CHAPTER THREE
TENDER
We were getting serious. We’d met each other’s friends, had keys to each other’s apartment, and had weathered colds and crankiness, in addition to afternoons of fucking and cake. It was obvious that we were going to keep on seeing each other.
One Wednesday night after a dinner of steamy, spicy sesame rice noodles with tender asparagus, meaty shiitake mushrooms, and spinach, I approached Lucky as we washed the dishes together. Well-fed bellies tolerated processing vastly better than empty or poorly fed ones. I was quieter than Lucky and detested drawn-out processing, but it was obvious that we were headed toward more commitment with capital letters, no glitter. When we talked about monogamy and polyamory during our first date at Café Flore, it was frivolously. How were we to know that we’d still be fucking, fisting, and flirting three months later? That we’d have exchanged household keys, nursed each other through colds, read Hergé’s Tintin in Tibet aloud on Friday nights, minced innumerable onions side by side, traded neckties, and remained enamored?
“We need to talk,” I announced gloomily while cleaning the metal cooking spoon with a soapy green scrubber.
I think that by now Lucky was accustomed to my sudden pronouncements, the periodic flare-up of the Voice of Doom that overtook me, resulting in short, fatalistic, blunt conversations. “What is the problem?” she asked, as she dried the spoon on a red-striped cotton tea towel.
“Are we monogamous or what? I think we should talk about it and decide. It would suck if we got waylaid by a trick or something,” I announced decisively.
“I’m happy the way things are right now. It’s working for me.” Lucky looked at me curiously, took a gray tea-pottery mug from me, dried it, and put it in the drainer.
“I know that neither of us is seeing anyone else, but what if we want to? What if one of us ends up in an unexpected clench during Queer Leather Hour at the Eagle? And you’ve always had a passel of tricks trailing behind you. Well?” I pushed onward stubbornly. I hated this pigheaded urge in myself to push conversations, but felt powerless to stop. This was important. I’d been in successful monogamous relationships and successful polyamorous relationships. I’d also been in both where there’d been cheating, lying, and hurt feelings.
“Do you want someone else? Is that what this is about?” Lucky asked.
“No. I just want to be prepared. How about you? Do you want someone else?” I asked Lucky as I cleaned our dinner plates in the hot, soapy dishwater.
“No. At least not right now. I’d rather take this as it comes, just do it organically.”
I raised my eyebrows. “No. And I mean really, no. As far as I’m concerned, ‘Organically’ is code for fucked up. Let’s decide what we are, then change it if we need to, and not after the fact! I’m leaning toward polyamory so that you can see new people. Me, I don’t have enough time for someone else and barely have enough time for everything I want to do!” As soon I said this I realized that I was partially whining about time, and my lack of it.
“You are little Mr. Bossypants aren’t you!” Lucky exclaimed. “How about we’re monogamous for now and we revisit it in a year. I’m not seeing anyone else right now and I’m not looking.” Lucky dried each plate and stacked it with the others in the cupboard.
I felt chagrined. I’d been whining and pushy, yet still had managed not to tell Lucky what was really bothering me because I didn’t know what it was until that very moment while washing dishes in the kitchen. Sometimes my lack of self-awareness annoyed me. One would hope that at age sixty, you could figure these things out, but apparently I was mistaken.
“Lucky, I’m sorry. It’s more than just the monogamous-poly kerfuffle. I need more time alone. I haven’t been able to write as much as I want to, and I prefer writing alone. This is my bigger issue. Oh fuck!” I was embarrassed.
“Oh! This is really about time management?” Lucky looked bemused. Fortunately, she also looked amused. “How about we take a couple regular nights away from each other. Maybe every Monday and Tuesday? No communication. No texts, no emails, no dinner. Nothing. Then by Wednesday, we’ll be chomping at the bit to see each other again. I have plenty to occupy myself while you’re writing, carousing, and jerking off.”
“Yes! That is perfect. You don’t mind?” I was incredibly relieved that Lucky understood that my need for solitude was not in conflict with my need for Lucky. And I was also grateful that she was so even-keeled. Was it her study of Buddhism and meditation, or did Lucky just have a fabulously calm nature? I didn’t know, nor did I care. I just knew we balanced each other out. And I needed solitude in order to need Lucky.
I pulled the plug, letting the dirty dishwater drain. I took down two red pottery bowls and scooped us bowls of creamy Three Twins cardamom vanilla ice cream topped by hefty spoonfuls of sea salt caramel sauce. “Baby, I love you!”
Lucky left for the living room as I scooped out the ice cream, and I thought about what I’d just said. I’d just told Lucky that I loved her. I wasn’t the type of person to blurt out “I love you” during sex, and I’d never said these words to Lucky before. I knew that I had a crush on Lucky, but love? I didn’t fall in love easily or quickly. Did I love Lucky? As I stood in the cool light of the open-doored, battered white Frigidaire, in my tiny orange kitchen, I realized that after three months, I was in love with Lucky. A gleaming new moon crescent shone through the kitchen window. I filled Francy’s blue pottery IKEA water dish with fresh water from the tap as I thought about this new information, then I made my way down the darkened hallway with our ice cream to the living room to join Lucky.
Lucky was already reading Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love, her glasses sliding down her nose, graying pompadour mussed, and totally engrossed in true tales of San Francisco history from the 1960s to the 1980s. Francy had staked out her feet and was sprawled across both of them, belly overhanging Lucky’s red ribbed socks and purring loudly. I looked at Lucky fondly. I was in love. With Lucky. What a strange life it was.
During the next few months, our lives calmed down some and we became more familiar with each other’s regular routines. As our individual daily lives started becoming our coupled daily life, we did more and more couple things together. We both read at the Queer Open Mic at Modern Times Bookstore in the Mission, and at Smack Dab at Magnet in the Castro. We shopped at the Civic Center farmers market on Sunday mornings, meandering among the freshly hatched techbros, Asian and Russian families, Tenderloin residents, jugglers, musicians, and beggars to find the cheapest and freshest organic fruits and vegetables, sniffing and poking the spinach, new green garlic, purple plums, and tender berries, then stuffing our knapsacks with our bounty.
Lucky went from perimenopause into menopause. She woke up each night at 3:30 sharp the way old people do, her periods finally stopped completely, and she had some faint bleeding when I fucked her that would evolve into a weeks-long vaginal irritation. She started going to Circle Community Acupuncture for the sleeplessness, and decided to stop getting fucked in her cunt until she could figure out a solution to the bleeding and atrophy. I’d had the same issue a few years before and used a topical estrogen cream for a while. It had helped, so Lucky made an appointment with Kaiser to see if she could get a prescription.
We started throwing monthly potluck salons, inviting our circle of friends over to share food and witticisms. Birdie and Tamera always brought a guitar and played a song, Ian brought his tablet and showed us his latest photography of handsome men in fetish gear, Mikail recited filthy poetry, and Ebony read to us from her memoir in progress. Maxwell and Poppy loosened up about gender identity and butch coupling, and one night under the influence of several homemade blackberry cordial and champagne cocktails, Poppy even drunkenly apologized for her unkind words and bad behavior at our first potluck. Fueled by too many Gene Kelly movies, Lucky and I started taking tap dancing lessons together, envisioning nighttime twirls around lampposts in the park.
Lucky finally admitted that the candy I’d been buying her from Miette’s fancy candy boutique was wasted on her, and that she vastly preferred the more plebeian California See’s Chocolates, particularly anything with milk chocolate and nuts, although her favorite was the old-fashioned milk buttercream.
We both dreamt of flying, although we flew differently. I jumped up and left the ground like a slow-moving rocket, arms by my side and effortlessly airborne. Lucky flapped her arms like a bird, soaring in elegant circles. I discovered that Lucky liked to sing “I Enjoy Being a Girl” in the shower, and she discovered that my favorite dinner when I was blue was macaroni and cheese, applesauce, and green peas, and that I liked to mix them together into a monster mash on my plate. In short, the honeymoon phase was over but it still felt like a honeymoon. Learning about Lucky was like being on the most fascinating archeological excavation in the world. I’d uncover something new, brush it off carefully to avoid any damage, then admire it with delight, and Lucky seemed to feel the same about me.
It felt comfortable, even though it was unexpected. I remembered being single and throwing a potluck where everyone except for Tov and I were coupled, and how annoying they were, each couple in their cocoon of shared experiences and mutual domesticity. They finished one another’s sentences and completed one another’s thoughts, two people becoming one. If there was a disagreement, you could hear the repetitive structure of their argument as they explained their differences, something that they had carefully honed over the months and years until the disagreement was a calm recital of facts, all the sting removed. One’s legs started where the other one’s legs stopped. I was so put off by the experience that I didn’t throw another party for eight months. Were we one of these interlocked couples now, or had our enforced two days without communication slipped us over the hump from a couple that was possibly codependently living in each other’s pockets, into a couple composed of two individuals who adored each other?
With Monday and Tuesday free, I started back to work on the book I’d been writing. Lucky was right, by the time Wednesday rolled around, we were so eager for each other that we were fucking in the hallway. I’d be distracted all Wednesday afternoon, texting Lucky filthy texts about where I wanted her hands, daydreaming during meetings, and squirming in my office chair. I’d leave work, get home, and wait for Lucky’s key in the door. Francy heard Lucky before she arrived, and would scamper to the door eagerly, fluffy tail held high with the orange feathered tip swishing rapidly. Lucky would walk in the door, drop her knapsack, kiss me, and grasp my hair, forcing me to the carpeted hallway floor. Her pants fly would be already undone and she’d be packing, waiting for my eager mouth to envelop her cock. I’d breathe in the night air on her jeans and the musky scent of her cunt as I’d lick the head. I’d peek up to see her looking down at me, watching my lips, my open mouth. It was hard to resist swallowing more of Lucky’s cock immediately. I’d hold out for thirty seconds before I’d quickly deep-throat her cock, my lips pressed against Lucky’s shorts as her cock hit the back of my throat and Lucky possessed my mouth, fucking me with quick hard jabs. Then Lucky would yank down my overalls, throw me facedown, and fist me, her hand burrowing deep inside of me, as surely as her key had slid into the keyhole just minutes before. My cunt clenched her hand back as we fucked, both of us grunting and yelling our desire as we came. We’d collapse briefly on the Persian hall runner, dust off, then rise to begin the next few days together.
One Saturday evening in August, Lucky taught me how to make marijuana salve to relieve the pain of aching joints. She’d discovered the miracle of pot salve at Poppy’s fifty-eighth birthday party in Oakland. Most of the people at the party were lesbians and dykes of a certain age, all over fifty. A long conversation on using marijuana salve to help with painfully arthritic joints was interspersed with gossip about who’d broken up with whom, new girlfriends, lesbian drama, new homes, new pets, new jobs, and bad health. Lawyers traded marijuana dispensary recommendations with social workers, while librarians traded salve recipes and directions with nurses, and truck drivers traded medical marijuana doctors’ names and numbers with bartenders. Many of the women at the party were sober and had been for decades, so using marijuana for its pain-relieving properties while avoiding getting high was important. With the Indigo Girls singing “Closer to Fine” and over a table laden with hummus, gluten-free carrot cake, lentil salad, kale chips, and deviled eggs, they discussed coconut oil, buds and stems, beeswax, and vitamin E oil.
Lucky told me about the party as we arranged our ingredients in my tiny kitchen, Lesbians on Ecstasy’s “Summer Luv” blaring from the tiny countertop speakers. Lucky had been cooking the coconut oil and marijuana together in a Crock-Pot at her place for two days, and had brought it over for our medicinal craft experiment. We drained the savory swamp-colored liquid through a cheesecloth funnel, then added the beeswax, vitamin E oil, and a few drops of ginger and vanilla essential oils. We decanted it into Victorian cut-crystal dresser jars with sterling silver engraved lids. It was pea green goop by the time we were done, but Lucky swore that it was the only thing that had brought any relief to her sore hands and knees. I was excited, skeptical, and eager to try it on my knees. Giggling, we rushed into the bathroom, I rolled up my pant leg, and Lucky rubbed green gobs into my knobby pale knees and her swollen knuckles.
We inadvertently started traditions. Were we making a family? That was what chosen family did. They created themselves from dust and dreams. And isn’t that how traditions start? One minute you’re eating a coconut tart at Tartine’s, and the next minute you’re seriously reviewing a list of San Francisco bakeries and pastry shops, trying to decide which one to explore next, and planning on visiting one every first Saturday of the month. Lucky and I shared a sweet tooth, not that there was only one tooth between us. We decided that we would tour the sweets of San Francisco, neighborhood by neighborhood, and cake by cake. Stella’s in North Beach was great for cannoli and sidewalk people-watching, B Patisserie in Pacific Heights for exquisite traditional Viennese pastries, Golden Gate Bakery in Chinatown for their rich yellow egg custard tarts and rowdy crowds, Devil’s Teeth in the Outer Sunset for their over-the-top cinnamon sticky rolls and proximity to the beach, and The Ice Cream Bar in Cole Valley for their herbal-infused ice-cream floats and flirty smart soda jerks. We had our sticky work cut out for us and threw ourselves into this project with enthusiasm.
Many of those adages about getting old are true, and one that was truest was the one about waking earlier and earlier until I was waking at hours that used to be my bedtime. I remembered crashing at 5:00 a.m. after nights of drinking white Russians, making out with punk girls on the dance floor, and picking fights with straight rockabilly guys. Now I woke each morning between 5:00 and 6:00 a.m. Lucky and I both slept naked. I loved looking at her warm olive skin next to my pale freckled flesh. I woke each morning with Lucky curled behind me, her tiny hands draped over my chest until her fingers came alive, half asleep and reaching for my nipples, twisting them and resetting the current that ran between my nipples and my cunt. She would twist and pull those tender knobs of flesh until I’d whimper, my ass pressing backward against her cunt, my asshole twitching, opening. Lucky thrusting her hips, grinding into my ass. I’d get up to piss, and when I came back to our bed Lucky would have put on her cock. I’d crawl under the warm cotton sheets and quilts, rubbing my ass against her cock, with her hands pulling my nipples and then pinching them with her fingernails. My nipples were always tender these days. It was our mission to keep them hard, expectant, sore, waiting. I’d feel her cock at the entrance of my asshole, resting, barely pushing in, and my asshole would open, urging Lucky’s cock to slide in. Lucky would slide in an inch slowly then slide an inch out slowly, then slide in two inches and slide out two inches, until all seven inches of her cock was buried in my ass. She would bite my neck, an anchor as we fucked. All I wanted was to be filled by Lucky, her pumping deep inside of my ass, her hands now grabbing my breasts and
squashing them tightly, renewing bruises left over from days before, as we fucked each other into another day. The smells of sex, freshly laundered sheets, our bodies fucking, and Lucky’s sweat made a cave that overtook me, until I came with a wail and Lucky came with a forceful thrust and a growl.
Afterward, we’d lie in bed, the quilts in disarray as we talked and dozed. I’d turn down the lamp and turn on the bedside radio to keep us company as we chatted about the books we were reading, our projects, our wishes, and our days. We were slowly building a life.
Were U-Hauls in our immediate future? The old dyke adage was that lesbians moved in together on the second date. Of course, dykes were also supposed to get a toaster every time they recruited a straight woman into their midst. If that had been the case, Lucky, who was a reformed playboy, would have had a kitchen crammed full of toasters from floor to ceiling like a wayward art project. As it was, she had one beat-up but elegant vintage 1930s rounded-top stainless steel Sunbeam toaster on her tiny kitchenette’s white-tiled countertop.
A month after our coming out party, Lucky approached me with nervousness and excitement. We’d just finished preparing and devouring a dinner of a corn, zucchini, goat cheese, and fresh mozzarella quiche, with a spinach and avocado salad, and were curled up on opposite ends of the sofa together covered with a woolen men’s-suiting patchwork quilt, Francy sleeping between us. Lucky was wearing an olive-green vintage lightweight quilted wool smoking jacket and black woolen lounging pants, while I was wearing floral Liberty of London cotton lawn pajamas. We enjoyed dressing up in elegant lounging wear for evenings at home, even if we disrobed once we went to bed.
“Behrouz, the Petersons are moving out of state. She got a teaching job at the University of Pennsylvania and he’s going with her. Their roommate is moving in with her girlfriend in Oakland,” Lucky said meaningfully.
Behrouz Gets Lucky Page 7