Black Glass

THE VIEW FROM VENUS: A CASE STUDY

Linda knows, of course, that the gorgeous male waiting for her, holding the elevator door open with his left hand, cannot be moving into apartment 201. This is not the way life works. There are many possible explanations for the boxes stacked around his feet — he may be helping a friend move in, his girlfriend, perhaps. Someone equally blond and statuesque who will be Linda’s new next-door neighbor, and Gretchen will point out that she is a sister, after all, and force everyone to be nice to her. Their few male guests will feel sorry for her, oppressed as she is by all that beauty, and there will be endless discourse on the tragic life of Marilyn Monroe.

The door slides shut. Linda reaches for the second-floor button, but so does he, and they both withdraw their hands quickly before touching. He takes a slight step backward, communicating his willingness to let her punch in the destination. She does so; the outline of the button for the second floor shines slightly. It is just below eye level. She watches it closely so as not to look at him, and she can feel him not looking at her. They share the embarrassment of closely confined strangers. The elevator does not move.

Linda is upset because she is nervous. This nervousness is in direct proportion to how attractive she finds him. She is very nervous. She tells herself sharply to stop being so juvenile.

He reaches past her and re-presses the button. “It’s always like this,” Linda tells him. “When you’re in a hurry, take the stairs.”

He turns slowly and looks at her. “I’m Dave Stone,” he says. “Just moving in.”

“Linda Connors. Apartment Two-oh-three.” So he will be living here. He and his girlfriend will move in together; they will both be neighbors, but she will still be a sister, and no one will be allowed to rip off another woman’s man.

The elevator groans and shudders. It begins to lift. “I’m transferring up from Santa Barbara,” Dave says. “Have you ever been there? I know how this is going to sound, but you really do look familiar.”

“Nope.” The elevator jerks twice before stopping. Linda is expecting it and is braced against the side. Dave stumbles forward. “Maybe you’ve confused me with some movie star,” Linda suggests. “A common mistake.” She gives the door a slight push to open it. “My roommate Lauren says I have Jack Lemmon’s chin,” she adds, and leaves him struggling to unload his boxes before the elevator closes up and moves on.

Inside the apartment Linda gets herself a glass of milk. Her mood now is good. She has stood next to a man, a strange man, and she has talked with him. She actually spoke first instead of merely answering his questions. And she tells herself, though it is hard to ever be sure of these things, that nothing about the conversation would have told him this was difficult for her.

The truth is that men frighten Linda. The more a particular man appeals to her, the more frightening he becomes. Linda knows almost nothing about men, in spite of having had a father practically her whole life. She believes that men are fundamentally different from women, that they have mysterious needs and assess women according to bizarre standards on which she herself never measures very high. Some years back she read in “The Question Man,” a daily column in the San Francisco Chronicle, that men mentally undress women when they pass them on the street. Linda has never recovered from the shock of this.

One of Linda’s roommates, a red-haired woman named Julie, is curled up with a book. It is a paperback entitled The Arrangement. Julie likes books with explicit sex. Julie already knows she is destined to be some married man’s lover and has told Linda so. Linda reads Jane Austen. For fun.

“Have you seen what’s moving in next door?” Julie asks.

“I met him. Big, blond… his name is Dave.”

“Chiseled features,” says Julie. “That’s what you call those. And he’s not the only one. There’s a little dark one, too, and a couple of brothers who haven’t arrived yet.”

Four of them. And four women inside Linda’s own apartment. There seems to Linda to be a certain inescapable logic at work here. She pictures a quadruple wedding (where she is the only one technically entitled to wear white, but no one need know this) and then life in a cozy suburban quadruplex. It is only with some effort that Linda remembers that Dave did not really seem to be her type, being unquestionably more attractive than she is. “Not my type” is the designation Linda applies to men who pay no attention to her. It is an infinite set. Those few men who are Linda’s type she invariably dislikes. She drinks her milk and makes the realistic decision to forget Dave forever. They’ll always have their elevator ride….

• • •

WELCOME TO Comparative Romance I. You have just experienced the Initial Encounter. The point of view is female: We shall be sticking to this perspective through most of this term. And we shall access only one mind at a time. This gives a more accurate sense of what it would be like to be an actual participant. It is not uncommon for those inexperienced in the process of absorption to have an uncomfortable reaction. Is anyone feeling at all queasy? Claustrophobic? No? Good.

Then let me make a few quick points about the Encounter and we will return. You must remember, owing to the time required by Transmission and Processing, that these events are not current. We are involved here in a historical romance. The location is the city of Berkeley, before its secession. The year, according to local calculation, is 1969, a time thought by some to have been critical in the evolution of male/female relationships. Can anyone here provide a context?

Very good. In addition to the war, the assassinations, and the riots, we have a women’s movement which is just becoming militant again. We have many women who are still a little uncomfortable about this. “I believe in equal rights for women, but I’m not a feminist,” is the proper feminine dogma at this time. To call oneself a feminist is to admit to being ugly. Most women are reluctant to do this. Particularly on the West Coast.

Are there any questions? If not, let’s locate ourselves and Linda at Encounter Number Two. Are we all ready?

Well?

I’m taking that as an affirmative.

• • •

LINDA MEETS DAVE again the next morning on the stairs. He is returning from campus and invites her in for a cup of coffee in exchange for her advice in choosing classes. She is on her way to the library but decides it would be more educational to see the inside of apartment 201. She has an anthropological curiosity about men living together. What do they eat? Who does the dishes? Who cleans the toilets? Her hands are cold so she sticks them into the opposite cuffs of her sweater sleeves as she follows Dave back up the stairs.

Her first impression is that the male sex is much neater than the sex to which she belongs herself. Everything has already been unpacked. There are pictures on the walls, tasteful pictures, a small print of Rembrandt’s thoughtful knight, the gold in the helmet echoing the tones of the shag carpet, a bird’s-eye view of the Crucifixion, a bus poster which reads WHY DO YOU THINK THEY CALL IT DOPE? The dishes all match; the avocado Formica has been sponged so recently it is still wet.

Linda is so busy collecting data she forgets to tell Dave she doesn’t really want coffee. He hands her a steaming cup and she notices with dismay that he has not even left her room to soften the taste with milk. She uses the cup to warm her hands, smells it tentatively. “Did you know,” she asks him, “that in Sweden they have a variation on our bag ladies they call ‘coffee bitches’? These are supposed to be women who’ve gone mad from drinking too much coffee. It gives you a whole new perspective on Mrs. Olsen, doesn’t it?”

She hears a key turning in the door. “Kenneth,” says Dave, and Kenneth joins them in the kitchen, his face a little flushed from the cold air, his eyes dark and intense. Kenneth gives Linda the impression of being somehow concentrated, as if too much energy has been packed into too small a package.

“This is Linda,” Dave tells Kenneth.

“Hello, Linda,” Kenneth says. He starts moving the clean dishes out of the drainer and onto the shelves. “I love this place.” He gestures expansively with a plastic tumbler. “We were right to come here. I told you so.” He is sorting the silverware. “I’ve been over at Sproul, what — half an hour? And in that time I got hit with a Frisbee, someone tried to sign me into the Sexual Freedom League, I listened to this whole debate on the merits of burning New York City to the ground, and a girl came up out of nowhere and kissed me. This is a great place.”

“What was the pro side of burning New York?” asked Dave. “I’ve got relatives there.”

“No more blackouts.” Kenneth puts a coffee cup away, then takes it out again immediately. Linda sees her chance.

“Take mine,” she urges. “I haven’t touched it. Really.” She gives Dave an apologetic smile. “Sorry. I meant to tell you before you poured. I hate coffee.”

“It’s okay,” he says evenly. “I’ll never ask you over for coffee again.” He turns to Kenneth. “Tell Linda what happened last night.”

“Oh, God.” Kenneth takes Linda’s coffee and sips at it. He settles into the chair next to her, leaning back on two legs. Linda decides she is attracted to him as well. She looks away from him. “Last night,” he begins, “this guy came to our door looking for a friend of his named Jim Harper. I said we were new to the building, but I didn’t think there was a Jim Harper here.”

“I don’t know a Jim Harper,” Linda says. “In fact, you’re practically the only men. Except for—”

“So he says Jim Harper might be living under an alias and have we seen any little brown guys around. I say, ‘Is he a Negro?’ and he says, ‘No, he’s just a little brown guy.’”

“So,” Dave finishes, “Ken tells him we’ll set out some snares tonight and let him know in the morning if we’ve caught anything. Who are the other men in the building? Are they little and brown?”

“There’s only one. Dudley Petersen. And no. He’s middle-aged, middle-sized, medium coloring. We think he’s a CIA agent, because he’s so cunningly nondescript and he won’t tell us what he does.”

“You could live your whole life in Santa Barbara without anyone coming to your door looking for small, brown men,” Kenneth tells Linda. “I love this place.”

Linda does not respond. She is thinking about Dudley. Last summer he’d gone to Hawaii for two weeks — on vacation, he said, but she wasn’t born yesterday. She knows a Pacific Rim assignment when she sees one. He’d asked her to water his ferns. Apparently she’d been overzealous. She wouldn’t have thought it possible to overwater a fern. There’d been bad feelings on his return. But while she had access to his apartment she’d found a shelf of pornographic books. Quite by accident. She’d brought them downstairs and shared them with her roommates. Really funny stuff — they’d taken turns reading it aloud: “He had the largest hands Cybelle had ever seen.”… “‘No,’ she moaned. ‘No.’ Or was she saying ‘More. More?’”… “Her silken breasts swelled as he stroked them. She drew his head down until his mouth brushed the nipples.”

It all reminded her of an article the Chronicle had once run in the women’s section. An expert in female psychology (an obscure branch of the larger field) had argued that small-breasted women were using their bodies to repress and reject their femininity because they would rather be men. Under hypnosis, with the help of a trained professional, these women could come to accept themselves as women and their breasts would grow. This happy result had been documented in at least three cases.

What had struck Linda most about the article was its very accusing tone. Men liked women to have large breasts; it was highly suspect, if not downright bitchy, the way some women refused to provide them. Linda feels Kenneth looking at her. Mentally undressing her? Why, even as they speak, Dave and Kenneth are probably asking themselves why her breasts are so small. Because she is cold and nervous, Linda has been sitting with her arms crossed over her chest. Now she deliberately uncrosses them.

“When do the rest of you arrive?” she asks distantly.

Dave looks himself over. “I’m all here,” he says. “This is it.”

“No. Your other roommates. The brothers.”

There is a moment’s silence while Dave and Kenneth drink their coffee. Then they both speak at once. “We couldn’t afford the apartment just the two of us,” Kenneth says, while Dave is saying, “The Flying Zukini Brothers? You mean you haven’t met them yet? You are in for a treat.”

“They’re here already,” Kenneth adds. “God, are they here. They have presence, if you know what I mean. Even when they’re not here, they’re here.”

“Go home while you can,” advises Dave. “Go home to your small brown men.” His eyes are just visible over the tilted rim of his coffee cup.

Footsteps stamp at the doorway. There is a sound of keys. “Too late,” says Dave ominously as the door swings open. Two clean-cut men in T-shirts which show their muscled arms try to come through the door together. They catch, in charmingly masculine fashion, at the shoulders. They are nice-looking, but somehow Linda knows the quadruple wedding is off. No one would take the last name of Zukini anyway, not even if they hyphenated it.

“I got a car!” says the first of the brothers through the door. “I mean, I put the money down and it’s sitting in the basement. I drove it home!” He accelerates into a discussion of RPMs, variations in mileage, painless monthly payments. Man talk. Linda is bored.

“Linda, this is Fred,” says Dave. “The other one is Frank.”

“You want to go see the car?”

“I got a class.”

“Good thinking.”

Linda shifts from one foot to the other, feeling awkward and grateful for Fred’s noise, which makes it less obvious. She wants to say something intelligent before she pushes her way through the clot of men blocking the door, and the longer she puts it off the more awkward it becomes. She gives up on the intelligent part. “Thanks for the coffee,” she says to Dave. She narrowly misses Fred’s fist, which has swung good-naturedly past her ear and settled into Kenneth’s shoulder.

Kenneth covers the spot with his right hand. “Don’t do that again, Fred,” he says, his tone deceptively light. And then Linda is out in the hall and the door closes behind her.

• • •

WE HAVE REACHED the end of the Second Encounter. Let’s take a moment to reorient ourselves, and then perhaps you have questions I can answer. Yes? You. In the back.

The Chronicle? No, I believe it is a major newspaper with some particularly well-known columnists. Did you have another question?

Well, yes. I know it wasn’t painted by Rembrandt and you know it wasn’t painted by Rembrandt and in fifty years everyone will know it wasn’t painted by Rembrandt, but in 1969 it was a Rembrandt. There was another question, wasn’t there? Yes. You. Speak loudly, please.

Well, I’m not sure I want to answer this. We are experiencing these events as Linda does; to give you an objective assessment of Linda’s physical appearance would taint this perspective.

Let’s imagine a reality for a moment, an objective, factual you. How do others perceive you? How do you perceive others’ perceptions of this you? We are now at two removes from the objective reality; we have passed it through two potentially distorting filters — others’ perception of you and your perceptions of others — and yet for the purposes of relationships this is absolutely the closest to reality anyone can come. So this is where we will stay. Linda is small and thin; you experience this with Linda. She perceives herself as ordinary so you will share this perception. But I will point out that, although Linda imagines her appearance to be a liability, still she dresses in ways that support it. She cultivates the invisibility she feels so hampered by.

The point you raise is an interesting one with its own peculiarly female aspects. The entire issue, women’s perceptions of their own bodies, is strange and complex and one of you might consider it as a possible term paper topic. Let’s collect a little more data and then discuss it further. We’ll pick up the Third Encounter a bit early to give you a chance to see the women together first. And let me just give you this bit of insight to ground your thinking on this subject. There are four women involved in this next Encounter, four relatively intelligent women, and yet all four share the same basic belief that anyone who looks at them closely will not love them. They feel that their energies in a relationship must go primarily to the task of preventing the male from ever seeing them clearly.

Are we ready? All right.

• • •

DINNER IS OVER, and the women of apartment 203 are still sitting around the table. They are holding a special financial meeting. Item one: Someone has made two phone calls to Redwood City and is refusing to acknowledge them. This is of interest only to Linda; the phone is in Linda’s name. Item two: Was the Sara Lee cake which Julie consumed unassisted a cake bought with apartment funds or a personal cake?

Julie’s position is completely untenable. She argues first that it was her own private cake and second that she most certainly did not eat it alone. It is the most flagrant case Linda can imagine of someone trying to have her cake and eat it, too, and Linda says so. Julie is a closet eater and has developed a number of techniques for consuming more than anyone realizes. She will open the ice cream container from the bottom and shovel away unnoticed until someone else tries to serve herself and the ice cream collapses under the spoon.

Julie can seldom decide if she is dieting or not. This ambivalence forces her to rely on an ancient method of weight control. If, after polishing off a chocolate cake, it turns out she is on a diet after all, she throws it up. Of course this step, once taken, is irrevocable. Julie thinks that she is fat, although the whole time Linda has known her she never has been.

“Self-induced vomiting is hard on the stomach lining,” says Gretchen. Gretchen is as short as Linda, but more muscular and athletic. She is a feminist and says so. “This is what finally destroyed Roman culture.”

“Lead in the pipes,” contends Linda.

“What?”

“They used lead in their water pipes. Eventually they were all brain-damaged.”

“The process was accelerated by self-induced vomiting.”

Julie is not listening. She is holding her red hair in her fingers, isolating single strands and splitting the ends. Julie does this routinely, although she spends extra money on special shampoos for damaged hair. Gretchen bites her fingernails. Lauren, who is black and so beautiful that strange men approach her on the street and say, “Hey, foxy lady,” to her, pulls out her eyelashes when she is nervous and has done such a thorough job she now wears false eyelashes even to class. Linda bites her lips. She was told once as a child that her eyes were her best feature; she ceased to have any interest in the rest of her face. And then later she read in Chekhov that an unattractive woman is always being told she has beautiful eyes or beautiful hair. Linda’s most recent compliment is that she has nice teeth. It is hard to get excited about this.

Someone knocks on the door. The women’s hands all drop to their laps. “Come in,” says Lauren.

It is Dave. Linda’s breath quickens slightly. He has brought a penciled sign which he claims to have found Scotch-taped to the doorknob of 201. Attention!! it says. Emergency!!! Clothes drier in basement refusing to fonction! Suzette.

“What do you make of this?” Dave asks. He is wearing a dark blue T-shirt which reads KAHOALUAH SUMMER CAMP — TURN YOUR LIFE AROUND. It looks good on him.

“Suzette lives directly above us,” Linda tells him. “Apartment Three-oh-three. Just a guess, but I’d say she’s got a load of wet laundry and she’d like you to fix the dryer. She’s a foreign exchange student from France,” she adds. “Which explains the exclamation marks.”

Gretchen shakes her head, moves her dark and heavy bangs off her forehead with the back of one wrist. She has to shampoo daily, and even so her hair is oily by evening. “It’s because you’re male, of course. She thinks mechanical abilities are linked to the Y chromosome.”

“It’s shaped like a little wrench,” Julie points out.

“Or maybe she read your aura.” Lauren’s smile is particularly innocent. She examines her fingernails. “I wonder what color an electrician’s aura would be?”

“Bright?” suggests Linda. Dave is looking at her. He is waiting for an explanation. “Suzette’s a little strange,” she tells him. “She communicates with Venusians. She writes herself notes from them; they guide her hand. It’s called automatic writing. I think. And she reads the magnetic field around people’s heads.” Linda swallows uncomfortably. “She’s very pretty.”

“If you like pretty,” says Gretchen. It is a trick question.

Dave dodges it. “I don’t know how to fix a dryer.”

“I’ll tell you what.” Lauren folds her hands and smiles up at him. “You go up there and explain that in person. I imagine she’ll forgive you. Apartment Three-oh-three. Just above this one. You can’t miss it.”

Dave takes his note and edges back out the door. Linda feels her aura dimming around her ears.

“I bet they thought living in an apartment building with nothing but women in it would be out of sight,” says Gretchen. Her tone suggests malicious satisfaction. “Serves them right if it’s just one broken dryer after another.”

“Is the dryer broken?” Julie asks. “I used it this afternoon, fading my jeans. It was working fine then.” She looks at Lauren and they both start to laugh. “Poor, poor Dave. He’ll never leave Suzette’s apartment alive. He’ll walk through that door and one thing will lead to another.”

One thing is always leading to another in Julie’s own romances. The phrase mystifies Linda, who feels that, logically, a gaping chasm must separate polite “Hello, I got your note” sorts of conversation from passionate sex. “What does that mean, Julie?” she asks, perhaps more vehemently than she might have wished. “‘One thing leads to another.’ That never ever happens to me. Can you describe that?”

Julie looks embarrassed, but more on Linda’s behalf than her own. “Oh, come on, Linda,” she says. “You know.”

Linda turns to Lauren. “Tell me about the first time one thing led to another when you were out with Bill.”

“Don’t be a voyeur,” says Lauren.

Julie laughs and Linda looks at her questioningly. “Sorry,” she offers. “It just struck me as funny that you should be accused of voyeurism. You’re the last of the prudes.”

“How the hell can you tell?” Linda demands. “Have I passed up a number of opportunities to be licentious? Alert me when the next one comes along.”

“She’s not a prude,” Gretchen objected. “Just naive. And very smart. It’s an unexpected combination, so nobody knows what to make of it. And, of course, men don’t care about smart anyway.”

Linda rises from the table with dignity. “I’m going to my room now,” she says, “because my presence seems to be having such a dampening effect on your desire to discuss me.” She starts down the hall, and it occurs to her that the route is absolutely identical to the one between the kitchen and the bedrooms in apartment 201. Or 303. She dredges up a parting shot. “There’s no way I’m going to pay for two phone calls to Redwood City I didn’t even make. I’ll take out the phone first. Try me.” She goes into her (and Gretchen’s) bedroom and closes the door. She lies across the bed she has very sensibly decided never to make. It would just have to be done again tomorrow. Every tomorrow. The blankets form comfortable little hills and valleys beneath her. And above her? Directly over her head, one thing is leading to another. She tries to imagine it.

DAVE: I got your note. I came as soon as I could.

SUZETTE: I’ve been waiting. (Their eyes lock.)

DAVE: (gazing at her) I don’t know how to fix a dryer, Suzette. I wish I could.

SUZETTE: It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters now that you’re here.

(Dave steps through the door. Suzette closes it slowly, sensuously, behind him. She presses against it with her back. They are both breathing audibly.)

SUZETTE: I was just about to slip into something more comfortable. (She removes her sweater.) Would you like to watch?

DAVE: (grabbing her) Suzette! (Her silken breasts begin to swell.)

Linda makes them swell larger and larger until they pop like balloons. It is a fleeting satisfaction. She consigns the phrase “One thing leads to another” to the large set of things she doesn’t understand and nobody is ever going to explain to her, a set which includes the mysterious ailment known as hemorrhoids.

Gretchen comes into the room, ostensibly to find her English Lit assignment, but the quarter has not even started yet. Linda is not fooled. Gretchen just wants to see if she is angry. “Julie made the calls,” Gretchen says. “Of course.”

“Has she admitted it yet?”

“Any moment now.” Gretchen fusses with the things on her desk. “Hey, Linda?”

Linda rolls onto her side and looks at Gretchen. “Yeah?”

“We all love you just the way you are.”

“I know that,” says Linda.

• • •

ALL RIGHT. That was Encounter Number Three. Let’s just take a moment to stretch and shake off the effects of the absorption. Or sit quietly. Return to yourselves. When you feel ready, we’ll discuss what we’ve absorbed.

Yes? Is everyone back now? Good. Questions?

Very good. You are very quick; I wondered if anyone would pick this up. We do have an agent on the scene, although our control of her is limited to suggestion only. The note, for example, was our idea, but the spelling was all her own. We communicate with her in the manner Linda described and we have identified ourselves as Venusians, a wildly implausible cover which she accepted without hesitation. We hope with her help to have some input into the pacing of the romance. At present it is not unusually slow but cannot be said to be developing quickly either. And we have so much ground to cover this term.

I did say we’d come back to this topic and I take your point. Lauren would be an interesting focus for us later; certainly the additional variable of being black in a predominantly white culture adds yet another complication to the issue of women and their bodies. The other three women represent differentiated approaches to the topic: Julie dislikes her body and abuses it; Gretchen dislikes her body but believes politically in the injustice of current standards of physical beauty and is attempting to substitute standards of health and strength instead; Linda is interesting because, in fact, she likes her body quite well, she just doesn’t expect anyone else to. Linda perceives her major shortcoming to be the size of her breasts, although she is mystified as to the reasons men desire more here. As long as Linda is our focus, we will share this mystification. Later in the term, when we switch to the male point of view, these things may become clearer. Let me just emphasize that it is hard to exaggerate the importance of these physical aspects, perceptions, and self-perceptions to the question of romance. Yes?

I must tell you that I find your remarks both alarming and repelling. It is one thing to agree, as we all must for the sake of the study, on the principle of physical relativity. We can accept that they find each other attractive even if we do not find them so. We can do our best to dispose of our own physical standards and prejudices in those areas where they seem likely to cloud the study. We can even remind ourselves that they might find us just as repellent as we find them. But it is quite another thing to speculate as you have just done on their physical intimacies with such specificity of detail. You are in danger of losing your academic detachment and, frankly, I will not be able to allow your continued participation if I see any more evidence of such imaginative and sympathetic absorption. Is that clear?

Yes? No, this is a good question. Of course you have not heard of Redwood City. No one important has ever lived in Redwood City and no one important ever will. The mystery is not that anyone would deny having placed phone calls to such an area; the mystery is that anyone could find someone there to call in the first place.

We are going to skip the fourth and fifth Encounters. They are brief and concern themselves only with a discussion of possible professors and classes. You will remember them, once absorbed. And I’m going to time our approach so that we pick up another critical memory of the period that has lapsed. Are you ready? Stay with me now.

• • •

THE BOYS IN apartment 201 had decided to give a party. Kenneth had come in the evening to extend the invitation. It was to be a small affair, limited to people who lived in the building and a few who could be persuaded to spend the night, since the city of Berkeley was under curfew.

“We’ll just sit out on the terrace and yell ‘Fascist pigs’ at the passing police cars,” Kenneth said. “It’ll give us a chance to meet our neighbors in a relaxed social setting.”

Two days later he invited the entire Cal ROTC on an impulse. Linda hears him arguing with Dave about it as she rises slowly toward the second floor in the sticky elevator. “It’s going to be fine, Dave,” Kenneth is saying. “You worry too much. Getting arrested for violating curfew will radicalize them.” Linda gets out of the elevator and Kenneth catches the door with his hand, batting it back so that he can get in. “Later,” he says cheerfully as the door closes, making him disappear from the left to the right.

Dave looks at Linda sourly. “Did you hear?” he asks. “Can you imagine what our apartment is going to look like after a bunch of cadets have partied there? What if they just don’t go home? What if they pass out all over the place? They’re all going to be physical as hell.” They hear Kenneth’s feet below them, pounding the sidewalk. He has an eleven o’clock class. Linda can see, reading Dave’s watch sideways, that it is 11:02. Dave moves his arm suddenly to brush his hair back with his hand. The watch face flashes by Linda. She likes Dave’s hands, which are large and rather prominently veined. She tries to find something not to like about Dave. “Come on in,” Dave offers. “I’ll make you a cup of hot chocolate.”

“I hate chocolate,” says Linda.

“Of course you do. I knew that. Come in anyway. I’ve got a problem, and I’m surrounded by Zukinis. Did Kenneth tell you that Frank registered Peace and Freedom last Monday? Yesterday he switched to Republican. I don’t even pretend to understand the intricate workings of his mind.”

Linda follows Dave into apartment 201. Her palms are sticky with sweat, which strikes her as adolescent. The whole world is wondering when she is going to grow up, and she is certainly no exception. Linda has hardly seen Dave since the night he went up to Suzette’s. She wishes she could think of an artful way to find out how that evening ended. Or when it ended.

Dave puts a yellow teapot on the stove. Not a stray dish, not a fork left out anywhere. The avocado Formica gleams. Before, Linda believed they were neat. Now she is beginning to feel there may be something unhealthy about it. The neatness seems excessive.

Fred Zukini is sitting at the kitchen table. The wastebasket is beside his chair; every few moments he crumples a piece of paper and drops it in. There is a stack of library books by his left elbow. His arm is bent to support his head. “Please don’t make a lot of noise,” he requests.

Dave lowers his voice. “You want to know his class load? This is the absolute truth. He’s got music for teachers, math for teachers, and volleyball.”

“Is he going to be a teacher?” Linda asks.

“God help us. We spent all yesterday listening to him learn to sing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ by numbers. I don’t know if it was music or math. Today, at breakfast, he demonstrates the theory of the conservation of milk.”

“The what?”

“How you can pour one large glass of milk into two small ones with no resulting loss of volume. Then he asks me to correct a paper he’s working on. The assignment is for two pages; he’s done ten. I can’t say I was enthusiastic, but I wouldn’t want it said that I discourage initiative. So I look at it. He’s hovering by my elbow, all nervous, because it’s his first college paper and I’m a seasoned junior. Eight pages are a direct quote. Out of one book. I tell him, ‘You can’t do that,’ but he says it’s exactly what he wants to say.”

“How are your own classes?” Linda asks. “Did you get into MacPherson’s?”

“I did, but I had to lie about my major. And you didn’t tell me he threw chalk.”

“Only when he’s provoked. It’s no fun if you’re not surprised. Did he throw it at you?”

“No, but I jumped about a foot out of my chair anyway.” Dr. MacPherson teaches Economic History and is one of Linda’s favorite professors. He can tell you about the Black Plague so that you feel you’re actually there. If you are momentarily overcome, however, and he thinks your attention is wandering, he sends a piece of chalk singing past your ear.

The teapot whistles asthmatically. Dave gets out the instant coffee, makes himself a cup in a green enamel mug, and puts the coffee jar away. They tiptoe past Fred, who groans for their benefit and crumples another piece of paper. They sit on the living room couch at a respectable distance apart. No one’s leg touches anyone else’s. “You said you had a problem,” Linda hints. Please, please don’t let it be Suzette.

“Yeah,” says Dave. He blows on his steaming cup. “I do. It’s Mrs. Kirk up in the penthouse. She hates me. She started hating me Tuesday morning and she refuses to stop. It’s because of the sign I had in our window. Maybe you saw it?” Linda shakes her head. “Well, I’d spent a bad night because a number of our neighborhood cats were out looking for each other. And I made this small and tasteful sign for our window. It said THE ONLY GOOD CAT IS A DEAD CAT.”

Dave blows on his coffee again and takes a quick sip. Linda remembers how silly she always thought it was, as a child, the habit grown-ups had of making drinks so hot they couldn’t drink them and then having to wait until they cooled. Sometimes they waited too long and had to heat the drink all over again. A bad system.

“How can you drink that?” she asks. “Thirty seconds ago it was boiling.”

“You blow right next to the side,” Dave says, “and then you only drink the part you’ve blown on. I could teach you, but when would you use it? Tea? Do you drink tea?” Linda shakes her head. “No, you hate tea. Am I right?”

Linda smiles and watches Dave blow and take another sip. It’s a larger sip. She thinks he’s showing off.

“It was a small and tasteful sign,” Dave repeats. “A very restrained response considering the night I’d just been through. You probably heard them, too?”

Linda shakes her head again.

“Well, I can’t explain that,” Dave says. “You must be a very sound sleeper. So Mrs. Kirk thinks my sign was aimed at her particular cats who are, apparently, too well-bred to yowl all night. She’s called the manager and she’s threatening to call the SPCA. The manager asked me to go and smooth it over with her, since she’s an old and valued tenant, in contrast to myself. And I did try. I’m not proud. She won’t even open the door to me. She thinks I’m only pretending to be sorry in order to gain access to her apartment and bludgeon her cats. She told me she just wished we lived in England where they know how to deal with people like me, whatever the hell that means.”

“So what do you want from me?”

Dave smiles ingenuously. “You’re very popular, Linda. Did you know that? I can’t find a single person who doesn’t like you. I bet even Mrs. Kirk likes you. Couldn’t you go up and tell her you and I were having this casual conversation about cats and I just happened to mention what models of catdom her cats are? Invite her to the party. Invite her cats.”

Linda doesn’t respond. She is too surprised by the assertion that she is popular. She is liked by other women; she always has been. In high school she had seen clearly that girls who were popular were almost always those not liked by other girls; this was, in fact, the most reliable indication of popularity, the dislike others of your own sex had for you. It was believed to be the price a woman paid for being beautiful, although Linda knew beautiful women who were not popular and Linda knew also of women who were not so beautiful, but insisted other women hated them in an attempt to fool men into thinking they were. Men were instantly sympathetic to this. Sometimes Linda had even seen this work. Surely being popular has nothing to do with Mrs. Kirk’s opinion.

“Please,” says Dave. “It’s a small favor.”

“No, it’s not,” Linda informs him. Mrs. Kirk is the ex-wife of a state senator. He has been married twice since and although he is now free as a bird again, his interest in sending her alimony checks on schedule has dwindled. Six months ago, shortly after the dissolution of his last marriage, he was picked up for drunk driving. A small newspaper article reported the event. Page 29. Mrs. Kirk cut it out and posted it in the elevator in case anyone had missed it. She added her own caption: Would you vote for this man? But Mrs. Kirk is a bit of a drinker herself. Any visit to the penthouse is an occasion for Bloody Marys and long discussions on the inadvisability of giving your heart and the best years of your life to swine. It is not the conversation Linda wishes to avoid, however. It is the drinks. Linda can hardly face tomato juice alone; add liquor and it becomes a nightmare. And there is no way to refuse a drink from Mrs. Kirk. Linda looks at Dave’s hands. “But I’ll do it anyway,” she says.

Fred slams a book closed. “Could you be a little quieter?” he calls from the kitchen. “I really have to concentrate.”

“Don’t respond,” Dave warns her. “Don’t say anything. He’s fishing for help. He’s dying to tell you what his assignment is.”

They sit quietly for a moment. The sun has moved down the wall to Linda’s face; on the opposite wall the painted sun illuminates the knight’s helmet in the Rembrandt and never moves. Dave shifts closer to Linda on the couch but still does not touch her.

Linda focuses on the painting. She feels very warm, but she tells herself it is the sun. “We’ll make a deal,” says Dave. He has lowered his voice, but his tone is nothing more than friendly. “You go talk to Mrs. Kirk for me and I’ll get Dudley’s fingerprints for you at the party. Then we’ll be even. Are your roommates coming?”

“Yes,” says Linda. But she is lying. They have no intention of attending and they all told her so last night.

She goes home and tries to persuade them again. “I don’t think I can lose fifteen pounds by Friday,” says Julie. “I can’t have fun at a party if I’m fat.”

“Sorry. Bill and I are going to a movie,” says Lauren. “If we can agree on something. Dutchman is on campus, but he wants to see the new Joey Heatherton epic in the city.”

“It’s about Vietnam,” says Julie. “Give the man a break. I’m sure his interests are political.”

“Listen to this,” says Gretchen. She is holding the Chronicle, folded open to the women’s section, in two white fists. The strain in her voice tells Linda she is about to read from Count Marco’s column.

“I don’t want to hear it,” says Linda. “Why read it? Why torture yourself?”

There is no stopping Gretchen. “He’s complaining about the unattractiveness of women you see in hospital emergency rooms,” she says. “‘Set aside a flattering outfit, loose, no buttons, of course, and a pair of fetching slippers. Think ahead a little.’ He’s concerned that, in the case of an emergency, we may become eyesores. God! I’m going to write the Chronicle another letter.”

“Any attention to a columnist, they consider good attention. The more letters he provokes, the more secure his job. He’s ridiculous. Just don’t read him.”

“It’s not trivial,” says Gretchen. “You think it is, but it’s not. They pay this flaming misogynist to write antifemale poison, and then they put it in the women’s section. Can’t they just move his column? Is it too much to ask? Put it in the goddamn sports section.” Her voice has risen steadily in volume and pitch until she hits its limits.

Linda reaches out and brushes Gretchen’s bangs back with one hand. They won’t stay; they fall back into Gretchen’s outraged eyes.

“It’s important,” Gretchen says.

“About this party—”

“I don’t want to go.” The newspaper crackles in Gretchen’s hands. “I told you that.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t like them. They look like fraternity escapees. Jock city. Fifties time warp. Have you ever tried to have a conversation with Fred Zukini? He thinks Bernadette Devlin is a French saint. He told me he saw the movie about her.”

“Dave and Kenneth are nice.”

“Shall I tell you about this party?” Gretchen asks. She takes a deep breath; she is talking more slowly and has regained control of her voice. “I know about this party. We’re talking party games. We’re talking people passing oranges around using only their chins and everyone maneuvering to be the lucky guy who gets his orange from the woman in the low-cut blouse with the Mae West body. We’re talking beer cans that people have crushed with their hands, collecting like flies on the windowsills.”

“They’ve ordered a keg,” says Linda.

“Excuse the pun, but I rest my case.”

Lauren is standing behind Linda. She clears her throat in a way that makes Linda turn to look at her. She is combing her hair higher and wider. “Julie says you’ve got a thing for Dave. But Gretchen says you don’t.” Her voice is quiet. “Who’s right?”

Linda tries to think what answer she wants to give. She takes too long.

“If we thought you liked him we would never have sent him up to Suzette’s. You’ve got to know that,” Lauren says.

“Even if he is all wrong for you,” adds Gretchen.

“It’s all right,” Linda tells them. “He was going to meet Suzette sooner or later.” But come to the party. You’re supposed to be my friends. She doesn’t say it out loud so nobody does it.

• • •

ARE WE ALL BACK? Does anyone have any questions or comments to make?

Actually, the curfew was more of an annoyance factor. If you could demonstrate persuasively to the police that your reasons for being out were nonpolitical, you were likely to get off with a warning and the instructions to go right home. Unless you were a male with long hair. Later the National Guard brought tanks into Berkeley and stationed them at critical intersections, but even this was primarily for show. Though you must remember that there was real fighting and some serious injury.

Well, cats are one of those topics on which you find only partisans. You love cats or you hate cats; no one is indifferent. I can’t explain this. Perhaps these questions are taking us a little far afield. The course is Romance. The point of view is female. Does anyone have a question that is a little more penetrating?

No, no, we will be looking at the romances of older (and younger) women later. Mrs. Kirk will not be a focus, although we will be meeting her. Her partiality for alcohol would make her a difficult subject. Absorption is tricky enough without the added complication of chemical abuse. Let me tell you, though, that on the two occasions when Mrs. Kirk’s husband has remarried, his wives have both been thirty-three years of age. He himself was fifty-two and then fifty-eight. Mrs. Kirk herself is now fifty-eight, and in 1969 if she had become enamored of a man of thirty-three, even in Berkeley, this would have been considered humorous or pathetic. Yet Mrs. Kirk at fifty-eight, judging by appearance alone, has aged less than Mr. Kirk at fifty-eight. There may be variables in this situation, the significance of which we have not yet grasped. Keep the issue in mind, though for the purpose of our current case study all the participants are contemporaries. In the back there?

He was not really a Count. Yes?

Those changes are sexual. The course is Romance. We will not be discussing them this term, although you will find them even more pronounced when the subjects are younger and male.

I must mention to you the possibility of sensory overload in this next Encounter. We are going with Linda to the party. The room is smoky and hot; the music is loud and primitive. This will be an exercise in academic detachment. Ready?

• • •

GRETCHEN HAD OFFERED Linda grass before she left, but Linda had refused. She wanted to keep her wits about her, but now, standing in the open doorway to 201, she realizes suddenly that in a couple of hours she will be surrounded by drunken strangers. And she will still be sober. There is nothing to drink but beer, and she finds the taste of beer extremely vile.

The Doors are on the stereo: “Twentieth Century Fox.” Linda is glad Gretchen is not there. Just yesterday Gretchen had called Leopold’s to ask them to remove records with sexist lyrics from the bins. She had a list of the most outrageous offenders.

“Sure,” the salesman on the phone had said. “Anything for you chicks. Why don’t you come down and we’ll talk about it. Are you a fox?”

“No, I’m a dog,” said Gretchen, slamming down the phone and repeating the conversation to Linda. “Male chauvinist pig!”

Linda passes Dave on her way in. He is in the kitchen washing some glasses. Suzette is with him, perched on the countertop. She has dressed for the evening as Nancy Sinatra, short skirt, white boots, mane of sensuous hair. She is leaning into Dave’s face, saying something in a low, intimate whisper. Linda cannot hear what she says, doesn’t even want to know. Anything Suzette says is rendered interesting and charming by that damned accent she has. Linda doesn’t say hello to either of them.

She finds Kenneth and he hands her a beer, which she accepts tactfully. “I was just thinking of you,” Kenneth says. “I’m glad you’re here. I’ve got someone I think you’ll like.” He uses his elbows to force a path through the ROTC. Linda has to follow very closely; it closes up behind them like water. At the end of the path is the living room couch. On the couch is a thin, pale woman with eyeliner all around her eyes. She’s done her lashes like Twiggy, tops and bottoms. No lipstick, but she’s wearing a skirt and nylons. This surprises Linda, who glances around quickly and sees that a lot of people in the room have legs. She is wearing jeans herself, not Levi’s, since Levi’s doesn’t make a jean small enough to fit her, not even boys’ jeans, which are too large at the waist and too small through the hips, but as close to Levi’s as she is capable of coming. They should have been appropriate to the occasion, but Gretchen was right. Linda finds herself in the fifties, where it is still possible to underdress. Where did Kenneth find these people?

Next to the woman on the couch is a man, and this is who Kenneth introduces her to. “Ben Bryant,” he says. “A writer. Ben, this is Linda Connors.” He looks pleased. “A reader,” he adds. “She reads everything. She even reads nonfiction.” He starts to introduce the woman, his hand is opened in her direction, but he never finishes. “And this is—” he says. “Margaret! You made it! Far out!” and he is gone, a little heat remaining where he had been standing. Linda moves into it.

A man behind her is talking above the music in a loud voice. “But Sergeant Pepper is the best album ever made. The Beatles have ennobled rock and roll.”

Another man, higher voice, responds. “Ennobled! They’ve sanitized it. It used to be black! It used to be dangerous!”

Linda smiles at Ben even though she is nervous and he is wearing a thin sweater vest with leather buttons, which she doesn’t think looks promising. “I don’t really read that much,” she says. “Kenneth is easily impressed.”

“Melanie and I,” says Ben, “were just discussing the difference between male and female writers. I was comparing Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad.”

“I like Austen,” says Linda warningly.

“So do I. What she does, she does well. But you must admit the scope of her work is rather limited.”

“Must I?” Linda’s uncomfortableness is disappearing.

“The difference between the two, as I was just telling Melanie, is the difference between insight and gossip.”

Linda looks at Melanie. Her face is impassive. “I’m not so sure a clear distinction can be made between the two. Who knows more about people than the gossip?”

“You’re playing devil’s advocate,” says Ben comfortably.

“I’m expressing my true opinion.”

Ben settles back in the couch, crossing his arms. “I don’t want you to think that I think the differences are biologically determined. No. This is a sociological limitation. Women’s writing is restricted because women’s lives have been restricted. They’re still capable of writing well-crafted little books.”

Linda opens her mouth and Gretchen’s voice comes out. “You’ve lived a pretty full life?” she asks.

“I’ve traveled. Extensively.”

“So have I. I was in Indonesia when Sukarno fell. Grown men circumcised themselves in the hope of passing as Muslims.” Linda sees Ben shift slightly in his seat. “Circumcised themselves. Someday I may want to write about the things I’ve seen.” She has won the argument, but she has cheated to do it. Linda has never even been to Santa Barbara. Dr. MacPherson was in Indonesia when Sukarno fell and has described it so vividly Linda knows she can carry it off if she is challenged. She isn’t. Ben is looking at his lap. Linda’s mood is black. She has been at the party maybe fifteen minutes and already she has betrayed her sex. Worse, she has betrayed Jane Austen. She isn’t fit to live. Linda punishes herself by taking a large sip of beer. And another. She holds her breath and swallows and decides she has paid enough. She abandons her glass by the couch and pointedly directs her words to Melanie. “Excuse me,” she says. “There’s someone I have to talk to.”

Linda shoves her way over to the stereo and Kenneth. “Don’t introduce me to any more writers,” she says.

“Didn’t you like Ben?” Kenneth asks. “Fred, let Linda pick out a record.” Fred Zukini is just about to put the Association on. It is a lucky thing Linda came along. She asks for Big Pink. She wants to hear “The Weight.”

Kenneth turns the music up. He has one arm draped around Margaret; he kisses her on the neck. He smiles at Linda, but it is definitely a get-lost kind of smile. Linda responds, spotting an empty chair in a corner and retreating to it.

She sees Dave again, sitting under the Rembrandt, talking with Dudley Petersen. She cannot quite hear their words, though the young man with the high voice who disliked the Beatles is still clearly audible. “No, no, no,” he is saying. “We’re talking about the complete failure of the dialectic.”

Suzette has found Dave again, too, and in the sudden silence between “Tears of Rage” and “To Kingdom Come,” Linda hears Suzette ask Dave if she can sit on his lap. Well! Linda can’t help feeling this is somehow lacking in subtlety. Her father told her, advice she has never needed, not once, that boys do not like to be chased and he was a boy himself and should know, but there Suzette is, settling herself in, laughing like Simone Signoret, and this appears to be just one more area in which Linda has been sadly misled. The situation is hopeless. Linda looks at her shoes and wonders how early she can go home. In fact, Linda likes Suzette for being so brazenly weird. Gretchen likes her, Julie likes her, Lauren likes her — add them together and it should have been enough to prevent such popularity.

Linda leans back and closes her eyes, listening to the conversations close to her. To her right, two women are laughing. “So he doesn’t have a condom,” one says. “‘I figured you’d be on the pill,’ he tells me and I say, ‘Listen, bucko, we have a saying among my people — the person who plans the party should bring the beer.’ ‘Your people?’ he asks and I say, ‘Yeah, my people. You know. Women.’” The second woman’s voice is soft and throaty. “Probably just never heard women called people before,” she offers.

Farther from her, Linda hears someone suggesting a party game. Everyone is to lie down with their heads on someone else’s stomach and then all laugh simultaneously. Score another one for Gretchen.

She hears Frank Zukini asking some woman what her major is. Penetrating question, Linda thinks. “Drama,” the woman answers. “I’m a thespian.” There is a long pause, and Frank’s voice when he responds betrays shock. “Whatever’s right,” he says, at last.

And then Suzette’s voice, close to Linda’s ear, indicates that Dave’s lap is unoccupied again. “I have a message for you,” Suzette tells her.

Linda sits up and opens her eyes. “For me?”

“Yes. From the Venusians. They’re very interested in you, Linda. They ask about you a lot.”

“How flattering,” says Linda. “Extraterrestrial attention. What’s the message?”

Suzette’s hair is the color of the knight’s helmet and surrounds her face like an aura. “They said not to do anything they wouldn’t do.”

“Suzette,” says Linda, smiling at her, “tell them to relax. I never do anything.”

Dudley Petersen passes. Linda knows he sees her, but he goes in another direction. Still brooding about his ferns. But Mrs. Kirk joins her, carrying her beer in a pewter mug with a hinged lid and a glass bottom. “Marvelous party,” says Mrs. Kirk. “No hippies. Just a lot of nice young people enjoying themselves.”

“I’m not enjoying myself,” Linda tells her. “I’m having a terrible time.”

“It’s because you’re not drinking. Kenny! Kenny!” Mrs. Kirk waves a plump hand and her bracelets ring out commandingly. “Linda needs a beer!”

Kenneth supplies one, giving her an empty glass wrapped in a paper towel at the same time. “The glass is a gift from Dave,” he informs her. “And Dave says not to handle it too much. Would you like to tell me what’s going on?”

Linda takes the glass and her spirits lift ridiculously. But briefly. “It’s evidence,” she says. She watches Kenneth weave his way back to Dave. Kenneth wants to invite the police department, any off-duty officers and anyone they are willing to let out of jail. He argues with Dave about it. Dave is holding the phone clamped tightly together and refusing to release it.

“Hey, Linda.” It’s Fred Zukini. “You still haven’t seen my car. You want to? I got a tape deck, now, and I put a lock on the gas cap and I put sheepskin on the seats.”

Linda takes a long drink of her beer and then sets it and the empty glass back under the seat where they’ll be safe until she can retrieve them. She follows Fred to the elevator, passing through a nasty, acrid smell by the couch where Ben Bryant is smoking a pipe. With tobacco in it.

Fred doesn’t seem the sort to seduce her in the basement. Too much risk to the car, for one thing, and Linda doesn’t like him so she is relaxed and calm, picking her way through the couples who have opted for romantic subterranean lighting. Fred stops at a polished red VW bug and runs his hand over the curves of the trunk. “I got extra locks on the doors, too,” he says. “Because of the tape deck. I’m going to get leather for the steering wheel.”

Linda leans over, peering into the car’s interior. Above the soft and snowy sheepskin, next to the steering column, a set of keys dangles. “You’ve left your keys in it,” Linda tells Fred. “Anyone could take it.”

Fred pushes her roughly aside, pressing his forehead against the window. “It’s locked.” His voice breaks. “It’s all locked up. The keys are locked inside.”

“Oh,” says Linda. She thinks for a moment. “Maybe you could get in with a coat hanger. I’ve seen that done.”

“Linda, the windows are closed. And it’s got special locks.”

“Oh.” Linda thinks again. “I guess you’ll have to break a window.”

Fred runs a hand through his hair, but it is too short to be disarranged. His face is anguished. “Could you let me think this through?” he requests. “God, Linda, could you be quiet and leave me alone for a bit?”

Linda makes her way back to the elevator, the heels of her shoes snapping on the cement floor. A white-faced cadet stumbles across her path. He moans once, a pathetic, suffocated sound. “Oh, no,” he says. He falls against the first of the washing machines, claws it open, and throws up into it. He looks at Linda and throws up again.

There is a message here, Linda decides. A message from the Venusians. The message is to go home. Go home to her roommates who were so right when she was so wrong, and Linda feels that all she will ever ask for the whole rest of her life is not to forget and wash her clothes in the first machine or spend another second with anyone named Fred or Frank or Kenneth or—

The elevator opens slowly, suspensefully, and Dave is inside. “I thought you might need rescuing,” he says. “Mrs. Kirk gave me the keys to the penthouse. She says you can see all of San Francisco from there. Want to come?”

“Why not?” Linda answers coldly. “As long as I’m in the elevator anyway.” She joins him. They face front. No one’s shoulder touches anyone else’s. The elevator does not move. Linda jabs the topmost button. And again. The elevator gives a startled lurch upward. About the third floor, Linda asks where Suzette is. Maximum aplomb. A casual, uninterested question. She is merely making conversation.

“Sitting on Frank’s lap. Apparently he’s a very old soul. A teacher. A guru, would you believe it? He has a yellow aura. Suzette just about died when she saw it.”

“Too bad for you,” says Linda. The elevator has stopped, but its door is sticking. Linda has to wedge her foot in to force it open.

“I’m not interested in Suzette.” Dave sounds surprised. “Linda, the woman communicates with Venusians.” He fits Mrs. Kirk’s key into the lock. “You’re not drunk, are you? I mean not even a little. You hate beer?”

“Yes.”

“Just a lucky guess.”

“But I’m working on it,” Linda tells him. “I’m growing. I’m changing.”

“Oh, no. Don’t do that,” says Dave. They enter the penthouse and are attacked by a mob of affectionate cats, escaping to the terrace with their lives and a quantity of cat hair. The evening couldn’t be more beautiful, absolutely clear, and the lights on the hills extend all the way to the water, where Linda can actually see the small shapes of the waves, forming and repeating themselves endlessly over the bay. The air is cold, and somewhere below she hears the sound of breaking glass.

“Did that come from the basement?” Linda asks with some interest.

Dave shakes his head tiredly. “The apartment. That’s what I get for leaving Kenneth in charge.” He moves closer to Linda, putting his hands around her shoulders, making her shake. She can’t think clearly and she can’t hold still. The entire attention of her body is focused suddenly on those places where his hands are touching her. “My apartment is full of drunks and it’s after curfew,” Dave says. “I’m going to kiss you now unless you stop me.”

And what Linda feels is just a little like fear, but no, not like that at all, only it is so intense that she is not quite able to participate in the first kiss. She does better on the second, and by the third Dave has moved from her mouth to her neck and is telling her that he fell in love with her the first time he saw her, that first day in the elevator, when he saw she had Jack Lemmon’s chin.

• • •

WELL. THERE WE ARE. This seems to me to be a natural breakpoint, and although I can’t deny that we could learn a great deal more by going on here and, time permitting, we may return and do this later in the term, for now I want to bring this experience to some sort of close. The course is, after all, Romance and the focus is courtship, not mating, and let me add that the process of absorption is rather — well, untested in situations involving actual chemical changes in the subject’s physical system. We don’t want to find ourselves as subjects in someone else’s lab test, now, do we? Of course we don’t. Let’s let the lab work this out first.

We did go far enough with Linda to make some final observations concerning women and the physical aspects of romance. These are the sort of concerns which will continue to occupy our attention, as we determine whether or not they are universal, specifically female, or merely manifestations of a particular personality type.

I’m speaking, more specifically, of the body/mind split which occurred at the moment Dave touched her. I thought it was very pronounced. Did anyone not feel this? Yes, very pronounced. Linda’s body began to take on, in her own mind, a sort of otherness. Partly this was inherent in her conscious decision to feel whatever her body was feeling. A decision to be physically swept away is a contradiction in terms even when carried out successfully, and I feel Linda was relatively successful. But this is only the most straightforward, simplest aspect of the split.

Linda’s arousal was dependent upon Dave’s. Not upon Dave himself. Upon Dave’s arousal. Did you notice? In the earlier encounters we didn’t find this. Linda responded to his hands, to his face, to his voice, to various secondary male characteristics. She found him attractive. Mentally and physically. But toward the end she was much more aroused by the fact that he found her attractive. I don’t want to get into a discussion of evolution or of psychology. I merely point this out; I ask you to consider the implications. We have a sort of loop between the male and the female, and the conduit is the female’s body. It has been said — and we will be trying to determine, as we move on to other subjects, different ages, different sexes, whether it has been oversaid — that any romantic entanglement between a male and a female is, in fact, a triangle, and the third party is the female’s body. It is the hostage between them, the bridge or the barrier. At least in this case. Let’s be cautious here. At least for Linda. I’m ready for questions.

I would imagine that being told you had a nice chin was about as exciting as being told you had nice teeth. But this is just a guess. Linda was hardly listening at this point.

They went to Dutchman, a movie in which a white female seduces and destroys a black male. It made for an uncomfortable evening. Yes?

Well, the Joey Heatherton choice would have been problematical, too. No, I understand your interest. We’ll look at Lauren more later. I promise.

Nobody has a clue as to what the lyrics to “The Weight” mean. I doubt that the man who wrote it could answer this question. He was probably just making it rhyme.

Are there any more questions?

Anything at all?

Then I’m ready to dismiss you. Be thinking about what you’ve absorbed. Next time we’ll begin to look for common themes and for differences. It should be enlightening. The course is Comparative Romance. The point of view is female. We’ll start next time with questions. When you’ve thought about it some more, I’m sure you’ll have questions.