Beggar of Love

by Lee Lynch

  It was Margo’s staring silence that distressed Jefferson. The silence reproved, described abandonment, maybe envy of her evident happiness. There she was with young, lovely Ginger and not with Margo. She thought Margo might complain aloud, attack her verbally, or make it clear that she felt betrayed. That might have been better, she thought, better than the cold knife of disapproval in Margo’s gaze and in her frozen lack of expression, verbal or in gestures. When Angela felt she’d been denied her due, she’d whined, cajoled, complained, and accused, but that was unusual for a lesbian, Jefferson realized. They were more like Ginger or even herself, who tended to avoid confrontation and the risk that the closet door might swing open. A grown woman who had revealed herself so fully to a freshman as Margo had was a walking accusation and needed no words. The things she’d asked from Jefferson for her own pleasure—Margo was now facing down Jefferson’s memories. Was she wondering if Jefferson despised her? Probably, but really, she thought, Margo despised herself for trusting someone who now might share Margo’s secrets with the slim, graceful dancer by Jefferson’s side.

  If there was a punishment on the books for allowing another woman to be that vulnerable to her, it was this silence and Margo’s loud gaze. And the memory, not of the acts of pleasure, but of the suspicion that something about herself was broken. How else could she have walked away from Margo and Angela, vanishing from their lives with no explanation? She didn’t even want to think the woman’s name today; the sight of her reminded Jefferson of the revulsion she had felt.

  Something had gone too far, something had gotten out of hand. Again, it wasn’t the greedy lust of the woman or the touch of shame she felt at complying with her more imaginative requests. Something had been taken from her, perhaps by her own doing, her own complicity in cheating on Angie, sleeping with a teacher so much older than herself, learning to lie to someone she loved and who trusted her. In high school, they’d loved with the complete trust of children. She worried not only that she’d destroyed that part of herself, but that she’d done the same to Angie. Now that she knew she was capable of betrayal and inflicting pain in order to have what she wanted, she suspected everyone else in the world was capable of the same thing. She’d discovered that she couldn’t trust herself to honor what she’d thought she’d believed in. How could she now trust anyone else?

  Or had she only lost her innocence, a perfectly natural loss that would have happened eventually with or without Margo?

  It didn’t seem to matter; she realized that she was angry at Margo. No, she thought, running her fingers back through her short hair, she was experiencing a rage that befit being raped. Despite Margo’s passivity when they were lovers, Jefferson had been interfered with, not Margo. She’d certainly lost some possibly nameless quality. She sensed its absence. There was something she was not giving Ginger now that she’d known how to give Angela before Margo.

  She returned Margo’s glare, the two of them in their ridiculous black robes, and curled her hands into fists. She left the safe circle of her friends and family to step toward Margo, then watched as Margo shrank back very slightly and peered around as if for protection before she turned and wove her way through the other professors, who were still milling around, as if finding their places in line was beneath them.

  She turned back to her family, but they were looking past her. She felt the dean approach before she turned.

  “Excuse me, young lady,” he said. “What do you have for footwear?”

  Margo, she thought immediately. Margo had spotted her gym shoes and spoken to the dean. That’s when it hit her: Margo had always had this power and had always used it to control her. That annoying Everly Brothers hit, “Kathy’s Clown,” popped into her mind. Margo was getting her revenge by trying to make a clown of her.

  She came to something like attention. “Sorry, sir. I’m a PE major. I don’t own anything else.” Lying came so easily now.

  “Young lady,” the dean ordered, “find yourself footwear in compliance with the dress code or you won’t be accepting your diploma onstage.”

  She saw that too-familiar look of her mother’s, the expression she wore at horror films. The Jeffersons had paid for this day and she knew they wanted their moment in the sun.

  Gladys’s feet were almost Jefferson’s size. She swapped her sneakers for low pumps. Gladys coached her in walking for about two minutes, making a joke of it, making it fun. Jefferson swept across the stage in her clown shoes, in front of Gladys, her parents, Angie, Ginger, and Margo, with her head high. Instead of giving in to humiliation, she treated this wearing of the ridiculous heels for the first—and last—time as a gym exercise. If she could win a tournament, certainly she could meet Margo’s mean challenge.

  Chapter Fourteen

  During the next few years after college, Jefferson was no less in love with Ginger, no less determined to live her life with Ginger. She still went though the horrible doldrums that had followed her out of childhood. She drowned the awful sinking of her moods at the bars and, sometimes, with the excitement of the chase. It had started with Taffy, but then, still in her junior year, Jefferson had found Patti so cute, and a senior, already out at school. Patti had slipped love poems to Jefferson in their history-of-music class. Jefferson had already known that material inside out from growing up with the parents she had and had been bored.

  Drinking coffee together after class, Jefferson told her she was involved. Patti ignored this. Patti had a car. She was a golfer too and drove Jefferson and her golfing buddy to the course where they played as a threesome. Ginger, with her jobs and rehearsals and performances, could never go and had never played golf.

  One day, Patti had a flask with her and by the time she pulled into a spot down by the water, deserted in winter, Jefferson was raring to get her into the backseat. She made love to Patti quickly, but would not let Patti under her clothes. The thing with Patti was over within weeks, when Patti, infuriated that Jefferson wouldn’t split up with Ginger, tricked her into getting out of the car at one of the old stone-faced gas stations on the Henry Hudson Parkway and drove off. Jefferson had a flask of her own by then and, high on a combination of the half she drank after their game and her new secret freedom from secret Patti, she bounded through the streets of Washington Heights until she found the A train.

  Jefferson got off at Ginger’s stop and rented a hotel room. It felt so good to have Ginger in her arms that night. Her naked back, the firm curve of her waist, her undemanding desire were all so familiar and right that Jefferson knew she would never be attracted to another woman again. She was twenty-two by that time and much better at knowing what she wanted.

  In her senior year, that Thanksgiving night when Minerva Castle, the little Englishwoman who helped Grandmother Jefferson, led her to her live-in room to show her the awkward but flattering sketches she’d done of Grandmother, Jefferson was drunk, like her father and mother and grandfather downstairs.

  Minerva offered her more wine. She knew where that would lead; it always led there. Women were so hungry. Especially the mousy ones like Minerva, who she would never associate with sex or guess would be interested in being gay. Yet they were the most wild for touch and release.

  “You’re gay, aren’t you?” Minerva Castle had asked. This was a woman in her thirties, exotic with her British accent and disproportionate breasts, kind of a lightweight in the brain department, but earnest and kind. “Me too,” she said when Jefferson came out to her.

  She missed Ginger, but of course neither could present the other at home for the holiday, like a straight couple. They hadn’t even talked about the possibility. Jefferson found herself being made love to in Minerva Castle’s twin bed. She didn’t like it this way, preferred giving pleasure to receiving it, but Minerva was determined. The woman’s clammy hands and oily facial skin had put Jefferson off, but the experience was exciting and she couldn’t help responding. Minerva preferred penetration, so she didn’t have to reciprocate orally and felt as if she hadn’t
been unfaithful. Minerva also liked a little anal penetration, just with Jefferson’s pinky.

  “Where did you learn that?” Ginger asked, breathless, when she used that trick at home.

  “Honors Sex 300, Princess,” she’d responded. “Miss Parsons teaches it on Saturday nights.”

  “Miss Parsons?”

  Jefferson gave Ginger an exaggerated wink.

  “Sure. You’re kidding. I’m so gullible with you, Jef.”

  “Miss Parsons would wet her gym shorts. I can’t imagine her—I mean, can you?”

  They laughed, then Ginger tried it on her, but Jefferson couldn’t come. She never could with Ginger, as if her emotional excitement was on a different track from her sexual response. She didn’t let on to Ginger, of course. She never wanted to hurt Ginger.

  She looked forward to seeing Minerva Castle on holidays. The woman made no demands on her time or company outside of bed, but one day in Jefferson’s senior year Grandmother teased Minerva about her boyfriend the gardener. Minerva, usually as pale as Grandmother’s chicken broth, turned the same pink that orgasm gave her. Jefferson was repelled. Every time she saw Minerva after that she wanted to drench her in bug spray.

  Ginger lived with her parents the year Jefferson was a senior. She had already graduated, but couldn’t find an apartment she could afford and still survive. It was tough because they’d been so happy rooming together at school. Jefferson fought with Emmy and Jarvy to live off campus at the family’s city apartment, but they wanted her to wait until she had a job so she didn’t get used to depending on them. They did agree to buy her a car, a 1971 Chevy Nova.

  It had been Uncle Stephen’s, then Cousin Raymond’s. It was old and smelled of cigarettes, but Jarvy had the transmission replaced and the engine overhauled. All that year, it carried Jefferson and Ginger back and forth to the family place on Saturday Lake in New Hampshire, through the depth of winter in the snow and ice. Ginger had to drive what they called their chariot of ashes then because Jefferson had a horror of losing control of the car in weather, and Ginger, though Jefferson had to teach her, was a born driver and sailed through the worst storms, fearless, as if it was high summer.

  After Minerva, there was no one but Ginger her whole senior year. She and Ginger had three seasons of love by the fireplace at the lake, three seasons of isolation on the long drives, during the long nights and on Saturday Lake after the tourist season, then in early spring as soon as the lake thawed. Classes were a dream to be slept though when she got back. Ginger had been able to find only part-time work during the week, teaching dance at the Neighborhood House, and without college performances, her gigs were few. They planned for her to give private lessons after Jefferson graduated and after they went to France and the British Isles that summer. Jefferson had already been offered a job teaching at a classy private school in the city through someone her mother knew. Her parents planned to let her live in her grandparents’ apartment then. Ginger could move in and only have to help with utilities. She could rent a loft space for lessons.

  When they visited the house in New Hampshire that winter, they learned to keep their clothes on until Jefferson got a fire started and Ginger made up the Castro Convertible in the living room. They lived on deli food and takeout that they’d gather on their way out of the city. She made sure she scheduled classes offered only Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday so almost every week they would have four days together, a nine-month-late honeymoon on the lake, watching the red oaks lose their leaves, the bright red winterberries arrive, ice fishers suited up for the freezing air, and lilac bushes bursting into lusty bloom. Sometimes they hiked or boated or ice-skated, but mostly they stayed in the knotty-pine house with nothing but their nubile minds and splendid bodies to entertain them. Jefferson had never been happier.

  Despite the way dance displayed Ginger’s body, she had that Irish-Catholic shyness about moving around the house naked and shocked Jefferson the first night she donned a granny gown. Now she knew why relationships died. Someone put on a granny gown or one quit drinking when the other didn’t. A curtain closed and shut one person out, or a curtain opened and revealed too much. The first time she saw Lily Ann Lee’s breasts with the moles on them, it shouldn’t have mattered and didn’t for a while, but now they were friends instead of lovers, partly because Jefferson could live without ever seeing that body nude again. Everyone, she thought, has a right to her own aesthetic.

  Ginger’s body was beyond compare. Jefferson could spend days, weeks, years of her life watching Ginger walk, bend, reach, scratch her bottom. The gown smothered the fire in her, but there was so much more to Ginger and to what they had together. With praise and encouragement someday Ginger would get over that self-consciousness. Would it be too late by then? Or would she automatically pull a granny gown over her own eyes, look away or not see what she was looking at?

  When they were together they were by turns comfortable, playful, sexual, but mostly asleep. During the week Ginger was all about dance. As much as she adored Ginger, as close as Ginger came to being everything she could want in a woman, sometimes she felt like she was married to Tinker Bell.

  In those early years, they didn’t have sex, they made love. Ginger was open, eager, easily roused and satisfied. She followed Jefferson’s lead as pliably and as gracefully as she danced. Ginger professed her love, collapsing like a telescoping cup into something like a loving little animal, warm, so close she might be under Jefferson’s skin or curled around her heart. She whispered her ardent feelings and passionate promises of forever. Ginger made it clear that she knew their bond was beyond breakable. She used the term “soul mates” and Jefferson agreed that they were, although she had somehow imagined a more consistent devotion on both sides.

  She would get out of bed while Ginger slept—afterward—and sit down with the bottle of Jameson. She’d sip it over two ice cubes and replay the way tall, willful Ginger went all soft and yielding in her hands that night. The contrast excited her beyond anything she’d ever experienced and she felt like a top-of-the-line lover—creative, sensitive to Ginger’s every desire, as if she were an extension of Ginger’s perfect body, as if Ginger was some other self she could please.

  Yet the next morning she could find little sign of her fiercely loving Ginger. With Ginger’s mother’s disappointed coldness—she’d gotten her first job as a chorus girl on Broadway when she became pregnant with Ginger—and her father’s work-above-all ethic, where could Ginger have learned that sweetness can carry over into the daylight hours? She probably had all she could do to save the loving little kid she must have started out as from withering completely. With Ginger turning to a will-o’-the-wisp come daylight, Jefferson felt a little less guilty about her own absences, like she was entitled to them, damn it.

  Ginger worked hard and spoke of quitting performance, opening a dance school. “I want to earn my keep here,” she told Jefferson, though with Jefferson’s teaching wage and her family’s deep pockets, they weren’t hurting. Ginger picked up money giving dance classes, especially after school hours and on Saturdays, when Jefferson was off.

  “Keep performing,” she urged Ginger. “Princess, it’s your dream, your mom’s dream too, and I’d miss watching you dance.” In truth, she’d been bored at the last few performances, but Ginger didn’t have to know that.

  “Sure. As long as I have a steady income,” Ginger had answered.

  “But you’re a dancer. How could you cut that off? If I had a talent like yours and didn’t use it, I’d fade away.”

  “Teaching is a talent too, Jef. And coaching.”

  “Teaching is a job. Maybe some day there will be gay softball teams to coach and I’ll love what I do, but right now, it’s part of my job. A fun part, but nothing like your name up in lights.”

  “I can’t get satisfaction out of dancing unless I know I’ll have solid ground under my feet, like you do.”

  “I can coach till I go blind and deaf, Ginge. You won’t be able to dance that l
ong. Now is when you need to be performing.”

  “I don’t know.” Ginger moved away from her and crossed her arms. “Of course I want to perform forever, but I’m an ironworker’s daughter from the Bronx. I know my limits. Do you see my brothers getting all artsy? Joseph can draw like he was born to make a living doing portraits on Sixth Avenue in the Village. He and Kevin followed my father into the union. It’s their best shot in this life. We’re not in with the people who go places. Maybe if I’d been a tiny bit more talented, well connected, more of a hustler, more outgoing, maybe I could reach the big time and earn enough to keep me for the rest of my life, let a husband support me—”

  “I’ll support you, damn it.”

  “I know you would, sure, but I couldn’t live with that. You’ve got your own way to make. Your family may have money, but you’re not the idle rich. If you supported me I’d feel like a failure. I need to prove I can succeed in the dance world, and if I can’t do it as a dancer, I’d like to do it as a teacher. I have to ask myself, too, how long can I realistically keep up performing? What will I do when my body gives out?”

  “You don’t believe enough in your own talent,” she said, not asking the hard question: why did Ginger think it was all right to be financially supported by a husband, but not by her?

  “My biggest talent is work. I watched my dad rack up the overtime year after year, with no life beyond work except a beer, the TV, early to bed, never a complaint. He was my model, his are my values. It’s how I earned college and paid my way through. It’s how I got his respect. I couldn’t believe it the other day when he said he’d borrow on his retirement to invest in a dance school when I’m ready.”

  Had she been attracted to Ginger because she thought Ginger would be some kind of star? Okay, a little bit. Maybe there was a spot of tarnish now, but it wasn’t like Ginger would have to give up dance to be a used-car salesperson or something. She’d seen Ginger teach at the Neighborhood House and she was good. She had the nine little ones in her beginning tap class moving like mini-Rockettes. Even the really heavy teenager in Saturday-morning modern dance was learning to carry her body gracefully, thanks to Ginger. She couldn’t knock it. Ginger clearly delighted in giving away what she knew and loved, just like Jefferson got into it too when she was teaching.