“Yeah, all right,” she said. Then she bent down and kissed me, tongue and all. I meant to stop her, uncomfortable with Laura right there, but my body responded without my thinking about it. I felt the pulse in her neck under my hand. Then I pulled away.
“I’ll call you,” Natalie said and sauntered away down the street, her earrings swinging. I watched two men and a woman stare at her as they passed. She had not acknowledged Laura’s presence once. I was furious with her. And I wanted to be walking down the street beside her.
“I’m sorry,” I said, turning to Laura.
Laura kept her gaze trained down the street. “Well, I don’t appreciate having to watch you make out. It seems like I’m always being reminded how easy it is for you.”
I was mystified. “How easy what is for me? Kissing?”
She turned her face toward me; her eyes were accusing. “Being sexual. Finding someone to sleep with.”
I could feel my head move back, away from her. “Wait a minute, Laura. Where is this coming from?”
She gestured with her head down the street, and we started walking. When I looked over at her, she seemed to be concentrating, her face angry and intent. “It’s always been that way, Min. It’s just not usually so obvious.” I could hear how she was struggling for the words. I waited, biting down on my need to defend myself. “You assume that if you’re attracted to someone, you’ll have sex with them. And you usually do. You don’t worry about whether the other person’s attracted to you or whether it’s a good idea in the long run or whether you have anything in common.”
It was true; when I felt attracted to another woman, I was helpless to it. I loved the sexual force that brought two people so intimately into each other’s orbit, even briefly. It was impossible to resist, like gravity.
Laura went on, “Maybe that person isn’t available. I never expect that anything will happen just because I’m interested. I think it’s kind of presumptuous, actually.”
I was listening to Laura carefully. I didn’t disagree with anything she had said. But I felt strangely removed from her emotion. What did she want me to do? We were different; I attracted lovers more easily than she did. I didn’t feel as rejected when we broke up. I didn’t need as much from other people as she seemed to. For a moment I felt guilty, but there was nothing I could do.
“What about this guy you’re with now, Ethan?” I asked. “What about Nick and Devin and Al?” I added, referring to guys she’d gone out with when we were in school. I knew I had to be careful with her, but I kept going. “Guys have always liked you, Laura. You’re pretty and you’re fun to be with and you’re sexy too. I was jealous of you all the way back in junior high because you had boobs and I didn’t.” She smiled, looking down at the sidewalk. We stopped at a corner to wait for the light. I took a breath. “But you don’t let guys in. You keep yourself hidden. You don’t put out the energy that you’re available. Sexually, and emotionally too.” I wanted her to understand what I meant, but at the same time I knew there was a point beyond which she would stop hearing what I was telling her.
The stoplight changed, and I started to cross. Laura didn’t follow. I went back to where she stood, her hands in the pockets of her painters pants, staring at the white pedestrian lines on the street.
I stood in front of her, trying to coax her to look up. “Have I hurt your feelings?”
“Not exactly.”
Right then, I felt how much I loved Laura—not in the passionate, hungry way I had three years before, just loved her, pure and simple. I didn’t often feel this forceful welling up of affection for another person. It was almost painful.
I pulled her arm, freeing her hand, took it in my own and led her across the street. “I’m sorry,” I said. “The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But I thought you needed to hear it.”
She shifted her hand in mine for a better fit, and I thought that in tenth grade I would have been ecstatic if she’d held my hand. Back then I would have misinterpreted the gesture, wanting so much for our intertwined fingers to mean more than they actually did.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” she told me. “I don’t know how to be any more open than I am.”
I squeezed her hand. It wasn’t as though I could teach her any technique. On the street, people passing glanced down at our linked hands and looked away. I smiled at them anyway.
I said, “I think you’re very open, at least with me. But I’ve known you for a long time. It’s hard for you to trust that a stranger could really like you. Especially when you’re attracted and want to establish something that might last. Am I right?” I wasn’t sure; she had already accused me of being presumptuous.
“Yes,” Laura said reluctantly. She stopped, pulling my hand, in front of a restaurant. “This is it.”
It was impossible to see inside. Paper screens were set in all the windows. Behind them a warm yellow light invited us in. I was ravenous. I said to Laura, who was studying the menu, “You have a lot of integrity, Laura. And a good heart. Someone will recognize that.”
“You think so?”
I took my hand from hers and put both my arms around her shoulders, holding her close. She held me too, swaying slightly from side to side. My cheek against her hair, I realized I was smiling. “I know so,” I said.
Surely there was one other person in the world who would love Laura the way I did.
Natalie brought her head up to mine and kissed me, her mouth tasting of my own wetness.
“Mmm, you taste good,” I said.
“I thought so too.”
Her breath was warm and slightly sweet. The fingers of one hand still inside me, she held me while another shudder rippled up my spine. I could feel the lazy grin on my face. My entire body was in a state of suspended animation. I was glad I hadn’t let my annoyance with Natalie’s behavior on the street stop me from sleeping with her again. Laura, in my position, probably would have refused to speak to her. Maybe if Laura let go of her scruples once in a while, she’d have better luck with guys. I immediately regretted the thought, knowing it was unfair.
“Do you need to go home soon?” I asked. I craned my neck around to look at the clock. 10:07 p.m. Natalie had told Ana she was going to the movies with a friend. I wondered if Ana had believed her. Through the wall, in the other bedroom, I could hear Henry and his girlfriend Karen giggling.
“Yeah, but not right away.” Slowly, Natalie eased her hand out, pressing a sweaty thigh between my legs. I shivered, though I wasn’t cold. She was good at keeping contact, at not leaving a part of the body where she had been without warning. She would do well as a massage practitioner. She licked each finger, closing her eyes as she did it.
“So tell me something,” she said. “You’ve been talking about your dad’s wedding every time we get together. How come you didn’t ask me to go along?”
“Would you have gone?” I asked, astonished. It seemed pretty clear to me that our relationship didn’t extend to weekends away together. But I hadn’t even considered asking her.
She ignored my question. “I’m your lover, right?” she asked.
I nodded.
“The only one you’ve got at the moment, hmmm?”
Again I nodded. Jane didn’t count.
“Are you afraid to show up with a woman lover? A black woman?” She was looking down at me searchingly, waiting to see what I would say.
I took her sticky hand in mine, clutching it against the pillow above my head. “Do you want me to ask you just because you’re my black lesbian lover? Do you want to go so you can make a statement? I don’t.” I released her hand and rolled us both over onto our sides.
“No,” she said, frowning, which made me want to kiss the rumpled furrow between her brows. “I’m not interested in whether your father and all his white friends can deal with me, I’m interested in whether you can deal with me. How are you going to present yourself in that world? Why do you want to play it safe?”
I propped my head
up on one hand. Why did she think she knew what was best for me? “I can’t play it safe, Natalie. Most of those people won’t even know who I am or why I’m there. I asked Laura to go because she’s my best friend.”
Natalie rolled her eyes and lay on her back, pulling a pillow under her head.
I was tired of this bullshit. “Fuck it, Natalie, what’s the problem? You don’t like Laura because she’s white?”
She looked at me hard. She didn’t move, but I could see the shrug in her shoulders. “I have no reason to like her.”
“You didn’t give her a chance! She’s my closest friend. Did you think that would change?”
Her gaze suddenly became remote, guarded, her eyes half hooded by her lids. She looked almost as disinterested as when she had met Laura.
I sat up, scrambling to the edge of the bed. “It’s getting late. You should leave.” I stood up, opened the creaky door, and left the room. Naked, I felt my way down the hall in the dark to the bathroom.
When I came back, Natalie was gone. I switched off my bedside lamp and lay in the dark, wide awake, still furious. Outside the window, the orange slice of the waning moon hovered behind a drift of clouds. I looked down at my body stretched out on the bed, silvered by moonlight. My legs were long and sturdy, my chest almost flat with two button nipples, my stomach taut above the bush of black curly hair. In the room next door, Karen moaned, then moaned again. There was a bump against the wall, then Henry said something I couldn’t hear. Then, after a long silence, Karen’s voice rose and called out in inarticulate syllables, wafting on a breeze of pleasure. Smiling, I touched myself, and soon I was calling out, quietly, too. Listening to another woman come always made me happy.
I went to my father’s wedding alone. I took the train down the coast to San Diego and arrived the night before in time for the rehearsal dinner at the bride’s parents’ house. Most of the guests were my father’s and Angela’s friends or from Angela’s family; the only person I knew, vaguely, was a friend of my father’s from his old job in San Francisco who now worked in LA. I didn’t recognize him when he said my name and shook my hand. After he identified himself, he said, “Isn’t this wonderful? I’ve never seen your father looking so happy.” I merely stared at him. Didn’t I want him to be happy? At that moment I wished I hadn’t come. It could only get worse. My father’s friend asked me a few questions about myself which I answered in monosyllables. When he saw I wasn’t going to help him out, he wandered away in search of a drink. Even though I had stopped smoking, I bummed a cigarette from a woman sitting on a couch petting the dog.
That night Dad never left Angela’s side. I barely got a chance to hug him hello before his attention was pulled away by someone else, and Angela and I were left standing together, face to face. She still wore suits, but perhaps in honor of the occasion this one was a peach color. Her pearls nicely set off the tone of her skin around her clavicle.
“Well,” she said brightly. I looked up at her face. Why would my father want to marry someone like her? I couldn’t figure it out. “I’m so glad you could come, Min. I hope you’ll visit us more in the future. I really want to get to know you better. You know, you’re always welcome in our house.”
“You could come visit me,” I suggested, thinking that maybe with her influence I could finally get Dad up to San Francisco.
“That’s nice of you, Min, but we’re awfully busy. We’re not taking our honeymoon until the fall, when things at work ease up a little.” She seemed proud of this. She gulped from her drink, something that smelled like floor wax. “Oh God, do you think anyone’s enjoying this party? How’s the massage business going?”
“I graduated a few weeks ago, so I’m certified now.”
“It sounds like a fun thing to do, taking a course for a few months. You’ll probably make tons.”
“I really don’t care about the money,” I said.
“Listen,” Angela said, laying a hand on my shoulder confidingly, “if you decide you want to go to college after all, I have some very well-placed connections. You’ll have no trouble getting in.” I realized as she spoke that her working for a non-profit had nothing to do with wanting to save the environment. I remembered one of my father’s letters in which he wrote that Angela had gotten her MBA from Harvard immediately after college. She looked around the room appraisingly. She turned to my father to whisper quickly into his ear, and then she hustled him off to take care of some problem that needed fixing. The woman he had been speaking with and I smiled helplessly at each other, and she shook her head and turned away.
It was worse the next morning, when the caterers had to be directed and the putting up of the decorations overseen. I tried to ask my father if we’d have any time to talk alone, and, distracted, he smoothed down his moustache with one knuckle while watching the serving tables being unfolded and said maybe the next day, before I left. Then he excused himself and walked off to supervise where the tables were supposed to go. I kept telling myself I couldn’t expect his full attention today of all days.
The wedding was held outside, in the afternoon, in a huge garden behind an old mansion of a hotel that overlooked the ocean. The ceremony itself took place at a corner bower where the trellises were woven with white silk ribbons and two huge palm trees presided overhead. My father looked spare and nervous and surprisingly handsome in his tux. Angela carried baby’s breath and wore a simple, long white dress. Over her newly wavy hair she had a headdress with a train. She let it trail behind her on the grass, and, at the altar, turned to gather it up, letting it fall in a heap beside her. Seeing her face as she turned, her wide-set eyes and delicate, pointed chin, I found myself thinking that if she weren’t marrying my father I might have asked her out myself. She turned back to the minister, and I tried to concentrate on the ceremony. All around me people were smiling. I heard a woman whisper to her husband, “They wrote the vows themselves. Isn’t it moving?” I realized there were very few single people there, and no children. Just a lot of straight couples, mostly married, all white, there to welcome the happy couple into the fold. I missed Laura, wishing she had been able to come with me. Then I realized that some day I’d have to go to her wedding. She wanted this particular brand of acceptance, this social approval. She thought being married sealed the commitment. I was boiling hot in the silk tunic and loose pants my father’s check had allowed me to buy. A man in front of me shifted and blocked my view. I stood on tiptoe, craning to see over his shoulder. I couldn’t even hear my father and Angela exchange their vows. The light wind from the ocean blew away their words.
The reception was a complete farce. I stood waiting a long time in line to be received by the wedding party, which was only my father and Angela and his best man and her bridesmaid. My father had tears in his eyes after he hugged me, but I didn’t know what they meant. Was he glad, in the end, that I was there? Was he that happy to be married again, to someone other than my mother? He introduced me as his daughter to the couple in front of me and the man behind me. They all looked at me, astonished, and the woman said she didn’t know he had a daughter. Angela hugged me too, an exuberant embrace during which I felt her breasts through her wedding dress, soft and ample. Afterwards, I went directly to the drinks table and asked the sandy-haired surfer boy in a suit standing behind it for a Scotch on the rocks. I’d never had Scotch before—I’d discovered long ago that I didn’t react well to hard liquor—but it was a drink I remembered all the adults having at my grandparents’ house in Rhinebeck.
The garden had a series of walks, and down every one vases had been placed, full of fresh-cut gladioli and lilies. Tables with white linen cloths and table settings were arranged every few yards so that people could move around and eat where they wanted. In the center of the garden a band had set up in front of a large area inlaid with blue and green tiles. I walked around for a while, testing myself on the names of the shrubbery while gulping the stinging scotch. Then the first notes of a big band tune started up. I went back to the d
rinks table to get another Scotch before helping myself to food.
I found a seat at a table with two older couples. One of the men I was sitting next to, portly with long steel-gray hair, turned out to be Angela’s uncle. His name was Morris, his wife’s was Jill. I was surprised when he turned his full attention to me, ignoring the conversation Jill was in the middle of with the other couple, who hadn’t bothered to introduce themselves.
“This must be kind of tough for you,” he said. “Your parents got divorced five years ago, didn’t they?”
“Yeah. Sometimes I still can’t believe it.”
“I can imagine. On our side of the family, we’re happy for Angie. She’s over thirty already, and Jonathan’s a terrific guy. But it’s more complicated for you.”
“Yeah, well. I don’t know Angela. Maybe she’s great for him. I hardly see him since he left. I don’t know much about his life. The truth is I feel like I’ve lost him completely.” I felt tears brim over. I wiped my cheeks with my fist, furious with myself. The Scotch was already affecting me.
Morris watched me, his bushy gray eyebrows pulled together. “I don’t know if this will help you. I’ve gotten to know Jonathan a bit over the last two years. When we get together, he always talks about you. He misses you, very much. It sounds like you were extremely close. He told me once that when your mother and he agreed the marriage was over, he realized he couldn’t face living nearby. It would have been too painful to be a part-time father, picking you up every other weekend, hoping all the gifts he gave you might make up for his not being at home. For him it was all or nothing. Don’t think less of him for that.” He paused. My tears kept spilling over. “I’m sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.” He pulled a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and handed it to me.
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