She wrote a few sentences in her journal. For the first time she jokingly admitted, in its pages, the desire for MF to become a returning client. It wasn't really so much good sex that she craved as the companionship of a male friend or friendship in general. She had not exchanged perspectives of adult realities (such as so and so sending a resume through email on this advent called the Internet) nor had she engaged in racket ball competition since her friendship with Betty at Rice University. She had not had a steady boyfriend since early in her undergraduate education when she decided that men were special creatures who were uniquely loathsome in no lesser degrees than women. She felt a stagnancy of a life with little personal inside of it but her books, paintings, and the child who would be going away to school fairly soon. It was a bizarre version of stagnation in a life that by its prime purposes should not have been stagnating at all: by being a mother, she nurtured; by reading she was nurtured in the profound, and the profound was so unlike the pointless levity of socializing with living creatures; and by painting she rose into Godhood in the realm of ideas. And yet being wholly purposeful was such a solitary domain relegated to gods and not to creatures of movement who needed frivolity and interplay of ideas of the most shallow domain to feel alive. Between the need for a physical feeling that one man had bewitched upon her and that need for frivolity and friendship in the adult domain, she realized that such a recipe could very well be a toxic combination of ingredients. It was the baking of a vulnerability and she was not prone to consume vulnerabilities. Women meandered around as gadabouts while consuming their chocolaty vulnerability like bonbons but, she told herself, she was not a lowly woman. She opened the bedroom door and walked out. She saw the fern in the living room. That one plant was intact, stagnant and alive in the purpose of its pot as she was in hers. She did not see any dirt anyplace. Even if Nathaniel had cleaned the floor it wouldn't have been done so neatly. Mouse stood there in front of her boldly. "Mouse, did you do something bad?" The cat looked at her dumbfoundedly. "Hmm, I didn't think so," she said. So, the boy had lied to her about the cat defecating in the fern's soil. "How did he learn to lie?" she asked herself and her higher authority said that a boy did not need a model: he would use logic like a sophist. He would display his rationale like fireworks for dazzling and dazing one in darkness. He would dazzle and daze others into believing that such brevity of lights was a firm reality. Her higher authority said that using logic to one's advantage was an instinct no different than sucking and biting. Then she saw that the door was open.