Chase Banter [02] Marching to a Different Accordion

by Bennett, Saxon

  The other woman sniggered but did not remove her glasses. This revealed her dimples. Her blond hair was cut short as well. She was of a slighter build but taller than the other woman. “We don’t care about that.”

  “I can’t think of anything illegal that I’ve done.”

  “You’ve violated the code.” The woman with the black crew cut glowered.

  “Which is?”

  The blond woman handed her a laminated card. Chase quickly read it. “You’ve violated rule number three.”

  Chase looked at the card again. “I’ve shunned my duty to the cause? How?”

  “You’ve deserted us by becoming Shelby McCall. Don’t think we don’t know about that,” the woman with the black crew cut replied.

  Chase had enjoyed having a pen name then, especially given the success of her first two mysteries. In addition to helping her to create her persona of trousers and blazers without feeling a complete hypocrite—well, at the time she hadn’t thought that she was a hypocrite—it gave her a certain amount of anonymity in her life as Chase Banter. When she handed over her Visa card, no one said any of the socially unacceptable and ignorant things that were guaranteed to pierce an artist’s tender heart and psyche. Like “Hey, are you that mystery writer that lives around here?” Or “I only read real literature. You know, like Jane Austen and Harper Lee.” Right. As if Austen hadn’t essentially been a romance writer and To Kill a Mockingbird wasn’t in large part a mystery novel, Chase thought smugly.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Chase said, trying to buy some time. She looked around desperately for one of the red shirts that indicated the presence of a sales person.

  “Lesbian books—your books are necessary to keep the flame alive. We can’t have it like it was before, where women were scrambling for the few available books that had lesbians in them. What if Beebo Brinker hadn’t come along? Or Rita Mae Brown hadn’t written a few books before she bailed to write novels about fox hunting that do not contain even one lesbian character. We started her career and this is what we get.” The woman with the black crew cut glowered again. She moved forward, backing Chase up against a shelf of hard plastic binders of various colors. She pointed her finger at Chase’s chest. “We will not allow that to happen again.”

  The blond woman pulled the finger down. “Let’s be diplomatic about this. You will continue to write lesbian novels—at least one per two-year cycle. That’s fair. And do not cheat us on page count. Books are expensive and less than two hundred and fifty pages will not be acceptable.” She pulled a sheet of paper from her inside breast pocket and handed it to Chase. “These are some issues we have decided need to be addressed through the medium of fiction.”

  “Who is ‘we’?” Chase inquired, hoping it wasn’t something like the freaky right wing triumvirate that was supposedly threatening to take over the world through the financial control of all available resources.

  The blond woman whispered, “The Council for the Continuation of Lesbian Culture.”

  “This is a joke, right?” Had Lacey hired these women to come and yank her chain? She had also been adamant about Chase continuing to write lesbian fiction, whining at her, “You can’t just abandon us.”

  The blond woman lowered her sunglasses to reveal nearly black eyes. “Do we look like we’re joking?” She cracked her knuckles.

  “Maybe not,” Chase said.

  “We’ll be going now. Just remember: We’re watching you and we expect results,” the woman with the black crew cut said.

  Chase snapped back to the present. Bud had finished painting Saturn’s rings and now was looking expectantly at Gitana. Every afternoon they played what Chase referred to as Extreme Croquet. Bud had seen croquet in a movie and then pleaded for a set for her birthday. Chase had tried to explain that they needed grass and that seeing as how Bud’s birthday was around Thanksgiving that they couldn’t play then even if they had grass. Bud remained adamant and they ordered a set online. The day it came, Bud took it outside and set up an elaborate course atop snowdrifts, off rocks, around the garden and through a tree grove. It was absurd. But she got everyone to play that day and it turned out to be more fun than playing on grass because it was far more challenging. Thus Extreme Croquet was born.

  “Is it time?” Gitana said mockingly.

  Bud pursed her lips as if to say, “You know it is.”

  “Can I beg off? I’ve got some work I have to do right now,” Chase said, leaping up.

  Bud gave her the stink eye.

  “It’s important,” Chase said.

  “Yrev?” Bud inquired.

  “Yes.”

  Bud nodded. Gitana took her hand and called out behind her, “Don’t get too lost. We’ll be hungry soon.”

  “I won’t.” Chase went to her writing studio, taking the dogs with her as Jane had a habit of stealing balls during Extreme Croquet, making the game even more extreme. The dogs settled on the couch with their chew bones while Chase rifled around in her desk drawers until she found the laminated card and list that the Pink Mafia women had given her.

  Chase read the mission statement again: “We, the duly elected Committee members, are dedicated to the care and feeding of Lesbian Culture, the maintenance of our collective identities and the common causes that unite us as a people.”

  Chase sighed heavily. They really did need a writer—a speechwriter. Just who had “elected” them, anyway? And who had drafted this credo, which was part dog food label and part Declaration of Independence, with precepts that had been lifted from the Hippocratic Oath and the Boy Scouts?

  “Precept #1: Do no harm.” That was good as far as it went, Chase thought, but then her mind delved deeper. Did this include not dating converts—as dating a straight woman becoming gay or, to be politically correct, realizing her true sexuality, could and did usually cause harm, as it had in the case of Lacey and Jasmine? That had broken up a marriage, albeit not a good one. And Delia had been instrumental in that because she’d first seduced Jasmine. Had the Pink Mafia visited her?

  “Precept #2: Be clean, diligent and kind.” The diligent and kind part was simple enough. But clean? Did that mean hygienically clean, clean of drugs or linguistically clean?

  The third one—the rule they said Chase had violated and for which they had deemed she owed reparations—was just as she remembered: “Do not shun one’s duty to the cause.”

  She looked over the list of issues they’d given her. Again, who were they to tell her what to write? Still, the topics weren’t bad ones—combating homophobia, overcoming fear to realize one’s true identity, spirituality within the pagan community, family relations including stories with children and, Chase was glad to see, fur kids. It was the last category, though, that caught her attention. They wanted a novel about a lesbian commune.

  Chase’s seemingly dormant or rather taking-a-vacation-on-the-island-of-Lesbos muse popped her head up from the lounge chair where she had been drinking a piña colada. Chase assumed she was just getting ready to wave down a waiter for another shrimp cocktail when she heard her fairly scream, “Let’s do that one!”

  The Muse of Commercial Endeavor twirled around in her ergonomically correct office chair and threw a silver-plated letter opener at the Sacred Muse of the Divine Vulva, as Chase had always referred to her, who ducked just in time for it to miss her.

  “Ladies, that’s enough.”

  “We’ll see about that!” said the Muse of Commercial Endeavor. She got up from the chair in a fury and was coming toward the Muse of the Divine Vulva with a stapler.

  Chase, deciding that Divine Vulva didn’t stand a chance against a loaded stapler, stuck out her foot and tripped Endeavor. She dropped the stapler as she flew into Vulva’s lap face first.

  “Oh, I like that,” Vulva said.

  Endeavor scrambled away from her. “Don’t touch me, you pervert.”

  “Homophobe,” Vulva said, taking a sip of her drink and finishing off her shrimp cocktail.

  “Bo
th of you stop it. Let’s have a nonviolent discussion about the pros and cons of doing this book.”

  “Which I think we should call Living with Lesbians,” Vulva said. She’d never been good with titles.

  “That’s just what I mean. You have no marketing sense. That title makes the book sound like a self-help book for coping with lesbians,” Endeavor said.

  She was right, of course, Chase thought. Endeavor was always right. Endlessly right. And when it came down to it, right was tiresome from time to time. Couldn’t she write two novels like she used to? Her mystery series wasn’t as challenging as it had been in the beginning because she was familiar now with the style and the readers’ expectations. Maybe writing a lesbian book would freshen her up a bit. Endeavor was beginning to cramp her creative juices like she was a lemon being squeezed dry.

  “You know what, I’ll write both.”

  “You can’t do that. It’s a stupid waste of time,” Endeavor said.

  “Oh, do shut up for once. I need a break and I want to be relaxed for the next novel. I’ll write better and most likely quicker because I’ll be more motivated and not piss around so much. That’s how I worked before you came along,” Chase said. She smiled warmly at Vulva, who fairly cooed. “Ready to come out of retirement?”

  Vulva hopped up and rubbed her hands together. “When do we start?”

  “Right this minute.” Chase turned on her computer.

  Chapter Eight—No

  And whispering, “I will ne’er consent,” consented.—Byron

  Lacey stood in the doorway of the writing studio. The dogs looked up at her sleepily—after ten in the morning they were out of commission until Gitana returned home at three. Chase was cursing under her breath: The auto-control on her tab mechanism had taken to blocking the text on the right and she didn’t know how to fix it. Donna would have to do it later, but it irritated her and an irritated writer did not do her best work while being irritated. Good God, even her thoughts were messed up—using the same word three times in one sentence was considered a felony in the editorial department.

  “What’s wrong?” Lacey asked.

  “My tabs are fucked up and I can’t fix it.”

  Lacey leaned over. “Have you saved this?” She pointed at the computer screen.

  “Yes.” Chase leaned back. Lacey’s breasts were dangerously close to her face. Ever since Lacey had become a lesbian or, as Lacey put it, “discovered her true persuasion,” her propensity for close personal contact had blossomed. If she sat next to you, it was always so close your thighs touched. When she hugged you goodbye, it was full body contact. If you said something cute, she stroked your cheek and gazed at you lovingly. It was downright creepy, but Chase didn’t want to hurt her feelings. They had been friends or, as Lacey put it, “BFFs,” best friends forever, since they were children. At least Lacey wasn’t insisting that her entire life be rewritten to accommodate her present identity—something like “I dated this guy but it was really a brainwashing of my lesbian sensibility by the all-invasion patriarchal culture of gender-difference in the mating arena.” That Chase could not handle.

  Lacey moved the mouse around, clicking it and frowning until she corrected the situation. “How in the…” she stopped and glanced in the direction of Bud, who appeared to be fiddling around with Chase’s old laptop. “I mean how on earth did you do that?”

  “Like I know. I must have hit a weird key.” Chase did not have the stunning typing skills that one would expect of a writer. She had only recently learned to write on the computer rather than in her marbled composition books, and typing and composing didn’t always jibe—especially if she was on a roll. At the end of the day, Donna went through and fixed the snafus. This system worked extremely well because they didn’t end up with a slew of proofreading at the end. “But thanks.”

  Bud, it appeared, had come out of her concentrated trance and looked up from the computer. “Ciao.” She waved at Lacey, but the motion was more “go away” than “welcome!”

  Lacey’s head whipped around. “Was that Italian?”

  “That particular greeting has more than one meaning, you know,” Chase said, giving Bud a disapproving glance for being rude. “And I think Bud was aiming for the other end.”

  Bud glowered and jabbed at the laptop. She did have a point. Chase was often cranky when she was interrupted from her writing. Bud had probably learned it from her.

  “What is she doing?” Lacey asked as she peered at the screen of Bud’s computer.

  “She’s writing a story.” Chase beamed at her. If Chase couldn’t win a Newberry Award for her novels the next best thing would be for her amazing child to do so. She hoped Bud could pull it off before she turned twenty. The world appreciated the merits of the young far more than the seasoned.

  Bud nodded.

  “It looks like gibberish to me. Are you sure she isn’t just playing around? And why isn’t she typing with both hands?”

  “Because she’s four and her hands are too small for the keyboard. The tech industry doesn’t make keyboards for toddlers,” Chase said blithely.

  Bud looked smug.

  “Well, if it’s a story, what does it say?” Lacey challenged.

  Chase got up and went to the second desk that now graced the studio. She said, “May I?”

  Bud turned the laptop so Chase could see it more easily. “It says ‘Once there was a blue bear that wandered the forest searching for others like her—big and blue and round. She searched for a long, long time and could find no one. She sat down under a big tree and began to cry great big tears and when they hit the soft forest floor they grew into blue bears. The more she cried the more bears there were until her tears were of joy rather than sadness.’”

  Bud looked up at her, seeking approval. Chase smiled broadly. “That is a fabulous story. I love it and I think it’s very philosophical.” They both looked at Lacey.

  “Are you sure she’s not an alien?”

  “Lacey!” Chase admonished.

  “I’ve never met a kid who’s as creepy smart as she is,” Lacey said, studying Bud with apparent suspicion—like if she looked long enough and hard enough Bud would turn light gray and her eyes would become large and slanted.

  “She can’t help it she’s smart. Look, you’ve hurt her feelings,” Chase said, pointing at Bud, who stared at Lacey with doe-like eyes.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” Lacey reached out and gave her a hug. “Can I bribe my way out of this?” she asked as she released Bud and dug in her enormous Coach purse.

  “New purse?” Chase inquired. The thing must have cost seven hundred dollars.

  “Yes, isn’t it nice?” She finally located the item she was looking for. It was a red iPod a little larger than a wallet. “You can download entire audio books or podcasts or just music if you like and you can look stuff up—it hooks right into the Internet.” She handed it to Bud.

  Bud looked at it in wonderment. Chase instantly coveted it. Bud saw this and held it close to her chest. “Knaht uoy.”

  “Oh, I got one for you too,” Lacey said, digging out another one and handing it to Chase. Hers was lime green. Donna could give her lessons and she liked the idea of looking things up. She still meant to visit her potential new friend, Isabel, at the Main Library to do a little research. She loved libraries and she was hoping Isabel would show her the ropes of their operation, which had always been one of her secret fascinations.

  “Do you like them?” Lacey asked.

  “Well, of course. But I’ll need lessons,” Chase said, noticing that Bud was already fiddling around with hers. She studied Lacey for a moment, suddenly aware that Lacey didn’t drive nearly forty miles from Albuquerque into the boondocks of the East Mountains to hand out iPods. “What’s the catch?”

  Lacey moved a stack of papers from the couch and sat down. “Why does there have to be a catch?” She looked around at the scuffed furniture and old leather chairs. “You know, I could order some furniture from the Pottery
Barn and really spiff this place up.”

  “We like it this way,” Chase said. Bud looked up from her new toy and nodded. “Now, what do I have to do?”

  “Well, there is a small favor I have to ask and believe me I wouldn’t do it if I wasn’t desperate, especially now that you no longer write lesbian fiction, but we need qualified and published panelists.”

  “As a matter of fact, I am writing lesbian fiction again now. I’m doubling up.”

  Lacey leaped up and raced to where Chase was sitting at her desk. She hugged her so forcefully it nearly knocked both of them to the ground. “That’s fabulous. I mean, I know you need to write for serious cash, but your dyke fans miss you. I know they do. I check out the blogs and they bemoan the loss of dyke writers. I try to tell them that they need to help support these authors by purchasing books. Somebody has to pay the bills.”

  “Panelists?” Chase asked once Lacey had resumed her post on the couch.

  “Yes, we’re setting up a public discussion panel on the future of lesbian fiction. We’ve got Jasmine, P.H. Kinjera, she’s the dyke philosopher, kind of like a younger version of Mary Daly, Delia, of course, taking up the erotica end, and Ellen MacNeil, who does first-person humorous coming-of-age stories. I’d like you to cover the romance end.”

  Chase sat stunned. “You’ve arranged all this?”

  Lacey blushed. “Well, I’ve had some help.”

  “Who?”

  Bud’s iPod was now playing Vivaldi, The Four Seasons concerto. She had managed to download already and Chase was duly impressed. She looked sheepish and turned down the volume. Chase found it odd that a four-year-old was fascinated with classical music, but she was glad Bud didn’t have a penchant for American Idol and dance to it in front of the television like other small humans.

  “Your mother.” Lacey picked up a book on Emily Carr, a Canadian artist who painted forests. Chase had read a biography on her and discovered that she was a much-ignored artist who had done the same kind of work Georgia O’Keefe had. It had been research for the art theft part of her latest novel, The Thief. Chase had chosen one of Emily Carr’s paintings in hopes that it would spark interest in this amazing but little-known artist.