Clio Rising

by Paula Martinac

  “Here’s what you’ll do,” Bea went on. “It sounds like Clio is going through a patch of moody reminiscence about Flora. She’ll get over it, she’s done it before, and I want you there when she does. You can trim your schedule a little, miss a day here and there. She probably won’t notice.”

  I was waiting for further instructions, which weren’t forth-coming. “Anything else?” Bea asked, as if I’d initiated the closed-door meeting.

  I hesitated, then blurted out the question I’d been pondering for a while. “Do you know who Louise was?”

  Bea’s interest was piqued. “Louise Durand?”

  “Clio gets perturbed by the name Louise for some reason, and there was a nurse at the hospital named Louise who set her off.” I left out the part about the editor named Louise and the “Madame Louise” story Clio had written.

  “She was Clio’s benefactor,” Bea said. “I met her a few times when I was young, not through Clio but in another context. She died a few years back, had to have been a hundred.”

  Having a benefactor would explain why Clio might have more money stashed away than I originally imagined.

  “Her husband made a fortune in railroads, but then he died and Louise made a career of spending it,” Bea went on. “Somewhere along the way, she cut Clio off. Abruptly. Even Montrose doesn’t say why, and it was well before my time.”

  I let the information sink in.

  “Livvie, are you trying to tell me Clio stopped writing again? Is that why she doesn’t need you as much?”

  Cornered, I had to admit that Clio was abandoning her idea of a collection.

  “But I want you to know I didn’t do anything to cause it,” I said in a voice that sounded pathetic, even to me.

  “No one said you did,” Bea snapped. “Although you were so sure that trip of yours would help her progress, not hinder it.”

  I didn’t recall being that certain, but it seemed futile to disagree. “I was wrong,” I said.

  Bea grunted something under her breath and dismissed me by saying she had to make phone calls. Her tone made me suspect that my months-long streak as the golden girl of the office had officially come to an end.

  • • •

  To understand Clio better, I knew I needed to finish reading Clio Hartt: A Life by Sylvia Montrose— the book Gerri had lent me. There had been an earlier biography of Clio written by a man, Gerri explained, but it studied her only in juxtaposition to her male counterparts, and Montrose had employed a feminist lens. Still, Gerri faulted Montrose for shying away from using the “L” word for Clio, despite her relationships with women.

  My three boxes of books stood in a sturdy tower in my bedroom, unopened. I hadn’t seen the point of unpacking everything at Ramona’s because it was unclear how long she’d let me stay.

  When I removed every book from the boxes and spread them across the bed and floor, the Montrose volume wasn’t there. I searched the assortment twice. I remembered it as an expensive-looking hardcover that would be hard to miss among my mostly paperback collection. Gerri had pointed out with pride that it was even signed by the author, whose reading she had attended at Brentano’s.

  Panic didn’t set in until after the second pass through all the books. There were only three hardcovers, all Norton anthologies from my college days.

  Thea had helped me pack everything before my moving day, so I called to ask if she remembered seeing the Montrose biography.

  “I didn’t know you owned that,” she said. “I would have liked to read it.”

  “It’s Gerri’s, and it’s missing.”

  “I know we double-checked the bookshelves in your room before we left. Did you give it back to Gerri at some point?”

  “No, I always intended to finish reading it.”

  “Well, you could buy her another one.”

  “It was signed.” I sighed, worried that only one option remained. “You think Barb took it?”

  “I wouldn’t put anything past Barb.”

  On an afternoon after I’d brought Clio some cat food for Remington and coffee and bread for herself, I wandered over to Fifteenth Street at the time I knew Barb would be getting ready to leave for work. Luckily, the intercom, like the door lock, never worked well— it was mostly static— so she buzzed me in without knowing who it was.

  She stood with arms crossed outside the apartment door.

  “Carolina. I never thought I’d see you here again. What’d you do, forget where you live?”

  “It seems like I left something behind when I moved.”

  “What was that, your pride or your common sense?”

  “Ha ha,” I said. “Look, did you . . . do you by any chance have my biography of Clio? The one by Montrose?” I stopped short of hurling the accusatory, “Did you take . . .” at her.

  “Let’s see,” she said, her hand to her chin in mock consideration. “I’m not sure. Do you by any chance have my Foghorn Leghorn glass?”

  I’d expected the question, so I had the glass tucked into my messenger bag. I withdrew it and held it out to her.

  “That book is worth way more than this,” I said, as if cost alone could justify my nicking one of her prized possessions.

  She snatched it from me. “I can’t believe you actually stole from me,” she said. “I was good to you, Carolina.”

  Barb went into the apartment and left the door open for me to follow her.

  “Well, you stole from me, too. Where’s the book?”

  “For the record, I didn’t steal from you,” she said, emerging from her bedroom with the Montrose volume and a second book, too, a paperback with a green cover. “I saw it on your shelf and just wanted to take a look, but I guess I forgot to put it back.”

  “What were you doing in my room when I wasn’t home?”

  “Oh, please. Like you never went into my room?”

  I had, but I hadn’t taken anything, which seemed less reprehensible.

  “So let’s drop all the indignation and call it even, okay?” she suggested. “We both got our property back.”

  “Thanks,” I said, accepting the book.

  She startled me by shoving the paperback at me, too— But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies.

  “What’s this for?”

  “Your girlfriend. If she still is your girlfriend.”

  Total confusion set in. “You bought Thea a book?”

  “N-o-o,” Barb said with fake patience. “She gave it to me. I don’t want it anymore.”

  My eyes darted back and forth from Barb to the book.

  “Hasn’t she given you any Black Studies books yet? She made it kind of a mission with me. I would have thought you’d have a whole shelf by now.” She smirked. “Oh, wait, you didn’t know I came before you? Well, we weren’t together long enough to qualify as ‘girlfriends.’ I sure don’t count her.”

  Thea always acted like the very sight of Barb turned her stomach, but I’d never considered that was because they’d dated before we met and the affair came to a bad end.

  Careful not to look at her and betray my alarm, I slipped the two books into my bag, and the weight of them made me list to one side.

  “Have a nice life, Carolina,” Barb said as I headed for the stairs, desperate to be out in the cool air. “You and me probably would have been okay if Gerri and Thea hadn’t flipped you.” A curious choice of words, I thought, like I was a double agent.

  I waved over my shoulder, figuring there was a chance I might run into her again at Ariel’s or someplace else in the small sphere that was Lesbian New York. But in fact, I never saw her again.

  • • •

  When I appeared, uninvited, at Thea’s apartment door, she was dressed in baggy sweats and an oversized Cornell hoodie she had lent me the night I slept over; in fact, it was the only thing of hers that fit me. Tortoise-shell glasses made her look like the nerdy professor she aspired to be. I knew she wore contacts— our first night together, we had to trek to a deli for solution so she cou
ld spend the night— but we’d been together such a short time, I’d barely seen her in glasses.

  “Livvie, I’m prepping for class,” she said, without any movement to let me in. “Eight o’clock comes early.”

  I had planned for this all the way uptown and was not prepared to back down. Reaching into my bag, I fished out the book.

  “Barb asked me to return this to you.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  After I had left Barb’s, I’d opened the front cover and read the inscription: In Sisterhood (and more!) – xoxo Thea 5/83. It was the “xoxo” that had made my blood start pumping and set my feet on the path to the A train. Thea had never had a single good thing to say about Barb, but as recently as seven months ago she’d given her a book with an “xoxo” inscription.

  I flipped the cover open for her now.

  “Oh,” she said, taking it without looking at me. “I forgot all about this. Well, thanks. You can’t have too many copies of But Some of Us Are Brave.” She stood aside so I could enter, and then continued down the hallway to the living room. Vern’s room was empty so I was free to make a scene.

  “That’s all you’re going to say?”

  “I gave that to her before I met you, before you even lived in New York,” Thea said.

  “But in all the times you were bad-mouthing Barb, you never thought to tell me you two had gone out?”

  “It was hardly ‘going out,’” she said, making air quotes. She flopped onto the couch and tossed the book onto the coffee table, where it landed next to texts she was reading for class. “It was a few weeks. Maybe a month.”

  “And that means what? You had dinner? Went to movies? Slept with her?”

  Thea bit her bottom lip. “All of the above. At first, she acted like she was into me, but pretty soon she told me I was too vanilla. Can you believe it? The only chocolate girl she probably ever dated!”

  I just stared at her.

  “You think I’m crazy, but Barb’s smart and you know she can be charming when she wants to be. She was flattering about my job and the PhD thing, and I fell for it. At first I even liked that she tried to run the salon. I thought we could have a casual thing, something to dull the pain of Diane. I probably could have even overlooked the kinky stuff she was into. Hey, I was at the Barnard conference, she wasn’t. I know about that shit.” I didn’t know what “the Barnard conference” referred to, but she was on a roll and not to be interrupted. “But I was too vanilla.” This time the word had even more sting to it as if Thea still smarted from the rebuke.

  I thought she’d finished, but she rambled on, not even bothering to look at me— almost like I wasn’t there. “She couldn’t even let me down smooth. No, that would have been too uncool. She had her reputation to preserve. I saw her more clearly after that and we started taking swipes at each other.”

  When she finally looked at me again, her face displayed a weird blend of emotions— maybe embarrassment at having withheld the truth, but also annoyance that she had to defend herself. “Everything with Barb got worse and worse, and when you first came to the salon, I wasn’t even sure I was going to stay.”

  A big, sad bubble welled up in my chest as I realized I’d been a casual thing for Thea, too. That would explain why she didn’t tell me about her job search, why she kept urging me to keep things light. I was another step in her ascent away from Diane.

  “I should go,” I said.

  “Livvie, don’t be like this.”

  Don’t be like this. Her words vibrated in my ears; Hallie had said the same thing.

  Maybe I should have known we would fizzle out like this, like the lyrics of that old song Aunt Sass liked: “our love affair was too hot not to cool down.” Maybe the incident with Diane on Thanksgiving should have been a clue. Or maybe I should have spent more time puzzling over why someone like Thea was interested in me in the first place.

  She made a few attempts to get me to stay and talk it out, but everything she said sounded halfhearted in my ears. On the other side of her apartment door, I listened for the click of the dead bolt before heading to the nearest pay phone.

  • • •

  Gerri was working late, and I caught her before she left the office. “I’m meeting Renee,” she said. “Can you tell me in thirty seconds? Or better yet, can it wait?”

  I raced to summarize. “It might be over with Thea,” I said because that was the quickest way to the problem.

  “Oh, man, look, meet me at Renee’s,” she said. “I’ll be there by six-thirty.”

  “But Renee—”

  “She’s good in somebody else’s crisis. I’m really sorry, Liv.”

  I stopped at a bodega for a Bud, which I swigged from a paper bag like a derelict. On the C train, a rider or two glanced at me like they couldn’t believe I was openly defying the law. When a transit cop strolled through our car, I tucked the bag behind me on the seat. A guy across the aisle nodded at me as the cop passed as if to say he would have done the same thing himself.

  There was a doorman on duty at Renee’s building whom I hadn’t seen before. His name tag read “Miguel,” and his uniform was identical to Jorge’s, but he didn’t bother with the bellhop-style cap and his tie was loose. In fact, he seemed looser in general, like it had been a long shift and he couldn’t wait to get back to his real life.

  “I don’t think Renee’s expecting me,” I said, as he buzzed her apartment. “But Gerri told me to come. She’s on her way.”

  “She ain’t here yet,” Miguel said. “But I believe you.” I looked a little more respectable because I’d swallowed the last of the Bud on the sidewalk, pitched the bottle, and tossed a Tic Tac into my mouth.

  “Livvie Bliss. Nice name,” he said into the phone, with a faint smile in my direction. “She says Miss Gerri invited her. Okay. Sure.” He listened, then laughed. “Sí. Tuve un mal día.” He listened again, then said something I didn’t catch, and finally mumbled, “Gracias” and replaced the receiver. “You can go up.” I’d had a year of Spanish in high school, which amounted to just enough words to figure out he’d had a bad day. It wasn’t necessary or expected, but I tipped him a couple of bucks— first because he’d said he believed me, but mostly because he got my name right on the first try.

  Renee was opening the door as I stepped off the elevator. “What, no cookies?” she asked with a flirtatious tip of her chin. “I’m not sure I can let you in without cookies.”

  “No cookies, sorry.”

  “Then you owe me.”

  Renee had staged the apartment for romance, and I instantly regretted coming. She lit tapers and pillar candles in different locations, and set two wineglasses out on the coffee table alongside a bottle of red with a French label.

  “Oh my God, I’m the third wheel,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  She shrugged. “If Gerri told you to come, it must be important.” She opened the wine while I slumped in a chair and tossed down my bag. My coat stayed on so I wouldn’t look like I expected too much of their time.

  “Here,” she said, handing me a glass. “You look like shit, by the way.”

  Which made me smile through my misery. I took the wine gratefully, and it was smoother than anything I’d ever been able to afford.

  “I never knew wine wasn’t supposed to taste like vinegar,” I said, to keep it light.

  Renee poured a glass for herself, too, and took a seat across from me. “So . . . what happened? Or you want to wait for Gerri?” She was a lot nicer than I remembered, but then I’d met her when the whole drama with Barb was first going down. Maybe this was the Renee that Gerri loved and had been with for years. Maybe the other Renee was just an aberration, someone who went wild briefly and then returned to sanity. The wine soothed and warmed me, and once I started, my words tumbled like a rock slide. In the chronology, I had just finished telling Renee about handing Thea the book when I heard a soft knock at the door. They were together again, but Gerri still didn’t walk in using her own key. />
  “Uno momento,” Renee said, jumping up to answer the door. I cast my eyes down to give them privacy but heard a distinct smack of lips as Gerri entered. Alice came running from wherever she’d been sleeping and scraped at Gerri’s legs until she picked her up.

  Gerri carried her little dog to me and set her gently in my lap. “Let Miss Alice comfort you. She’s really good at that.” As if on cue, Alice licked my nose and then circled three times before arranging herself in a comfortable curl across my thighs.

  If Gerri reacted at the mention of Barb’s name, it wasn’t noticeable. Renee’s eyes fell to her glass, but Gerri held my gaze with admirable stoicism. The affair with Barb had hurt them both, and the wound had barely scabbed over. What I felt about Thea was nothing in comparison— disappointment more than grief— and my angst seemed almost juvenile.

  Gerri sipped her wine, and reserved comment until I finished. “That’s tough, Liv,” she said with a sympathetic nod. “All I can tell you is there are peaks and valleys in relationships. You get through them and move on, learn to trust each other again.” She and Renee, sitting so close together on the couch, were indeed a testament to “moving on.” But Gerri was seeing my situation with Thea through the wrong lens.

  “There’s more to it,” I said. “It’s not like you guys. You have this history. I mean, ever since Thea told me about her job interview and that she was only applying to schools out of town, I had this weird feeling she doesn’t want to be as invested in me as I could be in her. In a funny way, even though she was the one who pursued me, it’s like I’m more into her than vice versa.”

  “Talk more about what worries you,” Renee chimed in, the therapist-in-training trying to push me toward a breakthrough. “That Thea will move away?”

  My hands rested along Alice’s warm sides, and the comforting in and out of her breathing made it easier to talk. What also helped was reading compassion and concern on both their faces, not just idle interest that might fuel future gossip.