Beggar of Love (22 page)

While she wondered whether love without desire on Ginger’s part was still love, Delia, on the bed, ran those delicate hands down her nightgown and Jefferson felt herself stir. Delia raised one hand to her right breast and rubbed the nipple. Jefferson’s eyelids became heavy. Through her narrowed vision she watched Delia pull at the lace that lined the bottom of her gown and inch it up her thighs. Jefferson responded as actively as if Delia had been going down on her. Then Delia reached under the covers and brought out a vibrator. She started it and moved it over her gown. She could see the outline of Delia’s other hand, under the gown, moving one finger. Jefferson was throbbing and drank deeply to slow her reaction, fascinated and at the same time saddened.

What got into these women’s heads? Why would it be so exciting to have another woman, a complete stranger, watch from across a room? Had Delia been fantasizing all her life about a moment like this: the drunk butch lesbian in the doorway, shirt open, excited by Delia’s excitement? Jefferson had never imagined anything like it, but it fed something in her. Not a sexual need, something a little dark. Something that got a minor kick out of being the one standing and in control of herself while this woman wriggled on the bed. She had her period anyway, so this suited her fine, but what had happened to the high-spirited kid she’d been?

“Somebody’s got to,” Delia said, her voice barely there. She pulled her gown up to her waist, spread her legs until her heels overhung the mattress, and replaced her fingers with the vibrator. Jefferson’s impulse was to go to Delia and put her fingers inside her while the vibrator stimulated her. She knew the woman would push her shirt aside and touch her breasts while Jefferson made her come, but before the impulse made its way to her slowed-down brain, Delia sucked in one loud breath and squirmed against her hand, saying, “Oh. Oh, oh, oh, Jesus.”

Jefferson drained her glass at the sound of the queen’s key in the front-door lock, thinking, for the thousandth time, if I never drank again, would I still go prowling for strangers? She quickly buttoned her shirt as Delia fled the bed for the bathroom. The queen, his makeup a mass of fissures like bleached, dried mud, looked puzzled, then scared, then knowing, all in the moment that Jefferson fled past him. She bounded down seven flights by swinging over two or three steps at a time, grasping the rails. At the second floor she missed a step, almost went down, but caught hold of the bar. All her weight hung on her twisted wrist for a long, painful moment. She tackled the next flight more slowly. Outside it had begun to shower, and the cool raindrops splashed against her face as she jogged to the subway stop, ignoring the misery of her wrist.

She caught the R train back into the city, cradling her left arm in her right, angry that she would have to play handball this way for a while. She knew what sprains felt like and this was a sprain. Tomorrow, she promised herself again, she would drink nothing, not even a beer. Sordid nights like this were not how she wanted to spend the rest of her life.

Jefferson paced under the hotel canopy. She moved away from the gray building, out to the curb, back along the red mat to the glass double doors. The doorman, about sixty, whose uniform sported golden brown shoulder braids that almost matched his skin, watched her with a scowl on his face. At first, she’d explained that she was waiting for a guest. That had been half an hour ago, when she was fifteen minutes early. Now she scowled back at him.

What was he going to do? Call the cops because she wanted to make amends to Shirley and was a little bit anxious?

She looked quickly up, but saw only a family leaving the hotel. The sharp scent of the father’s lime aftershave hung behind him in the wet air. A tiny girl in a hooded red rain cape held his hand. He lifted the girl over the water in the gutter and set her in a waiting limousine next to her mother, then waved until they were out of sight.

Jefferson recombed her wet hair. “Amends, Jefferson,” she told herself. “You’re making amends to the woman, not seducing her all over again.” Then why had she put on cologne? Why the new burgundy shirt she’d been saving for a special occasion? Why her brown leather jacket and her softest cords? Why was her heart doing the tango, double time, inside her chest?

Again, there was activity in the lobby. Again, it was not Shirley. What would she look like after ten years on the West Coast, writing comedy in movie land? Would she be harried like some of the LA career women Jefferson had met? Or her zany old self, cracking jokes with every breath, unable to relax long enough to make love decently, despite having come on like a hurricane, despite acting like a mini-sex goddess? Why in hell had Jefferson been obsessed with getting the woman to bed?

Because that’s how she’d been in those days. It hadn’t been Shirley, it had been all of them. And for what? What was left? She should at least have good memories. When it had come time to sort through what she’d done, and to whom, she’d found that the histories of all those beloveds, not to mention the details of the relationships, eluded her in a way the women never could. Now she was tracking every one of them down. She had to clean up yesterday to make today work.

Damn. Where was Shirley? It was half an hour past their meeting time. Jefferson felt clammy, chilled through by the late fall rain. Did she get the day wrong? The time? The hotel? Should she go up? No. That was the last thing she intended to do. She’d already spotted a coffee shop around the corner where they could talk safely. She’d even purposely left her big black umbrella at home, the one she’d used so often as an excuse to pull a woman near for the first time. Had she used the umbrella with Shirley? Would Shirley be expecting it? In any case, she herself would not fall into any of the traps she’d set for others.

For a moment, Jefferson stopped pacing. She stood at the edge of the canopy, peering through the downpour at the yellow cabs, the black cabs, the mail jeeps, the limos, the beat-up economy cars that jammed Broadway at the end of this crosstown street. Rain seemed to trap the exhaust smells. A few people with umbrellas squeezed through the gridlock, then turned up Broadway at a furious pace, as if to make up for lost time.

Lost time. Jefferson jammed her hands back in her pockets and whirled into her pacing again. Almost thirty years she’d lost in her games of sodden pursuit. Because it was true, what her new AA sponsor had said, that as soon as Jefferson stopped drinking, she had also stopped whoring around. The same sponsor had practically promised that her depressions—and she’d finally admitted to herself that’s what they were—would lift if she practiced the twelve steps. Obviously, she’d have to practice harder.

She thought of Ginger, left at home, burying herself in work, left without a whole lover, or plain left. That feeling of guilt was compounded by all the guilt she carried around about the rest of her little love-them-and-leave-them liaisons.

What could they have had if Jefferson had stayed home? A little of the peace she sometimes experienced now? A feeling of freedom, like she could do anything, go anywhere, and it would be good without fighting or tears or conflict? Without the feeling that some malevolent creature lived inside her and busied itself tearing her up, so that everything demanded a hundred times more effort because first she had to stitch herself back together again?

Jefferson pulled her hands out of their hiding places. She stood, half under the side of the canopy, half in the rain, looking at them. First the backs, pale and chafed from early tastes of winter. Then the palm, callused a little from working out recently. Her right palm collected rain in a tiny puddle at its center. These were the hands that had stopped dragging themselves, one over the other, up an endless rough rope. She licked the rainwater in her palm. Its taste was metallic, almost bitter, and snapped her right into the present, into this moment of waiting to make another apology for being such a creep in the past.

A cab pulled in front of the hotel so quickly that Jefferson surmised it had been stuck in the Broadway traffic. Without seeming to move, the doorman was beside it, sweeping the passenger door open. A leg appeared, high-heeled shoe first, then a long calf with the edge of a dark, clinging skirt at its peak.

LA had been good to Shirley. Jefferson smelled her own sweat and the tango began again. Had Shirley changed so much, or had Jefferson forgotten the poise, the warm smile, the arms that hugged as if they were made for welcoming back old lovers? Didn’t Shirley remember how Jefferson had dumped her, abandoned her in that sleazy bar for a quickie with a woman she’d had her eye on for weeks and who’d finally returned Jefferson’s interest that night? She couldn’t hug Shirley back, so consumed was she by the old guilt.

“Come on up, handsome. The years have seasoned you nicely.” Shirley offered her arm.

Jefferson didn’t so much hear and see as feel the cab pull away, leaving a vacuum she suddenly had to fill. Instead of being in the hotel waiting for their meeting, Shirley had been out living her own life and caught Jefferson off balance. And she hadn’t expected Shirley to have this presence, this woman-of-the-world air of command.

“Jefferson?” Shirley said after a moment.

Quickly, Jefferson answered, “I thought we could go to the coffee shop around the corner.”

“Oh, God, Jeff. I am so wiped, I have to use the little girls’ room, and I long to change out of this monkey suit. You can wait in the lobby if you want, but I promise not to bite.”

The doorman was watching the sky, hands behind his back. Jefferson felt like she was at the tail end of a tug of war, pulled forward under the canopy by a need to put an end to a past that shamed her, pulled back by temptations of repeating that past. In the few seconds she needed to make a decision, Shirley’s face adopted a look of concern; the doorman’s, one of even deeper suspicion.

“Jefferson?”

She linked Shirley’s arm with her own and steered her into the lobby.

It was hot in there and smelled like the steam heat of old New York buildings. As they crossed the lobby she could see herself, Shirley’s elbow cupped in her hand, in a mirror. The floor was a huge black-and-white checkerboard, and Shirley’s heels clicked across it.

“What’s the story, handsome?” Shirley asked. “This isn’t kidnapping at my age, you know.”

Jefferson managed a smile. They sat facing each other on a faded couch. Cream-painted columns dotted the lobby like elderly guests half-snoozing the afternoon away.

Shirley’s arm burned against Jefferson’s palm. She had always touched women like lovers, she realized. It was as much second nature to her as worrying about how she looked. Was it too late to learn how to be friends?

“Do you mind if we don’t go upstairs?”

“Since when is Jefferson afraid of the big bad wolf?”

“Aw, hell, Shirley. That’s the problem. I
am
the big bad wolf. If I went up there with you I might act like I used to, and that’s not what I want.” She felt about as debonair and in control of this situation as the three little pigs.

“What do you want, Jeffers?”

Now she remembered what had sparked her desire for Shirley. Those vivid blue eyes, like a splash of cold water, a surprise every time. As she always had, Jefferson stared into them, withdrew from their intimacy, but went back for more. She made her hands crawl inside her pants pockets where she fingered a heart-shaped stone Ginger had found on the beach during their trip to Florida. There would be no casual touching of Shirley, no touching at all. “I want to apologize.”

The blue eyes looked shocked. “For what? For being the prettiest butch I ever beguiled into my bed?”

“You beguiled me into your bed?” It had never occurred to Jefferson that the campaign might have been mutual.

Shirley lifted wavy hair back from her eyes. “Don’t you remember? I interrupted the great chase. You wanted what’s-her-name, that siren everybody was after. What was her name?”

“Cindy?” Jefferson asked, guessing.

“Yes. And the last time you and I went out together—well, you got drunk again and I decided Cindy could have you. So what are you apologizing to me for?”

Jefferson sat straight up and ran her fingers through her hair. Shirley had let her go. “For disappearing on you at the bar. For going off with Cindy.”

Shirley was still toying with her own hair. She shrugged. “That’s the way it was back then. Or the way I was. Trying out this one and that one. Not that you didn’t measure up the nights we spent together.” Shirley looked up into Jefferson’s face from under her hair, her laugh like melting chocolate.

Jefferson struggled to get out of the past, the bar, the guilt of having abandoned this woman. “What did you do?”

Shirley narrowed her eyes and cocked her head. “Are you serious? What do you think I did? We did?”

“I didn’t mean the nights we spent together, Shirl. After I left you. In the bar.”

“Actually, I’d rather describe our nights together. But who can remember a bit of it? Why?”

Jefferson pulled herself back on track. “Because I need to apologize for a lot of things. It’s part of getting well for me.”

Shirley relaxed against the couch now and seemed to study Jefferson. “Okay,” she said after a while. “Thanks. I appreciate you caring after all these years.” She smiled. “I like you better this way, you know. Undrunk.”

Nodding, Jefferson smiled. “Yes. Me too.”

“Whatever happened to that fancy dancer you lived with? Was she really the love of your life like you claimed or your perpetual chase? You butches do like your conquests—especially the straight ones.”