Beggar of Love Read online

  Finally, Ginger sighed, and she rolled her swimsuit down her belly and bottom, down her legs, waiting for Ginger to step out of it while Jefferson paused, crouching at the tops of Ginger’s long legs.

  “Baby,” she pleaded, coaxing Ginger’s legs apart, then parting her outer lips with the fingers of both hands. She ran her tongue from top to bottom of her open and, she discovered, cream-covered labia. “Baby, you’re dripping.”

  Ginger, silent as always when they made love, moved one foot sideways and bent her knees to give Jefferson more access. She kept her tongue in motion while supporting Ginger at the hips. Dancing as always, Ginger lowered, then raised, then lowered herself against Jefferson’s tongue, varying the pressure until Jefferson stayed with her clitoris, circling while Ginger shuddered above her, knees akimbo, hands on Jefferson’s shoulders in the most erotic stance Ginger had ever assumed with her.

  “It’s been too long,” Ginger admitted as Jefferson stood, sliding her hands up Ginger’s sides. Ginger’s calves had been pressed against the king-sized bed. Jefferson stripped off the spread, blanket, and top sheet, then stood at the edge of the bed and beckoned her.

  Ginger said, “I didn’t know I’d missed this so much. There’s never time.”

  She reached for the buttons of the shirt she’d thrown over her old Speedo.

  “Let me,” Ginger said, swiftly unbuttoning and slipping the shirt off. As Jefferson had, she loosed the straps and pulled the Speedo down, pressing her lips against Jefferson’s, opening her mouth, inviting Jefferson’s tongue inside.

  Jefferson really let loose then, years of desire flooding her senses. She touched all the parts of Ginger she’d loved and been denied for so long. She was excited, as Lily Ann had said, out of her mind and took Ginger again, her finger thrusting into the beloved narrow wet burrow of her lover slowly and gently until she had Ginger meeting her every move, chasing her finger, as if they’d never stopped making love together.

  She knew she had Ginger then, had reconnected with that primal part of Ginger that wanted nothing but pleasure and release. Elated, she withdrew her finger and positioned her hand to insert three fingers. “I love you, woman. I’m giving you my love. Can you feel it?” Making a triangle of her three fingers, she reached as deeply inside Ginger as she could, no longer as gentle, her one desire to drive Ginger wild.

  If the old hotel had thinner walls Ginger’s cry of pleasure would have brought security.

  Ginger slept then, and Jefferson watched the reflections of the pool below dance on their ceiling until twilight. She dropped off too and was only awakened by the feather touch of Ginger’s hands on her. She opened her eyes and smiled at Ginger. Ginger’s fingers were circling her tummy.

  “Kiss me,” she’d said.

  Ginger kissed her. They touched lips and tongues for a long time. Desire overtook Jefferson again. She led Ginger’s hand back to herself, hoping she was ready. Ginger used one of her long fingers to manipulate her. She focused all her concentration on that one spot and moved her hips to their rhythm. She badly wanted to come for Ginger. Ginger lifted her pelvis to get the touch she needed from Jefferson. Jefferson’s thighs tensed. She was so near, about there, when Ginger stopped.

  “Did you come?” Ginger asked.

  “Not yet, honey. A little longer?”

  “Sure. My tongue?”

  She still always refused oral sex from other lovers, saving that for Ginger and being completely frank with her lovers about why. She could only groan and nod. Ginger missed her cue and obviously interpreted her response as a no. Her finger went to work again, but she wasn’t otherwise caressing Jefferson or kissing her, or saying longing words.

  She gave up after a while and pulled Ginger to her. She held her. Why hadn’t she ever tutored Ginger in lovemaking? She’d never been with a woman so incapable of following the signals of her partner’s body. Why wasn’t her deep love and desire for Ginger enough by itself?

  She got up to go to the bathroom. Ginger was watching as she returned. She smiled and anticipated Ginger lifting her arms to bring her close.

  “Stop doing that to your hair,” Ginger said.

  She had a habit of running the fingers of both her hands through her hair to roughly comb it back from her face.

  She stopped.

  “It doesn’t make you look attractive.”

  As she got under the covers, she touched Ginger’s shoulder with one hand.

  “Cold,” Ginger said. It was true. In her hurry to be with Ginger she’d washed, but hadn’t waited for hot water. Her mistake. Ginger pulled the covers over her shoulders as she turned away from Jefferson. “You wiped me out.”

  Hesitantly she curled against Ginger’s back and met no resistance. She held Ginger with a tenderness no one else since Angela had inspired in her, softly kissed her lovely hair, considered herself fortunate to have this much contentment with Ginger. She drifted off to a fantasy of mutual passion, mutual orgasms, mutual declarations of eternal love, but awakened with the question that haunted her always: why had Ginger, a dancer, never learned to be a lover? Was it because she’d been with no one but Jefferson? Or was it the worst reason: Ginger couldn’t feel passionate about another woman, about Jefferson—maybe about anyone.

  Each day of their vacation was the same: sleep late, breakfast at the hotel, swim, make love to Ginger, nap, have drinks before, during, and after dinner at the hotel restaurant, which was an elegant affair. By the fourth day, Jefferson persuaded Ginger to explore another beach and they walked hand in hand, in warm, ankle-deep water as far as they could. Ginger smiled at her a lot. They talked abut everything but work, about which they had agreed not to speak, and sex. Why didn’t Ginger ask her if she was okay with what they did? Or explain why she never wanted to make love at home? Lack of time was a lame excuse.

  On the last day of their vacation she resolved to bring it up. Ginger had become entirely passive in bed. Her receptiveness was thrilling, her responsiveness exciting—and Jefferson couldn’t stand it another minute physically, never mind emotionally. If she could work this thing out with Ginger, maybe she’d leave the other women alone. She reached for the glass on the bed table, sipped her whiskey, then took a long swallow. She’d confess that she had never had an orgasm with Ginger. It would either destroy them or make things better.

  “Ginger,” she said while Ginger rested in her arms after several orgasms. She told her what hadn’t been happening for her, though she didn’t say it had never happened. She described what she needed from Ginger, looking in her eyes while she did, asking if Ginger was okay with what she was saying.

  “Sure. I’ll do better, Jef,” Ginger said in a sleepy voice, and reached up to her.

  It was a simple, autonomic response that led her to initiate lovemaking once more. Ginger had a less-than-wild orgasm, then lay there smiling.

  “Ginge,” she said when Ginger stopped moving. “Ginge,” she whispered, not for the sex, but to escape the unavoidable journey to her dark place.

  In recent years Ginger had started snoring as she slept, in a very quiet, ladylike way. She snored now.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The day of Gladys’s funeral it was the bright hot summer of 1996, but Jefferson felt cold, so cold. At thirty-seven, she felt stooped and worn out. She emerged from the dark subway into all that radiance, hoping that the black of her blazer and pants, let out at the waist since her grandmother’s funeral, would draw sun rays to her and blanket her with warm comfort. She remembered that funeral, how tranquilizers had been the wrapping around her grief till liquor was served back at the big old house she’d grown up in. She’d finally passed out on top of the guests’ coats in the front room, never having shed a tear.

  This church was grand, ornate. How often had Glad set foot in it, living? Other mourners climbed the wide, stone steps; Jefferson didn’t know these people and hoped no one would notice Glad’s lone queer friend. She imagined that customers seldom attended waitresses’ funerals. There was
Sam, though. Glad had worked for him half her career. Glad told her that some students returned after graduation with pictures of their wives, husbands. Jefferson had escorted Ginger those many years ago to meet Glad, as if taking her home to meet mother. Some brought baby pictures; Jefferson offered winning team shots from whatever job she currently held. Of course she’d introduce some of her side-dish lovers. After each of these disappeared, Glad would ask, “How’s Ginger?”

  “Ginger’s fine,” she whispered now, pausing in the sunlight before she mounted the steps. “Ginger’s as fine as ever, Glad,” she said gratefully, feeling Glad’s presence in the warmth, like a stream of herself from heaven. “She had to work today,” Jefferson went on, “rehearsing her students for this season’s big recital. I’m sure she loves you encouraging me to stay with her.” As she said this, she thought about her reservations and hoped she wasn’t telling Glad a lie.

  “What did you expect?” she could imagine Glad asking. “You run around on Ginger, you’re pouring the booze down your gullet like you’ve lost all interest in living, and you’ve never held a job for more than three years at a time.”

  The first time Ginger left her, when they were in their mid-thirties, she hadn’t gone as far as moving her things from the apartment, but Jefferson left too, sleeping for over a week on Gladys’s couch. It was painful to be in the apartment without Ginger, though Ginger was not often there. That’s actually what she’d been counting on when she’d brought Taffy home with her, the one day Ginger managed to leave work on time.

  It was a silly thing to do. She didn’t like Taffy, that spoiled preppy jock who’d grown up to be a fund-raiser for some big foundation, but some piece of Taffy was a magnet for some piece of Jefferson. She suspected that Taffy was someone she could have been, someone she might have liked being with. Taffy was more comfortable in the world than Jefferson. She drank a lot, but had matured into one of those women who could juggle people successfully. No matter who was actually hosting a gathering, or if there was no host at all, Taffy kept the conversation going and the drinks flowing and made the introductions. She knew how to connect people, which ones would hit it off, and how to retreat gracefully once she could see they would be fine without her. Jefferson admired that skill.

  Moreover, it was hard to deny a professional beggar. Taffy never stopped chasing her. And she never stopped succumbing to Taffy. That day she’d gone, after school, to one of Taffy’s soirées. When Taffy had an education project, she liked to have some teachers around to show they were engaged in the process, as she’d told Jefferson. To thank her, Taffy treated Jefferson to drinks afterward, on top of the cocktails they’d already been served. She introduced Jefferson to Russian vodka. It was only when Ginger walked in on them that she realized how badly her judgment had been impaired—by Taffy as well as the vodka. Ginger arrived in time to see her on the couch, nude, licking Stoli from between the reclined Taffy’s shockingly superior, golden-hued breasts.

  Ginger’s quick departure both woke her up and stunned her. She was too drunk to respond quickly. She let her go. Taffy seemed annoyed at first, as if the surprise had been Jefferson’s fault, but she recovered more quickly and Jefferson found herself lying with her head in Taffy’s still-naked lap, Taffy soothing her with reassuring words as she stroked Jefferson’s hair.

  “She’ll think I’ve been sleeping with you all along,” Jefferson said, groaning at the irony. Her sad monster was threatening to engulf her.

  “Jeffy, you have.”

  She groaned. “What am I going to do?”

  “If you want her, Jeffy, you crawl back on your knees. You stop drinking and stop fucking me and whoever else’s bed you share, and you promise her all the things you’re incapable of giving her: sobriety, fidelity, stability. She’ll risk giving you another chance and you’ll be more careful.” Taffy sighed. “And you’ll stay away from me for the rest of your life.”

  “No, Taff,” she cried, contrite now to two women. She felt so out of control, kind of crazy too. She held on to Taffy, afraid that she, Jefferson herself, would disappear altogether.

  Taffy, who had retrieved the Stoli from the freezer after Ginger left, offered it to Jefferson.

  She downed a swig, two swigs, a third and suddenly remembered what it felt like to be master of the universe. She parted Taffy’s thighs and enacted a betrayal Ginger would never know about. Taffy fell back, legs excitingly open, her own hands spreading her center, an icing of opaque moisture decorating her persimmon-like parts. Jefferson really liked this Russian vodka. She’d never made love so effortlessly or so effectively. Taffy responded with all the athleticism she’d displayed on the hockey field.

  When she woke up, at about one thirty a.m., Taffy was gone. Slowly, she remembered that she was home and Ginger wasn’t. She was still fairly drunk, but sober enough to know she’d chopped the bottom out of her boat. She wished she were in the family boat up on the lake, hauling water-skiers or racing across the water, slicing the lake in half with a line of white, like the line of Taffy’s cream. Shame engulfed her. She tore the covers and sheets from the bed and washed them, load after load. She raised every window in the apartment to air out the scents she and Taffy had left. The bed remade, she showered and went to the living room to await Ginger.

  Ginger called, midafternoon.

  “Is she gone?”

  “Yes. I’m so sorry—”

  “My love for you is a curse and a blessing, Jefferson. I guess I’m trying to say, you’re working hard to make your love nothing but a curse.”

  “Princess, it wasn’t love, like with you. It was stupid drunken fumbling to prove—”

  “What? That you’re as good as a man?”

  She was taken aback. “Why would I want to prove that? Do you think a man would be better?”

  “I don’t know what else you’re trying to prove.”

  “No!” She was insulted that Ginger would think to compare her to a man. She didn’t think before she said, teeth gritted, “That. I. Was. Wanted.”

  There was no response on the other end of the line. She ran the pads of her fingers along the light down on her jaw.

  “Are you coming home, baby?”

  After a silence, Ginger answered, “I don’t know.”

  By eleven that night, she knew Ginger was gone, maybe for good. She wanted Ginger to be able to come home. More to the point, another night in the apartment, images of her life with Ginger warring with carnal images of herself and Taffy, was unthinkable. She jumped on the subway down to Gladys’s.

  Gladys took one look at her and said, “It’s bad this time.”

  She hung her head.

  “What did you do?”

  “Russian vodka. And Taffy,” who she had introduced to Glad. She told her about Ginger, hanging onto one of Glad’s arms with her two hands. “May I bunk on your couch?”

  “I should probably say no. I’m pretty disgusted with you, Jefferson. But you’re sober at the moment, aren’t you? And you know you made a mess of things.”

  “You know what, Glad?” She rose and went for her coat. “I can get a room at a hotel. I don’t want to be a bother to you, or at home. Waiting.”

  “Sit down,” Gladys ordered.

  “Why can’t I get it right?” she asked, complying. “Other people, you and Ernie, lots of people get love right.” That’s when she started crying. Glad persuaded her to try AA.

  Today, outside the church, she pulled the damn tissues from her pocket, remembering that Glad had gone to get her a box of tissues that first time Ginger left. Other times she’d cried on her shoulder, Glad would hand her napkins from a dispenser on the counter. How could she go into that cold mausoleum of a church? I don’t want you to be dead, Glad! If she didn’t go inside, she could think Glad was out of touch for a while, that was all.

  A cloud passed over the sun and then moved on, like a gentle warning. She straightened from her stooped posture and pushed back her hair.

  “Okay, Glad, I get it
. It’s the only way I can visit you now. In sunbeams.” A breeze, so rare these last few days, blew back at her. She smiled. “And breezes.” She stepped inside the church.

  Her suit did hold a little warmth and she huddled inside it through the cool vestibule, into the still, high-vaulted church. Mourners filled the first nine rows, then straggled back to where she settled. She shuddered. Church was another place where silence was more valued than truth. She recalled going with her parents to hear the careful, empty sermons, as if those would teach her about life. She’d sit perfectly still, yearning to be outside practicing her softball pitch. “I hope you appreciate this,” she silently teased Glad.

  The organ played. There were flowers, sermons, hymns. She tried to think of Glad, to remember her, but the other mourners distracted her. She didn’t want to look at the coffin. Then someone stood up in the family pew, made his way to the front, and bent to an instrument case. It was Gus, Glad’s youngest, a man in a full beard now instead of a boy in a baseball cap, readying a French horn instead of a toy rifle. So Gus had become a musician. How she’d envied Glad’s kid growing up with such a woman. She let her mind wander back, back to the days when they’d met.

  She shivered in the cool church all these years later, watching Gus prepare to play. Glad had come through that first operation, but there had been others, and Jefferson never knew the last few years when she’d gone away—for golf tournaments, an alcohol cure, for the women between times with Ginger—if Glad would be at the Lunchbox when she came “home.”

  Yet she never went to Glad’s apartment and didn’t know this son who would honor Glad or the other children or Ernie. She’d been afraid she wouldn’t fit in on Mott Street, that the friendship couldn’t be the same there. Glad had been proud to be her friend, but both of them knew that Jefferson belonged where she was in Glad’s life.