Worth the Wait

by Karelia Stetz-Waters

  Chapter 29

  The Mirage was packed for a Sunday because Iliana and Lei-Ling were as delightful as kung pao ketchup and Pop Rocks on waffles. Tall, muscular Iliana in a white cotton dress that looked, not surprisingly, like her gi. Tiny Lei-Ling who had liked the idea of white wedding dresses but had ended up in a cornucopia of pink lace and platinum lamé. They were the best Portland had to offer: strange, charming, hardworking, in love. Everyone knew it. Well-wishers crowded around them, raising toasts.

  “You give us hope,” one woman said.

  “To love!” someone else said.

  Merritt gave a lengthier toast, describing Iliana and Lei-Ling’s courtship, a story she had memorized through unsolicited repetition. Iliana hugged her.

  “Avery will come back,” Iliana whispered. “Believe it.”

  “Maybe,” Merritt said. Avery hadn’t texted her yet, but she would. Merritt could feel a smile light her face, and she knew Iliana saw it too.

  When the toasts were completed and the dinner of Mirage specials had been eaten, Iliana and Lei-Ling left the bar in a shower of confetti and headed to the coast for a honeymoon of clam digging and hot tubbing.

  Vita brought around a tray of flaming shots. Merritt waved her away.

  “You have to,” Vita said. “It’s the Flaming Peacock. Grape vodka and overproof rum.”

  “You aren’t allowed to push liquor. It’s against OLCC. You need to offer me a popcorn shrimp so I don’t get drunk.”

  “Ooh,” Vita said. “We’ll put a shrimp in each one and then it will be a shrimp cocktail.”

  “No,” Merritt said. “No one wants the Flaming Peacock with shrimp. I’ll leave before I drink that.”

  “Not before we place our bets.”

  It was probably best she leave now, Merritt thought. If she were lucky, Vita was taking bets on the number of girls she’d caught kissing in the Mirage bathroom or the circumference of someone’s cervix. Appropriate, all-ages bets that would not get them sideways with the Neighborhood Enhancement Committee…except yes, they would. But it was probably Vita’s favorite theme. Merritt the bachelor. Merritt the heartbreaker. Merritt wished she could tell her the truth.

  “It better not be me,” Merritt said. “I’m not like that anymore, and I never was, not that you noticed.”

  She could hear Avery. You’re not cold.

  Vita winked at her. “We’ll crowdsource that one.” She reached onto her flaming tray and pulled out the one shot that was not lit. “Your Sadfire Reserve, my dear. We are what we are.”

  Vita strutted away.

  The crowd grew. Vita announced a DJ, and the woman took her place in the booth at the edge of the dance floor. Techno Adele filled the bar. Vita circled the bar with two coffee cans, a roll of raffle tickets, and a pen. A few minutes later the door to the bar opened, and Merritt watched a girl slip in. Eighties rocker hair covered her face, down to her lips. Jerry Xan hair. Her tights were ripped, and she seemed to be wearing three or four T-shirts, all of them shredded. Her jean vest read, ANARCHY BEGINS AT HOME. Altogether, she looked like a Halloween costume that had been put through the blender. Still, she had a body like Avery’s, small and curvy in a way that made skinnier women look underfed, and Merritt longed for the feel of Avery’s body on top of her.

  Vita beckoned to the woman to come closer to the bar. She held out a ticket, explained something, then shook the coffee cans in front of her. Merritt thought she saw the girl say something that might have been, That’s wrong, but it was hard to tell with her face hidden. Then the girl tossed her ticket in one of the cans.

  “All right, ladies.” Vita tapped a glass and gestured to the DJ to bring down the music. “I’m a bartender, so I’ve seen love born and love lost. Iliana and Lei-Ling are proof there is hope for all of us. How strong do you think love is?”

  Women raised their glasses and whooped.

  “I’ve put my money on love-conquers-all,” Vita said. “You know our incorrigible bachelor.”

  “Oh, leave Merritt alone,” one woman called out.

  Merritt raised a middle finger in Vita’s direction.

  “I’ve got one can that says what I say,” Vita went on. “Our Merritt Lessing is in love. And this can says no. You’ve all placed your bets. You know how this works. Winning can is a raffle. Losing can is a donation. Where’s the donation going, Merritt?”

  “Fuck off, Vita,” Merritt called, but she couldn’t muster up much indignation. This was the Mirage. These were her people. Vita had served her beers since she turned twenty-one. “The Pride House.”

  “The Pride House it is.”

  The girl with the awful eighties hair watched her from beneath lip-length bangs, or at least Merritt felt like she was watching. She could have just been lost in her hair. Maybe she was trying to find an Out in Portland coffee shop and had stumbled into the Mirage by mistake. Maybe she thought she’d woken up in a hedge.

  “So, Merritt Lessing,” Vita said. “I called it weeks ago. You’re in love. True or false?”

  There was a ripple of approval.

  Someone said, “No way.”

  Merritt thought she heard someone else say, “You know what she did to Carlie Dewey?”

  Merritt thought of Avery’s plane lifting off the runway, heading for Cincinnati. She’d fly first class, direct flight. The flight attendants would ask for her autograph, and news of her presence would rustle down the aisles. Someone would bring a young girl up to her seat, and she’d shake the child’s hand and ask her what kind of drawings she liked to do. So kind. So thoughtful. And she’d be thinking about Merritt.

  “So,” Vita prompted. “We’ve got sixteen fifty riding on this. This is important. What is it, Merritt?”

  “Oh, well, for sixteen fifty,” Merritt said.

  People chuckled.

  “For whatever. For a million.” Merritt held up her hands in surrender. “Yeah, I am in love.”

  The bar cheered almost as loudly as they had for Iliana and Lei-Ling.

  “There’s proof, folks,” Vita said. “Anything is possible.”

  Vita motioned to the DJ to raise the volume, and the dance floor filled. Portlanders weren’t great dancers. Their parents had all been aging hippies, artists, or port workers, and they danced accordingly: heads bobbing with chicken-like exuberance, arms waving like octopuses in slow motion, or shifting their weight from foot to foot with the subtlety of hardening concrete. Merritt didn’t know her mother well enough to imprint on her dancing, so she kept her seat in the corner. The girl with the eighties hair was making her way through the dancers. For the first time, Merritt knew there was no girl at the Mirage who would turn her head. Then the girl stopped in front of Merritt. And the world slowed on its axis. The dock workers’ children were the only ones dancing because they danced without moving. And Merritt saw that she was wrong. There was only one woman in the Mirage. Avery tucked a hank of hideous black hair behind her ear. Merritt beamed. “You’re supposed to be in Cincinnati.”

  “You were supposed to give me an ultimatum. Come to your friends’ wedding or you’d never forgive me.”

  “I would never say that.”

  “I know. That’s why I came. I pushed my flight back. I still have to go to Cincinnati tomorrow, but I wanted one more night.”

  Merritt felt so shy and delighted she barely knew what to say. “This is quite the outfit.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t be me in a lesbian bar, but I wanted to be with you.”

  “This is so you,” Merritt teased. “Where did you…?” She stroked the wig. It didn’t move. It was like something used to insulate houses before fiberglass.

  “DX dressed me.”

  “In her clothes?”

  “Something from her bandmates. And this”—Avery touched the wig—“is vintage Jerry Xan.”

  “For real? Jerry Xan doesn’t have his own hair?”

  “Did you think nature could do all this? Real signature hair is hard to come by.” Avery tilted her chin
up. The rest of her face disappeared.

  Merritt drew the strands apart, found Avery’s lips, and kissed her.

  “Dance with me,” Avery said.

  Marlene Crown must have been a good dancer, even if she was a bad mother. Avery moved against her in time to the music, suggesting everything without throwing her ass around like some of the younger girls did. (Maybe their mothers had been backup dancers.)

  The song slowed, and Avery put her head on Merritt’s shoulder. Merritt put her arms around her. She imagined she could feel Avery’s heart beating against hers. Iliana was right, Merritt thought. She’d always thought she was the only one to get hurt, to be scared. As soon as she’d seen Avery at the reunion, she’d been convinced everything had been Avery’s fault. But Avery had been scared too. She’d been young. Her mother had asked her to make a decision that would change her life, and Avery had made the right decision and the wrong one. Now, tonight, in Merritt’s arms, Avery had a chance to go back and take both paths at once. Maybe that was what everyone wanted, to be who they were and to go back to see who else they could have been.

  Merritt closed her eyes…and opened them only when she felt someone knock into her with the force of a bar fight. But no one fought at the Mirage.

  “Hey!” Merritt said.

  She didn’t have time to shift into the loose opening stance of hidari hanmi or to protect Avery, who had suddenly been snatched away. By Alistair! He pushed Merritt back into the corner with one hand while he ripped Avery’s wig off. Her chestnut curls cascaded down her back. He pushed her vest off too, as though he was going to take her on the floor.

  “Alistair, no,” Avery said.

  “Ponza,” he said.

  “What are you doing?” Merritt cried.

  Suddenly a man in a white tracksuit was pushing through the crowd, an enormous camera raised. He pushed it in Avery and Alistair’s faces, snapping pictures so fast he could have made a movie. The flash cut through the darkness.

  One of the old butch dykes lunged toward Ponza.

  “What are you doing?” she yelled, with a ferocity that told Merritt she remembered when a photo meant ruin. It still could. “Get out of here!”

  Alistair swept Avery up in his arms. He dipped her back like a tango dancer and kissed her. Avery struggled in Alistair’s arms but not enough. Above them, the disco ball whirled in a snowfall of light. Merritt felt dizzy. She tried to push Ponza aside, but her chi was gone. She wasn’t a black belt anymore. She was just a tough, angry girl shuffled from school to school—fighting or flirting as best she could. Ponza held his camera in one hand, drew back his fist, and swung, landing a pathetic blow on Merritt’s cheek. Being paparazzi had clearly not prepared him for street fighting. Still, the small jolt of pain knocked her back with surprise. Avery was still suspended in Alistair’s grasp.

  “Portland is one of the most inclusive cities in America,” Alistair said to the camera Ponza had shoved back in his face. “And this is just one example, a bar where gays and straights mix. We’re clubbing down the street. The Swizzle Club is next. Who’s coming?”

  To their credit, the women at the Mirage just frowned. No one wanted to go clubbing with Alistair King.

  The Nostalgia-rom was planned for the last day of summer—September 22—but the end of summer had come early. This was it. The fall would be crisp and bright for a second. Then the sky would go gray, a spit of rain would become a sheet, and it would never stop. Merritt was back at the Vale prom, staring at Avery. She had fallen for it again. I want someone who loves me first, she cried inside. But Avery had her arm around Alistair’s waist, and though Avery looked stricken, she was also saying, “We just love Portland. There’s so much to do here.”

  Merritt was too proud to run. She picked up her Sadfire Reserve, looked at Avery with what she hoped read as disgust, knocked back the last of the whiskey, turned slowly, and walked out.

  She was a few blocks away when she collapsed on the stone steps of an old bungalow. She didn’t care if the owners saw her, if they thought she was homeless, if they called the police. She rested her head in her arms and wept.

  Chapter 30

  How could you?” Avery said as soon as Alistair had hustled her into the front seat of the pink convertible. The top was lowered in an accordion of pink canvas and their quick flight down the road whipped Avery’s hair around her face. She had left the wig in the Mirage.

  “Me?” he demanded, his tone clipped. “Avery, someone saw you there. At a lesbian bar! They tweeted. It’s all over the Internet. And it looks like what it was. Thank God Greg saw it ten minutes before Ponza. This is the scandal Ponza has been waiting for. I saved your ass in there.”

  “But Merritt.”

  Avery had seen the pain on Merritt’s face. Merritt had looked like she’d been stabbed. She looked like she must have the day she’d realized her mother wasn’t picking her up from boarding school. It was as though the cool facade she’d always worn had been stripped away. Avery knew it wasn’t Ponza’s punch that had hurt Merritt.

  “Fuck.” Alistair sighed. “Merritt.”

  “Yes. Merritt! I have to find her.”

  “You have to come to the Swizzle Club with me and then God knows how many more clubs. We’re clubbing. We were at the lesbian bar for twenty minutes. We didn’t even realize what it was, but Portland’s so nice. Everyone fits in.”

  Alistair’s face was grim and his driving erratic. He swerved away from a row of orange cones in the bike lane, then drew up short behind the next car.

  “No, Alistair,” Avery pleaded. “We have to find her. She can’t have gotten far. I love her. She can’t think I didn’t pick her. Don’t you see? It’s exactly like prom. She’ll think I’ve done it again.”

  “Call her,” Alistair said curtly. “Explain. She knows you and I aren’t like that. You know we didn’t really kiss. I’ve been more intimate with a bottle of 7 Up.”

  It was true. If Merritt had been on the inside of that kiss, she would have known how chaste it was. Alistair had held his breath. He’d tucked his tongue into the corner of his mouth.

  “This isn’t a government conspiracy,” Alistair added. “It’s pretty simple. You can’t look gay right now.”

  Nothing felt simple. Avery felt the weight of her love, of everything that had happened at Vale, and of the fifteen years she had wasted pressing down on her. People got to make mistakes, but she’d made too many already.

  “Please take me back to her place. I’ll wait for her there if we can’t find her.”

  Avery had to throw her arms around Merritt and beg for forgiveness.

  “Avery,” Alistair said, turning left out of the center lane and startling pedestrians in the crosswalk. “Look behind you.”

  Avery turned. She didn’t need to pull her hair out of her eyes to see Ponza in the car behind them.

  “He will follow you every single step you take in Portland,” Alistair went on. “If we go find Merritt, if Ponza sees you chasing after the girl you were just dancing with, King and Crown is over. You can’t pretend that you two are just really good friends who like each other a lot. She’s your lover. It’s written all over your face.”

  “I need to see her.”

  “You need to stay away from her.”

  All those nights she had lounged in Alistair’s hotel room, reading while he tapped away at his laptop, messaging his consultants on another America Wyoming project, she’d been happy. But she wasn’t happy now.

  “I want to buy a house.”

  It occurred to Avery that she was probably the only person in the world who felt like she was betraying her best friend by buying property. Ironic, since buying property was what they had done their whole career.

  “With her? Aves, you’ve known her for only five or six weeks. That’s nothing. Do you even know what she really wants?”

  “I asked her to marry me.”

  She wanted to rattle Alistair. This announcement would do it. Alistair took a corner too fast
and bumped into the curb. The car lurched.

  “Did she say yes?”

  Telling him about her not-really-a-marriage-proposal was a mistake. She realized it as soon as she’d brought it up. Merritt hadn’t said yes because Avery hadn’t really asked. Alistair didn’t seem to notice the flaw in her story.

  “You could have told me, Aves,” he said, as though she had answered him in the affirmative.

  Alistair slowed down. Ponza slowed too.

  “She didn’t say yes,” Avery said. “Not yet. We were just talking.”

  “She didn’t say yes? What self-respecting lesbian gets a marriage proposal from you and says…what? Let me check with my accountant? I’ve got a couple other offers on the table; I’ll get back to you? She’s crazy.”

  That was the Alistair Avery knew and loved, the Alistair who always came to her defense, the Alistair who didn’t realize that Merritt could have better offers. She was still mad.

  “You told her to leave me!”

  She wanted to say, You’re a friend now. Why weren’t you a friend then?

  “I told her to be careful because she cared about you.” Whatever anger Alistair had brought to the Mirage had faded out of his brow and out of his voice. “If you go looking for Merritt right now, you will be making a decision for you, for me, and for King and Crown. You’ll end our show.” He sounded desolate. “Fifteen years, Aves. I’m not saying you can’t be with her. Maybe you even want to quit. It would break my heart, but you have a right to…I think. Check your contract. But I’m just asking you not to make that big a decision right now in the Barbie-mobile, driving through God-knows-where”—he gestured toward the gray warehouses that surrounded them now that they had turned off the main road—“with Ponza tailing us like a cop. Just call her now and see her later.”

  “Can you lose Ponza?” Avery asked.

  “Sweetie, do you see what I’m driving? The crew had every grown-up car blocked in. We need to go find some clubs and look happy. We’ve been King and Crown for fifteen years. Please give me this. Give me ‘I thought about it before I called it quits.’”