Nights Like This (15 page)

 

 

Dinner was overpriced Philly cheese steaks at the hotel bar and grill. We sat at a table next to a nice couple from Austin who, after much conversation, discovered that Vanessa and I were not sisters but lovers and left abruptly after scribbling their room number on the check slip. I would have thought they were merely in a rush except that his face was all shades of crimson and he murmured “fucking foreigners” as he took his wife's hand and walked past our table. I didn't understand why he chose “foreigners” to describe us because we had both told him we were from New York. Somehow, it seemed to me that he believed that Vanessa and I had to be from a country far away where a lack of morality justified our relationship.

“That's fucking great,” Vanessa said.

“What, that suddenly they think we're assholes?”

“Well doesn't it bother you?”

I didn't answer her, unsure of what to say.

“Tell me you don't give a fuck about shit like that,” she said.

“I don't really,” I said. “I mean, not enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“I don't know. I always think I should care more. Do more. But at the end of the day, I'm just happy living out my life, you know? If he wants to hate me, let him. If I care, he wins, right? So I just live me life.”

“Yes and had the Reverend Martin Luther King said that, our world may have been very different today.”

“That was an altogether different fight, Vanessa.”

“Really, Jess?”

“I don't know,” I said.

I was waiting for Vanessa to go on a tirade, to lecture me and tell me how it was my social obligation to do something. Sign something. Wear something. Paint rainbows.

“You don't know what?”

“I don't know why we're here arguing when I could be home at peace. I don't want to argue with you over logistics, Vanessa. You do your thing and I'll do my thing. I think you said that to me. And when I'm telling you about what I do or don't, you're getting upset with me. If you want a political activist go find one. To me living my life the way I want to live it is enough.”

“Sometimes, that's the best you can do, right?” she said.

I looked at her with surprise and wondered how to take her in, how to understand her. I would have guessed that, if anything, Vanessa would be the one to try to shake my nonchalance. She didn't seem to mind my haphazard attitude.

“Are you politically active?” I asked.

“No. I don't play into the bullshit. I'm not fighting a fucking war. But you come into my world and tell me how to live in it, then I'll fucking go off. I'm not an activist; I'm not a marcher, not a preacher, not a martyr. Someday, someone will come along and do for gay rights what was done for civil rights. But you know what I think? I think that it's the art of the time, just like it was back then, that'll initiate momentum and movement. And then things will fucking explode.”

“You think so?” I said.

“Absolutely, princess.”

“Why not you, Vanessa?”

“Why not me?”

“Why not?” I said.

“Because I'm not the one who is going to write the prologue to the stories that are now being written, lived, breathed, enjoyed or suffered. I know someone, who, once she finds her conviction, will rock the world with her book. A book about us, about this very night and about pasts and presents she has lived. Don't you feel it yet?”

“I don't know.”

“There it is again…. ‘I don't know.'”

She smiled at me. We sat quietly, staring at discarded edges of bread, a straggle of meat here and there on our plates.

“Will you write our story, whatever it turns out to be?”

“Yes.”

“Then that's the first conviction you have. Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” I said, “now can we please have a shot or something? This is too much right now.”

“That's a great idea.”

Vanessa signed the check and we got up and walked slowly to the bar.

We settled on the bar stools and Vanessa looked around to attract the attention of the bartender, a blonde in her late thirties who looked bored with the bar and with life overall.

“Can we have two shots of tequila?” Vanessa asked when the bartender looked towards her.

“Salt and lemon?”

“Salt and lime,” Vanessa said. “You prefer lemon?” she asked as she looked at me.

“I could never tell the difference between a lime and a lemon,” I said.

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah.”

“Now you will.”

The bartender came with our shots in one hand and a plastic cup with lime wedges in the other.

“Can we have lemon too, please?” Vanessa asked.

The bartender smiled.

“Well sure,” she said as if she was pleased beyond belief to get lemon wedges as well.

The bartender returned with a saltshaker and a small plastic cup of lemon wedges.

“Now try this,” Vanessa said as she handed me a wedge of lime.

I put the lime in my mouth and sucked the pulp. I tasted the sweet sourness, the pungency of the lime. It was like tasting a fragrance.

“Now try this.”

She handed me a lemon wedge and I took it.

I placed the wedge slowly in my mouth. It was a more flavorfully sour, a true sour.

“Taste the difference?”

“When you taste them like that, yeah,” I said.

Vanessa smiled at me as if we had made a great discovery. She reached for her shot glass and gave me mine. Playfully, she pulled my hand, licked the fleshy part between my thumb and forefinger and salted my skin. She did the same with her hand.

“Ready?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Lemon or lime?” she asked me.

“I like the lime better,” I said.

She smiled at me. She looked beautiful.

“Bottoms up,” she said. “To limes and lemons.”

We drank the shot, sucked lime wedges, had another.

“What do you usually drink?” I asked her.

“Bombay Sapphire and tonic.”

“That's disgusting.”

“Yeah well, better than a lot of other shit that you could drink,” Vanessa said.

I didn't have a preferred drink. I thought I should but I didn't have anything I liked enough to drink regularly. I usually ordered Heineken Lights but that was more out of habit. Unless she was experimenting with flavors, Anjali stuck to her very, very dirty martinis, extra olives. I always thought she was trying to fit a snack into a martini glass. Tiffany had liked dry vodka martinis. She had told me once that women who drank fruity, girly drinks were bad fucks. I had been tempted to tell her that she wasn't that great either but I had refrained myself.

“You okay?” Vanessa asked.

“Yeah, I'm okay.”

We sat at the bar, looking at each other. The lighting at the bar was a soft incandescent glow. Vanessa's skin was brown, baked like raw earth, fragrant with her citrus tainted perfume. I looked at her face, an angelic devilish look about her, as if she were both soft and dangerous, as if she could go either way. I was drawn to her, this woman who in an instant, solved the mystery of limes and lemons. This woman who, on a whim, took me to an airport to watch planes glide on tarmac.

“What're you thinking?” she asked, “Ready for another drink?”

“Not a shot.”

“No, but will you let me order you a drink?”

“You going to order for me?”

Vanessa kissed my arm, close to my shoulder, where the short sleeves of my shirt ended abruptly.

“We are going to find you a drink. A drink that is yours, a drink you are known by.”

“Is that important?” I asked.

“It's important only because it's important to you,” she said.

She kissed my arm again and then looked at me, her eyes softly intoxicated, somehow very intoxicating in their ability to understand me. I did want a drink that was mine, a mixture that identified and defined me. I wanted distinction in everything I did, everything that surrounded me. I wanted to be aware, alive to everything I experienced. I wanted every choice to be deliberate, every action to have meaning not to anyone else, but to me.

“Tonight, you're going to try a gin and tonic. See if that suits you.”

“You think it will?”

“I don't know, but we'll try.”

She ordered two Bombay Sapphires with tonic. The bartender seemed pleased.

“To us,” Vanessa said as we held our glasses full of transparent, gleaming ice and liquid.

We sipped our drinks slowly and I felt the night mellow around us. She held my hand as we sat at the bar. I felt like she was holding me, not letting me fall from my idealism into the reality of the way things were. Simple gestures seemed meaningful with Vanessa and that simple evening seemed full of meaning and possibility.

“So Jess, how do we get you to write?”

“Break my heart. Sometimes that works.”

I smiled at her. It was a dishonest smile. Truth was I didn't know how to get back into it. I didn't even know how I had struggled with it as long as I had. But all the responses I had gotten, every critique, every rejection, had said the writing was good but needed emotion. I didn't know how to change that or even what that meant. I just knew that when I had stopped, I had stopped wanting. But I was hungry again, desiring to write but not as I had written. I wanted to write with genuineness. I wanted to write what was inside me but I was scared to see what lurked in my heart. And I truly believe that there lurked, not lived, something inside me that I was scared to bring to my own attention. I sipped my drink, wishing more than anything to achieve numbness.

“So, Jess, what do we have to do? Fuck? Get drunk? Cry?”

“No, smart ass.”

You had to laugh with Vanessa, at her antics, at her choicest of words.

“Then what?”

I leaned towards her and kissed her mouth softly.

“I don't know,” I said.

“All right. Try this. What is Hemingway? I mean if you had to say what the essence of his writing was, what would you say?”

I thought for a moment. Hemingway.

“Short sentences but vivid. His language is unique, a style infused with life and vivaciousness.”

“What is Frost?”

“Poet of nature but his language is often evoking themes of loneliness, love, sometimes friendship. It is the fusion that makes his poetry stay within the heart.”

“So,” Vanessa said as she looked into my eyes.

She looked within me and then through my hollow self.

“So,” she repeated softly, “what is Jess?”

I kept looking into her eyes and I wished she could seep into me. I wanted Vanessa to fill my hollow spaces.

“I don't know,” I said honestly, “I don't know. But I want to know. I used to but it wasn't anything I want to go back to.”

“You used to write crap.”

“Well, I guess.”

“No, you had the skill and you used to use it to write what you thought you should. You wrote what you thought ‘they' wanted you to whoever the fuck ‘they' were. You were scared. Write about you. To do that, you have to find you. To do that, you need…conviction!”

She took a sip of her Bombay Sapphire. I watched the liquid pass her lips, slip past her strong jaw, down her throat. When she swallowed, I watched and I wanted to kiss her neck. I did. She gently pulled my face towards her so she could look into my eyes again.

“I take photos of what I want, when I want. I could go around wondering what I should shoot, what people might want. But why?”

“But you don't want to be a photographer.”

“I am a photographer because I take photographs. I don't need anyone to validate that. You are a writer. You can't own that because you're waiting for validation. From whom? Whose words are worth more than yours?”

“Yours?” I joked.

“Well of course, smart ass. But I'm being honest. Write and write honestly. Because you don't want to be a fake because then, you'll never be a fucking writer. Be a sell out if you want. But don't be a fake.”

“What's the difference?” I said as I gulped my drink, anxious once again to enter a state of numbness.

“You can only sell out after you've been going all out for you. Being a fake means you've never been yourself. It's strange. No one will trust you until you're you. And then whatever the fuck you become, you'll still be someone. But if you never start as you, no one will ever trust you worth a damn.”

“I think you're getting buzzed,” I said.

“I think you don't know how the fuck to be real.”

“You think I'm a fake?”

“Can't be fake until you've been real.”

“So what the fuck am I?”

“Lost,” Vanessa said. “We have to find you.”

“First you have to fuck me,” I said as I drank the rest of my Sapphire in a gulp, hoping it would bring everything to a nice muted place where I wasn't so uncomfortable.

“I thought we were platonic,” Vanessa teased.

“We are. That's why the probability of finding me is as great as the probability of fucking me.”

“I plan on doing both.”

“Never going to happen,” I said.

Vanessa asked the bartender to get me a glass of water and I sipped water with lemon, not lime, while she slowly sipped her Sapphire, calmly, as if she were contemplating the fucking fate of the world. I wondered what she was trying to think so hard towards. Actually, I wondered why she was so interested in me writing or not writing. Either way, she had me here, at a fucking hotel at the airport in Philadelphia for ten days. And she had me excited about spending ten days here as if there weren't enough hotels in New York where we could get tipsy at an overpriced bar.

“Why do you care so much what I do?” I asked her.

I think it came out a little more forcefully, a bit more defensively than I had intended it to sound.