Sudden Death (22 page)

“Is it true?”

“Yes,” she said.

Miguel sighed. “I guess I always knew. I don’t understand
it. I don’t know if you were born that way or if it’s a disease like alcoholism, but I know this: it could cost you a bloody fortune.”

Carmen started to cry. Miguel put his arm around her. He wasn’t going to tell her how bad it could really be. Perhaps the chestnut could still be plucked from the fire.

“What do I do?”

“Lie.”

“Christ, Miguel!” she sobbed.

“Everybody else does. Don’t be a fool.”

“What about Harriet?”

“I don’t know.” He stroked his moustache. “I suppose I could marry her. If she’s good enough for you, she ought to be good enough for me.” He tried to laugh.

Carmen was bewildered. His suggestion had a bizarre and unexplored psychological flavor to it. “What good would that do?”

“It would explain why you two room together on the road and live together in Cazenovia—she couldn’t sleep openly with me. Now that Kuzirian is accusing her of being a lesbian, we’ll tell the real truth.”

“She told him she loved me.” Carmen stated this with some pride.

“That was wrong.”

“You should have been there. It’s not like you think. She didn’t ever announce it.”

Miguel raised his hand to stop this torrent. “No doubt, no doubt. We can say he’s trying to get a story that doesn’t exist. She does love you as a friend and future sister-in-law. We’ll make him look like shit.”

“I don’t know.”

“Think about it. We’ve got to do something.”

Tomahawk’s corporate offices were so high up in a Manhattan skyscraper that employees swore they suffered nosebleeds. Howard Dominick pulled at his thinning hair, a sure sign of advanced misery, since he usually took great pains with his remaining strands.

“I told Lavinia something had to be done about those girls.”

Ruth, his long enduring secretary, nodded in agreement.

“Tomahawk can’t afford this. What will our customers think? Are they going to look at our salesclerks funny? They’ll think we underwrite some kind of lesbian harem. Besides”—he lowered his voice—“we’ve sunk in so much money in order to become identified with women’s tennis, how can we get out of it now?”

“It may not be as bad as all that,” Ruth said soothingly.

“I can see the mail we’re going to get, to say nothing about what the Old Man will say.” The reference to Jensen Bainbridge caused him to shudder. “They’ll say women tennis players are all a bunch of dykes.” He yanked his hair again.

Trying to inject a note of humor, Ruth said, “What matters is, are they butch? If the girls look feminine, we can squeak by.”

“Hell, even the straight ones look butch.” Howard put his head in his hands.

So rampant was Susan Reilly’s public display of heterosexuality that Alicia Brinker fully expected her to wear diaphragms for earrings. Craig and Lisa were with her at Hilton Head while Alicia bunked out with a player who just qualified off the Futures Circuit. Susan, never bound by such considerations as sexual fidelity, banged away on Craig nightly. Every third word out of Susan’s mouth was “my
husband” or “my daughter.” Alicia read her New Testament. There didn’t seem to be an answer that applied to what she was feeling. She knew that the person she loved had done something unspeakably rotten. Alicia had not added two and two together, but it was a matter of time. She was good at math.

Initially she didn’t believe Susan was the source of Martin Kuzirian’s column. Egoists don’t go around talking about other people. Susan wouldn’t blow the whistle on Carmen. Besides, if people started thinking the women’s tennis circuit was a hotbed of lesbianism, wouldn’t Susan herself be in jeopardy? It slowly occurred to Alicia that Susan’s best defense was a good offense. Direct attention away from herself. Maybe it was true that the people most vehemently opposed to homosexuality were themselves closet cases. Alicia dismissed these thoughts. It couldn’t be true. Nonetheless, she felt as though bugs were crawling up her spine.

She closed her eyes, opened her Bible, placed her finger blindly on the page, then read the following passage:

Alicia reread the passage. She closed her Bible and felt worse.

She couldn’t have felt worse than Carmen and Harriet who were still rocked by Kuzirian’s disclosure. After a twenty-four-hour interval, Lavinia made her entrance into Carmen’s condominium. Under the circumstances, Lavinia behaved admirably.
She contained her dislike for Harriet and discussed the matter with both of them. She had brains enough to know she’d get nowhere by pitting Carmen against Harriet. Her argument was logical if one accepted her original premise, specifically, people don’t want to know the truth and they don’t need to know the truth. A tennis player is an entertainer whose job is to provide spectators with a few hours of pleasure away from the cares of their lives.

Lavinia cast no blame. She spoke for women’s tennis as she saw it. Harriet grudgingly respected Lavinia. Lavinia made no bones about anything larger than her profession, and she was more than willing to compromise to advance that profession. However, Harriet squirmed when Lavinia requested that Harriet get lost, that Carmen vehemently deny all rumor of lesbianism, and that Carmen find a boyfriend fast and get a blurb in
People
magazine to that effect. Lavinia was good friends with one of the editors.

Lavinia zeroed in on Harriet. “You’re older, Harriet. You know that Carmen has five years left minus injuries. Her career is a short one. What’s a sacrifice on your part? The two of you can be together quietly at home. Life on the road is grueling. Take a much deserved rest, Harriet. Carmen can do whatever she wants when she retires. She can live more openly then, if that’s how you see your lives, but for now, she must think only of tennis. I know a press conference may seem odious, but life isn’t always what you want it to be, and people aren’t always what we want them to be. America isn’t ready for a lesbian scandal in women’s tennis. Neither are the sponsors. There’s more to this than the two of you. Try to think of the big picture.” She paused. “Let me put it this way, Harriet, you have a different perspective so you probably think sports are not very important, but twelve-year-old girls look up to Carmen. You don’t want them to think she’s a lesbian, do you?”

Harriet found the lecture so beyond even a retort that she
listened without opening her mouth. Lavinia took this for acquiescence. After a few more well-chosen words, she exited, not without some style.

Carmen lit a cigarette after Lavinia left. Harriet was unusually quiet. That bothered Carmen.

“What are you thinking?”

“What?” Harriet jumped out of her skin.

“Thinking, what are you thinking?”

“I’m trying to balance what people say against what I feel and then balance all that against what’s right for you.”

“I’m not a liar.” Carmen exhaled a dragon’s breath of blue smoke.

“No, you’re not.”

“Everyone’s asking me to lie.”

Harriet tried not to pray her lover would be the woman she wanted her to be. She prayed instead that she would be able to love Carmen no matter what she did.

“I don’t want to be a martyr,” Carmen snapped.

“They’re asking me to embrace amorous martyrdom, not you.”

Carmen paced. “Yeah, yeah. They are sure dumping it on you. Everyone’s dumping it on you.”

“I’m an easy target. I told the truth and that makes me a sucker.”

“Miguel says it has to do with advertising.”

“Oh?”

“He says that we’re bombarded by lies about products. You know, you buy an eggbeater that will last until eternity but it falls apart in a week. He says it makes all Americans liars. No one trusts anyone or anything anyone says.”

“He might be right. We aren’t what we were when I was a little girl.” Harriet remembered when no one locked her doors.

“Why did this happen to me?” Carmen was bewildered.

“Damned if I know. I’m still trying to figure out why I
was born. Right now it would be better for you if I hadn’t been born.”

Carmen stubbed out her cigarette. “You’re not getting enough oxygen.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Run away.”

“You can’t!”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I can’t make that decision. It’s your life.”

“No, it’s your life.” Carmen kept moving around the room.

“Honey, it’s our lives, but it’s your conscience and your career. I’ll love you no matter what you do.”

“Even if I lie?”

“If I stopped talking to people or liking them because they lied, I expect I’d have but one friend left, Baby Jesus. No, I’d have Jane Fulton. There are a few people out there who aren’t chasing the bubble popularity.”

“I feel so small. Do you think I’m a coward?”

“No, I think you’re torn, and you’re scared. You’re human. You don’t look small. I didn’t say that I loved you because I’m a hero or Wonder Woman. I did it because I couldn’t live with myself if my relationships with other people were predicated on falsities. Not direct lies exactly, but falsities. I still believe a person is only as good as their word. If a person lies about one thing, soon enough they’ll lie about other things. I couldn’t betray myself. I didn’t know that when I barked at Kuzirian but maybe my whole life led up to that moment. I am what I am.”

Carmen burst out crying. “I don’t want to be pushed around. I don’t want to be a piece of meat. I want to be my own person! I hate all this. I feel so trapped but you can’t lose as much as I can. I could lose millions of dollars!”

Harriet felt the blood rush to her face. “What’s the difference if it’s three thousand or three million dollars? Is sorrow
measured by the account book? Nothing is nothing, and after this, I have nothing. No job, nothing.”

“I’ll take care of you.”

“For how long?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you can’t be alone, honey. If I’m hidden away in Cazenovia, and you’re on the road eight to nine months out of the year, how long will it be before you find a new lover? For a while you can cover by calling her your coach or your business manager or your secretary. But how long will it be before you want to bring her to our house?”

This cut to the quick because deep in her heart Carmen knew it to be true. She exploded. “That’s not true. I love you. And what is all this truth bullshit? I can do more good by being the best woman tennis player in the world than I can do by telling people the truth about you or lesbianism. I’m someone to look up to. I’m number one. I’m an example. Lavinia is right about the twelve-year-old girls. They need heroes.”

“Is it so inconceivable that people might like you for just what you are? Whether you’re a lesbian or not, you are still number one. No one can take that away from you.”

“No one else is taking chances. Why should I? Answer me that! And if what you say is true, why are gay people still in the closet? America’s two hundred and forty million people, right? How many accomplished people can you name who have told the truth about themselves? Americans are such cowards they import Quentin Crisp to do the dirty work for them!”