And someone else reminded her that it had been decided there would be no male children allowed on our bus.
“That’s different,” Pat explained. “We are asserting our right to our own lives and bodies.”
“But to pay for babysitting…” someone said, “when it would be a good lesson for them to see us, to recognize right from the beginning that this is wrong…”
We were cozy together, huddled away from the hateful forces outside. We knew everyone despised us and that made our hearthfire blaze all the higher. I’d not been so snug since the last thunderstorm I’d spent in the linen closet with my mother. The world was divided into two camps:—people who killed defenseless animals for fur, dumped toxins into reservoirs, and hated lesbians; and those of us who were sensitive to the myriad needs of the world and hated no one, absolutely no one, except those people in the first group.
The bus started and Stetson waved, looking forlorn, I thought—left behind, all alone. I blew him a kiss. (I’d come to transgress.)
Someone started a chant and, clapping, stamping, we pulled onto the highway and out of poor little Hartford toward the real city.
“I’m hyperventilating,” Lee said.
“Okay, okay. Breathe nice and slow,” I said. “I’ll count with you.”
“There,” she said. “That’s better.” She squeezed my hand. “What would I do without you?” she asked.
She’d have stayed home, and felt fine. Instead, two blocks into the march, she sank onto a doorstep and said she couldn’t go any farther. “It’s a virus,” she said, “the nausea, ooof.” I rubbed her back. A man went by wearing an enormous ostrich feather fan on his penis and nothing else, thrusting as if to fuck the whole world. Colonies strutted past, shouting out their pride—proud to be gay, proud to be bi, proud to ride motorcycles—What would Cyril have thought? I wondered.
“Tens of thousands of amazing lesbians, seas of them,” I wheedled, with the sinking sense of how alike they—we—all looked, how exactly we’d fit ourselves to the mold. So righteous in our unconventionality; so perfectly the same. “We don’t want to miss that.”
Lee’s panic attacks had eaten further and further into her life until she didn’t dare take a plane trip or ride in an elevator, and if we tried to go out to a friend’s house, she’d end up bent double with stomachache and have to be taken home. Also, she’d become acutely self-conscious, so that she sometimes seemed to be performing a mocking pantomime of whatever she meant to be doing—mincing between her plants as she watered them, or washing the windows with large, unnatural strokes. She was trying with all her might to act like the person I wanted her to be, but when she tried to speak, her mouth would go dry suddenly. Her anxious voice quivered in my mind all day, saying: “You won’t go down to Washington Street, will you?” “You’ll call, when you get there? You’ll keep the door locked? You’ll be home before dark?” Once we went swimming at the Y together and she cried out in alarm when she saw me swim toward the deep end of the pool.
The transsexuals, pre-op and post-op, pranced by. They dressed as if they were turning themselves not into women but dolls. What, I wondered, would make a society think its fantasies ought to come true? What if people dared speak out the desires of their hearts as fully as those of their bodies? Still, the transsexuals knew how to carry themselves—they’d show us a thing or two about women! Lee pawed through her purse for the little pink pills the doctor had prescribed for her palpitations, and took one with a gulp, leaning against my shoulder.
“That’s a little better,” she said.
I was beginning to feel a great sympathy with, of all people, men. Why hadn’t I been grateful to those boyfriends when they leapt up from the bed and rushed to the ball field or the library or whatever arena of striving and conquest was furthest from the foggy tide basin of female feeling? If not for men’s ridiculous qualms, I’d have stuck right to them, lovely, sticky creature that I was, so partial to those long looks, long kisses, long, long afternoons of ardent dishevelment, after which I could rest amidst the tangled bedclothes in the satisfied exhaustion of one who has been most deeply, fully, properly used. I’d have married any one of them, with my arms open, my heart open, my mind open as a sieve. Thank God they had done me the favor of resisting, letting me live a little longer before I folded myself into someone else. Lee loved me as completely as I could have hoped, and I was stuck like a sparrow on the lime twig of comfort, beside her. The parade passed by, traffic surged in behind it, and I hailed a cab for Central Park.
What a day! Frisbees sailed above us. Men strutted in leather harnesses. Women caressed each other’s naked breasts in the sun. And here was Grace Jones, tall as a man, sleek as a woman—she looked as if a committee of gay men had designed her, like the huge golden Oscar statue at the Academy Awards. Everything stopped; we stood at attention, she took the microphone, and into it she snarled transcendently: “I need a maa-aa-an.”
Faces froze, the women near us looked to each other for guidance. Was this a slap? Was it all right? We looked around—what should we do? She had been named Entertainer of the Year by the Gay Congress of the City of San Francisco. We applauded, but our smiles showed mostly consternation.
Back home the song rang in my ears as Lee and I tried to make love in honor of Gay Pride Day: it seemed the hardest work I’d ever done. I always had to remember to touch her gently—though the delicate little caresses she wanted would have driven me up the wall—but now I could barely keep myself from hurting her. I bit her shoulder, as if a bolt of pain would awaken her, engage something passionate, but she said, “Now, no biting,” like a coy kindergarten teacher remonstrating with a child. I ran my hands roughly over her, wanting to take her like a lump of clay and wrench her into some more satisfying form. Her nipples tasted as bitter as iron—I hate you, I thought, but I managed to make myself call her darling.
After she fell asleep I went out to the living room to read Middlemarch, and watch Dorothea struggle to properly love her husband, to honor him even after his death. She was conscious of everything, examining all the moral questions, striving to live up to her beliefs and her promises, even when they ran counter to each other. The promises I had made to Lee clanged in my mind suddenly like all the church bells in a mad city, drowning out everything else. I closed the book and set it on the parsons table, and Philippa’s voice spoke in my thoughts as clearly as if I were sitting in her classroom. She was quoting George Eliot: “There was not room enough in poor Rosamond’s mind for furniture to look small in it,” reminding us how tender Eliot was toward her characters and all their mistakes.
One small thing became clear to me just then: Philippa Sayres was the closest I had to kin. I tiptoed into the kitchen for the phone.
* * *
“WHAT DO you mean, you’re in love with me?” She laughed, after my lugubrious confession. “It is most unlikely, Beatrice! You’re in love, I don’t doubt it, it’s in your nature.” Here she laughed in tipsy appreciation: “But with me? Me? I really don’t think so, Beatrice, no. You’re onto something, though, something…” She paused to parse this latest feeling, and after a moment in which I could imagine her consulting her inner oracle, she said, “Yes! That’s it! You need to go to graduate school!”
“Graduate school?”
She was paying me a compliment, in her own idiom. She saw me (oh, I did love her) as a dashing figure, and so accorded me her highest honor. To Philippa, scholarship was a fine steed for a good joust, and she welcomed me into the battle. She’d been my knight on a white horse, no question.
“What would I study?” I asked her.
“Goodness, Beatrice, surely you can figure out something for yourself,” she said. “Listen, I can’t talk, Gone With the Wind is on.”
I watched it too, and when it was over I kept staring, until somewhere in the middle of the night I woke up to see the Israeli Philharmonic performing live in Tel Aviv. The volume was down so far that I couldn’t hear the music, but the sight
itself was beautiful—all these musicians working as a body. How well they must know their conductor—they were attuned to the slightest change of his face. How lucky, to be a strand of that music, a member of an orchestra, to bring all of yourself—every instinct, thought, and movement—to work, toward a beautiful end, studying and studying, trying and erring until there was no further need of thought and it was natural, it was music.
The eye of the camera closed in on a bassist, a young man. He was too tall, with a raw, alert face that seemed to be watching and taking counsel from everything around him. Not the kind of face you usually see on television: that mask of glamour that commands adoration and holds those who adore it at bay. That’s what we think beauty is. The beauty of this man’s face, its rapt concentration, filled me with grief and longing, and suddenly, with hope.
“I’d like to sleep with that orchestra,” I heard myself saying.
A most inconvenient insight, but the minute I had it, I felt a revolution start, in every single cell. I went to the door of the bedroom and was almost surprised to see Lee asleep there. If my thoughts had the power they ought to have, she would already have evaporated. I could hear her small—righteously small—voice, cautioning me not to swim out so far, and suddenly I wanted to swim the ocean, swim all around the world. Fascination was anathema to her. I’d fallen in love with her stolidity. And she had given me what I’d needed: someone to rebel against.
It’s a great night for a drive, I said to myself, with mutinous joy, and I snapped the car keys from their hook and took the steps downstairs as lightly as a kid. Outside, a man stood at the cemetery’s edge, but it was four in the morning, too late even for prostitutes. I waved to him and he pretended not to see me. No doubt he thought he was just looking for sex. If only something so simple could be true.
I’d forgotten what it was like to drive. To steer, with a touch, a silent, powerful beast along the street, while the world moved past as if on a conveyor belt, to see the dark city lay its avenues open before me—should I turn left, through the college gates, or right, toward the wealthy suburbs where the people who could bring themselves to grapple with the world in daylight were dreaming now in their downy beds? It didn’t matter—what would have been impossible in the daytime traffic was effortless now and I crossed the city like a child skipping through an empty house, turning down Main Street under the banners proclaiming, “Hartford Swings” in honor of the Big Band Festival, up Asylum Avenue through the insurance sprawl, and down Park Street past the library. Mr. Klipsch was asleep in the doorway and I felt as fond, seeing him, as if he was my brother. The light was on in the back window of the bakery—Mrs. Arruda would be at work there. It amazed me, but I was coming to know people, to be a part of this place.
Ahead, on the horizon, I saw a thin, rosy line, and heard Ma’s portentous: “Red sky at morning, sailors take warning,” her voice taking the drama of nature for her own. Who knew, who could guess where I was headed, what would happen? Behind me a state trooper turned out of his roadside lair, and my heart jumped, but he passed me and a moment later I saw him sweep smoothly in beside a disabled newspaper truck, blue lights flashing a silent message: even here on the highway in the last hour of the night, you are not alone. Dawn bled upward until the sky was tinted as pale as old petals. So I was driving east. Of course. Stetson’s place was east, just across the river. I was going to see Stetson; it was the most natural thing in the world.
Nine
“DID I wake you up?”
“Well, it’s, like … five-thirty?” He was standing in the doorway of an apartment so small I could see all of it over his shoulder: a convertible love seat that, pulled out, took up the whole living space, and behind it, a tiny kitchen, a bathroom door. No one would ever guess that its resident was obsessed with folded sweaters: there was a pile of dirty clothes in the corner and one of dirty dishes in the sink.
“What is it? What’s the matter?” Stetson asked, beckoning me in, and sitting down on the end of his bed, still half asleep, his hair sticking up every which way
“To answer that, I think I’d have to write a book,” I said. How could I explain it? Say that I’d decided to move to Middlemarch? That my father had been mauled by a tigress and when my own stripes started to show, I’d had to take drastic action? Or, my mother dreamed of getting out of debt by writing a sex novel, but sex was a mystery to her, so I had to figure it out? Or, the Israeli Philharmonic seemed to need a woman and Grace Jones said she needed a man?
I couldn’t say the word “man,” though, because Stetson was sitting there in his shorts, all too palpably representing that gender, with golden stubble glinting over his face. His shoulders, his knees, were so big and square, his chest hairless, defenseless, to my surprise. (So, all this time I’d had some image of his body in my heart. Another surprise.) And, his tattoo: what I’d thought was a dagger was the tail of a snake, whose body was wrapped and rewrapped around Stetson’s chest and over his shoulders, its head menacing me from the crook of his left arm.
“What?” he asked, seeing me stare. Then: “Oh, that.” He looked down at himself and shook his head. “You see why I need to get married. I can’t spent my life explaining this guy to strange women. Look.” He showed me how the creature’s venomous eye was right over a vein. “When it started to pulse, it was time for the needle,” he said. “He looks like my father, actually, from a certain angle.”
What I noticed was how fully the snake was holding him.
“The thing about a tattoo is, it’s permanent,” he said. “Nothing else really is.”
“I’ve figured it out—what the letters stand for,” I said. I almost reached out to touch them and had to remind myself I had no right.
“You have?” He grabbed a T-shirt from his pile and pulled it over his head. “How?”
“Well, I mean I can guess. ‘Don’t tread on me.’ I mean, more or less. Right?”
He laughed a little, and looked at me with surprise, as if he thought it strange I’d puzzle over this. “In a way,” he said. “How was the march?”
Oh, the march. “It was fine, fine. Lee got a little nervous, but otherwise, fine.”
“So, then you thought you’d come over and decipher my tattoo?”
“I got in the car and started driving, and I didn’t know where I was going, and somehow I got here.”
“How do you know my address?”
“I must have seen it at the store, because as soon as I saw the sign for Tilden Street, the number 333 popped into my mind. It’s just been kind of a weird night.”
He smiled, so fondly.
“Stet, I think I came here to tell you not to get married…” I said, as if I were a fortune teller who was only just seeing the clouds of prophecy resolve.
“You got in the car in the middle of the night and drove aimlessly until you happened to pass my apartment, and came up to tell me … something … which you now realize is that I shouldn’t get married?”
“Yes,” I said, with some amazement, because it was the first thing I’d felt sure of in a very long time. “That’s what I’m saying.”
“And,” he said, edging discreetly away from me, to fish for a pair of pants, “why shouldn’t I get married?”
“Because…”
“Yes?” He held my eyes with a laughing challenge, and suddenly I knew why, and the minute I knew it, we stopped being able to look at each other. So, with my hands over my face, I pulled all my courage together and told myself to be honest with the man who had been so honest with me.
“Because it would be better—I mean, I’d like it better—if you—married—me.”
I stood fixed to my spot, appalled to hear myself. “I don’t mean marry,” I explained quickly. “I mean—” I stamped my foot on the worn floorboard. “I have an idiotic crush on you.” I’d meant to be done with crushes, and a crush on a man! Pat had been right about me, how infuriating.
“And—” he took a breath, preconfession, “—you’ve noticed th
at I have an idiotic crush on you,” he said.
I didn’t dare hear this, but I felt his arms around me.
“But,” he said softly, his head bent over mine, “you were the one who spoke it. You were the braver one.”
If tulips had sprouted out of my head right then, I wouldn’t have been surprised, because his words fell on me like the first warm rain. It’s true, I thought, I am brave, no matter how I quaver and tremble and flee—I’d been brave since that first stupid day when I went off to school in my little plaid jumper, with my mother ready to smash a champagne bottle on my bow.
“Stetson,” I said, into his collarbone.
I couldn’t fit my arms all the way around him, and his smell was so heady that I could only think to say, “Stetson, you’re a god!” Two seconds of heterosexuality and I’d turned into Barbie.
His T-shirt read ONE DAY AT A TIME, and I kissed the Y. Then I lifted his arm and kissed the snake’s oft-pierced eye. I was going to kiss everywhere anything had ever pricked him, to breathe him into myself; we were going to get to know each other the way most people only dream about.
He took my arms and held me away.
“But you have somebody,” he said. “And so do I.”
As I hadn’t realized I was going to throw myself at him, I was ill-prepared to argue this point. Apparently his family didn’t follow their hearts so doggedly as mine.
“In ten minutes,” he said, “the phone is going to ring and it’s going to be Tracy, giving me my wake-up call.”
“Why isn’t she here?” I asked. This was better than shrieking, “You said you didn’t love her!” like the banshee I was bound to become now. (Isn’t that what happens to women who fall in love with men? They dash themselves against the cliff face of the masculine heart’s refusal, and go mad.)
“She doesn’t come here,” he said. “See this?” He plucked at the cloth that was thrown over the back of couch, khaki polyester splattered with paint. “It was my bedspread in the halfway house.” My heart throbbed the way it always did when he was confessing.
The Bride of Catastrophe Page 35
