The World and Other Places Read Online Free PDF Page A

smiled like a child and fell in love.
Why Do You Hate Men?
    Here comes Sappho, scorching the history books with tongues of flame. Never mind the poetry feel the erection. Oh yes, women get erect, today my body is stiff with sex. When I see a word held hostage to manhood I have to rescue it. Sweet trembling word, locked in a tower, tired of your Prince coming and coming. I will scale you and discover that size is no object especially when we’re talking inches.
    I like to be a hero, like to come back to my island full of girls carrying a net of words forbidden them. Poor girls, they are locked outside their words just as the words are locked into meaning. Such a lot of locking up goes on on the Mainland but here the doors are always open.
    Stay inside, don’t walk the streets, bar the windows, keep your mouth shut, keep your legs together, strap your purse around your neck, don’t wear valuables, don’t look up, don’t talk to strangers, don’t risk it, don’t try it. He means she except when it means Men. This is a Private Club.
    That’s all right boys, so is this. This delicious unacknowledged island where we are naked with each other. The boat that brings us here will crack beneath your weight. This is territory you cannot invade. We lay on the bed, Picasso and I, listening to the terrible bawling of Salami. Salami is a male artist who wants to be a Lesbian.
    ‘I’ll pay you twice the rent,’ he cries, fingering his greasy wallet.
    ‘I’ll paint you for posterity. I love women, don’t you know? Oh God I wish I was a woman, wafer-thin like you, I could circle you with one hand.’ He belches.
    Picasso is unimpressed. She says, ‘The world is full of heterosexuals, go and find one, half a dozen, swallow them like oysters, but get out.’
    ‘Oh whip me,’ says Salami getting moist.
    We know the pattern. In half an hour he’ll be violent and when he’s threatened us enough, he’ll go to the sleaze pit and watch two girls for the price of a steak.
    As soon as he left we forgot about him. Making love we made a dictionary of forbidden words. We are words, sentences, stories, books. You are my New Testament. We are a gospel to each other, I am your annunciation, revelation. You are my St Mark, winged lion at your feet. I’ll have you, and the lion too, buck under you till you learn how to saddle me. Don’t dig those spurs too deep. It’s not so simple this lexographic love. When you have sunk me to the pit I’ll mine you in return and we shall be husbands to each other as well as wives.
    I’ll tell you something Salami, a woman can get hard and keep it there all night and when she’s not required to stand she knows how to roll. She can do it any way up and her lover always comes. There are no frigid lesbians, think of that.
    On this island where we live, keeping what we do not tell, we have found the infinite variety of Woman. On the Mainland, Woman is largely extinct in all but a couple of obvious forms. She is still cultivated as a cash crop but is nowhere to be found growing wild.
    Salami hates to hear us fuck. He bangs on the wall like a zealot at an orgy. ‘Go home,’ we say, but he doesn’t. He’d rather lie against the skirting board complaining that we stop him painting. The real trouble is that we have rescued a word not allowed to our kind.
    He hears it pounding through the wall day and night. He smells it on our clothes and sees it smeared on our faces. We are happy Picasso and I. Happy.
Don’t You Find There’s Something Missing?
    I thought I had lost Picasso. I thought the bright form that shapes my days had left me. I was loose at the edges, liquid with uncertainty. The taut lines of love slackened. I felt myself unravelling backwards, away from her. Would the thinning thread snap?
    For seven years she and I had been in love. Love between lovers, love between mother and child. Love between man and wife. Love between friends. I had been all of those things to her and she had been all of