THREE
Eleanor hadn't always been into girls. She never felt she had exactly been 'born that way'. This was one reason why she had never felt comfortable among feminist groups. Maybe it was also because (unlike most of the hard-line feminists she knew) she had a scientific background, with a degree in physics and a masters in computer science. She had always been taught to doubt, to doubt everything, especially beliefs that were almost universally accepted.
The greatest influence on her life had been her supervisor at King's College, London, who had been an adherent of the great Austrian philosopher of science Karl Popper. Popper had argued that since there were no proofs except in logic and pure mathematics, what we had to do when attempting to determine whether a theory was true or not was to make every attempt to falsify it. If it failed any of these tests, then while the theory might be able to teach us something, and while it might be interesting, it could not be true.
Influenced by this way of thinking, he also eschewed the inductivist method, which purports to work its way from data to a conclusion, in favour of the deductivist method, which starts with a hypothesis and then sifts the data, at each stage applying the test of falsifiability so the hypothesis may be discarded in favour of another at any step. Part of his justification for his approach was that no one operates a true inductivist method, anyway, since, given the vast amount of data typically available for analysis, a decision on which data to work with must be made at an early stage, and this decision owes everything to deduction, in other words, the hypothesis which one chooses to bring to his or her study.
Although she attended a few women's group meetings at King's (both after and before her first lesbian encounter), she was driven up the wall by the ignorance she heard from speaker after speaker, as well as by the arrogance with which irrational views were cherished and promulgated. Ignorance and arrogance, she learned, while still in her early twenties, was a particularly powerful and potentially destructive cocktail.
She knew a tendency to be heterosexual or homosexual was unlikely to be genetic because of the evidence of identical twins. Even though they shared the same DNA (with minor mutations being possible - that was true), one twin would sometimes be straight and the other gay. So, she reflected, other factors, such as family, socialisation, education and one's own character and personality, were likely to play a part.
Growing up with an older brother and a younger sister to parents who were happy enough and who had recently celebrated their thirty-sixth wedding anniversary, it was posters of boys and men that she had stuck on her walls as a pre-teen and a teenager. Her first date had been with a boy, as well as her first kiss and her first make-out session. And, of course, she had lost her virginity to a boy (or rather a man), when she was 18.
She was still technically a schoolgirl, although she had finished her A-levels and was mainly involved in extracurricular activities, such as swimming, at which, with her tall build, she excelled, and a musical that the leavers had decided to stage. She met the man who was to become her first real lover through this production, although his involvement was only peripheral.
Adam had been hired at a nominal charge to help with the lighting. Even though they had most of the hardware they needed, the unexpected departure, halfway through the term, of the teacher who usually coordinated all the backstage work meant they needed someone to set up and operate all the kit. One of the boys in the production had a sister who used to go out with Adam, and the two of them had stayed in touch when the couple had broken up.
Although it was hardly love at first sight, Eleanor was attracted to Adam for the same reason that so many 18-year-old girls are attracted to older men. He was less gawky than the boys in her year, he seemed confident and assured, and he didn't get at all awkward around her. In fact, it was rather the opposite: he seemed to ignore her while plying his attentions on two of the other girls, each of whom were more extrovert - not to mention curvier - than Eleanor.
When he asked her out - for a drink at the pub and then maybe a nightcap at his place - she knew what she was signing up for if she accepted. She wasn't head over heels in love with him, for sure, but she thought that made it easier in many ways. She would be able to lose her virginity to someone who seemed a nice enough guy before she went off to university. This, she reasoned, would take the pressure off her when she got there and spent her first year in a student hall. She would no longer be an outsider looking in, as far as sex was concerned, and would be able to come over relaxed and knowing when the subject of boys came up.
The evening went about as well as she had been expecting. The only real surprise for her was Adam. She had been expecting him to be your usual dumb male, but he hadn't been like that at all. As the evening wore on, he seemed to tumble to her plans; so much so that she thought he might call the whole thing off. While they were still in the pub, he told her (rather than asked her) that it was her first time. She tried to laugh it off with as much sophistication as she could muster, but she feared the damage had been done.
His response was a genuine laugh - not at her so much as at her strategising. He told her that felt like the stag who had won the right to mate with the does. She was unable to stop herself blushing deeply, but this seemed to endear her to him, as he told her there'd be no more drinks, since it was important that she be as sober as possible when she took this important step. If it all sounds mechanical related now, it was something that Eleanor was very happy to hear at the time. To this day, she cherishes that evening she spent with Adam. If she had it all to do again, and she was walking the path of a straight woman, she knew she couldn't choose better than this Man (Man being what Adam means).
She did in fact meet Adam again a couple of times after her divorce, and he seemed to be unsurprised that she appeared to prefer the company of women. She sometimes wanted to ask him how it was that he understood more about her than she understood about herself, but she never did. She did come to realise, though, that a man's intuition could be every bit as powerful as a woman's; that they could match women for sensitivity. Hell! to think of all the insensitive women she had met in the years that followed her liaison with Adam.
But it was at college that things really began to change for Eleanor, even though she had next to nothing to do with the feminist/ militant lesbian crowd. As a science major, she took courses where three quarters of the students were male, and more than half of the female students were foreign, typically from China, India and Africa. It was through swimming that she met the person who was to change her life forever. Her name was Linda, and she was a dozen years older than Eleanor.
FOUR
