Beggar of Love

by Lee Lynch

  For a moment, Jefferson stopped pacing. She stood at the edge of the canopy, peering through the downpour at the yellow cabs, the black cabs, the mail jeeps, the limos, the beat-up economy cars that jammed Broadway at the end of this crosstown street. Rain seemed to trap the exhaust smells. A few people with umbrellas squeezed through the gridlock, then turned up Broadway at a furious pace, as if to make up for lost time.

  Lost time. Jefferson jammed her hands back in her pockets and whirled into her pacing again. Almost thirty years she’d lost in her games of sodden pursuit. Because it was true, what her new AA sponsor had said, that as soon as Jefferson stopped drinking, she had also stopped whoring around. The same sponsor had practically promised that her depressions—and she’d finally admitted to herself that’s what they were—would lift if she practiced the twelve steps. Obviously, she’d have to practice harder.

  She thought of Ginger, left at home, burying herself in work, left without a whole lover, or plain left. That feeling of guilt was compounded by all the guilt she carried around about the rest of her little love-them-and-leave-them liaisons.

  What could they have had if Jefferson had stayed home? A little of the peace she sometimes experienced now? A feeling of freedom, like she could do anything, go anywhere, and it would be good without fighting or tears or conflict? Without the feeling that some malevolent creature lived inside her and busied itself tearing her up, so that everything demanded a hundred times more effort because first she had to stitch herself back together again?

  Jefferson pulled her hands out of their hiding places. She stood, half under the side of the canopy, half in the rain, looking at them. First the backs, pale and chafed from early tastes of winter. Then the palm, callused a little from working out recently. Her right palm collected rain in a tiny puddle at its center. These were the hands that had stopped dragging themselves, one over the other, up an endless rough rope. She licked the rainwater in her palm. Its taste was metallic, almost bitter, and snapped her right into the present, into this moment of waiting to make another apology for being such a creep in the past.

  A cab pulled in front of the hotel so quickly that Jefferson surmised it had been stuck in the Broadway traffic. Without seeming to move, the doorman was beside it, sweeping the passenger door open. A leg appeared, high-heeled shoe first, then a long calf with the edge of a dark, clinging skirt at its peak.

  LA had been good to Shirley. Jefferson smelled her own sweat and the tango began again. Had Shirley changed so much, or had Jefferson forgotten the poise, the warm smile, the arms that hugged as if they were made for welcoming back old lovers? Didn’t Shirley remember how Jefferson had dumped her, abandoned her in that sleazy bar for a quickie with a woman she’d had her eye on for weeks and who’d finally returned Jefferson’s interest that night? She couldn’t hug Shirley back, so consumed was she by the old guilt.

  “Come on up, handsome. The years have seasoned you nicely.” Shirley offered her arm.

  Jefferson didn’t so much hear and see as feel the cab pull away, leaving a vacuum she suddenly had to fill. Instead of being in the hotel waiting for their meeting, Shirley had been out living her own life and caught Jefferson off balance. And she hadn’t expected Shirley to have this presence, this woman-of-the-world air of command.

  “Jefferson?” Shirley said after a moment.

  Quickly, Jefferson answered, “I thought we could go to the coffee shop around the corner.”

  “Oh, God, Jeff. I am so wiped, I have to use the little girls’ room, and I long to change out of this monkey suit. You can wait in the lobby if you want, but I promise not to bite.”

  The doorman was watching the sky, hands behind his back. Jefferson felt like she was at the tail end of a tug of war, pulled forward under the canopy by a need to put an end to a past that shamed her, pulled back by temptations of repeating that past. In the few seconds she needed to make a decision, Shirley’s face adopted a look of concern; the doorman’s, one of even deeper suspicion.

  “Jefferson?”

  She linked Shirley’s arm with her own and steered her into the lobby.

  It was hot in there and smelled like the steam heat of old New York buildings. As they crossed the lobby she could see herself, Shirley’s elbow cupped in her hand, in a mirror. The floor was a huge black-and-white checkerboard, and Shirley’s heels clicked across it.

  “What’s the story, handsome?” Shirley asked. “This isn’t kidnapping at my age, you know.”

  Jefferson managed a smile. They sat facing each other on a faded couch. Cream-painted columns dotted the lobby like elderly guests half-snoozing the afternoon away.

  Shirley’s arm burned against Jefferson’s palm. She had always touched women like lovers, she realized. It was as much second nature to her as worrying about how she looked. Was it too late to learn how to be friends?

  “Do you mind if we don’t go upstairs?”

  “Since when is Jefferson afraid of the big bad wolf?”

  “Aw, hell, Shirley. That’s the problem. I am the big bad wolf. If I went up there with you I might act like I used to, and that’s not what I want.” She felt about as debonair and in control of this situation as the three little pigs.

  “What do you want, Jeffers?”

  Now she remembered what had sparked her desire for Shirley. Those vivid blue eyes, like a splash of cold water, a surprise every time. As she always had, Jefferson stared into them, withdrew from their intimacy, but went back for more. She made her hands crawl inside her pants pockets where she fingered a heart-shaped stone Ginger had found on the beach during their trip to Florida. There would be no casual touching of Shirley, no touching at all. “I want to apologize.”

  The blue eyes looked shocked. “For what? For being the prettiest butch I ever beguiled into my bed?”

  “You beguiled me into your bed?” It had never occurred to Jefferson that the campaign might have been mutual.

  Shirley lifted wavy hair back from her eyes. “Don’t you remember? I interrupted the great chase. You wanted what’s-her-name, that siren everybody was after. What was her name?”

  “Cindy?” Jefferson asked, guessing.

  “Yes. And the last time you and I went out together—well, you got drunk again and I decided Cindy could have you. So what are you apologizing to me for?”

  Jefferson sat straight up and ran her fingers through her hair. Shirley had let her go. “For disappearing on you at the bar. For going off with Cindy.”

  Shirley was still toying with her own hair. She shrugged. “That’s the way it was back then. Or the way I was. Trying out this one and that one. Not that you didn’t measure up the nights we spent together.” Shirley looked up into Jefferson’s face from under her hair, her laugh like melting chocolate.

  Jefferson struggled to get out of the past, the bar, the guilt of having abandoned this woman. “What did you do?”

  Shirley narrowed her eyes and cocked her head. “Are you serious? What do you think I did? We did?”

  “I didn’t mean the nights we spent together, Shirl. After I left you. In the bar.”

  “Actually, I’d rather describe our nights together. But who can remember a bit of it? Why?”

  Jefferson pulled herself back on track. “Because I need to apologize for a lot of things. It’s part of getting well for me.”

  Shirley relaxed against the couch now and seemed to study Jefferson. “Okay,” she said after a while. “Thanks. I appreciate you caring after all these years.” She smiled. “I like you better this way, you know. Undrunk.”

  Nodding, Jefferson smiled. “Yes. Me too.”

  “Whatever happened to that fancy dancer you lived with? Was she really the love of your life like you claimed or your perpetual chase? You butches do like your conquests—especially the straight ones.”

  “We’re still together.” She added in a mutter, “No thanks to me.”

  Shirley reached over and ruffled Jefferson’s hair. “You look like a drowned rat. You want to
come up and dry off, you charming big bad wolf? My promise still holds.”

  “Your promise?”

  “That I won’t bite.”

  Jefferson filled her lungs with air and exhaled very slowly. The tug of war had started again. Couldn’t she spend some time getting acquainted with this woman she obviously didn’t know at all? She almost pulled her comb from her pocket, but stopped herself. How she looked didn’t matter. “Okay.”

  “Good.” Shirley stood and started toward the elevator. Jefferson watched her, her hips, from across the checkerboard floor. The rain still poured down loudly outside the windows on the other side of the lobby.

  Shirley whirled at the elevator, cocked a hand on her hip as if presenting herself for Jefferson’s inspection, and asked, “Because tell me the truth, Jeffers, am I really your typical Red Riding Hood?”

  She remembered that tiny girl in the red cape who’d come out of the hotel earlier. She laughed, shaking her head. “No, you’re not. But I liked being the big bad wolf so much I thought you were.” She joined Shirley and, as the elevator lifted them, could almost see the old wolf in the lobby below, waving good-bye.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  While Jefferson was still in the city, she had watched a lot of crime shows, starting with Missing Persons in the 1990s. At first it drew her because Jorja Fox, who’d been on Ellen, was in it, but more recently she’d gotten into Without a Trace. One night, as she watched, she realized that her life was an episode. Should she have reported Ginger missing? Had Ginger’s parents done so?

  “So call her parents,” her enduring best friend, Lily Ann Lee, urged. They were at Jefferson’s apartment on the Upper West Side. It had the luxury of two small bedrooms, and she and Ginger had filled it up nicely together. The monthly maintenance fee was hefty, but she could cover it without help from Ginger. It had been their home for decades.

  Lily Ann had come over to help her move Ginger’s belongings into the second bedroom, which Jefferson had been putting off, unable to bear the finality of packing Ginger away.

  “I did call Ginger’s parents. Four times.” She rested her forehead on Lily Ann’s shoulder. “They hung up on me.”

  Lily Ann patted her on the back. “I thought you all got along.”

  “So did I. But now she’s with a guy and they must be in pig heaven.”

  “Still no reason to be rude to you.”

  “At least they were clear.”

  Lily Ann closed a cardboard box and labeled it. “I don’t think they would have hung up on you if she was really missing. They have to know she’s okay or they would have called you.”

  “Exactly what I’ve been hoping,” Jefferson said, taking the box from Lily Ann and moving it across the hall. “I think we’re going to get about everything in the closet,” she called back, opening the closet door. The sight of Ginger’s fanciful shoes filling the closet floor startled her. It was like finding Ginger’s ghost. Some nights, instead of plumping her pillow for the dozenth time and trying yet another position with which to lure sleep, she got out of bed and prowled the ghost of Ginger through the house. She would plunge her hands into Ginger’s dresser in hopes of finding something she hadn’t yet discovered, something with associations so vivid it would bring Ginger alive before her, a living, walking presence she could almost pull back on the bed with her and engulf herself in pleasure.

  Lily Ann came to the door. “Jef,” she said. “Why would you want someone back who would do this to you? I mean, it hasn’t always been heaven on earth, has it?”

  “That was my fault.”

  “Yet she didn’t leave until you stopped drinking and settled down.”

  “I guess the damage had been done by then.”

  “And I’d guess the blame isn’t all yours.”

  “Ginger never pulled the stunts I did.”

  “You know this for sure?”

  The very idea startled her. “You think, while I was running around on her, she was—”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time, J.”

  “That’s crazy!”

  “What else explains why she tolerated you hooking up with anything that moved?”

  “Lily Ann, I think someplace in her understood.”

  “Understood what? That you were a good old-fashioned cad?”

  “That I so welcomed being wanted—as who I am—for my queer self, that I couldn’t say no to any woman who cast her eye my way. Sometimes I think I wanted Ginger because she hadn’t wanted—never did want—me, but responded, like I did, to being wanted.”

  “Wow,” Lily Ann said. “You about lost me there. Whatever, there was something you weren’t getting at home, Jefferson, and you know it. I’m not saying it was sex.” Lily Ann held out a hand to stop Jefferson’s protest. “That much rabbiting is not about sex.”

  “You never liked Ginger.”

  “I never exactly understood what you saw in her.”

  “She was—”

  “And I don’t need to know. That woman lived behind a vault door and nobody got to spin her wheel, if you ask me. But knowing you, that’s what you liked about her. With Ginger, your chase never ended, and nothing you can tell me will convince me that it’s not the chase that turns you on.”

  She reached to stop Lily Ann, holding her by the arm. “Lily, you’re my best friend, what brought this on?” Had Lily Ann been jealous all these years?

  “You want to know what I think, J? I think, when you stopped drinking and running around on her, Ginger got bored with you. I think there was something in that woman that needed you to be a bad girl. I want you to see what was what clearly. I don’t want you beating yourself up over it or getting jaded about love.”

  “She’s my girl, Lily Ann.” She knew she sounded pitiful and unsure, but no one had ever told her these things before. Did she really know what she was doing? “She might not have loved me anymore, but ever since Ginger—she was the only one who wanted to be with me. The rest, since you, have wanted sex: sex from my fingertips, pleasure from my hands, praise of their beauty, admiration for being on my arm.”

  Lily Ann looked at her as if deciding whether to tell her something. Was there anything left to tell?

  “You think she was different from the others?” asked Lily Ann. “It was no coincidence, you know.”

  “What?”

  “The hotel. Shirley. Ginger finding out.”

  “You’re not saying she planned it.”

  Lily Ann shook her head. “No, but she was waiting for an opportunity to come along and make up her mind for her.”

  “So I handed her the bat and she hit the ball out of the park? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Or she choreographed the dance.”

  “How?”

  “She had to get away to find out if you’d defined her correctly.”

  “Defined her?”

  “You told me she’d never felt attracted to women before you.”

  “It wasn’t in her frame of reference, never occurred to her.”

  “She has to find out if she’s living her life or one you made for her.”

  Lily Ann was right, she decided, remembering the women she’d been with who hadn’t known they were gay—until she came along.

  They were sitting together on the sofa now. Jefferson was holding Lily Ann’s hand tight.

  “That,” Lily Ann explained, “is one reason why this is such a major blow to your ego. You failed to keep her and also failed to keep her gay, J. By defining her you defined who you are and what you can do in the world.”

  “Are you saying I wanted to control Ginger?”

  “She’s proof of who Jefferson is.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. Since when are you the expert on Jefferson, not me?”

  “If you were a thinker, J, or a noticer or even stood still now and then, you’d be teaching philosophy, not PE.”

  But she wasn’t really listening anymore. Her eyes got all glazed and her ears filled with an Abba song she lov
ed to dance to. This analysis stuff was fluff. She just did what she did.

  “You still want to find her, don’t you?” Lily Ann asked.

  She was surprised at the question.

  “What about writing to the family, asking if you can take them Ginger’s things, or if they want to pick them up?”

  Jefferson felt like the floor was falling out from under her. “Give away Ginger’s stuff? Her first tap shoes?” She held them up. “The green leather sneakers she found in the trash?” She knew she must look silly, the large bear Ginger had won at a street fair under her arm, the tap shoes dangling from one hand, a long slinky black dance skirt draped over her shoulder.

  “Give them up, J. Go face-to-face with the family. They’d have to tell you something then.”

  “Lily Ann, I don’t think so. I can’t imagine.”

  “Okay, don’t twist yourself inside out, girl. I can see how it could smart a bit.”

  She let out a painful breath. “You know what really makes me break down? Folding sheets by myself.” She remembered the time, folding laundry together, she’d wrapped Ginger in a sheet and spun her out, then collapsed on the clean linens with her. She gave a happy laugh at herself. “Thanks for listening to me obsess, Lil. Come on, let’s get the dresser in here.”

  The weirdest change for her wasn’t Ginger’s absence; it was the absence of the despair that had haunted her all her life, until the last several months. Listening to someone else talk about her family in an AA meeting, she’d realized that Jarvy was an alcoholic. He’d been a happy drinker through her childhood, but at some point that had changed. She remembered how moody he was and wondered if he, too, had suffered from joylessness. If he, too, had tried to escape it with whiskey. If his dalliances at the railroad station in Dutchess were attempts to shake off frightening funks like, she’d figured out with her sponsor, her womanizing had sometimes been.