What she liked was a woman's arms that showed defined rounds of shoulders and biceps, a hint of muscle, the same in thighs and legs, a body at the same time sleek and dynamic, restrained in its energy. She had known such a woman only once in her life, a girl she had met while a student at Wellesley, an athlete, but the girl had been a senior while she was only in her second year, and after their brief interlude the girl had graduated and vanished from her life. Now, nearly twenty years later, all she had of this girl was a memory burnished and reworked so many times, she was no longer certain what had been real and what was her fantasy.
Her name was Claudia, and as she sat near an open window looking out at the Piazza Barberini in Rome, her thoughts were not of the past but of the present. She could hear the shower running in the bathroom. She could hear the traffic in the square, the automobiles, an occasional shout from somewhere, sometimes even the faint sound of music from another open window. In the bathroom was a girl named Deirdre, a slender blonde with an angelic face, a former student in one of her classes whom she had met in Firenze and taken to her bed.
Now they were in Rome together. She enjoyed Deirdre immensely, but for Claudia it was merely a transient lust, while for Deirdre it was apparently something else. It had become evident to Claudia that Deirdre was completely infatuated with her. Deirdre talked constantly about love and romance, and about how she would do graduate work in one subject or another in order to be near Claudia, who could not imagine Deirdre as an interference in her settled life. But Claudia was torn because she'd had no lover in some time, no one as physically stimulating as Deirdre, no one who excited her as much, even if she felt no real love for Deirdre and even if Deirdre was not her physical ideal.
A quandary, Claudia thought, as another horn sounded down below in the square. She had to decide whether to remain in Italy another few weeks and return home with Deirdre as Deirdre expected, or break it off now and return home alone.
Claudia never liked personal quandaries; she liked to be on firm ground, to have a personal life with the certainty necessary to keep herself focused in her work.
At that moment two things happened: Some crazy Italian shouted a remark about Pagliacci out of a nearby window, and at the same moment Deirdre came gliding out of the bathroom wrapped in a large white towel, hair and feet wet and adoration in her eyes.
Claudia turned in her chair, turned from the window still attempting to translate in her head the Italian's words about Pagliacci, turned to Deirdre, looked at Deirdre's wet feet, then looked up at Deirdre's angelic face.
"The floor isn't clean," Claudia said.
Deirdre gave Claudia a conspiratorial smile, approached close enough so that her legs touched Claudia's knees, and said, "I thought about you in the shower."
"Oh?"
"Well, you know, I thought about you."
And she waited, wrapped the towel more tightly about her torso, and smiled again.
Claudia decided that whatever the Italian had said about Pagliacci was likely to be trivial. She had never liked that opera anyway. Too overtly emotional, as though the point was to get you to fall down in tears in front of the stage. Laugh, clown, laugh. Well, never mind that now, she had a confection here in front of her, an entire strawberry shortcake.
"Did you really think about me?" Claudia said, and before the girl could answer, Claudia had her hand inside the towel between Deirdre's legs, her hand quickly rising to Deirdre's source, where her fingers dipped into the wet to give Deirdre what Deirdre expected.
