The Female Man

LAMENTISSA (wistfully): I bet you do better.

WAILISSA: I do the floor better than anybody I know.

LAMENTISSA (excited): Does he ever say it's wonderful?

WAILISSA (dissolving): He never says anything!

(There follows the chorus which gives the game its name. A passing male, hearing this exchange, remarked, "You women are lucky you don't have to go out and go to work.")

Somebody I did not know came up to us: sharp, balding, glasses reflecting two spots of lamplight. A long, lean, academic, more-or-less young man.

"Do you want something to drink?"

Janet said "A-a-a-h" very long, with exaggerated enthusiasm. Dear God, don't let her make a fool of herself. "Drink what?" she said promptly. I introduced my Swedish cousin.

"Scotch, punch, rum-and-coke, rum, ginger-ale?"

"What's that?" I suppose that, critically speaking, she didn't look too bad. "I mean," she said (correcting herself), "that is what kind of drug? Excuse me. My English isn't good." She waits, delighted with everything. He smiles.

"Alcohol," he says.

"Ethyl alcohol?" She puts her hand over her heart in unconscious parody. "It is made from grain, yes? Food? Potatoes? My, my! How wasteful!"

"Why do you say that?" says the young man, laughing.

"Because," answers my Janet, "to use food for fermentation is wasteful, yes? I should think so! That's cultivation, fertilizer, sprays, harvesting, et cetera.

Then you lose a good deal of the carbohydrates in the actual process. I should think you would grow cannabis, which my friend tells me you already have, and give the grains to those starving people."

"You know, you're charming," he says. "Huh?" (That's Janet.) To prevent disaster, I step in and indicate with my eyes that yes, she's charming and second, we really do want a drink.

"You told me you people had cannabis," Janet says a little irritably.

"It isn't cured properly; it'll make you choke," I say. She nods thoughtfully. I can tell without asking what's going through her mind: the orderly fields of Whileaway, the centuries-old mutations and hybridizations of cannabis sativa, the little garden plots of marihuana tended (for all I know) by seven-year-olds.

She had in fact tried some several weeks before. It had made her cough horribly.

The youngish man returned with our drink and while I signalled him Stay, stay, she's harmless, she's innocent, Janet screwed up her face and tried to drink the stuff in one swallow. It was then I knew that her sense of humor was running away with her. She turned red. She coughed explosively. "It's horrible!"

"Sip it, sip it," said he, highly amused.

"I don't want it."

"I tell you what," he proposed amiably, I'll make you one you will like." (There follows a small interlude of us punching each other and whispering vehemently: "Janet, if you-")

"But I don't like it," she said simply. You're not supposed to do that. On Whileaway, perhaps, but not here.

"Try it," he urged.

"I did," she said equably. "Sorry, I will wait for the smokes."

He takes her hand and closes her fingers around the glass, shaking his forefinger at her playfully: "Come on now, I can't believe that; you made me get it for you-" and as our methods of courtship seem to make her turn pale, I wink at him and whisk her away to the corner of the apartment where the C. S. vapor blooms. She tries it and gets a coughing fit. She goes sullenly back to the bar.

A MANUFACTURER OF CARS FROM LEEDS (genteelly): I hear so much about the New Feminism here in America. Surely it's not necessary, is it? (He beams with the delighted air of someone who has just given pleasure to a whole roomful of people.)

SPOSISSA, EGLANTISSA, APHRODISSA, CLARISSA, LUCRISSA, WAILISSA, LAMENTISSA, TRAVAILISSA (dear God, how many of them are there?), SACCHARISSA, LUDICRISSA (she came in late): Oh no, no, no! (They all laugh.)

When I got back to the bar, Clarissa was going grimly into her latest heartbreak. I saw Janet, feet apart-a daughter of Whileaway never quails!-trying to get down more than three ounces of straight rum. I suppose one forgets the first taste. She looked flushed and successful.

ME: You're not used to that stuff, Janet.

JANET: O. K., I'll stop.

(Like all foreigners she is fascinated by the word "Okay" and has been using it on every possible occasion for the last four weeks.)

"It's very hard not having anything, though," she says seriously. "I suppose, love, that I'm hardly giving anything away if I say that I don't like your friends."

"They're not my friends, for God's sake. I come here to meet people."

?

"I come here to meet men," I said. "Janet, sit down."

This time it was a ginger moustache. Young. Nice. Flashy. Flowered waistcoat.

Hip. (hip?)

Peals of laughter from the corner, where Eglantissa's latest is holding up and wiggling a chain made of paper clips. Wailissa fusses ineffectually around him.

Eglantissa-looking more and more like a corpse-sits on an elegant, brocaded armchair, with her drink rigid in her hand. Blue smoke wreathes about her head.

"Hullo," says Ginger Moustache. Sincere. Young.