Beggar of Love (21 page)

It was the last half of the last inning. Annie Heaphy stepped up to bat. The teams were still tied. The sun was a little less hot. The grass was strewn with intent lesbians. She could see that the teenaged boys, passing back through, seemed gripped by the tension. Marie-Christine had begun a cheer:

Our Lavender Lovers

Are Lavender Winners!

Jefferson remembered the very first time her own team had won, they’d been playing field hockey up in Rye. She’d been very together, in tune with her teammates, and had pushed and wheeled her way toward the winning point. The cheers sounded—the cheers that were, for that glorious moment, the only sound in the world.

She’d thought she’d never hear them like that again, and here they came now, rising, swelling as Annie Heaphy hit the ball with all the power in her middle-aged arms and it sailed over the pitcher, sailed over second base, sailed over the outfield, toward the roof of the Plaza Hotel, and Annie came running, running, no longer nonchalant, around every base till she was home. Home.

Jefferson didn’t care who saw her. She stood crying in front of everyone. Crying to see the batgirl twirl in excitement, to see Liz smiling and crying all at once, to see Sally leaping with delight, to see Marie-Christine dance Annie around and around.

To see Ginger.

Where had she been? Watching out of sight?

And holding Jefferson’s cap. Her winner’s cap—looking faded, worn, but with a good stiff brim to it still, bent in the middle, where she liked it.

“I thought you might need this again,” said Ginger, always ready with the right gesture, a weary compassion in those green eyes that looked like home.

By the time she was forty-four, Jefferson had developed the habit of grabbing two cold ones on her way home from work. She’d quit alcohol for three years and knew she could handle a drink again now and then. She always stopped at Jogi’s, the little store that kept its beer colder than the others on her route home. Tipping the beer back and pouring it into her mouth relaxed her from a hard day of teaching these crazy public-school kids. She was glad to get on with the city school system; the commute to Dutchess Academy had become a grind. When she left work now, the noise of the kids’ excited shouts and her shrill gym whistle faded from her ears; the iced liquid soothed the raspy feeling in her throat after a day of yelling instructions. The act of chugging right out on the street felt like bursting the bonds of bureaucracy that tightly taped every muscle in her body.

The first can would be empty when she got upstairs, and she’d stick the second in the freezer while she changed her clothes. Ginger taught afternoons and evenings, so Jefferson’s time was her own. This was when she’d pay her bills, clean the counters, correct hygiene-class papers—whatever needed doing—while she downed the second beer. She was still into whiskey, Irish whiskey, and after her chores were done she drank it with a short dash of water to open it up. If the beer was her bridge to life after school, whiskey and water was what mellowed her out.

She was aware that she’d developed a ritual over the years, but she considered it better than going from school to the bars downtown. This was her parents’ ritual, the way the adults in her family relaxed in the evening. It felt natural. When Ginger was home, Jefferson drank no more and no less. Ginger might have nothing with her but one wine cooler. Every now and then they would share a bottle of wine with dinner or celebrate an anniversary or New Year’s with champagne, but Jefferson drank most of it and was proud that she could hold her liquor while Ginger got giggly and silly on a couple of glasses. In the early years it had never failed: alcohol made Ginger amorous. They’d had some good times getting Ginger tipsy.

It was Friday night. The usual crowd would be at Café Femmes, but she felt too tired to go schlepping all the way downtown. Spooners was a hushed little bar around the corner. They played old rhythm-and-blues and left her in peace. They also served Jameson, which was all she really wanted from a bar.

Spooners, ironically named for its original owner, Walter Spooner, was a mixed non-gay/gay male bar. She felt safe from temptation there, but comfortable. She slipped into her bomber jacket and walked the two blocks, feeling good. The night was soft, the traffic was light. Neon came and went in the windows. She felt a little neon herself, lightly buzzed, shimmering, an adventuring shadow. A couple of drinks, she thought, looking forward to joshing with Neal, the bartender, then she’d go home and watch a TiVo of
Will and Grace
with Ginger. Ginger had left her only once since that second time; Jefferson hadn’t slipped up and gotten caught since then.

She loved the sound ice cubes made when warm whiskey cracked them. Inhaling, she smelled the Jameson and knew life was perfect.

She didn’t understand Ginger and knew she never would, no matter how many gay boy bartenders she unloaded to about her. That was okay, she thought. What she wanted to know was why she loved her so much. The older Ginger got, the more she withdrew from that warm, playful part of herself that Jefferson kept hoping would come back full force.

Gladys had noticed it too. She’d asked, not long before she died, “What’s come over your girlfriend, Jefferson? Would a smile make her face fall off?”

“She gets more like her mother every year,” she’d told Gladys, rubbing her shoulders. “More silent, more frowny. My playmate is just about gone.”

“Maybe it’s some sort of inherited illness,” Gladys had suggested, letting her head fall forward. “Or maybe—”

“Uh-oh. You’re going to blame it on me. I hear it in your voice.”

“No.” Gladys’s voice was lower and slower from the massage. “But did your dad pull on your mom what you do on Ginger?”

She tried to keep the pressure of her hands steady on Glad’s shoulders. She’d never told anyone else, not even Ginger, about Jarvy’s extracurricular activities. Angela never mentioned it either. It was too unreal, even to herself. Wow, what if Glad was right? It had never occurred to her that she was acting like Jarvy in her own way, or that Emmy or Ginger had been shaped by her spouse’s behavior.

“Or early Alzheimer’s.”

“What? No! Not my Ginger.”

“I read where there’s a personality change first.”

“That’s crazy, Glad. There’s nothing wrong with Ginger but a little stress.”

“Which you add to.”

“Stop being a pain in my butt, Glad.” She’d changed the subject.

Here at Spooners, no one knew about Ginger, and Neal was always trying to fix her up. He couldn’t understand why someone as hot, as he called it, as she was didn’t go home with a woman every night instead of hanging around with the boys. She didn’t tell him that this was as safe a place as there was for her: few women came in, and if one did and she felt compelled to stray from Ginger, it wouldn’t be with a lesbian from their circle of acquaintances.

“You’re no fag hag,” he once told her. “Did you get your little heart broken?”

One of the regulars had suggested, “She’s Mrs. Jameson. Married to the bottle. It’s sort of like being a bride of Christ, only your savior is liquid.”

“You’d think I spent every night in this bar,” she’d answered. “I have a life, you know.”

By then a new arrival had taken the men’s attention. She’d been troubled ever since by the impression the regular had of her.

Tonight, Neal, the forty-something balding flirt, was in a matchmaking mood. “The babe in the back booth with Alvaro? I’d almost give up boys for her.”

Jefferson glanced that way and found an impish-looking, animated, slim white girl crowded into a booth with three large queens, who, in an unqueenly way, seemed to hang on her every word. Jefferson could hear the woman’s Southern accent rising and then falling to a hushed hoarseness. Oh, yeah, she thought, and sent a round to the booth when she ordered her next drink. She felt less bummed out than she had in a week. She was on a new SSRI for the depression, but it didn’t do much more than take the edge off so far.

The girl was probably straight, she was thinking, when she felt the little hand on her forearm.

“I wanted to thank you in person.” The woman got closer to Jefferson. “That was so sweet.”

She could see now that the woman hadn’t needed more to drink by a long shot, but then she didn’t either. The woman also looked older close-up, perhaps early forties or a hard-lived late thirties. Her eyes, besides being slightly unfocused, had a shocked hardness to them, as if something terrible had happened to her and she’d never recovered. It was a look she associated with straight women. They accepted such horrors, some of them, at the hands of men.

“My pleasure.” She pressed the delicate hand that was offered but, inside, turned away. All women are good, she thought; they’re just not all good for me.

“May I sit with you a while?” the woman asked. “I’m Delia. My cousin and her friends are getting a little much.”

The part of her that wasn’t excited by these slumming straight women felt apprehensive. They can come and go as they please, she thought, taking from the gay world and scuttling, titillated, safely back to their own. She was angry at their invasion of her sacred ground. The woman was already settling on the stool next to hers, and she already had a friendly arm around Delia’s waist.

It turned out that Delia had never been to New York before, was staying with her cousin, one of the queens, and had divorced her third husband. Delia was a driver for a linen service and gave Jefferson an earful about running a sales route.

“Aren’t there gay bars with more women in them?” she asked Jefferson, but when Jefferson started to write out a list of addresses in her whiskey-sloppy hand, Delia insisted that she couldn’t go alone and bought Jefferson another drink. “Unless,” asked Delia, “I shouldn’t be buying? Is that some kind of insult to you?”

She was at the stage of inebriation where it was so easy to shrug off qualms and Delia was so brashly cute, she said, “I’ll chaperone you to one women’s bar, but then I need to go. My partner will be home waiting for me.”

“I’d wait for you too, sweetie.” Delia’s words were a little slurry.

At that moment Jefferson experienced the transition from the world of gravity, atmospheric resistance, and common sense to being high. Delia was no longer a confection of makeup and alien experiences, but of womanly grace and a commanding desirability. She steered Delia out of the bar. They were barely out of sight of the bar when they began groping each other, staggering into doorways, tilting against gates as they kissed, and coming to dead stops on the sidewalk for long clinches.

“I was never with a girl before.”

“We need to get off the street before someone sees us.”

“I have my cousin’s key.”

Finally, they reached the subway.

Delia read an address in Bay Ridge from a scrap of paper she found in her purse.

“You’re kidding.”

“Is that too far?” asked Delia, her face expectant, her eyes roaming Jefferson’s face and body.

“For you?” she replied with a smile and once again slipped her arm around Delia, pulling her snug against herself as they navigated the stairs and turnstiles to the platform and keeping her close once they were seated on the nearly empty trains. How could she deny Delia now? She’d committed herself with that first round of drinks. She could be home in a couple of hours. Why, she thought with drunken logic, disappoint this woman who needed badly to come out?

They were over the bridge, it seemed, in record time, and outside a tan apartment building near the Eighty-sixth Street subway stop. There was no camera visible on the elevator, but Jefferson had come down enough to refuse to fool around. She also didn’t want to miss
Will and Grace.
Ginger would be home soon and wondering where she was. In the cousin’s apartment, Delia immediately poured Old Mr. Boston whiskey over rocks and added soda. Jefferson drank, chasing her high regardless of the fact that this brand would give her a horrible hangover in the morning.

While Delia was in the bathroom, Jefferson wandered the living room of the one-bedroom apartment. The queen had filled his walls with posters, photographs, and framed headlines from gay-pride parades and political protests. Jefferson wondered if he had attended all of these events or was a collector of memorabilia or both. This year, maybe she and Ginger would march. It had been a while for her; Ginger never had.

Delia’s body surprised her. Thin though she was, she filled out her lacy black nightgown admirably. Jefferson, starting on her second Mr. Boston, admired the woman from the bedroom doorway. Although she’d told Ginger how negligees got her motor running, Ginger consistently opted for her flannel nightgowns.

“Aren’t you ever going to come touch me, Jefferson?” Delia asked in that hoarse, husky voice.

Jefferson, back in mellow mode, smiled and started unbuttoning her own shirt.

“Oh, boy. I never thought this could be so exciting.” Delia’s drawl had become more pronounced with each drink.

Jefferson lounged against the door frame, shirt untucked, hanging open, both covering and promising. She wanted to go to Delia, but no, she didn’t want to. She remembered the last time and how she’d sworn she was through with strangers. Wasn’t it time to show some respect for what she had with Ginger, despite how little they had? When she wasn’t blaming Ginger for her absences, both literal and sexual, she was blaming herself for giving Ginger such sparse allegiance and violating their love, if that’s what it still was. They hadn’t had sex since Florida. No, they hadn’t had sex since she told Ginger what she needed. Boy, had that backfired.