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culmination, and post-coital lassitude as its natural ground: what better time for tales than at day’s end, in bed after making love (or around the campfire after battle or adventure, or in the chimney corner after work), to express and heighten the community between the lovers, comrades, co-workers?
    “ ‘The longest story in the world—’ Sherry observed, ‘The Ocean of Story, seven hundred thousand distichs—was told by the god Siva to his consort Parvati as a gift for the way she made love to him one night. It would take a minstrel five hundred evenings to recite it all, but she sat in his lap and listened contentedly till he was done.’
    “To this example, which delighted him, the Genie added several unfamiliar to us: a great epic called Odyssey, for instance, whose hero returns home after twenty years of war and wandering, makes love to his faithful wife, and recounts all his adventures to her in bed while the gods prolong the night in his behalf; another work called Decameron, in which ten courtly lords and ladies, taking refuge in their country houses from an urban pestilence, amuse one another at the end of each day with stories (some borrowed from Sherry herself) as a kind of substitute for making love—an artifice in keeping with the artificial nature of their little society. And, of course, that book about Sherry herself which he claimed to be reading from, in his opinion the best illustration of all that the very relation between teller and told was by nature erotic. The teller’s role, he felt, regardless of his actual gender, was essentially masculine, the listener’s or reader’s feminine, and the tale was the medium of their intercourse.
    “ ‘That makes me unnatural,’ Sherry objected. ‘Are you one of those vulgar men who think that women writers are homosexuals?’
    “ ‘Not at all,’ the Genie assured her. ‘You and Shahryar usually make love in Position One before you tell your story, and lovers like to switch positions the second time.’ More seriously, he had not meant to suggest that the ‘femininity’ of readership was a docile or inferior condition: a lighthouse, for example, passively sent out signals that mariners labored actively to receive and interpret; an ardent woman like his mistress was as least as energetic in his embrace as he in embracing her; a good reader of cunning tales worked in her way as busily as their author; et cetera. Narrative, in short—and here they were again in full agreement—was a love-relation, not a rape: its success depended upon the reader’s consent and cooperation, which she could withhold or at any moment withdraw; also upon her own combination of experience and talent for enterprise, and the author’s ability to arouse, sustain, and satisfy her interest—an ability on which his figurative life hung as surely as Scheherazade’s literal.
    “ ‘And like all love-relations,’ he added one afternoon, ‘it’s potentially fertile for both partners, in a way you should approve, for it goes beyond male and female. The reader is likely to find herself pregnant with new images, as you hope Shahryar will become with respect to women; but the storyteller may find himself pregnant too…’
    “Much of their talk was over my head, but on hearing this last I hugged Sherry tight and prayed to Allah it was not another of their as if ’s. Sure enough, on the three hundred eighth night her tale was interrupted not by me but by the birth of Ali Shar, whom despite his resemblance to Shahryar I clasped to my bosom from that hour as if I had borne instead of merely helping to deliver him. Likewise on the six hundred twenty-fourth night, when little Gharíb came lustily into the world, and the nine hundred fifty-ninth, birthday of beautiful Jamilah-Melissa. Her second name, which means ‘honey-sweet’ in the exotic tongues of Genieland, we chose in honor of our friend’s still-beloved mistress, whom he had announced his intention to marry despite