“You’re very gracious, and of course I’ll want to contribute something.”

She got the particulars, made notes, and by the time she got off the phone they were on Woody and Susan terms. She pushed back her chair and tried to figure out what her misplaced burst of can-dor was going to cost her. If she’d just said yes in the first place she could have made them perfectly happy with one of her mistakes, perhaps a Lynah Throp watercolor. She had a dozen of them moldering in her storage bin, bold primitives of fanciful animals that had impressed her on first sight and had never impressed anyone else, not even a little. She’d never sell them—she’d never display them again, so how could she?—and the chance to unload one and get a tax deduction in the balance was a godsend.

But now she had to give them something decent, something that was certain to bring upwards of a hundred dollars at an auction where most of the bidders wouldn’t pay thirty-five cents to see Christ ride a bicycle.

Hell.

Well, it was her own damn fault. She’d think of something.

H E R M O T H E R H A D D I E D almost five years ago, and she offered up a silent apology at having taken her name in vain. It had seemed like the perfect excuse to turn aside the wrath of a pissy little queen like Harwood Zeller, and she had to say it had worked like a charm. But if she’d had any sense she’d never have needed it in the first place.

The real reason for her pique, and one she thought Zeller might well have understood, was even more clichéd. She’d been waiting for a phone call from a man, and it never came.

Her obsession with John Blair Creighton hadn’t ended when she’d run out of books to read. She emerged from his work with the conviction that she knew the man, that they were mated on some sort of psychic level. In Stelli’s, even as she’d apologized for intruding, she’d sent him a message with her eyes, and she knew he’d received it. He’d liked her looks, he’d responded to her, he’d taken the card she’d handed him—and then nothing. He hadn’t called.

And wouldn’t, now. Weeks had passed, and he’d have called in the first few days if he was going to call at all.

She could send him an announcement for Emory Allgood’s show, an invitation to the opening. She could add a handwritten note urging him to come. But he probably got a steady stream of those, like everybody else in Manhattan with a vague interest in or connection to the arts, and would probably discard it without even recognizing her name. Or he’d make a face, thinking Here’s a dame with a lot of crust, first she interrupts my meal, and now she wants to sell me some junk sculpture.

Besides, that wasn’t until November. Why did she have to wait that long?

On the nights when she was alone, she’d developed a ritual that she recognized as pathological even as she found it irresistible.

She would bathe, and perfume herself. She’d had enlarged photos made from her two favorite dust jacket pictures of him, one taken outside Village Cigars on Sheridan Square, where he looked mar-velously butch in a denim jacket and boots and a beard, the other a studio shot twenty years old, a portrait of the author as a young man, fresh-faced and innocent. These she placed on her bedside table, and lit the little lamp so she could see them.

Then she would touch herself while her mind occupied itself with the fantasy she had selected during her bath. Sometimes it was simple enough—she was Susan and he was John, and they loved with a love that was more than love, di dah di dah di dah.

Other times she became one or another of the female characters in his books, and played out scenes that departed from those he’d written, until she and her partner du jour were drawn into a maelstrom of passion.

More than once she was Marilyn Fairchild, with her auburn hair and her hot throaty voice, meeting him in a dingy Village bar and taking him home to her apartment. In that fantasy the two of them made fitful, angry love, moving from one position to another, snarling at each other while their bodies thrust away. At the end she lay writhing on her bed, a butt plug in her ass and the largest dildo deep in her cunt, while she strummed her clit with one hand and gripped her throat hard with the other.

That scared her, the first time she did it. Because in the fantasy it was two hands, not one, and his hands, not hers, and his grip didn’t loosen with her orgasm. She was imagining herself dying at his hands, and the notion evidently thrilled her.

But it was just a fantasy. It wasn’t really anything to worry about, was it?

I T W A S N ’ T A S I F she lacked for sexual outlets. Nor was her grow-ing fascination with Creighton taking the joy out of her real encounters with real people. If her initial experiments had been designed in part to empower her sexually, then she’d succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. She seemed to grow more powerful every day, able to get almost anyone to do almost anything.

She remembered what she’d said to Franny, drawing a distinction between her own acts and whoring. She didn’t do what people liked. She did what they very definitely didn’t like, or at least didn’t know they liked, and made them like it.

Had Franny ever dreamed he’d like being treated like a girl, his body smooth and hairless, his flesh perfumed with scented oils?

Every Friday night she took him to places he’d never been and showed him parts of himself he’d never imagined.

The other night she curled up beside him and sucked on his nipple, her cupped hands fashioning a breast from the surround-ing flesh. All smooth and hairless like a girl, she’d murmured.

Franny, wouldn’t it be nice if you got hormone shots? You could grow tits, Franny. I could take off your bra and suck your titties.

Franny the tranny, she thought, knowing that in fact it would never go that far. He wouldn’t go out looking for a sex-change doctor, and she didn’t think she’d really like it if he did. She liked his manly chest, his firm pectoral muscles. But her words would stay with him, and he’d grow breasts in his mind, and when she stroked his chest and sucked his nipples he’d respond as urgently as if he did have breasts.

No reason she couldn’t get him to have his nipples pierced.

She’d send him to Medea—no, she’d take him to Medea. She hadn’t gone back herself, wasn’t so sure she wanted labial rings after all, but if she took Franny, and hooked him up to that St.

Andrew’s cross of hers, and if she could blow him while Medea did the piercing, at least for the first one, and then if she could talk Medea into letting her do the second, urging the needle through the stiffened flesh . . .

H E R T H R E E S O M E W I T H J A Y McGann and Lowell Cooke was going through interesting changes. Lowell, the loser in a who-comes-last contest (which could be as easily viewed, she thought, as a victory of her left hand over her right hand) had been a good sport, giving his promising young author what he’d previously only given him metaphorically. She’d rubbed against him while he performed the act, murmuring encouragement, adding a caress or two of her own to his.

Now, several weeks later, any inhibition they’d had about inadvertent contact was long gone, and their hands were as apt to be on each other as on her. The sandwich remained their finale, and it never ceased to thrill her, having one at her back and one at her front, being impaled fore and aft. She sensed, though, that it wouldn’t be long before she now and then yielded her central role, and took a turn as one of the pieces of bread.

Meanwhile she was still the meat in the sandwich. Or, as one of them had told her, You’re in the middle, fucking a writer and a publisher simultaneously. You know what that makes you, Susan? The agent!

T H E A L L G O O D S H O W W A S shaping up. She’d hired a small van and picked up the artist’s new work, four of the five pieces he’d made since her earlier visit. He kept one, managing to communicate that he was not sure it was finished, but beamed happily as the rest were carried off.

Lois Appling photographed the new pieces, although they wouldn’t be in the brochure, or in the show itself. They’d be held in reserve, for private sale to select customers after the sold-out show was down, or as a start toward her next show sometime a year or two down the line. And she sent Lois out to Brooklyn to photograph the artist. Lois normally worked in her studio, but understood that this particular artist was too nuts to come into Manhattan to have his picture taken. She brought back some good shots of the man at work, capturing not only his eccentricity but also his passion.

With all that done, she’d decided there was no need to deny herself. She got Reginald Barron to come into the city, met him for a drink at Chelsea Commons, took him on a walking tour to show him where the Carpenter had thrown his firebombs, and brought him up to her apartment and fucked the daylights out of him.

He was, as she’d anticipated, a beautiful boy, with a classical physique and a beautiful penis. His skin was like velvet, and his abiding innocence was delicious. He was not without experience—how could he be, looking the way he did?—but it was clear that she was something new to him, worldly and sophisticated, a woman his mother’s age with a girl’s hairless body.

For all of that, there was something oddly disappointing in the experience. She knew that she could enmesh him in an affair, that she could lead him across new frontiers as she led the others, but she knew that wasn’t something she wanted to do. Afterward, when he came out of the shower, she brought him a glass of iced tea and told him she certainly hadn’t planned for this to happen, but that she was just as glad that it did. It was a barrier they’d had to cross once to ensure a smooth working relationship, she told him, and he nodded thoughtfully, as if the gibberish she was spouting made perfect sense. And it had been lovely, she went on, but now there’d be no need for them to do this again. In fact, she stressed, it was important that they not do it again.

He nodded again, told her he supposed she was right. And, if he was a little disappointed, it was clear to her that he was also more than a little relieved. If he’d been just a few years older, she thought, he’d have known to keep the relief from showing.

She felt a similar admixture of disappointment and relief when he was out the door. Part of what bothered her was that she’d planned on waiting until after the November show. She’d jumped the gun by three months, and for no good reason beyond libidi-nous curiosity. She wasn’t lacking for lovers, nor had she been driven by a particularly urgent yen for Reginald.

It took her a while, but she figured out what it was. She had an itch, and couldn’t reach to scratch it, so she’d scratched somewhere else, where it didn’t itch.

The itch was Creighton, and she couldn’t have him. So she’d used this boy, in a way that had proved pleasurable but unsatisfying for them both, and now he was gone, and she felt worse than when she’d started.

She bathed, put on a robe, turned on the television set. The news was bad, the way it always was. She switched channels, and landed in the middle of some special on terrorism, just in time for them to show her for the thousandth time the plane striking the tower, and the burst of yellow flame shooting out the other side.

“What’s the difference?” she said aloud. “What does it matter what anybody does? We’re all going to die.”