We are the nothing-to-lose ones,

the try-anything-once ones,

weed seeds inside our cells –

dandelion, nettle, lizard tail –

roots sunk in, for it is the tips

that count, reaching out to tap

new moisture. Roots, stems, leaves,

the stomata, those little mouths

opening, closing, sucking in air

in the evening when we boil

wild ginger and sleep in its vapor.

Like cures like, we hear in the morning

when we brush ourselves with

vegetable fiber in the shower,

beat ourselves with our fists.

(This is no crazier than anything else.)

I bet on the reptiles, on the scaly-skinned,

the spadefoot toad who burrows backward

and sleeps seven feet down in the sand.

I go with the insects who breed and feed at night,

with the single-celled protozoan protected

from the heat by is own cyst.

I bet on the woman on the couch with

a growth on her cheek, the seven-year-old

in cowboy boots with eczema head to toe.

I roll for the shay hand, spastic muscle, drooling lip.

I roll for the palsied girl that she may walk,

the diapered man that he may no longer drip.

I lie hour after hour, staring at the lightbulb

in that lamp over the bed, then everything seems rimmed

in peelings – the intercom, the nurse’s caps, the strings

that tie this gown around my neck. I’m encased in

this room and if I could pull away the rind of this illness,

it’s been so long, I wonder what might be left underneath.

My skin. No one can understand the pain of being touched.

Or not. The problem: not even a rash to show the staff

bustling in at 6 a.m. Disappointing, I’m sure, for the interns.

Because there were no available roles for a woman who drove men wild and enjoyed them in bed by the dozen and gave as good as she got and didn’t want to marry and never suffered for any of it, Mae West had to become a writer before she could be a movie star. She began her literary career with a sketch for a vaudeville act in 1913, when she was twenty and her fame still rested largely on her ability to perform a well-advertised “muscle dance in a sitting position.” By the time her first successful theatrical opus, entitled Sex, got her arrested in New York, in 1927, she’d been honing her playwriting skill alongside her nonpareil shimmy and cooch for over a decade.

Hurston was at the height of her powers when, in 1937, she first fell seriously out of step with the times. She had written a love story—“Their Eyes Were Watching God”—and become a counterrevolutionary. Against the tide of racial anger, she wrote about sex and talk and work and music and life’s unpoisoned pleasures, suggesting that these things existed even for people of color, even in America; and she was judged superficial—by implication, merely feminine. In Wright’s account, her novel contained “no theme, no message, no thought.” By depicting a Southern small-town world in which blacks kept mostly to themselves, enjoyed their own rich cultural traditions, and were able to assume responsibility for their own lives, Hurston appeared a blithely reassuring supporter of the status quo.

At a Fountainhead anniversary banquet held by the Ayn Rand Institute, nearly two hundred people paid a hundred and twenty-five dollars each to listen to excerpts from Rand’s private letters, and to watch each other bid more than five thousand dollars for her blue-green metal ashtray and matching lighter (the last-minute addition of two cigarettes marked with a dollar sign, a famous Rand prop, doubtless drove up the price) and twenty-five thousand dollars for the manuscript of her last speech, made in 1981 to the National Committee for Monetary Reform, for which Rand herself had been paid in gold. Throughout the festivities, responsively conservative business executives, teachers, secretaries, lawyers, and a scattering of college students who’d been barely old enough to read at the time of Rand’s death discussed the principles of heroic individualism by which she had taught them all to live.

I had been in Ireland for six months, living mostly in Dublin, and I knew the unspoken rules of the Irish pub well enough to know that I was breaking most of them. I was a woman and I was alone. I was drinking stout instead of lager, a pint instead of a half pint. I was trying to pay for my own drink and, since there was no real lounge in this pub, I had no choice but to sit with the men. These were things a woman, traditionally, should not do, but I had a strong sense that in Ireland most rules had been created precisely that they might be broken…

Religion was as pervasive as the currency. It was everywhere. It was embedded deep in the Irish mind, and that seemed most evident in the way Irish people blessed themselves as they passed by a church; an instinctual flutter of the right hand as they studied the headlines of the newspaper they had just bought, or scolded a disobedient child, or made a conversational point to a companion. Sometimes just the fingers moved, twitching above the sternum or passing absently over the face in a barely perceptible wiping motion. Riding in a Dublin bus, I was often gripped by an eerie disorientation at the moment the bus passed by a church (a church I was never quick enough to notice), and I glimpsed, in the periphery of my vision, thirty hands flying into the air in similar fashion.

Conor was hot-faced and frowning now. Angrily he said, “Well, you son of a bitch, Mick Pat! When was the last time you had a good cleaning out? When was the last time you had a good cleaning out of your pipes, Mick Pat? You never had sex in your life, you little bastard. You’re a virgin. You are a virgin.”

Mick Pat sat still in his seat. He looked at the floor, and his heavy gray hair fell forward boyishly on his high forehead. With his smaller hand he brushed his hair back, then laid the hand gently over his mouth; but for the nicotine stains, it was the hand of an adolescent boy. “I am not,” he said. “I am not. I am not.” But he spoke unconvincingly, as though trying to persuade his own doubtful soul.

Faye fell to the deck in slow motion. It took forever for this part to end. “Hold still,” he warned as he cut her out of her clothes, the blade cool against her belly. “You won’t be needing these,” he said, and she knew rape wasn’t the last thing. She knew he intended to kill. That was next, when he had done with her. It meant something to him to know he was disgusting her now, hurting her, terrorizing her, it was why he did it, why he kept his eyes on her face, as he labored over her, his good arm corded and trembling, the point of the knife at her throat. She stared up past him to the square of sky framed by the hatch, waiting for it to be over, this now, waiting for the next thing, her next chance, her last chance.

The day Cristo died, his mother’s secret life ended. She used to take off her wedding ring to wash dishes, and drop it into Cristo’s baby cup on the windowsill while she worked, and when she had finished at the sink, and the counters and the stove were wiped clean, she’d smooth almond lotion onto her hands and massage it in, then slip her ring back on, always doing this, every time, except when she fled on one of her musical and sexual fugues, taking nothing but the northbound bus, no luggage, no ID, nothing pawnable, just cash in her pocket for bus and concert tickets, coffee and cigarettes and incidentals—someone else would pay for the drinks and meals and room, if it came to that, and that’s what it usually came to, and her staying gone as long as her mood and mad money held out.

That boat had been there all along, and he’d ridden past it—the bus crossed high over the marsh at that point, on the Interstate, and the view unblocked, the last gold-dusty light almost signaling in its slant, drawing his drowsy eyes to the skip-planked dock and barnacled pilings. He’d always sat on the other side of the bus, or was dozing, or talking, or getting things together for when they got to town. There the boat stood, his future, shining in the raveled fringe of the marsh, the sungold as thick as pollen, every blade of grass burnished, and the creek with that same gold in its reflected sky. The weathered wood looked gentle, gracious, elegant in its curves, in that light. He loved the boat at first sight.

This decision to wear his coat—like other stratagems of Mr. Shawn’s, like many of the procedures at the old New Yorker—might have been viewed by outside observers as quaint. But it was simply a solution to a practical problem. He was terrified of catching cold, because that might keep him from working. It might slow what always looked in him like the semisacred task of getting out the magazine each week in a form as close to perfect as he could make it. He was also phobic about self-service elevators, especially if they were full of strangers, people with emotional demands, or people with colds. I’ve never known anyone to match him in the imagination he brought to getting around some problem—to thinking things out. Working on his proofs at the Algonquin was simply the solution to that day’s dilemma: how to do his work, when he had to leave the office early because the fellow who operated the manual elevator was going off duty at three in the afternoon. (The elevator was the only own Shawn could ride serenely, and it had been expressly retained by the building’s management after the other elevators were automated.)

Edith [Wharton] knew what she wanted. And what she wanted, with all the energy of a passionate nature that has been starved and stoppered for a lifetime, was W. Morton Fullerton, warts and all. The year she welcomed him in to the Mount, the winter was already setting in. She and Fullerton went out driving in the motor and were forced to stop when snow began to fall, so that Cook could put on the chains. The couple walked a little way into the woods, where they talked and smoked cigarettes. They broke off sprigs of witch hazel. In her and him, something stirred. He must have given off—sitting there on a deep bank in a cold New England wood—that faint and indescribable aura, just short of a scent, that even well-bred, well-bathed, and well-dressed men give off when they are in the habit of frequent and eclectic sex.

At this point, the telephone rang. It often does when Miriam Rothschild is in residence at Ashton Wold: allies on the fronts of her various causes; friends in Jerusalem (where she interests herself in wildflower conservation, a crafts center, and the Biblical Zoo), or in Zurich or America; friends to meet in town (this week, after the Chelsea Flower Show), or over luncheon back at home in the country. This particular call was a request, for the second time in two days, that she provide a home for a fox. She has eight foxes, and some of them like to come in and watch animal programs on television with her. People are known to call her Mother Fox.

“Tell me,” she instructed the caller, firmly taking charge. “Is it tame? What age is it? Is it very nervous?”

“Do you masturbate?” he pried.

“Only alone, by myself.” I felt him bristle at my insolence.

“Do you work with appropriate fantasies?”

“Work?”

“You know, do you masturbate to appropriate fantasies before indulging in your inappropriate ones?” He’d given me very specific instructions about this. He scolded my silence by scooting his chair forward till I could smell the odor of his leg.

“Sometimes. Sometimes I forget.”

THE SEX OFFENDER © 1994 by Matthew Stadler; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.

No stars pierced the sky, nor lights reflected back off the overcast. A fire burned high on the bare hillside. Its orange flame danced weakly in the frozen air, offering the occasional blackened silhouette of branches and a tiny, fluttering tricolor being carried around the flames. Was Hakan up there, I wondered, with them? Would her song be sung, again, wobbling richly through the winter air to touch my ears, and why? What standard did she bear for them, what spirit? Was the night their enemy or friend? I watched the Prime Minister wander away into that same night and could not help but love him whose demise they sought; I felt, for the first time, that they loved him too. They could not say it, and perhaps did not even recognize the embrace contained within their hatred. I wondered how much he knew of their plot against him, and whether it was an end he in some ways desired. And what did he know of me?

THE SEX OFFENDER © 1994 by Matthew Stadler; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.