But of course I didn't die; I only slept and slept for as long as I could stand to sleep, and then people were calling me on the telephone as is their wont, and so I told them about it and received their indignation as a kind of flattery. Of course I didn't make a peep about it to the MB, when we had our weekly telephone-call-in-bed yesterday morning. Besides the fact that I was embarrassed to reveal to the MB that I was considered unbeautiful by a man I had genuinely desired (the MB being almost universally attractive to men, with her houri eyes and masses of coarse dark hair), I also didn't feel quite ready to handle her analysis of the situation (the MB belonging to the same school of hard and fruitless honesty in which Stephen has apparently been reared.) But I told Maman, who said of course I have no interest in a person like that, and Daddy, who said he would shoot him on sight, and wept with some degree of honesty to my neighbor Neal, who is in love with me and promised also to shoot Stephen on sight.

After the torpor and despair wore off a little bit, I decided to throw myself with a new violence into the social world, making plans to go to book parties and symphonies and rock concerts and restaurants and so on and so forth. I went to see a friend of mine who is a gardener & caretaker at this 17th-century Dutch house, with its own little snow-covered park and corncobs built into the foundation. This was soothing. He allowed me to make a shabby-looking lavender sachet with a scrap of checkered cloth and scissors and a handful of dried lavender that came in industrial-sized jars; he also allowed me to walk about in clogs & then bought me dinner at a funny Caribbean (two r's? one?) restaurant with pink plastic tablecloths & many exotic juices. I would mostly like to live in a 17th century Dutch house, except for the fact that the only one I could live in would probably be full of Cajuns & not Dutch at all, & really I don't know where I'm going with that sentence, because I haven't been sleeping due to all the socializing; the book party had an open bar, which was a disaster.