Alan Goldfein

Dominating Women Alan Goldfein

The doubl'entendre of the title is unavoidable. Look once it means one thing, twice it means the other. The Man wants to be Mister Potent at one time, The Woman wants her own power at the other. Or: their wants collide: Kablooey! With an expiating cringe (that never expiated) Alan Geist used to joke-pun that his GEIST'S BIKES was his vehicle. What he'd meant was that GEIST'S BIKES was all things: his woman-school and his woman bar mitzvah and his invitation to some secret women's group. Men bought bikes, fine, but it was women bike-buyers whose surprising variability-from the fragile to the apologetic to the seductive to the confident-investigative to even the fierce and raging-it was women who came to draw "innocent" Geist out from mere salesman, and an insecure unsalesmanish salesman at that, to a social scientist of sorts, a regretfully involved forensic-spy on that Other sex about which he'd known about as little as he did about the dark side of the moon-or for that matter the sunlit side. He learns from the emotionally vulnerable and mousy but muscularly ripe female body-builder champion Dale-or rather he learns while he discovers that he also teaches, an ambiguity with heartfelt tenderness; he cowers while he combats the compulsively domineering and flamboyantly inventive Eugenia; he "dates" Marie, a black woman whose political intellect is so similar to that of his lawyer wife's, who he is betraying, Marie who intimidates him (in much the same fashion as does his wife Linda-who he "loves"); he meets a, well, "wonderful" "decent" "balanced" "trustable" "reliable" "generous" (and of course) "lovable" woman, a Lithuanian refugee from Russian incursion, a veterinarian, who, redundancies aside, just maybe, just maybe, just finally, he might be able to, on an even keel, what? "love"? . . . But, face it, Alan Geist, albeit tortured, is a rogue, a clueless stumblebum philanderer-for whom, and justifiably, all this "investigation" of his precipitates "answers" that are neither a "follow the yellow brick road" nor a Via Dolorosa.