Beggar of Love Page 6

  “Literature is part of the curriculum. I have to take it.”

  Angela was gazing at the drapes. “Seriously, let’s start dreaming about where to go, all right, baby?”

  She slipped an arm around Angela’s slender waist and pulled her close, nuzzling her belly with her nose.

  Angela stepped back, her voice tight. “Not right now, baby. The cramping.”

  “I’m sorry.” Jefferson turned to her books to hide the tears that leapt to her eyes. Maybe she was near her time too. There was no reason to feel rejected. Angela was sick tonight, wasn’t she?

  At the bedroom doorway Angela stopped. “Jefferson, are you going to your grandparents’ for Easter?”

  They’d be playing the newest opera recording they’d bought. The house would smell like honeyed ham. The dessert Jell-O would shimmy on a flower-patterned plate. She tried to keep a wary tone from her voice as she said, “You know I have to spend the afternoon there.”

  “Just checking. I’ll go to my parents’.” Angela closed the bedroom door almost too carefully. Jefferson had complained about the violence of doors slammed in anger.

  She’d heard the hope, then disappointment, and finally surrender in Angela’s few words. They went through their tug-of-war each holiday, Angela ready to make a partial break from her parents, Jefferson too full of guilt. Would there ever be a time they could stay home, cook their own turkeys and hams, maybe next fall go in to see the Thanksgiving Day parade together?

  She sighed into her cup of coffee. How could they love each other, be each other’s family, be all they could be to each other and to themselves while their parents were still alive? The cloud sat so heavily on her she stared at her books more than she worked on her report.

  Chapter Eight

  When Thanksgiving came and Angela arrived back from her parents’ place on Cannon Street, she fell crying into Jefferson’s arms.

  “I can’t stand another holiday with them, Jefferson! I won’t do it. If I have to stay here alone Christmas Day, I will.”

  “Ange, my sweet girl, what happened?”

  “My mother, with her matrimonial campaign. I tell her I’m happily married and she bites her lip and looks away like I stabbed her with the carving knife. Don’t they know it’s 1976, not 1906? I can’t stand it.”

  Jefferson held Angela closer. She couldn’t let her stay home alone Christmas Day. Yet she couldn’t refuse to go to her grandparents’. She couldn’t show up with Angela. “I know, I know,” she said to comfort Angela. “I get the silent treatment. Maybe it’s not as bad, but it doesn’t feel good either. They don’t want to hear about anything that has to do with you, not even what a fine cook you are. Night school, that’s all I can talk to them about.”

  Nothing was wrong with the way her parents had raised or treated her. She was too different, like one of those babies stolen from their beds and replaced by changelings.

  She stroked Angela’s hair, trying to exude strength. This would pass, she reassured herself. It had before. Angela would never refuse to go to Cannon Street, especially for Christmas. Would never make her choose between families. She kissed her hair, then her cheek, her neck, saying, “I love you, Angie, it’ll be all right.”

  Angela went stiff, thrust her arms straight out, and pushed her away. “I don’t want to be kissed right now! The last thing I want is that. Leave me alone.”

  The bedroom door slammed and Jefferson sunk to the couch, stunned.

  They’d gotten through it. The next week brought snow. From a window at the little print shop where she worked, she could see that the few boats bobbing against the marina docks were covered in it. She scrubbed at the deep ink stains on her fingers in the shop bathroom, then jogged through the splashing slush toward the station. At the beauty college, she leaned in the doorway and waved. “I’m late,” she called over the roar of dryers, glad there was no time to face Angela after last night. The big-eyed little baby dyke, Tam, who hung around the shop, totally crushed out on Angie, was out of high school for the day, sweeping the old wooden floor with her push broom. She waved, and Angela lifted shampoo-lathered hands from a customer’s hair in greeting.

  The conductor was used to Jefferson’s wild dashes to catch the 3:22 and held his departure signal until she’d flung herself aboard. As soon as she hit her seat she opened her German text and began to translate. Would Margo be around to practice on today? She noticed a fingernail she hadn’t gotten clean and worked at it with Jarvy’s old penknife, which she’d found under the boards of their motorboat up at the lake.

  Her monster cloud was with her, so she kept active, but it was bit by bit enveloping her. Between classes she stood on some steps under the overhang of a building and watched the snow fall. The city, she breathed. She drank in the movement of the streets, wide and narrow. Now that the weather had slowed everything, the music of the city seemed louder. She seemed to hear it rush through her veins. It was crazy, she knew, to love such a large anonymous entity, but the sounds of motors, of horns, of beckoning whistles, of the thrumming power plants of huge buildings—these, with the soft, nearly constant backup of her parents’ record collection or the classical WQXR, had been her lullaby before they moved to Dutchess and when they came back to see a show or to shop. She’d never heard rain on her roof while growing up here, but watched the shine of its wetness transform the streets into winking pools of reds, yellows, greens. The sight was both exciting and comforting, full of promises that could not be kept elsewhere.

  She ducked into the student center to remove her soaked shoes and socks and warm her feet by a radiator. Dinner was her usual special-of-the-day bowl of cafeteria soup, with a roll and butter, spiced by the growing thrill of being back in the city, of feeling as if she belonged in college, and of her daily allotment of independence. She loved having her Dutchess nest and loved Angela, except for how quirky she was being these days, but plunging into Manhattan four days a week had ended her exile. The city would keep its promises now. She would find a way to balance dejection with joy.

  She stifled yawns through an introductory education course. Out the fourth-story window the snowflakes seemed larger and faster. She’d never had trouble traveling to Dutchess after school, but it hadn’t snowed like this for years. If she made it, would she be able to return for Margo’s class tomorrow night?

  She wasn’t inventing an excuse to see Margo as she galloped down the stairs and into another building. She needed the assignment for the weekend in case she got stuck.

  As always, a few students waited after class to speak with Margo. Jefferson caught her eye. Did Margo stop dawdling then? Jefferson wrote the assignment in her book and they walked together into snow-muted streets, ankle-deep in the cold, wet stuff.

  “Do you want to stop for coffee?” she asked. Always before they had gone for coffee with a group of students.

  Laughing, Margo clasped her arm. “I must get home to feed Hermann.”

  “Hermann?” Jefferson asked, fearing the worst.

  “My marmalade cat. Want to meet her?”

  “You mean now?” She felt about twelve in all her self-conscious awkwardness.

  The street was so brightly lit a spotlight might have been focused on it, yet its shadowed doorways were deep, as if hiding secrets.

  “You are worrying about your train,” Margo said, and gave a liquid shout of laughter that seemed to climb toward the rooftops. “I thought you had heard the radio reports. A train derailed. Penn Station is filled with people who should have been whisked home hours ago. Come, we’ll call the railroad from my apartment, find out if you’re stranded.”

  So Jefferson walked through the unreal city at Margo’s side, making herself slow to match small Margo’s pace. She felt rudderless, knowing what she should do, but having no will to do it and no one to help her turn away from the blooming, doomed excitement inside her. Cars and trucks had all but disappeared. It was as if a party had been cancelled and no one had notified her and Margo. They were the las
t revelers, looking for a celebration. She should go to the station at once, call Angela, but being with Margo lifted her mood, and the snow would not stop decorating for the party. She let its dreamy spell embrace her.

  Margo lit a candle, then another, using a streetlamp to find the way through her apartment. “I like this lighting better than electric bulbs, don’t you?”

  The shadows danced around them on the walls. “Really?” she asked. “You live in this light?”

  “Not to grade papers.” Margo walked close to Jefferson. “I don’t think I’ll be grading papers tonight.”

  Margo was tiny. She played with Jefferson’s fingers. Jefferson said nothing, but her blood pumped and rushed and heated her unbearably.

  “The phone is over here,” Margo said, leading her to the kitchen table. The apartment was not a bad size for the city. Except for stacks of books and folders, it was neat. The dark furniture looked well cared for, though far from new, all light blues and greens. Margo leafed through a phone book and read her the number. It was busy. They looked at each other across the table. Jefferson dialed again. Busy. Margo. Busy. Busy. Busy. Margo. Margo.

  “Maybe Angie will know.”

  “Angie,” Margo said, as if weighing her chances against the unknown woman.

  “I’ll call collect.”

  “I’ll go see a man about a dog.”

  When the bathroom door closed, she dialed. She had never called home collect before, and Angela accepted the call with a panicked voice.

  “I’m fine,” Jefferson said immediately.

  “I was afraid your classes were canceled and you were on the early train! Do you know about the derailment? Where are you?”

  “One of my teachers lives near the school. She let me use her phone. The radio says the railroad schedule is a mess.”

  “You make her let you stay there, baby. There hasn’t been a train into Dutchess since the 3:06, and it was two and a half hours late. Even if you can get on a train in that mob scene you won’t get to me until morning. Stay where it’s safe and warm. I’ll call the shop for you. I don’t think anything will be open tomorrow anyway. The beauty school cancelled classes.”

  “You’re okay?” She rubbed her jaw, as if that would muffle her lies.

  “Snug. Except I miss you. Dutchess lost power for a while, but it came back on. Will she let you stay?”

  “I don’t see why not. She has a comfortable-looking couch.”

  “I’m so glad you’re safe. We’d better get off. This must be costing a fortune. I love you.”

  “Me too, Angie.” The needle on her moral compass flickered every which way.

  She hadn’t felt so cold since that last long summer in her grandparents’ house. The birds. She hadn’t thought of them in a long time. Did they ever stray from their own nests? Maybe, once in a great while another tree looked so appealing—what a silly thought. Angie was fine. Whatever happened here was completely separate from what they had together.

  Margo reentered the candlelit room. She had changed into a light green peignoir and richly blue robe. At home, both Angela and Jefferson wore pajamas.

  “Angie said no trains are coming into the station at home.”

  “I’d be glad if you would stay the night, Ms. Jefferson.”

  Seeing Margo like this, heavy-breasted, at least ten years older than her, the apartment flickering like some den of seduction, fresh makeup giving Margo the florid face of a temptress in an opera, Jefferson said, “But I don’t want to lose my job. I’d better try to get back.”

  She could see the all-too-familiar cost of rejection, quickly hidden, cross Margo’s face. “What do you do?”

  “I work in a small print shop.”

  “Ah,” Margo said, with her charming smile. “Always around books, this one.”

  “Oh, no. Nothing like that. Pamphlets, business cards, once in a while a small gardening book or a guide to the river. Like that.” Still, it was gratifying to be thought of as a book person. She did not want to lose Margo’s friendship. “You have a big library.”

  “Literature,” Margo said, a hand sweeping across the room, “is my life.”

  Was she saying how lonely she was?

  “I teach it, read it, write it. Dream it.”

  “You write?”

  “Of course. Don’t you?”

  “No. I mean, I used to, a little, in high school. But things changed. There’s no time for that.”

  “Stories? Poetry?”

  She nodded, eyes down. “Poetry. Not very good.”

  “Love poetry.”

  She nodded again.

  “To Angie.”

  Was she crazy to admit this? She gave a half-nod, watching Margo.

  “Let me show you something.” Margo found a file on her desk, looked at a few sheets of paper and extracted one, a poem, which she gave Jefferson to read. She was embarrassed to get this glimpse into a teacher’s private life.

  “Margo, it’s real poetry, you wrote this?”

  “We were going to America at last. Our husbands had sent for us. Beirut was a nightmare. Marthe and I learned to take comfort with each other while our husbands were making homes for us in California. I wanted to keep flying, with Marthe, right over their heads and around the world back to Europe, nightmare or not. But war makes one practical. And impractical. I left him as soon as I could. Marthe felt too bound and stayed with her husband.”

  For some reason Jefferson imagined, at that moment, thousands of women all over the world leaving their Bogarts behind, confessing their love for one another and coming together in desperate, weeping relief, in want, in an erotic camaraderie against which she knew she had no resistance. She loved her own small world, but tomboy that she was, she also loved to explore.

  Without seeming to have moved her hand, she found Margo’s breast cradled in it and she was kneading it. She tensed in anticipation of rejection. Instead, Margo’s mouth opened and her breathing became audible, wetly rasping.

  Winning an Olympic medal could not have made this more of a defining moment in Jefferson’s life. It was the moment she learned the power of her longing and the power of her lesbian hands. Women, from now on, would come to her for touch. She didn’t know if that was how it was for other lesbians, but for her—her mind leapt to the reality that she had a magnetic heat in her fingertips that pulled them to her.

  At the same time, she didn’t want to make love to this greedy gnome of a woman; she didn’t want to betray Angela. Margo, though, was all the allure of the city and held the mystery of her future. She was desire come to life. Jefferson abhorred her and couldn’t resist her, was compelled to embrace Margo, the exotic night, even while longing for the daylight of Angela.

  Despite herself, she would be nothing in the world at times but a flammable longing for each woman she desired. If one wanted more she couldn’t give it to her because the longing would not stop with her. The longing would be an entity all its own, not attached to a specific woman, never satisfied. She would bring her desire to her lovers like a gift packaged up in herself, tied up with the velvet ribbon of her hands. Their coming together would be the climax for her, orgasm no more than a physical release, each woman’s response her reward.

  Jefferson silenced Margo with an open, wet mouth. Her rushing blood blotted out all but their sounds and the candlelight and thoughts of anything but her desire. Her whole being was centered in her hands, and the only sensation in the world was her pounding blood and the raging heat. No feelings of despair would dare assault her now. It was so good to have the heat back after Angie’s recent coldness. Nothing mattered but pressing this soft new body, her first adult woman’s body, to her own. Margo thrust her hips forward and Jefferson ground her pelvis into Margo’s. She was crazy with hunger for this woman of the city, her fingers full of the poetry they’d recited, immemorial sap rising until she no longer could distinguish Margo’s cries from her own.

  Chapter Nine

  In September 1977, the nineteen-y
ear-old Jefferson stood at the dormitory’s back door, watching her father lift his now-heavy body behind the wheel of his Cadillac. After cramming all summer to finish her first freshman term as a commuter, she was a second-semester freshman moving into a dormitory well after the rest of her class, and her parents had driven her, with all her luggage, past the still-green leaves along the roads, down to school. On their way home, they would stop for dinner and her father would have his first drink, then a second, both doubles. He’d excuse himself, and on the way to the men’s room he’d pass the bar, order another, and quickly down it before returning to the table, where he would order a fourth. That might be enough to get him home to Dutchess.

  Emmy came back to the dorm door to hug her one last time, as if to make up for all the missed hugs and misunderstandings between them. Jefferson didn’t expect her mother to understand her. How could a straight parent imagine what went on with a gay kid, how could a mom like hers get it when her daughter’s only interest was sports, when she didn’t date boys or chatter or giggle or indulge in long fashion talks? The poor woman had no idea she’d been living with a husband who fooled with men and a daughter who loved girls.

  “What is wrong with you?” Emmy had many times demanded to know, as she’d demanded the same of her husband, but much less often and much more timorously, when the evidence of his runaway drinking compelled her to confront it. Jarvy never went to the opera or the theater with Emmy these days; Emmy went with her mother. Jefferson remembered so clearly how her parents had doted on each other until the last few years when Emmy stopped drinking. Their doctor found liver damage in both of them. Jarvy ignored it. Before that they’d had their own world of two, and Jefferson had felt in the way more than she hadn’t. How old were they? Maybe Jarvy was having his midlife crisis, what with his thinning hair and wide waistline and his rendezvous at the railroad station. Today, this last buffer between Emmy and her problems was vanishing.

  Jefferson accepted the hug stiffly, although one part of her wanted to cry out in terror, “Don’t leave me here alone!” But evidence of dependence on her part only upset Emmy and, of course, they weren’t going to coddle her more than they ever had.