Kris slung an arm over my shoulder and extended the other in front of me toward Ray. “I’m Kris.”
Their brief handshake seemed like a conversation, communicating power dynamics and relationships.
“Oh, I’m being a bad host!” Derek said. “Introductions!” He introduced the rest of the table, facilitated chitchat about Ray’s occupation (salesclerk) and others at the table (tech and design people). Then we wound around to me.
“Phoenix is a trapeze artist,” Kris said proudly. “Very talented.”
“Aerial dancer,” I said.
“How did we not know this?” Teddy asked his partner. “Circus people are here!”
“Like in the circus?” Jeremy asked in the same moment.
“Like Cirque du Soleil?” Ray asked a second later.
“More Cirque than circus,” I explained. “But I’m not that good.”
“She’s very good,” Kris said.
“You have to say that,” Eric teased her.
“How long have you two been together?” Ray asked us.
Kris and I exchanged a questioning look. Nobody had asked us that. We assumed that Eric and Derek’s friends had been briefed on our situation because they didn’t ask questions about that, or really about us at all. Maybe it was just that they were all old friends and were eager to catch up, but the spotlight had been comfortably off of us the whole time.
“I’ve been her sub for about three months,” I said finally. I glanced at Kris to see how she took that tidy summary, and she gave me a little nod.
“Oh, like me,” Ray said and smiled. They had impossibly perfect teeth.
“But I haven’t seen you at any parties,” I said.
“I haven’t seen you either. I usually go with them Saturdays.”
“I’m sometimes performing Saturdays, for work.”
“We keep missing each other,” Ray said with a grin. “I hope that isn’t the case for much longer.”
It was my turn to blush. Other people took over the conversation, and Ray and I exchanged a little more small talk over the delicious and extravagant meal. Ray had to cut out early to go to work, and after they left, the guys complimented Eric and Derek on their new sub. As they did, Kris eyed me carefully.
After a long afternoon and evening of food and drink and conversation, Kris and I waddled into a cab, tipsy and stuffed. “How was it?” Kris asked me, a hand on my knee.
“Great. Thank you so much for letting me come.”
“It was nice to have you there.” After a beat she asked, “What did you think of Ray?”
I picked at my cuticle. “They were nice. Cute.”
“Uh-huh.” She leaned in and whispered in my ear, “Because Derek told me Ray loves girls, and those guys love to lend out their subs.”
My skin felt hot. What on earth? Was Kris really suggesting that she’d make one of my secret fantasies come true with one of the most attractive people I’d ever seen?
I didn’t ask for permission. I kissed her fiercely. We made out in the back of the cab all the way home.
Chapter Twelve
We didn’t have much time to talk about, let alone arrange, any fantasy scenarios in the weeks that followed. Sasha and I got extremely lucky booking holiday parties, and our schedule was the fullest it had ever been. Kris had even more work than usual. We managed our daily schedule, but our longer sessions and play parties started to fall by the wayside. We promised we’d find time for at least one more extended session together before I went to New Mexico for Christmas with my family.
The last Friday before I left, I expected a play party, but instead of getting home around seven thirty and rushing us off to the night’s locale, Kris stomped in just after five. I’d never seen her home so early.
“Hello?” I called from the kitchen. I’d been looking at the fridge and debating cooking up the meager options or going to the store.
“Hi,” Kris answered in a nasal voice. She flopped onto the couch. I looked her over. Her nose was red and she looked pale and exhausted.
“Are you sick?” We’d managed to make it through the fall with nothing worse than a brief head cold for me. Kris had bragged that she never, ever got sick.
Kris sniffled. “I’m dying.”
“Want some tea before you do?” She made a noncommittal noise and I put the kettle on.
“I was fine this morning, just a little congested,” she said.
“It happens.”
“Not to me!”
I walked to the living room and stood in front of her, feeling her forehead. “I don’t think you have a fever, but you’re clammy. Why don’t you get in your pajamas and some slippers, I’ll make you some tea and soup, and you relax?” I ruffled her short hair.
“We’re not going to play tonight.” She looked miserable.
“Clearly. Go get changed.”
Kris dragged herself up the stairs. I made us both mint tea with honey and pulled a batch of tortilla soup from the freezer, one I’d been particularly proud of, along with the last portion of frozen tomato soup.
“Tomato or tortilla soup?” I asked when I heard her coming down the stairs.
“Tomato, and can I have a grilled cheese sandwich? And orange soda?”
“Do you turn into a little kid when you’re sick?”
“Don’t laugh.” She shuffled up to a chair in the dining room. I’d never seen her flannel pajamas before, even in the laundry, and I knew why. Kristen Andersen, wunderkind and dom, was wearing baby blue jammies with monkeys printed all over. Sweet cartoon monkeys with bananas.
“This is a new side of you.” I turned my back and stifled a giggle.
Kris slumped in her chair. “I don’t get sick,” she said. “So I don’t know how to act. And these are my only pajamas. My mom bought them.”
“You’re fine. I’m just teasing.” I poked around in the fridge. “No orange soda but there’s ginger ale. A grilled cheese seems possible, though. Want it with the soup or before?”
“With the soup. In triangles.” I brought her a mug of tea and a can of ginger ale. She sipped the tea and complained that it was hot.
I wanted to tease her more, but she looked so pathetic I could only feel sorry for her. Sorry and unexpectedly fond of her. “Go find something for us to watch, some bad TV or a movie. Relax.”
“Phoenix?” She looked at me with huge eyes, her glasses put away for the night. “Thank you for taking care of me. Nobody ever takes care of me.”
“How can they, if you never get sick?” I stirred the soup.
“I mean it.”
“You’re welcome. Grab a blanket and get comfortable on the couch. I’ll be there in a second.”
We settled in to a cheesy romantic comedy, the last of the tomato soup I’d made the month before, plenty of fluids, and grilled cheese in triangles. I tucked the blanket around Kris. We ate with just the sound of the movie.
“This is delicious.” She slurped her spoonful, despite her usually faultless manners.
“Thanks.”
“It’s the best thing you’ve ever made.”
“You’ve had this before, remember? This is leftovers.”
“I never remember what I eat. I just gobble it up as fast as possible and get back to work.”
“In that case I’m going to start making a lot less effort.” I nudged her.
“I’m sorry. I should pay more attention.” She sounded genuinely sad.
“You’re okay.” I rubbed her back lightly.
“Maybe my priorities are all wrong. I’ve been so stressed out. That’s probably why I got sick.” She blew her nose. “You know what I have planned for Christmas? Catching up on reports I should have read last week.”
I frowned. “You’re not going to see your family at all?”
She shook her head. “I see my parents once a year, for their wedding anniversary at the end of July. I call them every couple of weeks and on holidays, and that’s plenty. I used to go for Christmas or Thanksgiving
, but I hate traveling around the holidays. My brother and his wife live in Seattle with their kids, and my sister comes in with her kid, and I feel like I’m intruding on family time. They have this completely different relationship with my parents, and then I show up and everyone tries to catch up, but half the time I’m checking my phone or trying to write an email under the table. Besides, they always want to know about my personal life, and what do I say?”
“What do you say?”
“When I had a girlfriend, I’d mention her, but I haven’t brought anyone home in a decade. For a while it’s been, ‘I’m working a lot. I’m dating but no one special.’”
“Ouch, what a cold phrase.”
“They want me to get married and have kids. Any hint of a serious relationship would give them the wrong idea. Besides, I am not discussing anything kinky with them, and I haven’t had a girlfriend for years; I’ve had subs. What would you say in that situation?”
I shrugged.
Kris thought for a minute. “Actually, that’s a good question. What are you going to say to your family?”
“It’s different. They’re perfectly happy to talk about my career and what everyone is reading. They don’t pry about my personal life.”
“Is it denial? They’re uncomfortable with you being gay so they’d rather not talk about it?”
I laughed. “No. If anything, they miss Amanda. She and my mom still email, mostly about work since they’re both English lit people. Every once in a while, my mom will tell me what Amanda’s doing, or ask if I’ve talked to her lately. I mean, Amanda and I are friends on Facebook and we parted on good terms, but there’s a reason we broke up, you know? We ran out of common ground, and it’s hard to keep a friendship going with your long-distance ex when you want to talk about the nitty-gritty of making a living out of art, and she wants to talk about theory and academia. Except, my parents also want to talk about theory and academia. Amanda has a serious girlfriend now, but my parents used to try to get us back together, like for years. She was the great student that I never was, and my mom sort of mentored her, so they wish they could keep her in the family. Unfortunately, no one I’ve dated since has been anything like that.”
“So it’s not that you’re queer, just that you’re a weird artist.”
“A weird artist who isn’t dating anyone they can relate to. Sometimes Carolena would get nerdy about politics, and my dad liked that for a minute. But she was so militant. Everything was revolution and reclaiming Aztlan, and my dad had been so deep in that when he was young that he was like, ‘Yeah, but how are you actually learning from our mistakes?’ He teaches at least one student like that every semester, so he can get cynical. As for my mom, she gets bored if arguments aren’t sufficiently nuanced, and Carolena’s were not.”
I could see Kris trying to work something out in her head and frowning with the effort.
“You don’t know what Aztlan is, do you?” I asked.
“I’m making a mental note to look it up.”
Kris sneezed and I handed her a box of tissues. “It’s the legendary original home of the Aztecs. But it’s also what some people call the part of the US that used to belong to Mexico. Well, Spain before that. So the West or the Southwest, depending on your view. Some Chicano activists are or were really into the idea that it should be its own country. Carolena was all about it, and really liked to quote all these activists. But my dad knew those activists personally, had worked with them, had even taught one or two, and he was over it. He’d been having that conversation since the seventies.”
“Wow, your family is something else.” She blew her nose. “My parents usually just talk about baseball and gardening.”
“It’s normal to me,” I said. “I don’t really think about it.”
“Is your sister like that too?”
“Are you kidding? She works in college administration. My brother-in-law is an adjunct at like three colleges. Their kid goes to a daycare on a college campus operated by education professors and their grad students. When I go home, I’m the only person in the house without at least a master’s. Well, the only person over the age of two.”
“And the rest of your family’s like this too?”
I chuckled. “And then some. The rest of my family are teachers. My abuela, my tias, most of my tios, half of my cousins and the people they married. Everybody is a goddamn teacher. When I was a kid doing cartwheels outside, they’d be like, ‘Don’t you want to go in and read a book?’”
“I wonder what they’d think of me,” Kris said.
“Working at a tech start-up and no grad school? Please. You know the answer.”
“Wow, and I thought I was impressive. I guess you won’t be mentioning me.”
I raised my eyebrows. “What exactly would I tell them if I did, anyway? ‘I’m living with a woman, but ours isn’t a typical relationship. She has certain, ahem, requirements that I meet nicely and I get a place to live out of it’? Weird artist with a puny bachelor’s degree is hard enough, but what’s going on here? That is way outside the understanding of my family.”
“You’d think leftist academics would be more progressive,” she said.
I shook my head. “My mom did not get a doctorate so her daughter could get consensually slapped around for housing. She’s second-wave all the way. And you’re a white person with money! My dad would die. No, he’d lecture me about self-worth. This would not make sense to them, believe me.”
She blushed. “They don’t need to know the details. I don’t know, maybe I’m your roommate then. Don’t they know you moved?”
“Sure, but I made it sound like I found a place with a friend of a friend and that my roommate and I are basically ships in the night.”
“That’s not so far from the truth, actually.”
“Except here I am, taking care of you when you’re sick. Plus all the fucking.”
She gave me a bright, if sickly, smile. “You’re really fun, Phoenix.”
I did a little dance with my arms and shoulders, illustrating how fun I was. Kris laughed.
She looked at me for a minute. “It’s strange how little I know you outside of, well, what it is we do.”
I cleared out dishes and took them to the dishwasher. “What do you want to know? I’m an open book. Do you want more tea or anything?”
“I’m okay,” she said. “Why are you named Phoenix?”
“My mom’s favorite myth.” I sat back down on the couch. “She said she wanted to ‘impart me with the ability to always find rebirth and renewal within myself.’ English professors, am I right?”
“What’s your sister’s name again?” she asked with a tiny smile.
“Connie. Well, Consuelo, after my grandmother. My dad picked that one. She’s always been lucky.” I rolled my eyes.
“I’m named after my grandma too.”
“Look at us, learning all about each other. A whole new level of intimacy.”
She smiled. “We should hang out more often.”
“Yeah, but you’re never around for that.”
Her smile faded. “Do you think I’m making the wrong choices with my life?”
“I really don’t feel qualified to answer that one.” I pulled my feet up under me.
“I wonder sometimes. People have been telling me for years that I work too much, that there’s more to life than work. I never took it seriously because I loved working so much. But lately, I’m not sure. Seeing you so excited about what you’re doing, about your shows…I miss that feeling.”
“You’re losing your passion?”
“I guess. Maybe it was more fun when there was less riding on it. Now that I’m so close to the top, I feel like I can’t slip, but not even that. Even just holding steady would be failing. I have to keep expanding, keep going up, and it’s not like it used to be. In the beginning I was working with these two great people, Sam and Amy, but then he moved on to another start-up, and she quit and had a baby a couple of years ago.”
“It changed things.” She sighed.
“Were they like your best friends?”
She shook her head. “We weren’t exactly buddies, but we were great at developing ideas together. Sometimes we got in huge arguments and couldn’t stand each other, but in the end we always came up with something great. We had very different lives, and I don’t think we always understood each other, but intellectually, we all clicked.”
“I get that. Sasha and I would probably not have become friends if we didn’t perform together, but she’s my favorite person to create with and that makes me love her. We annoy each other sometimes, but we appreciate each other very deeply and it makes us good friends. We’re both better at what we do because of our work together.” I drained my mug. “Maybe you need another partner.”
“Maybe. I feel worn out, I guess, and I don’t know if I could offer the energy I had when we started. Maybe Sam and Amy had the right idea. They worked hard and made their money, and then wanted to do something else. Amy said other eager young things were ready to take it over, and we should let them.”
“You could,” I said. “You could sell and pretty much be set for life, right?”
Kris gave a modest shrug. “I don’t know about set for life, but I’d have a lot of options about when and how much I’d need to work. But what would I do with myself if I wasn’t working?”
“Um, whatever you want?”
“What’s that?” She gave me a helpless look.
“Oh, Kris, that is the saddest thing you’ve ever said.”
“Maybe I’m just sick.” She blew her nose again. “Maybe when I’m better, everything will look different.”
“Sure,” I said, though I doubted it. Kris’s life depressed me. I didn’t want to spend all my time working, and I had a hard time understanding why she did.
She looked at me, concerned. “Phe? Am I the only white person you’ve ever dated?”
I laughed. “We’re not dating, remember?”
“Right.” She looked down. To my surprise, she sounded a little sad. “I guess I’m putting it delicately.”
“Beth was white,” I said. “What about you? Please don’t tell me it’s been all white girls for you.”
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