“Well,” Greta said. I could see it was going to be between her and Chrissy. They’re both blondes, I don’t mean that in a bitchy way but they do try to outdress each other. Greta would like to get out of Filing, she’d like to be a receptionist too so she could meet more people. You don’t meet much of anyone in Filing except other people in Filing. Me, I don’t mind it so much, I have outside interests.

“Well,” Greta said, “I sometimes think about, you know my apartment? It’s got this little balcony, I like to sit out there in the summer and I have a few plants out there. I never bother that much about locking the door to the balcony, it’s one of those sliding glass ones, I’m on the eighteenth floor for heaven’s sake, I’ve got a good view of the lake and the CN Tower and all. But I’m sitting around one night in my housecoat, watching TV with my shoes off, you know how you do, and I see this guy’s feet, coming down past the window, and the next thing you know he’s standing on the balcony, he’s let himself down by a rope with a hook on the end of it from the floor above, that’s the nineteenth, and before I can even get up off the chesterfield he’s inside the apartment. He’s all dressed in black with black gloves on”—I knew right away what show she got the black gloves off because I saw the same one—”and then he, well, you know.”

“You know what?” Chrissy said, but Greta said, “And afterwards he tells me that he goes all over the outside of the apartment building like that, from one floor to another, with his rope and his hook… and then he goes out to the balcony and tosses his rope, and he climbs up it and disappears.”

“Just like Tarzan,” I said, but nobody laughed.

“Is that all?” Chrissy said. “Don’t you ever think about, well, I think about being in the bathtub, with no clothes on…”

“So who takes a bath in their clothes?” I said, you have to admit it’s stupid when you come to think of it, but she just went on, “… with lots of bubbles, what I use is Vitabath, it’s more expensive but it’s so relaxing, and my hair pinned up, and the door opens and this fellow’s standing there…”

“How’d he get in?” Greta said.

“Oh, I don’t know, through a window or something. Well, I can’t very well get out of the bathtub, the bathroom’s too small and besides he’s blocking the doorway, so I just lie there, and he starts to very slowly take his own clothes off, and then he gets into the bathtub with me.”

“Don’t you scream or anything?” said Darlene. She’d come back with her cup of coffee, she was getting really interested. “I’d scream like bloody murder.”

“Who’d hear me?” Chrissy said. “Besides, all the articles say it’s better not to resist, that way you don’t get hurt.”

“Anyway you might get bubbles up your nose,” I said, “from the deep breathing,” and I swear all four of them looked at me like I was in bad taste, like I’d insulted the Virgin Mary or something. I mean, I don’t see what’s wrong with a little joke now and then. Life’s too short, right?

“Listen,” I said, “those aren’t rape fantasies. I mean, you aren’t getting raped, it’s just some guy you haven’t met formally who happens to be more attractive than Derek Cummins”—he’s the Assistant Manager, he wears elevator shoes or at any rate they have these thick soles and he has this funny way of talking, we call him Derek Duck—”and you have a good time. Rape is when they’ve got a knife or something and you don’t want to.”

“So what about you, Estelle,” Chrissy said, she was miffed because I laughed at her fantasy, she thought I was putting her down. Sondra was miffed too, by this time she’d finished her celery and she wanted to tell about hers, but she hadn’t got in fast enough.

“All right, let me tell you one,” I said. “I’m walking down this dark street at night and this fellow comes up and grabs my arm. Now it so happens that I have a plastic lemon in my purse, you know how it always says you should carry a plastic lemon in your purse? I don’t really do it, I tried it once but the darn thing leaked all over my chequebook, but in this fantasy I have one, and I say to him, ‘You’re intending to rape me, right?’ and he nods, so I open my purse to get the plastic lemon, and I can’t find it! My purse is full of all this junk, Kleenex and cigarettes and my change purse and my lipstick and my driver’s licence, you know the kind of stuff; so I ask him to hold out his hands, like this, and I pile all this junk into them and down at the bottom there’s the plastic lemon, and I can’t get the top off. So I hand it to him and he’s very obliging, he twists the top off and hands it back to me, and I squirt him in the eye.”

I hope you don’t think that’s too vicious. Come to think of it, it is a bit mean, especially when he was so polite and all.

“That’s your rape fantasy?” Chrissy says. “I don’t believe it.”

“She’s a card,” Darlene says, she and I are the ones that’ve been here the longest and she never will forget the time I got drunk at the office party and insisted I was going to dance under the table instead of on top of it, I did a sort of Cossack number but then I hit my head on the bottom of the table—actually it was a desk—when I went to get up, and I knocked myself out cold. She’s decided that’s the mark of an original mind and she tells everyone new about it and I’m not sure that’s fair. Though I did do it.

“I’m being totally honest,” I say. I always am and they know it. There’s no point in being anything else, is the way I look at it, and sooner or later the truth will out so you might as well not waste the time, right? “You should hear the one about the Easy-Off Oven Cleaner.”

But that was the end of the lunch hour, with one bridge game shot to hell, and the next day we spent most of the time arguing over whether to start a new game or play out the hands we had left over from the day before, so Sondra never did get a chance to tell about her rape fantasy.

It started me thinking though, about my own rape fantasies. Maybe I’m abnormal or something, I mean I have fantasies about handsome strangers coming in through the window too, like Mr. Clean, I wish one would, please god somebody without flat feet and big sweat marks on his shirt, and over five feet five, believe me being tall is a handicap though it’s getting better, tall guys are starting to like someone whose nose reaches higher than their belly button. But if you’re being totally honest you can’t count those as rape fantasies. In a real rape fantasy, what you should feel is this anxiety, like when you think about your apartment building catching on fire and whether you should use the elevator or the stairs or maybe just stick your head under a wet towel, and you try to remember everything you’ve read about what to do but you can’t decide.

For instance, I’m walking along this dark street at night and this short, ugly fellow comes up and grabs my arm, and not only is he ugly, you know, with a sort of puffy nothing face, like those fellows you have to talk to in the bank when your account’s overdrawn—of course I don’t mean they’re all like that—but he’s absolutely covered in pimples. So he gets me pinned against the wall, he’s short but he’s heavy, and he starts to undo himself and the zipper gets stuck. I mean, one of the most significant moments in a girl’s life, it’s almost like getting married or having a baby or something, and he sticks the zipper.

So I say, kind of disgusted, “Oh for Chrissake,” and he starts to cry. He tells me he’s never been able to get anything right in his entire life, and this is the last straw, he’s going to go jump off a bridge.

“Look,” I say, I feel so sorry for him, in my rape fantasies I always end up feeling sorry for the guy, I mean there has to be something wrong with them, if it was Clint Eastwood it’d be different but worse luck it never is. I was the kind of little girl who buried dead robins, know what I mean? It used to drive my mother nuts, she didn’t like me touching them, because of the germs I guess. So I say, “Listen, I know how you feel. You really should do something about those pimples, if you got rid of them you’d be quite good-looking, honest; then you wouldn’t have to go around doing stuff like this. I had them myself once,” I say, to comfort him, but in fact I did, and it ends up I give him the name of my old dermatologist, the one I had in high school, that was back in Leamington, except I used to go to St. Catharine’s for the dermatologist. I’m telling you, I was really lonely when I first came here; I thought it was going to be such a big adventure and all, but it’s a lot harder to meet people in a city. But I guess it’s different for a