Beggar of Love (29 page)

Almost to herself she said, “When I was younger I swear I had no clue what was right and what was wrong, but now, Mitchell,” she looked up at him, “I think you and I both know exactly what we need to do.”

“You’re right, Jefferson. I’ve learned where I belong and who I’m really responsible for.”

As Mitchell darted away through the traffic, she wished she carried a stash of poison darts to fling into his back. Damn Ginger. She could have said something, could have tried to work it out. How many times had she berated Ginger in her head for letting her get away with sleeping around on her? Now she knew Ginger was so involved in herself she simply hadn’t been paying attention. It was funny how much she was like Jefferson’s mom, both there and not there: the perfect lover if you didn’t mind getting your love at arm’s length.

Mitchell had taken the path; Jefferson leapt the iron rail and jogged to the street. Finding a cab near the Quinns’ building would be nearly impossible, but Ginger was going home with her. Today, if she could swing that hole in one.

Ginger was still able to get around without help when Jefferson took her up to the lake. It hadn’t happened right away, but then the pain returned. Ginger thought she had cancer because she could feel some sort of mass inside, unlike before, when she’d only had pain. Why hadn’t they taken out the tumor when she’d undergone surgery, she asked Jefferson by phone. Ginger was still at her parents’ apartment, trying to get strong enough to go back to work. She refused to move back in with Jefferson, who was working full-time, when her mother was home all day and could help her.

It was May before she agreed to go to the lake with Jefferson for a week or two. Away from the city, who knew, Ginger said, she might be 100 percent again. The damn city doctors didn’t know what they were doing. There was a ball of something in there, she could point to the exact spot, but she was damned if she’d go back to a cutter. That’s all they wanted to do: cut, cut, cut.

She knew Ginger well enough to see that she was in denial and that her anger at the surgeon came from fear, but she’d gone online and researched her condition. She had to agree that it sounded like a simplistic diagnosis, but she was no doctor. Maybe blood-pressure medication and getting away from stress was just what Ginger needed. It couldn’t hurt.

As for being together, they hadn’t talked about Ginger’s little getaway, nor had Ginger been in touch with their friends. She had no clue what was going on inside that gorgeous head. They had only seen each other in luncheonettes near the Quinns’ apartment on Saturdays, but they talked on the phone a lot, hours at a time some nights. With Ginger so removed, she was in full seduction mode again and had no interest in going anywhere else to be with anyone else.

On the way to the lake, where Jefferson had taken no other woman, Ginger insisted that Jefferson let her do some of the driving. It might tire her too much, but it seemed important for Ginger to see herself without limits, so Jefferson stayed out of it. She watched Ginger’s hands on the steering wheel now, her fingers as thin as they had been when she’d gotten together with her in college over twenty years ago. They’d lost the classical station a while ago and were listening to an NPR blues show. These were a dancer’s hands, deliberately expressive when Ginger moved them; still as sculpture otherwise. Movement had always been Ginger’s language as well as Jefferson’s; she wasted neither words nor motion. So they were quiet on the ride north. Five wordless hours by Ginger’s side was more pleasure than five years with anyone else.

They hadn’t been lovers for such a long time, hadn’t even touched. Jefferson couldn’t stop herself from sighing. She had messed up one time too many. She didn’t like to think about the gap in her life between Ginger’s desperate exit and the diagnosis that brought them together again. She’d cried about it in their doctor’s office, while Ginger was dressing in another room. Dr. Fried had offered to prescribe something to make it easier to help Ginger through her recovery, while emphasizing that recovery wasn’t certain with this illness. Jefferson had always quit taking meds before, refusing to admit that her blue times were something she couldn’t handle on her own. This time, she started taking Zoloft and could feel its buffering effect.

Ginger drove them out of Laconia and north along Lake Winnipesaukee. Jefferson noted all the changes since she’d last visited. The lakes region, once protected by the old money that had developed it as resort communities, was selling out to the condo-hungry and the manufactured-home retirees from Massachusetts.

“There it is,” she said. As always the pleasure of her first glimpse of the vast blueness of Lake Winnipesaukee licked right up through her innards like attraction to a new woman. One breath of this air and she seemed to breathe out the worst of her awful spurts of despondency.

“How far to Pipsborough now? It’s been so long since I was last here,” Ginger said.

Jefferson reached to Ginger, touched her gently, and pointed. God, she loved this woman still. She could touch everyone else she cared about, but she’d ruined Ginger and her for touching, for much of anything. “We’re on the outskirts. Go up over the hill. I was thinking that it wouldn’t need much flooding to make Saturday Lake part of Winnipesaukee. I wonder if global warming will do something like that. Make the lakes region one big lake.”

“Oh, I remember that restaurant. They forgot to thaw the lobster tails,” Ginger said with a little laugh.

She laughed too, but remembered how cranky Ginger had been over the lobster. She’d slept out on the cold porch, leaving Ginger fussing in the bed in the then-unheated cottage. “Fine dining is not the lake’s forte. That’s why we brought groceries.”

“And bakery. What did you get?”

“I went to that Austrian place on Ninth Avenue. They had the Viennese cake you like.”

“Sure! The Sacher? With chocolate ganache?”

“That creamy icing.”

“I can have all the chocolate I want, but you’ll have to eat the icing, Jef, you poor thing. The doctor said fat-free food or die. You can’t imagine, anyway, the nausea I felt when it happened. At least I know the symptoms now.”

“Poor Ginger. I’m so glad, so glad…”

Ginger looked at her and gave a nod as she turned her eyes back to the road.

Jefferson pressed her hands together, words pooling just behind her tongue, enough words to drown her. She remembered where they were and said only, “Oh, hey. Go to the right after that frost-heaves sign.”

Bad choice of landmarks, she thought. She hoped the cake wouldn’t make Ginger throw up, as more and more foods seemed to. Ginger still talked in terms of food sensitivities and allergies, but Jefferson suspected there was a bit of food anxiety going on. She was talking about a macrobiotic diet. Was she afraid of sex too? She longed to reach over and touch Ginger’s hair as she always had, but she’d done it once and Ginger had flinched enough to notice. No, she’d hurt Ginger too many times to expect touch. But once. If they could make love once, she knew it would knit up some open sores. Could love ease Ginger’s blood pressure? Strengthen other weaknesses in her arteries?

Then she remembered how long it had been since they made love. As she struggled to stop drinking, her mind wasn’t on sex. Ginger had never been much of an initiator. When Jefferson emerged from her fog, filled with energy and a new enthusiasm for life—how could she have missed the everyday pleasures of baking a cake, reading a big fat book, sitting through a whole Yankees game on TV and talking with Gabby about it later? Her body seemed to cry out for Ginger’s touch, but Ginger, she realized, had always been sparing with her touches, and now—did Ginger like the sober Jefferson? Had it only been the inebriated, chemically altered Jefferson she found attractive?

Ginger turned into the driveway to the Jefferson family’s bungalow. The ground was all pine needles. Jefferson opened her window for the spicy fragrance. The sight of Saturday Lake made her feel like she had arrived home. Ginger turned off the engine. Somewhere below them, far out on the lake, a boat was speeding. Otherwise there wasn’t a sound. For several minutes, they sat in the car. Silence was a luxury after the city.

She looked over at Ginger and saw her eyes were closed. “Gi?” she said.

Ginger started, as if she’d been asleep, and smiled with her eyes still closed. “So peaceful.”

Jefferson instructed her, “Stay put. I’ll carry things in and get a fire started in the woodstove.”

Ginger stirred. “I’ll help.”

In her best gym-teacher’s voice, a voice she’d perfected through decades of teaching and coaching, Jefferson repeated, “Stay put.”

“Yes, teach,” she agreed with what sounded like both resignation and weary pleasure.

Jefferson was surprised, and this was the first sign that she should be as worried as she was.

Later, she settled Ginger on the couch under one of her grandfather’s old green army blankets, smoothing back her hair. She realized she was studying Ginger’s face, looking for signs of illness. She had to stop that. The blanket’s smell brought back the feel of itchy warm wool on chilly New Hampshire vacation nights. God, she loved it here, especially with Ginger, regardless of the reason. She pulled the door quietly shut behind her, walked out from under the trees and down the sloped lawn to the lake. It was that golden time of late afternoon when sunbeams fanned like spotlights through the branches along the shoreline. She sat on a boulder at the edge of the little cove, the sandy beach at her feet no bigger than the floor of a two-man camping tent, and listened to the lake water lapping at her toes. The summer people weren’t up yet, it was too late for anybody but wild-turkey hunters, and the fishers seemed to cling to the full rivers and streams in spring. The neighbors on one side, behind an old low stone wall, would return from Florida after Memorial Day. The year-round people on the other side were the town veterinarian and his wife/receptionist.

Jefferson had taken time off work to pick up Ginger. She had been afraid that Ginger would change her mind about coming up. She wished she could keep her here with her forever—which didn’t promise to be a very long time—but she wanted Ginger near the city hospitals, and Ginger had gotten tight with one of her hospital nurses. Three of her old dance students helped with the housekeeping, while Ginger’s many relatives from the outer boroughs kept her supplied with casseroles and stews and baked goods. Once a week Mrs. Quinn did her special “Ginger shopping” with the younger brother, who still lived at home and carried the shopping bags of food. They got Ginger out for exercise and fresh air. If that meant walking to the nearest bench in the park and watching the Rollerbladers, dog walkers, and joggers rush by while Ginger and her mother, eighty-three, rested for the three-block trip back, that was fine.

Jefferson hated to cook and wasn’t very good at it, so for the trip north she rented a car and stocked it the way Emmy and Jarvy always did: ordered a ham with scalloped potatoes and vegetables from Trimmings to Go. The fragrance of the honeyed ham had made her long for dinner despite—Ginger laughing at how wicked she felt eating fast food—getting drive-through Dairy Queen for lunch.

The lake water was still. The green trees, lawns, and white cottages that lined it were interrupted here and there with trees in various stages of maturing: hawthorns, hickories, maple, oak bunched together like femmes dressing for a pride dance. Wooden oars knocked against metal oarlocks as two kids in fleece jackets, collars up, rowed an aluminum boat along the shore. She was chilly and needed a nap herself. She and Ginger could walk back down to the water tomorrow, in the bright of day. Inside, Ginger’s flip-flops flapped.

It was five thirty that evening when Ginger said, “You snore now.”

Her back was to Ginger as she hung her bomber jacket on a hook. She was glad Ginger couldn’t see her smile. Ginger had been pretty loud herself. Had Mitchell snored, she wondered, a dull pain entering the area of her heart.

She’d woken in the soft leather easy chair that had been her grandfather’s, doing that—snoring through her nap. She turned to Ginger and explained, deeply embarrassed, “It’s this extra weight I’ve put on.” Since she didn’t sleep with anyone these days, she hadn’t known. The truth was, she didn’t even sleep with herself. A premenopausal insomnia had fallen on her, and lying awake through much of the night had become yet another problem to solve with an early retirement. She closed the curtain in the window next to her chair and pulled the floor-lamp chain. The room was luminous with a warm yellow blush. “Did I wake you?”

“No. I got chilly.”

She sat up to tend to the fire.

Ginger startled her again. “I put more wood on.”

Through the stove window she could see flames working at the wood. She wanted to hold Ginger, to make her warm. “I need to bring in a supply for the night.”

Ginger picked up the book that she’d set facedown on her chest. Would Jefferson have time to finish it before Ginger—no, of course she’d finish. After dinner she planned to read aloud to Ginger from
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
a book Ginger had raved about ten years earlier, one of the times they had tried being together again. She’d heard that laughter was healing. Could more laughter, or less cheating on Ginger, have prevented the aneurysm?

She rose quickly—before she did something crazy like put her arms around Ginger and keep her close forevermore—and grabbed the barn coat hanging at the door. Outside, she dragged the lake-chilled twilight air in through her nose and pushed it from her lungs, hard. How did anyone get through the mishmash of hope and finality that was a brush with death? Would she talk about it? Would Ginger remain in denial and pretend it hadn’t happened?