by Lee Lynch
Finally she saw Annie move when one of the circles of dancers grabbed her and she began to dance with them. She did so awkwardly, studiously, as if afraid to miss a step when all the others were dancing with abandon. Victoria looked away to give Annie more freedom and when she looked back Annie had thrown herself into the dance and was smiling that wonderful smile. Still, Victoria looked away again so that Annie would keep dancing and then suddenly found herself being pulled into the circle. Oh, if it had been anyone but Annie, she would have pulled rudely away. Instead she could not let go and clung to Annie’s hand, following her, careful not to lose the women behind her, soon completely involved in this crazy ritual by the warmth of Annie Heaphy’s hand.
When the song stopped Annie did not let go. They stood right in front of the band, facing it, still holding hands, while the music began again. Annie had felt more comfortable in motion, but Vicky looked more relaxed like this. Annie felt the heat grow in her body and knew that she had to communicate its intensity to Vicky soon. Then Victoria’s eyes closed and she lowered her head. They turned toward one another slowly. Annie waited for Victoria to lift her head and say something, but when she did look up, she said nothing, only looked with glazed eyes at Annie. “Do you want me to let go?” Annie asked hoarsely. Victoria bit her lower lip and shook her head, moving her long hair across her shoulders. The longer they stood, holding hands, the more the crowd seemed to recede. Electrical charges, Annie thought, going up and down our arms, across our hands. Melting, my arm is melting down into her hand, Victoria thought in sudden panic, but kept herself perfectly still, as if the welding were accomplished.
The band went on with a slow, sensuous song. Annie made herself move, move before the wavering light that was Victoria and, never dropping her hand, took Victoria’s other hand in hers. Victoria closed her eyes and pulled Annie’s arms around her. They began to sway to the music in the cradle their arms made, locked together behind Victoria. Annie tilted her head up so her cheek brushed Victoria’s jaw and her lips rested on her thick, sweet-smelling hair. Victoria, seeing through a haze, part of which was actual fog on her glasses, let her face in turn find Annie’s soft yellow hair and she rested her lips gently upon it.
Annie whispered, “We better dance,” and before Victoria could miss their stillness, Annie had broken the cradle and moved closer, so close their hips, if they were to move them, must move together. Annie’s arms settled around Victoria’s waist, her hands lightly guiding the movement of Victoria’s hips. Victoria pulled her arms back and let them drop across Annie’s shoulders, her hands riding, closed, behind Annie. So they danced, Victoria’s body beginning to feel as her arms had, as if she were melting into Annie. Her vision blurred and became dark beyond the brightness of Annie’s hair. Her hands, clasped behind Annie’s back, seemed to be an oasis of discipline for her emotions. So we’re dancing, Annie thought, breathless with the feel of Victoria’s breasts beneath her sweater, just touching her own. She was stunned by the gentle grinding of their pelvises to the band’s slow song. And I’m under control, she thought, forcing all her will into her hands to keep Victoria moving and into her legs to move herself.
The music had to stop. They dropped back from each other, no longer touching, and tried each other’s eyes. Victoria was still bent toward Annie and saw such taut excitement in Annie’s eyes she felt ready to explode. Annie said, “Let’s get some air.” Like a horse in blinders, Victoria followed the jeans and flannel shirt and shining head before her as they skirted cleverly the edges of the crowd and reached the door.
These refugees from the collective experience side-stepped quickly out of view of the hall and shared each other’s eyes. Victoria broke away, feeling too close to begging for the touch she’d never felt before. Familiar with the building, she headed for the mock trial room. She had been there enough to know the ground even when Annie shut the door behind them and there was only the vague light from two street lamps dimly outlining the room. “Before a jury of my peers,” she admonished herself, knowing that if she cared little about her peers before, they might go hang themselves now. Reaching the platform to the side of the jury chairs she gurgled a deep and quiet laugh, turning to Annie and saying very quietly, “The sentence is pronounced.”
Annie, not stopping, sat on the edge of the platform. “This is no time for puns,” she laughed softly back as Victoria leaned against the short wall that enclosed the chairs.
“Ohhh,” Victoria moaned as Annie swiveled to be beside her and moved her index and middle fingers along Victoria’s nose and cheeks as if exploring her. Victoria took one finger between her lips, then touched it with her tongue. “Vicky,” Annie said as Victoria lightly bit her finger. “Vicky, Vicky, Vicky,” she repeated, her hands touching, touching everywhere on Victoria’s long, slim body and Victoria’s arms coming up to her shoulders, pulling her closer, touching her lips to Annie’s lightly over and over until so loudly in the dark Annie heard her say “Please,” so deep in her throat it was almost a growl and startled Annie, a growl from this cool perfect woman, but before her thought could get in the way her body responded, her hand slipping between Victoria’s pants and her skin, gasping herself as she found the pouring, swollen flesh and began to stroke gently, gently until she found the place that made Victoria groan and stayed there with Victoria’s hands fluttering up and down her neck. “Up and down and up and down,” Victoria thought over and over until there was nothing but the feel of Annie’s babyfine hair in her mouth and then Annie’s lips on hers pleading, “Oh, come home with me, come home with me I need to know you naked.” Victoria struggled down to consciousness, trying to touch Annie more, while Annie withheld herself with her plea and both of them got up, neatening, touching, stopping, holding each other almost at each step in their slow progress up the aisle of the courtroom.
They went into the hall, separating for their coats. Annie, serious and hurried, grabbed her army jacket, darted to her friends who were still standing, watching, drinking. She made sure they could all fit into the other car they had come in. “Who’s your Yalie?” Eleanor teased.
“Vicky, from the bar in New York. Remember?” Annie answered, catching the cap Turkey threw to her.
“Found that on the floor,” Turkey laughed. “Say hi—if there’s time.”
“I’ll try,” Annie answered with a glare at Turkey’s light treatment of Victoria as she skipped, then jogged away.
Victoria meanwhile had glided like a sleepwalker through the women on the other side of the hall, passing Rosemary and Claudia and smiling at their staring faces where they danced in a group. She picked up her coat and swung it across her shoulders as she made her way to them. “I’ve got a ride home,” she smiled, tossing back her hair to cover her excitement. “Thanks for bringing me. It was just what I needed,” she said mysteriously to their still speechless stares.
They hurried down the tall old corridor and pushed through the heavy wooden door into the clear, stinging-cold night. They stretched their arms toward each other and held, then swung around and around, laughing up to the stars through, Victoria thought with her heart pounding in fear and exhilaration, through all the space in the universe.
Later, Victoria lay as close to Annie as she could for warmth in Annie’s tiny, cold house. Like a toothpick house, she thought, holding Annie even tighter. Heidi had built her a “toothpick house” one summer. It took a week to make in a careful, patient process. What a wonder it had been to her completed! She was terrified of accidentally breaking it and finally persuaded Heidi to take it with her when she left. Now she’d remembered the toothpick house again and thought, Annie, Annie, what keeps the wind from blowing all this and you away some dark night? She was amazed that Annie found a sense of security in this threatened home.
The little house seemed messy, but more, Victoria thought, because there were neither closets nor adequate drawer space than because things were untidy. She could see Annie had organized her possessions; any disarray gave the impression more of a house no
one spent any time in than one uncared for. But there was such a wilderness around it of marsh and beach, with an empty road, another cottage, and a ramshackle bar the nearest neighbors. It did seem just like Annie: delicate, lost in a wilderness, barely keeping herself together, but basically sound and able to offer shelter despite its scarring from the elements. Now, with Annie sleeping, Victoria felt secure enough, warm enough, as if Annie’s still, silent presence were stronger than the one that tried to communicate with Victoria. We unsettle each other. We’re so uncomfortable. Except laughing and touching. So magic, so simple, the touch. Our real selves do the touching, she thought as she fell asleep curled around Annie Heaphy.
The next night, Sunday, they spent in Victoria’s room. They felt some of the joy of Saturday, but as they became more real to each other, it frightened Annie to see the list of their differences grow. She woke at dawn feeling very scared. Her one insistent thought was, “I don’t want to be here,” but it slept, leaden, in the back of her mind. It weighed her down, paralyzed her, making its silent waves into her tensing body. She remembered the night with Eleanor and other nights in strange beds. Those relationships had come to nothing. Would Vicky become a stranger in a month or a clinging friend like Eleanor? Annie moved slowly away from the curve of the still sleeping Victoria, telling herself it was out of consideration, but really it was because she was afraid to wake the woman she hardly knew. The sight of Victoria’s naked back, the lovely soft lines of her shoulders, filled Annie with horror. How could she leave such a woman? How could she stay and face the consequence of such a commitment?
The room was cold, but heat came banging slowly out of the radiator like the disembodied sound in a nightmare. She longed for the softer sounds of her foghorns. The one narrow window allowed in just enough light to make everything grey, to finish taking away all last night’s magic from what Annie saw. The room was sterile, not full of Victoria as it had been, but empty of anything familiar or safe for Annie. It did not seem to belong to the Victoria she had begun to know. Yet right now it seemed safer to remember the partial Victoria than to invest more of herself in discovering the unknown. She wished for the closeness and safety of the night at the Pub where they had met in a place comfortable for both of them: Annie’s bar in Victoria’s community. Where above all, the newness and excitement of getting to know one another had quieted her fears.
Annie sat up on the edge of the bed, surprised to feel warm, and very, very quietly began to dress. Why must she always panic like this, she wondered, regretting the loss of the beautiful woman on the bed. Wasn’t Vicky different? Annie had thought so only a few hours ago as she aroused Vicky’s warm, responsive flesh with her hands, her mouth. Such intimacy seemed impossible now, absurd. Yet couldn’t she, just once, stay and see if it would work? But she felt so naked, so vulnerable. She couldn’t, when she finished dressing, look at Victoria. Am I afraid that she’ll be someone I don’t know, Annie wondered? Afraid then I’ll have to admit how alien I feel she is? Tell her, “You’re separate and different and strange to me and I’ve got to get out! You can’t hold me here!”
As the words surfaced, Annie’s panic grew. Though part of her longed to stay, her fear was too strong. She tightened her whole body, grabbed her coat and left the room, feeling, as she closed the door with terrified stealth, that she was leaving some sacred place against which she had sinned.
Chapter Six
Bells pealed in Victoria’s mind the week after she and Annie Heaphy made love. She didn’t understand why Annie had left without saying goodbye, but sensed, in her own fears, that it had something to do with the power of what they felt for each other. She felt, in any case, the ecstasy for which she had longed in her fantasies of a monastic life. She saw bushes filled with fuzzy lavender flowers, just born, blindingly bright in the spring rain that had suddenly come upon the world. She saw the Yale daffodils bellowing all their yellows through the downtown, reflecting themselves in the dozens of yellow cabs she saw every day. Yet now each time she saw a yellow cab, fear and hope fought for a place inside her. The fear went icy into her veins, stabbing its way down her arms, constricting her gut, freezing her legs so she could not move for fear of more fear. The hope warmed her, thawed her frightened tension, bred dizzying dreams in her love-fogged mind. “Anne,” she’d cry half aloud, then, “Anne, Anne, Anne. Come to me, call me, hold me.” Then, sobbing inside she’d change: “Stay away, don’t come near me, I can’t bear it, I can’t bear your touch, let me stay inside.” Embarrassed by her own mental histrionics and confused by the flood of unfamiliar emotion, Victoria would wrap herself in her ice blue bedspread and roll back and forth, sometimes crying, sometimes dreaming of how it would be when Annie came.
She did not answer her telephone, afraid it would be Annie. She did not answer knocks at her door, unable to deal with anything familiar, it would now be so changed. Claudia just walked in before Victoria could lock the door one day when she returned from class. Victoria swung around at the intruder, her face critical of the invasion, while she held her breath that it might be Annie.
“We’ve been worried about you, Victoria.”
“I’d like to be alone, Claudia.”
Claudia smiled, not her usual broad-grinned smile, but softly, with concern. Victoria pictured Claudia smiling at a therapy patient like that. “Why are you miserable?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Please let me stay,” Claudia pleaded, her arms outstretched from her overalls in supplication.
Victoria shrugged, unable to refuse the farm girl side of Claudia she liked so much. She turned to put her books on the desk while Claudia settled herself cross-legged on the bed.
“Why don’t you put your jeans on anymore? I like you in them,” Claudia said.
Fear flashed through Victoria as she thought of them. “I don’t feel comfortable in them,” she managed to say.
“Don’t they fit your image?” Claudia teased. Victoria was silent as she straightened her room, her back to Claudia. “It must be taking quite a beating,” she continued.
“What must be?” Victoria asked wearily.
“Your image. I know mine did at first.”
“What are you talking about?” Victoria asked, turning to look through tear-filled eyes at Claudia, who sat alert and straight-faced, a ready well-meaning listener. The pink shirt Claudia wore beneath her overalls brought out the pink of her cheeks, making her seem innocently trustworthy.
“Coming out, silly. Did you think you were hiding anything from us?” Victoria looked defeated. Her shoulders sagged suddenly and she sank onto the bed, facing Claudia. She still had not brushed her hair and the spring breezes had pulled it every which way. “You’re a mess, you adorable, unapproachable intellectual,” Claudia said, taking Victoria’s hand. “Talk to me. You’ll feel better.”
Victoria looked without hope into her friend’s eyes. “You can’t help me.”
“I know. But you can feel better just talking about it. Maybe it’ll all begin to make sense.”
“It makes enough sense to me.”
“But I want to know what’s going on. I’ll ask some questions, okay?” Claudia asked without really wanting an answer. “Is it Anne, from the bar in New York?”
“Yes.”
“Who is she other than that?”
Victoria watched her friend lean back against the wall, pulling her legs up and hugging them to her chest. “Nobody,” she answered. “Everybody. A college dropout cab driver from the wrong part of Boston.”
“Why do you like her?”
Victoria paused for a moment. “She’s hearty, determined, full of strength and life and not afraid of anything.”
“Did you like being with her?”
“Yes,” Victoria said, blushing.
“Then what’s the problem? When will we meet her officially?”
After another long pause to fight back tears, Victoria said, “One question at a time. Your second one first. I may never s
ee her again, so I don’t know when you’ll meet her. As to problems, I don’t know where to start.” She stood and walked to her dresser, picked up the brush and began to stroke her hair. Claudia stretched out her legs and watched the mirror as Victoria’s mouth began to form words and reject them.
“You don’t know how to deal with being a lesbian,” she suggested as she saw Victoria’s eyes redden and her chest begin to move as if she was gasping for air.
Victoria turned to face Claudia, her arms leaning against the dresser behind her. “I don’t think I am one. I just love Anne.”
“Okay, so you haven’t even begun to deal with the fact that this isn’t a temporary aberration.”
“I’d just like to deal with Anne for now.”
“I’ll bet you would,” Claudia teased. She became serious again when Victoria scowled at her. “Tell me the problem with Anne.”
Victoria released the dresser and gestured helplessly toward Claudia. “She’s a woman!”
“Have you ever loved a man?”
“No.”
“Have you ever loved another woman?”
“Maybe a little, in high school. But one’s supposed to be attracted to women at that age.”
“Do you want to love a man?”
“Of course not, but I’ve been thinking about how hard it must be to be gay in this world. Everything I’ve read talks about one night stands and a lonely old age. Some of Anne’s experiences have been so painful and damaging to her.”
“Like what?”
“Like never being your real self to most of the world. Always having to hide your emotions. Being humiliated in public with catcalls and obscene jokes.”
“I haven’t gone through any of that yet, but on the other hand, I’ve never done anything easier in my life than love Rosemary, even if she does make herself rather difficult to love at times.”
“I suppose it might be worth it, but how does one face the world then? What do I tell my parents who are hoping for a secure, monied marriage? They might accept me being a single professor, at least that’s respectable, but having a woman lover? How do lesbians live? Can they get good jobs? Will I be able to get a teaching job?”