By Brad Gooch
Date: 31 March 1998

Todd & Lucy

When Todd had been standing there, his words an oil geyser, Lucy felt a
creepy kinship. Not intimacy or anything as airy as that. She felt sweat
of his sweat, breath of his breath. He was talking for her freedom as well
as his. He was recomposing Fidelio. She felt toward him as toward a
political liberator, a Bolivar. Not liberating her from Frank, but from
herself. Her feminism had to be given her from the outside, as everyone's
identity must finally be, but only after they have worked to prepare
themselves, like an instrument, to play the song of myself.