I first met Laur a few years ago when I was already grown up. Cinnamon and apples, ginger and vanilla, that's Laur. Now having Brynhildic fantasies about her was nothing-I have all sorts of extraordinary fantasies which I don't take seriously-but bringing my fantasies into the real world frightened me very much.

It's not that they were bad in themselves, but they were Unreal and therefore culpable; to try to make Real what was Unreal was to mistake the very nature of things; it was a sin not against conscience (which remained genuinely indifferent during the whole affair) but against Reality, and of the two the latter is far more blasphemous. It's the crime of creating one's own Reality, of "preferring oneself" as a good friend of mine says. I knew it was an impossible project.

She was reading a book, her hair falling over her face. She was radiant with health and life, a study in dirty blue jeans. I knelt down by her chair and kissed her on the back of her smooth, honeyed, hot neck with a despairing feeling that now I had done it-but asking isn't getting. Wanting isn't having.

She'll refuse and the world will be itself again. I waited confidently for the rebuke, for the eternal order to reassert itself (as it had to, of course)-for it would in fact take a great deal of responsibility off my hands.

But she let me do it. She blushed and pretended not to notice. I can't describe to you how reality itself tore wide open at that moment. She kept on reading and I trod at a snail's pace over her ear and cheek down to the corner of her mouth, Laur getting hotter and redder all the time as if she had steam inside her. It's like falling off a cliff, standing astonished in mid-air as the horizon rushes away from you. If this is possible, anything is possible. Later we got stoned and made awkward, self-conscious love, but nothing that happened afterward was as important to me (in an unhuman way) as that first, awful wrench of the mind.

Once I felt the pressure of her hip-bone along my belly, and being very muddled and high, thought: She's got an erection. Dreadful. Dreadful embarrassment. One of us had to be male and it certainly wasn't me. Now they'll tell me it's because I'm a Lesbian, I mean that's why I'm dissatisfied with things. That's not true. It's not because I'm a Lesbian. It's because I'm a tall, blonde, blue-eyed Lesbian.

Does it count if it's your best friend? Does it count if it's her mind you love through her body? Does it count if you love men's bodies but hate men's minds?

Does it count if you still love yourself?

Later we got better.

VII

Jeannine goes window-shopping. She has my eyes, my hands, my silly stoop; she's wearing my blue plastic raincoat and carrying my umbrella. Jeannine is out on the town on a Saturday afternoon saying goodbye, goodbye, goodbye to all that.

Goodbye to mannequins in store windows who pretend to be sympathetic but who are really nasty conspiracies, goodbye to hating Mother, goodbye to the Divine Psychiatrist, goodbye to The Girls, goodbye to Normality, goodbye to Getting Married, goodbye to The Supernaturally Blessed Event, goodbye to being Some Body, goodbye to waiting for Him (poor fellow!), goodbye to sitting by the telephone, goodbye to feebleness, goodbye to adoration, goodbye Politics, hello politics. She's scared but that's all right. The streets are full of women and this awes her; where have they all come from? Where are they going? (If you don't mind the symbolism.) It's stopped raining but mist coils up from the pavement. She passes a bridal shop where the chief mannequin, a Vision in white lace and tulle, sticks out her tongue at Jeannine. "Didn't do it!" cries the mannequin, resuming her haughty pose and balancing a bridal veil on her head.

Jeannine shuts her umbrella, latches it, and swings it energetically round and round.

Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye to everything.

We met in Schrafft's and sat, the four of us, at one table, ordering their Thanksgiving dinner, argh, which is so traditional you can't stand it. Gah.

"What's Indian pudding?" says Janet, baffled.

"No, don't, better not," says Joanna.

We munch in silence, slowly, the way Whileawayans eat: munch, munch, gulp.

Munch. Gulp, gulp, gulp, Munch. Meditatively. It's pleasant to eat. Janet screws up her eyes, yawns, and stretches athletically, leaning over the back of her chair and working her bent arms first to this side, then to that. She ends up by pounding on the table. "Mm!" she says.

"My goodness, look at that," says Jeannine, very self-possessed and elegant, her fork in mid-air. "I thought you were going to knock someone's hat off."

Schrafft's is full of women. Men don't like places like this where the secret maintenance work of femininity is carried on, just as they turn green and bolt when you tell them medical events are occurring in your genito-urinary system.

Jael has got something stuck between her steel teeth and her sham ones, and cocking an eye around Schrafft's, she slips off her tooth cover and roots around for the blackberry seed or whatever, exposing to the world her steely, crocodilian grin. Back they go. In. Done.

"So?" says Jael. "Do we do business?" There is a long, uncomfortable silence. I look around Schrafft's and wonder why women at their most genteel are so miserly; why is there no Four Seasons, no Maxim's, no Chambord, for women? Women are very strange about money, feudal almost: Real Money is what you spend on the house and on yourself (except for your appearance): Magic Money is what you get men to spend on you. It takes a tremendous rearrangement of mental priorities for women to eat well, that is to spend money on their insides instead of their outsides. The Schrafft's hostess stands by the cashier's desk in her good black dress and sensible shoes; women left to themselves are ugly, i. e. human, but Gentility has been interfering here.

"This is awful food," says Janet, who is used to Whileaway.

"This is wonderful food," says Jael, who is used to Womanland and Manland.

Both burst out laughing.

"Well?" says Jael again. Another silence. Janet and I are very uncomfortable.

Jeannine, one cheek bulging like a squirrel's, looks up as if surprised that we could hesitate to do business with Womanland. She nods briefly and then goes back to building mashed-sweet-potato mountains with her fork. Jeannine now gets up late, neglects the housework until it annoys her, and plays with her food.

"Jeannine?" says Jael.

"Oh, sure," says Jeannine. "I don't mind. You can bring in all the soldiers you want. You can take the whole place over; I wish you would." Jael goes admiringly tsk tsk and makes a rueful face that means: my friend, you are really going it.

"My whole world calls me Jeannie," says Jeannine in her high, sweet voice.

"See?"

(Laur is waiting outside for Janet, probably baring her teeth at passing men.)

To Janet, Jael suddenly says: "You don't want me?"

"No," says Janet. "No, sorry."

Jael grins. She says: "Disapprove all you like. Pedant! Let me give you something to carry away with you, friend: that 'plague' you talk of is a lie. I know. The world-lines around you are not so different from yours or mine or theirs and there is no plague in any of them, not any of them. Whileaway's plague is a big lie. Your ancestors lied about it. It is I who gave you your 'plague,' my dear, about which you can now pietize and moralize to your heart's content; I, I, I, I am the plague, Janet Evason. I and the war I fought built your world for you, I and those like me, we gave you a thousand years of peace and love and the Whileawayan flowers nourish themselves on the bones of the men we have slain.

"No," said Janet dryly, "I don't believe." Now you must know that Jeannine is Everywoman. I, though I am a bit quirky, I too am Everywoman. Every woman is not Jael, as Uncle George would say-but Jael is Everywoman. We all stared accusingly at Janet but Miss Evason was not moved. Laur came through Schrafft's revolving door and waved wildly; Janet got up to go.