would it be all right if they copied from him, they were ambling by in order to impress Sapphira with the fruits of their boyish masculinity, they would perhaps say hello to him then, and then later in the halls it was if he were masked or cloaked or otherwise concealed, outside of the radiating force of Sapphira, no longer her satellite, moon to her great Jovian significance, her efflorescent girlhood, she would telephone him for forty-five minutes after the bus ride home and speak of how Kevin or Tom or Lenny had tried to get her to agree to this or that home breast exam, or the like, and then one afternoon when her parents were vacationing or on business, in autumn, leaves the colors of unrestored frescoes, Sapphira invited him over, arranged in hushed tones to meet, and once inside the door, Ihave an idea for you, you are so wonderful, you are my best girlfriend, you are my one and only, and I want you to be just like me, come on in, girlfriend, sister of mine, and next he knew they were in her room, and she was helping him off with his jeans, helping him off with his T-shirt, and helping him on with her white underpants, and then her trainer bra, and then her plaid, pleated field hockey skirt, her eyelet camisole, and then they were in her parents’ bathroom, with the vanity mirror, turning him, as on a Lazy Susan, to appreciate all angles, scattering widely upon the glass table the pencils and brushes of her trade, and, God, here is the difficult part, I was so aroused, I have never felt so passive and so aroused, as she ringed my eyes with her lavender eyeliner, as she brushed on the mascara, as she rouged me, covered my actual physical blushing with her Kabuki cultural blushing, as her hands danced all around me with delicate embraces, it was as though she had a hundred arms, like she was Hindu statuary, I had never been so loved as I was loved now that I was a girl, I had never been so esteemed, and she even had a wig, which was sort of a bow-headed thing that a cheerleader might want to wear, with short bangs, and Sapphira herself had been a cheerleader so she ought to have known, even if she was only wearing chinos and sandals and a sweatshirt that afternoon, And she even painted my toenails in a red-umber, the color of menstrual efflux, and it was true, as I lay upon her bed with the fringe skirt, and she hugged me and called me her rag doll, that I had never felt so scorched as I felt then, and I knew, I knew, I knew, I knew what I was, so outrageous in my elevated state that I had to run into the bathroom to gaze on myself all over again, feeling a racing in myself that I had never felt before, the teleology of desire, the bound and cauterized site of the feminine, that’s how it was, and I was so ashamed, and so ashamed that she knew, and she knew that I knew, and she visited upon me a knowing smile, and it was that smile that did it, that toppled the carefully erected façade, and I began demanding, Get this stuff off of me, Get this stuff off me, even as I knew now what she was to those guys, to Kevin or Tom or Lenny, she was no different from what I was then, I could have provided for their needs as well as she, could have provided the trophy, the object, the ravishment they desired, I had become Americas delightful exotic doll; this was a heartfelt display to be sure, and obviously it would not have been polite for me to turn away this difficult and generous admission, but I was still upset, you know, I was still deterritorialized, and if he tried to explain that this assumption of the clothes of the slut from up the street gave him access to femininity, I was going to have to get shrill, I was going to swallow a hunk of him, with my vagina, if necessary, some hunk of bicep or quadricep, Who, then, is this other to whom I am more attached than to myself, since at the heart of my assent to my own identity it is still he who agitates me? I told him we needed to leave now, we needed to pay the check, goddammit, for once in our lives we would pay the check without arguing about whose turn it was to pay, because we needed to leave now, and there was a flurry of settling up and tip-leaving, his hands trembled at the astronomical sum, his essential tremor, and the bottled blonde with the decorated navel didn’t even give him a second look as she swept the six ones and change into her apron and carried the two twenties back to the register, and we eased between the empty conversations in the Upper West Side bar, the discussions of cars and shares in the Hamptons and good mutual funds, and I, in my tempest, insisted on a cab, though we had in the past argued about whether taxis were an expense that fitted into the extremely narrow budget that we were trying to observe, and, if truth were a thing that could be revealed by argument, if truth were some system of layers that you could husk when your relationship had assumed its permanent shape, then it was true that our pennilessness, our academic poverty surrounded by this Rube Goldberg contraption of cosmopolitan New York, by the limousines, by the price-gouging restaurants, by the dwindling number of our classmates who practiced the life of the mind, by our undergraduate classmates who were now psychiatrists, or lawyers, or boutique money managers — this academic penury was wearing us away, sanding us down, burnishing us until like the professors of our own youth, we were hollow mouths, reciting things we no longer felt or cared at all about, we were the culmination of a genealogy of ghosts, Marx, Freud, Derrida, Lacan, Nietzsche, Reich, syphilitics and cocaine addicts and income tax evaders, and I asked where in this arrangement was room for what I had once loved with an enthusiasm dialectical, rhizomatic, interstitial, defiant, the possibility that thinking could save lives, as at the moment when I first heard him lecture, back when he was the assistant for Intro to Film Analysis, when he paced the proscenium by the blackboard in that room off of 116th, back when he smoked, chain-smoked, barely made eye contact with those restive kids, how I loved him, back when he said, Anorexia, the scurvy on the raft in which I embark with the thin virgins, misquoting it turned out, in order to make a point about Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, he wanted to make a difference and I wanted to make a difference, or a differance, a deferral, a deferment, a defacement, I recognized my own image in the eyes of that boy who was recognizing his own image in me, a flickering in candlelight, candles about to be blown out in the hushed, sudden interior of a bedroom, flickering in the pink night of youthful graces, all that was gone now and we had opened the windows of the taxi because the air was thick as bread, and we said nothing, and the taxi idled in traffic on Broadway, my stubbly legs crossed one over the other, I needed a shower, and I felt cross and shameful, unemployable, old, I felt he would leave me for a younger woman, like the barmaid, a trickle of blood at the corner of her perfect lips, as I pronounced these assessments, these solemn truths about us, facteur de la verité, as the taxi with its geometrically increasing fare expelled us on 120th and we paid the cabby a months salary and we walked past Grant’s Tomb, cromlech, dolmen, barrow, in our necropolis, what it was to be a woman in this afterlife, giving an extra bit of effort in the going hence of what you once loved, he said nothing, the key turned in the lock, it tumbled the bolts, as if the idea of the key were the perfection of an ancient ethics, I couldn’t believe that I would have to lose what it seemed like I was about to lose, what it once seemed like I might always have, all the lights in our apartment had burnt out in our absence, he always left the lights on and the bulbs were always blown, Let’s compromise, he said, running his hands nervously across his Velcro crewcut, adjusting his eyeglasses, I’m so tired of fighting, and I didn’t know what I was going to do until I did it, though there was a certain inevitability to these next moments, and I slammed the door, and I pulled the metal folding chair from under the kitchen table, situated it at the end of the table, situated it for spectatorship, I have a vagina, I said, Ihave a uterus, I have a cervix, he nodded wearily, and I said, Man’s feminine is not woman’s feminine, and he nodded wearily, and I told him to quit nodding, and I asked him if he happened to know where his shoehorn was, and he shook his head, no, and I said, Of course, it’s a trick question, but I know where your shoehorn is, because I keep it with mine, as with so many other things you couldn’t be bothered to think about, so I walked into the interior of the apartment, which was not so far that he couldn’t hear the emanations of my breath, Look, he said, Idon’t know what I’ve done to cause so much difficulty, but I apologize, I honestly do, let’s let it drop, I love you, and I could feel my steep decline coming on, as when the low-pressure system moves in and drives off summer filth, yet having made the decision, I couldn’t let go of it, or maybe it’s more credible to say that it was obvious that I could feel like subjecting him to this painful scrutiny and at the same time not feel like doing it at alclass="underline" Idemand that you deny me that which I offer you, that sort of thing, a Saturday, a post-structuralist Saturday, the night on which I urged my lover to give me a pelvic examination on the kitchen table, which he refused, of course, Oh, the old biology is destiny argument, it doesn’t suit you at all, and don’t you think you’re acting childishly? was and wasn’t, in my view, and the torrents of my argument were and were not forceful, and this was and was not erotic, this argument, like the arguments that produced that old sweet thing so much gone from us now, and the resolution, it seemed to me, would be ephemeral, would never be what I suspected it would be, and so I went on with the display nonetheless, climbing up on the kitchen table now, holding, among other props, the two shoehorns, the one from a Florsheim on 8th street, plastic shoehorn of imitation cordovan, and the other a shiny metallic stainless steel shoehorn of my own given to me gratis when I had bought, on Madison Avenue, this pair of sandals I was wearing, peeling off the ivory sandals, yanking down my beige nylons and then also my lingerie, satin and from Victoria’s Secret, and then I hiked up my skirt, a thin, rayon, slightly clingy wrap in a floral print, cream with navy blossoms thereupon, and I shoved a throw pillow from the sofa under my lumbar region, and I leaned back such that I was facing him, it facing him is the right term, since, now, he was facing away, having assumed what was happening, at last, and I readied my shoehorns, greased slightly, They’re cold, they’re always cold, when they come for you with the speculum it is always cold, with a splenetic passivity, he mumbled, Don’t I need a light of some kind, but I had one of these, a penlight that he himself used when grading papers late at night in our tiny apartment, when he did not want to wake me, and I embarked on my tour, Look, look, look, spread wide the external petals at either side, and I helped him along, as he seemed a little unwilling to commit, never mind that first trompe I’oeil for now, that little nub, move indoors, where the walls are pink and ridged like when the sand upon the beach is blown by successive waves, which means that estrogen is present, because when menopause strikes the rugae will vanish, straight ahead, if you please, the cervix has a different texture, sort of a pearly pink like gums, dense fibrous, thick, rigid, averages four centimeters across, and the hole is a tiny dark spot, the os, like the hole in a bagel that swells to threaten its cavity, in a nulliparous woman it’s a hole, if you’ve had children it’s more like the creases in an old balled feather pillow, then up through there is the uterus, of course, you can’t see, up there, endometrium, now lined with blood and sludge, the color of ugly seventies wall-to-wall carpeting, my sludge,after which we head north up into the pear, because its shaped like a pear with a sleeve around it, and at ten and two o’clock in the pear, little holes, oviducts, and these go around each ovary, like treble clefs, they wrap cursively around each ovary, each end fimbriated, and in mid-cycle during ovulation, one egg gets primed to be released on one side, sucked into the tube from the corpus luteum, and then there’s the hydatid of Morgagni, and the Mesosalpinx, and the Epoöphoron, and the Fundus of the Uterus, and the external abdominal opening, basically open all the way up there, all the way up, unprotected, vulnerable to the approach of the fleet of chromosomes, the little Navy SEALs coming up the canal here, although you have to wonder at the fact of it from an evolutionary point of view how a perfect vulnerability makes for the reproduction of a species unless that ends up being the locution of our biology, of our position in things, or, to put it another way, the victim, in your construct, the penitent, always has the upper hand, always has control, hidden from you, present and absent, both; yes, an uncomfortable position, holding the shoehorns in this way, arched over myself, while he took command of the penlight, while he tried to neglect his responsibility, and I mean uncomfortable in a lot of ways, I mean that I didn’t want to watch his expressions of remorse, I didn’t want to think about what I was doing, I was better off looking at the stuccoed ceiling, an interior style that always made me feel really claustrophobic, the simulated remodeling ease of stucco, and if at this point the penlight didn’t do the job, didn’t illuminate, what did I care, now, alone or married, fertile or infertile, pregnant or barren, what did I care that he had gone now and left me on the kitchen table, had gone to the bedroom, I could hear him now padding away, the door only partly ajar, I could see the dim clamp light on his bedside table illumined, I could see him brushing his teeth in that furious inconsolable way he had, he sawed at his gums, and now he was reading, of course, reading in volumes that no longer comforted, reading to repair the differences, what was all this talk, all these pages, all this prose, all these sentences, what was it all for, I thought, on the kitchen table, holding two shoehorns in this way so that I was open to the world, its first citizen, its first woman, its original woman, naked on the kitchen table, like a repast, I left off talking, my outrage lapsed, what had we been arguing about, what was the source of the argument and where did it take us, don’t leave me here like this, all your broken bindings, your printing presses, your history of histories, I climbed down off the table and began straightening things up.