So I forgot to mention that after I spat in his coffee cup that time, Stephen left a brief adorable message on my answering machine that said, ever-so-succinctly and with a little bit of a whine in his voice and a little bit of a chuckle, "So you spit in my coffee and I am still charmed. Still charmed. What do I have to do, lady?" My knees dissolved, as they are known to do, and I felt a hot flush of something and had to bring my hands up to cover my face in delight, and in a moment of weakness called him back but absolutely hung up when he picked up the phone. He has not called since. I am relieved but also kind of full of agony--checking e-mail a little too much, staring with angry but submissive eyes at the jade-green screen of my cellular phone. Naturally most of the friends consider this silence to be wise & healthful--everyone except the IR, who said, drinking some kind of weird herb-infused organic milk that her neighbors make for her & lolling against the counter in her apartment: "I don't see what the big fucking deal is. Why do you need to be fucking beautiful? It's like, he's a prick or whatever but I'm totally always fucking guys who think I'm really ugly and shit and who think I'm really stuupid and it's like, fuck it, who cares? I mean, they're stupid, too, right? They're fucking ugly as sin, they got blue teeth and shit, I mean, shit, they got, like, a fuckin' lazy eye, it's crazy shit they got, I still fuck 'em anyway." I noted that perhaps that was why she was seven months pregnant. "Whatever," she said, "You've always been all fucking virtuous, that shit is retarded, you know? I mean, who gives a fuck if Isadora's daddy thought I was beautiful, you know?" Then she said something profound: "You know you fucking hate it when they think you're beautiful anyway, it's like, oh I could look at you for hours, baby, you're so beautiful, whatever. It gets fucking pathetic. Hey, I had this idea. Do you think I can smoke herbal cigarettes like your friend Lucille or whatever smokes, the lettuce ones?"

This is entirely true. I fucking hate it when people think I'm beautiful. I like hearing it, I eat it up, but moist-eyed reverent men are totally retarded. Oh, Ignominious Redhead, you will raise a very wise baby.

Meanwhile the erotic fiction is on hold while I write some mini-biography of Beckett for a colleague of my father's who is doing some anthology of Irish writers. Dull, dull, but my grant money is running out ever since I bought those diamond-plated ice skates.

My recent comments about Lucid Billy have elicited some questions, & to them I say: L.B. was the charismatic front man for some dynamic local ska band with whom many of my stripper friends liked to hang out for some reason, and one time we were at someone's house smoking pot and sitting around making macrame or something & Billy (who was straightedge) had all these troubles he was telling to me, and by the end of the night I was making him some Chef Boyardee in his filthy apartment and listening to scratchy records of nature sounds and telling him he would be all right. Somehow I ended up giving him a brief and unspectacular pole-smoking; afterwards we watched cartoons and played Spin-the-Bottle with just the two of us and then played Boggle. The next day he had breakfast with everyone we knew and referred to me as a "no-account chickenhead" & made various references to my promiscuity. Therefore I launched an elaborate, eight-day plan to convince him that I had turned into a chicken. Several of my girlfriends got involved & made up old wives' tales about girls turning into chickens after unreciprocated oral sex or something ridiculous like that, and I started letting little feathers fall out of my sleeves and from under the hem of my skirt, and started eating plates of millet in a peckish way in public, and bleached my hair platinum-white and got a feathery haircut, and then disappeared for three days, at the end of which we released a white chicken wearing a little cloche hat into Billy's apartment, and the poor kid was so haunted by remorse (because it really was a tender sweet evening for which he was boundlessly grateful) & by his bipolar disorder that he really snapped, and wept, and screamed, and was hospitalized. But his band's album sold pretty well for a while afterwards.