What Do Women Want

two heads. Bodies arranged in the right way, they could penetrate each other.
    These are four unions, four stories of loyalty and its limitations:
    1
    “Jill is more black-and-white than I am,” Calla said about her girlfriend. “By personality, she’s a jock. She’s feisty. Things for her are either/or. I think maybe commitment comes more naturally for her. Once, maybe in our second year, when we were walking down the street, down the stairs actually, on Queen Anne Hill—there was this thick bed of ivy there—I started crying. I told her I’d never felt such unconditional love.”
    This was how she saw the woman she’d met four years ago in a lesbian bar, the woman she’d been living with now for a year. And this, that phrase, “such unconditional love,” would reverberate later when I listened again to Meana, when she told me about an approach she took with only a few of her couples.
    The bar had two levels. When their eyes had caught at a distance—Jill standing upstairs and Calla below—Jill’s had refused to let go. “Ballsy,” Calla remembered, and recalled other impressions: Jill’s sharp features, her combination of dark blond ringlets and green irises, the spareness of her athletic body, and the way that, when Calla had wandered off from their first conversation to flirt with someone else, Jill reappeared and announced, with whimsical flair, that she intended to compete. Calla took her home. For most of the year leading up to their meeting, Calla, who was in her early forties, had kept herself celibate in an effort to purge all the forces that had led to her last relationship, her last quick, eager pledge of fidelity, her last attempt at living together, her last disappointment, her last flight, her last repetition of this process, and that night with Jill, short, sinewy, brazen Jill, the sex went on ceaselessly, as though somehow a year might be pressed into hours.
    For Calla, there had been a moment. One afternoon back in high school, in PE class, on a volleyball court two courts away from her own, with blue and white balls and black and white nets and cut-offs and gym shorts between them, she had noticed a classmate, a girl she’d seen and briefly spoken to before. But she’d never noticed her in this way, never had this reaction, this sense of invading chaos. Filled with dread, within days she gave herself a test. “I proceeded to go through in my mind the act of going down on her,” she said. “And when I was done, I thought, No, I don’t want to do that.” To her great relief, this meant that she wasn’t a lesbian.
    Soon she was writing the girl poetry. Soon they were applying each other’s makeup, telling each other how pretty they looked. She spent nearly all her nights at the girl’s house, in her bed, the two of them in their underwear, tickling or running fingers along lengths of limbs. Things went no further. It wasn’t until her freshman year in college that Calla stole away from a party, went to a dance at the university’s LGBT center, wound up thoroughly immersed in a woman’s body for the first time, and, in the wake of that night in that graduate student’s bed, “realized how crazy girls made me.”
    Two decades had gone by since then. Cautiously she had put off living with Jill until the initial thrall subsided; meticulously she had tallied the pros and cons of how they were together; insistently she had promised herself that she wouldn’t repeat the betrayals and disappearances of the past. The small apartment they shared was on Queen Anne, where she had wept gratefully on the ivy-ensconced stairs. Nowadays, after an evening out together, they might stand at the plate glass window that overlooked Puget Sound and share a rare cigarette and gaze out at the dark water, at the island’s faint outline.
    Sex sometimes began here, usually after six or seven or eight chaste nights. “Should we?” Jill would ask, inflecting her question with humor, with a sly reference to the count of nights that had gone by.
    Calla would answer that they should.
    “You don’t sound too excited.”
    “Get into bed. Get out the toy and get naked.”
    “I’ve been forcing myself to push through my own resistance,” she told me. “When Jill asks, it’s like, I don’t really want to, I should want to, I feel guilty about not wanting to. I tell myself I need to let go, that it’s been too long. And then when we do start, it’s playful, and I can feel her getting turned