“What’s more, I think they do this on purpose,” Thalia continued. “They’re afraid of what they can’t quantify because quantification means control. I think this is what was at work in religion too. The fear of sensations, this abject terror over things you feel as opposed to those you can’t is why male-dominated religions evicted the Great Goddess—she was sensual, sexual. The guys needed to cut God down to size just as they do with wine.”

Thalia paused to take a quick sip of her wine.

“You get all of this out of how guys don’t really enjoy wine?” Zoe asked in amazement.

Thalia shrugged. “It’s about experiencing the indescribable, about feeling rather than thinking, and in that sense wine and the Creator of our universe are a lot alike. They are both sensual and they both must be felt, experienced, rather than understood or analyzed to death. Logic built Western civilization, but logic cannot properly comprehend the infinite or the sensual. The Goddess was about creation—the world, life. Procreation is sexual and from the earliest days it has been a woman’s function, something men felt they had no control over. This was a problem. They needed to exert control and since they couldn’t really control their own urges, they decided to control the object of the urge.

“Most sex laws control the behavior of women and not men. Men transgress with a wink and a nod; women get pilloried, shunned, or burned at the stake. Over the ages, the male-centric religious spin doctors couldn’t handle the incomprehensibly sensual nature of the Great Goddess Creator, so they gradually marginalized her into a local fertility deity and turned sex from a pleasurable, spiritual experience into a dirty little act. It was about the only way their big heads could exercise any control over their little heads.”

“Quite a theory.” Zoe shook her head and then took another sip of the wine.

“Yeah, well I’ve had a few years to formulate my unified theory of putzes,” Thalia said. “But that’s not why I broke into the wine cellar. I want to hear about your forger friend.”

“Talk about a putz,” Zoe said.

“Too bad,” Thalia said sympathetically.

“No. Extremely good, actually.” Zoe smiled mischievously. She set down her wineglass and held her hands out like someone describing the fish that got away. “A putz about this big.”

Thalia laughed so hard she spilled wine on her dress. “C’mon, seriously. Tell me.”

Zoe picked up her glass and after a sip of wine, continued.

“I met Erik in Amsterdam the summer between my sophomore and junior years at UCLA,” Zoe said. “I had an internship with the Stedlijk Museum and roomed with a Dutch family who had a house on the Vondelpark—like their Central Park—not far from the museum. One afternoon not very long after I had started work, one of the assistant curators asked me to accompany him on his rounds, returning paintings—rejections from aspiring artists who had hoped to be exhibited there.”