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stayed with their husbands in the inn, and the kids who lived in the cabins for the whole summer and did odd jobs. Maria had befriended two of the older women; we stopped at their table on the way in. I was introduced to the artistic wives and their husbands, obese, amiable: Lots of loud polite talk—the skinny boy at the next table smirked with a thin Voltairian sneer. Maria was teaching a life-drawing class and she promised Marge, one of the two ladies, some extra time this afternoon.
    The rest of the morning we spent on the porch in front of Maria’s cabin. She was wearing a floppy straw hat and a halter top. She was painting a still life—wine bottle, apple,Cinzano ashtray—and she laughed and said, “This is hard. Abstract Expressionism eliminated all this tiresome observation.”
    Although she was a Communist, Maria liked the songs of Noel Coward, Mabel Mercer, and Marlene Dietrich, and she played their records for me in the underfurnished rec room at the inn. She was the first to see the irony in this inconsistency, but her merely personal taste scarcely counted, she thought, when the question was one of a “scientific theory of history.” I quickly came to love the tumbling wit of the Coward lyrics and the quixotic charms of Mercer and Dietrich, two stylists without voices and with a range of about five notes. Coward’s rolled r’s and theatrical diction, joined to the gossip that he was “gay,” interested me. “Yes,” Maria said casually, “all slander, no doubt.”
    Closer to hand were Betts and Buddy, an ancient lesbian couple who lived in the most remote cabin at Solitaire. Just once I saw Buddy, who had been elected the local sheriff. I mistook her for a man, a short wide man, with grizzled, close-cropped hair and a swaggering walk. She was wearing her uniform and talking to the colony director, a much younger woman. I never saw Betts, but Maria often did, and loved describing her. “They’re terribly poor, but Betts must have been a debutante fifty years ago because she has such fussy, elegant manners. She never leaves the cabin and is always wearing silk lounging pajamas and angora high-heeled slippers, She draws and redraws her makeup. She smokes with a cigarette holder and languishes. We’re led to believe she’s ill, but of what no one is crude enough to ask. Buddy stops at the bar in town for a drink every evening to shoot the shit with the guys, but then hurries home to her better half. Isn’t it bizarre we find their marriage charming but we can’t endure the heterosexual original they’re aping?”
    As I listened to Maria, I absorbed each small wrenchingof convention without a blink. The teasingly affectionate portrait of two such eccentrics stunned me, though I never let on. I knew I might be as diseased as they were—in fact, I had no doubt of it—but I’d never aired my neurosis as these women did, and if it were found out, I’d expect to be run to ground, not gently chided. But as the records spun, as Noel Coward talked about life coming to Mrs. Wentworth Brewster at the Bar on the Piccola Marina, when Marlene confessed that men clustered round her like moths to a flame and if they burned their wings she was not to blame, I felt plunged into a piquant world where sins were winked at, where in fact a juicy peccadillo was the price of admission. We sat in shabby rattan chairs under a naked light bulb inadequately screened by a lantern-shaped basket whose weave was too wide and let our eyes stray over the Ping-Pong table, the game of Chinese checkers, and the dart board, while just outside more and more moths, drawn by the light, or Dietrich, beat against the screens. Maria walked about restlessly as though she only half-believed her own daring words.
    We drove into town in her station wagon. It felt strange to be chauffeured by Maria, and I registered this new awkwardness, which certainly I had not known last winter. But then I’d still been her little Dumpling, whereas now I