Celine and Ixchell belonged to a women’s dance collective called Azure Bosom that worked out of Ovary Studio in the Bowery. Celine adored Cypress and had hit on her to move in the first time they showered together after pointe class. Celine was thin like a puma, with mahogany-tinted, pure flesh. No eyebrows or hair on her head; just rich skin and line. Celine usually painted her cheeks and eyes with bright geometric shapes. Her lips were always deep purple. Ixchell liked crêpe and velvet dresses to sit right on her Panamanian ass, where her two braids bounced when she walked. Ixchell had taken off her eyebrows too; there were tufts of ostrich and macaw feathers above her eyes, and earrings that attached to the ring in her nose, so she was a gliding and jeweled thing. Ixchell and Celine smiled a lot and never covered their bodies with arms, or slumped carelessly into a seat or neglected to breathe evenly and deeply when anyone was looking at their bodies, but they never saw men on a personal basis.

Actually, someone had said not one of the women in Azure Bosom saw men, at all, anywhere. Celine and Ixchell took Cypress in and gave her the window-room looking at the Brooklyn Bridge. Cypress was beside herself, in a woman’s house at last. Everywhere—in the bathroom, the hallway and living room, all along the studio walls—were photographs, paintings, drawings, and sculptures of women by women. All third-world women. Cypress saw herself everywhere she looked. Nothing different from her in essence; no thing not woman. And she loved it.

Celine cooked for friends the same as Cypress had in San Francisco, but now for breakfast and evening wine came women. Writers, dancers, printers, painters, and filmmakers, beautiful like a woman appreciates. Courteous, good-smelling and clean, and each one unique. Cypress met more women in three days with Celine and Ixchell than she had ever known. And they talked about art and New York and food. About God and Venus intercepting Uranus and men. Cypress never knew that women as lovely as these appeared to be and as complete as these appeared to be could have so much to say about men. Cypress had nothing to say about them. She wanted to talk to women who were about being women; she didn’t want to talk about men. Not here in her woman-being space. And how they talked so perfectly, in tact, inscrutably desirable and bitter:

“Well, if ya could’a seen that dude’s face when I kissed Elva on the corner by the theatre. He looked like I had cut off his dick. So I pulled open her blouse a lil an’ licked her titty. God. He looked like he was gonna puke.” (titter, titter)

“Yeah, but what good would a man do somebody like me? I write my own things and pay my rent. ’Cause somebody’s got a penis mean I gotta want it?”