14:15 Zizi

My head works like a magnet. It only moves to where it is attracted. It is simple, primal, ultimately arbitrated by a series of pleasant phenomena that arrange themselves in a particularly enchanting configuration inside the erectile tissue of my brain. I am headed for the home of Zizi, just like that, in the 20th along Boulevard de Belleville, almost across from Pere Lachaise, just down the block from the Arab Market – Sonja’s endroit, in other words. [Sonja would later try to use Zizi’s talents as a colorful background character in her film. When Zizi had her own ideas she began calling Zizi, a guipon,  a mop.]

In any case, me and Zizi have hovered like planets with certain mysterious atmospheres, certain unstable yearnings, inside one another’s orbits at so many openings and gatherings. How long can you leer [that look which seems to say, I have peed my pants but I hope that this smile will distract you from this fact] at someone before something goes wrong.

After an opening of Manu’s “Terra Inconnu de Paris” (Unknown Territories of Paris) Show in the Usine Usinage [literally Usage Factory], an old factory with a huge scrawl of elaborately animated grafitti letters: TONTON BLACK FBI: NON A LA CULTUR MARCHANDISE!, on Rue de l’Usine where he showed photos of Paris that looked like they’d been taken from space probes on other planets or closely cropped so that it could be America, Austria, Senegal. During the opening, I asked Manu, dressed in a padded get up that was part American football and part Japanese samurai [he insulted people and then invited them to punch him while his partner, Siena CulbuteKlantenreacties filmed the coflagrations] what was with her, this Zizi. Not again, he smirked. And he tells me that she is always asking the same about me.

“It’s  like both of you get sick or somethin’ around each other.”

I got up from my knees where I had been looking at one of his photos which were hung provocatively at ankle level all around the gallery forcing the curious onto their knees. This situation of sophisticats in sharply creased garments crawling around on all-fours he documented as well with a camera he hid in his suit made out of what seemed to be potato sack.

“We’ve only ever chewed past a few awkward monosyllabic utterances in Franglais, none of which fit together in any shape to form meanings.”

I began telling Manu that last week, however, she sent me naked pictures of herself pregnant, a big beach ball covering her pubic area, when suddenly he shrugged, backing out, saying he had to be elsewhere. Refill the punchbowl with more fluorescent psychoactive libation at the reception table, the tableau vivant, complete with Siena Culbute’s piece, a tabletop covered in top soil crawling with live worms around the two pitchers of fluorescent libation. Manu had maybe heard way too much of this Zizi-Julien entanglement. But I will now ask you to bear with me: her eyes like smoldering hunks of coal, burning right through the picture I have of me in my brain. Look, see, here’s the photo, her blond hair in 2 braids, seductive wisps of bangs hide her expressive brows. An arrow pointing to the left braid says “Tirez ça, you get the milk.” The one on the right “Du sucre.”

She also recycled some of my own words [words as friendly fire?] for an art opening she organized. My words said in broken French: That I am totally absorbed by her image, like a snippet of paper covered with writing dropped into water – the ink drifts off, the paper dissolves. “J’ai envie de tu voir quand je reviens. Je veux te rencontre sans vêtements, sans pretense, sans peur, tout nu.” [When I return I want to see you without clothing, without pretense, without fear, totally nude.] I re-read it, thought, am I that much of an idiot to believe this was an earnest and private declaration? If I were a politician I’d have had to step down in disgrace. But Zizi thought my French was precieuse and poetic, perfect for the exhibit’s press release text.

Manu considered it an indiscreet act of provocation: “She is swooping down outta the hills to capture the bishop.” He fluttered his hands inside the pockets of his paint splattered overalls to indicate, I thought, that arousal was in sight. Besides, I knew what the bishop looked like!

“I gotta say though, Sophie’s gonna hang your balls inside the bells of Notre Dame and ring them until there ain’t nothin’ left to ring. I’ll record it for you if you want.”

“When yer kept on a short leash you develop a long neck. It’s evolution, man!”

After that, me and Zizi managed to find ourselves tête a tête, knee to knee in cafés through no known volition of our own – if I didn’t call her and she didn’t call me, then how did this date get made? Do people in this alternate state of mind fall outside the framework of agendas and calendars? Live in a kind of treehouse with magnetic heart valve implants?

This lack of discernible volition might be the beginning of a definition of what this feeling of love is – less idealistic and more… effluvial. Add nice nothings, pregnant silences, piercing crystal ball eyes in the search for answers to questions caught somewhere between brain and lips. But is this emotional veering that steers the self into a heart-shaped vat of logic-scrambling hormones nothing more than an addiction to the chemical pleasure of swooning? Swooning as a logic scrambler, a brain full of hypnotic symphonic white noise. A hum that aids and abets sudden leaps of torso and spirit, one lifting the other and vice versa. You are half-baked, you are standing on top of the world singing Porter “Birds do it / bees do it / even educated fleas do it.”

Our scrapbooks splayed open before us on a sticky wobbly café table because it was easier for us to point to things we had done or been than to explain them in Franglais. Huddled there the way Tarzan and Jane huddled into one another – touching, pointing, grunting. And when you hear a corny Johnny Mathis number, “The Twelfth of Never” say, coming out across the thick aromatic air, yeah, there it is: “I need you, oh my darling like roses need rain / hold me close, melt my heart like a pile of snow” you suddenly say, this song speaks to me. Let me learn the words.

You see her shaking her head here and there and you feel your head swaying up and down – yes, yes, I understand, don’t quite understand but I so much want to. I leaned back and just stared and stared and stared, sipped and stared, my foot touching hers, smirked and stared, her eyes full of tricks of light, tics of intrigue, her make-up simple, bland to non-existent, she in a metallic gold bustier and a red lacy diaphanous blouse.

“What ees wrong?”

“Nothing. It’s just weird that nothing is wrong – rien.”

“Does thees mean everyzing is right?”

“I guess. I wanna believe it.”

The next time it’ll be white lipstick and a sheer white silken blouse with the watermarked images of deep sea fish swimming across her absolutely white solar plexus, hint of nipple serving as wandering eye.

The way we couldn’t exactly communicate made it all the more essential. So, I mean, you tell me, is this something you’d paint as nefarious? It isn’t, is it? I mean, let me just state without hesitation: No, I did not seek out any of this. I did not set out to cheat, to cuckold, to backdoor, to sneak around; it just happened and that I allowed to happen what happened is not a crime, now is it? This is pure human interaction. A radio is on, it receives a signal... I rest my case.

I mean, it’s what we all want but end up sublimating into dangerous sports, binge eating, paint ball, Disney, recreational drugs, model trains, informed drinking, rock climbing, nagging, complaining, video games, flipper, driving too fast, stamp collecting, daydreaming.

I stared outside, nothing moves across the café square, all is dog-day still except the elbows of drinkers, the shiny yellow leaves in a dense lulling breeze full of heat and the smells of another part of Paris. A man making a leaf-caught-in-a-breeze gesture with his hand. We were somehow now suddenly drinking Pastis. Did I order them or...?

“La creme de la Provence.”

“Anis, a flavor Americans ne comprend pas.” I’m convinced this is why ex-pats, to distinguish themselves from their former land, embrace Pastis as a kind of liberational ploy. But I do not know how to say this in French so I don’t.

“They collez the labels of Pernod & Ricard on their bathroom miroirs...”

She shakes her head in that way that means she does not understand all the words but would love to and makes a meaning out of the ones she does comprehend. So you sit and sip the pastis from a slender glass of spiraling crystal so that the glass accents what a pastis does. The glass sits on a short sturdy stem. Your fingers pinch the stem. You look through the glass at her ...You wonder about plot, about meaning, about the sense of purpose we hoist ourselves up by and then you sip your pastis and you look at her and you realize that all of life is this unresolved moment. That there is no resolution, no action, no thriller, no murder, no blame, no penchant, no rationalization ... nothing can compare with this idle moment.

This is what I am thinking and craving as I rush to her home between Renault Cinqs and Vespas. Peanut shells on her stoop. She greets me with a wave from her 3^rd-floor landing, pigtails dangling. By the time I climb her stairs, she has unfurled her hair. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair so that I may climb the golden stair.” I call out but the echo in her staircase makes this literary illusion totally incomprehensibly obscure. At the top of the stairs she offers a kiss of 3 cheeks and places my hand on her tummy and says, “Flat. Platte.” The softness rising and falling arhythmically and giggly. I caress her errantly through her silken blouse, play with the pearly shark tooth buttons. But not too ponderously. Are these the beginnings of an instruction manual? Well, you tell me. Call it: This Is How It Is Done.

Sophie, who is probably right somewhere along the way, after discovering my liaisons with several mothers says: “They are just desperate to be liked for their pooosies again. They do not love you for you but more they love that you are loving them.”

Zizi’s skirt long, wrinkled an elegant and strategic dishevelment – fashion through a thresher. Things, patterns, handmade jewelry, colors all forced to cohabit on her person. This is the audacious aspect of where fashion becomes so much more, becomes personal style. I look down at her heels – left one with Band-Aid – as she offers a tour of her walls from atop her backless platform high heels. What is it that makes a woman dangerous the more she provokes the illusion of precarious fragility?

Her walls, covered with velvet-velour wallpaper, are like a topographical map to an imaginary planet. Her place like a folk museum in some psychedelic Balkan fiefdom. Rich in folk art, primitive etchings depicting everyday activities – hauling water, chopping wood, breastfeeding – a still from a Dziga Vertov film, maybe The Man With A Camera, hand-colored but also post-dada items, a bright green statuette of the ultra-curvacious Parvati, wife of Shiva, a paintbrush stiff with globs of dried paint nailed to the wall, kitsch colorful tchotchkes, Santarina articles, Moroccan tile pieces, out-of-focus photographs [one in particular catches my eye – wait, is that Thud and Happy dressed as extras from Fellini’s Roma in the background?] graphics for album covers – I see La Sonorité Jaune, Vox Populi – she has done, and more.

There’s a photo by Manu of himself dressed in bear claws and white underwear (the first of a series called “Saoul Vêtements / Drunken Underwear”). Manu’s art/life partner is Siena Culbute (her pseudonym: Siena for her supposed place of birth and Culbute, meaning “to get back twice as much as you paid for something” in flea market argot, I am told.) She is a notorious artist whose art is much appreciated by the very bourgeoisie she despises and they despise the fact that there is an opinionated woman behind them although they don’t mind being taken seriously enough to despise – better despised than forgotten.

“About that photo…”

“Wheech one?”

“The one here. The one of you in a crowd, you dressed as a silver mermaid or something.”

“That was crazy. Something of an effort by the American community, I think by ladies from WACO an the American University and Herald Tribune to, how do you say, mettre en faveur…?

“I’m not sure. Ingratiate or something.”

“Maybe. They would like to do their best, show their best face and sponsor a young art event of new artists, mind you, some of us are not so young and we are none of us so new. But it happened and now it is over.”

“You did not suspect anything suspicious?”

“Well, the interest alone was already suspicious and some took way too many photographs to be just interested on their own.”

“I see.” I wondered for a short instant if there was indeed something fishy going on, on the level of surveillance. They, the American community and its many members of various construction cartels and chambers of dubious commerce, never mind the many suspected intelligence community members [snitches and infiltrators who had copped pleas in major drug sting trials] had been very troubled by a wave of squatting in areas of Paris they deemed as potentially prime locations for development of their American Center and had encouraged Paris officials to clamp down hard on these “trespassers and scofflaws” [mostly usine artistes (artists, DJs, musicians, and rogue architects who squatted and developed old derelict factories)] and, of course, the mayor needed very little encouragement to carry out this assignment in the name of international relations and civic bonhomie.

I have noticed that at galleries and openings they [the same types who have eye-opening or thrilling experiences when they finally, after 3 years in Paris, end up on the Porte de Clignancourt Porte d’Orleans Metro passing through Barbes] all love her stuff and love to handle the work, turn it around in their hands, love to project their Art History 101 knowledge of modern art, but then at the last minute, they back out of the purchase, putting it back down where they’d found it, insisting they’ll keep in touch and letting you know how many contacts they have in the art and art auction worlds and how magnificently and effortlessly they could wield power and get you a show, a group show, an article in the Herald Tribune, all of which they’ll do soon, watch them write it in their agendas and watch them hand you the raised letter business cards… Like flirting, like tourism, like window shopping, like peep shows… They can only have intercourse with her via the act of consumption, promising to purchase and then breaking that promise as a kind of vengeful form of pseudo-sexual sadism. Siena’s recent gift to Zizi is a canvas that looks exactly like a piece of her wall put inside a frame.

“Mais, eet ees a painting I assure you.”

And with that, she unveiled Marcel (after Duchamp), asleep in his crib behind mosquito netting like a cauliflower in a sunny field.

“Un sculture de rêve.” She sighs.

We sit with tea saucers on our knees in her gingerbread house drinking a mix of teas called something like Gnome Mix / Mélanger du Nain. The music is of water dripping onto steel drums. “L’influence de John Cage.”

“Oui.” I am staring at her legs, clean as letter openers. Nifty Bauhaus shapes. “It makes me want to faire peepee.” Have I actually blurted this, or am I whispering it inside the conch shell of my mind?I am staring at her figure. My smile like a shaved pussy laid down. It is impossible to tell she has had a baby except for that wonderful drugged and heavy-sloe-eyed tranquil transcendence seen on the faces of women with newborn babies.

For my own connaisance [the French words for “knowledge” and “birth” sharing a common root] I later investigate this phenomenon of the mother’s glow. The book I found but forgot to write down the name of, states that “motherhood probably makes women smarter. Hormones released during pregnancy and nursing enrich the brain sectors devoted to learning and memory. Certain brain cells and cell structures double in size and in density while the mother cares for her infant. Pregnant and new mothers were found to be bolder, more curious and energetic. Their brains could be said to be on enhanced functioning – more stimulated, more sensitive to all sorts of stimuli. They appear to be walking around on a cloud or as if they have been meditating...”

In any case, calm lake eyes. Bleu du Lac  – I test compliments in French on myself before uttering them. I suddenly also remember Blue Lake, Adirondacks, Upstate NY where you could sit anywhere – like I did when I was a kid – and watch the sunset shimmer across the lake. Or sit on top of Blue Mountain or sit naked in a peach blossom orchard or on a warm rock surrounded by the cool water and think about sliding into the absolute bluest of waters. Dark fish like dreams I have not yet had.

“Bleu du lac.” There I go. “But you wanted this bébé?”

“Marcel? Pas tout a fait. But now that he is here ...” Diving off my father’s shoulders into Blue Lake. Chasing skittish sunfish under murky water. Catching perch and sunfish, putting them in a bucket, handling them and later throwing them back in the lake.

“And Marcel’s papa?” If I was a stone how many times would I skip across her blue lake eyes?

“He was the rotten pit inside a sweet peche (peach). And now he is gone. Do you like du lait in your tea? Allo!”

“Je suis desolé, Je suis mesmeré par tes jambes.”

“Les jambes. They are mine, but I do not own them in French. Du lait? Suddenly my mind melted her intent into my desire. Du lait began to sound just like “do lay, to lay, to lay down, get laid” ...

“Oui. OUI.” We sit. “OK, ça suffi, enough merci.” I stare at the gnome mix tea. She stares at me. I stare back into the cloudy tea. I stand up to escape from the heat of her stare. I place sweaty hands in pants pockets and browse her bookshelves. Flip through books without seeing a word. Why do we do that? Her collection of books organized the way a scent is placed on the nape – to enchant. Dammit, I am turned on by her goddamn book collection!

She is now leaning against the crib like some woman in a Tennessee Williams story. Her hands behind her, gripping the railing.

“I want not so much to think of it that Marcel is part of him. But in ze two times we make almost amour, à  peu près amour, he made it in the first place d’accord to be sexual animal again.  But now I kick him out. He is evil. And I have become a usine d’horomones...”

I move inside her orbit, stand close, a full two heads taller. I feel a  kind of vertigo, a magnetic urge, a collapse of all logic and trepidation coming on. We are hurled into one another’s breathing – her breath inhaled by me, my breath pulled in through the twitch of her nostrils. I am kissing her ... forehead (like a frankincense-stinking pope!) then the perplexed knot between her brows, the bridge of her nose, take her entire nose into my mouth ... or at least parts of me have become rogue states and have gone off on their own accord after months of staring at her face and imagining her. I flick my tongue into her nostrils. She gives a tiny start. This is the first orifice. It is a mucous membrane. I am in training. The mutinying body parts are kissing her full around the lips, into the lips, biting into them, I am inside them, and she is guiding my hand around her body, the Bay of Plenty, The Cape of Good Hope, The Firth of Fun... I am shaking, short of breath. She is kissing me better than anyone has ever kissed, lips entering my mouth, renovating my gums. Her hand guiding mine down her back, slowly over each knuckle of her vertebral column. My forefinger dangles off the end of the “S” of her tailbone. My finger slides into her split. Her buttocks flexing ever so slightly. I think of a boy’s first baseball mitt. The way you pound it, open and close it, rub it, waiting for the ball to come your way. And at night the way you have to treat it with oil, wrap a ball in its web and then tie it tight with twine. I lift her skirt – no panties. Again, the image of a baseball mitt being opened and closed – catching a ball, the sting in my palm. My hand runs to the front to feel her moist fur collar. Her fingers take my rogue hand and place it on her breast solid with milk.

“You are sure you want no more lait?”

“I dunno, I dunno, I dunno.”

“You can.” She squatted, back against the crib railing. I went down on my knees and placed her nipple in my mouth. She caressed my hair, fingers tangled, she yanks my head back.

“Gentille.” I was trying to be gentle as she held the breast’s heavy underside and began to squeeze and I tasted the milk and I was hyperventilating, almost crying. The taste and scent of the milk so sweet and mnemonic and warm. Actually, I thought it tasted something like her perspiration, with the slightest hint of anise-scented narcotic pheromone that calms the spirit. I am entering any one of thousands of paintings of the Virgin Mary holding her breast in classic iconographic pose as nursing female, cupping her hand under the solid plenteous breast, the agony of its filled state testimony to her need to satisfy, nurse. As I lay snuggled on top of Zizi’s chest, sucking and licking a tickle off the small bumps around her aureola, she began to speak: “How you say… Montgomery glands are ze name, I learn from child-giving class, for the leetle bumps that circumference the aureola. And my nipple...”

“…Is dark, aubergine dark. But won’t I be stealing le petit’s lait?” She squeezes gently, the warm milk is in my mouth.

“J’ai suffi pour tous.” The nipples the color of Bourgogne. Her breasts, conveyors of an infinite plenitude, [they are swollen to twice their normal size] a complex delight of the sensualized object of perception.

“I am just a woo-man, like any other...”

“Now, now...”

“... And the fun is only added. A child is a child, special but not to be made into a decoration for you.” I am in her arms, as she looks down at me in adoration. I am delirious, I am entering a Renaissance painting – Eve’s firm breasts, their globular perfection, held defiantly aloft between insouciance and innocence. Sensuality defying mere function in the state of grace that denies the entire bullshit of the Fall.

“I am sometimes not even missing art, in fact, I feel as a whole.”

“Not a hole?”

“Uh?” I flicked my middle finger inside her moist chatte. She pushes my face away playfully. I see now how her pussy coup de cheveux has been shaped into a man’s face – Groucho Marx or Freud or Henry Winkler? – face, suddenly reminding me of that Fuzzy Face toy [is that the name?] we had as kids. A flat box containing a man’s bare face and a pile of metal shavings in a corner that you shaped and sculpted with the attached magic magnetic wand into whimsical interpretations of facial hair.

“I am maybe feeling like a big part of something else. That I never feel before. Like almost religious.” Marcel was in his crib, head thumping against headboard; a whimper emerging, and in an automatic response, her warm milk began to ooze from her nipples like the magic you hear about the crying Virgin Mary like the one in Las Vegas where Americans sat in their lawn chairs waiting for Our Lady of Guadalupe, a small homemade shrine brought back from Mexico, to weep real tears.

She carefully detached my lips – suction pop – from her breast, pressed her lips against mine and squeezed my cheeks so that the milk squirted into her mouth and then we kissed and she sent that same milk back into my mouth again. I swallowed some of it and spit the rest back into her mouth. This went on for another half an hour [5 minutes?] as we slowly dragged one another to the floor in her hallway. The skin is the map upon which touch finds its way to the fantasies about its own nature. Four fingers up her moist mink stole – faire attention – thumb pressed on her clit.

I did not want to have my mind wander where it suddenly was finding itself – into ordinary regions of errands, neat little piles of papers to file, responsibilities, work, grocery-shopping, time, promises, Sophie. Despite feeling totally content, I suddenly felt myself despite resistance, becoming afraid of the awesome nature of this contentment that might head into forever, so scared, in fact, that I broke our clinch. I had not quite packed my bags yet, nor gathered all my qualms for ritualistic burning. Her offer had been as bold and generous as Sonja’s had been – a 6-month trial period. Live with her free, no work, just write, after 6 months see if you want to stay ... forever. I kid you not! That this is a fact makes it not a boast, right? I am standing, buttoning fly, repairing my dishevelment, swallowing hard.

And so, I watched her watch me as I slowly squeezed through the crack in her door no wider than my uneasy smile or a knife blade that was reflecting off the center of her eyes. I am full of praise, promises, and apologies. I am full of it. As I descended her lacquered staircase I could smell her scent all over me. And I was now quickly entering survival mode, again thinking of how I was going to extinguish this scent of Zizi to spare Sophie the pain of her creative suspicions.

I never did return to Zizi’s midst ever again. I've lived a life that's full… And much more than this, I did it my way. Regrets, I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention. This remains a mystery: had my curiosity been overcome by a sudden bout of survival instinct? Fear of commitment or mid-life crisis are also reasons you might hear from Rita disingenuously consoling Sophie and her other solace sisters. Freud went on about how people do things to spite their own best interests. Had Zizi really said, “I am happy to let this lait not be wasted on towels and bras” that I find my brain repeating this over and over as I ran home that late evening, licking my body clean through Stalingrad to rid myself of her scent? I even rubbed elm leaves I ripped from a shade elm [or was it a chestnut?] all over the exposed parts of myself. Did someone catch a glimpse of me from the triangular rear window of a passing voiture? The insanity of my behavior forever etched into his or her memory. But it was no use, she had infected my pituitary gland and had created the groundwork for a lasting, frightening, purest of unions sanctified by scent.

I eventually sent her a letter – “chicken shit” [Frank], “dumb shit” [Guy]. In the letter it was already no use, hopeless. I tried to explain my way out of appearing like a coward. To say the things, one truly feels, and not just the words, of someone who kneels. Alright, so I was terrified of her sophisticated and complicated entanglements, yes. I explained how “I feared losing all familiar footing. How I might be ruled forever by your hormones. Because your scent is like those used to summon up spirits according to planetary conjunctions and signs of the zodiac. Scents, because of the volatile nature of their combination, emit vibrations that have a profound effect on scentualnauts like me. I mean, I want to read up on your planet, on the sachets of you that I should wear around my neck. I want to live deep inside you as deep as you have entered inside me. But…” But then why wasn’t I just going over there to be the very thing I was saying I wanted to be? I bet you know the answer to that one. I’m better off if you keep it to yourself.

A few months later I discovered that she had boldy [callously? Opportunistically? Naively?] excerpted my declaration in bold emphatic typeface on the invitation she had designed for yet another art exhibit she was curating called “L’A’MOUR FOU, L’ARMOIRE FARFELU.” (Mad Love, Bizarre Wardrobe.)

Many, many months later I received a letter from her out of the blue in my little mail slot at the Patois: “I have a fênetre that I sit in and I listen to la ville Paris hum by. I feel air, I am doing nothing and I feel good! Art has tell me that milk is magical. You can look back at all the Virgin Mary paintings. I never was so interested. But now I stare under hypnosis at a painting like Raphael’s ‘Vierge au Sein’ where it show an old man enchainé; he is prisoner or esclave and a young robust woman, his daughter, who visits him regular offers her ripe seins. He was old and left to die in prison. No prison guard, no one suspect she is sustaining him this way. Amazed are the prison guards until they discover what she is doing. But they are not angry, they are awed by her inspiring charity and return him his freedom. I do not hate you. No far away from that. Alltho you confuse me. Maybe you are like Truffaut who for him love was always made on the run…”

At home, shit, I was already 2 hours late: Sophie is propped up in bed wearing a turtleneck, a defiant gesture of abstinence as punishment. She will withhold the treasures of herself to become attractive to me again. Or she may be just closing up shop on all this and moving elsewhere, drifting away: “I have to read you this: ‘Zarathustra’ – we can maybe say he is you for a moment – ‘is approached by a full-breasted woman...’” I am in the kitchen frantically washing myself of Zizi but to no avail, “... one of your many gros-nanas friends, no? She is radiant beautiful when she declares she wants to sleep with him.” She has raised her voice above the shush of the running water. I am only half-hearing. My hand still smells of Zizi. “Is this not your story that it is women always being the first to approach you and you innocent go along out of no choice in your mind, no? Luckily – in here this story anyway – Ahura whispers to him that he should at least examine her back before they start. Zarathustra reaches back to caress her. Suddenly he shudders with nausea when he discover that her back is full of snakes and toads and decayed with leprose and other skin diseases, open sores ... Think about this. I hope you will.”

When I finally climbed into bed I could tell she was feigning sleep. I made several attempts to say I was sorry [what an inadequate word, really]. But we just lay there back to back feigning sleep, each knowing the other was not really asleep but powerless to do anything about it.