"And the dog?" "Growing more quickly. He shits a lot, too. Thanks for asking. What do you want?" She smiled bashfully as if she were an errant child whose laziness or mischievousness had been exposed. She noted the peculiarity of her erroneous reaction: a fixated response that she had comported in girlhood. Back then it had always preceded an impetus to be diligent so that she might propitiate a teacher's wrath and regain favor with one of those rare individuals whom she admired in her more credulous days. "I hate how this ended," she suddenly confessed in womanly neediness. "I don't know why you just pulled out like that." "Pulled out like what? I proposed and you said no, so that was it. I decided I needed a wife who would be supportive and that you were right all along: it wasn't you." "I think I was supportive." "Why would you think that? You were never interested in any of my plans--at least not in the later stage of things. Maybe you just aren't interested in the business aspects of life, although I at least thought you were about selling those paintings of yours--at least at the beginning of knowing you. Maybe nobody changes. It is just what we know of them at different stages of expressing themselves--that changes. Just ideas of people at different stages...ideas changing." She now felt that being here had not been such a mistake after all. Even though she repudiated superstition in all of it derivative forms from anthropomorphism to destined fate still she couldn't help but feel that she was meant to be here hearing his profound utterances and perceiving him anew. "Yes, how can it be anything else? An individual is too large. So what were these ideas of yours about me in my many stages?" She really meant, "...my many stages as perceived by you in your stages" but she cut it short. "I don't know. At the time I admired your ability to rise up in the world...the business savvy to do that, and how people were interested in your strangeness. Before that I thought of you as a caring mother and before that -- " "A disgusting whore?" "No, not disgusting." "Why not?" "I liked it -- the thought of you with many men. I imagined the smell of your skin afterwards ...I don't know. It was sexy." "Hmm," she thought, "latent homosexuality. His river is not damned for it flows both ways." She spoke, "What am I now -- this sexy art mom weirdo -- this idea of yours now at this stage?" "I don't know that I have one. I don't know who you are now." "No, you don't know who you are being without a woman all these months. Men need women, you know." The words belied the womanly slime oozing within her. "They put on women. Just like you needing symbols of importance as that attachZ case of yours, those flashing appointments in that PDA of yours, and that cellular telephone of yours. If you did not have money and things to flash at others how different would you be from any naked Etruscan savage apart from not being dead and living in America?"