Dear Naomi,

I’m sorry, too, that we haven’t seen much of each other lately. Has it really been ten years? I suppose we’ve both been very busy. Are you still with Herman?

Last Thursday, darling, I passed within 200 miles of your house in the Charente, on the way from Bordeaux to Paris. Would have stopped by, had it only occurred to me, and if I hadn’t already promised to spend the night with Giorgio and Matt. Well – spend the night…not that way, of course!

I’m entirely not the type to enjoy having sex with two men. It’s surprising how many people enjoy that sort of thing, don’t you find? Carl was always going on about how he’d love to sleep with two women. In fact, he had the specifications all ready:  they had to be two redheads, and they had to be twins.

One day he actually ran into redheaded twins in a bar in Seattle, and of course he felt this was a sign from God. And that’s not a manner of speaking: in his own bizarre way, he was as religious as your average mental institution inmate, believing that God followed his every step with keen interest and gave him Signs left, right and center. As if God doesn’t have anything better to do with His time…So, in his mind, the twins had been planted by the Lord to give him the best sexual climax he had ever experienced.

Here’s the surprise to this story: the twins accepted his offer, and he actually spent a night of Hot & Sweaty with them. The only downside? They were ugly as all hell, early fifties with thick glasses (sorry, darling, not implying that people with glasses are generally unattractive – I wear reading glasses, myself, occasionally), and half an hour into the thing one of them burst into tears because she’d never been with a man before and hoped ‘this would lead to a relationship’. The plainness of the women, and the virginity and despair of the one were not in Carl’s dream scenario, of course, but it was what God wanted for him, and you can’t argue with that.

You must have heard this sort of thing a lot from men – the Two Women thing. Common as it may be, I’ve never had a desire to have it on with two men. On top of that, the two dear men in question, in the Charente, are gay – so the whole thing would just end in a terrible fiasco. I have, in my younger days, made an effort to cure several men from this unfortunate affliction, but to no avail. I don’t mean to toot my own horn (that is so vulgar! as is the expression itself, of course) but it does seem obvious that if I can’t turn them, the whole thing’s hopeless.

It’s a scary thing, to me – gay men. Alice likes to take me to homosexual hangouts – to the “Petunia”, for instance, and while their tiramisù is great, I was taken aback, almost physically taken aback by the positive wall of a cold front I walked into. It was only then that I realized just how much attention I get from men. When it’s absent, I get clammy and nervous. Do you ever feel that way?

The dreadful thing is it makes me doubt my femininity,  my physical attractiveness. And I neverdoubt my attractiveness. That’s why I don’t like to hang out with gay men. It’s different with Giorgio and Matt, of course – they adore me. And Giorgio is from too good a family to make one feel anything other than extremely sexually desirable.

My usual migraine coming on – will write more, soon, love,

Lisa