Stumbling on the Sand

by Jenna Rae

“Yeah.” Officer Meeker smiled back. “Sure. What kind of food?”

  “Oh, gosh.” Lola considered. “Something unique. Something I couldn’t make at home. That won’t make me vomit on you. Again.”

  “Got it.” She nodded. “Wanna go now?”

  “Lemme grab my jacket.”

  The restaurant was homey and warm, with copper cookware and pop-art posters brightening the beige wall on one side of the narrow space and brick on the other. Their casual conversation flowed and soothed her. Meeker talked about her childhood in the Louisiana countryside, where she was raised by her grandmother until her death and then was sent to live in Brooklyn with a great-aunt she’d never met before. She told several anecdotes about the academy and different people she’d encountered on the job.

  In the soft candlelight, the broad planes of Meeker’s face looked soft and round, and Lola glanced at her wide, generous mouth. She would be a good kisser, Lola thought, and blushed. Meeker looked at her questioningly, interrupting her own story about a mugger with a speech impediment.

  Lola shook her head.

  “No, what?”

  “You’re so pretty. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to embarrass you. It’s rude and I’m sorry.”

  Meeker made a face. “I don’t get called pretty a lot.”

  “You are, though.”

  Meeker shrugged. “I’m not dumb enough to argue with flattery twice, so thank you. As long as we’re talking about it, you look beautiful.”

  “It’s the candlelight.”

  For the second time, Meeker threw back her head and laughed. “I thought I was bad at taking compliments.”

  Lola smiled. The food had been delicious and the conversation delightful, but dinner was over and she wasn’t sure how to end the evening. She cleared her throat. “I need to say something to you.” She smiled at Jude’s raised eyebrows. “I’ve had a wonderful time and I’d like to see you again. But I don’t live here. I’m not planning to stay in New York for more than a few days. And I don’t kiss or make out with or sleep with people I barely know.” She considered how to continue, but Meeker put her hands up.

  “Hey don’t worry.” Jude leaned forward and smiled. “I’m glad you’re straightforward. I know you’re leaving soon and I don’t sleep around either. So, let’s get you safely back to your nice hotel, and maybe you’ll let me take you out to a mediocre dinner tomorrow. Sound good?”

  Lola smiled and nodded, too pleased to speak. She paid the check, waving away mild protests, and they walked back. The street was icy and Lola’s chest hurt from the cold air, and she was having trouble keeping her balance. Meeker put one arm around her and held her steady as they walked, and the warmth between them was welcome. Meeker’s body was shapelier than Del’s, Lola realized, her waist smaller and her hips and breasts larger. She was built more like Lola, only an inch or two taller and more muscular. Lola wondered what Meeker would look like naked. Would she look as beautiful as she felt? She stumbled, her focus broken, and giggled as her hip bumped Meeker’s. She’d never been so keenly aware of another woman’s body before, except for Del’s, and she felt like Meeker could read her mind. The silence between them should have been awkward but wasn’t.

  Too soon, they were back at the hotel lobby. They made plans for the following evening, and Lola rode up to her room feeling alone and lonely. The door had barely closed behind her when there was a knock. Mindful of the late hour, she used the peephole.

  She opened the door and was enveloped in Meeker’s firm arms, crushed against her soft lips, smelling her cologne and tasting curry and sweet tea. The kiss made her dizzy with sensation and longing, and she melted against the generous curves. Meeker broke off the kiss suddenly and whirled around, escaping the room without a word. Lola stood in the doorway, her body shaking and her heart pounding, a small smile playing at the corner of her tingling lips.

  It was strange, kissing someone who wasn’t Del. At the thought of Del, Lola’s smile faded. Had Del really ever loved her? Did she miss Lola even a little? Who was she kissing these days? Del was too attractive to be alone for long. Lola felt a sudden chill. She wished Del’s arms were wrapped around her, Del’s voice was whispering in her ear, Del’s lips were kissing hers.

  Chapter Eight

  Del stalked away from the computer as if covered in stings by the words on its screen. She’d been trying to figure out what Lola wanted her to read in the stories she was sending, and at least that mystery was solved. She’d moved on. She’d traipsed off to New York City to have a fling and had had the audacity to throw it in Del’s face.

  Del took a long pull from the emergency vodka bottle she kept in the freezer and rubbed her aching gut. Wandering toward the dining room, she stood in the doorway and examined the stacks of data she’d violated her principles to obtain. To follow her guy, she’d asked a favor she hadn’t earned from Mac. She’d dived into Ernie White’s disgustingly privileged and destructive life. She’d invaded his privacy to at least as great an extent as the peeper violated the privacy of his victims. She’d done all that and accomplished exactly nothing.

  If he turned up dead, Del mused, she’d be a great suspect: her walls were covered with giant sticky notes detailing the man’s life, his whereabouts, his interests, his habits. She knew how he liked his coffee—extra sweet and extra hot—where he went on vacation, how much he spent on his cell phone service. But she couldn’t find out what his criminal activities were and she couldn’t connect him to Mikey’s murder. She felt powerless to do her job effectively and powerless to manage her personal life. It was midnight, and Del glared at the clock. Mikey had been dead for sixteen days.

  The house felt empty without Lola in it, so she took off on her motorcycle. Usually a ride helped Del relax and get away from her worries, but her wandering began to feel more like patrolling after only moments. Cutting through the dystopian landscape of the Tenderloin, she saw gleaming high-rises and late night streets populated almost exclusively by the homeless and the desperate. She zipped toward the tourist spots around the wharves and saw too many drunken, restless pedestrians for midnight on a weekday. Most were probably tourists and college students, each group over-represented in the categories of both victim and perpetrator of personal and property crimes.

  Nearly every section of Hyde Street she passed featured at least one transient, most cloaked in featureless squalor that erased individuality, age, gender, race and background. When she’d first moved to the city, she had been shocked by the number of raggedy wanderers she’d seen in doorways and alleys and parks. Now, twenty years later, Del smirked at her own last-millennium naiveté. There had to be at least three times as many street people now. Each of them, she knew too well, had a story. Each of them carried around hopes and losses and wishes and regrets and hurts. She’d had to harden herself to their stories and their personal difficulties long ago, and she wondered about the cost of that.

  Stopped at a light, Del watched a couple of young boys in fatigues, stringy arms around each other’s necks, looking for sex or fights or maybe their car. They seemed too young and scrawny to be soldiers, but then more and more people looked young and scrawny to her. She dragged her gaze away to continue along the grim pathway through the most dehumanized part of the city. Mikey had probably spent the last year of his life like the drifting castaways she passed, unwanted and unseen.

  Hyde Street led her from the post-civilization world of the Tenderloin to the more livable neighborhoods she had seen but spent little time in—Nob Hill and Russian Hill. Nice houses, fewer street people, the city as people liked to see it. There was character here, but it was the kind of character people liked to experience: fun and quirkiness buffered by money and safety. Del thought she’d feel soothed by the more affluent air, but she still bristled with restlessness. She was turned off by the shops, restaurants and clubs that drew the discontented with bright lights and inviting music and colorful displays. As she headed toward Aquatic Park, her itchiness was only increased by the dis
connect between her mood and her surroundings. Despite leaving them behind, she still smelled the denizens of late night streets. She felt their loneliness and desperation and blind blankness as a viral infection that chased her through the nighttime façade of the city. Each of those transients was Mikey and he haunted her. Del gulped the cold night air and tried to push away her ennui. She’d been planning to ride along the marina but no longer wanted to do so.

  Del reversed course and headed back toward the Mission District. She took a short tour of the livelier Mission late night streets, feeling cheered by the colorful murals and variety of languages and people she saw. A pair of moms pushed a blanket-laden stroller, probably taking a colicky infant out for cool air. They passed an elderly couple wearing tweeds and following cocker spaniels on well-worn leads. She smiled at a group of well-heeled, middle-aged revelers doing the Electric Slide in front of a French restaurant where the house wine was twenty dollars a bottle and where Janet once got into a loud argument in French with the Armenian restauranteur over the proper way to caramelize an onion.

  A few minutes later Del stood outside The Lex, debating whether or not to go in. Outside the air was cold, and the neon Lexington Club sign looked like a beacon from a lighthouse. A few couples stood clustered on the sidewalk, chatting and smoking. Inside the music was soft and mellow, and the heat from the dancers was steaming up the stained glass window by the front door. A flash of long hair went by, a misty wraith, and Del could almost smell the dancers’ sweat and perfumes from the sidewalk.

  “Welcome to Elysium,” she muttered to herself, her smile a bitter twist. She’d found refuge and companionship and comfort at The Lex more often than she would ever care to admit, but she had the distinct feeling her depressed mood would sour even this favorite place. I should bring Lola here, she thought, as she strode the last few steps to the entrance. But it was too late. She should have brought Lola here back when Lola was still interested in going places with her.

  She pulled open the familiar door and made her serpentine way over to the bar. The Lex’s Whiskey Wednesday drew a younger, more adventurous lesbian crowd. These ladies were on the make. Wasn’t that, she asked herself as she surveyed the room, why she’d come here instead of somewhere else? Del felt like she was playing a role: butch on the prowl. Hadn’t she done this once already? She’d scooped up a badge bunny in an hour and then gone rabbit on the poor girl.

  Why am I here? Why the hell did Lola send me that stupid story? Is this her way of telling me to fuck off?

  A squadron of young studs stood shoulder to shoulder a few feet from her. Their brutally shorn hair, their lean, muscular bodies, their arrogant posturing—all were designed to signal prowess.

  As Del watched the youngsters pose and preen, she recalled her own years of strutting with carefully cultivated indifference. Their naked desire for validation and acceptance made Del smile and left her feeling maudlin at the same time. They looked unbearably young and vulnerable to her, which was not, she knew, the image they wanted to project. She avoided their eyes, not wanting them to see her condescension. She could remember all too well how it felt to be a lonely twenty-something woman in men’s trousers and loafers, breasts bound and shoes shined. She remembered feeling like a kid wanting to be chosen for the team, desperate to project strength and confidence and to woo that most elusive object of desire, the femme. It had been scary and exciting and titillating. Of course, like anything, as it became easier to pull off, it got boring.

  Again Del was reminded of the way predators needed ever more stimulation. Why was it so hard for her to tease apart the mating dance and the hunt? Was that normal? Or was she as twisted as the perverts and monsters she chased? Had the chase changed her in ways she would continue to have more and more difficulty differentiating between?

  Determined to push aside the contamination of her job, Del got a beer and scanned the room. The studs had naturally attracted the attention of a group of girls dancing in a colorful cluster several feet away. Each wore the requisite femme uniform: high heels, layers of makeup, short skirts. The two groups of young clubbers were living stereotypes playing out in front of her. The femmes flirted, giggled, tossed their hair. They coyly cut their eyes away from the butches, and then glanced back through their false lashes.

  She usually enjoyed watching the alcohol-fueled opera, but tonight she felt the players’ desperation and loneliness more than their excitement and hopefulness. She was tired for them. Dating was too much work. Being young was too much work.

  I’m too old for this. I don’t wanna flirt and play games. I wanna go home and cook dinner and talk about nothing and snuggle and make love with a woman who loves me. I want Lola.

  She scanned the room again. There were eight, no, nine, women in their thirties and forties with long dark hair. Only, she reminded herself, Lola cut off her long hair. Now she’s different and she doesn’t want me anymore. She looked around again. There were seven women about Lola’s age with very short brown hair. Del let her gaze slide off each of them.

  I’m profiling, just like the fucking predators.

  Hadn’t she had this same thought in the last bar? She laughed quietly to herself but kept scoping out the room. Two of the brunettes were pseudo-hippie chicks and clearly a couple. Three were fairly androgynous, which was fine with her. But none of them looked especially interested in a blond Amazon.

  Del recalled the motel where she and Janet had first made love and how they’d met at Wild Side West, the other bar she’d been into hundreds of times, and she quickly and resolutely ignored the memories and the nostalgia. She eyed two women she’d seen notice her. One was so heavily made-up she looked like a caricature, even in the variable light of the bar. The other looked a little uncomfortable, shy, maybe bookish. She sat alone at a table in the corner, her pretty eyes wide as she took in the scene. Was she even out? Del had seen more than one straight or bi or curious or whatever chick show up and sit down to watch the bar’s patrons with the same wide-eyed look.

  Del ordered a dirty martini and shrugged away from the bar, noting the untouched white wine in front of the woman she thought might be playing tourist in the lesbian bar. She took her beer and the martini over to the quiet table.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.” The woman’s gaze was clouded, her voice muted.

  “I don’t want to bother you, but it’s pretty crowded.” Del waved a hand around the room. “I can’t find a seat anywhere. Mind if I sit here?”

  Del flashed a shy, brief smile. She was reasonably sure her target would be too polite to decline unless she felt encroached upon. The woman nodded her head. She licked her lips nervously, and Del offered a reassuring smile.

  “Kinda like a circus, huh?” She gestured with her beer at the flirtation show.

  “Kinda.” The woman’s nervous laughter was quiet. “It’s not so different from a regular bar.” Her dark eyes widened. “That came out wrong.”

  “No worries.” Del pushed the martini halfway across the small table.

  “They just seem very, very—”

  “Young.”

  The woman’s laugh tinkled out, and she covered her mouth. It was so like Lola, that little surprised laugh, that shy gesture. Del looked away from the woman. They sat in silence for a few minutes, watching a particularly flashy young femme sashay up to Stud Row and choose. The stud selected played it too cool, though, and the red-clad young blonde tossed her hair and chose another dance partner.

  “I don’t think I was ever that young.” The woman next to Del spoke so softly, it hardly seemed like she’d uttered the words aloud.

  Was it too soon for the obvious compliment? Del considered. Yes, definitely. She simply smiled and raised her eyebrows in agreement. She pushed the martini a bit closer to her table companion.

  “Ever tried one of these?”

  “A martini? No.” The woman shook her head, and her hair fell into her face. She tucked it behind her ears and smiled uncertainly.

 
“Take it if you want. I ordered it for a friend, but she just texted to cancel. I don’t like martinis, and I don’t want to waste it. Why don’t you try it? If you don’t like it, no problem. But sometimes it’s fun to try new things, right?” Del leaned close. “I promise and swear, it’s not spiked or drugged or anything, but if you’re not comfortable drinking from a stranger’s glass I completely understand. No hard feelings.”

  Del looked away again, giving the woman time to consider without feeling scrutinized.

  Nothing’s changed. The same lines, the same games. It never changes. We just get a tiny bit more subtle, a little less overt. Or do we only think we do?

  “Right,” the woman said, smiling bravely, and sipped at the drink. She made a face and Del laughed with her as she set down the glass and pushed it away.

  “Well, at least you tried it,” she said and saluted with her beer. “To trying new things. My name’s Del.”

  “Tracy,” the woman replied. “My name’s Tracy.”

  “Nice to meet you, Tracy.” Del sat back, crossing her legs. Tracy was not her real name. Tracy was too scared this little adventure would taint her real life to use her real name, but she wasn’t a good enough liar to be convincing. She was looking for something that didn’t fit into her life, some temporary fix to the problem of her sexual orientation and the heterosexual marriage it threatened. That was okay. That was better. Tracy, whoever she really was, had a tan line on her left ring finger. Probably, Del figured, she has the ring in her purse, wrapped in tissue paper or a hankie to protect it.

  Hubby’s out of town, kids are at sleepovers. What’d she tell her mom, her friends? Maybe said she would be at a spa? Whatever.

  “I’m guessing you’ve never been in a bar like this before.”

  Never say lesbian to the tourists. It scares them.

  Tracy shook her head, biting her lip. “It’s that obvious?”

  “My guess is, a lady like you doesn’t frequent any kind of bar.” Del made a face at her own too-obvious flattery and saw Tracy’s answering smile. Self-deprecation worked wonders. When had she learned that? Not soon enough and too long ago, her daddy would have said.