American women, as a rule, will rarely listen to a monologue by a man; when they do, it is usually because they want something from the man. Men have, generally, the better faculty for speech; in America they are not trained to use it. And they are, moreover, so accustomed to female authority in their formative years that they submit, all their lives, to the clamor of it. An aggregation of American people is thus conventionally dominated by the tongues of women and sounds like the continuous breaking of dishes. Yvonne had listened through part of a lunch and all of a dinner and now we set our communication in a more definite language--one that followed the tempo of maracas and made use of the whole body. "Rol," she said once, during an Afro-Cuban number, "needs lessons." "Who doesn't?" "Did you take a lot?" "Hundreds." She danced quietly for a while. "Did they teach you--?" I held her a little closer. The gardenias smelled like nights in Florida. "It's not in the book, Yvonne. But there's nothing in the book, either, that says you shouldn't go to Havana and find out what the steps mean--when you've learned how to do them." She said, "I think I better sit down." We went to our table and she ordered another Planter's Punch. Her face was a damp, darker color now than peach; perspiration had curled small ends of her hair so that they were like the tendrils on vines. She was panting--and trying to disguise it--but I could hear the breath in her throat and see the dilation of her nostrils. We had been dancing hard. We both needed the long, slow drink of air--though the air here was warm, full of smoke, and had garish light in it that made too plain the grimed plaster on the walls. Too plain, that is, for the music and its mood. "You do things to me," she said. "You do them to yourself. In sex, men respond to the subject, women to the object. I'm your object--but you're the response." "I could be annoyed with that." "More of what you'd call antifeminist propaganda?" She shook her head. "Annoyed on the grounds that you apparently never let yourself go." "On the contrary. I always let myself go. But I always let my brain go along, too." She thought about that. "Annoyed--then--on the grounds that there's nothing reciprocal about the dance we had." "But you'd be wrong. After all--I asked you to dinner." "Because you were curious." She spoke petulantly. "Because you like to find out what makes people tick. Because you're full of half-baked missionary impulses." "Because you're a damned good-looking dame." "You think so?" "Don't fish." "I'm not! Plenty of people think that I'm a spoiled brat with merely superficial good looks."