-12-

Later that day, Virginia and Anax went back to the park where they had met the box turtle person. Virginia wondered what they should do if they were to suddenly find themselves confronted by a strange turtle, possibly transformed into a very large one. What if it put its head down and moved in their direction in a very determined, albeit slow, fashion, making it obvious that they were in its way? What if Anax decided to dispute the right of way with a box turtle twenty times her size? Had anyone ever been charged and taken down by a box turtle? Should she start wearing a helmet when she and Anax went walking?

Two young women approached them on the path, talking to each other with animation. One of them made eye contact with Virginia and waved enthusiastically. Just before they passed Virginia, the one who had waved said to her, “This may sound strange, but do you need . . .” The end of her question was just a jumble of sound to Virginia. She stopped and turned. “Do I need what?”

The two women also stopped, and the one who had spoken raised her voice, still smiling in a friendly fashion, probably thinking to herself that you have to be patient with half-deaf old ladies. “Do you need a church to go to?” she repeated.

Virginia’s first reaction was to recoil. She could spot them instantly when they came to her door, all nicely-dressed young men and women waving pamphlets and offering made-to-order faith that didn’t require any thought on her part. Then she could close the door decisively after a polite negative. But it seemed downright perverse to interrupt someone’s enjoyment of a beautiful day with such an unexpected frontal attack.

What a bunch of weirdoes! thought Virginia. If I had such a need, is this really how I would go about filling it? She toyed with the idea of sharing her thought. I suppose their answer to that would be “God works in mysterious ways.” As if my own godless reality weren’t mysterious enough! “No thanks,” she said and continued on her way.

After the walk, she sat down at her laptop to look at her email and was pleased to find another installment of Steve’s Paris story. She printed it out so she could show it to Amanda when she got home.

Just then the bus attendant came by to ask if we wanted any refreshments. Since they were included, I said yes, and I was surprised that the choices included a couple of things that were both authentic Parisian fare and still something I would be willing to ingest. I had heard they were big meat-eaters, to the point they actually consumed it raw, which is so disgusting I don’t even want to think about it.

But other times, other customs—as they say in French, or is it Latin? I have trouble telling them apart. Which is the one they used to use in church way back when? Does it seem odd to you that someone as ignorant as I am should even have heard of Paris? I’ll have to tell you about that. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I have French ancestors. My dad’s mom had a French name, and my DNA test showed more French than just about anything else.

I have my strong points, but learning foreign languages isn’t one of them, especially when there aren’t any people around to practice with. I can’t think of anything more boring than learning a foreign language online. I guess you could say the same about learning anything online. And if you want to be totally honest, does anybody really ever want to learn anything, online or not? It wasn’t to “learn” about Paris that I signed up for that trip, it was basically to reinforce all my prejudices and preconceived notions, to see them validated and writ large in living technicolor, so to speak. I’m positive I would have been super disappointed if the visit had merely brought home some little-known fact about the French, such as that they don’t like maple syrup or root beer, just to pick an example at random.

Whoever this protagonist is, he sounded pretty darn different from Steve. She supposed that was somehow or other a measure of how good it was. She had no experience with critiquing another person’s writing. Although she loved to read, she had no confidence in her ability to judge a work of literature, any more than she could intelligently evaluate a painting. Under most circumstances she would be tempted to simply accept the writer’s own opinion of their work. Then again, they might be the kind who require a lot of positive reinforcement to keep going. A lot of artists seemed to crave praise, whether or not it was deserved.

She had a vague sense that writers in general were difficult to live with. There were so many stories about them. They drank a lot, they got depressed, and they were totally self-involved. It was to the point where the general opinion was that you had to be pretty much a raging lunatic to be a writer, a successful one anyway. She couldn’t recall ever hearing about a famous writer (or even an obscure one) who was a devoted family man and all-around nice guy. Now stop right there, she told herself. Back up. Since when did the masculine pronoun become de rigueur when talking about writers?

 She spent some time coming up with a completely androgynous image: a busty, muscled cartoon figure with an outsized head (to make room for all the words) and armed with a pen, but she stopped herself again at the disproportionately phallic implications of the writing instrument. Sigh. It was the same with a paintbrush. And the conductor’s baton. How could women prevail against such overwhelming evidence that the creative impulse was the province of the male? Her place was obviously next to and slightly below the artist, his attentive and willing helpmeet.

Was she willing to even consider becoming the submissive partner of an erratic would-be Shakespeare? Of course it must be a real upper to feel one had been chosen to be the companion of a genius. Then again, what if it was only a self-declared genius, and was she sure she could recognize the difference?

Her phone rang. Since it was Steve, she answered.

“Did you get the next installment that I sent you?” he asked.

“I sure did. I like it. So how is it that you know so much about Paris?”

“I lived there for a while. After college. I was bumming around, and they offered me a job at the youth hostel. Not in the city, it was a suburb called Rueil-Malmaison. I lived there for about six months. We used to take the train into Paris all the time.”

“Is this the second chapter?”

“Well no. After I showed it to my writers group I decided to add a page or so to the first chapter. Is there anything you think isn’t clear or needs to be changed?”

“Not at all. So you belong to a writers group? How often does it meet?”

“Every week. It’s a huge help. Some days I would just put off writing if I didn’t know I need to get something together to read to them. And not all the comments, but at least some of them, are very insightful.”

“I always think of writing as being a solitary pursuit. Just you and the computer screen. Being in a group doesn’t make you feel as if your writing is done by a committee?”

“No, but you do have to be careful. It helps if someone points out your sentence can be taken wrong, that you need to make yourself clearer. But you have to be selective. There’s always the danger you’ll end up writing for your audience.”

“Who are you writing for?”

“Good question! My muse, I guess.”

“Does your muse have a gender?”

“I’m not sure. Sometimes it seems like an inner voice that comes from a part of myself, which doesn’t mean it has to be one gender or the other; that would be thinking in old-fashioned terms, as if there were only two. Sometimes the voice seems to adopt the gender of the character who’s speaking at the time. I haven’t exactly made a study of it. Maybe I should.”

 “I’ve always kind of wondered how you get a muse,” said Virginia. “Does Amazon ship them overnight? I mean I’d love to have an inner voice telling me where and how to take my pictures. Doesn’t it kind of let you off the hook if you don’t feel like writing one day? Oh, my muse didn’t show up. It’s not my fault. You know what I mean?”

“Well, except you have to keep in mind that you have an obligation too. ‘Woe be unto you if the angel comes and you’re not there.’ I can’t remember where I heard that, but it’s so true. You have to be there for the muse just as much as he, she or they have to be there for you.”

“The Greek muses were all female, weren’t they?”

“Yes, but I never got the idea women had much say in ancient Greece. A democracy that doesn’t consider women citizens isn’t very egalitarian, don’t you think?”

“I’m always amazed at how many females were worshipped in male-dominated societies. If you wouldn’t turn to a woman in real life to help you out, why would you expect a supernatural one to have the power to save you? It just doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe in a way it does,” suggested Steve. “Female characteristics are idealized in the abstract. In reality they’re taken for granted, not prized at all.”

“Do your characters ever have any doubts about what gender they are? Do you?”

“Not yet, but there’s plenty of room for that to happen. Nobody knows what the future holds. How about you?”

“I’ve always been fine with who I am, but I like the spectrum idea, like a peacock spreading his tail. I’m thinking about it as if it were a party game where everybody has to line up according to where they are on the spectrum. What kind of questions would you ask to decide if your place was to the left or right of the person next to you?”

“I kind of like it too. It takes into account how fully unique I am. Who wants to be lumped together with a group that includes outliers like Hitler or Attila the Hun? Maybe that’s what I’d ask at the party game: which do you feel closer to, Mother Teresa or Saint Francis of Assisi?”

“But how would you separate the huge group of Saint Francisses you would end up with?” asked Virginia.

“Maybe whittle it down by which animal you feel most able to communicate with? That’s getting close to an actual party game I once participated in, Which animal would you be? We had to line up by order of size.”

“I guess you have to pick some order, but I don’t like the idea that bigger is better. Whereas if you made it according to who was most male on one end and most female on the other, the ‘best’ would be completely a matter of opinion, with the one in middle winning for lots of us.”

“And again, what is most ‘male’?” asked Steve. “No two people are going to agree on that.”

“Now that would be an interesting way to line people up. Not by how male or female they are, but how much they agree with each other about what male and female even mean.”

“Great idea! Want to try it? What are the first three words that come to mind when you hear the word male or female? Write them down and we’ll compare.”

Virginia was once again impressed with Steve’s ability to grasp the essential element of their discussion, take it seriously, and nevertheless turn it into a game. Maybe this dork was a keeper.

She grabbed her To Do list and jotted down three words: strong, confident, responsible. All positive qualities, nothing a guy could take offense about. Looking it over, she decided to pretend it was her female list and see how Steve reacted. Then she applied herself to coming up with stereotypical feminine qualities that, in the best of cases, applied to men as well. Gentle. Adaptable. Biddable? No. Yielding? No. Accepting? No. Patient—that was it. Not your typical description, but again, not in any way offensive. She waited for Steve to indicate he was ready.

Finally he spoke. “You didn’t use the first three you thought of, did you?”

“Well no,” she admitted. “Did you?”

“Heck no. I overthink everything. I can’t help myself.”

“How about if we text them to each other? That way we can each read the other’s at the same time, do our thinking together.” Steve agreed, and they both set up the text and pressed Send at the same moment. Their phones dinged. “Hey no fair,” she said. “You didn’t label your lists.”

Steve chuckled without answering. Then she added, “Oh, I see. You did it on purpose.” One list read Responsive, sensitive. appreciative. The other one was Forthcoming, perceptive, sympathetic. “I can see words are your thing. You don’t really need a thesaurus, do you?”

“And I don’t think male and female are necessarily all that different,” Steve pointed out.

“The stereotypes are though, don’t you agree?”

“Yes, but what good are stereotypes? Aren’t they always dangerous? Racial stereotypes, for example. Even when they include good qualities, it gets in the way of seeing the person as an individual.”

Virginia cringed. “Now you’re making me feel bad that I even brought this up.”

“No, it’s not your fault. I liked the idea at first, when I was just thinking in terms of people getting to know each other. Then I liked it because I like words. But as soon as we started playing, the game screamed Stereotypes, and it took on a whole new meaning, one that I just couldn’t go along with.”

Virginia was impressed. “Are you always this discerning?”

“No, most of the time I’m a blockhead. The tortoise, not the hare.”

“Slow but steady wins the race.”

“Who’s racing?”

That caught her attention, maybe because she had just been spending time with turtles. “You mean Aesop is worthless? after all these centuries?”

“It’s not bad advice, I guess. But it depends on the situation. If the house is on fire, you don’t want to respond like a tortoise.”

“You really do have to re-examine all those old tales, not just Aesop. Who would want to marry a handsome prince and live happily ever after? Maybe if you had a nanny to take care of all the babies. And what exactly is the problem with going for a walk by yourself in the woods? You might run into a wolf? So take a self-defense class.”

Perhaps thinking they had strayed too far from a subject he found all-absorbing, he brought them back to the book he was writing. “Didn’t you say you had been to Paris? Was it the way you expected it to be?”

“How could it be? I expected it to be magical. I expected every step to add stature to my self-image. I expected to be filled with inspiration from the moment I set foot on the Pont Neuf until I sat on the steps at Montmartre. In a way, of course, it was. Everything, even the hassle, was different and exciting.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Steve agreed “While I was there, I took a peek at Italy, Spain, Germany, Belgium and Switzerland. I kept thinking it would stop being amazing that I was even there. Only it never really did. And it got so I wanted a rest from wonder. My wonder meter kind of broke down. So I came back.”

“That reminds me, is your main character male or female?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“Um, isn’t that kind of basic?”

“Some people think so. The advice you get online is that before you even start to write the book you should have created the biography of the narrator or protagonist. It should have their age, what they look like, where they went to college, everything—so you can refer to it if you forget. But I’m the kind who questions authority, and I want to see what happens if you don’t do it that way.”

“I’m not a writer, so I guess my opinion isn’t worth much, but I like your approach. At some point, you’d think your voice would make it clear if it has a gender. I mean, it’s not impossible they’re non-binary, right?”

“Maybe. So how soon did you start asking yourself if the character was male or female?”

“Right away, I think. Right after I wondered when it took place.”

“That is basic, isn’t it? I can always go back and put in a ‘Call me Ishmael’ line. Do you think I should?”

“You could try it and see how it looks. I wouldn’t use Ishmael though.”

“No, Melville’s heirs might sue.”

“I’d like to read some more.”

“Okay, I’ll send another chapter.”