Sandra had a great yearning to make love outdoors, an event she had never accomplished, although these days she found herself thinking about it frequently, and the desire seemed to be growing rather than waning. She was an efficient young woman, a university lecturer in medieval history, and she hated interfering obsessions. She had her work, after all, and this fixation on the outdoors was really so unlike her. And it might be so difficult to achieve. For one thing, she lived and worked in the city, and the "outdoors" at issue was not city outdoors but country outdoors. And the second thing, and perhaps more important, was that she had no lover. How could she rid herself of this obsession to make love outdoors if she had no lover? The fantasy did not concern masturbation, and in any case she had no car and the idea of renting a car and driving out to the country to finger herself under a tree seemed crazy.
Finally, one evening when her thoughts of the outdoors persisted strongly enough to make work impossible, Sandra put down Clybourne's _History of the Twelfth Century_ (which she considered superficial and perhaps not worth her time anyway), and she decided this very evening she would attack her "outdoor fantasy problem". She would find a lover (a woman, since she had never had lovers other than women), and somehow she would persuade her new lover, if not this evening then in the near future, persuade her that a tryst in the country would be a marvelous experience. Her fantasy accomplished, her obsession would end and her equilibrium would be restored.
Now that she had an agenda, Sandra quickly mobilized her "focused and organized" persona. She knew precisely the type of woman she wanted for this expedition, the type she always found attractive, although for the past several years she had avoided such woman like the proverbial plague since affairs with her "type" usually evolved into obsessive entanglements whose intensity quickly destroyed her equanimity and her ability to work. Sandra knew herself: start one of those dyke dramas and she'd be a wreck for six months. Her new lover had to be her type, all right, but there had to be an understanding of limits.
Sandra's erotic type had been set when she was quite young by a surreptitious reading of Mademoiselle Maupin. She had, in fact, cleverly torn the guts of the book out of its binding and glued a new binding from a destroyed copy of Pride and Prejudice, which she thought the most stupid story imaginable, with its collection of stupid women yearning to be married to stupid men. Concerning Mademoiselle Maupin, Sandra had never quite completely deciphered the mystery of why Madelaine de Maupin, posing as the handsome nobleman Theodore, had excited her to such feverish nightly masturbations. Oh, those reveries she had!
But mystery or no mystery, ever since her youth Sandra's ideal lover had been the archetypical androgynous woman, lean and gallant and with a heart-rending noble face, a woman who looked elegant in a suit, a woman who combined strength and beauty in a perfect rendition of Madelaine de Maupin posing as Theodore de Serannes. Slow down, Sandra thought. The present reverie made her want to abandon her agenda to simply lie down on her bed naked and masturbate. No, she would not yield. She was not the sort to become unfocused and disorganized once she set her mind to an objective.
Sandra knew a few things apart from the appearance of the woman she wanted, even if she hadn't met the woman yet. She knew what the woman would want in another woman, at least what the woman would want Sarah to look like. Sandra certainly had enough experience with such women to understand all of that.
Sandra hurried to begin her preparations for the evening. She had a hot shower, and then she carefully applied her make-up and chose her clothing. She knew the importance of clothes during an escapade like this one. The woman she desired would want her in feminine clothing, an announcement of attitude, a hint of sexual pleasures yet to be achieved. Sandra never wore such clothes at the university, since the result would be equivalent to dangling a strip of honey-coated paper before a swarm of male flies. But this evening she would have her adventure, in a place where other women arrived for their own adventures, and she would dress for it with perfection. Simple but perfect. An elegant black knit dress that clung to her body like a second skin to reveal her breasts and belly and hips and thighs. A thin gold necklace with a dangling Aztec design. Sheer black stockings and strappy high- heeled black sandals. The black would set off the blonde hair that framed her face. She knew she would look good. She expected she'd be a smash hit. She hurried to paint her nails before dressing.
At precisely ten o'clock, Sandra arrived at a place called Velvet, a dimly-lit chic little lesbian bar and dance-club that catered to professional women. Sandra hadn't visited this particular bar in several years, and she was quite content that no one recognized her. She perched herself on a stool at one end of the bar, ordered a Cosmo, and looked at the crowd.
Ten minutes passed. She sipped the Cosmo. Well, what did you expect? Sandra thought. The room had its quota of smashing young femmes, lovely twenty-year-olds who even if they were hardly beyond nubile seemed sophisticated to the point of ennui. Most of the women, however, were in their thirties, a mixed group of physical types, but all of them groomed and appropriate to the ambience. Another ten minutes. Where is my Maupin? Sandra thought. How long could she sit alone at the bar before appearing desolate? When would the sleek butch she wanted approach her?
