Lemon Reef (4 page)

The warm night air mixed with gasoline and Del's musky perfume. I tried to conceal my attraction to her. I felt compromised, revealed in my loneliness and desperation, but the sight and smell of her lulled me. But even the re-surprise of her gorgeousness and my easy recall of my closeness to her did not weaken my resolve. For the first time in five years, I was not hoping for her to be wherever it was I intended to arrive. I realized my leaving her was real.

My dog was barking. I turned toward him and told him to be quiet. When I looked back, Del was staring at me with a strange expression.

“Did you just call that animal Gregor?”

“Yeah. Why? That's his name.”

“As in,” with mild sarcasm, “
Metamorphosis
?”

Shrugging, I asked, “What's wrong with that? I like that story.”

“You
like
that story? You stopped talking to anyone who didn't vote for it after you nominated it for the high school Christmas play.”

Irritated, I countered, “It was the only gay adolescent coming-out story I could find.”

She playfully pleaded me to reason, giggled while scolding. “You're the only one who ever read it that way.”

I drank her laugh, trying to sip and guzzle it at the same time. It reassured me that Del recognized me, knew who I was, was glad to see me in spite of herself. Then, as if caught, she shifted her attention, the talking ceased, and my heart was flailing about like a decked mackerel. The moment had been like an eye of lucidity in a storm of dementia. Now she was gone, and I missed her terribly and all over again.

Del watched the meter on the gas pump, her waiting palpable. I stood behind her, invisible and foolish. “Why are you so mad at me?” I asked finally.

“You know exactly why,” she said, without removing her gaze from the machine. While I shook my head, she offered both a question and an answer: “Why did you tell Gail about us?”

“What?” I laughed. “That's it? That's the reason you haven't talked to me in five years, because I told Gail Samuels that we sucked each other? You fucked anything with a dick, and that's why, because you were afraid people would think you were
gay
?” I realized the strength of my protest was the measure of my guilt, and I felt sorry for going off. “Del, Gail never told anyone.”

Del unhooked the pump from her car, put her gas cap back on, and started walking away. “Wait! Del.”
Again
we were fighting,
again
. I was surprised when she stopped, hoped she was agreeing by turning around to have the conversation she'd been refusing to have for years. I blew out one breath attempting to regroup. “That can't be the reason you hate me so much,” I said. “You can't care about the gay thing, not really. And anyway, our friends knew about us.”

“They didn't know anything, Jenna, until you told them.” All I could think about was how long it had been since I'd heard her say my name. A most familiar gesture: she ran her hand along the side of her neck to lift her hair off her face, her glance cast downward in reverie. “I did care. You need me to admit it, fine. It was embarrassing. I was embarrassed by how I felt about you. But even if I wasn't”—her face hardened and her inflection turned disdainful—“what we did together was private. You had no right to tell anyone.”

I groped for an explanation that would make my indefensible act seem less significant when, honestly, I knew I had broken her heart. “Del, it was just sex.”

“Is that what it was?”

Now I was angry. “You would know, all that real sex you've had to compare us to.”

“
Real sex?
Wait, you mean”—she laughed benignly and even fondly—“you mean because it was with boys? Jenna, I didn't mean it that way. It wasn't like that.” I realized what she had meant and started to apologize. She hated apologies. She continued forcefully. “I meant…” She hesitated, and then with a hint of sadness she confessed, “It wasn't just sex to me.”

Arms out, palms up, I pleaded. “Del, I was fifteen years old.
I was fifteen years old!
”

Her coolness resurrected, she folded her arms over her chest, a gesture of superiority. “So was I, but I didn't betray you.” She leaned back and glanced at her sleeping baby, her tone a reminder that she was in a new life now. “You acted like you were the victim.”

“You went hetero with a vengeance…”

“Are you fifteen now? What's your excuse for saying that to me now?”

“It's just, you can't call it loyalty.”

“Why not?” Half laughing, she said, “What I did hurt me, not you.”

“We were not that separate. And”—my heart ached as I pushed it out—“I was in love with you.”

Del looked at Khila, and this time I looked with her. We stood side by side staring into the car window. Light hair and a teardrop-shaped nose peeked out from the blanket Khila was wrapped in; her tiny hand was nestled under her chin.

Del's arm brushed against mine and our fingers linked fleetingly, as if our bodies remembered something we had forgotten. I surprised and slightly embarrassed myself with what I said then. “Rounded edges and hollow spaces in which small things—small treasures—could safely, easily be concealed.” I turned from Khila to Del, the pain in my heart gone from muted to stabbing. Del looked at me too, her green-gold eyes open and still, her cheeks shallow.

“What does that mean?”

I stared at her, hoping she'd remember. My neck and jaw tightened, and a wave swelled behind my eyes. I shook my head and said, “Nothing.” I cleared my throat, stifled tears, smiled at her. “It's nothing.”

She wrapped one hand around the other, twisted her fingers, shifted her eyes nervously. There was a long silence. Then Del said sadly, wearily, as if she was thinking it clearly for the first time, “As twisted as it sounds, I think I was trying to protect us.”

I knew it was true. I had felt so betrayed by her apparently easy recourse to boys, but now seemingly disconnected, even contradictory pieces of history snapped into place. “A ruse?” I offered softly, and more to myself.

She paused and looked down. “I think so. At first, maybe. Then I don't know what.” She leaned back against her car and turned her head reflexively, checking Khila again. When she brought her face back, her brows were clenched. She fixed her gaze on me, her expression impassive. “It got a lot more involved.” I knew she was referring to where things had ended up, before she met Talon. Her sustaining myth about Talon was he had saved her from Ben Reed.

Ben Reed, a guy we knew from high school, owned a little fleet of flower carts. He had taken Del in when she couldn't stand to live with her mother anymore. When we were seventeen, I would drive by Del on Biscayne Boulevard, where she stood selling flowers from one of Ben's carts. The business was rumored to be a front for a prostitution gig. At the same time I'd learned this, I'd also learned Ben referred to Del as the “cream of his crap.” Del's endeavors as a prostitute were well-worn grist for jokes among the kids we went to school with. The boys who had tried to sleep with Del in high school and felt indignant at her rebuffs now took loud revenge. That night at the gas station, however, I had the impression Del believed I didn't know that she had “tooted”—as we called it—for a while. I let her think that. Anyway, I was having admission problems of my own, not confessing that there had been no one else since her—knowledge I'm certain was just as common and that lent itself just as readily to sadistic jokes at neighborhood parties.

“What about you?” she asked, but I could tell it was a closing rather than an opening.

“I'm driving to San Francisco tomorrow. Berkeley, actually.” My throat constricted with the knowledge that the content of our exchange from here on out was subordinate to the structure; we were saying good-bye. “Law school.” But Del confused me by waiting for more. “I mean…” I scrambled, grabbing at the chance to say something more. “I am going to law school there, but I'm also going because I'm gay.” I cast my gaze about seeking a safe landing, gave up, and lit on her face. “Maybe it'll be easier there, you know?”

“You've had that idea for a long time,” she said sweetly. Then, “Law school? You dropped out when I did.” I recounted how I had beelined through: high school equivalency test, junior college, scholarship to University of Miami. She shook her head in disbelief, smiled in a way that conveyed she was proud of me. “You always were really smart.”

You are
. “Del, don't marry this guy.”

She ignored me, asked playfully, “Any girls?”

I was delighted at being invited into the interlude of playful banter. “I'm thinking about sleeping with someone,” I lied.

“Oh, I should try that,” she said, her tone gently self-mocking.

“What?”

“Thinking about it first.”

*

Madison came into the room and found me staring at nothing. She sat down on the floor facing me. “What is it?”

“I lost track of her. Once I left Miami, I never looked back.”

“What were you supposed to do? She wasn't exactly up for staying in touch.”

“I promised her…” I stopped. The rest of the sentence,
I would never let go of her
, seemed too ridiculous to say after so many years. “Truthfully, I don't think anything can be done to stop Talon from taking Khila now. Grandparents have limited rights. And there's also the fact that we're talking about
this
grandmother—I mean, what judge in her right mind would give Del's mother custody of any kid?”

“Maybe you can't do anything about Khila, but you should still go to Del's funeral.” Madison's thick, dark brows enhanced the blueness of her eyes. “You loved her and she's dead.”

The comment, although sincere and perfectly reasonable, struck me as naïve. This, I realized, must be how a starving person feels when receiving a referral for psychotherapy. In the environment in which I grew up, how I felt about Del had never mattered at all. Madison had grown up in Berkeley. She'd had her first out relationship in high school, came out in a more defined way in her second year at Yale. She was a gay-identified writer—had published her first collection of short stories about being gay by the time she'd finished graduate school. Her first novel, recently published, recounted her last year in college and the breakup of her first major relationship. For her, coming of age as a gay woman had been empowering, sexy, exciting. For me, it had been life-threatening.

In fact, Madison's comfort with herself was part of what had attracted me to her to begin with. The first time I saw her was at a party after the pride parade. She was dressed in tight jeans, and she was topless but for chain mail, which hung from her bony shoulders to her midriff like a medieval chest guard. She was by herself, barefoot, lost in the music on a nearly empty dance floor. I thought she was beautiful: tall and slender, with thick, dark hair to her shoulders and sapphire eyes. I was sitting at the end of the bar, tucked in the shadows, outside the reach of the lights. My friends had gone home, and I had been about to. Madison noticed me and smiled. I pushed beyond my comfort zone and joined her—me in my jeans, law-school-logo'd T-shirt, and tennis sneakers, feeling shy and out of place. There had been other girlfriends in law school, but no one I had really fallen for.

In the morning I woke up to her studying me. “I love your mouth,” she said, her finger etching my bottom lip.

I was barely awake, still getting oriented to her room. I fell back on the pillow. “Not really much to it,” I said of my mouth, which felt particularly dry and unattractive right then.

She hovered over me, smiled. “There is
so much
to it.” I was twenty-three, and my stomach fluttered under her gaze in a way it hadn't in so many years, the feeling at first was unrecognizable.

*

Now in our Bernal Heights cottage, simmering orange haze seeped in through our weathered-white window, which framed an incidental snapshot of the San Francisco Bay Bridge. A soft breeze rippled the frayed edges of the burlap curtain, ushering in a mixture of scents from the garden—English lavender, mint, rosemary, lemon blossoms. The day that had thrown me such a curve was drawing down. I traced its effects, afraid of how I might be different for having lived through it. Puck rolled over on his back and nuzzled me to pet him. His jutting chest, a splash of white against his otherwise blue-black body, eagerly sought to be scratched. Growing more insistent, he whacked me with his large, gawky paw. His persistence pulled me back to the present, to the here and now, to this incandescent orange room and sun-warmed bed, to Madison, to the sweetness in my current life.

I rolled my eyes at Puck with playful annoyance. He whacked me again, this time slightly harder. Capitulating, “Okay, okay,” I rubbed his chest. He wagged his tail, spun around on his back in hopes then of catching it, and bounced to his still-precarious legs.

Madison stood up, glad, I thought, to be distracted by needs other than mine. “I want to take Puck out before it gets much darker. Do you want to come?” She was already heading for the door.

*

We walked the narrow, winding path that spiraled up Bernal Hill to its peak. The bay lay out before us, the water the color of polished nickel, the sky a sweep of melting oranges and reds. The old red brick of San Francisco General Hospital stood out from the mass of buildings and streets that made up the Mission District. Beyond lay the Bay Bridge, a parking lot at this hour. It was cool enough that we needed layers, which even after ten years seemed strange to me in August. In fact, with the exception of maybe five days out of the year, I was always cold in San Francisco, always searching for thicker socks or a warmer jacket. It was something I didn't give much thought to anymore. I just dressed for cooler weather and used the heat or made fires more often than made sense to anyone else. The hardest part for me was the ocean. It was maddening to live in a place with such a beautiful landscape and ocean access and not be able to go in the water without a wetsuit, which I simply refused to wear.