Romare Bearden, The Return of Odysseus (1977)

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I had the "female" role in that relationship.

Waited, long-suffering like Penelope, holding at arm's length the suitors who pursued me, while she was Odysseus, wandering where and with whom she chanced. I was the caregiver she ran to for shelter, the healer who dressed all wounds, the rock upon which she'd anchor when storms tossed the bleeding wine-dark seas. I considered this to be loyalty. She manipulated and abused that loyalty with ruthless clarity.

She understood the situation via these three axioms. Women and men are different species incapable of communication or concourse. Solidarity exists within genders, war between them. All's fair in love and war.

I've grown to adulthood detesting the trivial and sad catalog of ideologically-constructed "differences" between genders. Women are not from Venus, men are not from Mars. Women and men are all from Earth. This implies both hope and responsibility. Hope, that one day in a culture made free of Puritanism and prurience gender will be accepted matter-of-factly as a gift of nature, emptied of the bizarre and unhappy connotations of conquest and conflict we invest it with today. Responsibility, to work toward the creation of that free culture.

Beachfront. Exhausted-looking woman slumps on a motel room bed. Moonlight through open windows paints her silver.

Her other lover, the one she lives with, is manipulating her with promises. In a burst of insight she throws a potted plant through his French doors and hits the highway. She must be flying: makes the 600 miles from there to here in under six hours. To lie in fetal position whimpering, "I want to die."

By morning she's laughing again, as we dance together down the brown sandy beach. Yet her anguish follows after her like a loyal dog.

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