A small stack of paperbacks perched on top of the computer monitor, and against the wall next to the television, two large bookcases almost reached the ceiling, stuffed with books. The bottom shelf contained mostly reference books—a Merriam-Webster dictionary, a Spanish/English dictionary, and other hardbound tomes, then a sea of color in the spines swooped up to the top shelf. Frankie had more books than bookshelf space, and she had placed some titles horizontally, over the top of the vertically placed books. Dez wanted to take a closer look but didn’t want to seem nosy.
“Well, I’m ten minutes late,” Dez said, smirking, as Frankie closed the door, “but you know it’s all your fault.” She took a couple of steps toward the bookshelf. Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky was in there. She also saw the familiar art-deco spine of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the near match of Tar Baby, but on different shelves, making Dez cringe at the thought of Frankie not arranging her books in alphabetical order by author last name. Maybe she just put her books in randomly was Dez’s next thought, and was unsurprised that it gave her almost as much stress as reading Exodus Nights.
Frankie made a clicking noise with her tongue, the same sound Dez had heard on the phone earlier. “My fault?” Dez looked at Frankie’s expressionless face; she obviously hadn’t caught Dez’s smirk.
“Yep,” Dez said, trying to sound a lot more confident than she felt. “I went out and bought Exodus Nights before dinner, and I got all caught up in it. Lost track of time.”
“Ah,” Frankie responded, a smile touching the corners of her mouth.
Dez’s heart raced. Had she revealed too much too soon? Was the fact that she bought the book right away going to look desperate? Overly interested? Stalker-ish? After all, Rebecca Shaeffer, the actress who had been shot point-blank by an obsessed fan just three years earlier, had lived just a few miles away.
Frankie was stooping over the coffee table to pick up the Chinese food carton when she said, “So, um, I guess you’ve got a few questions for me.” She turned her back on Dez and walked to the kitchen, where, to judge by the sound, she put the carton in the trash.
When she emerged a moment later, Dez shrugged, trying to pretend she wasn’t burning with curiosity. “I think the Frank Bethany pseudonym is pretty clever.”
“You think so, huh?”
“Of course I do.” Dez paused, wondering how much more she should say. She decided to push one more time. “Nice picture, too, although I’d have to say the likeness isn’t very good. I hate to say it, but the camera makes you look decades older.”
Frankie smiled. “And male.”
Dez put her hands up in a mock gesture. “Hey, I’m not here to judge.”
Frankie laughed. Her teeth were white and straight. Even without the cherry dress, she had a pinup type of beauty in her face. Large eyes, high cheekbones, a round face.
Dez caught herself staring, then cleared her throat. “Well, if I’m taking you to coffee tonight—”
“And dessert, Dez. Don’t sell me short.”
Dez smiled, though she hadn’t remembered a mention of dessert on the phone. Limoncello, yes, but not dessert. “Coffee and dessert, sure. But you think I oughta get to know a little bit more about you?”
“Like what?” Frankie said, going to the hall closet and pulling out a jacket on a hanger. “Is it still raining out there?”
“Just a drizzle,” Dez said. “And like maybe your real name?”
Frankie laughed, putting the jacket back. “You don’t think Frank Bethany is good enough?”
“If I were your editor, sure enough,” Dez said. “But I’m not your editor, I’m your date.”
“You sure sound like my editor, trying to convince me to put Exodus Nights out under a man’s name.”
“And that reminds me,” said Dez, “who is that guy in your author photo?”
Frankie blinked and hesitated. “That’s my Uncle Alex.” She started talking faster, like floodgates were opening. “My agent insisted on it. I had to fly Uncle Alex out here from Vermont on my own dime. I was the one who had to get him to their photography studio and everything. I had to hire someone to do his makeup, get his hair right, select his clothes.” She folded her arms. “Seriously, you would not believe some of the things my agent has me doing for this gender reversal. I thought George Eliot and George Sand sacrificed themselves to make it easier on future generations.”
Dez shook her head. “I don’t know,” she began. “Even ten years ago, women were pretending to be men. You know Dell Shannon?” That was the name mystery writer Elizabeth Linington wrote under. Dez had found Dell Shannon’s books in the Lake Charles library, and she had almost burst with excitement to read an American police-procedural author—until then her mystery sustenance had been mostly Hercule Poirot and Inspector Morse. But the thinly-veiled racism in Linington’s books had been crushing.
Frankie waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, you don’t have to tell me. I know the war hasn’t been won yet.”
Dez’s brain pinballed from Dell Shannon to the campus police officer who detained her outside class for an hour because she looked suspicious. But this was Frankie’s story, not Dez’s, and so she put on her sympathetic face. “It must be hell, for sure, girl.”
“Sure is.”
“Those Rottweilers were a cute little detail.”
“The what?”
“The Rottweilers. You know, ‘Frank Bethany lives in New Hampshire with his wife and two Rottweilers.’”
Frankie laughed. “Oh, that’s right. I forgot about that. The Rottweilers were my agent’s idea.”
“And you’re not married or anything, either, right?”
Frankie smiled and shook her head.
Dez stood there for a moment, trying to take it all in: the sofa, the kitchen, the bookshelves, the piles of books and papers. Frankie didn’t apologize for the state of her apartment; in fact, it hadn’t even occurred to her that she should. Dez’s mother, after cleaning all day for company, would then greet her visitors with an apology for the nonexistent mess. Maybe Frankie had the right idea.
“So, are you ready to go?” Dez finally said.
Frankie picked up her purse from the kitchen counter. “Sure.”
They stepped out into the night, and Frankie locked the door behind them. The rain had finally stopped, and it was cool, but not cold. “What do you think?” Frankie said. “Should we chance a walk to the bistro?”
“I guess it depends how far away it is,” Dez said.
“It’s just a couple of blocks.”
“I can do a couple of blocks.”
“Great.” Frankie smiled warmly at Dez.
Dez was glad she had left the jacket in the car. With her long-sleeve shirt and dark blue jeans on, she was warm as she walked, and she was hoping she wouldn’t break into a sweat. She was glad Frankie had left her jacket at home, too; the aquamarine sweater looked amazing on her. She tried to think of something to say that wasn’t about Exodus Nights.
“So what are you working on now?” Dez asked, stepping over a puddle.
“I’ve got outlines for three different books right now.” Frankie shrugged. “None of them are particularly appealing to me, though. Everyone wants a sequel to Exodus Nights. That’s still his biggest seller, you know.”
“His? You talking about yourself in the third person?”
Frankie stammered. “Well, sometimes it’s hard for me to think that I’m actually the one writing that. Since I don’t see my actual name on the book cover and all.”
The next puddle took up Dez’s half of the sidewalk, so she walked behind Frankie. “Is that weird for you? Not seeing your name as an award finalist even though you’re the one who wrote everything?”
Frankie shrugged. “I don’t know. It would probably seem just as surreal to see Francesca Bethany there. And my editor did say that I’d be taken a lot more seriously with all the violence and sex I have in my books if all the readers thought it was a man that wrote it. Maybe I wouldn’t
have won that award if I wrote under my own name.”
“The PEN/Faulkner? I thought the book cover just said you were nominated.”
Frankie shrugged again and hesitated. “My agent said the nomination had the same kind of sales bump as a win. Everyone who cares buys all the nominated books anyway.”
“So it kind of is an honor just to be nominated,” Dez joked.
“I guess.” Frankie’s gaze was in the distance again.
It had only been ten minutes, but the date wasn’t going particularly well, Even though Dez was really interested in Exodus Nights and why Frankie wrote under a man’s name, she racked her brain trying to come up with other things to talk about.
“So who invited you to the party last Friday?” Dez said.
“I came with Bianca.”
“Bianca?”
Frankie chuckled. “I don’t know her last name either. We were smoking pot over at her house on Wednesday night and she invited us all.”
Dez nodded. The conversation had run out of steam again. She figured it was as good a time as any to try to get Frankie’s romantic history, even if Dez couldn’t get her last name.
“So,” Dez said, as casually as she could, “what was the name of your last girlfriend?”
“John,” Frankie said.
Dez looked at Frankie and saw that she wasn’t kidding. “So you were dating a man last?”
“Well, the last person I was in a relationship with.”
“But, you know, you’ve been with girls.”
“Oh, yeah,” Frankie said, nodding. “I’ve definitely been with girls.”
“Okay,” Dez said. “Sorry for the third degree. I’ve been on a couple of dates with freshman girls who said they were bi, but really they just wanted to make their ex-boyfriends jealous.”
Frankie laughed, although Dez didn’t think it was very funny. “The shit women do for gender expectations, right?”
Dez looked at Frankie, not quite getting where she was going.
“I mean, look at me. I write that lifeboat scene, I write that wolf and insect sex scene in the hospital, and everyone’s all like, ‘Hey, you can only sell that if you’re a man.’”
Dez was quiet for a moment.
“And, if that weren’t insulting enough, it winds up nominated for all kinds of awards and winds up on a bestseller list and actually proves the publisher right.”
“You telling me you couldn’t just do an ‘F.B. Bethany’ and leave it at that?” Dez was halfway hoping Frankie would correct her on the last name, but Frankie didn’t take the bait.
Frankie shook her head. “Don’t remind me of the fights I had with my editor over that.”
They crossed Sepulveda and it became Camino Real and with that change entered the Redondo Beach city limits. Dez thought maybe two blocks away from Redondo Beach was close enough to count, but she still couldn’t get a decent handle on Frankie.
“Which way?” Dez asked. Frankie pointed down Camino Real, vaguely enough that Dez still didn’t have a good idea where they were going.
“So, is this bistro known for their desserts?” Dez said. She was still curious about Frankie’s experiences with the publishers—she had really enjoyed her women’s studies class—but she was feeling a rant coming on, and was hoping to make out with Frankie later. A rant might preemptively destroy the possibility of that before it started.
“They should be,” Frankie said. “It kind of sucks that they have the best desserts south of San Francisco, and yet they’re nowhere near making the best dessert lists.”
“Yeah, that’s kind of a travesty,” Dez said.
Frankie opened her mouth and then closed it. Dez thought maybe she was going to tie the travesty of the bistro not getting recognized to the travesty of her having to write under a man’s name to have any success. Dez looked at Frankie and smiled. She was glad there was some semblance of self-control under there.
“So, um, what did you do before you were a writer?” Dez said, ducking under a low-hanging branch. She brushed against it and it showered her with droplets.
“Well, I’ve always been a writer,” Frankie said. “I just didn’t get paid for it for the first twenty-five years.”
Frankie’s too-precious answer annoyed Dez. Frankie’s beauty had distracted Dez from taking umbrage at some of her responses, and Dez found much of what Frankie said fascinating. But other times, she seemed like she needed heavy sedation not to go off the rails. Attractive yet maddening: the two weren’t mutually exclusive.
Frankie sighed, and it dawned on Dez that she wasn’t hiding her annoyance from Frankie particularly well. “I waitressed, mostly,” Frankie continued. “I had a job at a barbecue place over in Carson. It wasn’t a fancy restaurant, but they charged fancy restaurant prices for good barbecue. Sometimes I made two hundred bucks a night in tips.”
“Hey, I waitress too. The money ain’t bad when the crowds are decent. Frank Bethany makes more than that for you?”
“Yep,” Frankie said. “My agent was right—getting nominated for the Pulitzer was a good as a win.”
Dez hesitated. Exodus Nights had been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner, not the Pulitzer. Was Frankie really that out of touch with her own work? Or did she really not care about the awards? Or—and Dez realized, the most likely scenario—Frankie purposely misidentified the award so to convey the idea that she didn’t care about winning awards.
Ugh, Dez thought. It was the worst kind of phony behavior: pretending not to care.
They came to a light with a red Don’t Walk signal. Dez looked over at Frankie. The woman did know how to put herself together. The silence stretched out, and Dez scrambled for something to say; it would be an excruciating evening with Frankie if the conversation kept stopping.
Dez was still interested in how she came to write as a man, and she wasn’t sure what else they had to talk about. Frankie hadn’t asked any information about Dez yet, although perhaps that would come over dessert.
“So how did your agent convince you to change sexes with your author name?” Dez said, not really caring that she was opening the door for an epic rant. “I mean, especially today. Four hundred years ago, sure, I get that it wasn’t ladylike, but today?”
“Yes, Dez,” Frankie said, “especially today.” She cleared her throat. “I mean, yes, women had far fewer freedoms four hundred years ago. But the expectations placed on women today are deeply ingrained. The price a woman pays for breaking a gender expectation is probably worse today than it was in the time of Jane Austen.”
“Hah,” Dez said. “Sounds like you’ve done a little bit of research on that.”
“Only my master’s thesis,” Frankie said. “Except Frank Bethany made it big before I finished it..”
“So what price does the woman pay today?”
“Well, you read Exodus Nights.”
“Just the opening chapters.” Dez stepped around another puddle.
“Okay, so look at what happens. There’s a murder at sea, and it’s grislier than just about everything I’ve read that didn’t have Chainsaw Massacre in the title.”
“Yeah, all right, I’ll give you that it was pretty grisly. But you know, I don’t think it was gratuitous or anything. I mean, it was real clinical. You can’t say that about the chainsaw massacre stuff. All of that’s totally gratuitous.”
“Well, thanks, I guess, but look at the other stuff. There’s the wolves copulating. And then they transform into insects, and they’re still copulating, and then they transform back into people, and they’re still copulating.”
“Sure, that’s a whole lot of copulating. But again, it wasn’t like a Penthouse Forum letter or anything. Dear Wolves-and-Insect Copulation Monthly, I never thought this could happen to me, but…”
“Oh, come on, Dez, be serious.”
Dez looked at Frankie, and it was clear from her face that she didn’t think Dez’s attempt at levity was funny. “Okay,” she said. “My bad. Sorry. You mean that women can’t sell t
heir stuff if they write that kind of subject matter?”
“Exactly.” A shopping center appeared on their left, and the bistro looked to be on the end. “Women aren’t supposed to write scenes like that. And certainly not in the kind of grisly, psychotic detail I did.” She scoffed. “We’re not even supposed to have thoughts like that. We’re supposed to be good girls.”
“You don’t have to tell me what people want me to be like. I’ve been a dyke for a while now.” They started walking across the parking lot, Dez walking carefully around the puddles, Frankie walking through them, not caring about her shoes or the hem of her palazzo pants.
Frankie kept talking, like Dez hadn’t even said anything. “Listen—when you know a novel is going to be all violent and sexual and sadistic, but you find out the author is a woman, what do you do?”
“Depends on what bookstore I’m in,” Dez said, then thought of Dell Shannon. “Actually, I’d probably buy it. Might be something I’d really like.”
“Okay—well, most people would put the book back. Or, actually, most people wouldn’t even pick up the book to begin with.”
“You serious?”
“Yes, I’m serious,” Frankie said, opening the bistro door. Dez followed her in. “They’d walk over to another section. Stephen King, Bret Easton Ellis, Tom Wolfe—they can all write about these violent, sexual topics. Women have to write about love and heaving bosoms. Or thin allegorical feminist manifestos masquerading as fiction.” They stood at the hostess stand, in front of the Please Wait to Be Seated sign.
“I don’t know,” Dez said carefully. “I think there are some women who’ve been able to break through that.”
Frankie scoffed. “First of all, if you mention Ayn Rand, I swear to God I’m going to kill you in your sleep.”
Dez idly wondered if that was a veiled promise to share her bed tonight.
“Two for dinner?” the hostess said. She was skinny, her strawberry blonde hair was big, and she smelled of Aqua Net.
“Dessert,” Dez said. The hostess put the dinner menus away and grabbed the smaller dessert menus. Dez and Frankie, led by the ozone-depleting scent of hairspray, followed the hostess to an empty table and sat.
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