I heard about Gail from Susan that year more often than from Gail herself, and Mrs. Carter was mentioned every time. I was motivated to meet the woman by the time of the term-end party. I picked up Susan and we arrived with salad greens at six.

There weren’t many people yet and the place was half packed-up, so it looked relatively cavernous. We greeted the few and got to work helping Gail in the kitchen. Jean looked lovely as usual in the face and hideous as usual in the knobby fat-free body. She was too weak to stand and of course not interested in food, so she sat at the table with a white mug of steaming water between her thin hands, talking to us about law school. We all knew she’d have to make a long stop at a hospital before any more school, but no one said anything about that.

I lost interest in the conversation and gazed at the plants on the windowsill above the sink. One jade, one pothos, one crooked little cactus. I fed them water off my fingertips, and the drops silvered in the oblique light of sunset. I tuned into the talk again when they switched to the whispered subject of female orgasm. Susan was trying to make a point but the others talked over her, drowning her out in friendly fashion, unwilling to hear anything about sex from the one among us who returned from her first night with a guy acting wretched, desperate to bathe, counting the 36 hours she understood it would take for all the nasty sperm in her to die. That’s what I think was happening when the doorbell rang and someone opened it. Gail breathed the name Carter. I turned and looked at the woman. And dropped the salad greens all over the sink.

“Miss Lubov,” I stated.

She said “Angela” back.

I began to stammer something. She smiled widening her whole face and came toward me with both hands extended.

I don’t recall our exact words. The next I remember we were sitting face-to-face on the floor, still smiling at one another, drinking red wine, catching up. Her eyes were large and gray. Her hair was thick and streaky.

I had taken comp lit from her my freshman year. She left the university at the end of that term, took some time off, taught back east, married, traveled slowly with her husband back to the west coast, and returned just in time to mesmerize Gail.

That comp lit course had been an experience for me. Determined not to read or write any criticism, I arranged with Miss Lubov that I would maintain a serious journal, with a minimum of four real entries a week. Of course it turned out that I worked harder on the journal than anyone in the class did on the assigned tasks, much harder than I would have worked if I’d been cooperative, and I knew that, but I didn’t mind. I was having too good a time with Yeats’s phases-of-the-moon cycle, as I toyed with the talkings of Robartes and Aherne, made poems, and dreamed in foreign languages. I was at my dormitory desk late into every night, sitting at the end of it I’d shoved into the closet for any kind of privacy from my hyperbolic hysterical West Virginian roommate, absorbing the underground music from my KLH table radio while I wrote and dealt solitaire and wrote some more.

I handed my journal to Miss Lubov at the end of the course, when all the other students turned in their take-home essay finals, and I showed up like all the others at my appointed time for a 15 minute oral final, expecting to get my journal back. It turned out to be a day of exploded expectations.

I knocked on her wire-glassed wood-framed door and when she said “Come in,” I saw that the student ahead of me was running over his time. Apparently Miss Lubov had gotten off-schedule. I excused myself and began to back out of the room, but she stopped me and repeated, “Come in.

“Really. Join us,” she said with a smile, and she pointed to a sonnet by Dylan Thomas and asked me for a sight interpretation. I said something satisfactory – I remember she grinned at me and the other student nodded – and we three chatted about the poem. Then she dismissed the student ahead of me and asked him to shut the door on his way out.

She had me take his chair. She turned to me. By then my 15 minutes were up and the next student knocked on the door and began to enter the room before Miss Lubov spoke. “Excuse me, Michael,” she said to the tall blonde guy in the doorway, “but I’m running a little late. Please take a chair in the hall.” He retreated. He closed the door.

She looked at me and smiled wider. “So tell me,” she asked as she leaned forward a little. “Why do you write like a man?”

I know my answer wasn’t elegant, because I was stunned by the question. No one had ever asked me that before. I hadn’t thought it. I stammered out something about all my literary role models being male. Which was true.

She countered with a luminous speech about the benefits of being female and an artist. She told me that when a male artist is in love he is conflicted. He must either make his art or make his love; he cannot do both. But a woman, Miss Lubov told me confessionally, a woman can love and create. She can milk her cycle, as it were, and use the play of emotional responses that comes naturally as a result of her changing hormone levels: here’s how it seems when I’m lusty, when I’m sad, when I’m cozy, when I’m mad, when I’m edgy, when I’m soft.