The Red Car

by Marcy Dermansky

  I had one of those now. A degree in writing. I had a possessive husband. We had had that fight, but I wondered if it was real. I had not told anyone. Not even Judy, or the ghost of Judy, knew. And so, maybe, it had not happened. Or was not as bad as I thought it was. I had a new job, one where I did not have to work from an office. Soon, I would have to get to my computer and do that job: picking news stories that went on to corporate websites and rewriting the headlines. Judy’s funeral conveniently fell on my day off. Tomorrow, I told myself, I would make sure to do my work.

  “Good girl,” Judy said.

  It was strange how alive she felt, now that she was dead.

  “You are forgetting something,” she said.

  “What?”

  I looked out the window of the bus, going up and down the hills, the view of palm trees in Mission Delores, and then I remembered. I remembered that I had written a novel.

  “That,” Judy said.

  I wasn’t sure. I would have to reread it. For now, I rode the bus to the last stop. The bus, of course, was not an accident. I was meant to catch that bus because it turned out that I knew exactly where I was going. The bus let me off at a stop only blocks away from my old apartment on Castro Street, and so I walked there. From the street, I would be able to look up at my bay window, my pretty small room on the third floor, where I spent those crazy few months when I lived with Phoebe and Alice.

  The clothes I had worn on the plane were in my backpack, so in a matter of seconds I could go back to being me. Was that what I wanted? I could walk down to a taqueria and change my clothes in the bathroom. I could eat a burrito, go to a used bookstore, a café. It was like I was taking a tour of my old life, as if maybe the old me had died, too.

  I looked up at my window.

  I had loved that little room. I had loved my desk. I had loved my laptop computer, the first one I had ever bought. I had felt like my life was full of promise. It was a shock when I found out that Phoebe was bat-shit crazy, that Alice was starving herself to death. It took all the pleasure out of my small and inexpensive room. I wondered, again, if Alice was still alive.

  I very much hoped that she was.

  Someone came down the steps of the apartment, an attractive gay woman. Or maybe that was a wrong assumption for me to make. But she looked gay and the Castro was a neighborhood full of gay people. But then, I had lived there, too. It was not required for residency. Still, of course, this woman was a lesbian. Her hair was short. She was wearing a tank top and khaki cut-off shorts. She had tattoos on her arm. Her arms were muscled. She looked strong. Suddenly, I felt shy. I liked the way she looked, more than my fancy Diego-approved clothes.

  “It’s okay,” Judy said. “You look lovely.”

  I was getting irritated with Judy, always contradicting me, even when she was being kind, and I didn’t believe it was her anyway, it was my own fucking head, fucking with me. So really, I was getting irritated with myself.

  “Can I help you?” the beautiful woman with the short hair asked me.

  “I used to live here,” I said.

  “No shit?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I pointed to my room on the third floor. “The bay window. It had a dreamy view.”

  “That’s my room.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “The closet was full of stuff,” she said. “When I moved in.”

  “Stuff?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Clothes. A nice blanket. Notebooks full of writing. A desk.”

  “That could be my stuff,” I said.

  “You want to check it out?” she said.

  “Could I?”

  “I was just going to a café to do some writing.”

  I named the name of my favorite café.

  “Yeah, that was a good one. That place went out of business a couple of years ago but there is another place not far from here.”

  I stood with my hands at my sides, sad about my favorite café.

  “Do you want to see if the things are yours?”

  “It was ten years ago,” I said.

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  “Do you have the lease or do you rent your room from someone?”

  “A woman named Phoebe,” she said.

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “She’s a real recluse.”

  I laughed. “She might not want to see me.”

  “Same Phoebe?”

  I nodded.

  “I had a feeling about her when I moved in,” my new friend said. “But the deal was so good. Right on Castro.”

  “I think she takes in roommates when she runs out of cash.”

  She turned around and I followed her into my old building, which was pretty much the same except the peeling gray paint on the wall was peeling more than before, coming off in sheets. I pulled down a strip with my hand and then realized what I was doing and stopped myself.

  “I like your dress,” she said, as I followed her into her bedroom, which had once been my bedroom. I had to remind myself that we were not actually friends. “It reminds me of Audrey Hepburn.”

  “I went to a funeral today,” I said

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Someone you were close to?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I wondered what Judy would have to say about that. She did not comment.

  The woman whose room it now was went to the closet and she pulled out three cardboard boxes. “I keep meaning to give the clothes and books to charity, but never get around to it. I guess this is why.”

  I sat down on her futon. I was loath to look at my things. There, I saw on top of the pile, was what was once my favorite cardigan. I used to wear it much too often. It was a shapeless garment. I did not want to wear it ever again. I could still hear the words from Judy’s letter in my head. Her comment about my oversized clothes. I didn’t know what it all meant. Her car had been hit, plowed into, and yet what I read had felt like a suicide note.

  My new friend sat down next to me. She took my hand. Her hand was soft. There was dirt under her fingernails. There was dirt under my fingernails, too, even though I was wearing a pretty dress.

  “I have never been to the funeral of a person I cared about before,” I said.

  A tear dripped from my cheek. I wasn’t crying for Judy. I did not know why I was crying. She saw the tear; she wiped it away with her finger. She leaned over and kissed me. I had never kissed a woman before. I had always wanted to kiss a woman, but had never had the opportunity. Actually, that was not true. In college, a friend had made a pass at me and I had turned her down. I had been too nervous to respond properly. I wondered, sometimes, whether my life would be different if I had kissed her back. Maybe we would have fallen in love. I would have moved to Somerville with her, another gay neighborhood, this one outside of Boston. I might have liked that. I would have never married Hans.

  My new friend had soft lips. She tasted good, like coffee, even though she had told me that she was on her way to a café.

  “You taste good,” I said. “Like coffee.”

  “You taste like tequila,” she said, laughing.

  “We went out for drinks after the funeral.”

  I kissed her again. I somehow could not help myself. I had not asked her her name. She had not asked for mine. Arms around each other, we lay back on her futon. It was so nice, just kissing and touching, her hands in my long hair, my hands on her head, the soft buzz of her scalp. She unzipped my expensive black dress and I slid myself out of it. Her hands were on my back, running over my breasts, up and down my legs, in between my legs. I could not believe I was actually doing this. This was so unlike my experience of sex with Hans. I felt like I was enjoying myself too much. I was enjoying myself too much and this made me feel guilty. I sat up.

  “Too fast?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “You are not gay?” she asked.

  I nodded again.

  “I hate that,” she said. “Straight girls.”

&nbs
p; “I liked the kissing,” I said.

  The woman kissed me again. She also gently probed her finger inside me, this time underneath my underwear. Who was to say that I wasn’t gay? I was thirty-three years old. That could almost count as still young. To someone older at least. I didn’t know anything definitely.

  “I can probably do this,” I said.

  “Of course you can.” She smiled at me. “What I am doing, this is what men do. Only I do it better.”

  “You do,” I agreed.

  She slipped off my underwear. I lay back on her futon. It was in the same place where I had kept my futon. For all I knew, it was my futon. I closed my eyes. I could not quite believe how good it felt, her fingers touching me, her lips on mine. I came much too quickly, my whole body shaking. I was embarrassed. My new friend lay on her side, watching me. I still did not know her name. I felt at that moment that if she let me, I would love her. I could live with her in this room that had once been mine, I could go back in time. I could go back to the office, go out for lunch with Judy and tell her that I had become a lesbian and she would laugh at me.

  “I love to make women come,” my new friend said.

  I was still catching my breath.

  “You are really good at it,” I said.

  “Maybe I can put that on my résumé,” she said. “I need a better job.”

  I laughed. I was feeling more comfortable, already.

  “I have to go,” she said. “I actually only have a couple of hours until work.”

  “Where do you work?”

  She said a place and I gave her a blank look. “I am a waitress, but really, I am a writer.”

  I had forgotten. This was San Francisco where every single white girl you met had majored in English and wanted to be a writer. Even the lesbians.

  I felt a certain impatience emanating from her. “Shouldn’t I do something for you?” I asked.

  “Nope,” she said. “No time. Also you couldn’t.”

  “I could,” I said, like a petulant child.

  I did not like how the energy in the room had changed. I was being sent away. I did not know how I ended up in her bed, but I wanted to lay under the covers and go to sleep. My new friend seemed to understand my thoughts.

  She handed me my dress.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I really am sorry,” she said. “I have a girlfriend. She is already pissed at me. She says all I have to do is blink and I cheat on her.”

  “You have a girlfriend?” I asked, jealous. I had forgotten that I had a husband.

  “And I promised. I told her, no more girls. But there you were,” she said, helping me into my underwear as if I was a little girl. “Standing on my doorstep, dressed like a present I had to unwrap.”

  She looked at those boxes. “You should probably take them with you.”

  I looked at them. Did I want these things? “Can I come back for them later?”

  She looked at her watch. “I don’t think that is such a good idea,” she said. “Especially if Phoebe already kicked you out.”

  “I don’t know your name,” I said.

  “Lea,” she said.

  “My name is Leah,” I said.

  “That is too weird,” she said.

  “How do you spell it?” I asked her.

  “L-E-A.”

  “I spell mine with an H.”

  “Still weird,” Lea said. “I mean, it’s not that common.”

  It wasn’t. There had been six Jennifers in my sixth-grade class. I could not remember ever meeting another Leah, spelled any which way. I wondered if that meant she would let me stay. This was stupid. Lea had made her position clear. I did not want to cause trouble for her. I was already in trouble. It was not a good feeling.

  “So you’ll be able to carry these?” the other Lea said, standing up.

  I felt sad. I did not want to talk about leaving. I wanted to talk about our names some more. Was she named after someone in her family? Her paternal grandmother, like me? Did Lea know the Hebrew definition of our name meant weary? Or patient. The patient wife of Jacob. I had never liked that. Did Lea feel like a Lea? She did not seem weary or patient or ready to ever be someone’s calm and supportive wife. Her arms were too strong, muscular. I looked at the boxes. I had on those high-heeled shoes, which were already hard enough to walk in.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. I was pretty sure I didn’t want those boxes anyway.

  But Lea picked up all three boxes. I followed her out of the room and down the hall. I did not offer to help.

  “What about Alice?” I asked as we went past her door. I still could not remember her last name. It was possible that I never knew it. “Do you know what happened to her? She used to live here, too.”

  “Alice?” Lea said. “You mean poor wounded Alice, the anorexic with a heart of gold.”

  “She still lives here?” I was incredulous. Ten years had passed. “I thought Phoebe wanted us both gone.”

  “Between you and me, there is something slightly sinister going on with the two of them,” Lea said. “Not healthy. Codependent in the sickest way.”

  I stopped where I stood. On the wall hung a painting I vaguely remembered, unfinished when I had left. Rabbits in a meadow. It wasn’t particularly good. I remembered the canvas in Phoebe’s room when I interviewed for the room.

  “Maybe I want to say hello to Alice,” I said.

  “She’s not here. She has group today,” Lea said.

  “She had group when I lived here, too.”

  “They are really both crazy. It is actually really good I met you today. It confirms what I already knew. I need to move out of here. But my girlfriend doesn’t want me to move in with her.”

  “You keep making other girls come.”

  I felt brazen, just saying the word “come.”

  Lea had started already walking down the stairs and I followed behind her, shoes in my hands. What would I say to Alice now? She was still alive. Wasn’t that what I had wanted to know? I had felt guilty, for years, leaving her, not knowing what happened to her, worrying, and now I knew.

  “I feel like I am only going to be young right now,” Lea said. I wondered what she meant, and then I remembered, she was talking about me and what we had done. I had had that thought, too. I realized that probably, if not technically, I had cheated on Hans. I wondered if it counted because I had been with a woman. If it had not been intercourse. That was what Bill Clinton had said. At the bottom of the steps, Lea put down the boxes to open the front door.

  “Okay,” I said. “I will help.”

  I took one of the boxes. But I was the one in the dress, so I let Lea carry the other two.

  I followed her two blocks down Castro Street, to the place where the Victorian houses ended and the strip of stores and restaurants began. Lea hailed me a taxi. She tried to put me inside the taxi.

  “This was fun,” she said.

  I was not sure what to say. I felt confused, almost the same sort of fear I had felt sitting in Judy’s red car. It did not make sense. Lea asked the taxi driver to open the trunk and she began to put the boxes in the trunk while I watched, not sure how to end this good-bye.

  She came over to the open door. She gently cupped my chin with her hand.

  “You have money for a taxi, right?”

  “I do,” I said.

  I had had this conversation so very recently. Hans had left the apartment and gone to the ATM across the street. That had been yesterday. That had not even been twenty-four hours ago. That had been in a different world.

  “I could just come with you,” I said. “To the café. I am a writer, too.”

  There, I said it.

  “Good,” Judy said. “A much better writer than she is, too.”

  “What about the boxes?” Lea asked.

  “We can take the taxi to the café.”

  I was surprised when Lea agreed. We actually held hands in the backseat. I wondereded what it would be like, if she were my girlfr
iend. I could introduce her to my mother, say, This is my girlfriend, Lea. I wondered how long we would think it was funny, the way we had the same name. Lea had the taxi drop us off at a café on Valencia Street, not far from the bar where Daniel had been a bartender. I missed Valencia Street. I paid the fare. Lea carried the boxes to a tiled table in the back of the café. I carried my shoes and my bag. I watched as Lea pulled a laptop computer out of her backpack.

  “You were carrying that, too?” I said, full of admiration.

  “I work out,” Lea said.

  That, of course, was obvious. She started typing.

  I was not sure what I was supposed to do. My computer was in the trunk of Diego’s car. I had to do something. In one of the boxes, I found an old notebook. It was only half full. I opened to a blank page and I started writing. I figured I might as well write something. I had told Lea I was a writer. I had finished my novel, so I might as well start something new. A story, maybe. Writing in a notebook, it was something I almost never did anymore. I wrote a sentence and the words started to come. They came too quickly, and I could not keep up, writing by hand.

  “You see,” Judy said.

  But I did not know what she meant.

  You see, you are writing?

  I knew I was a writer. I knew I had written a book and I even knew that it was probably good. I just wanted to keep that quiet. Make sure. Protect myself from disappointment.

  You see, you are a lesbian?

  You see, you should have never gotten married?

  You see, you should have never left San Francisco?

  It worried me that I did not understand Judy’s chiding. If the voice was coming from me, wouldn’t I understand my own meaning? I bit the end of my black pen, which burst onto my hand. I used a napkin to contain the ink.

  “You’re pretty,” the other Lea said. She had stopped writing. She was appraising me. I wondered for how long. My fingers were covered in black ink.