“Okay.”

“Plus,” she said, “it’s just plain hot.”

“A turn-on for guys, you mean.”

“Probably, if only because of what it says. Hey, look at me, I’m hot. But it’s a turn-on just having it. Physically, I mean.”

“Physically? Knowing it’s there, I suppose, but—”

“No, physically, Susan. You know how it feels when someone plays with your nipple and it gets hard? Or you do it yourself?

That’s how you feel all the time.”

S H E D I D N ’ T W A N T T O miss anything.

And there were things she’d missed just by being born when she was. When she was a kid, safe sex meant your parents wouldn’t find out what you did, or it meant being on the pill. But by the time she was old enough, out of high school and ready to check out the world, safe sex meant being careful what you did and whom you did it with, because there was suddenly this new disease and if you got it you died. Penicillin didn’t help, nothing helped, you just died.

When she was married, when it began to dawn on her and Gary that they both had urges that extended beyond their own double bed, they’d speculated about partying with other couples, about orgies, about clubs where you could just take off your clothes and have sex with strangers. There used to be clubs like that, there was Plato’s Retreat, for one, and it was supposed to be a hip thing to go there in the late seventies and early eighties, before AIDS, before safe sex. She’d heard stories about it, in high school, in college, and there were different movie stars who were supposed to show up now and then, and by the time she’d have been ready for it, the place was closed.

Gary had wanted to see her with another woman, and somehow he found another couple similarly inclined, and she and the other wife spent an awkward half hour doing things, both of them for the first time, and she might have enjoyed it if it hadn’t been abun-dantly clear that the other woman was just there to keep her husband happy.

The men didn’t notice the difference, or didn’t care, and when she and Donna had run out of new things to pretend to enjoy, Gary, fiercely tumescent, was on her at once, even as the other man—she couldn’t remember his name—mounted his own wife. Gary would have been happier taking a shot at Donna, that was obvious, but that had not been part of the original game plan, and she was just as glad, finding Donna’s husband singularly unappealing.

They’d met them through a personal ad Gary had answered (or perhaps he’d placed the ad himself, she was never sure) and of course they never saw them again. He was funny afterward, annoyed with her for not having gotten into the spirit of the thing, then concerned that she had been having such a good time with the other woman. Deep down inside, was she really a lesbian?

He was anxious, too, that someone in his office would find out, and what kind of behavior was that for an assistant district attorney, an officer of the court and member of the bar? She didn’t see how that could happen; at his insistence they’d used false names, and of course at one point she’d called him Gary, which no one appeared to notice, anyway, but still he’d reproached her for it on the way home. Didn’t she have any sense? Couldn’t she even keep names straight?

Then two weeks later he wanted to meet another couple, he had their letter and photo, and he sulked and pouted when she said she wasn’t interested.

The incident hadn’t ended their marriage, it was going to end anyway, but the underlying issue was not the least of the forces pushing them apart. He’d long since remarried, and she heard they were happy, and tried not to wonder what their sex life was like.

Since then she’d slept with men she was attracted to. And she had gone to bed a couple of times with a woman, a canvasser for the local Democratic organization. They’d gone to the same college but hadn’t really known each other then, and the lovemaking was good but the woman was too neurotic, and a couple of times was plenty.

When she was living with Marc, he’d taken her once to an S&M

club he knew about at Greenwich and Gansevoort, in the old meatpacking district just below Fourteenth Street, and they’d worn leather to fit in and drunk fruit juice at the bar. Nobody was actually screwing, the activity was all role-playing, bondage and discipline, domination and submission. Some of it looked interesting, but in a curiously intellectual way. She felt disconnected from it, and, worse, was very conscious of being an intruder. Her spiked wrist bands and leather pants didn’t change the fact that she was just a voyeuse.

“They don’t mind,” Marc had assured her. “They’re exhibition-ists, for God’s sake. If they didn’t want an audience they’d stay home.”

She could understand that. She had a streak of exhibitionism herself, and much the best thing about her half hour with Donna had been knowing she was being watched. But she really didn’t want to stand around like a tourist while a fat man with a too-long goatee had his buttocks whipped by a wraithlike woman in what looked like a black wet suit with cutouts. Nor, God help her, did she want to change places with either of them.

“I just thought it was something you should see,” he told her later, and she said she was glad she’d gone, but wouldn’t want to go again. No, he said, neither would he, but he had the feeling she’d make a dandy dominatrix.

What made him say that, she’d wanted to know. Was he interested in that sort of thing? Did he long to play slave and mistress, did he want her to tie him up, to do any of what they’d seen at the club?

“Not my scene,” he’d said, “but I have to say I can picture you in the role. Maybe it’s just that you’d look great in the costumes.” Was it something she wanted to do? She hadn’t thought so, but knew there was something she needed to explore, some limits she had to test.

Once the museum in Lausanne had changed her life, she’d been too busy to find the envelope, let alone push it. The gallery took all her energy, and didn’t leave her the time to have a relationship in which to grow restless. There were a few men she saw, two of whom were ideal for her purposes. They were both married, they both lived out of town (one in Connecticut, one in a suburb of Detroit), and she’d met them at the gallery, where they’d bought pieces of art from her.

When the first one had hit on her, the Detroit guy, she’d been concerned about the propriety of sleeping with a client, but she decided she was being overly scrupulous. She wasn’t a shrink going to bed with a patient, or a studio boss nailing a starlet, or a matrimonial lawyer (like hers, for example, the shitheel) consol-ing an incipient divorcee. He’d fallen in love with Aleesha MacReady’s take on Susannah and the Elders, and she’d sold it to him with the mixture of elation and despair that came from getting a good price for a work she herself loved and would never see again. What was there about the transaction to prevent them from having dinner together? And, afterward, why shouldn’t she go back to his hotel room (the Pierre, a high floor, a view of the park, very nice) and fuck his brains out?

Her life worked, and the gallery was getting a good reputation, and even making a little money. Lately, though, she was feeling a vague restlessness. She couldn’t define it, didn’t know what it was, and found herself talking about it at lunch with an old school friend.

“Tick tock,” Audrey had said. “You need to have a baby.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your biological clock, Suze. You’re what, thirty-six?”

“Close enough.”

“What does that mean, thirty-seven? And don’t tell me about your lack of maternal impulses. Doesn’t matter. Tick fucking tock, and you’ve got the urge whether you know it or not.”

“Forget it,” she’d said. “I don’t want a baby. For God’s sake, I’d rather have fibroids.”

And it was true, the last thing she wanted was a baby, she didn’t even trust herself with house plants, but the clock was ticking all the same, and it wasn’t her fertility that was running out, it was her life. She didn’t really expect to die soon (though people died whether they expected to or not, they got on planes that crashed or worked in buildings that planes crashed into). But the same friend who’d advised her that her clock was ticking had brought news of a classmate who’d died of breast cancer, and another struck down by one of the more virulent forms of multiple sclero-sis. She was young, she was in the fucking prime of life, but that was no guarantee of anything, was it? Because there were no guarantees, and there never had been, but it took you a while before you realized it.

How long before she wouldn’t want to have sex? How long before nobody much wanted to have it with her? She looked great, people looked at her on the street, and not just construction workers, who looked at everybody, but men in suits, men with briefcases.

If there was anything she wanted to do, now was the time to do it. If there was anything she was curious about, now was the time to satisfy her curiosity. That was what had moved her to crawl under the table at L’Aiglon d’Or and surprise Maury Winters with a blow job he’d be a long time forgetting. She’d always wanted to do something like that, she’d always wondered what it would be like, so what was she waiting for?

And if someone saw her, so what? So fucking what? The management wouldn’t ask her to leave. They were a French restaurant, and hadn’t a president of France died that way, carried off by a stroke or a heart attack, leaving some terrified little cupcake (or an éclair, s’il vous plaît) trapped in the well beneath his desk?

So why shouldn’t she get her nipple pierced? How painful could it be? If she didn’t like the result, she’d take the ring out and let it heal up. And if it really made you feel excited all the time . . .

S H E S A I D , “H O W C O M E you don’t have any piercings?” And, when Medea put a finger to an earlobe, “Besides that. I mean, everybody has pierced ears.”

“The others don’t show.”

“Your nipples?”

“Would you like to see?”

There was the slightest smile on Medea’s full lips, and Susan sensed that the woman was playing with her. She could resist, or she could let herself be played with. And what on earth would resistance gain her?

She nodded.

Medea reached behind her neck, unfastened a clasp, and let the white shift fall to the floor. She stepped out of it, and she was the same golden brown color all over, and Susan was sure that some of the color came from the sun, because she could smell the sun on Medea’s skin.

The woman’s figure was exquisite, slim at the waist, just full enough in the hips to be feminine. Her breasts were as firm as a girl’s and of a size to fit the hand, and both nipples were pierced, and sported gold studs identical to the ones in her ears.

She felt lightheaded, felt a tingling in the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet. She had never been so moved by the physical beauty of another human being. She was responding to Medea as to a work of art. She felt foolish staring at her like this, but sensed the woman was willing to be stared at. And this was confirmed when Medea raised her arms over her head and pirou-etted slowly around, like a slave girl displaying herself in an Eastern market.