid or not, had gotten an A from the committee, and I had a bottle of champagne on my dresser. I was wearing a silk nightgown I’d gotten at the thrift shop that morning—someone’s bridal nightgown, faded like old rose petals, with a dove embroidered on it, and fluttering from the dove’s beak, a banner that read GRACE. Champagne, silk, petals, doves, grace—there was a lot of longing, magnetic longing, in that room, especially as it was only a small dormitory single. Philippa kept a vigilant hand on the doorknob so as not to be drawn farther in.

“Where are you going next week, by the way?” she asked suddenly.

Next week? But of course, I was graduating. Sid and I had planned to go back to Chicago together, but obviously that was off.

“Maybe I’ll stay in town for a while,” I said. “We…”

“We, like you and me?” she said. “Together?” She looked mortally puzzled. “But, what would you do here? Surely you’re off to the city, or … wherever … aren’t you?” Then, suspiciously: “Beatrice, have you been boasting about me? Have you told other people we might be staying together?”

“No!” I said. “I mean, I hadn’t even spoken to you about it.”

“If this were me I’d have been boasting and had to cover my tracks.”

“Well, as it’s me,” I sniffed—

“You want to live with me?” She was beaming all her hummingbird’s concentration now on the strange idea that I might love her, as if it were the drop of nectar in a lily’s throat.

“I think that is most unlikely,” she said, with incontrovertible authority, so that I had to reconsider. Who would want to live with Philippa? She was a dictator in bed, barking orders just when I felt most tender, so that by now I felt tender at the very sound of her barking an order, which was, yes, unlikely, but didn’t it prove my point? I adored her! And she—just that morning she’d turned up outside my economics class, saying that as she had nothing to do except comment on these last fifty essays, she’d looked up my schedule so she could walk me to lunch. Then, as we stepped over a drainage ditch, she stopped still, peered in, and accidentally delivered a lecture on the Roman aqueducts. How would such a thing happen, if not from love?

But she knew so much, about aqueducts and everything—she must know what we ought to do. She stood there cocking her head to the left and to the right, as if the idea that we might stay together was such a revolutionary upending of the laws of physics that she felt a pedagogical responsibility to follow out the whole equation, lest she overlook the sort of astounding new theory that would escape a more conventional mind.

Then she nodded, quickly and definitely—yes, I was absolutely wrong.

“I really have to go,” she said. “These dorm parking lots are like bumper car rinks. Students are terrible drivers!”

So ardent, so vigorous, full of belief, full of longing—we made terrible drivers, but as lovers, well, that was another thing.

“Philippa, are you saying that you’re leaving me because you’re afraid your car will get scratched in the parking lot?”

She thought for a moment. “Well … yes.”

I started to cry. I thought this was what one did under the circumstances. “But Philippa, I love you!” I said.

She smiled involuntarily, a sudden flash which was instantly put out. Maybe she was touched, or maybe mocking, but whatever, those words had sealed my fate, because she picked up her teaching manner where she had thrown it twelve days ago, and proceeded to demolish my quaint little notion as quickly as if I’d tried some deconstructionist foolery in class.

“We’ve had an affair, Beatrice,” she said. “It was very nice. But there’s no real match here. It’s in the pheromones, you know that. The nose knows.”

She paused appropriately but I refused to laugh. “Pheromones!” she said, throwing up her hands, “What can we do about them? Nothing! We’ll still be friends of course!”

“Of course,” I said, taking a deep breath. I knew that what came naturally to me was invariably wrong. After all, I’d learned it all from my parents. Philippa was a woman of the world, so if she thought crying was inappropriate the tears would have to go.

“Okay, okay, ’bye!” she said, seeing headlights come down the drive and fearing her bright little convertible was about to suffer an insult. “We’ll talk!”

“Okay, ’bye,” I said. I felt dazed, as if a hummingbird had flown in one of my ears and out the other. I couldn’t feel sad, though—Philippa had said not to, and she was my North Star. I sat still on the bed for a long time, until I realized I was waiting for her to come back. Then I got the champagne out of the sink, popped the cork, and drank some out of bottle, congratulating myself, though my A seemed meaningless suddenly. I’d only wanted it for her.