myna corbett and the responsibilities of beauty were to occupy me on and off for the rest of the year. I don't know exactly what it was I felt for her, or thought about her, or expected to give or receive. There are a thousand kinds of love. The simplest thing to say is that she made me feel comfortable. She created a private balance of nature, a sense of things being right, or almost right, both in themselves and against a larger requirement. So this love in a way was ecological; she made me feel at peace with my environment and maybe on my better days I did the same for her. Since my examinations of life sometimes ended in oblique forms of selfmockery, and since my investigative projects often manifested themselves as parodies of hunger or grief or exile, it was refreshing to seek in this woman a perfect circle whose reality overpowered the examiner's talent for reducing in size and meaning whatever variety of experience he was currently engaged in sampling.

Myna owned half a million dollars and membership in a sciencefiction book club. There, by most standards, her attraction ended. She weighed about 165 pounds. Her face had several blotches of varying size and her hair hung in limp tangled clusters. She bit her nails, she waddled, she never shut up. We had two classes together, Mexican geography and a sort of introduction to exobiology. Myna was the only female in the geography class (traditionally a course for football players) and seemed quite serious about the layout of Mexico. We got along well from the very beginning. I enjoyed listening to her talk and I liked the total liberty of her clothing. There was a sense of cavalcade to the way she dressed. Any number of fashion eras were likely to be represented at a given time. The feeling was warm, colorabundant, distinctly antihistorical.

We had mock picnics behind the Quonset hut— chopped almonds and Gatorade. Myna would usually bring along a sciencefiction novel. She'd eat and read simultaneously, bouncing slightly on the brown grass when she reached a particularly invigorating passage. It was during our third or fourth picnic, on an unseasonably cool day, that we got involved for the first time in the responsibilities of beauty. Myna wore a carved plastic bracelet, meshed gold chains around her neck, and a handembroidered? Victorian shawl over a silk gypsy blouse and floorlength patchwork skirt. Her boots were studded with blue stars."I've just realized what's really curious about you," I said. "Somehow you don't transmit any sense of a personal future."

"I'm a now person, Gary."

"That's good because I'm a then person."

"I know," she said. "That's why I like you. I need some perspective in m............