“But I’m not; I’m one of the best.”

“Suppose I thought you were the worst?”

“But you don’t.”

“Of course I don’t. I think you’re great. But suppose I didn’t. What would you do?”

“I’d put your ass out.”

“You’re joking, but that’s exactly what you would do. You’d put my little ass out. Correction: my big ass.”

“Seriously, Manda-Panda . . .” His shadow shook its head, shifted on the couch.

“I am being serious. And don’t call me Manda-Panda except under conditions of confessions of love. Excuse the bad form.”

“Seriously, Amanda, I’ll be embarrassed for you if you publish that. I don’t see how your editor . . .”

“You’ll be embarrassed for you, you mean. For yourself.”

“Yeah, I guess for myself. For the both of us. But wouldn’t you be embarrassed for the both of us if you sat in on one of my classes and I wasn’t quite up to snuff?”

I wanted to laugh at his old-fashioned way of putting it, but I sat with my eyes glued to his shadow. It ran its large hand through its thick hair. It yawned again.

“We’d be embarrassed for ourselves and for each other because we know we’re capable of better,” he said.

His shadow rose up and came to embrace (I started to write “embarrass”) my shoulders.

“There’s my lovely woman,” he said, ready to call me Manda-Panda again, ready for kisses.

“Yeah, you’d put my big ass out,” I protested, “but I bet you’d fuck it good first!”

I twisted out of his embrace.

“Stop this nonsense,” he demanded. “Just stop it, Woman. Come to bed.”

My feminist friends would be disappointed at the resolution of this scene, but I stopped the “nonsense” and went to bed, ready for kisses my own self.

51

Once Catherine sent me this picture postcard with a woman in white face and wearing a joker’s cap—a sentimental clown. You’ve seen them. She scribbled “Self-portrait.” She’d drawn the joker’s cap herself, or painted it on.

52

Like I was sitting in this restaurant in New York once—Horn and Hardart’s I believe—and this man and woman were in the booth behind me. I didn’t hear the full context of the conversation, just that suddenly the man said, “You clown.” I waited for the woman’s answer. Her voice when it came, was too soft, as if she still had her milk teeth.

“I’m not what you think I am,” she said.

He slurped his tea, laughed at her, and assured her she was.

She came back with the only defense she seemed to have.

“Don’t slurp your tea,” she said. “You’re not supposed to slurp tea; you’re supposed to sip it. Slurping’s bad manners. Weren’t you ever taught?”

53

“I wonder what it was like for them up here?” I ask.

“Who, the slaves or the pirates?”

“No, the women fugitives. Were there women pirates too? I guess there must have been, mustn’t there?”

He looks at me as if the questions are too strange to answer. I cannot see his face in the dark, but I imagine that’s his look. He turns over in the sleeping bag and goes to sleep.