by Stella Duffy
“New York? Not Australia?”
“No. Not Australia. Look could we have lunch or something? I would like to see you.”
And, like the stupid, forgetful, easily swayed idiot she was, Saz had agreed. What’s more she’d invited Caroline to her flat. In sixty-five minutes time.
She got out of bed, dusted, vacuumed, washed, dressed (in the most stunning, just-thrown-on effect she could manage), dashed down to the shop to buy flowers (to herself, from herself) and waited. Waited for over half an hour because, as always, Caroline was thirty-five minutes late.
Caroline arrived with apologies and a bunch of flowers – same as the bunch Saz had bought an hour earlier, same shop, same price, different intention. Not “see how happy I am”, but “see how sorry I am”. She stood on the doorstep looking like it was this time two years ago.
Saz caught her breath and asked her in.
Caroline sat at the kitchen table, drinking weak coffee, looking thin and pale and beautiful with her fine, straight, auburn hair falling over her face. Caroline sat at the kitchen table and told Saz all about it. How the Australian had cheated on her, lied to her, used the car and flat for six months and then gone back to Sydney leaving only a huge phone bill and a postcard saying “Thanks for the hospitality but my visa’s run out.” How Caroline had wanted for months to run back to Saz begging forgiveness and kisses. How she’d stayed away until she could trust herself to behave sensibly. How she didn’t want Saz back, not that she assumed Saz wanted her, how she knew she needed to be alone. Which was why she was leaving to go to film school. In New York. The money was coming from her dad who probably hoped she’d find herself a nice American boy. And now, well now she needed to say goodbye. And sorry. Properly.
Saz sat listening spellbound. She really did look very thin. And her skin. She’d forgotten that Caroline didn’t have very good skin. Not enough exercise. She’d also forgotten what wonderful eyes she had. And her hair. The way it fell over her eyes. The way Caroline flicked it back without even a pause in the conversation. The way she wanted to kiss her. Caroline talked so long and so hard, telling her story so fully Saz wondered if maybe she’d given up therapy. She hadn’t. She just wanted Saz to understand.
“Yeah Carrie, I know, I do understand. I understand that what you do is run away. I understand that we were becoming too close. I understand that you want me to forgive you so you can go off to New York feeling whole and happy and clear. I understand that going to New York is just running away again. I understand that this is the third career-oriented course you will have done in five years. I mean how long have you wanted to be a filmmaker? What happened to furniture design? I understand that it’s easy for you to keep running away as long as your father keeps funding you. I understand that as long as you let your father fund you, he will never treat you like the adult you want him to. I understand that now you know what it feels like to be left. And while I must admit I’m sorry for you, I’m also glad. I understand Caroline, that even at twenty-four it’s about time you grew up. Perhaps it’s a good move. Do you think you can stick at this one?”
“I don’t know. But I want to try. I don’t want to fuck up again. I’m sorry you’re still so pissed off at me …”
“Only because you wouldn’t let me be pissed off at you six months ago. If you’d have let me shout at you last year I’d be fine now and shagging half of North London.”
“North London? I thought you’d want to stick to this half of the river after me.”
“Anyway I’m not pissed off at you. And I’m celibate. And I’m bitter. I’m a bitter, twisted old dyke. Obviously.”
Saz laughed despite herself as she quoted Caroline’s mother, who when Caroline had come out had accused her daughter, aged fourteen, of being a “bitter, twisted old dyke”. She’d then apologised and been sweetness and light ever since, but it was a big accusation for Caroline who, at fourteen thought she knew everything and now at twenty-four was just beginning to admit that she still wasn’t quite “grown-up”. The laughing helped. Saz told Caroline that she thought she’d been an absolute bitch and deserved everything the Australian had done to her. Caroline agreed though she thought the phone bill for £368 was a bit much and made more coffee. They asked about each others’ families, mutual friends who had split off on either side and other friends who had never been mutual.
They ate lunch. Caroline as always ate lots though she looked like she ate nothing. They listened to Tracy Chapman and Kate Bush for old times’ sake. By 4pm they knew all about the past year of each others’ lives and Caroline had to leave. She left leaving an address in New York – luck being what it was for Carrie she’d been given a flat in New York in exchange for her London flat – minimum six months, possibility of two years – and the offer to Saz of a sofabed whenever she wanted it.
Saz closed the door behind Caroline and sighed. The phone rang. It was Gary.
“I’ve got the names of two hundred women, physical descriptions – height, weight, hair and eye colour. I’ve even got marital status and occupation where available.”
“Gary, brilliant! You’re an angel, what do I owe you?”
“Two tickets to ‘As You Like It’ at the Barbican?”
“Sure sweetheart, when do we go?”
“Ah. Well actually, I’d really just like the tickets if you don’t mind. I’ve got someone I’d like to take.”
“Gary! You’ve got a date?”
“Yes and no questions or you don’t get the info. You book the tickets, I’ll send the papers.”
“It’s a deal. But she’d better be cute!”
Saz did the dishes and made a mental note to call Helen or Judith as soon as she was finished cleaning up. She wanted to get cross-referencing as soon as possible.
The phone rang again just as she was putting away the last cup. It was John Clark.
“John. Any progress for me?”
“Well Ms Martin, I’ve typed out a full physical description, a list of all of the restaurants we ever went to, I’ve got the date of when she broke her ankle and, I don’t know if this will be of any use to you but I’ve got a postcard she sent me …”
“A postcard?”
“Yes, she sometimes went on business trips midweek – once though, it overlapped our dinner night. So she sent a postcard to my work instead.”
“Where’s it from?”
“New York.”
“New York! Any address?”
“Well just a hotel address …”
“John that’s brilliant! Don’t you see? She’ll have to have given the hotel some name and address for London!”
“Oh yes, of course, I didn’t think … shall I call the hotel?”
“No, there’s no way they’d give that information over the phone. Just get all your info to me and I’ll see what I can do. I was thinking of taking a quick transatlantic trip anyway …”
Saz hung up having arranged to meet John the next day.
Then she picked up the phone to tell Caroline the good news.
CHAPTER 9
Leftovers
After a while of living together it became obvious I’d have to meet more of her past. And as I couldn’t meet her family then it would have to be friends. And ex-lovers. I hate meeting ex-lovers. I hate the history that they hold. We both have ex-lovers who are men. Mine are an eclectic collection of performers and artists, men I knew at university, old flatmates, present lovers of other friends – about one third of them gay. Some of them were gay when we met, some weren’t. It took me a long time to make up my mind too.
The Woman with the Kelly McGillis body only has a few ex-lovers. She has three women and three men. Her men are a different sort of men to mine, mine are much more like boys. Hers are a doctor, a lawyer and a carpenter. Men to take home to mother. When we first met she couldn’t get over the number of ex-lovers I have, male and female.
“But Maggie, how did you fit them all in?”
I chose to avoid the obvious joke. I can
be quite ruthless when it comes to comedy.
“Look honey, most of them are friends – we were friends, we became lovers and then we went back to being friends again. If you don’t have to spend the first three months just getting to know each other and if you don’t have to stay together just because otherwise you’ll never see each other again – then you can get through an awful lot of lovers. Besides that, it’s kind of nice, like keeping it in the family.”
I felt strange about all her relationships. I didn’t want to know about them and yet I did. I’d ask about them and then when she told me I’d get angry and jealous. I’d try to hide it but I’m not very good at hiding.
I suffer terribly from jealousy.
I met one of the men once. The carpenter. He seemed nice. And completely innocuous. Dull. Which annoyed me even more. Because if he was so dull and so nice, how was it that she’d ended up with me? That she said she wanted to spend forever with me? Was there in me some hidden shred of boring which she found attractive?
Though there is something about boring which is attractive. A life with no surprises. A life with no change.
I don’t like change.
We went to dinner at the carpenter’s house. He’d just finished renovating it. It had taken him five years. And he’d enjoyed doing it. Enjoyed stripping the banisters by hand. Enjoyed sanding the skirting boards, replacing the sashes on the old windows. I’d have ripped it all out and replaced it with chrome. Something clean and crisp with no hidden recesses. So nothing can hide away.
It did look wonderful, but he said there was still damp in the walls and rot in the foundations. He told us about the rot as if that wouldn’t shatter the view of all that we’d just seen.
Once I know that something’s rotten, I can’t see it any other way.
And then when she went upstairs to the toilet he told me that he liked me. He liked me and he wanted to have sex with me.
I must have looked stunned because he said it again.
“I mean it Maggie, I think you’re really beautiful. You’re driving me crazy.”
Even if I’d wanted to, that would have done it. I couldn’t possibly have sex with someone who says “driving me crazy”.
“No Peter. I couldn’t. Apart from anything else, I couldn’t do it to her.”
“Well, we can have a threesome.”
Then I knew he was a bastard.
“No Peter. We could not have a threesome. Not only would it bore me senseless, but she wouldn’t like it. She doesn’t have good sex with men.”
“But she told me …”
“She was twenty-two, Peter. At that age women often lie to men. Some women do it all their lives. Some women really believe it would harm a man irreparably to hear that they were an incompetent lover.”
He was blustering now, “I’m not …”
“How do you know? Can you be sure that not one of the women you’ve seduced with your masterful technique was faking it?”
“Well no, but you just know don’t you?”
“Do you Peter? Do you know what it feels like to be a woman? Do you know what good sex feels like for a woman? I know because I’m a woman. How can you possibly?”
He was deflating in front of me. And the more I pushed home my point, the further he moved away from me. Not that it’s even a point I believe in. There’s a big myth surrounding “women-loving-women”, it sells a lot of books. No one can ever really know how another person feels. But it’s a great argument when dealing with a Neanderthal.
Then the Woman with the Kelly McGillis body swayed her slightly drunken way back down the stairs and came to sit beside me. Holding my hand and occasionally kissing my bare left shoulder. And we talked of nothing for another hour or so until she and I left for home. She was getting into the car as I turned to say goodbye to him on the doorstep. I looked up at him and was momentarily shocked to see that Mr Dull-and-Boring was long gone. He grabbed my wrist very tightly and snarled “You’re wrong, she did enjoy it. She never faked a thing.”
But it was him that was wrong there. She might have had good sex with him. Her memories, what she told me of its mediocrity, may have changed with the mists of time. But she did fake things. Lots of things.
We went home, car windows wide open to the cool air and made love slowly, desultorily. I took a long time to come and when I did it was fitful and barely satisfying. And again I marvelled at how such a stunning woman could have liked, even loved, a man so bland.
Until I remembered how tightly he grabbed my wrist and the look on his face as he stood in the doorway and I realised that perhaps she’d seen that look, that anger before too. Perhaps she liked it.
I think maybe she did.
Only one of the women lovers was a problem. She wanted to be my friend. I didn’t even want to know her.
Victoria Cook was an artist.
I expect she still is, but we don’t send Christmas cards.
She was a painter who exhibited at small, primarily women-only galleries. And after we’d been together for about a year and a half, Victoria Cook decided she wanted to be our friend. My friend.
Dolores knew her through a women artists’ group she used to go to. She thinks she’s weird. And if Dolores thinks Victoria is weird then she’s got to be strange. However she, and most of the rest of the world also think Victoria Cook is very, very beautiful. Cool, charming, tall and gracious. All the things I always wanted to be and never became, being too short and loud and “cute”. Cute is good, but it’s not gracious. And unfortunately Victoria isn’t one of those women who avoid their ex-lovers at all costs. She “maintains relationships”. She takes her problems to her therapist and uncovers a “difficulty-strategy”. After staying away for quite some time Victoria realised that she had a difficulty with me being the new lover and came up with a strategy that involved me becoming her new friend.
I’d rather appreciated her staying away. They say it’s better the devil you know, but I prefer my devils snuggled up with the skeletons in the closet where they belong.
Victoria wanted to come to terms with me. Which meant she got to share her tales of life with the Woman with the Kelly McGillis body. She got to give me their history, when I liked to think there was no past before me. Victoria invited us both for lunch twice and drinks once. I went, each time feeling like I was late for the execution of my own relationship. They’d been together for just seven months and much of that time Victoria had been “developing an installation” so they’d only been able to see each other once or twice a week.
“And you know Margaret, I never felt I really had a handle on her. Always felt there was something else going on.”
I always want to hit people who call me “Margaret”.
“Well, you were busy with your work Victoria.”
“Yes, but I always felt she was not quite as committed as I was.”
That lack of commitment had caused Victoria to end the relationship with a terse note asking for no contact for six months.
“To give me time to see reality.”
Within those six months the Woman with the Kelly McGillis body had met me and I’d become her reality. We saw Victoria three times and each time led to huge arguments between us.
“Look Maggie, she only wants to get to know you. Can’t you humour her?”
“It doesn’t humour me to think of you being with her. Where’s the comedy in that?”
“It was years ago, I’m with you now. I want to be with you. For God’s sake, I’ve been with you longer than I’ve ever been with anyone!”
The more I heard about Victoria, the more insecure I became. I know jealousy isn’t attractive but there’s nothing like wishing it away to make it even stronger.
Wishes are for the tooth fairy.
When Victoria realised I wouldn’t play along in the way her therapist would have preferred, she sort of dropped away from our life. Slowly, like the scab coming off a particularly nasty sore. I don’t know if the Woman with the Kelly McGilli
s body missed her or not. But after all, she did have me, and I’m enough for any woman.
Or should be.
And the fourth woman lover was me.
Still is.
CHAPTER 10
The New York Marathon
New York was cold. Cold in that special New York way. That is, colder in temperature than London, but the friction of living there making it seem about nine times as hot.
Saz arrived late on Friday night and spent the weekend with Caroline, ice skating in Central Park, queuing outside in a virtual blizzard for tickets to a modern operetta at La Mama. They drank lots of espresso, ate too many doughnuts and even more bagels and then Saz spent Sunday afternoon alone in the Guggenheim, walking round and round trying to decide the best way to approach the hotel.
The information she’d gained in the week while waiting to go to New York had hardly been groundbreaking. “September” had stayed in a small private hotel on West 43rd and John Clark remembered her once saying that she always stayed in the same place when she went to New York. Which sounded like she went there often. She had told him that it was almost always midweek, though occasionally it had been one of the Fridays when she wasn’t with him. Gary’s information had been even less helpful and more time consuming. Having gone through every one of the two hundred names he’d given her, getting physical descriptions of the deceased from wherever she could workplaces, colleges, school records – she got the list down to sixty white women of about the right height and weight. She then cut it down to only twenty women with brown eyes and blonde, fair or dyed blonde hair. And then the hard part came. Using the details Gary had given her, she contacted the relatives where they were listed and began the agonizing job of trying to get a photograph of the deceased from each of the grieving relatives. In most cases she pretended to be an old school friend who’d read the death notice and was devastated not to be able to make it to the funeral. Could they bear to spare her a photo of Julie/Sally/Diane, just for a few hours so she could go and get a colour photocopy made? The families were usually helpful and friendly, adding to Saz’s guilt even more. Where they were difficult she did more checking to get a photo from school magazines or office security departments. Finally she had photos of eighteen of the women and when John Clark had gone through them about five times and still said that none of them were September, Saz got Judith to take him to the morgue to see if he could identify either of the two unnamed blondes lying cold and unburied after four weeks. He couldn’t.
