INTERNAL SPACES: I think that the spatial aspects of this hypertext are difficult to explain and to understand unless you have read it several times. And I believe this is true because the author leaves some space references incomplete, not explicitly expressed. So, to my mind, I think it would be better if we established a difference between the internal references and the external references included in the text.

 

 

INTERNAL REFERENCES

EXTERNAL REFERENCES

GROUNDED

·  She arrives at L.A. airport.

·  Andy was waiting there for her.

·  They go to Andy‘s messy apartment.

·  He put his junks away to let her leave her books somewhere.

·  Where she does come from is not said, but I think, after further reading, she comes from her city, where she was living until then. Maybe it is in another state, even country or continent.

OUTING

·  Our narrator and Allie are in a thrift shop.

·  There is a man, saying compliments to Allie here too.

·  That thrift shop is in L.A.

·  She is introducing Allie to us: There are some past time references (what she used to do before).

·  Both women, when laughing at the man, say some spatial references: to take her home to have sex with her under the clothes rack…

REASSURANCE I

·  Andy often goes shopping alone and buys boring things.

·  Now, Andy is in the kitchen, arranging the shopping but she wanted to argue with him.

·  They had the same argument at the Therapist’s

·  She refers to some time and space aspects when talking with the therapist. She talked about three former relationships she had: one lover took her to his wife’s bed to hay sex another one took her on holidays (we do not know where) and left her there and a third one took photos of her being naked to put them on his office. 

WITHOUT A MIRROR

·  Narrator and Allie are in a mall, in a makeup shop.

·  Here, there are more time references to Allie’s past as a model.

IF THE SUIT FITS

·  Allie and she meet on the purple garbage can of Ben & Jerry.

·  Then, standing in front of her, our narrator realizes that she is attracted by her friend.

·  Once again, Allie talks about her past: She is not scared of her friend; her work was to attract people.

A BLAST

·  The narrator and Andy are discussing at home about not to argue so frequently.

·  They go out for an ice-cream; they took the car, where there was a new CD collection.

·  Finally they got to the ice-cream store.

·  She says Andy must have bought those new CD whiles she was at school.

FULL BLOOM

Our narrator, Allie and Andy are at Andy’s apartment. Andy is sitting on the sofa in the living room, where he is reading the Rolling stones while both girls are on the kitchen floor comparing their squares. The narrator had her own squares hanging on the balcony.

·  Andy suggests them to wash the squares and while they are doing so, he starts cleaning the kitchen’s floor.

 

SETUP

·  Allie suggests going to the Whiskey’s now she has got some money. It is a pub where she used to go when she was younger and where she lost her virginity. She was there with Jack Nicholson, other teenagers and the owner of the pub.

·  They make some verbal references to a hidden portfolio that embarrasses Allie a lot, because there are photos of her doing as a model.

·  Again time references to her past. But now she shows she regrets about it too.

OOOHHH

Both women are at Allie’s apartment, in her bedroom. She was going to show her portfolio to her friend, which was under the bed. It was full of ad photos where she could hardly recognize her friend.

·  Each of these photos had a story and those stories hurt Allie=more references to her past life and how hard and terrible it was. She is still regretting. But instead of crying she goes to the balcony and shouts.

TIED UP

Both friends are at a book store, where Allie was getting some film-based books to have something to talk about with her director. They say something about having dinner together that night.

·  Allie remembers a film director was still interested on her: before, whenever she wanted a role on one of his films, she had sex with him, so she would try to do it again.

GAMES

The narrator and Andy go to pick Allie and her new boyfriend, Rodrigo, the film director, and all four go for a coffee. There, they played games about films.  After that, they drop the former model and the film director in his apartment.

·  Now it was Allie who was paying all her attention to Rodrigo at the café and even apologized for her friend’s comments.

·  Narrator does not like Rodrigo very much.

CLOSE

·  Andy and she are on their apartment, sleeping at the same side of the bed when an earthquake happened.

·  They wake up, dress and go out of the building. They re-enter their flat but it was a mess so they go to the restaurant ‘La Salsa’ to have much.

·  They return to their flat and tried to sleep.

·  There were weaker earthquakes after that: if it was a heavy one, they quickly went to the doorway. 

·  That chain of earthquakes damaged the whole city of Los Angeles; it left them with no electricity.

TASTELESS

Allie tells to her friend that Rodrigo brought a picnic too her work, that they shared a bath and played a kind of erotic game. The narrator asks Andy to try it too at the end of the day when she arrived home, but thought of it twice and they did not do anything.

·  Allie is trying show to her friend that now she has got a better life than before, better even than her friend’s life, who has a boring boyfriend.

·  This is a way of trying to forget her past.

FINALLY

Our story teller and Allie arrived to Andy’s apartment, where they started to kiss each other and in whose bed they had lesbian sex.

·  Allie had had lesbian sex before but our girl had not, so she was a bit lost.

·  She already starts to think how she would tell it to Andy later.

DISASSOCIATION

·  The couple is sleeping and Andy thinks it is a good moment to talk so he took off the comforter and asked his girlfriend. She is thinking about being alone on his brother’s future wedding.

·  Her brother would marry soon.

·  She has to run away.

TOOL

·  She told Andy about her relation with Allie and they split up. She would have told it to Allie but she never replied her calls; she was now living in Rodrigo’s apartment.

·  Allie has reached her purpose. Now her friend is no longer with Andy (that is, in L.A.), she has no interest on her.

·  She has got her own life, living with Rodrigo, and she was going to donate her eggs, because she had a kind of support of Rodrigo.

BACK TO SCHOOL

·  Now, she is sleeping on her apartment again, but now she is alone and it is she who is regretting for what she had done.

·  She hated Allie, who now was happy, Andy, who left her and even herself.

THE EDWARD-ALBEE TYPE

This node is a past reference of when she met Allie: They were sitting with a group of friends (maybe in a pub or in a cafe, I guess) and then they had a conversation.

·  From the very beginning of their friendship, Allie was trying to make a fool of her, showing her too extrovert character.

REASSURANCE II

·  The main character explains to us how daily life with Andy was, sharing their apartment.

·  She regrets then they had to break up soon. 

·  Sharing her life and house with Andy does not make her happy. Living together is a difficult experience at her present.

WHAT MONEY CAN BUY

·  Allie was paid a considerable amount of money. She phoned (I guess from her apartment to Andy’s apartment) her friend and they went to have lunch together and to get their hair cut at the hair dresser. ‘Mexico’, the restaurant where they had lunch (and where they ordered extra meals to freeze for when Allie is poor again) and the hairdresser’s are on the luxurious mall ‘The Ivy’

·  They had then hair cut: The narrator’s cut was $75 while we do not know how much Allie’s cut was, but the hairdresser started to say compliments to her.

 

 

I USED TO PLAY PROFESSIONAL BEACH VOLLEYBAL

·  Here, both girls come to the beach and when they passed the volleyball courts, our main character stared at them. They had a conversation about the narrator’s past: she used to play professional beach volleyball.

·  We know a little about our narrator’s past life ( This node leads me to the thought that the narrator is the alter ego of Adrienne Eisen herself, as she also used to play professional beach volleyball) It seems that she misses it, at least being fit, not the 8-hour daily training.

DRY

·  Andy and her girlfriend were on their apartment. They were lying on their bed, going to have sex, but in the end she could not.

·  Andy went to the bathroom to have a shower, but as his girlfriend needed to talk, they went to the beach to have a walk.

·  In their way to the beach she said she loved their apartment.

·  Noticeable change from the narrator we were used to some nodes ago to the current narrator: she now cares about her feelings.

·  The fact that she loved their apartment because it was near to the beach seems that she was a bit nostalgic, homesick, and melancholic about her past. But suddenly she shows again she has not changed so much at all and that she was even more like Allie by asking him to change their sides.

SANDWICHED

·  Allie and the narrator are on Andy’s kitchen, preparing some cheese sandwiches; they are going to the beach. Andy is at have too, but he has no plans, he is only thinking about going to his office.

·  His girlfriend asks him to go the beach with them.

·  Once they are on the beach, Andy eats all the sandwiches. Allie confesses she hates having him there with them.

·  She did it on the Popsicle stand, where girls were buying some ice-creams.

·  Andy was waiting for them on the sand.

·  Allie shows no respect for her friend’s boyfriend by saying that he could not count as a person because he never before had said something interesting.

·  Andy is here as simple as he has always been during the story: he does not realize that her girlfriend’s friend is putting her against him.

IT’S WHAT’S INSIDE

·  Our narrator comes with Allie to the egg donor place (maybe a hospital or a private clinic).

·  There she was rejected because of her past, so she became angry: she wanted the money to buy a computer.

·  After that, both friends had lunch at Century City.

·  Here, even the title of the node is explaining to us what it is about: ‘It’s what’s inside’. It refers to what is inside Allie, in a metaphoric sense: she cannot become an egg donor because of her past life: she was involved in drugs, mental illnesses, alcoholism, felony… 

EXPOSED

Both girls were on the laundry room, under Andy’s block of flats, doing his laundry. They were sitting on the floor, reading and talking about their breasts Andy’s girlfriend become astonished when Allie showed her breasts.

·  It is the first time the age of a character is revealed to us: Allie is 26 years old.

·  I think Andy’s girlfriend may be older, as she got so shocked when the young girl showed her breasts.

GESTURES

Allie and Rodrigo come to Andy’s apartment to have dinner.

·  They had dinner on the table, where Allie spilled some water Andy had to clean up.

·  The narrator shows here again that she cannot put up with Rodrigo. She is getting her friend skills and bad habits.

·  Allie does a very funny thing in a certain way, she is saying to her boyfriend that, in a future, he will have to cook too, but I do not think she really loves him and wants to spend her whole life with him.

·  Rodrigo explains to her the kind of movies he is working on at the moment: romantic comedies. This comment has near past, present and near future references: He has been working on them for certain time (I do not think he has started right now), he is producing them at the moment and he’s going to produce them, at least until he finishes his Italian romantic comedy.

ESCAPE STORIES

·  The narrator and Andy are in their car with Mike, Andy’s brother, and Karen, the women he lives with.

·  They were going to Andy’s mom, which was a ten-hour long way by car.

·  Andy’s girlfriend had to stop to go to the bathroom. And, when she returned, she changed Andy and start driving, just to let her boyfriend have a short rest.

·  She wants Karen to make a new past time reference: she would like to hear how her last husband killed himself in front of her. (She shows us that now she has become a kind of Allie: she insisted on asking for an embarrassing subject!)

THE UNIVERSE

We cannot guess where this scene does take place. But both girls were talking about their orgasm and what they did on their beds with their boyfriends. (Allie remembered the first time she had sex with Rodrigo, and confessed to her friend that he did not satisfy herself.

·  That night after having talked to Allie, the narrator arrived home and asked Andy to try with his tongue instead of his penis.

·  Allie shows here that she treated Rodrigo as an object from the beginning of their relationship.

·  She is showing her friend in a certain way that she has already had lesbian sex.

THE END OF THE BED

·  Andy and his girlfriend are at home, in bed. They are aware this is the last time they were making love.

·  Their clothes fell on each side of the bed.

·  Then again, she becomes a bit nostalgic with those moments which she has already lived, even those lived with Andy, so that she prefers calling it making love rather than fucking and accepts his proposal of putting on some music. Those songs would be their songs for the rest of their lives.

SILENCE

 Allie is at a Zen-Buddhist monastery. The narrator would have gone with her, but she refused her because she had to be alone to relax. Instead, she has taken Rodrigo.

·  The narrator wants to go to the Zen monastery because she really needs it; she had to make up her mind and remake her life ( in future), but her friend did not want her to disturb her spirit, although she was who had driven her into that instability.

TOGETHERNESS

·  As Andy is full of spots and scabs, so they spent the weekend at home. She had rented a film, but it bored them so they tried to do another thing together: talking with people through the Internet.

·  Finally, after trying to have some fun watching TV or in front of the computer screen, they both went to bed.

·  Andy’s girlfriend has resentment inside: she has to make good use of the time they were spending together, but they had not done it till the moment.

·  Through the Internet, she visits different chat rooms: The first one, where she found nobody interesting, and the other one about sex. This room was full of men but they did not want to talk with her because she has got a man Username: Andy.

     

Academic year 2008/2009

© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López

© Laura Pons Fernández

laupons2@alumni.uv.es

Universitat de València Press