by Lee Lynch
Synopsis
Jefferson is the lover every woman wants to be—or to have.
Magnetically attractive, athletic, alcoholic, Jefferson is an anchorless innocent wandering through a world of women who can resist her no more than she can resist them. Never lacking a lover, Jefferson knows little of love; brought up on the right side of the tracks, she's drawn to the wild side. Every lesbian has known Jefferson—or is Jefferson.
Not since The Well of Loneliness has there been a lesbian novel of this scope. But much has changed since then…
Beggar of Love
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Beggar of Love
© 2009 Lee Lynch. All Rights Reserved.
ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-364-8
This Electronic Book is published by
Bold Strokes Books, Inc.,
P.O. Box 249
Valley Falls, New York 12185
First Edition: October 2009
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Credits
Editors: Jennifer Knight and Shelley Thrasher
Production Design: Stacia Seaman
Cover Design By Sheri([email protected])
By the Author
From BOLD STROKES BOOKS
Sweet Creek
Beggar of Love
NAIAD PRESS
Toothpick House
Old Dyke Tales
The Swashbuckler
Home In Your Hands
Dusty’s Queen of Hearts Diner
The Amazon Trail
Sue Slate, Private Eye
The Old Studebaker
Morton River Valley
Cactus Love
From NEW VICTORIA PUBLISHERS
Rafferty Street
Off the Rag, Edited with Akia Woods
From TRP COOKBOOKS
Butch Cook Book, Edited with Sue Hardesty and Nel Ward
Acknowledgments
Thank you:
Len Barot for caring about my work.
Shelley Thrasher for your careful editing, suggestions, and cheers.
Stacia Seaman for her caring work.
Connie Ward for your personal and professional support.
Lee Coats for sharing your stories.
Jennifer Fulton for telling me I’m a literary writer.
Jackie Brown for your friendship and enthusiasm.
Jean Sirius for your encouragement in writing down the hard parts and for Ginger’s flip-flops.
Marilyn Silver for your help with 21st-century New York City.
Joy Parks for your support.
Dedication
This book is dedicated to
Nel Ward and Sue Hardesty.
Thank you for your friendship, love, and shelter.
And to
Elaine Mulligan
for giving me back my stories.
Chapter One
Ginger wasn’t coming back this time, Jefferson felt it. She didn’t blame Ginger, but for the final break to come over a mistake, a misunderstanding—the pain of it pummeled her. She’d only gone to Shirley’s room to finish apologizing and to get to know her without sex hanging them up. Then they walked around the corner to the coffee shop as Jefferson had originally planned, as she told Ginger she would. She was bursting with herself when she got home.
“I’m home, Ginge! I really had a good time seeing Shirley,” she’d planned to tell Ginger. “Talked and laughed with her without once feeling like I had to seduce her.” It was so good to be free of the compulsion to get physical with a woman. She’d finally unloaded some of her guilt. For so long she carried it around in an imaginary old cloth sack she dragged by its drawstring closure everywhere she went.
She’d bounded up the stairs instead of waiting for the slow elevator, unlocked the door to the apartment, and went in, panting, smiling, ready to shout, “I’m free!” First she’d stopped drinking; now she knew she was serious about being faithful. They’d celebrate with a bottle of sparkling cranberry juice.
“Ginger?” she’d called into the hollow-sounding apartment, startled when the refrigerator made the clunking sound that signaled a defrost cycle.
She could hear Ginger’s heavy Bronx accent as she read the note Ginger had left. “I ran into Elisa from Hunter,” it said, “at the recital. She saw you at the Hotel August in the elevator with another woman. You promised I wouldn’t have to endure this again. I should have known better. This time I’m really done.”
Since then she’d heard nothing. Ginger’s Aunt Tilly had barred her from Ginger’s dance school. None of their friends had heard from Ginger. Jefferson couldn’t sleep; the line between consciousness and unconsciousness became more and more thin. So here she was, on a personal stakeout, spending winter break watching Ginger’s dance school for signs of her. In years past, waiting to meet Ginger, she’d gotten friendly with the waitresses in the restaurant where she now sat hunkered in her worn brown leather bomber jacket by the window, and they kept the coffee coming as she watched across the snow for a chance to explain that, this time, she hadn’t strayed. If she’d lost Ginger again, what had been the sense of getting sober and staying away from other women? She ran both hands through her hair, combing it back. Oh, sure, at the program they’d tell her she’d done it for herself, but who was she without Ginger?
She’d always loved the city in the snow. It tamped down the noise, the traffic, the hustle. The snow was deep enough that each infrequent vehicle drove in the tracks of the last one. Everything wore a clean icy tarp about two inches thick. Buses were sparse and no passengers waited at the stop down the block. New York was as much at peace as she’d experienced it since the last blackout.
The next blow came like a roaring avalanche. A car pulled up outside the Dance Loft and Ginger, bundled in the pouffy coat with the fake fur collar Jefferson had given her last year, hurried to it, wheeling her huge green suitcase. Their gay friend Mitchell Para got out and opened the trunk. She’d never thought to call him.
He hugged Ginger, long and tight, then loaded the suitcase while Ginger went back to the doorway for—oh, no, she thought. All her luggage? What was going on? Mitchell was following Ginger now, shadowing her, not six inches away, his arms outlining her, as if to protect her or to shepherd her to the building. Ginger’s face looked like it belonged on an injured athlete, the pain was so obvious. Was she sick? No, you didn’t haul four suitcases to a hospital. Had one of her brothers fallen at a building site? No, that didn’t make sense either. Four suitcases? Had she packed every one of her prized collection of flip-flops?
Mitchell opened the door for Ginger and then got in the driver’s seat. Jefferson should have been lunging out of the restaurant to catch Ginger, but she sat there and watched Mitchell lay his arm across Ginger’s shoulders, draw her to him and kiss her. Jefferson stood, but within seconds, all she could see of them was the roof of the car, darting into a side street.
Breathless with shock, she stepped outside and looked for a taxi. But Ginger could be going anywhere: Mitchell’s place, out of the city, out of the state, out of the country. She imagined herself foolishly shouting, “Follow that car!” and lowered her arm. She slumped against the bare little tree beside her, a ginkgo she’d watched c
ity workers plant two years ago. She clearly wasn’t wanted on Ginger’s voyage. Ginger had every right not to wait around for an explanation after so many of Jefferson’s lies.
She charged across the street and through the gate of Ginger’s Washington Heights Dance Loft. It was the only building in the area with chain-link fencing around it; with its red stone walls, it resembled a little armory. Despite the weight she’d been putting on for the last ten years, again she sprang up the flight of wooden steps two at a time to the second floor. Ginger’s two instructors were holding classes. Aunt Tilly was at the reception desk. Jefferson placed her hands flat on the desk and waited in silence until the old woman looked up. Still formidable, she had to be in her eighties by now. She’d retired as a school secretary and come to work part-time when Ginger’s enrollment ballooned.
“You need to leave,” she told Jefferson. “Ginger doesn’t want to see you.”
Jefferson was streaming sweat and unzipped her leather jacket. “Where did she go?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.” Aunt Tilly averted her eyes.
Aisha was a student who had started taking lessons at the Neighborhood House, where Ginger first taught. A hefty, clumsy, but determined adolescent back in modern dance classes, Aisha now emerged from the classroom where she taught modern dance herself. Jefferson always thought of Aisha as an elongated butterfly who had emerged from her cocoon of baby fat. Several preschoolers in ballet slippers trailed her. Jefferson hugged her, then followed her into the girls’ changing room.
“Do you know where Ginger went?” she asked.
Aisha had an apologetic expression as she shook her head. “Ginger called me and Ronna”—the other full-time teacher—“into the office and introduced us to Milly Falls.”
“Ginger’s old teacher from college?”
“That’s her. Milly’s on sabbatical. She’s taking over Ginger’s classes for a while.”
“While Ginger—”
“I don’t know, Jef. She didn’t tell you neither?”
“I wouldn’t be asking if she had,” regretting immediately that she sounded irritated at sensitive Aisha.
“Don’t get all odd about it. All’s I know is I saw your bud Mitchell hanging around night and day, like some old manly husband to her. I always thought he was as gay as us. I got to tell you, Jef, I have never seen Miss G. so stone-cold all-business. It’s been like her heart seized up on her and her face froze this last week. Especially those eyes. I have seen warmer eyes on a damn statue.”
It should have come to her the minute she saw Ginger with Mitchell and the suitcases, but it didn’t hit her until Aisha, with her puzzled words, spoke the eulogy for their decades of love. The giant oak of herself fell to the ground, uprooted by the ice storm that had hovered over every lover since the beginning of time.
Was this what Ginger felt every night Jefferson didn’t come home or returned reeking of the scent of calumny? Ginger was beautiful, but what she’d taken for quietness in Ginger had become a savage coldness in recent years. Had Ginger felt this way while staring through their apartment windows at the iron balcony railing, fenced into a relationship full of spikes and bars? Was there a way to survive this devastation?
The city under its dirty crust of snow looked shredded and ravaged. Jefferson, spent in every cell of her body, walked the nearly sixty blocks home, every street bringing back a pulverizing memory of Ginger, every side street the one into which Ginger had disappeared. She felt as if she was crawling all the way.
Chapter Two
At four, she was too big for the church. Emmy, her mother, had dressed her in a navy blue Easter coat with a white lace collar, white gloves, lace-topped white anklets, shiny black shoes with straps, and a flowered dress that stopped, like the coat, short of her skinned knees. She felt like she had been shrunk in the wash and stuffed into doll clothes. She hated doll clothes. She hated dolls. She hated church and the drone of the organ that filled the stuffy air with its sad wheezing.
If only she could stretch tall. Instead, she did a silent inside stretch, but it only made her smile to pretend she would pop the buttons on her dress and inflate right to the ceiling of this big building. Her tight fists would smash through the stained-glass windows, and on the way up her shoulders, wide as Popeye’s, would nudge the scary cross off the wall so she wouldn’t have to look at that poor man and his bleeding hands.
She, Amelia Jefferson, would be like Alice in Wonderland—so tall she’d fill the rabbit hole and crash through the peaked roof and never have to be a little Episcopalian princess again.
“Amelia, stand still,” hissed Emmy, who had complained of a splitting headache on the way to church. Amelia knew she would have a headache today because she’d heard Emmy throwing up in the master bath on the other side of the wall during the night. She was never going to drink; first the grown-ups got silly and then they got sick. It was the only time they hugged her and cuddled her, though.
“Sing,” Emmy said.
She sang loud. She sang like she was yelling the hymn at the boys up the street when they played cowboys and Indians. She yelled out all her squirmishness. She yelled so she wouldn’t stretch so big she’d destroy the church. She sounded like those great big opera singers Emmy and Jarvy listened to on records.
“Quietly,” commanded her father, Jarvy, on the other side of her. His hand shook as it held hers, and his breath had that awful smell of peppermint toothpaste and whiskey.
“Sweetly,” said Emmy.
Amelia didn’t know how. She wanted to explain why she couldn’t sing quietly, but she wasn’t allowed to talk. If she did tell them why, they’d look at her the way they did when she was being wrong, and she was always being wrong. The light in the church, already dim, grew dimmer. So she marched then, which sometimes helped keep the dark away, whispered the words she guessed she was supposed to sing, and lifted her knees up, down, up and down, to keep time. Everything kept getting darker. She rested the rifle on her shoulder, its butt in the palm of her hand. Jack and Glen up the street were the Indians and she was going to shoot them. The boys were good at grunting, spinning, and gasping out a last breath.
Once they were dead she’d lead the little girls across the street out of danger, hitch a horse to the covered wagon, and make her tongue go “Cluck-cluck, cluck-cluck” as she and the other girls traveled out West to build a cabin where the sun was.
“Amelia!” came Emmy’s whisper. She’d been clucking aloud and not paying attention. It was time to sit. She was sleepy, but she wasn’t allowed to nap in church. She would think about something. She would think about the girls across the street, Cynthia and Fern. Was it okay to smile? She guessed not. Last week Cynthia was home from first grade. Fern was with their grandma because she had a cold and couldn’t go to kindergarten. Cynthia was a big girl and mostly didn’t like to play with Amelia. But that day, with her sister away, she did.
Why did they get in trouble? Cynthia was playing on her bed. She had Tinkertoys. Amelia got on the bed to play too. They made a train and then got under the covers to make a tunnel. The sheets were snow. Their legs were mountains. It was nice under there and she felt awful good, tingly shivery all over. She wanted to snuggle with Cynthia and take a nap. Maybe Cynthia would kiss her on the top of her head like Emmy did before she went to a party. Both mothers came into the girls’ bedroom and yelled at them. Why weren’t they allowed to be under the covers together?
She sat so still she would never be able to move again. Why did she have to do things she didn’t like doing? Why couldn’t she do what she liked to do? That darkness came around her, like night. She tried not to cry, but she felt awful. She wished she had a magic potion like the one in the story her grandmother read to her. It would make her think good thoughts.
Maybe Jack and Glen would be home after Easter dinner. In back of their house was a hill down to the brook. This time, if none of the bigger boys were playing, she’d win at King of the Hill. Last time she got rolled down the
hill and she’d ended up with a nose full of dirt. She didn’t go crying to Emmy like the little kids. She blew her nose on some big leaves and scrubbed the dirt off with water from the brook. She still got in trouble for the grass stains, but the big kids got in more trouble for tearing up the grass.
Thinking about playing King of the Hill made her feel strong. Late afternoons, sometimes the sun looked like pancake syrup dripping through the trees. She would twirl Jack around and around and then let go at the top of the hill so he’d fall and roll to the bottom. Glen was six; she might have to wrestle him down and then give him a push. She was stronger than those two. She was stronger than the other girls. She’d dance on the hilltop, the big winner, then climb the fence and run into the woods before they ganged up on her. That fence! This was the first year she could climb it. It was all up-and-down wood boards, but she knew how to shimmy up the posts now, grab hold of the acorn-looking things on top, and pull herself over.
They could never catch her when she ran, not even the big boys. She was faster and she was smarter. When they’d be about to grab her she’d jump behind a tree and run back the way she came. It was like when Emmy and Jarvy took her to the football game after the tailgate party and one of the big boys on the field ran in and out of the other boys who were trying to knock him down. She could be a football player when she grew up.
When she grew up and got married—she supposed she’d marry Jack or Glen—their children would call them Mommy and Daddy like Jack and Glen did with their parents. Emmy said Amelia couldn’t call her and Jarvy “Mommy and Daddy” because it made her feel too old. Emmy called Jarvy Jarvis when she was mad at him. Sometimes Emmy called him Daddy, she heard her. Whose Daddy was Jarvy, Emmy’s or hers?
