A philosopher, a psychologist, and an extraterrestrial walk into a chocolate bar …. Jass Richards

women. It was nice. It was one of the reasons they were regulars.

      “So are you going back to Manus?” Jane asked. Probably unnecessarily.

      “Don’t think so.”

      “Got anything else lined up?”

      “I hear Riverdance is holding auditions.”

      Jane took a sip of water. “You’d be able to use your psychology degree.”

      Bridgit returned with two cups of tea and two different, but equally decadent, chocolate desserts. And that was the other reason.

      “Thanks, B,” Spike said.

      “Yes, thank you, thank you,” Jane said, immediately forking off a huge piece of her Chocolate Divinity Cheesecake and mumbling “need this, need this …” Of the two, she was a little more … addicted. “Mmmm.” She leaned back, as the ecstasy travelled from her tongue to her brain. “The pure pleasure that is chocolate.” She lovingly licked her fork.

      “Mr. I-Need-Those-Financial-Reports should just chill and have some chocolate,” Spike said, taking a bite of her own euphoria.

      After her second, more leisurely, forkful, Jane commented, “Men don’t seem to have the capacity for pure pleasure.”

      Spike thought about that, then nodded agreement. “Their so-called pleasures are really just victories, aren’t they. Which means they derive pleasure only through competition. What’s the philosophical term for pleasures like that? Pleasures that aren’t pure.”

      Jane gazed off in deep thought, crinkling her forehead, searching for the obscure and technical word ...

      “Impure pleasures,” she announced.

      “Yeah, that’s it,” Spike grinned.

      They continued to enjoy their lavish desserts. Slowly.

      “Yesterday he called me Janey.”

      “Who?”

      “Mr. I-Need-Those-Financial-Reports.”

      “Billy? Ricky? Bobby? Do you know?”

      “Do I care?” she responded. “Wish I had a name, though, that didn’t have a diminutive version. What do people call you when they want to reduce you?”

      “Ezzie-the-Lezzie.”

      “Oh. Right.”

      For a while, Jane had envied Spike, neé Esmerelda, her community. For a while, ten years ago when they first met at a Women’s Issues group that had formed when they were both in their second year at university, she had accompanied her to the lesbian bars, thinking that politics surely trumped sexual orientation, but she felt like such an imposter. She simply wasn’t physically attracted to women.

      (’Course, now, she wasn’t physically attracted to men either. At some point in her mid-twenties, she faced a mind–body problem not addressed by Descartes: the dissonance between the two had become too great to ignore. And, apparently, too great to reconcile. She was delighted, therefore, when she realized, a short year later, that her body had opted for asexuality. She was completely comfortable with complete celibacy.)

      Furthermore, she quickly discovered that just as people were mistaken to assume that all straight women performed femininity, she had been mistaken to assume that all lesbians were politicized. As Spike had pointed out, one’s sexual orientation had nothing to do with whether one thought about shit. So maybe she wasn’t missing out on community after all.

      Then again, as a straight woman who didn’t buy into the feminine mystique—either the make-up and heels thing, or the male attachment thing, or the kids thing—she was some sort of freak (where were the post-70s straight women who’d said goodbye to all that?) who didn’t fit in anywhere. She couldn’t even claim a hyphenated-Canadian status based on skin colour or ancestry. So she was missing out on community. It’s just that she just didn’t envy Spike anymore for that. Especially since The L Word.

      (She still thought lesbians more likely than straight women to reject male domination in any of its forms, but she recognized now that that could be an accident of sociocultural practice rather than the result of conscious recognition and analysis of the patriarchy. That gays were as likely as straight men to subordinate women seemed to prove Spike’s intriguing point: same-sex orientation didn’t necessarily entail rejection of sexism, despite the latter’s basis, and embodiment, in heterosex.)

      “I shouldn’t have quit teaching,” Jane said after a while.

      “You didn’t quit. You were fired.”

      “I was a sessional,” Jane protested. “Sessionals don’t actually get fired.”

      “They get not-asked-to-teach-again.”

      “Well, yeah.”

      “And why did that happen?” Spike reminded her. Clearly they had spoken about this before. “Because you criticized the students’ opinions.”

      “It was a Critical Thinking course!” she protested again. “The whole point of the course was to teach that not every opinion is equally acceptable.”

      “Even so. That was disrespectful.” Spike was clearly quoting. “The students were offended. Especially what’s-his-name who went running to the Chair of the Philosophy Department. Who, in turn, felt compelled to mention it at the national philosophy conference. To everyone he met.”

      “Little prick.”

      Spike flagged Bridgit to their table. “She’s going to need another one of those.”

      Jane slouched into the bench seat.

      “Remember the students’ evaluations?” Spike asked. “ ‘She made it perfectly clear that she knew more than any of us.’ ‘She—”

      “I was their professor!”

      Bridgit appeared with another slice of Chocolate Divinity Cheesecake.

      Jane took a large forkful.

      “At least I was in the company of my intellectual peers,” she mumbled.

      “You mean the faculty, right?”

      Jane gave her a look.

      “As I recall, you weren’t too impressed with them either. And I quote, ‘Inquiring minds don’t give a fuck.’ ”

      A long few minutes passed before Jane spoke again. “I hear that in Paris, they have chocolate bars.”

      “They have them here too. At the 7-Eleven.”

      “No, I mean chocolate bars. Not chocolate bars.

      “Oh, well then.”

      “Like instead of serving beer and … beer, they serve, like, a hundred different kinds of chocolate.”

      “Yeah?”

      Jane licked her spoon. She also licked her plate.

      “We have to go to Paris then.”

      2

      “This is a bad idea,” Jane said from the passenger’s seat. It was Jane’s car—Spike just had her motorcycle—but Spike liked driving and Jane did not.

      “Going to Paris?”

      “Going to Paris on our lunch hour.”

      “And by car.”

      “That too.”

      A while later, once they finally seemed to be out of Toronto, which really, in their minds, included North York and Scarborough, Jane got out her laptop.

      “Going to work on