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was?”
    “Rachel Wallace,” I said.
    “She some kind of queer or something?”
    “She’s a writer,” I said. “She’s a feminist. She’s gay. She’s not easy to scare.”
    The cop shook his head, “A goddamned lezzy,” he said to his partner. “We’ll be outside,” he said to me. They started up the stairs. Three steps up the young cop stopped and turned back to me. “You got a good punch,” he said. “You don’t see a lot of guys can hit that hard on a short jab.” Then he turned and went on up after his partner. Inside the room Rachel Wallace was sitting on a folding chair beside the lectern, her hands folded in her lap, her ankles crossed. The president was introducing her. On a table to the right of the lectern were maybe two dozen of Rachel Wallace’s books. I leaned against the wall to the right of the door in the back and looked at the audience. No one looked furtive. Not all of them looked awake. Linda Smith was standing next to me.
    “Nice booking,” I said to her.
    She shrugged. “It all helps,” she said. “Did you hit that man outside?”
    “Just once,” I said.
    “I wonder what she’ll say about that,” Linda Smith said.
    I shrugged.
    The president finished introducing Rachel and she stepped to the lectern. The audience clapped politely.
    “I am here,” Rachel said, “for the same reason I write. Because I have a truth to tell, and I will tell it.”
    I whispered to Linda Smith, “You think many of these people have read her books?”
    Linda shook her head. “Most of them just like to come out and look at a real live author.”
    “The word
woman
is derived from the Old English
wifmann
meaning ‘wife-person.’ The very noun by which our language designates us does so only in terms of men.”
    The audience looked on loyally and strained to understand. Looking at them, you’d have to guess that the majority of them couldn’t find any area where they could agree with her. At least a plurality probably couldn’t find an area where they understood what she was talking about. They were library friends, people who had liked to read all their lives, and liked it in the library and had a lot of free time on their hands. Under other circumstances they would have shot a lesbian on sight.
    “I am not here,” Rachel Wallace was saying, “to change your sexual preference. I am here only to say that sexual preference is not a legitimate basis for discriminatory practices, for maltreatment in the marketplace. I am here to say that a woman can be fulfilled without a husband and children, that a woman is not a breeding machine, that she need not be a slave to her family, a whore for her husband.”
    An elderly man in a gray sharkskin suit leaned over to his wife and whispered something. Her shoulders shook with silent laughter. A boy about four years old got up from his seat beside his grandmother and walked down the center aisle to sit on the floor in front and stare up at Rachel. In the very last row a fat woman in a purple dress read a copy of
Mademoiselle
.
    “How many books does this sell?” I whispered to Linda Smith.
    She shrugged. “There’s no way to know, really,” she whispered. “The theory is that exposure helps. The more the better. Big scenes like the
Today Show
, small ones like this. You try to blanket a given area.”
    “Are there any questions?” Rachel said. The audience stared at her. A man wearing white socks and bedroom slippers was asleep in the front row, right corner. In the silence the pages turning in
Mademoiselle
were loud. The woman didn’t seem to notice.
    “If not, then thank you very much.”
    Rachel stepped off the low platform past the small boy and walked down the center aisle toward Linda and me. Outside the hall there were multicolored small cookies on a table and a large coffee maker with a thumbprint near the spigot. Linda said to Rachel, “That was wonderful.”
    Rachel said, “Thank you.”
    The president of the Friends said, “Would