Beggar of Love (23 page)

“We’re still together.” She added in a mutter, “No thanks to me.”

Shirley reached over and ruffled Jefferson’s hair. “You look like a drowned rat. You want to come up and dry off, you charming big bad wolf? My promise still holds.”

“Your promise?”

“That I won’t bite.”

Jefferson filled her lungs with air and exhaled very slowly. The tug of war had started again. Couldn’t she spend some time getting acquainted with this woman she obviously didn’t know at all? She almost pulled her comb from her pocket, but stopped herself. How she looked didn’t matter. “Okay.”

“Good.” Shirley stood and started toward the elevator. Jefferson watched her, her hips, from across the checkerboard floor. The rain still poured down loudly outside the windows on the other side of the lobby.

Shirley whirled at the elevator, cocked a hand on her hip as if presenting herself for Jefferson’s inspection, and asked, “Because tell me the truth, Jeffers, am I really your typical Red Riding Hood?”

She remembered that tiny girl in the red cape who’d come out of the hotel earlier. She laughed, shaking her head. “No, you’re not. But I liked being the big bad wolf so much I thought you were.” She joined Shirley and, as the elevator lifted them, could almost see the old wolf in the lobby below, waving good-bye.

While Jefferson was still in the city, she had watched a lot of crime shows, starting with
Missing Persons
in the 1990s. At first it drew her because Jorja Fox, who’d been on
Ellen,
was in it, but more recently she’d gotten into
Without a Trace.
One night, as she watched, she realized that her life was an episode. Should she have reported Ginger missing? Had Ginger’s parents done so?

“So call her parents,” her enduring best friend, Lily Ann Lee, urged. They were at Jefferson’s apartment on the Upper West Side. It had the luxury of two small bedrooms, and she and Ginger had filled it up nicely together. The monthly maintenance fee was hefty, but she could cover it without help from Ginger. It had been their home for decades.

Lily Ann had come over to help her move Ginger’s belongings into the second bedroom, which Jefferson had been putting off, unable to bear the finality of packing Ginger away.

“I did call Ginger’s parents. Four times.” She rested her forehead on Lily Ann’s shoulder. “They hung up on me.”

Lily Ann patted her on the back. “I thought you all got along.”

“So did I. But now she’s with a guy and they must be in pig heaven.”

“Still no reason to be rude to you.”

“At least they were clear.”

Lily Ann closed a cardboard box and labeled it. “I don’t think they would have hung up on you if she was really missing. They have to know she’s okay or they would have called you.”

“Exactly what I’ve been hoping,” Jefferson said, taking the box from Lily Ann and moving it across the hall. “I think we’re going to get about everything in the closet,” she called back, opening the closet door. The sight of Ginger’s fanciful shoes filling the closet floor startled her. It was like finding Ginger’s ghost. Some nights, instead of plumping her pillow for the dozenth time and trying yet another position with which to lure sleep, she got out of bed and prowled the ghost of Ginger through the house. She would plunge her hands into Ginger’s dresser in hopes of finding something she hadn’t yet discovered, something with associations so vivid it would bring Ginger alive before her, a living, walking presence she could almost pull back on the bed with her and engulf herself in pleasure.

Lily Ann came to the door. “Jef,” she said. “Why would you want someone back who would do this to you? I mean, it hasn’t always been heaven on earth, has it?”

“That was my fault.”

“Yet she didn’t leave until you stopped drinking and settled down.”

“I guess the damage had been done by then.”

“And I’d guess the blame isn’t all yours.”

“Ginger never pulled the stunts I did.”

“You know this for sure?”

The very idea startled her. “You think, while I was running around on her, she was—”

“Wouldn’t be the first time, J.”

“That’s crazy!”

“What else explains why she tolerated you hooking up with anything that moved?”

“Lily Ann, I think someplace in her understood.”

“Understood what? That you were a good old-fashioned cad?”

“That I so welcomed being wanted—as who I am—for my queer self, that I couldn’t say no to any woman who cast her eye my way. Sometimes I think I wanted Ginger because she hadn’t wanted—never did want—me, but responded, like I did, to being wanted.”

“Wow,” Lily Ann said. “You about lost me there. Whatever, there was something you weren’t getting at home, Jefferson, and you know it. I’m not saying it was sex.” Lily Ann held out a hand to stop Jefferson’s protest. “That much rabbiting is not about sex.”

“You never liked Ginger.”

“I never exactly understood what you saw in her.”

“She was—”

“And I don’t need to know. That woman lived behind a vault door and nobody got to spin her wheel, if you ask me. But knowing you, that’s what you liked about her. With Ginger, your chase never ended, and nothing you can tell me will convince me that it’s not the chase that turns you on.”

She reached to stop Lily Ann, holding her by the arm. “Lily, you’re my best friend, what brought this on?” Had Lily Ann been jealous all these years?

“You want to know what I think, J? I think, when you stopped drinking and running around on her, Ginger got bored with you. I think there was something in that woman that needed you to be a bad girl. I want you to see what was what clearly. I don’t want you beating yourself up over it or getting jaded about love.”

“She’s my girl, Lily Ann.” She knew she sounded pitiful and unsure, but no one had ever told her these things before. Did she really know what she was doing? “She might not have loved me anymore, but ever since Ginger—she was the only one who wanted to be with me. The rest, since you, have wanted sex: sex from my fingertips, pleasure from my hands, praise of their beauty, admiration for being on my arm.”

Lily Ann looked at her as if deciding whether to tell her something. Was there anything left to tell?

“You think she was different from the others?” asked Lily Ann. “It was no coincidence, you know.”

“What?”

“The hotel. Shirley. Ginger finding out.”

“You’re not saying she planned it.”

Lily Ann shook her head. “No, but she was waiting for an opportunity to come along and make up her mind for her.”

“So I handed her the bat and she hit the ball out of the park? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Or she choreographed the dance.”

“How?”

“She had to get away to find out if you’d defined her correctly.”

“Defined her?”

“You told me she’d never felt attracted to women before you.”

“It wasn’t in her frame of reference, never occurred to her.”

“She has to find out if she’s living her life or one you made for her.”

Lily Ann was right, she decided, remembering the women she’d been with who hadn’t known they were gay—until she came along.

They were sitting together on the sofa now. Jefferson was holding Lily Ann’s hand tight.

“That,” Lily Ann explained, “is one reason why this is such a major blow to your ego. You failed to keep her and also failed to keep her gay, J. By defining her you defined who you are and what you can do in the world.”

“Are you saying I wanted to control Ginger?”

“She’s proof of who Jefferson is.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. Since when are you the expert on Jefferson, not me?”

“If you were a thinker, J, or a noticer or even stood still now and then, you’d be teaching philosophy, not PE.”

But she wasn’t really listening anymore. Her eyes got all glazed and her ears filled with an Abba song she loved to dance to. This analysis stuff was fluff. She just did what she did.

“You still want to find her, don’t you?” Lily Ann asked.

She was surprised at the question.

“What about writing to the family, asking if you can take them Ginger’s things, or if they want to pick them up?”

Jefferson felt like the floor was falling out from under her. “Give away Ginger’s stuff? Her first tap shoes?” She held them up. “The green leather sneakers she found in the trash?” She knew she must look silly, the large bear Ginger had won at a street fair under her arm, the tap shoes dangling from one hand, a long slinky black dance skirt draped over her shoulder.

“Give them up, J. Go face-to-face with the family. They’d have to tell you something then.”

“Lily Ann, I don’t think so. I can’t imagine.”

“Okay, don’t twist yourself inside out, girl. I can see how it could smart a bit.”

She let out a painful breath. “You know what really makes me break down? Folding sheets by myself.” She remembered the time, folding laundry together, she’d wrapped Ginger in a sheet and spun her out, then collapsed on the clean linens with her. She gave a happy laugh at herself. “Thanks for listening to me obsess, Lil. Come on, let’s get the dresser in here.”

The weirdest change for her wasn’t Ginger’s absence; it was the absence of the despair that had haunted her all her life, until the last several months. Listening to someone else talk about her family in an AA meeting, she’d realized that Jarvy was an alcoholic. He’d been a happy drinker through her childhood, but at some point that had changed. She remembered how moody he was and wondered if he, too, had suffered from joylessness. If he, too, had tried to escape it with whiskey. If his dalliances at the railroad station in Dutchess were attempts to shake off frightening funks like, she’d figured out with her sponsor, her womanizing had sometimes been.

They had drifted back to the furniture. “Ginger left this beautiful dresser?” Lily Ann asked. “It’s gorgeous and in such great shape.”

“It was her grandparents’.”

“I’d use it, myself.”

“No, Lily Ann.” She bumped Lily Ann’s arm with her knuckles. “If it belonged to your ex you wouldn’t want to wake up in the morning and have it be the first thing you see.”

Lily Ann hefted her side and they walked a few steps, Jefferson backward.

“But it isn’t my ex’s,” Lily Ann said, setting the chest down. “Neither is Ginger’s family. I could call them, J. I could say me and my husband are coming to town for the weekend—”

“You’d do that? Pretend to be straight?”

“Why not? I could call right now.”

“They might have caller ID.”

“Tonight then.”

But when Lily Ann called Jefferson that night, before the
Murder, She Wrote
reruns came on, she said no one had answered and promised to try again the next day. “I’m not leaving a message, J, in case they think it’s strange of me to be too persistent or decide to get hold of Ginger about who I really am.”

“What if they know, Lily Ann? What if they give you a number to call? I’m not going to call it and have to talk to them.”

“We can Google the number. Or use a reverse phone directory, Jef. I have some resources at work.”

Jefferson closed her eyes and saw Ginger and Mitchell in the back of the cab again. “Do I want to know?” she asked, flipping the hood of her sweatshirt over her head and crossing her arms in a defensive pose.

“You want to know she’s all right.”

“Mitchell wouldn’t hurt Ginger.”

“But what is he doing with her?”

“Lily Ann, you’re talking like he kidnapped her for ransom.”

“For all you know, he might have. Or worse.”

“What’re you talking about? Mitchell is our friend.”

“Friends don’t ride off into the sunset with your partner.”

“No call. That’s what gets to me the most, Lily Ann. Ginger would tell me something, wouldn’t she?”

“If she could.”

“You’re scaring me.”

“What’s worse, J, her running off on you with a man or foul play?”

“Worse for Ginger or worse for me?”

“Gee-jus, Jefferson.”

“Well, it’s the truth. I assumed she and that turncoat wanted to be together. I may not deserve better after all the years I ran around on her, but I’m sober and faithful now.” She knew she was whining.

“She got bored? She did like you better wild?”

“But if Mitchell was up to no good, then when she comes back, we still have a chance.”

“You mean it saves your ego.”

“What’s left of it.” She looked at Lily Ann. “You don’t get it, do you?”

“I get being left, J. College. Remember? There was me, there was Ms. Big Hair—and goodness knows who else.”

“I was a kid. She was the bartender. And femme. I was swept off my feet.”

“Again.”

She touched Lily Ann’s short hair. “I wish I hadn’t treated you like that, but at least I didn’t leave you for a man.”