Love Notes

by Penny Mickelbury

  “She’ll get over it,” Mimi said uncharitably, tossing her belongings into the car and climbing in behind them.

  “You’re going, Mimi. We don’t have to stay late, but you’re going.” Gianna blew her a kiss and closed the kitchen door as the car door slammed shut, thereby missing Mimi’s reaction to her pronouncement, though she could easily imagine what that reaction was. Before crawling back into bed, she called Mimi’s office and left a sweet message on her voicemail. She checked the clock to be certain the alarm was set, turned off the light, and returned to sleep as easily as she’d woken from it.

  Mimi’s jaw muscles worked with the effort to stifle the yawn that had been threatening to escape for the last half hour. The six men seated at the table with her were waiting for her to answer a question that she’d answered twice already. Three of the men were the newspaper’s lawyers and three of them were editors and all of them, ostensibly, were on her side in this matter, yet, she was having a difficult time feeling allied with them. Where was the woman lawyer? Where was the woman editor? And the fact that one of the lawyers and one of the editors was Black provided Mimi with no sense of comfort and she wondered if that were deliberate on their part. Were they letting her know that she could expect no special protection or sanction from them just because she was Black? Good thing she had no expectations.

  It was much too warm in the conference room; it was too warm in the entire building. The unexpected and early winter-like weather had kicked on the central heat and that smell that accompanied the first heat of the season permeated the air, made Mimi’s nose tingle. Perhaps a sneeze would go over better than a yawn. Or she could just put her head down on the table, close her eyes, and go to sleep.

  “I’ve answered that question twice, but they say the third time’s the charm, so here goes. David Trimble did absolutely, positively and without a doubt, refuse to talk to me before my story ran. I left messages on his home answering machine and with his wife. I left messages with his receptionist and on his office voice mail. I sent registered letters to his home and to his office. David Trimble never responded. And if he had, what difference would it have made?” She looked directly at her immediate boss as she asked the question and he shifted in his seat and shifted his gaze across the table to one of the lawyers. Wassily was his name, weasel was his game.

  “Mimi, we just want to make certain we have all the facts,” the lead lawyer said, smiling at her. He was the only one of the lawyers who talked. The other two wrote on their yellow legal pads, even when nobody was talking.

  “You have them,” she said. “Can I go now?”

  “I don’t think you understand the gravity of this situation,” her boss, the Weasel, said, a hint of a whine in his voice. “A man is dead and his widow is blaming you, and me, and this newspaper.”

  “I didn’t kill him. Did you?”

  The lead lawyer raised his hands, palms out. “Let’s keep tempers under control, please, and keep to the facts. And the fact is, a lawsuit like this one puts the paper in a bad light, Mimi, and it’s our job to do as much damage control as possible.”

  Mimi imitated the lawyer’s gestures, raising her hands and smiling. “I’m all for that, guys, and as I see it, there are only two ways to control the damage: First, all the David Trimble-like weenies stop stealing the public’s money, or, second, we in the press ignore them when they do. If we don’t rat ‘em out, then they won’t have to blow their brains out when they get caught.” She looked around the table, meeting all six pairs of the eyes that were locked on hers, anger in every pair. “Either way is fine with me. What’s not fine is having you try to shift the blame to me.”

  “Nobody’s trying to shift the blame to you, Mimi,” the lawyer said.

  “Sure you are,” Mimi responded, “otherwise, this would have been handled over the phone. This isn’t my first law suit but it is the first time six of you have ganged up on me behind closed doors, and I want you to know that I don’t like it. Not one little bit.”

  The Weasel looked at his boss and then at Mimi. “We’re not ganging up on you, Mimi, we’re merely trying to keep you in the loop and part of the process. If there’s going to be a huge public outcry in response to Trimble’s death, you’re going to be affected just as we are, and we need to fashion a proper response. For all of us.”

  Mimi stood up. “I don’t need to fashion anything and you don’t need to fashion anything for me. I did my job. I did it honestly and truthfully and without breaking any canons or ethics of my profession.” She looked directly at the lead lawyer. “Or of yours.”

  *****

  Inside The Bayou, it could have been Mardi Gras, or Halloween, or the free-at-last party for the winner of the lottery, or a reprise of the world-wide millennium celebration. Or a combination of all of them—that’s how seriously the revelers were taking the opening of the new women’s bar/restaurant/dance club/piano bar. By the best recollection of the most social of D.C.’s social butterflies, it had been at least a decade since a new women’s gathering spot had debuted in the nation’s capital—a real women’s bar, not some hybrid thing that catered to straights a couple of nights a week, to men a couple of nights a week, and to different ethnicities of women the other nights. The Bayou was the real thing: a bar for the committed imbibers; a restaurant specializing in genuine—and expensive—Louisiana cuisine for the epicures; a game room for the players; a good sized dance floor the energetic; and a cozy piano bar for the romantics. The place looked like it belonged on the water. It had rafters and railings and lots of glass and a plank floor, and at the moment, more women than Mimi and Gianna could remember seeing in one place in a very long time. All kinds of women, all ages of women, all sizes and shapes and colors of women, all of them surrendering to full enjoyment of the moment.

  “Aren’t you glad you came?” Gianna yelled into her ear, the only way to be heard over the din.

  Mimi shrugged, grinned and nodded. She was glad she’d come. A party was exactly what she needed to shake off the awfulness of her day. She tried to lead Gianna to the dance floor, and was definitively rebuffed. Gianna didn’t dance. Ever. Mimi did, whenever she got the chance, so she waved good-bye, melted into the crowd, and, the rhythm of the room permeating her bones, made her way to the dance floor. She hadn’t been dancing in so long she couldn’t remember the last time, and for a moment she was saddened by the thought. How could she deprive herself of something she enjoyed so much? Then she reminded herself that until the opening of The Bayou, there was no place she’d have wanted to spend an evening dancing. But that was then and this was now, and right now the music ruled and Mimi was a willing and loyal subject. She took to the floor, no partner necessary. Or so she thought. Two couples turned away from her when she danced into their sphere, all four of the women young, tattooed, and ear ringed. Mimi was so shocked that she stopped moving and stood looking in amazement at the four young women as they danced away from her, apparently never having given her a second thought. She moved, finally, when she was bumped and jostled by the other dancers; but she moved to get out of the way, not to dance. She’d lost the desire for that.

  The crowd was as thick as raw honey and Mimi had no choice but to flow with it as it oozed toward the far edge of the dance floor. That’s when she spied Marianne and Renee, in the throes of some wild, crazy gyrations that might have been dancing on some other planet where rhythm wasn’t essential to movement. Her irritation of a few moments ago forgotten, she shimmied over and wrapped an arm around each of them.

  “Mimi!” they shrieked in delight, each landing a kiss on her each of her cheeks. They were so genuinely glad to see her that she experienced another pang of sadness at the thought that had Gianna listened to her, she wouldn’t have been here. They pulled her into their wild and crazy dance and, in a matter of seconds, several other women had joined the mad whirl. In seconds, she’d shaken off every ugly emotion she’d experienced during the day, including being snubbed by the baby dykes. She’d very much
rather dance with Marianne and Renee and the half dozen other women who gyrated with them for several minutes before moving off to join other groups. This, Mimi thought as she closed her eyes and felt the beat of the music in her veins, is how dancing is supposed to happen.

  “Where’s Gianna?” she heard in her ear, and opened her eyes to find herself cheek-to-cheek with Marianne. The decibel count was increasing by the minute, and the only way to be heard was to yell directly into an ear.

  Mimi leaned in even closer to answer. “Probably shooting pool.” Marianne and Gianna had been friends for half their lives and Marianne knew how Gianna felt about dancing.

  “Gianna’s why we have a game room here,” Marianna yelled into Mimi’s ear, and then she and Renee were enveloped by another group of merrymakers and Mimi was carried back toward the middle of the dance floor, this time to be welcomed by people who knew how to appreciate a serious dancer like herself; people, she realized, who had achieved the age of reason. She could make this a habit, she thought as she whirled around. And she’d have time for such habitual pleasures now that she no longer would be obsessed with her work—a decision she’d made after her meeting with the bosses and lawyers that morning. She’d be damned if she was going to do their dirty work and also be their pariah. If the public didn’t care that their government officials were corrupt, who was she to carry the flag up the hill? She’d been ferreting out graft and corruption long enough. Let somebody else do it. She’d happily work an eight-hour, five day week and become a Bayou regular. Hell, she’d probably have to; just because she’d decided to opt for normality didn’t mean Gianna would follow. What would she do with herself all those extra hours if she wasn’t working and Gianna was?

  She burned up the floor for the next hour, encountering more than a dozen friends and acquaintances in the process, some of them people she hadn’t seen in years, half of them asking about Beverly, her former lover. She definitely needed to get out more. She and Bev had split up three years ago and she’d been with Gianna for over a year, and people she’d known for a decade didn’t know about either of those changes in her life. She made two dinner dates for the following weekend, to renew old friendships and to introduce Gianna to those friends, and a breakfast date with the new artistic director of a theater company whose work she admired. Then she set out to find Gianna.

  Easier said than done. It was midnight and a female body occupied every inch of space in The Bayou—ordinarily, not a bad thing. But when one woman is searching for another woman and the only visual targets are women, well, the search could prove interesting if not immediately successful. Mimi thought she spied Gianna at least five times, and mumbled to herself that, “You’d think I know what she looks like by now,” and she was about to give up and go search, instead, for food when she saw Gianna huddled in a corner with Marianne. They were standing very close together and leaning toward each other, heads touching. They’d have to stand that close, Mimi knew, to hear each other over the crowd noise, but it was their facial expressions that grabbed Mimi’s attention, especially Gianna’s. She wore her “lieutenant look.” And it wasn’t just that her expression was grave or that her attention was focused entirely on what Marianne was saying. Gianna’s eyes were in another place, in the place where she saw ugliness and evil and hatred. In the place where she was a cop.

  Mimi shuddered. What could Marianne know that could transport the head of the D.C. Police Department’s Hate Crimes Unit into that space? She watched Gianna listen. She was perfectly still, yet her body radiated kinetic energy, and Mimi knew that whatever Marianne was saying was both important and serious because she would never intrude on Gianna’s professional self in this kind of environment otherwise, and if it were some frivolous matter, Gianna never would give it this kind of attention. She watched them for several seconds more, then headed for the restaurant. It was hours past dinner time and when she saw the line leading to the food, she knew it easily would be another hour before she’d be able to quell her ravenous hunger. Or maybe it was just the idea of genuine Creole and Cajun food that inspired the instant and overwhelming desire to eat. Her stomach rumbled.

  “Me, too,” she heard from behind her. She turned to face a tiny, very pretty woman with close-cropped hair and oversized eyeglasses with dark tinted lenses who looked vaguely familiar.

  “Well, we’d both better find some mind over matter techniques to help us survive this line,” Mimi replied equably.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” her companion responded with a dry, dead-pan tone, and Mimi knew instantly who she was: Cassandra Ali, a member of Gianna’s Hate Crimes Unit. She’d been on a medical leave of absence since being brutally beaten and almost raped by a neo-Nazi asshole several months ago. Gianna had broken several small bones in her hand punching out the scum who’d beat the young cop. Cassandra had lost the sight in her left eye and though she had otherwise recovered physically, she still was severely emotionally traumatized, and Mimi knew that Gianna worried about her; worried whether Cassandra Ali ever could return to full-time active duty.

  “You look familiar,” Cassie said as Mimi was wondering whether—and how—to make herself known. “My name’s Cassie,” Cassie said, extending her hand and removing the need for speculation.

  “Mimi Patterson,” Mimi replied, offering her hand in return, and watching the recognition dawn in the other woman’s eyes.

  “The Italian lieutenant’s woman,” Cassie said with a slightly mocking smile that didn’t quite make it all the way to her eyes. “Is she here?”

  Mimi nodded. “She’s over there somewhere,” she replied, waving her arm in the direction where she’d last seen Gianna.

  “I’m surprised. I didn’t think she was this out.”

  “She’s not,” Mimi answered, “but Marianne and Renee are good friends and she wanted to be supportive.”

  Cassie smiled, and Mimi for the first time noticed the damaged left eye behind the dark lenses. “That’s the kind of thing the lieutenant would do, put her own rep on the line to support her friends.”

  Mimi heard a slight bitterness in the tone and decided not to respond. Instead, she watched Cassie think and decide whether to speak further. Then she realized that they weren’t yelling at each other. Leaving the dance floor and entering any of the side rooms—restaurant, game room, or piano bar—resulted in dramatic reduction of the noise level. So, instead of being deafening, the sound of a couple of hundred ravenous women lined up, waiting to eat, was merely cacophonous. Cassie was not uncomfortable being observed or being quiet. Gianna once told Mimi that she thought of Cassie as the one most like herself, and Mimi could see why she’d think that.

  “You’re a good reporter,” Cassie finally said.

  “And I hear you’re a good cop.”

  The comment took Cassie by surprise. Then it annoyed her. Then her face changed and sadness took over. “I was a good cop,” she said slowly, as if measuring the words for accuracy. “I could have been one of the best. I was learning from one of the best. But that’s all over now.” And she walked away. Mimi watched her go and felt her own appetite leave with her.

  “Damn,” she muttered.

  “Lovers’ spat?”

  Mimi heard the words behind her and turned to find a grinning, vacuous face too close to her own. She strangled the words that were on their way out of her mouth, mean bruising words; words that the grinning, vacuous face didn’t deserve; words that more suitably belonged to her editors and the company lawyers, or to the slime that had brutalized Cassie Ali. She, too, left the food line, and, following in Cassie’s footsteps, she left the relative quiet of the restaurant to search for Gianna in the crush of bodies and noise.

  *****

  Gianna bit her ear, then whispered into it, “You’re lucky I don’t tell the world what a soft touch you are.”

  “It takes one to know one.” Mimi returned the bite, beginning with a nip to the neck and working her way down. When finally she took her mouth from Gianna, she sat up in b
ed and switched on the light. They were at Gianna’s and the lights were on a shelf above the bed, so they could lie with their heads beneath the shelf and see each other without being blinded. “And if I’m a soft touch, what does that make you?” She rolled over into Gianna’s arms.

  “A connoisseur of soft touches,” Gianna answered, softly touching Mimi all over.

  “What are you going to do about her?” Mimi asked, unable to hold back the question any longer.

  “I don’t know,” Gianna answered as softly as one of her touches. “I want her back but she’s not ready and I can’t keep an open slot for much longer. They’re already cutting budgets out from under department heads, and you know that Hate Crimes has never been anyone’s favorite child. I’m still alive right now only because of the good will of the Chief. If he pulls his support, not only is Cassie’s place in the Unit history, but the Unit itself is history.”

  Mimi was quiet. It was rare that Gianna confided so much so readily and she didn’t want to push her luck. So, she changed the subject. “Speaking of which, I’ve asked for a new assignment.”

  “And what was the answer?” Gianna responded as if she’d known what Mimi was going to say.

  “‘No’, of course. But I don’t take ‘no’ answers with good grace.” Mimi sat up, shivered in the chill, then scooted back down under the covers and close to Gianna. “They just need time to adjust to the idea.”

  “You’re too good for them to just let you do something else, Mimi, you know that. Why not just take off a couple of weeks and go back to it fresh and rested? And let that lawsuit business die down.”

  Mimi sat up again, this time pulling the covers around her shoulders. “Because nothing will change, Gianna, and it’s more than just the stupid lawsuit. I don’t really give a shit about that. The fool stole the money and then was too big a coward to face the music and do his time.”