Substitute for Love

by Karin Kallmaker

  How could she have not known that Tori was such a nice person? How could she not know whatever it was that Clay said her aunt knew? She was ignorant, for all her brains, that much was clear.

  Tish served her dinner at the dark end of the bar to spare her being single in the dining room with a blotchy, tear-streaked face. She had an enormous plate of noodles, broccoli and roasted garlic tossed with olive oil and Parmesan cheese. By the end of it she felt better, not so much teetering toward her future as perhaps allowing herself to fall because it was the only way to move on.

  She had agreed to a slice of a very decadent-looking chocolate cheesecake when a voice in her ear murmured, “Well, if it isn’t the mouse that roared.”

  Two things happened at once. She said, “Leave me alone,” and she felt a clenching, tight and hard, deep in her abdomen — muscles moving she did not know she had.

  Murphy leaned on the bar. In spite of the winter temperatures, she wore a sleeveless muscle shirt with her jeans, and obviously nothing under it.

  Holly thought, “Save me,” and hoped Tori got the message. But she hadn’t told Tori about not being straight anymore.

  “Now I’ve been told that Tori is still with Geena and you’re just a friend. That you have a boyfriend.”

  Holly said nothing because her mouth was watering, and the sheer magnitude of her physical reaction to Murphy’s long, lean body had taken her completely by surprise. She was nothing like Galina. What do I like, Holly wondered, now that I’m not straight anymore?

  “But I do always wonder,” Murphy went on nonchalantly, “how a straight woman can be friends with a dyke, hang out in a eatery run by a dyke, with dykes at most of the tables and, deep down, not be there because she’s curious.”

  Murphy shifted her weight and Holly wanted to close her eyes. But Murphy would know why — it would be to shut out the clear view she had of Murphy’s taut nipples, pushing hard against the shirt, straining. Her mouth wouldn’t stop watering and she had to swallow.

  Murphy’s voice was smooth and intimate. “I know women who have scruples about straight women. But I’m not one of them. I don’t care where a woman has been or where she’s going next. When I’m with a woman I’ve got one goal — finding out what she likes, even if she doesn’t know herself, and getting her there.”

  Holly’s sweater hid the gooseflesh that prickled her arms and back, and she was glad she’d put on all the extra layers. What could Murphy want with her? She wasn’t Tori. It had to be just for the conquest. The clenching muscles were now in her thighs, and her hips ached from the effort to keep them still.

  “Get lost, Murphy.”

  Tori, thank God, at last.

  “Can’t blame a girl for trying, can you?”

  “Yes, you can,” Tori snapped.

  Thankfully, Murphy and her nipples left Holly’s periph-ral vision.

  “I’m sorry about her,” Tori said as she slid onto the barstool next to Holly. “She’s only bugging you because of me…”

  Holly couldn’t say anything, not yet, but she could feel Tori’s gaze on her as intently as Clay’s had been earlier. The blush started at the top of her head and ended in a knot of heat between her legs.

  “Oh…” It was all Tori said for a while.

  Tish brought the cheesecake but Holly couldn’t eat it, not then. Finally, she sipped some water and felt like she could breathe.

  “Everything is happening all at once, isn’t it?” Tori’s voice was kind.

  Holly blinked back yet more tears and nodded. “Yeah. It started … sort of yesterday at lunch.” She laughed, not happily. “What a difference a day makes.”

  “Wow. Most women I know, well, it always seems gradual to them. Like the truth sneaks up. That’s how it was for me. For Geena.”

  “It feels like I’ve been struck by lightning.”

  “Stay away from Murphy,” Tori said seriously. “I understand how appealing she can be — and physically you’d have no regrets, but—”

  “I know,” Holly said quickly. “I know. I just, I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to be in control. Clay was always so quick to point out when I wasn’t. And this is…” She swallowed hard. “I can’t control this. Five minutes more and I’d have been wherever Murphy wanted me.” She twisted her fingers around each other, unable to say that she would have been begging, pleading, aching for things she could not even name. “I feel like I’m going from one addiction to another.”

  “And it doesn’t feel good. Oh hon, I know. Let’s get the cheesecake in a box and go see Flo’s place. At least take care of the shelter, food and clothing. Then you can focus on the rest.”

  Holly let Tori do the driving and most of the talking. She’d gone from Aunt Zinnia’s domination to Clay’s, and if anything was going to be better she had to take control of herself. Maybe she would be sexually satisfied with Murphy, but if she wasn’t careful she would go on making the same mistakes. Maybe she’d like the fire better than the frying pan, but either way she got cooked.

  Flo did have a dreamy accent. It was the first thing Holly thought and she gave Tori a glance of pure betrayal. They should have waited, how was she supposed to withstand such a thing?

  If anything, Tori was fighting a smile.

  All Flo said was, “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  Holly kept her hands in her pockets, though she felt she was being rude. Shaking hands with Galina had led to a lot of trouble. She thought about Galina’s card. Was she not straight anymore?

  The cottage was built for one. A breakfast table, sofa and one chair would finish the downstairs, and upstairs there was room for a bed and perhaps a desk. The upper floor smelled strongly of the beige paint that had been recently applied.

  “It’s students who most want it, but I’m tired of the bother and the mates who come round at all hours. My last tenant was an older woman. She’s moved to be nearer her daughter.” Flo was perhaps in her mid-forties, with soft features to match her lyrical voice.

  Holly was paying attention, or at least she was trying to. “I don’t have a job at the moment, but I’ve saved up quite a lot of money. I don’t even have furniture, so I could get exactly what fits. This is what I’m looking for.”

  They came to terms quickly and Tori gave a happy bounce. “I knew it was a good idea. I feel totally less guilty.”

  “You picked the last one very nicely,” Flo admitted. “I should pay you a fee.”

  “Pay me in scones,” Tori suggested brightly. “With clotted cream and strawberry jam.”

  “Bring Geena tomorrow for supper and we’ll be quits. We’ll do chips and eggs, too, just like my mum used to make home in Chester.” Flo had led them inside her back door and was putting the lease papers out on the table. Not to be a complete idiot, Holly read them, found them agreeable, and signed on the dotted line.

  There were footsteps overhead, then on the stairs. A woman a few years younger than Holly burst into the kitchen. “Oh, sorry, babe. I thought you were done.”

  “Just about. There’s nothing on telly tonight. I just checked.”

  The younger woman dropped a careless kiss onto Flo’s lips. “Then we’ll have to think of something else to do.”

  “This is Holly,” Flo said, after she had shared a contemplative smile with her lover. “She’s renting the cottage.”

  “That’s great. Nancy,” she said, holding out her hand.

  Holly had no choice. Nancy had a strong, warm grip. Holly had not known her arms could feel such a range of tingling sensations.

  “You have anything against beige?”

  Holly shook her head and took her hand back.

  “Good. I’ll be finished with the downstairs tomorrow.”

  “Will I be able to move in on Monday?”

  “Yeah, though it’ll still smell. Cold weather and paint, it takes forever for it to really cure out.” Nancy shrugged. She had broad shoulders. “I do commercial painting by day so I can do artistic painting by night.”
/>   “Oh, so that’s what you do with your nights,” Tori quipped.

  “Painting of one kind or another.” They all laughed. Holly joined in though she was thoroughly unsettled by the idea of Nancy’s sharp edges merging with Flo’s soft curves.

  It seemed that all she could think about was sex. Sex and Galina’s card. Flo’s mouth. Nancy’s hands. Murphy’s nipples. Tori’s eyes. Galina’s kisses. Was she not straight anymore?

  It was easy to settle into a house so small, and a visit to a used furniture store had completed the effort. She gave herself a few days to settle in — there could never be enough bookcases, she quickly concluded — and tried hard not to think about anything but mathematics.

  She surrounded herself with library books and rapidly realized she needed a computer. More technology — Clay would not understand. But she could find out about degree programs and requirements for colleges everywhere more quickly on the Internet than through the mail. She could join the Academy of Mathematicians and start reading the journal online. There was so much she could do, and so easily, that when she asked herself if it all somehow robbed her of her essential humanity, the answer was no.

  So she took the plunge into technology with a cute little laptop that had a built-in modem. She pored over the guide for beginners, made lots of mistakes, and came close to heaving it out the window at least four times. When she finally began navigating around the World Wide Web she wished for a printer. Technology was addictive. She bought a small color inkjet the next day and stopped to worry if she was damaging her essential humanity. She shrugged it off — even the Amish were selling quilts online. If the Amish could square their consciences with some technology, then who was she to worry?

  She found out that she could automatically synch her

  Palm Pilot to her laptop, sharing the addresses and appointments on both. It was so, well, cool. Clay was nuts. There was so much to learn that it was easy to not think about other things… Galina, Tori and Geena, Tori and Murphy. She saw Flo coming home from work and Nancy meeting her at the door with an eagerness that surpassed Clay’s at his most passionate. As she walked the narrow driveway to the street one evening she glimpsed Flo unbuttoning Nancy’s shirt while they were in the kitchen. It had been hours before she stopped seeing the image of Nancy’s hungry, trembling expression behind her closed lids.

  She tried not to think about Clay, because thinking about him made her think about Galina’s card and then all the rest. Sometimes at night she would shiver under the sheets and ask herself what it would have hurt to go with Murphy, to learn everything about what she liked. What held her back?

  It was her common sense, a quality that neither Clay nor Aunt Zinnia had ever thought she’d possessed in any sufficient quantity. Well, she did have it. She knew she needed to start off in this new life with some semblance of control. But at night she didn’t feel in control and her hands brought only torment.

  Two weeks passed in a numbed blur, with mornings that were over before she’d finished one cup of coffee and evenings that dragged endlessly. She joined the mathematicians’ society and read online journals until her eyes felt raw and her brain spun with puzzles and proofs, new and old. Theories and ideas were waiting to be tested in the ever-broadening, free-flowing exchange. The love of a good riddle discussed in the local brewery after classes had made way for Internet message boards devoted to single equations and new ideas added all the time. The humor and joy of it caught her all over again, just as it had when she was a girl. How could she have thought anything could substitute for something she loved?

  She spent six hours alone happily absorbing the discussion around a sound-wave proposal. Was it possible for two drums to be sound-wave identical but shaped differently? Yes, was the answer. The suggested equation for building two different/identical drums speculated that nearly infinite arrangements were possible. So far, two eight-sided drums had been designed based on the formula, one sort of L-shaped and the other closer to a Z. Clicking ever forward through the messages, she read that the two drums had been tested and compared by microwave in a sound lab.

  Scientists were thrilled. They now had a mathematical formula they could use to predict sound-wave results in any given material — say, steel — regardless of how it was formed. In a solid block or a thin wheel, it no longer mattered. X amount of steel in Y configurations should result in Z kinds of wave forms. If your business was testing train wheels for cracks, you could now use a microwave sound test instead of the less reliable hammer method. A reading outside the predicted result could indicate a crack much earlier than even an experienced railroad worker’s ear could. Forget steel — the manufacturers of silicon chips were euphoric. They now had a method of testing their computer microchips that didn’t damage the delicate silicon components.

  God, she loved math.

  She read, she slept, she read, she dreamed, she read, and she wondered how she could find her way back into the field. There was so much she had to catch up on. She’d lost so much time. Could she make a career of it? At twenty-six, with a birthday rapidly approaching, she was old to be taking up a master’s and doctorate program. Perhaps she should aim lower, get a teaching credential and employ what she knew. Jo was right — girls needed role models in math. But she didn’t have any coursework in teaching. How could she get a credential?

  Self-doubt came easy when you were lonely, she realized, and she went for long walks to vanquish what she called the Echo of Clay. She still felt poised between the past and future.

  So. If her work future was stalled by her lack of confidence, she would focus instead on her personal affairs. She had let them slide, refusing to look at Galina’s card, tucked into the edge of the bathroom mirror. She’d buried her head in math to avoid the messy questions that went unanswered. She was not straight anymore, but she wasn’t a lesbian — at least she didn’t feel like one. She didn’t know if it was possible to be a theoretical lesbian, or “all but sex” lesbian. How to go from theory to practice? Sitting in her little cottage day in and night out was not an answer.

  And there were darker questions, from her past. Perhaps that was the best place to begin. The past was finite, it could be explored, summarized and redressed. Her future needed a past.

  On a Friday night two weeks after her last visit, she pulled up to the curb outside her aunt’s house. She was not expected.

  Winter had taken a break, and though there had been a brief rainfall the night before, the twilight sky was illuminated by early stars.

  She was nervous about the confrontation, but laughed to herself when she accepted that even with two mirrors, the horizon and a familiar star to navigate by, she still wouldn’t know where she was. She hadn’t known for most of her life.

  She needed clarity for this conversation and so she would approach it with the most rational methodology she could. There was a secret, and Clay knew what it was. He’d said her aunt had been right about something, implied that her aunt had known all along that Holly was a lesbian. She remembered, too, her aunt’s furious reaction to Holly’s jibe about homosexuality running in families.

  There was a secret and she had already reduced it to two possible answers. Neither of them made sense, but that did not deter her. They didn’t make sense because the equation was incomplete. So she had to ask for more information to fill in the constants and variables that had been hidden from her. If she could stay calm, she might find what she needed.

  “It’s you,” Aunt Zinnia said when she opened the door.

  “It’s me. I know I didn’t call, but I need to talk to you about something.”

  “Come in, then.”

  Aunt Zinnia did not make tea. They perched on the sitting room chairs and Holly asked her carefully constructed question. “Why weren’t there any pictures of my mother for me to keep?”

  Aunt Zinnia didn’t answer immediately. She studied her hands, then finally said, “You know she and I had disagreements.”

  “Yes, but you might have le
t me have a few. For myself. Since she was my mother.”

  “You are probably right. At the time, I thought it was for the best. There weren’t very many in the house, and they were all recent.”

  Holly asked her follow-up question. “What did you think I’d see in them?”

  Aunt Zinnia shrugged. Her diffidence was feigned, Holly knew. Aunt Zinnia had a reason for everything she did, right or wrong.

  Paul Erdos, the beloved mathematician and champion puzzle creator and solver, proposed that a person could answer a question by throwing as many darts as necessary in the general direction of a target. The pattern of hits over properly constructed objects on the target would indicate where the solution lay. She had two possible solutions: The secret Clay had alluded to concerned either Aunt Zinnia or her mother.

  Now she had at least one hit within the range — Aunt Zinnia had refused to say what the photographs might have told her. It ought to have been an easy answer. For that one answer, she felt more certain that the secret was about her mother.

  All the thinking of the past two weeks had led her to acceptance. She did not know if homosexuality ran in families, but all she needed to know was that Aunt Zinnia thought so.

  “Did you think that if I had pictures of her, I’d be like her?”

  The shrug was more abrupt. Hit two.

  “You went to great pains to tell me she wasn’t a decent woman. Too pushy, too smart, too independent. Was there anything else? That made her not decent?” She could accept the answer. It wasn’t such a shock after all. If her mother had been a lesbian that was just the way it was. Her mother had loved her and nothing changed that. But knowing would help her emerge from the shadow the past cast on her own future.

  Aunt Zinnia was just staring at her. “I don’t know why you are asking all these questions.”

  “Because I am trying to make sense of it. You were so afraid I’d be like her. You even told Clay something about it. He wouldn’t tell me what it was but said I should ask you. So I’m asking.”