Dry Your Smile (47 page)

So this revelation with Iliana is all the more odd, for me. As usual, there's an irony in attendance. I've spent almost two decades fighting for the right of sexual preference as one of the central issues of women's freedom. If I've been straight-baited by some women I've also been gay-baited by right-wingers who assume all feminists are lesbian. Hello! Surprise! Here we are now, part and parcel of the group we thought we were safely crusading for as an outsider. Like the work on behalf of abortion rights—with Julian's private secret locked tight in the back of her throat during every speech. I better be careful about which oppressed group I defend. One of these days I'll wake up as a peasant in India.

Still, more than irony and amazement, there's the confusion. I find myself thinking about Larry, and a great calm undramatic bell of grief strikes and tolls through me. I think about Hope slowly beginning to die, and somewhere in my bowels something cries out
My God My God
but all regions between that cry and the surface of me feel numb, as if I've sleepwalked the past twenty-two years with Larry, sleepwalked the previous twenty with her, hearing messages of myself but from far away, underwater. I think about Iliana and I know that being drawn to her woman's body is connected with Hope and Hope's dying. Beyond that, I know only my own ignorance.

No, that's not true. I discover my own—bizarre to feel this at such a crisis-laden moment in my life—capacity for happiness. Shock upon shock. With so many details crowding my brain, my thoughts keep going back to Iliana: anticipation at seeing her, excitement at being with her, the
combination
of
intimacies
—friendship (the type one can only have with another woman,
yes
Charlotte)
simultaneous
with an erotic charge! Not having to sacrifice one for the other! So many layers of emotion oscillating at once. Even the pain, homelessness, fear, gets put to use by this new energy. I feel I'm internally hemorrhaging Life.

Is that the difference, then, from those other times, with women reaching for me like lost daughters in the night? That here
I
reach back—and find? That I'm cared for, tenderly and raucously, reminded to eat and sleep and relax, coaxed into laughter and pleasure? And how distinct the lovemaking: to be wanted for one
self
with such passion that one glimpses that self through the eye of one's lover—as desirable, sexual, actually beautiful!

Is that the difference? That with my entire life lying in ruins about me, I'm in love? I'm
in love
—with a woman?

CHAPTER NINE

Summer, 1983

“It's Independence Day,” Julian said softly. “Independence Day,” she repeated, her awestruck whisper echoing the first thought that had come into her consciousness on awakening. She lay still, letting the smile of that revelation play over her face. Then she turned her head to look at Iliana, asleep beside her.

My friend, she thought, easing herself up carefully on one elbow, the better to watch that sleeping face in morning light gauzed blue by the curtain. My … lover. The word still stammered in the brain. Yet there the lover was, her breathing calm, her hair tousled against the pillow, those beryl-gray eyes—the color of rain, Julian had declared—moving rhythmically in a secret dream visored by the lids and the lashes that curved over the cheek. Full and rich, the features of that face, even when in repose, but never more so than when animated in conversation. The cosmopolite with the naughty smile, the connoisseur of wines and cheeses, olives and Caravaggio, music, chiaroscuro. The patient watcher, who knew how to wait—and then how to woo when the time was right. How to bring Julian slowly, through these weeks of lovemaking, into responses at first passive, then awkward, then gradually sensual, open, less afraid. Oh how different, Julian grinned, how different to find a mutual desire heating in the blood, tensing the muscles, quickening the breath. Her trepidatious lovemaking to Iliana had elicited reactions so generous they seemed to Julian out of proportion to her own ineptitude. But last night, she thought, with a shameless blush this time, the very previous last night, something had broken loose in Julian, reverted to the wild, surged through her, resurrecting in her a lover whose arms, legs, torso, hands, mouth, seemed to remember a primordial cuncipotence of what and how, where and when, if, yes, now, there, yes this way, yes, yes. This time she had seen astonishment widen Iliana's eyes, felt it shiver through Iliana's flesh, heard it answered in her own body. And Iliana had opened with the abandon of an antelope to a leap of air.

Julian stretched languorously, her brain stretching, too, into twenty directions at once. How depraved it was to imagine or impose fixed roles in such a fluid situation! When the whole energy resided in this dancing balance—to take and be taken, give and receive, flicker effortlessly from one fever of surrender that lost nothing but regained one's self to another fever of passion that seized the surrender of the lover to the lover's self!

She yawned luxuriantly as a cat, congratulating herself on this dazzle of insights occurring for the first time ever in history, to her, Julian, the Chosen One. Fireworks of the intellect. Happy, oh happy Independence Day, she sang to herself.

Iliana stirred, opened her eyes, focused on Julian, and promptly announced in a sleepy voice that she was famished for breakfast but neither could she imagine ever being able to move again, considering what Julian had accomplished upon her last night.

“Then
I'll
make breakfast and we can have it in bed,” Julian shouted giddily, bouncing up to a sitting position. “What have we got? What would you like? Quail eggs? Truffles under crystal?”

“Dona nobis pacem. Such energy,” came the muffled reply, “We're out of everything but canned tins and condiments. I haven't had a chance to get to the market in days.” Iliana emitted a human purr as she rolled onto her back. “I want … croissants,” she blinked.

“Croissants you shall have. Fresh flakey croissants adrip with butter. Poached eggs greenly flecked with marjoram. Sizzling bacon, crisp as your laughter. Fragrant steaming espresso with a pungent curl of lem—”

“This is torture,” Iliana growled. “Don't describe it. Wave the wand and make it to
happen.
”

“—thick pulpy orange juice brassy as your smile, a triplecrème cheese
wantonly
gooey as your—”

“Juliana! This is not Tom Jones in a book! This is your starving lover whom you have incapacitated and who if you do not manage to feed soon will devour whatever is near,” Iliana slithered closer, smacking her lips menacingly.

Julian leapt out of bed and grabbed for her jeans, sweeping them up off the floor where they had been unceremoniously deposited the night before.

“What?” Iliana wailed. “Where are you going?”

“To the deli, silly twit. To wave the wand and make it to happen.”

“Wait, I'll go with you. Don't move so
quickly
, for god's sake.”

“No you won't. You'll lie there like an odalisque and I'll be back in a flash with a feast.”

“But I
want
to go with—”

“Please? I'm crackling with energy. Let
me
do something for a change?”

Iliana flopped back onto her pillow. “Just as well,” she groaned. “For me, I am not the same woman who went to bed last night. I will never be the same. Now I know how Atlantis felt after the tidal wave.”

Julian had already strapped on her sandals. “Then just lie there and float,” she called back, wriggling into her T-shirt as she stumbled toward the door. “The tidal wave is ebbing. But only for the moment.”

Running down the brownstone stairs, she hummed to herself, “Independence Day, Independence Day, I'm crazy and happy, does this mean I'm gay, tra la.”

Grove Street was serene as a sabbath, because of the national holiday. Only one other person was out so early, Jim Kwan, the always impeccably attired Hawaiian computer expert who lived just downstairs from Iliana. A short, rotund man in white linen shirt and shorts, he was walking his dachshund, the two of them a study in contrasting shapes. Julian called out a hello, wanting to address them as the Line and the Circle.

“Beautiful,
beautiful
amazingly
brilliant
day, don't you think?” she added, not waiting for a reply, but beaming as she swung past where the dog and his walker, pooper-scooper in hand at the ready, were stopped beside a tree. Fortunate man, she noted, the dachshund was at least a hundred and two years old and barely able to waddle; walking
him
could not be half so difficult as reconciling Sido and Phideaux in their polar temperaments and “sex role” styles.

Incredibly
reductive
, her fireworks brain flared again, to think of women playing
roles!
You didn't want an imitation man. You wanted another
woman. That
was it. Of course, the psychologists (the better ones) termed all this the “animus” or “anima,” the “male in the female and vice-versa.” Which not only missed the point but substituted another point entirely, still attributing action to some abstract male principle and reception to some abstract female one. Nor had the political rhetoric—lesbian, feminist, lesbian-feminist, or feminist-lesbian—really approached the implications of what such a glimpse of freedom might mean—for everyone, female and male, with a same-sex
or
opposite-sex lover. And for the
self
. Political insights at profound genius level, Julian congratulated herself.

She strode into the deli and danced through it rapidly, gathering up croissants, butter, cheese, eggs, and bacon into a small basket. Then she paused in front of the corner refrigeration bin. It was impossible to get at the orange juice. A low wall of stacked soup-can crates not yet unloaded barred her way. She looked around for the deli owner, but he was in conversation at the register with the sole other customer in the store.

“I tyell yoo dee Gaud's chonyest troot,” the customer was saying emphatically. “Deece dee honely cyontree for to bee frree een hyere.”

“You got it, buster. You're tellin'
me?
”

“Uh, please?” Julian called.

“Hi
knyow
. Hi cawm from Roosia honely seeks montas. Hi now trive tixi kib 'nd beink frree in Beeg Happle! Halso I vork as moofer and hahf my own wan.”

“Could somebody possibly help, uh—” Julian sang out again.

The deli owner rang up the man's purchase and pushed a paper bag toward him. “Yeah, the land o' the free. You people oughtta know.”

“Hi tyell you Hi
do
knyow! Commoneests hahfraid of Hamyerika, hahfraid of strunk cyontree 'nd strunk Preesiden' Rrrhaygan, ha ha.” He pounded the counter happily. Julian spied the Stars and Stripes tatooed on his forearm.

“Pretty bad in Russia, huh? I mean what's it
really
like over there? Ya hear all sorts of things.” The deli owner leaned across his counter in anticipation of
National Enquirer
gory details.

Julian sighed and looked longingly at the orange juice. She could just pass it up. But in the context, that seemed like a personal concession to the ultra-right wing.

“Hell, no,” she muttered, setting down her basket. She heaved the soup-can cartons one by one to the side, grunting with the effort, until she could reach the juice. Only when she approached the counter did she realize her effort had interrupted the solecisms of socialist sorrow. Both men were staring at her.

The deli owner rang up her purchases in respectful silence, apparently not daring to request that she perform Amazon act number two and re-stack his cartons. But the emigré cab driver was not so restrained.

“How cyome yoo such strunk geerrl?” he asked admiringly.

“Maybe because I'm a woman,” Julian snapped, counting her change. Then, suddenly remembering her one phrase of Russian, learned at the Crossroads Conference of International Women six years earlier, “Dóbro projálabat vy vismyrni feminism,” she smiled nastily at him, adding, “Welcome to international feminism,” for the deli owner's benefit. She gathered up her paper bag and stalked regally to the door. Behind her, the cab driver appealed to the deli man.

“Vhat Hi deed
say?
” he cried. “Hi honely be frreendly!”

The deli man shrugged. “Forget it, buster,” he grimaced. “Ya can't win. A guy can't do nuthin' right these days.”

His customer nodded sagely. “Hi knyow. Vimmin is crazy hall
hover
dee vorld.”

Enchanted with her riposte, Julian forgot her irritability the moment she hit the street again. She clasped her parcel as if it were her lover, and immediately re-immersed herself in her ruminations.

The
romance
of all this! This makes romance possible again! Her brain exuberated. Dear old Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughter Marie de France … the concept they invented … it was to protect women from being abducted and raped in the Middle Ages—romance, gallantry—long lost, especially to feminists … But every woman secretly
wants
romance … Some acknowledge it, some deny it, most feel guilty or childish about wanting it … It seems like a sign of weakness … This makes it
possible
again.

She raced up the stairs, unable to tell if her heart thumped from excitement or exertion. She could hear Iliana singing in the shower. It's
not
weakness when it's between two women, she reflected, unwrapping her parcels and starting breakfast in the kitchen. In the past weeks, Iliana had sent her flowers, toasted her with champagne, splashed her with rosewater—and Julian had learned the freedom, found the permission, to do the same things back.
That's
it, she concluded, that's why I don't feel compromised or purchased. Why hasn't anyone
told
everybody about this? She knitted her brows with concentration while setting the breakfast bedtable tray. And what do I care, care, care, the blood sang in her veins, I'm in love and I'm happy and it's Independence Day!