oval table or rectangular table as preliminary to detente, and if he was willing to let the point vacillate, then maybe he would know what it was like to be on my side of the negotiating table, to be me as I was perceiving him, overcoming in a flutter of jubilant activity obstructions of support in order to hold him in my gaze, perceiving that he didn’t care for me any longer, perceiving that we had come to the time in which it was probably right for me to engage the services of a good realtor, No, he said we were existing in segmentarity, but I said if he would let go of the point, and wear my skirt, feel the constriction of tights for the purposes of being professional without being provocative, being an adjunct without being a castrating cunt, as one guy in the department said of a colleague who didn’t try to be a little bit sexy, if he could wear my skirt, he would understand how sad this was all making me, and this is why I was on the verge of tears, in the wood-paneled bar on the Upper West Side, though I refused to allow him to touch me as I cried, as I also refused to use tears strategically, they were just how I felt and I would not conceal it, they were a condensation and displacement, sure, but they required no action, and I was, it’s true, a woman with a doctoral degree who believed against all reasonable evidence that there must have been some justifiability to the Western tradition of marriage, and who happened now to be crying, and who happened to be sad more often than not, who happened to have a striping of mascara on her cheeks, okay, but this only made him madder still, and there was a whole elegant spray of his logic about how feminine language undoes the proper meaning of words, of nouns, and that’s when I said that he had no idea what it was like, would never know what it was like, that all of his bright, politically engaged, advanced-degreed tenure-track friends would never know what it was like to be a woman, the fact of hips, cervical dilation, labia major and minor, childbirth, breastfeeding, hot flashes, premenstrual rage, an outside that is an inside, circularity, collapse ofopposites, it was something that he would never know about, and basically, I went on in my tirade, he secretly really liked it when I cooked, the percussive clanging of pots and pans, the poring over ancient texts like The Joy of Cooking or Julia Child, he liked to see me doing these things, and after I cooked there was always this stunning moment when the meal was done and the dirty plates and cups and saucers were teetering in a stack around us, in our tiny roach-infested kitchenette, there was this moment of arrest when he would feign a distracted expression, a scholarly absence, as if the life of the scholar were so profound that practicalities didn’t enter into it, and it was then that I understood that I was supposed to do the dishes myself, the dishes were my responsibility, even though I had done the cooking, the same was true on the days when he climbed down from his Olympian, woman-hating aerie and deigned to broil a tasteless piece of fish, some bland fillet that he always overcooked, and I was still the one who had to do everything else and had to sponge down the table afterward, and I was the one who ended up making the bed, and doing the laundry most of the time, washing his fecund jogging clothes which I had to carry, reeking, to the Laundromat, and his streaked BVDs, and I was the one who ended up buying the toilet paper, and I was the one who remembered to call his mom on her birthday, and I was the one who wrote the checks that paid the bills that placated the utilities who ensured that the electricity flowed into his word processor and printer and modem, and, I told him, I had done this in the past because I loved him, but that I was thinking maybe that I didn’t love him that much anymore, because I didn’t know how anyone could be so cruel as he was, cruel enough to cause me to feel that I didn’t know what my point was, or that it was inappropriate of me to even attempt to have a point, and yet as Irigary said, The “elsewhere”of the feminine can only be found by crossing back through the threshold of the mirror, so, I observed again, the Dark Continent of the social order, you’ll never know it, you’ll never know the possible world of the possible universe of womanhood, this Oriental city-state that exists parallel to your own stupid, unreachable, masculine world, you want to tame it somehow and never will and you’ll die never having tamed it, femininity, and the barmaid came around, and she was wearing very tight jeans and a T-shirt that was too short, purchased, I observed, at Baby Gap, so that her pierced belly button saluted us provocatively, she was like some teenaged toy girl, Hasbro waitress, she was the past of female sexual slavery, and in a moment of calculated witless-ness he gave her the once-over, paused dramatically to look at her breasts and her middle and the curve of her hips, Another round, please, and, of course, this was the thrust of his argument, as his argument always had a thrust to it, a veiled entelechy, namely, that he was above domestication, couldn’t be bothered, still I had my teeth into him, and there could be no distraction, as I would complete the argument, and would be through with him or else have some other kind of resolve even if fluctuating, Okay, then prove to me in any substantial way that you know what it’s like to be a woman and what our experience is like here where the legislature insists on control over how we use our bodies, prove for one second that you have an idea about what I’m talking about because we are at an impasse here where you either have to be intimate with me or lose me, the way I’m feeling about it, prove that I haven’t wasted years trying to have a conversation with a total stranger, at which point in a stunning delivery of high affect, a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another, on short notice, his own eyes began to brim with tears, as the next round of drinks came, even as he began to weep he checked out the barmaids rear as she retreated from our booth, beginning with a theatrical sigh his story, There’s something I haven’t told you about myself, and I said, You’re kidding, right, because we have lived together for a long time and I have read your IRS returns and I have typed portions of your dissertation because you were too lazy to type them yourself and I have listened to you puking and cleaned the bathroom after you puked and if there’s something more intimate than all that, some preserve of intimacy that I have not managed to permeate yet I’m going to be a little upset about it, with an expression of dreadful but stylized seriousness, his crewcut scalp furrowing slightly, from the brow upward, and he admitted that it was true, that there was something he hadn’t told me, a certain charcoal secret, a lost cat in the fringed outback of his psychology, and he said, Think of human sexuality as a continuum with inertia at one end of it and satiety at the other, two ends that meet somewhere wecan’t see, please not the language of the department office right now, could we try to keep this in the Vulgate, he ignored me: he was just a kid, scrawny, homely, no good at ballgames of any kind, last to be chosen when choosing up sides, happened to be friends with this one girl, the beauty of the middle school, theirs was the profane friendship destined to be crushed in the imposition of social order, something like that, when the mists of childhood receded once and for all she would have nothing to do with him, but in the meantime the two of them ate Twinkies in the lunchroom, traded secrets, as all these athletes and student councilors came by to talk to her, ignoring him, unless to inquire about aspects of algebra or geometry likely to turn up on an examination or pop quiz,