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    Queen Bee who must be that—always.
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    Chips of pain rattled my head. Inside my body an octopus seemed to be growing, restless, its tentacles pushing me into altered states. Hallucinating, in a dream, Talbot was carrying me to a divan. Bee’s voice, whispering bees on a summer’s day—rain (but how so? as outside was blaze of noon) pattered on the roof—a sound so intimate lulling me into half-sleep, half-dream. Feverishly I sank into pillows as Bee’s voice, soft, tender…
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    â€œLook Master, no doubt you didn’t insist she wax her mons as you do mine—see—the silky hairs swirl beguilingly as on a cherub’s head,” and she buried her face between my legs—“there’s a salty sweetness you might enjoy—her clit is rising slowly, but nicely—there, suck it, here—she’ll like that. No—notlike that—this”—she grabbed his finger and pushed it up into her pussy, pleased that I suffered seeing that it aroused him—I felt myself open as a flower toward the sun as Bee took Talbot’s hand, pushing his finger roughly up into me, causing me to cry out; dizziness overtook me as Bee’s face came closer, merged into mine as we became one. I pushed her away and kneeled down, took Talbot’s cock into my mouth as he stood, put his hands on either side of my head to steady it, whispering, “My darling, my love,” thrusting his cock, faster and faster, up and down my throat, but instead of satisfying himself he pulled out and lifted me back onto the chair to face him, spread my legs, gently, not to frighten, kneeling down, explored with tongue and finger, lingering as long as I desired—my voice cried, “I love you, Master, I love you I love you…” melting into quicksand as his voice came from a great distance, “Sweet Priss, I know, I know.”
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    W AS IT DAWN OR DUSK ? Seizing the cat in my arms I hurried away from the annex, back across the lawn into the kitchen, and filled a bowl with cottage cheese. All left now was to eat it, wait half an hour—get something in my stomach, the article in the New York Times said—and who was I to quibble? Since Talbot died I’d thought about it often. Wait half an hour—then take the ninety Seconals I have collected. Five minutes was all it would take—and sure enough—I’d be gone.
    How could I not have known that from the beginning he knew sex was distasteful to me—my joy, performance—lie, pretense, fraud. It wasn’t enough. But why did he stay? Why not leave me? How like his genius to come up with a solution so as not to let the hassles our separation would involve affect his sacred art—a Maîtresse with the infuriating name of Bee to replace what I could not give him. But the letters? Are they left in the box among mine, stamped with an invisible tête-bêche for me to find as rebuke? Or a farewell message that in spite of it all, because he chose one who resembled me, I was his true love? No—probably it simply amused him to create a paradox that might (to some) define a possible truth. His dictum, like Goethe’s, had been that the first and last task of genius is love of truth. But what truth? Was this Talbot’s—that when sexual boundaries no longer exist it frees us to integrate our personalities into the boundaries the world expects, the demands it imposes? This filled me with terror, for it would be a place of untamed impulse, in which unspeakable fantasies, perverse desires, possessive love, and all other egocentric passions of infancycontinue to exist unmodified by civilization or the process of growing up. And what of this Queen Bee in their castle high—Akeru—created by her Master— my Husband? What sort of woman could condone and be partner to this? Is she a chimera? A fire-breathing serpent, a snake with a lion’s body, a second head of an