actresses of a role they never quite understand, it being unnatural to themselves as women. That is, they are seeking reassurance for themselves underneath the image of women men seem to prefer.
It's a generalization I know but this would seem partly to explain the duality in feminine behavior, the essential nature clashing with the acquired role. And thus the contradiction in women which men say they do not understand. Lucy is the perfect symbol of what I have in mind. From our 13th year she has denied the portrait of woman as seen by men. The portrait, say, of the hard-boiled male writer whose hero looks at a woman and she keels over with passion for him. It happens so often in literature I suppose that's what men want, and women learn to pretend to give men what they want.
I didn't know what I was like as a woman until I let Rad make love. Yet I protected him against having to face the fact that I had no feeling when he made love. I put it down to some shortcoming in myself. Lucy does. Demora. Perhaps it's because women are so occupied in playing a part alien to themselves that at Hector's where I see and hear them at their most unguarded moments they seem, even though successful in the world's goods, so uncertain in their relationships to men.
But I also cannot get over the feeling, perhaps it's a wish, that a relationship is possible in which a man and woman are themselves. Meeting Vermillion has convinced me that real love does exist, even if it should never come to oneself. It must exist, or neither Lucy nor I would persist in searching for it. Even Lucy who laughs at "my" poets. If poets can sing as they have of love, it exists, or can be made to exist.
Chapter 38
THE MULTIPLICITIES OF PAIN
The last week in February Lucy returned early one morning—her skin was a deep apricot, her white silk suit rumpled and soiled.
"I didn't have time to change. I left in such a hurry, I threw all
