“Wait, the East German?”
“No, the guy with the nervous tic. He’s a handsome American.”
“Well, obviously.”
“Right. So he and the sexy French chick meet at this leather bar in Soho.”
“A leather bar in Soho?”
Frankie laughed. “I know. Ridiculous.”
“Soho in London or New York?”
“Does it matter?”
“New York is less ridiculous.”
Frankie laughed again, a full throaty laugh, and kissed Dez on the cheek. Dez tried to turn into it, to kiss her on the lips, but Frankie was quick and it was just a peck. “I did say it was the first thing I ever wrote.”
“You also said it was embarrassing.”
“And it is, right?”
“Oh, yes, indeed. I feel like I got my money’s worth.”
“So, yes, it’s a leather bar in Soho. And they have a conversation—and it’s totally stilted, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing with dialogue back then—about the microfilm for the nuclear weapons.
“Microfilm.”
“Oh yes. I was very low tech. No floppy disks for me.”
“Go on.”
“So she says she wants it, and he says he doesn’t have it but he knows where it is, and then they just start kissing, passionately, up against the brick wall, and then go into the back room and just have the raunchiest, nastiest sex I could think of at the time.”
Dez laughed. “How raunchy and nasty was it?”
Frankie turned red, all the way to the tips of her ears. “Well, considering I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, and considering how little experience I had, it wound up being, uh, how can I say this—unintentionally humorous.”
“Sounds painful.”
“Not as painful as what the sexy French chick did to him when they got on the bed,” Frankie said. “My guy friends at the time all cringed when they came to that part. One of them actually said, ‘Do you actually think that’s sexy? Because if you do, you need to see a shrink.’”
Dez shook her head and smiled. “This sounds awesome. You were into some crazy shit way before Exodus Nights, huh?”
Frankie giggled. “Okay, now shh, I’m about to get to the good part.”
“We’re not at the good part yet?”
“Not even close. So just when they both reach the, uh, pinnacle of their excitement, the door bursts open and the sexy Parisian girlfriend’s boyfriend comes in and threatens the nervous tic guy with a knife.”
“What kind of knife?”
Frankie rolled her eyes. “Well, I don’t know, Dez. A sharp knife. Right next to his, you know, private area.”
“Please,” Dez said, “I know I’m a lesbian, but you can use the real words in front of me. I’m not going to shrivel up and die.”
“His penis, then, Dez, are you happy?” Frankie untwined her fingers from Dez and poked her playfully in the ribs.
Dez smiled, running her fingers through Frankie’s hair. “Yes. I’m happy.”
“And then,” Frankie said, plowing ahead, “just as he’s about to cut off the guy’s manhood—”
“Manhood?”
“—the East German paranoid guy comes in with a crossbow and nails the boyfriend right between the shoulder blades.”
“With a damn crossbow?”
“Not just a crossbow,” Frankie said, making flourishing movements dramatically with her hand. “A silver-tipped arrow.”
“Was the boyfriend a vampire?”
“Um,” Frankie said pensively, “I don’t think so. I don’t think I was in my vampire-fetish stage at that point.”
“Right.”
Dez could feel her left arm start to fall asleep. “So what was the verdict?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean did it get published?”
Frankie laughed. “Oh, no. Not even close. Some of the rejection letters I got were pretty righteous, though.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Do not be sorry about the failure of The Harbor. It was the tenth rejection letter I got before someone told me that the integration of harbor, in both a literal or metaphorical way, made absolutely no sense in the story.”
Dez laughed. “Did you hide the symbolism a little too well?”
Frankie shook her head and her hair moved back and forth on Dez’s shoulder, tickling her collarbone. “I got so involved with the plot—making sure the East German’s descent into madness made sense, making sure that Electra or whatever her name was had a good sense of empowerment, that maybe I didn’t spend as much time explaining the meaning of the harbor. But the symbolism was anything but hidden.”
Dez wrapped Frankie’s hair around her finger.
“And the harbor was actually this really powerful allegory. Well, in my young, naïve mind it was really powerful.”
“Allegory, huh?”
“Yeah. I had it all figured out. The water represented Jesus, but the piers were going to represent organized religion.”
“And just how did you think you were going to pull that off?”
“Well, obviously I never figured that out. But in the big fight scene—in the outline, it happened on the pier itself—the East German and the handsome American were fighting, and ostensibly it was over the affections of the Parisian woman, who represented the future, but the slats on the wharf broke because the pier couldn’t handle the demands of the people it was trying to hold up, and because the logs used in construction were rotted from the inside out.”
“That sounds a bit heavy-handed.”
Frankie scoffed. “Believe me, I’ve written the most obvious symbolism and nobody gets it. The only people who get it are reviewers, who think everything is too obvious although it goes right over everybody else’s head.”
“Really?”
“Really. Like—okay, after her two lovers fall into the water, the Parisian woman drove off the pier into the water, and as she’s beginning to drown, her mouth fills not with water, but with red wine, and she thinks about how the promise of the pier had led her to this place, how it had led her to transform herself from a human with hopes and dreams into nothing but a corpse in the bottom of the harbor.”
“And that’s the Jesus metaphor.”
“Well, yeah, the harbor, not the Parisian chick. You know the whole water-into-wine thing.”
“Yeah, I heard the story once or twice growing up.” Dez hoped the sarcasm was evident in her voice—her mother had dragged her to church every Sunday until Dez left for California. “But it didn’t get published?”
Frankie sighed and intertwined her fingers with Dez’s again. “No. Not even a bite.”
Dez smiled. “It might not have worked in that story, but it’s actually not a bad metaphor. Maybe you could use it in your next book.”
Frankie went quiet, her mouth forming a thin line.
“You okay?”
“I’m just thinking,” Frankie said. Her voice was miles away.
Dez lifted her head just enough to pull the pillow down a little. There was no use denying that Frankie was fascinating, and she was coy and cute and curvy—and maddening.
“Hey, listen, Frankie, I’ve got class in—” Dez grabbed her watch off the nightstand and looked at it. “Oh jeez, six hours. How is it three in the morning?”
Frankie was shaken out of her stupor. “Wait—you have class?”
“Yeah, at nine.”
“Aren’t you an art director or something?”
Dez shook her head. “Maybe that was the other hot black girl you had sex with.” She laughed, but Frankie still had a serious look on her face.
“Did you tell me you were a student?”
Dez was annoyed; she remembered telling Frankie about her track scholarship at the bistro. But she shrugged and gave Frankie an out. “I don’t know. We might have been too busy talking about books.”
Frankie sat up, the sheets falling down from her shoulders to around her waist. Dez
tried not to stare. “Are you a grad student?”
Dez smirked. “Oh, you’re afraid you’re robbing the cradle now?”
Frankie looked worried.
“How old did you think I was?”
“I don’t know,” Frankie said. “You like talking about books. You knew all the words to a bunch of eighties songs. I guess I thought you were twenty-five or twenty-six.”
“Twenty-five-year-olds can have class in the morning.”
“Are you twenty-five?”
Dez laughed. “Nope. Twenty-one.”
“You’re only twenty-one?”
“Twenty-two in April.”
“What were you doing at that party in Westwood?”
Dez leaned over and grabbed her panties and bra and started putting them on under the covers. “Dancing with you to ‘Tainted Love.’”
“Where are you going?”
“Home. To get some sleep.”
“No, I mean where are you going to school?”
“Oh. Cal State Long Beach.” Dez realized, perhaps too late, that they had spent almost all evening talking about Frankie. Frankie’s book, Frankie’s story, Frankie’s opinions on gender dynamics, Frankie’s opinions on authorship, Frankie Frankie Frankie. Perhaps the only thing that Frankie knew about Dez was that she liked cheesecake. Well, and that Dez could do that one thing with her fingers and her tongue at the same time.
“What are you studying?”
Dez looked at Frankie. Her face was open, her eyes wide. Was she making up for lost time on the date, just now realizing that she had monopolized the conversation? Dez got out of bed and realized her annoyance was growing. But she smiled, the widest, most sincere smile she could hope for. “Oh, come on, Frankie, we won’t have anything to talk about on our next date.” She picked up her jeans, still damp from the rain, and put them on.
That put Frankie off balance and she wasn’t sure how to respond. Finally she smiled. “Right. And I have writing to do tomorrow too.”
“You okay dating a younger woman?” Dez put her shirt on and began to button it up.
Frankie smiled. “Sure. It just surprised me, is all.”
Dez smoothed her shirt down and looked around. “Did I leave my purse downstairs?”
“I don’t know,” Frankie said. “Let me go pee. I’ll see you out.”
Dez went downstairs. She put her black Doc Martens on, still wet from the rain, but dry inside. She saw her purse—next to Frankie’s on the floor.
She thought briefly for a moment, then opened Frankie’s purse and pulled out the wallet. Frankie’s wallet was leather-edged but made of canvas, with a floral pattern, blue and lavender and purple. Dez thought of the red cherry dress and how good a dress in the same fifties-pinup cut would look on Frankie with the wallet’s floral pattern. She looked at the driver’s license.
It was from New Hampshire.
Jennifer Renée Morgenstern.
Dez was stunned and almost dropped the wallet.
She checked again—but the photo next to the name was definitely Frankie’s. She wanted to go through every inch of the wallet. She pulled out a MasterCard, also reading Jennifer R Morgenstern.
What was going on? Was this a trick? She started to look at other cards in the wallet, but she heard the toilet flush upstairs.
She put everything back in the wallet and put the wallet back in the purse, leaving it right where she’d found it—at least, as close as she could remember. She and Frankie—or whoever she was—were making out when they dropped their purses, so she doubted Frankie would notice if anything were slightly out of place.
Footfalls on the stairs.
Dez blinked hard, trying not to have a shocked look on her face. She was tired—it was a little after three in the morning, after all—and the adrenaline rush from the sex had worn off. She realized she had at least a thirty-minute drive ahead of her, too, and suddenly a wave of exhaustion hit her.
Frankie appeared. She had put on a nightie, a little frilly, a little see-through; something Dez would never have been caught dead in.
“Are you sure you don’t want to spend the night?” Frankie said. “My bed is nice and warm. It would be nice to be with someone else on a rainy night like this.”
The nightie was meant to keep her there, Dez knew—and if she hadn’t opened up the wallet and seen a name that had nothing to do with Frank Bethany, she might have stayed. Actually, Dez admitted to herself, she definitely would have stayed.
“I don’t want to fight traffic from Torrance and run the risk of being late for class,” Dez said. “Plus it’ll take an hour and a half in the morning. It’ll only take thirty minutes now.”
“Okay,” Frankie said. She stepped closer to Dez, but Dez didn’t step closer to her. “Um,” she said. “I’ve never done this with a girl. Do we, like, kiss goodbye?”
Dez leaned over and kissed Frankie on the mouth. Dez started slow but Frankie returned the kiss passionately, moaning a little, in a very sensual way that Dez guessed Frankie’s male lovers would find irresistible.
Dez broke the kiss first. “Bye,” she said. “I’ll call you.”
She opened the door. The rain had continued falling heavily, but Dez was glad to get out of the apartment.
She stepped out into the downpour and a sense of calm came over her.
She walked out to the car, getting soaked, feeling Frankie’s eyes on her. She turned; Frankie was standing in the doorway in her thin, lacy nightie. Dez lifted her hand to wave goodbye.
Dez got in the car and sat for a few seconds, breathing hard. Warning bells, red flags, bridge out signs—everything was telling her to drive home and never look back.
She could still get four hours of sleep and be in the library for an hour before class tomorrow.
5
Dez found what she was looking for in a 1986 article in The Dartmouth. The microfiche made the photograph a series of white blobs on the reader’s screen, but there it was: Prof. Bethany Nominated for PEN Award.
And even through the white blob, Dez could see that Professor Bethany was a real person, a man with a confident smile and strong jaw, and that he was not a cute curvy white girl.
“You sure can pick ’em, Dez,” she mumbled to herself. She rubbed her eyes and started reading the article.
English department professor Frank Bethany has been nominated for the prestigious PEN/Faulkner award for fiction for his debut novel, “Exodus Nights,” published in June 1985. His second novel, “Friendly Fire,” has a release date of early 1987.
“Exodus Nights” is the first debut novel to be nominated in the five-year history of the award. Bethany will compete with Tobias Wolff, Harriet Doerr, and other authors. The award will be presented in April at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.
She had expected the article to be longer, perhaps continued on another page, but that was it. She scanned through the rest of that week’s edition: an article on a professor’s sponsored trip to West Berlin, the opening of a new dormitory planned for the fall quarter, and the injury of the star lacrosse forward. Dez had spun the wheel back to the beginning when she saw it.
On the masthead, in the list of staff writers, Jen Morgenstern. Dez narrowed her eyes and thought for a bit, then realized she was going to be late for class if she didn’t get going.
◆◆◆
That evening, Dez walked home through the rain with her hood pulled over her head. She hadn’t been able to pay attention in class, the lecture on interviewing witnesses just an audial jumble in her mind. She wondered what else Frankie had done to perpetuate the ruse. Was she pretending to be the famous author just in front of Dez, or was this the persona she presented to the world?
The telltale mud tracks, still wet in front of the door, suggested that Rhonda was home. Rhonda had, unsurprisingly, been asleep when Dez finally got home at 3:45 that morning, and had left for her morning class before Dez woke up. Dez stifled a yawn—after only four hours of sleep, she was exhausted, and walke
d upstairs, stopping in front of Rhonda’s open door. Rhonda was on her computer playing Minesweeper.
“Hey, girl,” Rhonda said, not taking her eyes off the screen.
“Hey, Rhonda.”
“You got in late.”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you.”
“How was your date with the chela?”
Dez hesitated.
“Oh, come on, Dez. You were out too damn late to not have a good time.” She clicked and a bomb appeared. “Dammit.”
“Well,” Dez said. “She had, uh, she was…”
“She was what? Unshowered?” Rhonda started a new game.
“Inexperienced with girls.”
Rhonda shook her head. “Oh, no. What was she doing at that party in Westwood?”
“I’m not sure. I guess she’s looking for a change.”
“You cut your hair different if you want a change. You don’t start having sex with girls.”
“Oh, come on now, Rhonda. Be a little nice. Remember your first time with a girl.”
Rhonda pressed her lips together and didn’t say anything.
“Yeah,” Dez continued, “you remember how awkward and weird it was, don’t you?”
“Fine,” Rhonda said, “you made your point. But you’re avoiding the question.”
Dez crossed her arms and tapped her foot, debating what to say. “You ever been with someone who didn’t tell you their real name?”
Rhonda stopped playing and looked at Dez. “What do you mean, didn’t tell you their real name? Frankie isn’t her real name?”
Dez shook her head. “No. It’s Jennifer Morgenstern.”
“She tell you that?”
Dez looked at the floor and pursed her lips.
“Oh my God, you naughty ho. You went through her purse. You went through her purse!”
“Well, I did—”
“Before or after you had sex with her?”
Dez put a hand over her face.
“After?” Rhonda sputtered. “You have sex with her and you didn’t even know her real name?”
“Well, I do now,” Dez offered lamely.
Rhonda stopped. “So does she have a reason for calling herself Frankie? Is there, I don’t know, some favorite uncle, or a childhood nickname or something?”
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