43. The truth. part 1.

Nan sat at the ready, with her notebook. Today she hadn't brought the binder.

"Once," he began, "there was a woman. She was wanton, lustful."

Today, the two young men from the first day were there, and they had brought a number of their friends. The old woman was back, with her bag, now drooping, emptied of its cargo of crumpled paper, and of course the old vagrant was in his usual spot. About a dozen other people were gathered, including the skateboarder from the day before.

Nan wondered what they were expecting. There were more of them today, so many more.

"I say it this way not because I have judged her," he continued. "You see, I was her." A pause while the listeners absorbed this.

"To her, 'lust' was a word that had a taste, not a bad one or good one, but a strong one. 'Wanton' was a word that implied nothing other than a predisposition, a particular way a mind and a body had woven themselves together. The sensations of physical pleasure were delicious to her. They gave her life. Her body was exquisite, a thing she knew without vanity, the way she knew that the sky is blue, and she loved more than anything to give it to another, and to take another in return."

The people watched in fascination. The young men frowned, but were intrigued. The old woman watched impassively, patiently.

"Her desires brought her sometimes into places of danger. She cared nothing for what others thought of her, but it was the things they thought of themselves which created a cloak of shame around the giving of one body to another, a mist of secrecy and silence around this pleasure. She took the risks.

"More than anything, the censure she received (which was open desire behind a door or within a room) puzzled her.

"One day, she had occasion to look into a mirror.

"Now, mirrors are puzzling things. They are physical objects, of course. But it's that thin stratum of a reflective material that gives the mirror its character. Sometimes there are flaws and distortions in the glass or upon the reflector, and so each mirror has its own personality a bit like a person, but it's the idea of reflection that a mirror embodies for us.

"And this woman--she'd seen her reflection before, of course, but her sense of herself had come from her interior, shaped by the warmth of the moving currents beneath her sensitive skin and within her shapely body. But here she was looking at herself, from the outside, for this one time, for the first time.

"Her reflection in this particular mirror was ugly and wan. She had not slept, after a night of moving along narrow streets in search of what she wanted in places she knew it was available. She had been satisfied several times, but her hunger had not been quenched.

"As she stood there, looking at the mirror, and saw herself as ugly, transparent, and flawed, saw that she had been questing in the warm, salty meat of desire for something absent in herself. She whispered, 'I accept this truth.'

"That day, her desires wound back upon themselves, and burned themselves out. From that day forward, she wore long gloves and long dresses that hid her body and prevented the touch of others. She went to her grave with the memory of all those loves, and was satisfied."

The old woman began to open her mouth to speak, and then stopped. Sid began to walk away. Nan followed him. She had written nothing in her notebook.