Beggar of Love (19 page)

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.

Gus lifted his horn to his lips and began an excerpt from “Finlandia.” She could sense Glad beaming and proud, watching how he filled the church with breath and emotion and sound for her. She felt elation at the way he returned to Glad the gift she had given him with his life.

Her thoughts drifted even farther back to her freshman self on the dormitory steps. Stricken with grief—and yes, it had been grief—to watch her own mother go, to watch her take off with the gifts she’d never given and to leave the heritage of fear. Of silent expectations. Of alcohol.

She bowed her head, not bothering to wipe away the tears. Glad’s persevering acceptance had finally sunk in. Too late for Jefferson’s athletic career, but not too late to succeed at being Jefferson. “I’m really not afraid to be me now.” She fixed her eyes on the sun ray stealing in through the stained-glass window, sighing with the breeze that entered when someone opened the church door. Glad and Ginger, between them, had been there when Jefferson was finally finished with drinking and on her feet again. It had been over a year now. She’d go from Glad’s funeral to another AA meeting. And cry for a week if she had to.

She whispered hoarsely, “I want to cry loud enough to fill this church with sound for you.”

Were tears the only gift she could give to Glad, the woman who had first loosed them? She envied the boy with his horn, who had found his own voice, and who’d had a mother who’d heard him all his life. But her tears would have to do: the wrong gift, to the wrong mother. And Glad would accept them, as she always had.

The last of the music faded. Now, she thought, Glad would be at peace.

She left the pew, finally, but a hand touched her elbow as she reached the church doors.

“Here,” Sam the cook said, eyes wet with his own sadness. He thrust a handful of napkins toward her. “I knew she’d want me to bring some for you too.”

I’m forty-one, Jefferson thought as she watched the twenty-year-old pitcher wind up. Once she’d been on the pitcher’s mound, her body tall, powerful, no gray in her thick sandy hair, proud muscles in her arms. Now she was coaching.
How in hell did I get to be forty-one?

The batgirl trotted across the park’s newly mowed grass carrying water. The hot sun felt good, heated the grass scents, made the spectators’ encouragement sound languid, undemanding. Jefferson drank, remembered to smile then into those adoring batgirl eyes. If this kid only knew, if those eyes had seen her at her depths, high on whatever combination of drinks she could get.

The opponents got a hit; Jefferson tensed, ready with her signal talk to guide the Lavender Julies up the last step from their two-year slump into winning the citywide series. Inside, she clicked, in perfect tune with her team. And they clicked with her. At last they were playing in unison, not like the beginning of the season when she’d agreed, once more, after a first year of failure and a season off, to coach the “Lavender Losers,” as everyone had taken to calling them. “You’re our only hope,” Sally the bartender had pleaded for the team she and Liz sponsored.