Sean Myers was a virgin. It was a source of acute shame for him. It was 1974 and according to the newsmagazines he read, something called the Sexual Revolutionary was happening. He was in the midst of it, and he couldn't seem to become part of it.

What made it worse was that his girl friend Leslie was not a virgin. She'd had sex with two men already in her life. Both experiences had been very bad. After the second one, she had come to a Great Revelation. She had Changed Her Ways.

Sean told Leslie that he thought it created a very unfair imbalance in their relationship for him to be a virgin and her not to be one. Leslie's response was to say that she could see how that could be true, and so maybe the best thing would be for them to break up. This was not at all the answer that Sean had been looking for, but Leslie started being more and more adamant about it.

Sean Myers was sitting in the window of a coffee house called the Bronze Angel in San Francisco's Mission District. He was trying to do two things and once, and not being very successful at either or them.

For one thing, he was trying to make sense of out the book Philosophical Investigations, by Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was handicapped in this by the fact that he had never had any courses in philosophy. He was a sophomore now at San Francisco State and was taking courses in chemistry, biology, and calculus, since he planned to enter the pre-med program. What he really wanted to become was a writer. But recently, he had been reading a lot of philosophy. He had tried Sartre and Nietzsche and found he could understand them fairly well. But Wittgenstein was much more difficult, although also much more intriguing.

Whenever Sean's brain got completely fogged up with Wittgenstein, he turn to the second thing he was trying to do, which was to write a letter to his girl friend Leslie, explaining why they should not break up and why they should start having sex together. He was handicapped in this by the fact that he was a virgin. Leslie was not a virgin, and Sean thought that she should be willing to equalize this imbalance in their relationship. But Leslie's two experiences with sex had been very bad, and now she had decided that pre-marital sex was wrong. Sean thought it very unfair that she should have reached this decision just at the point when she had finally met a guy who was willing to treat her well --- namely, himself.

The couple who came in were arguing loudly. The woman was wearing a brocade top that looked very Chinese, although she herself didn't look at all Chinese. The black pants had embroidery running up the legs.

She was wearing a pullover blouse that Sean assumed was silk, although when he thought about it later he decided that it was probably really rayon. In any case, it was a very brightly colored flowered print on a black background and looked very Chinese, although there was nothing Chinese at all about the woman. Her pants were also black covered with brightly colored spots that were apparently supposed to be stars. On her feet she was wearing flat gold-colored sandals.

Sean immediately decided that this woman was an artist. For Sean, this woman represented a whole world that he hoped to one day be a part of. A world of artists, and writers, and musicians. People who sat around apartments in Greenwich Village and smoked pot, discussed the latest articles in the New York Review of Books, stayed up all night and went to sleep at sunrise, and engaged in a never-ending ballet of exchanging sexual partners.

Now it was as if this world right there, right in front of him. It was there, almost touchable. All he had to do was just walk in, if he could only find the door. But he had no idea where to look for the door.

Sean stared at the woman. This was the only strategy he knew for making contact with women he wanted to meet. Unfortunately, it never worked. But Sean went on trying it, because he didn't know what else to do instead. He kept hoping that one day it would produce results.

On this occasion, though, something happened that had never happened before. Instead of looking away in annoyance, this woman returned his look, looked him right in the eyes. There was definitely a moment of making contact, a communication from her eyes to his. Her eyes seemed to be saying, ``Hi, I think you're interesting, I'd like to meet you.''

When this happened, Sean became completely flustered and looked away. He knocked his notebook off his table and had to bend down to get it. He was aware that he was looking like a complete idiot.

But when he finally looked back at the woman again, she had her back turned and once again was loudly/energetically/vivaciously berating her companion.

Sean was at that moment very aware of how young he was. And the door to that other, infinitely desirable world, which for a moment had seemed to be really open and welcoming, now seemed definitively closed.

On the afternoon of his encounter with Virginia, Sean had been facing two fairly certain disasters. One was that he was probably going to fail organic chemistry, which would have very unfortunate consequences for his plans to enter the pre-med program when he became a junior next year at San Francisco State. And the second was that his girl friend Leslie was probably going to break up with him that evening, which would have a very negative impact on his goal to cease being a virgin. Leslie was only the second real girl friend Sean had ever had and, judging by his track record, it might be a long time before he found a third.

One reason I want them to go to a bar is that Sean is nervous about the fact that he's actually underage. Might have to change the time period for this, because in 1972/74 I think drinking age in California might have been 18. In any case, he doesn't actually get challenged, because he looks much older than he is. (I rarely had problems in bars when I was 19, altho they've become a lot more careful now.)

In any case, he doesn't have a lot of experience with drinking. And so Virginia takes him into this bar, saying they're going to have lunch. But all they do is drink. Virginia keeps saying they need to relax a little before they order food, and she just keeps on ordering more drinks.

This is very typical of her character. She keeps saying things like, ``We'll do X.'' That's how she keeps the protagonist hooked. But she never delivers on these promises, she just keeps dragging him around from one place to another, wasting time.

She promises to introduce him to the sorts of people he wants to know --- writers, artists. She also says that she can introduce him to women who will be happy to have sex with him.

``I think that you are a very confused person. You have very confused ways of doing things. I'll take you to meet some real writers, so you can learn how it's done. Once you learn the tricks, writing can be really easy. You could be very successful at it, because you have the right kind of mind.''