A Round-Heeled Woman Read Free

him? Not me. I turned away, embarrassed by my sex and ashamed deep within myself of the hunger that I knew was as strong as those women’s. “Let’s go,” I begged Nathalie. We went.
    It would be a long time before I could bring myself to try again, to go on hikes with the Sierra Club, to attend alumni association events, to agree to a blind date. The women at these functions outnumbered the men at least three to one. I grew tired of talking to interesting women, of watching women more aggressive than I tree the few men present. Finally, I gave up. Celibacy was better than humiliation.
    So I returned to my longtime sexual partner, myself, and found comfort in the knowledge that at least I had tried. It wasn’t my fault I was alone. I wasn’t even especially lonely. Except for this: every once in a while, as I walked down the street or folded towels or filled my gas tank, this thought, completely unbidden, would leap into my brain lickety-split before I could repress it: What if I never have sex with a man again? It made my stomach churn, it made me dizzy, and it kept me awake sometimes like lightning flashes in a summer night.
    IN THE DARKNESS of the Elmwood Theatre, I decided on a happy ending for the lonely woman in
Autumn Tale.
On my walk home, the cool evening invigorated me. Suddenly, the thought came to me: I could do that, just like in the movie. I could write an ad. I knew at once where I would send it. By the time I got to the corner of my street, I knew what I would write. It went like this:
    Before I turn 67—next March—I would like to have a lot of sex with
a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.
    It was the absolute truth.

TWO
    The Library
    Read, read everything.
    â€”WILLIAM FAULKNER
    The day after composing my ad, I walked to my library, which is 225 steps up the block from my cottage in Berkeley, California. Like Ann Arbor, Gainesville, Madison, like all university towns, Berkeley is a wonderful place to live. Rich people and poor people live here, all different colors of people live here, young and old, homeless and not. I live a mile and a half from the university and feel much smarter than I did when I lived in a suburb in the house where I reared my son. My house in Orinda was redwood and glass, as a California house should be. It sat in the middle of two acres of wildflowers, live oaks, and bay laurels. Alongside the deck, which I entered from my bedroom, ran a creek. In the middle of the creek was a tall rock. Every winter, when the rains came often and strong, the water rushed over the rocks and made a waterfall, my own private waterfall. I could barely afford the house when I bought it in the seventies. By the nineties I was running out of money and the house needed work. So I sold it. Sometimes I miss it, though mostly I don’t.
    I am a renter now. My cottage is one fifth the size of my house, four hundred square feet down from two thousand. Here there is no dishwasher, no washing machine or dryer, no creek, no decks. Instead, it has French doors that open onto a wonderful garden cared for by my landlady and her gardener. It has a flagstone patio, where I sit in the sun to do the crossword puzzle. Renting my cottage gives me a life uncomplicated by the burdens of homeowning: a rotting roof, a plugged-up sink, peeling paint, loose tiles, etc., etc., etc., ad absurdum, ad nauseam. It also gives me an insecurity about what would happen to me if my landlady sold or moved or . . . or . . . or . . . And, once I placed the ad, I began to worry about where I live: What if a man actually answered the ad? What if he came to collect? What if I liked him? Where would we do it? Where I sleep is not actually a bed. It’s more like a slab of foam on top of built-in storage units. It is longer than a regular bed and narrower, kind of French now that I think of it. For me, it is comfortable; for two, well, maybe if we were stacked on top of each other.