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clinic downtown. But I think better of it, because she’d want to know why, or she wouldn’t want to know at all. And anyway years have passed, and this is today. “I have a daughter,” she says. She hands me her lighter and when I light her cigarette for her she blows the smoke in my face. “Yesterday, in front of our counselor, I told my husband I was leaving him.” She stops and I stop with her. She doesn’t even seem to care that I almost kept walking. “What do you think will happen to my little girl? Answer,” she says. We’re in front of my building.
    “We should go inside,” I suggest.
    “You can do better than that.”
    “Bell, I don’t know anything about children.”
    “Open this damn door,” she says.
    I make her a cup of coffee. She stands by the window peering cautiously through the blinds to the street. I crawl to her on my knees. She looks down at me skeptically. “You couldn’t give me what I want in a million years,” she says. She places her leg on a chair and guides my face to her and tells me where to lick and where to suck. “That’s where my husband fucks me,” she says. I’m stretching my neck as she lifts beneath my chin, surrounded by her legs. “Stop,” she says, pushing me away. Stripping her top and skirt. She’s getting fat. “Do you think I’m the most beautiful woman?”
    “I do,” I say. We’re going through the motions. The next forty minutes is spent with me trying to please her with my tongue until my mouth is dry and sore.
    She slaps me a few times over by the couch and for a moment I think this is going to work. She hits me particularly hard once and I feel my eye starting to swell again and she stops. “Lie down on the bed,” she says. “My husband doesn’t want me to do this.” She slides over me. Of course I’m not wearing protection. Nothing is safe. She rides up over me. Like an oven. She says, “Theo, darling.” She grabs my hands and places them on her thighs. She lies on top of me, biting me lightly. I grip her legs and stay quiet. Her chest against my chest. This is sex. There’s no real threat. If I yell loud enough she’ll stop, which leaves us with nothing. And when I say I exist only to please her I don’t mean it. And when she tells me how beautiful she is it’s because she doesn’t believe it. Or when she says she has to punish me and asks me if I’m scared, she doesn’t mean it. We don’t mean it.
    Ambellina is wrapping a belt around her skirt. I turn away from her and watch the door. “My husband would like to see me with you. He wants to see me with a submissive. Then he’ll realize it’s not a threat to him. Because, of course you are not. Then, when I’m done with you, he’ll make love to me like a real man. We’ll discuss it first. I want you to come over to the East Bay.”
    I walk her down the stairs, past the bicycles locked to the stairwell and onto the Mission streets. Ambellina gets in the cab and I give the driver my money. “Take her to Oakland,” I tell him. “She has to meet her husband.”
    “I’ll see you on Tuesday,” Ambellina says.
    “I love you,” I tell her back.
    Pat and I meet at the Uptown on 17th Street. A holdover from the revolution. The walls are covered with slogans for left-wing political movements. The tables are carved and stickered. There are two red couches in the back, a jukebox and a pool table, a view of the hookers who walk by at street level. Pat orders us two Speakeasys and two shots of whiskey and he pays for them. He always pays for the drinks and we never talk about it. He starts like he always does. “In the sixties,” he says, drinking his beer, “we were trying to change society.”
    “So much for that idea,” I tell him.
    “You’d be amazed how much fun you can have if you get out of your own head. The problem is that now people are only interested in themselves. What we have is a non-voting generation. That’s what they should call you guys, the non-voting