"From "Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life

I am myself. Impossible to tell by the quality of light whether it's cloudy out. Even after years. That's a railroad flat for you. But there is this enormous, unshakable satisfaction rooted far back in her skull, as though she has ascended, direct but unhurried, from the deepest levels of sleep. She's been dreaming, then. There, where she was, was sweetest sex, or music. ... Trying, she almost gets it. Smiles because it's funny. What's-his-name in the loft, stoned on acid, pumping away. And the acid pumping too, tremendous, with that trick of seeming to amplify each heartbeat. The joke is that, not having done any of this in years, she still dreams about it as though it were somehow important. Improves on it, yet, so that she wakes aroused, wet as she would not have been in real life. Was not, certainly, in that underheated loft, drug-terrified, incredibly ignorant. Still, if you wanted a baby you'd have to try it again. Briefly, of course. Unless you wanted to use the West Coast turkey-baster method of artificial insemination. A friend just back from the Bay Area has explained it: you find a friendly gay man, he jerks off in the bathroom. . . . Several California Amazons are said to have knocked themselves up already, proving conclusively that no doctor is required to mediate between woman and sperm. The approach has all the advantages: a minimum of contact, no expense, and best of all no father to cause trouble later on

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