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her breasts, andthat was nice, and she had thought that “intercourse,” the word she used before this new one, would be an extension of kissing, a loving transaction between two people, two people “in love.” But not so: now she is being “fucked,” and the word itself, its presence in her mind, makes her shudder with its ugliness, its dirt.
    Obviously, Smith enjoys what he does, or he wouldn’t do it so often, would he?
    Sometimes Daria wishes for Eliza, so that she could ask her—but ask her what? Use what words? “Eliza, do you like to ‘fuck’?” She has a feeling that Eliza does.
    But Daria is perfectly happy in Paris, really, and the city is so perfectly beautiful—although that September there is a heat wave, yellowing, bleaching, almost paralyzing the city—so happy, so beautiful, that she cries a great deal of the time.
    That perfect space, that vista from Notre Dame—the Tuileries Garden, then the Champs, wide and rising to the Arc—it is lovely enough to break your heart.
    And the slow dark Seine, its gray stone embankments, gray stone bridges, fishermen, alone; of course she cries.
    She and Smith are a perfect couple, too, beautiful and young and just-married Americans. A couple probably about to live happily ever after, with a lot of children and money and houses in the country.
    They are sitting on the terrace of the Flore, pretty, thin Daria in her sleeveless yellow linen, yellow-eyed (she can see herself in everyone else’s eyes), in the yellow September heat. And Smith, who is warm and flushed, very handsome today, is telling her about having come to Paris before, his boisterous undergraduate trip. The Tabu and the Méphisto, Bal Nègre. Juliette Greco. Pernod. “Well, I really didn’t know what had hit me,” Smith is boyishly saying. “I’ve always had a sort ofweakness for licorice, and we really lapped it up that night, like it was going out of style.”
    He pauses to light his pipe, as Daria thinks how handsome, how perfect he is. But what has he been talking about?
    “… West Indian dancing,” he says, and laughs. She must have lost her place.
    She feels like crying. But everything is perfect, isn’t it? “Smith?”

5 / Office Work
    Eliza’s income from the few stocks that Caleb Hamilton, her father, left amounted to about half of what she had estimated that, minimally, she and Catherine would need to live on; thus, she had had a series of part-time jobs. Economically a full-time job would have made more sense. She knew that; she was often broke, often worried. But working full-time left her much less time for Catherine—and no time at all for her own work, her secret poems.
    Josephine, who was visibly very well off indeed, sometimes sent checks—always welcome, a help; but Josephine felt that Eliza should support herself, and Eliza agreed. At thirty, she should certainly not be dependent on Josephine.
    Early on, Eliza was classified as a Medical Secretary, and so she remained, with one vaguely medical job after another. But it was strange, that series of medical settings; sometimes Eliza thought it another (probably futile) opposition to Josephine, for whom “scientific” was a nearly dirty word. “The scientific mind” was always uttered with Josephine’s most Bostonian scorn. In any case, locked into her Medical Secretary label, Eliza rather liked it there—in a furtive way she liked doctors, was excited by medicine.
    •  •  •
    From shortly after Daria’s wedding, that August, until late January, she worked in the research annex of a hospital, in a room labeled “Cardiac Data Retrieval.”
    Late January in San Francisco, which sometimes includes the week of Chinese New Year, can be and often is insane. Ferociously cold days of lashing rains are abruptly succeeded by sunny days of summer temperatures, when unnaturally bright grass grows suddenly in all the parks, as if overnight—when no one knows what to wear and everyone feels more than a little