Apples & Oranges

by Jan Clausen

  In fact, the axis of my interest in Elsewhere had run north-south for a very long time. Where the dominant U.S. East Coast culture looks to Europe, the West Coast (though it tries) has more trouble forgetting that we are not geographically or historically disjunct from that other, darker America “down there.” As a native of Oregon, I felt the tug of this connection, but as a white radical I was sharply aware of the dangers of cultural imperialism. I’d studied Spanish in high school, and in the early eighties I found myself cruising the Brooklyn Public Library’s Spanish literature collection, experiencing a craving for fluency that shamed me as if it had been an excessive physical appetite. How, I thought, could I ever justify my possessive longing for a tongue that wasn’t mine? Around that time, I remarked to Les that I’d like to see Mexico, only to hear what I took as a rebuke: she wouldn’t feel comfortable in the role of privileged tourist in the Third World. Solidarity changed all that, gave me the excuse I thought I needed. Language study would become quite the thing on the left in the years when a rather too reductive slogan had it that El Salvador was Spanish for Vietnam.

  The strength of the solidarity movement was its effort to help reverse severe imbalances of political, military, and economic power between north and south by channeling support from the overdeveloped world to popular movements for social change in countries that powerful U.S. interests had traditionally treated as virtual colonies. What would otherwise have been mere international charity was redeemed by this political agenda, and by the fact that priorities were at last being set not at the so-called center, but at the fermenting margins. Besides, “aid” flowed in more than one direction; we believed that we had an enormous amount to learn from Latin Americans about how to steer our own society toward a more democratic and egalitarian destination. Remote as it might seem from the Feminist Sex Wars, this perspective on transnational alliance similarly offered guidelines for the constructive resolution of questions of dangerous power. It said that we had to start from who and where we were. It gave me hope that what I wanted (not just what I thought I ought to want) could be part of the solution.

  I first traveled to Nicaragua in the summer of 1984, the fifth anniversary of the Sandinista Triumph, as part of a delegation of “cultural workers.” The trip was almost accidental, coming at a time when I was increasingly aware of Central America but hadn’t yet joined a solidarity group. I’d finally made up my mind to go somewhere interesting, and had settled on Mexico after consultation with Aimee, who thought that I might find Mexico City overwhelming but probably could manage all right by myself if I took it easy and stayed in smaller cities. Before I’d made definite plans, I was assaulted in Prospect Park. I escaped being raped and wasn’t seriously injured, but in the aftermath I felt shaky, not up to solo travel. Instead, I joined the Nicaragua group, a somewhat random collection of writers and academics who traveled under the auspices of a Sandinista cultural organization.

  While my two later trips to Nicaragua would have very clear objectives connected to my work in the Brooklyn Nicaragua Sister City Project, this one was basically revolutionary tourism, undertaken at a point when the contra war was escalating and the Nicaraguan government had decided that it could best enlist the support of North American progressives by bringing bunches of us down for a look at Nicaragua Libre. The hope was that we would return home and set about enlisting our neighbors in the battle to change our government’s policies. It was a brilliant tactic, almost unprecedented (the Venceremos Brigades in Cuba operated on a much smaller scale), and as the Sandinistas envisioned, it indeed helped galvanize the U.S. solidarity movement. Yet it brought up the most basic question of travel: to what extent does the traveler touch what’s really there, as opposed to moving within her own bottled atmosphere?

  I cared a great deal about the principles that the revolution stood for and that so many Nicaraguans were sacrificing so much to implement—above all, that there is another way, that wisdom and truth and insight don’t belong to the monied classes, that power can ripple up “from below,” that nations can elect alternatives to the devil-take-the-hindmost callousness that pervades global markets. Yet the terms on which this reality was being sold to us, and on which we were buying it, made me hesitate. I winced when a buxom gringa rushed to pose for a snapshot rubbing up against some teenage soldier’s AK-47. I bridled when our group was wined and dined by none other than Daniel Ortega, then beginning his first campaign for president. Did the government think we required flattery in exchange for our support? It seemed to me that the Nicaraguan revolutionary success appealed to a shallow, feel-good impulse in U.S. leftist politics. That perception propelled me, upon my return, to work for a time in Brooklyn CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) instead of plunging more directly into the Nicaragua issue. Only later did I see how thin the edge of glamour was, how quickly war and embargo would take their toll.

  In Nicaragua, I found myself shunning rhetoric, drifting toward poetry, flesh and lyrical details: the way the green, volcanic landscape looked like Oregon from the air, and oxen pulled great wooden-wheeled carts, and officials in the Ministry of Culture lugged scarce typewriters (manual, of course) from one office to the next, and hordes of revolutionary urchins swarmed around us, pleading, “¿Tiene un lápiz?” I became obsessed with a fellow delegation member, a gorgeous tough-minded lesbian in a man’s world who’d made her career as an academic expert on the Indochina conflict. Tried, was refused (tactfully enough); sobbed for a day and night, bereft, humiliated. Returned to the shock of overdevelopment, and to misery with Les, as we sat in Vermont deconstructing my cheating heart, watching Holstein cows like clouds drifting over an emerald heaven.

  As had happened after Alderson and Dee, I burned with shame at having staged what seemed like such an adolescent drama in the midst of other people’s life-and-death issues. I despised myself for openly wanting someone I couldn’t have and had no reason to want. Yet I went and did it again the following summer, in that narrow window of opportunity for relationship chaos that Les and I often took advantage of when Emma was safe at sleep-away camp.

  At the time I fell in love with Luz Sosa, I was thirty-five and she was not quite twenty. I’d already known her for more than two years, ever since I’d been at Enoch Rivers Transcripts. I’d spotted her for a dyke when I went for my interview: a thin kid in glasses and a no-nonsense short haircut, with a buttery complexion and a world-class smile. Gail, the business’s owner, had hired her as a messenger right out of high school and lucked into a stellar office manager.

  Gail treated her, I thought, like taken-for-granted domestic help, showering capricious favors and confidences, professing to regard her as one of the family and in return expecting total loyalty and unlimited overtime. As business expanded, she delegated to Luz increasing levels of responsibility, often staying away from the office altogether. Luz dealt expertly with clients, getting them their jobs on time, sweet-talking them when a typist messed up or Gail had miscalculated how fast we could deliver. She printed and collated, arranged for messengers, repaired faulty equipment, installed computer software, transferred sound from video to audio cassettes, performed ASCII conversions. Perhaps her most important skill was her deft handling of the temperamental workforce. She scrounged for extra hands when unexpected jobs came pouring in; she quelled the cutthroat competition for any available scrap of work that always broke out in slow seasons.

  Withal, she helped keep our funky female workplace rolling along in its guise as a cross between a live television talk show and an improvised soap opera. Would Gail (in her late thirties, with a daughter in junior high school) succeed in her quest to get pregnant by in vitro fertilization? Would Helen, a single mother with a strong southern accent who often spent her breaks in salacious colloquy with Luz, find sexual fulfillment with a teenage boy she fancied? Would Judy be let go? She was a weird and waspish Cuban (according to Luz, though she claimed to be Spanish) who quarreled with everyone and made paranoid speeches abou
t forces of evil pervading the office, but typed some fabulous number of words per minute and never said no when Luz needed her to work all night on rushes.

  Luz executed her masterly juggling act with the aid of an entourage of relatives and friends. Her cousin Sean was a messenger for a while. Her sister Debbie sometimes dropped by, infant in tow. Luz’s great tragic love was a girl called Gloria (“I know she’s straight but I like her, so I go after her”), who came around with her child-aunt, Milagros. Luz herself was always in motion; I’d watch her sprint across the room and slide into a corner of my desk to pick up the private phone line. One solid white-jeaned hip would be thrust in my line of vision, her key ring, clipped on a belt loop, bristling at my shoulder, while through an aural scrim of Pat Collins interviewing Plácido Domingo I’d hear her being multilingual in English: “I don’t wanna hear no lies. Yolanda said what? You tell her this from me—hey, me voy, no, I gotta. Talk to you later, jerk. Hello, Enoch Rivers. Okay, fine, yes we do transcribe microcassettes. By messenger? Fine. Hold on one minute, please. Yes, hello. Hi, Zoe. Yeah, come in, I’m dyin’, we’re swamped, I’ve only got three people working right now and CBS is sending twenty rushes. See ya in a few.” When she’d extinguished the blinking lights, she’d dash back to get the door, which would open on a messenger, his billed cap reversed, wearing fingerless gloves and a make-my-day expression, bearing yet another bulging Jiffy Pak.

  There was another side to her that I saw glimpses of as she began to treat me as an occasional confidante. (She talked to Gail and Helen a lot, too, but they were straight and she seemed to value me for my Older Lesbian perspective.) This was the sad side, the overwhelmed side. Her large extended family, in East New York and New Jersey, seemed beset by all the famous crises of urban poverty and for Luz, it boiled down to the fact that people she loved kept dying. Trying to keep them alive, to mourn them properly, were tasks that would have flattened a weaker person.

  Luz herself complained of headaches, took blood-pressure medication off and on. She didn’t like doctors. She showed me the blue underneath her fingernails, explained how she was born by caesarian. She’d gotten tangled in the cord and almost didn’t make it.

  And there was something else, a tiny hole in her heart that made her sick a lot when she was little. They operated once but didn’t fix it. “I can’t even run a block, my heart goes nuts. It pounds like crazy too when I . . . when me and Gloria. . . . You know what I’m saying?”

  She was coy about the language. Yet she’d tell me racy stories, how she and this Nicole got together last weekend, this cousin of her sister Debbie’s husband, up at Debbie’s apartment. Things were going good, but then Luz realized that they weren’t alone. Debbie’d lent a second bed to some guy. “Excuse me, but I was makin’ love to the girl.”

  Of course I thought constantly of what passed between us in terms of the abstract categories—oppression, privilege—that governed my life in the women’s community. Yet I never spoke of this to her; it wasn’t her language. Given her staunchly apolitical posture, I figured I’d probably risk offending her by even bringing up the subject. She was Hispanic, not “Latina”; she shrugged at my Nicaragua trip; she was fluent in the clichés of bourgeois individualism. We were equal, color-blind, best leave it at that. The world of Enoch Rivers Transcripts, and Luz Sosa with it, remained aloof from the glaring light of politics, and even though I knew our differences mattered, I welcomed the shadowy refuge. Perhaps, I thought, things could happen in the dark, sheltered from paralyzing scrutiny.

  She flirted outrageously. I knew it was just her way, that she got a little thrill from gently agitating women. I knew that it wouldn’t do to become invested in the effect her wandering hands and sexy talk had on me. But neither would it hurt to enjoy it, I decided.

  “When I became gay—”

  “Weren’t you born gay?” I teased.

  “Well, okay, and then when I was little like I mentioned I was played with, which only encouraged me. But I mean when I came out. I had one teacher, this woman, she was all dyked out. . . . After that I was the teacher, understand?

  “I like straight women, did I ever tell you?”

  She liked “hard” movies. Rambo was the best. Gandhi she pronounced “boring to the max.” She admitted taking in the occasional porn show. She followed masculine sports, preferred the Post to the Daily News. She claimed to be attracted to older women. Mature, intelligent. The type of girls who don’t say “fuck” every other sentence.

  Once in the fall, a slow week in the office, the two of us were alone and talking gay girl talk. She explained to me how she thought about her walk, demonstrated the dip, the swagger. How she’d be on the street with Gloria on her arm and some asshole would make a comment. She’d be ready to kick ass, but Gloria wouldn’t let her: “Luz, come on, I’m scared.”

  “I hate women,” she announced theatrically. “Yous lie and yous cheat and yous nag, nag, nag all the time.”

  “Hey, who’s this yous? What happened to us? What makes you think you can separate yourself from the rest of the female race?”

  “Because I’m Luz.” She flashed me a bad-boy grin. How I loved watching her go after what she wanted.

  Since Luz was butch, that made me the femme. We were still only playing, but I thought about these things.

  Les and I had long treated lightly the concept of roles. Perhaps we took them a bit more seriously now that there was such a vogue for them among the sexperts in our midst. We agreed that she was more butch in terms of certain mannerisms, what she called body language. But both in bed and in daily life we’d always basically adhered to the good old feminist idea that gender likeness, not cultivated contrast, was what attracted women to each other.

  Luz seemed to think of herself as a moderate. She explained that she steered clear of what she called dykes, “you know, the kind that wear the men’s underwear.” And yet I guessed that she would want from me something rather like what I used to know how to do for men. She would want to take the lead, want to feel she was acting on me. To experience the skill of her aggression as the source of my desire.

  With her, I experimented with a new relation to the “femininity” I’d been at war with since my teens. In this I was encouraged by the new feminist discourse that interpreted roles as erotic play with gender—and also by the fact that, like many a traveler, I felt that whatever happened didn’t count as me in quite the way my actions did when I was home. It was a slippery slope of sorts; I would eventually decide that if two women could play this game to their mutual satisfaction, without either being stigmatized as passive—if femme could be a role and not a fate—then maybe it needn’t demolish my self-respect to make love to a man I desired.

  But I wasn’t thinking of men then, I was falling in love with Luz. I was daring myself to play at taking her flirting seriously. It seemed to make a kind of sense. I knew she was stuck on Gloria, but that didn’t prevent her frequent bragging about the other girls she bedded. I wanted more of the kind of heat I felt these days when she leaned her body close to mine as I sat at my workstation. Once she’d bent right over and kissed me on the mouth, leaving me stunned with lust yet not missing a word of Walter Cronkite pressing James Schlesinger about how close we came to a nuclear exchange during the Yom Kippur War.

  Reviewing my other crushes and the misery they’d brought, I decided Blake was right (“Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires”). I determined to do something.

  She said of course she’d been feeling it too. Amid piles of transcripts, she said, “I can see myself all over you, I want to make love to you so much it hurts, I want to take you right here on this couch.” Only later I’d wonder where she got such sentences, decide she might have cribbed them from a Silhouette Romance. Right then the move was effective, like they say in judo, my nerve endings on full alert. I was wet and longing to be alone with her, but the logistics proved daunting.

  It was July, and Emma was conveniently at camp, but t
here was Les, and she’d made some rules. One of them was that nothing could happen in our apartment, even though she’d be out of town on the coming weekend. East New York wouldn’t do—Luz lived with relatives—but at last it turned out that she had an invitation to house-sit for a woman her aunt babysat for.

  That Friday evening near dusk, I parked on a quiet street near Brooklyn College. The house was huge on its narrow lot. Luz emerged barefoot on the porch, in a T-shirt and faded gym shorts. I felt overdressed, absurd, in an ironed shirt and careful earrings.

  I’d called her at work that morning, hoping she’d say I could come in. “Nope, we’re dead,” she’d told me, then mentioned being hung over. She’d gone out with Gloria and gotten bombed.

  We ended up in one of the twin living rooms, its dominant feature a wall-sized TV screen. Luz sank into an opulent settee and played with the remote. Enormous people towered over us, wearing Yankee uniforms. “Whoops, you don’t like baseball,” she observed cuttingly, switching to a rerun of “Bosom Buddies.” Men in drag paraded around a set; the laugh track shrilled as wigs and falsies were snatched away.

  Then she was drinking a Bud, standing up. I suggested my presence might be bothering her.

  Nothing like that. She was tired. Her head hurt. She was getting cramps, it was that time of the month.

  “So how did you happen to get so smashed last night?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t mean to. I kept saying let’s leave, but she . . .” Luz illustrated with an elbow-bending gesture.

  I’d never seen her like this. “Could you turn off the TV?”