I Came Out for This? (11 page)

Of course, she didn't rave about my article. She doesn't rave about anything I do. She said that I made it sound as though racial tension was unique to Washington, and that in her experience, DC is more “comfortably diverse” than many other cities. I never suggested that racial tension was unique to Washington, but everyone knows that DC is burbling with it right now. Maybe she hasn't experienced racial tension because she
looks
like a light-skinned black girl and black people think she's black. No, that's not it. She's just oblivious in a funny way. She's the only woman I know, besides myself, who is comfortable being the only white person in a club, restaurant, or other gathering like the Caribbean street
festival. She hangs around the Islander restaurant and schmoozes with the Trinidadian owner. I can't imagine that she's unaware of how black people feel about gentrification. I'm sure she is, but I think she just needs to criticize me, no matter what I do. She did say my article was well-written, but that's like saying, “Joanna, you have a nose on your face.” I don't need her to tell me
that
. She's lucky I love her, or she wouldn't get away with being all persnickety about my article.

I really shouldn't be so euphoric about her calling more than a whole
week
after my story came out. I should be highly insulted, in fact. But I'm not. I'm three feet off the ground. Wait a minute. My house buddies are talking trash out on the porch and I'm going to yell something to them.

I just yelled, “Hey! Watch your language down there! There are ladies in the house!” And little Guillermo yelled back, “Hi, Joanna!” Just that sweet greeting made my heart soar. Life is good. The sun is shining and I feel as though I've just been released from a torture chamber. All because Terri broke up with that woman. I hate to say it, but if she had praised my article to the skies but was still going with Sandra, her call would have meant nothing to me. I am so unevolved it's frightening.

We're going dancing tomorrow at Phase One, the lesbian bar down near Eastern Market. I hope it goes well. I can never predict. That's what makes me so nervous all the time. Not that I wasn't nervous before I met her. I've always been nervous, as you've probably figured out by now. When I was a real little kid, I used to blink. They should have taken me to a shrink. Actually they
did
take me to
a shrink, but it wasn't because I blinked, it was because Karen's mom called them to report that I was snatching kids' hats off in the playground and she had found pieces of paper with penises drawn all over them, so my parents schlepped me to this child therapist to show that they weren't negligent. Privately they never thought anything was wrong with me at all. And they never changed their opinion.

I'm okay now. Everything is okay. I know just because I had sex with my horrid wench last night, it doesn't mean I'm going to live happily ever after. But damn, it was good. In fact, it was the best time I've ever had in my life. It was certainly the best time I've ever had with
her
. I think everything will be okay with us now. I hope so anyway. I didn't move all the way to DC to count the water spots in this little blue room.

She was waiting for me at Phase One last night, sitting at the bar in a red shirt and black pants and one of her vests. She looked nervous, but she gave me one of her emotional hugs, the way she does after a disaster happens which, in this case, was breaking up with that idiot Sandra. After we had a couple of drinks, she told me the whole saga and I am sheepish to admit I reveled in her acerbic remarks about the woman's pathologies. I was right! She did keep getting up in the middle of dinner to throw up! At least, that's what Terri conjectured, because she stayed away from the table for a real long time and then when she returned she would be kind of sick-looking. Also, in bed she kept talking about how she
still “has to get used to” being with a woman. This woman is about as gay as John Wayne.

Terri and I drank some cosmopolitans, and then we sat down and a cute young guy who was with some women friends sat down at our table (asking first if it was okay) and we were all blithering and blathering and the kid happened to mention that he was high on Ecstasy and he had some extras. Neither of us had ever done Ecstasy before. We looked at each other and I said, “Let's do some!” I must have been crazy— I haven't done drugs seriously in years— but sometimes you just get that urge. So we popped a couple E's and sailed away. Ecstasy is the most gorgeous drug. At first it made me nervous, but then we were dancing and all of a sudden I felt full—just full— full of my own life. I was pure liquefied energy. Terri and I started dancing in perfect coordination— we could have won a dance contest, we were so in synch.

During one song we did a little pirouette and I swung back around and nimbly kissed her and said, “I want to make love to you.” She got this little twinkle in her eye and said, “Oh you do, do you?” We paid our bill and drove in our separate cars to her building, both of us going about 60 miles per hour. I thought I was going to lose it, trying to find a place to park, but I found a space right away. We stormed into Terri's place, tore off our clothes, and fucked on her living room rug and on the couch and half on the rug and half on the couch, for hours. Simultaneously, using our fingers and hands—not any of this “you do me and I'll do you.” We moved as a single gyrating entity, trying different positions, standing
up and sixty-nine and me in the back and her in the back and side-by-side and one configuration that I don't think I could ever re-create. Afterwards we went to her room and slept in each other's arms all night. And this morning she brought me breakfast in bed—eggs over easy, rye toast, and orange juice without pulp. She remembered how I like everything. She even put cream and sugar in my coffee. What a good girl!

I hope she wasn't all happy and glowy this morning just because she had sex. I know she loves sex, but I hope that her high spirits had something to do with being with me. I know I was happy and glowy from being with her. I didn't even feel much of a hangover from our wild adventure. I left around noon and I've been buzzing around all day. I think she is really going to want to be with me now. Why would she want to be with anyone else? I lived out all my fantasies last night and I am so grateful to my baby that I am going to send her some flowers. I'll send her a big spray of daffodils.

Nobody I've told about last night sounded too happy about it. Kimba and a couple of my friends from Cleveland sounded concerned, as though I'd said I'd been hearing voices telling me to jump off the roof, and Bette was even worse, acting overtly solicitous like a psychiatric nurse. Jerome just repeated his mantra that Terri's a “player.” The only one who made me feel good was Guillermo, who lit up when I told him and said, “That's wonderful, honey! I hope everything works out!” The
other ones just don't get it. Do they know what it's like when someone walks into your life and fills up all the dry, empty spaces? The pop psychologists say the songs on the radio aren't true. They say a relationship can't save you, that you have to feel tippity-top by yourself. And when I think of how I swallowed all that for years, I want to scream. Because it turns out that
they
were wrong and the
songs
were right. You
can't
feel tippity-top by yourself. And a relationship
can
save you. You see it happen all the time.

Terri called to thank me for the flowers. She was so perfunctory about it you'd have thought I had just returned her vacuum cleaner. That's so typical of her. She invited me to a “play party” hosted by an organization called “Sexual Exploration by Women,” abbreviated to SEXX. It's a women's leather group in Virginia. I've never been to a play party. All I know is that these leather women are into acting out S&M fantasies. Maybe Terri will tie me up at the party and do things to me while I scream and plead with her to “Please stop! Please stop!” That would be the tits. I hope
she
initiates it. I don't want to
ask
to be rendered helpless. That would defeat the whole purpose.

The most lovely breeze is wafting through my screened windows. Birds are chirping, cars are sailing by, and the moist air is hugging me like an aunt you don't see very often, a pleasant hug, not enveloping like a grandmother's hug. That will happen in August, people tell me. They say, just wait. It gets really bad here in August. But they don't know me. Just as I loved my grandmother's hugs, I love a humid day. Without humidity, it just ain't summer. I would never want air conditioning. I love my little room
with my screened windows. Screens are among my favor-ite things. I can still hear the screen door slam when we used to run in and out of the house when we were kids. I'm talking about the old house, our little brick house on Lawson Drive, before we moved to the Big House (as Tommy calls it) and got central air and I started to feel trapped in.

Joanna, just go to the store.

I know I'm avoiding thinking about the future. I'm so used to chasing a butterfly that I don't know what I'll do once it's in my hand. Can we really live together? When I fell in love with her, I was ready to throw all my stuff in the proverbial U-Haul and move in with her. I could have lived in a broom closet with her. But now I don't know how it would work. She's very practical and down-to-earth, and she's critical and tactless and often not even nice. How could I live with her, let alone be her partner in life?

But I can be her partner in life. I want to be her partner in life. I just don't know if I could live with her. Is that a contradiction?

She could have been a little sweeter about the flowers, the little twit. Maybe I should tie
her
up at that party and do things to
her
. That would give me a great deal of pleasure.

That play party was ridiculous. I would have had more fun going to the Safeway.

The party was in a ranch house on a nondescript street in Fairfax, Virginia. A woman who looked like Morticia in the Addams Family opened the door and showed us to the living room, where a lot of really skinny or really fat women were drifting around in sailor and police uniforms and leather garments. They all looked tentative and insecure and alone. It felt like a “getting acquainted” gathering for employees of some bizarre company. We had no idea where the hostess was, or even if the hostess was on the premises, and we never did solve that mystery.

Most of the “action” took place in the living room, where a skinny naked butch woman lay on a massage table having saltwater squirted into her vagina by a straight-looking blonde woman. A few women stood there watching. It was so silly. The “victim” and the “torturer” were chattering to each other as though they were sitting in a kitchen having tea. Whenever the water torture got a little rough and the butch woman twitched
or winced, the blond woman turned into a cheer leader, cooing things like, “Just a little bit more now,” and “You're doing so well!” Terri said in her tactless fashion, “What is this, an S&M scene or a Lamaze class?” and I had to pretend I didn't know her. Someone next to us said the blond woman was a “professional” from California, and Terri said, “If she's a professional dominatrix, we're all in trouble.” I thought that was a good time to walk away, so I went to another scene taking place in the corner of the room. A frizzy-haired girl lay on a mat in her underpants while a crewcutted tomboy leaned over her, pushing and stretching and otherwise manipulating her arms and legs. Terri came over and watched, and I said “What are they supposed to be doing?” and Terri said, “Maybe she's practicing kneading dough,” and I started laughing so hard that we had to leave. We peaked into the next room, where an enormous woman was strapped to a whipping post while someone who looked like her identical twin whipped her back with a toy whip like the kind you find in those “pleasure” shops. Their expressions were completely blank. Terri said, “Hm. Tenderizing meat,” which made me lose it again.

As a last resort we went into the dining room, where the table was laid out with an imaginative platter of celery, carrots, and cauliflower, French onion dip and humus. The accompaniment was red punch. I asked a sailor woman if there was any beer and she said they don't allow alcohol at these parties, I suppose because someone might get drunk and ram a hose up someone's gigi and not be able to get it out.

We left without eating. All the way home we laughed
and made fun of the party, but I felt kind of disappointed. I thought maybe we would end up doing some kind of kinky scene in there, but the event had all the eroticism of a children's piano recital. Also I felt strangely deflated about Terri taking me there in the first place. I want her to make love with me. Nobody's ever made love with me before, being sweet and tender with me all night and then the two of us lying in bed the whole next day, drinking mimosas and cuddling. The other night was wonderful, but it wasn't what you'd call making love. It was just fucking. The fact that Terri took me to that party before she's made love to me makes me feel kind of bad.