"Yes, how can it be anything else? An individual is too large. So what were these ideas of yours about me in my many stages?" She really meant, "…my many stages as perceived by you in your stages" but she cut it short.
"I don't know. At the time I admired your ability to rise up in the world…the business savvy to do that, and how people were interested in your strangeness. Before that I thought of you as a caring mother and before that — "
"A disgusting whore?"
"No, not disgusting."
"Why not?"
"I liked it — the thought of you with many men. I imagined the smell of your skin afterwards …I don't know. It was sexy."
"Hmm," she thought, "latent homosexuality. His river is not damned for it flows both ways." She spoke, "What am I now — this sexy art mom weirdo — this idea of yours now at this stage?"
"I don't know that I have one. I don't know who you are now."
"No, you don't know who you are being without a woman all these months. Men need women, you know." The words belied the womanly slime oozing within her. "They put on women. Just like you needing symbols of importance as that attachZ case of yours, those flashing appointments in that PDA of yours, and that cellular telephone of yours. If you did not have money and things to flash at others how different would you be from any naked Etruscan savage apart from not being dead and living in America?"
" I don't need a damn thing," he said coldly. "You are the one who's here. You are the needy one." He laughed at her. She knew that to him she looked foolish even though that time of the Turk's execution in early girlhood had made her immune to the opinions of others.