Why a whole sprawling postscript to this bête noire of the feminist movement? In fact, it turns into an inquiry about something a lot closer to home: a delusion of romance that I've clung to for far too long and that Paglia has helped me to "deconstruct." But of course it all started with the discovery that she is my unwitting ally.

Thus even as she exalts "wild masculine energy," "the glory of male lust," and "the pagan personae of athlete and warrior . . . whose ethic is candor, discipline, vigilance and valor" -- as she insists that a feminist dream of remaking men in a new mold, "a kind of shy, sensitive form," is in the interests of neither the human race nor of ordinary women -- in short, as she forsakes PC comfort and safety to defend an embattled masculinity, Paglia could well be promoting the risky sexual message of my own project. In fact, while explaining how her whole "romantic life" has been spent primarily with bisexual or heterosexual women (and lamenting the "hopelessness" of her own seduction efforts), Paglia confirms from afar, as it were, my reading of the (heterosexual) ur-myth of "the lady and the lusty smith."

"I fail to see why lesbians must pursue other lesbians -- "it's illogical," she says. "Straight women, with their radiant sexual aura, began it all." Which is just what my myth-reading tells me, only it doesn't associate that "radiant sexual aura" with a woman striving to project it.

I don't make that association, and I don't think most men, if they stop to think about it, do either. Especially in less fearful societies than ours, where sex is "in the air," in a passing glance between strangers on the street (and Paglia, who believes not in dampening lust but in "fanning the flame," thoroughly approves), I doubt that men are turned on exclusively or even primarily by her "vamps and tramps." I see an erotic counterpart to "male swagger" not just in the strut of the streetwalker but in the more contradictory demeanor of the "cocky virgin" -- an extreme of what might be called "provocative inaccessibility" and a figure that largely escapes Paglia's notice. (Britomart, whom Paglia admires enormously, comes closest to her, but Spenser's warrior maiden doesn't have the sexual swagger of my balled heroines; she never "taunts.")

In other words, Paglia never properly considers the role of "provocation and denial" in a game that can be very much in the interests of both women and the human race. Instead, taking "self-withholding" to be something of a class neurosis (a pathology akin to anorexia?), she says that "provocation and denial are built into the circuitry of the white middle-class girl," presumably the same (American) girl who projects "a soft, unfocused, help-me-please persona that, in adult life, is a recipe for disaster."

Yet Paglia also notes that "cockteasing is a universal reality" -- "part of women's merciless testing and cold-eyed comparison shopping for potential mates" -- and she complains bitterly, in an interview with Laura Hutton, that women "seem to be like citadels ... they close the door against you . . . and what I have had happen to me, okay, when girls and women have said to me, 'You think I'm leading you on?' when, in fact, her [sic] behavior had been, like for forty-eight hours, outrageously leading on! Outrageously provocative!"

So is it "citadels" or softness? Is the "Daddy's little girl" that Paglia despises also the outrageously provocative woman she desires? Probably not, but I wonder if she isn't talking about two forms of the same thing, which I make a point of disentangling (here, "A Fugitive Beast: puzzle of the unfallen pastoral myth") -- of distinguishing an infantilized, peculiarly American image of femininity from the robust folk femininity and downright taunting folk heroines with whom I have long identified. In traditional balladry, they are strong women who inspire strong lovemaking. And yes, the core ballad in my defense of the suspect erotic myth -- a ballad that were Paglia only familiar with it, she should surely approve for its glorification of male lust! -- is an exercise, on the grand scale, in provocation and denial.

I agree with Paglia on a trickier point that I'm not sure she means to make, for she never says just how straight women "began it all"; she lets "it all" remain wonderfully vague. But I would remind her that even the streetwalker was once a virgin (as even the conniving marquise, in Laclos' Liaisons Dangereuses, admits to once enjoying a simpler happiness and to feeling "sometimes sorry that we've been reduced to such expedients.") So I think I explore what Paglia refuses to explore when I argue (here, "The Taunter: 'right stuff' of the high folk pastoral") that it's "the lady" who really begins the whole suspect sexual action of "The Twa Magicians." The lady sitting "straight as the willow wand," at once both pure and "lustful," who sets this ballad of magical pursuit and capture in motion; "the lady" with her flaunted litany of insulting protest who calls forth "the lusty smith." Or so I concluded years ago, belatedly discovering Paglia and applauding her insights into the "dangerous, alluring courtship ritual of sex and seduction" of which "'no' has been, and always will be, a part" -- "a dangerous game in which the signals are not verbal but subliminal."

Like the "no" implicit in the lady's slim virgin body with its untouched and fiercely guarded "secret of life." For that's Paglia's language again. "Women have it. Men want it," she says in recognition of women's "dominance on the deepest, most important realm," although the mythical virgin lady, in applauded archetypal struggle, is clearly destined to "meet her match." And that's my borrowed erotic cliché. Inherently problematic, inherently "sexist," it sums up my sense of "The Twa Magicians" as high (hetero)sexual mystery, which appears, Paglia's vast scholarship and her kinship with the "woman on the street" notwithstanding, to be terra incognita for her -- my sense of a "game" that she never quite "gets."

To be sure, Paglia approves in principle the land of heterosexual love, describing it as "in sync with cosmic forces" even as she perceives herself to be violently out of sync with those very forces. She says she's "at war with nature," that is, at war with her own hormone-driven female nature which has impelled her to have sex with men on occasion but not, it would seem, to enjoy it very much and certainly not to enjoy any hint of the feelings implied in my erotic cliché. Other women may dream of "meeting their match" with the Harlequin romance equivalent of the "lusty smith"; but for her that meeting implies only distasteful female "submission." Far from strong lovemaking leading to love, "nature pushes me very strongly to mate," she says, "but then I wanna kill ... I hate this cloying intimacy." Or as she empathizes with the film of a mating female cat -- "like me, a solitary animal, and you can see that she's driven by those hormones to mate, to breed -- but she's angry at having to submit."

Now Paglia is quick to anger. She assails, loudly and entertainingly, a dizzying array of targets (victim feminism, French deconstructionists, women's studies, bouncy blondes...) exaggerating and personalizing the debate, too, in a way that cannot fail to raise academic hackles and surely cannot endear her to target subjects like "the Mad Hatter and her dumpy dormouse" 1 (Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin). But she also refuses to reduce complex issues like date rape to an ideological formula, and she appeals to many ordinary women who don't call commonsensical advice "blaming the victim." They may never have heard of MacKinnon or Dworkin, but mention Paglia and you may well get an enthusiastic "oh yes, I like her."

I keep on bumping into these "street fans" of Paglia, who, not surprisingly, often have strong working-class roots. They share her distrust of liberal doctrines like "social constructionism" (still much preached in regard to the total social construction of gender2) and her impatience with a world of middle-class privilege that feminists often invoke as if everyone lived or ought to live in it, her sympathy with those "really masculine men" 3 who exclude themselves from the environment generating most of the rhetoric, her resentment at attempts to impose white-collar standards of decorum on the blue-collar workplace3, her worry about "this arrogance that masculinity isn't something we need anymore" 1... And they surely applaud her reaction to Ivy League hecklers:

As I watched a half-dozen pampered, white middle-class girls, their smooth, plump cheeks contorted with rage, shriek at me about rape, I had two thoughts. First, American is failing its young women; these are infantile personalities, emotionally and intellectually undeveloped. Second, it's not rape they're screaming about. Rape is simply a symbol of the horrors and mysteries of the body, which their education vvnever deals with or even acknowledges. It was a Blakean epiphany; I suddenly saw the fear and despair of the lost... Feminism had constructed a spectral hell that these girls inhabited; it was their entire cultural world, a godless new religion of fury and fanaticism.

(from "No Law in the Arena," Vamps and Tramps)

Rape (rhetoric) as a symbol for the horrors and mysteries of the body? I can well believe Paglia's report that "it is affluent, upper middle-class students who most spout the party line -- as if the grisly hyper-emotionalism of feminist rhetoric satisfies their hunger for meaningful experience." She calls them "our daughters of privilege," embracing sexual oppression in Take Back the Night marches across the nation (and getting the lion's share of public rape center monies6) even as a privileged professional class now embraces happy working motherhood (and the "party line" today would seem to mean "acting as a cheerleader for women's participation in the workplace, no matter how mean her job or how difficult her family burden" 7). There's a certain self-indulgence in this feminist "sisterhood" (by contrast, our first feminists didn't see themselves as primary victims), and it shows in the way, according to Paglia, feminism turns a wilfully blind eye to issues of class and nature in any discussion of sexuality. Refusing to do so -- refusing, that is, to dismiss as infinitely malleable our sexual natures or as unimportant our differences of experience and opportunity -- she stands squarely against the ideologues. Here she is squarely on the side of the woman on the street.

Yet in her "horrors and mysteries of the body" I hear echoes of a "war with nature" and the "daemonic ugliness of nature" setting Paglia apart from the great mass of women (who may well be "at war" with their procreative capacities, or even more, with their weight, but who are basically still at home in their female sexual nature). I hear these disturbing echoes of a distinctly non-populist Paglia, as I also note, in her personal reflections on the "game of sex," a confusing mix of principle and proclivity, disapproval and ineptitude:

"I don't believe in playing games, and that's one of my problems. I think that sex is a game -- and I have a great trouble flirting and playing the game .... I'm absolutely simple -- simplistic even... I think that my error has been maybe to, like, put too much intimacy into the sex connection. You know, maybe I should be treating it more vcerebrally, more abstractly... See, I don't exploit people. I'm terrible at that... there's a self-withholding going on [in sexual contact] that I'm not capable of... I think I just show too much."

(from a conversation with Bruce Benderson, Vamps and Tramps)

No, no, Camille, it's just that as the eternal butt of the game, you have no real feeling for it! -- only an abstract appreciation for heterosexual lovemaking as the stuff of cosmic myth on the one hand, and on the other, a sense of deep personal injury, indeed of double injury.

"Angry," she says, "at having to submit," Paglia evidently equates the mating "to which nature pushes me" with hateful sexual submission. She identifies with a raped female animal at the close of any such mating with a man; but she also identifies (vis a vis other women) with a whole class of testosterone-driven young men, "tormented," as she herself is, by "signals women don't even know they're sending out." So "the lust that men have for women, the rage . . . and the way it can turn into rape" is something she can "absolutely . . . totally understand." Or as she puts it in a nutshell, "I see with the eyes of the rapist."

Now many men may reject Paglia's "rapist" vision of them (especially as it entails reveling in female helplessness and even inertness!) Still, she is surely right that "male sexual functioning does not depend on female response" or (as I would put it) that you cannot depend upon a man to suddenly lose interest in you just because you are suddenly dead set on resisting him! Lust can turn to rape or would-be rape (see here). So reality trumps ideology in my own "pastoral misadventure," as it surely trumps ideology in the much more erotic "staircase scene" from Gone with the Wind, where maverick feminist Christina Sommers found colleagues locked into their own ideologically rapist vision. In a lighthearted comment that was also meant as a serious warning to "out of touch" feminist philosophers, she tried to remind them of popular female feeling on the subject. "Many women continue to enjoy the sight of Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett O'Hara up the stairs to a fate undreamt of in feminist philosophy," she wrote, and the Society for Women in Philosophy responded.

SWIP felt the need to react formally to my heresy and arranged a meeting at which the feminist philosopher Marilyn Friedman read a paper showing once and for all how my views were treasonable to women.

Friedman told the overflow audience that she was stunned by my flippant reaction to Rhett's rape of Scarlett. For in her eyes there was no doubt whatsoever that Rhett raped Scarlett that night. Indeed, Friedman compared Rhett Butler to the psychopathic murderer/rapist Richard Speck.

I suggested to the audience that feminist philosophers ought to reflect on the distinction between being raped and being "ravished." It is a critical distinction -- quite clear to the millions of women who read romance fiction. It is behind the commonsense conviction that Rhett Butler is in no way akin to Richard Speck. The SWIP audience stared at me in angry incomprehension.

I had crossed a divide. For if feminism is a religion, Rhett Butler is its devil. My casual acceptance of women who find Rhett Butler so attractive was not to be forgiven. I never recovered my reputation as a reliable member of the sisterhood.

(from a Bradley lecture delivered at the American Enterprise Institute, Sept. 12, 1994)

Now Paglia admires Sommers as a fellow heretic and clearly doesn't confuse real rape (which she pithily describes as getting "beat up") with the erotic high point of popular women's Romance. Nor is there any confusion in her mind between these fuzzy fantasies in which other (more feebleminded?) women delight and the harder-edged, real rape fantasies, shown in movies like "A Clockwork Orange" and aping ugly sexual violence much too closely to be anything but a turn-off for most women, that she shares with at least some men. Paglia notes that both kinds of fantasy subvert feminist notions of how we ought to think and feel. Yet it is only for these "men's" rape fantasies that she claims any real empathy (which is not to say that she condones their enactment!). In short, she understands focused male savagery, even the "fun element" and "mad, infectious delirium" of gang rape, as it isn't at all clear she understands those "women who find Rhett Butler so attractive."

Paglia knows these women exist in staggering numbers; she knows they do not revel in rape, but I wonder if she fully understands that "critical distinction" between rape and "ravishment" or (shifting our attention to female energy or lack thereof) between mechanical sexual "submission" and a joyous, unpredictable "melting." Blinkered in her own "rapist vision," Paglia pays no heed to this side of the action; for her it is as if, in spirit, all sex were indeed rape, and she only wishes she were on the "rapist" end of it -- as if distinctions on the other side did not exist or did not matter. For me, they are key.

To be sure, my neat distinctions do not always hold. As Laclos shows in Liaisons Dangereuses (and de Valmont's rape/seduction of the innocent Cecile Volanges), there is such a thing as being betrayed by your own body. Sex is a messy arena (and it's no help to be a ninny like Cecile!). So I wondered myself, long after parting on terms of open emnity from the man who so disastrously misread me, just how I would have felt had he prevailed; indeed I "talked" myself, upon dreamy self-reflection, into a thoroughly erotic fantasy -- a "what if" that bore as little emotional likeness to the actual event as erotic "replays" of my teenage museum encounter with a "pushy old man" bore to that embarrassing nonevent.

So fantasy plays fast and loose with sexual memory. And I'm obviously oversimplifying on the score of sexual fantasy too. Paglia applauds Nancy Friday for exploring, in My Secret Garden, a rich terrain of female sexual fantasy confounding feminist notions of how we ought to think and feel -- indeed defying any spot judgment, as the full range of male fantasy doubtless does too. Still, men's and women's "rape fantasies" do show suggestively different public faces. And the SWIP ideologues' "angry incomprehension" with the public face of a popular female fantasy reminds me of Paglia's reaction to the whole "game" of sex. Hers, to be sure, is a more interesting, intensely personal reaction: where they see a whole class of women submitting to the "rapist" Rhett Butler, Paglia sees herself "having to submit" essentially to any man with whom "nature impels her" to mate. And she's angry too, though I cannot but wonder if it isn't as much at the "treason" of her own female body (at her own "meltdown"?) as at hateful man. Just what is it that she wants to kill?

Paglia evidently does see with the eyes of the rapist or rapist manqué (as I still see with the eyes of the cocky virgin), does find that film of a mating female cat to be a template for her own sexuality. But how odd that her experience should be at once so foreign to me, and so familiar! For I have a combative nature too, a taste for clearcut, energizing conflict and a distrust, nay a disdain, for sneaky "feminine wiles." And I too identify with female cats; indeed as a child (after my first, supposedly male, kitten proved female) I spent a lot of time studying them -- not just looking under their tails but spying on what I finally decided were courting cats and trying to figure out what all that yowling and chasing meant. I never saw the film to which Paglia refers and don't altogether trust the conclusion commonly drawn from it (the argument that female cats couldn't enjoy sex because "with cats it's so violent" plays just a little too neatly into the conscience of cat owners "who care," and it doesn't quite square with vmy own observations of some flagrantly provocative female cats either!). In any event, I decided that sex was as mysterious a matter for cats as it was for people, something I could only keep wondering about.

And at 69 I am still wondering. About the middle-class sexual neurosis, as Paglia apparently sees it, of "provocation and denial," about erotic fantasy and the "illusion" as she puts it (not unsympathetically) of love. In short, about Hal and me.

Our whole history, I suppose, could be described as an exercise in provocation and denial that didn't work -- or perhaps I should say that it worked only too well in a stuttering, delusional way. Hal calls ours a "beautiful romance," only regretting that he didn't find the right words to win me almost fifty years ago when we both were unattached. He has great faith in words, this man with the clumpy feet and gravelly voice who once stuck to me "like a cockleburr" (said my mother), who followed me to Europe and kept asking me to marry him and trying to argue me into bed, and who never knew how close he came to it, that awful year after my brother drowned, on what I had decreed would be our "last date."

What was the point of going on anyway? I didn't love him and obviously never would. He got under my skin, and I sometimes thought he understood me better than I did myself, but never, ever, would he sweep me off my feet; he was just too resistible, too full of argument instead of action, too opposed on principle to "sweeping" anyone "off her feet." And having settled that, I could listen to Hal one last time and not feel quite so prickly, feel indeed as if we were already lovers except for a bit of flesh that meant a promise to me -- one I couldn't honestly give, though it sent a shock wave through my whole body when he took my hand, though suddenly, desperately, I wanted to plunge on with real lovemaking. "Come back with me, Jeanie," he pleaded, and I hedged with a weaselly half-promise: if ever I did, it would be "for good."

It wouldn't have worked, I tell myself; we'd probably have made as unhappy a marriage as the one I shortly embarked upon. A stormier marriage for sure, even if I'm pretty damn sure that we wouldn't have argued any more about sex. You "get it out of your system," I remember being told by an advocate of "early experience" and thinking, much later, how dead wrong he was. Clearly I, at least, had reason for the "self-withholding" that Paglia decries; I could indeed be swayed to wildly irrational, total body commitment. And had Hal succeeded in making love to me, had he and I made the baby I so desperately and dumbly wanted to make? I suspect that his "beautiful romance" would have been the first casualty. For babies cost money; they make messy diapers; they cry at inconvenient times. And it isn't just babies who bring romance down to earth (like husbands, of course, they enter not at all into the fin amor of courtly romance); when I visited Hal after he finally married someone else, I found myself sympathizing with the woman who had to live with his highminded babble and whose principal fault, he sometimes suggested, came down to the fact that she wasn't his "dream."

And I still was? Why should I care anyway? But to the dashing TA with whom I shortly did plunge on to love-and-babymaking, to a flood of wild feeling and a temporary smothering of all doubt, I gave no whole promise either. "A reluctant bride" Alec once called me, and I soon became an escape artist of a wife. When our first big bash (helped by his toastmaster stories of our year abroad?) drew to an early close, I remember longing to follow our student friends out the door to an impromptu "real party." Indeed, after Alec fell asleep, I crept out of bed into the cold Chicago night and found a lit basement apartment window where I crouched for a long time, listening to the murmur of voices within (Hal's!) and hoping to be discovered but never daring to press the buzzer in the lobby. For how could I ever explain myself? What could I say that wouldn't be a confession that I'd made a ghastly mistake, wouldn't be a public slap at the father of my sleeping child? So in the end I walked home and crept back into bed.

That was my way, then: running off to the woods or to folk festivals, having babies and baking bread and digging in the garden, and all the while hiding behind a wall of hurt silence. For where Hal and I had argued everything under the sun (and arguing, with Hal, led to kissing), my rare arguments with Alec had a way of turning cold and ugly, to tears on my part and professorial comment, about "inappropriate" behavior perhaps or mental "sickness," on his. Were my spontaneous, middle-of-the-night tears also a sign of sickness? For Alec, they were clearly a turn-off, as his own sulking silence (his hurt?) was for me. "Your father would have blown sky-high," said my mother when I escaped for seven weeks to France -- and wasn't that just what I was trying to provoke? Some action for a change.

So there was fertile ground for fantasy from the start, and perhaps from the start for a particularly unhelpful one: the sneaky Tristan and Isolde story that Hal so likes to imagine himself (well, him and me) enacting. It's a convenient tale for him to admire since, like all tales of fin amor, it assumes the fine sentiment to be extramarital and to mean a lot of ducking and weaving. But it isn't just the sneakiness of the Triston story that bothers me. In Gottfried von Strassburg's most artful telling of the tale, it's the otherworldliness of "noble hearts" everywhere that's held up for applause -- those edele Herzen who cultivate an expanded Grotto of Love in their own fine feeling, divorcing an ideal of love from the messiness of human life. And I find that beautiful ideal, at least as a model for earthly human love, truly off-putting.

Now Paglia isn't slamming the imaginative construct of love when she calls it an "illusion," nor, I think, is she necessarily disagreeing with my mother's comment that every marriage needs a "touch of romance." Being "in love" is clearly an ephemeral madness, and yet the "illusion of love" bears nurturing. It can weather the rough and tumble of a shared life like my parents,' embedding itself in small actions to the end of life itself, or a hothouse plant in the grotto of fevered imagination, it can grow as did this "beautiful romance" of Hal and mine. Out of time and out of place ("the teenagers" they called us in Alaska) and yes, it had became mine too on those long night walks I took so as not to disturb Alec's precious "work" (in the university "rat race," as he called it in conversation with colleagues), not to be treated as a bothersome mental case -- as I cried and cried and did not know in the end whether I was crying for a drowned brother or a never found lover.

Marrying Hal might well have been a disaster, but at least it would have been real. Not like this stupid brooding over what didn't happen when it "should" or at least could have happened. Not like my repentant fantasies of Hal taking my hand and holding me fast -- as at epic intervals over the years he did take my hand and confess that he still loved me, and very, very belatedly (his small daughter coming along on that early morning Newport Festival walk must have delayed things by a decade!) did indeed "bed" me in a Parisian park when he was overtired and overworked and full of apologies for not "being a better lover." Though by then it almost didn't matter. I was already constructing a romantic illusion that required from Hal only occasional crumbs of (undying) love -- already singing "The Loyal Lover" and throwing myself into its soppy refrain of "I love my love and I love my love because my love loves me", already regretting how I'd once grumpily told him, "I'm not a jukebox."

How different from Alec, whose only response, when I came home from Marlington W. Va. with a prize in mountain music, was "there couldn't have been much competition"! But we hadn't met since my face had hit the dashboard of the family car; so going over to France at forty to "perfect my French" and incidentally seeing Hal (who was now living in Paris with his wife and three children while completing a doctorate at the Sorbonne) felt like a huge risk. I walked three times round the block, working up my courage to knock at 63 rue Jean-Jaurès and finally knocking on the door only because at close to midnight I really had no place else to go. And it was okay. "Jean," he said, looking straight at me and, glory be, not flinching. I needn't have worried, I suppose; Frenchmen hadn't exactly been flinching either. But I had worried. Hal was my link to an older, blyther me, to someone I wasn't sure even existed anymore. It mattered that he should still know her. And still love her? Yes, in a stuttering, memory-stuck way, his love had become a lynchpin of my life.

And the craziest part of it all was that the longer our romance sputtered on, the more it confirmed my reluctance to marry my loyal lover (well, loyal-in-his-heart) in the first place. For even as I felt more and more tied to him, the less and less of a man he seemed. More like a little boy really, building chivalric castles in the air while cheating (apparently with a whole string of Unitarian ladies!) on his workaday wife, cheating on her but unable to stand up to her in the crunch (i.e., when she found out, from a telephone call to Europe, about me) -- indeed, after once indignantly dismissing the talk that inviting me to his wife's turf had provoked (at "Camp Harmony" yet!) and calling the talkers, i.e., the would-be enforcers of an oppressive social code, "camp Nazis," he finally answered the question she posed on his return from Europe, "why did you come back?" with a cotton wool abdication of wilful choice. "It was the thing to do."

Now in twenty-four years of marriage I often thought how much easier it would be to leave a thoroughly blamable husband -- a drunkard, say, or a wifebeater -- than sober, responsible Alec. And how much simpler had Hal been the wilful deceiver instead of this "gentle soul" (as a friend says) who saw no reason why our romance should "hurt anyone" and who took such pride introducing me to colleagues on that ill-fated trip to Europe "without lying." As if his evasive truthtelling (like Isolde's tricky "oathkeeping") resolved anything! Indeed Hal's later insistance that "it's true; you are my ski buddy from Seattle" was all the more maddening for its sincerity. How much more appealing the childish insistance on a deceptive, literal truth in the old ballads (like "Clerk Saunders" telling his love to tie a napkin over her eyes "that you may swear and save your aith ye saw me not since late yestreen") -- a truthtelling aimed at deceiving others, where Hal, it seemed to me, was in the end only deceiving himself.

So I fumed, listening to his side of a stormy transatlantic phone conversation a week later (after his Swiss-resident daughter, to his dismay and my intense relief, "betrayed" us to her mother). "I didn't want to upset you," he said, and I don't know if I heard a squawk of outrage on the other end of the line or only imagined it. Because I was outraged too, hearing the very excuse that he'd given for reneging on his promise to me. "Tell her," I'd said before we left, and he'd said that he would -- and then explained why he hadn't with that noble excuse for cowardice: "I didn't want to upset her." He added that it wasn't the "right time," which always seems to have been some unrecoverable "if only" moment from the past." If only his company had sent him to Seattle years earlier; if only I'd issued a clear call to action then ("hey, I'm free!") instead of the guardedly offhand letter I wrote after divorcing Alec; if only I'd been there when he was considering divorce himself, seeking solace in other women's arms and "fantasizing," he says, about meeting up with me again. . .

And now I hear, "if it were ten years ago . . ."; If only, that is, I hadn't "given up on him" in the the blowup that followed our trip to Europe; if only I'd followed the lead of my energetic ballad heroines like the "Turkish lady" -- flown down and boldly claimed this man who'd expected his wife to fade away into the woodwork and whose only response to a barrage of tears was to "hunker down" for months of marriage counseling (with the sole aim, it seemed, of "calming Mara") He couldn't act, couldn't even pick up the phone, and he answered all efforts to lure him out with a highmindedness that bordered on insult. "Maybe we should just stop talking," I finally said after he hoped I'd be "valued in my fetching new garment" (a nightgown, as I thought my own e-mail made clear) "whomever I wore it for"; and the romance took another long, timewasting hit.

But I shouldn't have given up on him, Hal says, for he turns out not to have quite given up on me, buying with me "in mind" a woodsy house that Mara hates, but of course not telling me a thing about it. In fact I didn't learn about his whole dual-track life (with a now amicably distanced wife) until I was feebleminded enough not just to resume the "beautiful romance" (and yes, that was my initiative) but to start taking it seriously -- whispering hopes I'd never seriously entertained before into a small granddaughter's ear, caroling with quixotic enthusiasm, "Let another wedding be made ready/ Another wedding there shall be . . ." And then, of course, is when I hear, "if it were ten years ago . . ."

To be sure, for years I'd colluded in the deception. "Tell her," I'd said, and never made the words stick. For however uncomfortable I'd long felt, wondering whether Mara was blind to what others saw at a glance, whether she didn't want to know or simply didn't care (as Hal said, on strictly "logical" grounds, she shouldn't), I'd never pushed him to cut free; and to think that, on my account, he might actually do so was scary stuff. Being Hal's "dream," with serial honeymooning in Alaska or Sun Valley or Europe, was one thing, marrying him quite another. Besides, why force the issue now that he'd arranged his life with this huge untended space in it? Not just the distant house that Mara rarely saw (near the workplace she rarely visited) but neighbors who'd never met her (and rarely him): artisans and winegrowere who gave cook-outs with ostrich meat on the grill and who welcomed us with open arms, smiling at the ski-buddy-from-Seattle story and finding that we'd known each other for so long "incredibly romantic."

It was a lovely welcoming space, and not just for play On Hal's computer I could work on my messy website, and in bouts of floor-to-ceiling housekeeping I quickly filled his car with trash (for collection a hundred miles away!). Maybe, just maybe, I thought, this business of "weaving our lives together" might work. So why did I kill it? Why was I fool enough to insist that Hal "level with Mara" if he ever wanted to see me or talk to me again? Why didn't I indulge his reluctance to face painful conflict? (Hers too, my mother concluded ten years ago; "they're two of a kind," she said).

Now I could wax ethical here about holding my head high, wanting a man and not a mouse, wanting Hal to feel more of a man -- all the things I repeated to myself on the sleepless night before my birthday, weeks after Mara's second deluge of tears and Hal's second "hunkering down," when I fired off a call to action that backfired. "Thank you" Mara e-mailed back, while Hal answered, "do what you damn please" to the suggestion that I fly down and resolve, one way or another, a situation "without dignity or honor for any of us." And I meant the fine sentiments. It felt damn good as I sang my way down the ski slopes (before receiving any reply, of course!) to think that I was making something clear and unambiguous happen at last -- just the opposite from the slimy way I'd felt overhearing Hal's complicated phone excuse for not coming home at the usual end of the week to Mara. "Ho la hi, ho la ho"; how refreshing to cut loose from that whole moral quagmire, and how marvelously empowering!

But Paglia suggests a more visceral motive.

"Some women like to flirt with danger because there is a sizzle in it," she says, going on to talk of the "sizzle of hot sex" as a reason why women might choose to stay in a violent relationship. And suddenly this misinterpreter of my deepest sexual self is speaking for me again. Not, to be sure, as a battered woman in a violent relationship -- say rather a balked woman, in an insistently "gentle" one? But for a brief time before I was put on hold again, there was indeed a sexual payoff to the risky ultimatum suggested by a tough-minded daughter, a payoff to the mere thought of it. "Of course it's a risk, Mother; you may lose him, you know," she said at the end of our long phone counseling session; and her words struck like a blow to the pit of my stomach. No, I didn't know; it didn't seem even remotely likely -- but in an instant, losing Hal had become a gutwrenchingly real possibility, a danger I couldn't resist running.

And yes, there was an immediate, heightened erotic effect, which, on an ambulance ride to the hospital for pneumonia five months later, merged confusedly and disconcertingly with physical illness. "How do you feel now?" the medics asked, and in the interest of full medical disclosure I tried to tell them -- to describe a muscular aching for the man I'd been stupidly trying to call (as if from a thousand miles away he could do anything!), the man whose presence I craved and yet whose physical being seemed if not irrelevant at least hugely disproportionate to my erotic response. That disproportion had stuck me most forcibly when Hal and I watched the film "Unfaithful" and I saw nothing of my aging lover in the irresistible young Frenchman who provokes a steamy sex scene which is also a scene of rare (or rarely filmed) erotic power. But in Diane Lane's quivering body, oh my gosh, there I was at the very heart of it! A triumph of the cinema, and it underscored a triumph of my own imagining: that I'd made myself so shakingly vulnerable to the very antithesis of sexy "Paul Martel."

Not that I wanted Hal to be the screen hunk (whom, in fact, I was soon actively disliking and whose name translates, appropriately enough, to "hammer"). Surely Hal had never been young in that ruthlessly self-absorbed way! And yet, as I gaze into an old snapshot of him and me cavorting on the green fifty years ago, I wonder wistfully if he mightn't once have been a more compelling lover. More of a lover and less of a little boy intoning words of love at precisely the wrong moment (as if to reassure himself of their perfect truth? to talk himself back into lost time?) More of that man who has just scooped me into his arms and is looking at me in an oddly masterful way . . . and less of an aged Huck Finn as he appears at his wife's side on the public occasion of his own planning almost fifty years later ("she'll learn to accept you," he says) where she attacks me at the coffee urn and he stands there stunned . . . or as he appears, then, sitting beside her, tending the recording equipment with his legs crossed at the ankle, well below the pants that he says she doesn't buy too short and too tight on purpose ("she picks up bargains"). The picture doesn't surprise me, nor does the little boy retreat to e-mail, first with a petulant message that staying with a wife who clearly won't ever accept me means "unconditional surrender" and then a succession of suspenseful news bytes: "she's coming up to make soup," "she's acting much nicer" . . . A "moderator," called in to help Mara "get in touch with her feelings," is also set up for a phone interview with me. Am I aware of Hal's "character defects?" she asks, or as a friend of my daughter puts it, "are you sure you want this guy?"

How embarrassing to admit that I did! And how galling that he could use my own brave words against me, salving his tender conscience with the argument that I didn't want him after all, I couldn't want him after he "failed the test." (Surely I couldn't want a man so prone to crumple!) So he babbled of "enchantment," but of course, in the end, he has chosen Mara over me, the commonsensical comforts of marriage to a "good buddy" and rock solid folk musician over risky romance to a loose canon like me. At least, that's how I hear "she needs me" -- surely a noble euphemism for how, as I once argued oh-so-reasonably on her behalf, he needs her.

Paglia puts it more brutally. "Husbands shrink," she says, and at Hal's age, "nursing" clearly trumps sex. "How true!" I might once have said to that cynical bit of folk wisdom, how true especially for Hal . . . except that at last sighting he did not look as if he had made the sensible, "shrunken" choice. He looked the dashing stranger, whom I almost didn't recognize under the jaunty Western hat (since when has he worn one of those?), and he sounded so goddamn pleased with himself, touring with Mara's folk group -- pleased and at peace with himself -- so I can well believe the grapevine report on his marriage. It is, I am told, "much revived." And that galls too. Because I pushed them into it. With that damnfool ultimatum, I made them take their marriage seriously even as I pushed myself into unwilled, total body commitment to an illusion? to a man who no longer exists and perhaps never did, a man I only imagined into being out of my own crying need to be held? How banal! -- I really should throw that old photograph away.

But I thank Paglia for explaining my urge to raise the sexual stakes so suicidally late in the game. "Tu aimes frôler le feu," I was told thirty years ago in France; so clearly Paglia has it right. I do like to flirt with fire; I made the gamble; I wanted the danger. And now, well, it's nice to have made sense of the whole mess, comforting to know why I did what I did. I only wish it were warmer comfort. And it does seem a terrible waste . . .