by Robin Talley
Marian Love, and Paula and Elaine, had been taking up a significant percentage of Abby’s brain space these days, in fact. Of course, she’d been doing her homework, too, more often than not. She’d turned in that paper for Women’s and Gender Studies only a couple of days late, and she’d managed to write a few chapters of her project for Ms. Sloane. She didn’t have a title yet, so she was calling her book The Erotic Adventures of Gladys and Henrietta (which wasn’t even all that bad a title, in Abby’s humble opinion). The main character, Henrietta, spent most of her time railing against the unfairness in the world around her, so she was fun to write.
“I think that’s the building.” Linh pointed to a row house on the next block while they waited for the traffic light to change.
“Goody.” Abby bounced on her toes. Her phone hummed again with a text from her dad, but she turned it off. “This Ken Aldrich guy better have some good leads on what happened to Marian Love.”
“I know that would mean a lot to you.” Linh’s expression shifted, her eyes going wide and her smile turning fake as she slipped her hands into the pockets of her shorts.
Linh had been gamely listening to Abby talk about Marian Love all week, but now she was making a big show of looking all patient and understanding, and that wasn’t what Abby wanted at all. She wanted Linh to listen to her because what she said was interesting, not because she felt sorry for her. Abby hated being pitied more than anything.
“Hey, I wanted to ask you something.” Vanessa sidled up between them and nudged Abby with their elbow. Linh stepped back to make room, her normal smile returning. “You remember that movie Carol, with Cate Blanchett?”
“You mean the one Abby made the whole GSA watch last year?” Savannah laughed. “Because it’s the only fifties lesbian movie ever made?”
“Of course I remember it.” Abby glanced over at Linh to see if she remembered, too, but Linh was typing something on her phone.
“Well, did you read the book it was based on?” Vanessa asked. “I read it last year. It was kind of weird, but still really good. Was that one of these books you keep talking about?”
“The Price of Salt? Yeah, same genre. I read it last week. It’s gorgeous, right?”
“Totally. I read it because of the movie, but the book was so different.”
“I know! It’s completely devastating and overwhelming in a way the movie kind of isn’t, right?”
“Exactly!” Vanessa was gushing, which was delightful to see. Vanessa never gushed.
“Is the book as white as the movie?” Linh asked.
“Whiter, as far as I could tell,” Abby said, glad Linh was still listening to them. “I think the book’s got one reference to a black hotel porter who doesn’t get any lines.”
“Whereas the movie had, like, two nonspeaking black porters,” Vanessa said, and they all cracked up.
“Yeah, that’s one of the things that bothers me the most about these books,” Abby said as the laughter subsided. “Everybody in them is so generically white. It’s as though they had no idea what the world is actually like. I mean, look around us.”
Abby swept her arm out. She’d meant to point out the bustling groups of office workers they kept passing on the sidewalk, but her friends glanced back and forth at each other instead. They were a pretty diverse group themselves—she and Savannah were both white, Linh was Vietnamese-American, Ben was black, and Vanessa’s family was from Brazil—but that wasn’t what Abby had meant. It was just bizarre, how the pulp novels all seemed to exist in an entirely all-white world.
“So, excessive whiteness aside, are you saying one of these books is good?” Ben asked. The walk light came on, and they started across the street. “A book that wasn’t written by your long-lost soul mate, Marian Love?”
“A bunch of them were good.” Abby sighed. She’d already explained this to her friends a dozen times. “Most of them were bad, but that’s because most of them were written under pseudonyms by straight cis men who had no idea what they were talking about.”
“Ha!” Vanessa said. “Predictable.”
“You have to hunt to find the ones by actual lesbians.” Abby tried to keep her excited gestures in check. Sometimes she got carried away when she talked about this stuff. “I read one called The Girls in 3-B that was great—you could tell it was written by an actual real-life gay woman—but then I tried to read this one called Voluptuous Vixens by Kimberly Paul, and it’s so obvious that a straight guy wrote it. I’m sorry, but as someone who’s actually had lesbian sex, I want to send these guys a memo telling them lesbians don’t actually bite each other’s nipples all the time. I mean, that would hurt. A lot.”
Too late, Abby realized she should’ve stopped talking a few sentences ago.
“Speak for yourself, dude.” Ben laughed, trying to make a joke of it, but he sounded high-pitched and strained, and the others didn’t say anything at all.
Ugh. Abby definitely should’ve known better than to start talking about lesbian sex in front of her friends. All of whom knew she’d only had lesbian sex—or any kind of sex, for that matter—with one person. And that the person in question was currently walking three feet away with her face buried in her phone.
“Okay, well, anyway.” This time it was Abby who sounded shrill. She jerked her head up just in time to see the number on the building above them. She was in luck. “Looks like this is the place! Anyone want to come in with me?”
“I’ve got a paper to write,” Ben said quickly.
“Yeah, me, too,” Vanessa echoed.
“I’m supposed to meet my mom.” That was Savannah.
Abby glanced back hopefully, but Linh shook her head. “Sorry. Can’t this time.”
“Okay.” Abby squared her shoulders. She’d been hoping Linh would want to come in, but she couldn’t let that show. “See you guys later, I guess.”
She climbed the steps warily. Abby had expected the building to look like a museum, with big columns out front and maybe a domed roof, but this was only a normal row house. A tiny sign next to the front door read LGBT Archive of DC—Dial 200.
Abby dialed. The keypad rang twice, then three times, then four. She was starting to wonder if the place was closed when a man’s voice coughed into the speaker.
“Hello?” Abby pressed the button and leaned in. “I’m looking for Ken Aldrich?”
The man coughed again. “What?”
“Uh...” This meeting wasn’t off to a good start. “My teacher called ahead—Neena Sloane?”
“Oh, Neena.” The man’s voice changed, and he let out a chuckle. “Sure, come on up. It’s the second floor.”
The buzzer clicked. Abby stepped through into a small entryway, followed the narrow set of stairs up and knocked on a solid wooden door.
The man was still coughing when he opened it, but he smiled into his handkerchief and beckoned her inside. He was younger than Abby had expected for a historian—in his twenties, maybe.
He ushered her into a cozy space the size of a small living room with an original, obviously never-used fireplace on the back wall, exactly like the one in Abby’s house. The other walls were covered in towering bookshelves. A coffee table and a few scattered chairs took up the center of the room, and a narrow hallway led to another room in the back.
The coughing man sat down in one of the chairs and gestured for Abby to sit across from him. “Welcome. I’m Ken. Sorry, I forgot this was today. I’m under the weather, so I wasn’t planning on opening up this afternoon, but I can take a few minutes if there’s something you need.”
“Thank you.” Abby tried to smile. “I’m sorry to bother you when you’re sick. I’m just trying to find Marian Love.”
“Ah. I believe that name sounds familiar...”
Abby widened her eyes. She’d been sure a queer historian would know exactly who she was talking about. “She was the l
esbian pulp author who wrote Women of the Twilight Realm. She probably published it under a pseudonym, but I want to find out who she really was. Ms. Sloane thought you might have some information.”
“Ohh, I see.” Ken glanced toward the bookshelf. “Well, I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to help you, unfortunately. Most of our materials here are focused on local history. I hate to ask this, but did you already try Google?”
“Yes.” Abby was getting annoyed, but she tried not to let it show. “I read everything I could find, but it says her identity is still a mystery.”
“Huh, interesting.” Ken folded his hands under his chin. “I could never get into those old pulp books, myself. Too soap opera–esque for my taste, but to each his own. Women of the Twilight Zone, did you say the title was?”
“Twilight Realm.” Abby resisted the urge to roll her eyes and turned to study the nearest bookshelf. It was full of thick, serious-looking history books and files. Though some of them also had seminaked men on their covers.
“Right. Well, we might have a copy of it in the back. An early edition, if that would help you at all. One of my colleagues did some research work with one of the lesbian presses.”
“Sure, that would be cool to see, but do you know where I might find any information about the actual author? What her real name was, where she lived, anything like that?”
Ken frowned. “Hmm. This would’ve been, what, the sixties?”
“Earlier. The book came out in 1956.”
“You’re sure the author was a woman? A lot of those books were written by men, weren’t they?”
Abby struggled to hide her annoyance. Of course this guy, who was far too cool to read pulp fiction himself, thought one of the most important lesbian writers in history was a man. “I’m sure this one’s a woman.”
“All right.” Ken seemed unfazed. “Well, she probably would’ve been deeply closeted if she wrote it in 1956.”
“Well, not everyone was closeted back then.” Paula wasn’t, for one thing. Though of course, Paula was fictional. “I’ve done a bunch of research on the era already, and I saw that there were a lot more lesbian bars and stuff than there are now.”
Ken’s eyebrows shot up. Abby smiled. She could tell she’d gone up in his estimation.
“True.” He nodded. “Which is sad, really. Bar culture was huge in the fifties, since the bars were literally the only places where a lot of people were able to find any community at all. Even so, though, almost everyone was still closeted if you go as far back as the midfifties.”
Abby didn’t answer. She couldn’t imagine Marian Love concealing any part of herself. She was too strong for that.
“I’ll go see if I can track down that book for you.” Ken stood. “Will you be okay out here for a few minutes?”
“Sure.”
Ken disappeared through a door, blowing his nose loudly as he went. It was frustrating, how he had to go into the back to hunt for one of the most famous lesbian books in the world, but someone had apparently deemed all these naked dude books historically significant enough for prominent display.
Not that the lesbian pulp covers were any less gratuitous, Abby had to admit. She pulled up the gallery on her phone again.
Some of the covers were kind of cool, if you ignored how hilarious they were. She gazed down at the cover of a book called The Mesh, with two women in evening wear giving each other major side-eye. It was a beautiful image, apart from the weird title and the creepy yellow text that declared it “A novel of hidden evil...”
Was the picture on the cover a drawing? Abby squinted. It looked more like a painting. How bizarre, to think that actual painters made these incredibly detailed works of art and then slapped them onto books that sold for thirty-five cents at gas stations.
Abby opened a tab on her phone and ran a new search, this time for the cover artist who painted Women of the Twilight Realm. She got an immediate answer: the original cover had been painted by a man named Lawrence Hastings. He’d done a ton of paperback covers in the fifties and sixties. Most of the covers on his website weren’t quite as classy looking as The Mesh, but Abby could tell the art itself was good, even though most of it focused on scantily clad women, dead bodies or both.
Abby clicked around for more details and discovered that Lawrence Hastings had kept painting until he died back in the eighties. His son had launched this website to sell posters of his old book covers. That might be fun, come to think of it, to have the Women of the Twilight Realm cover blown up twenty times and hanging on her wall.
Ken coughed in the back room as Abby clicked the “Notes” tab on the Lawrence Hastings website.
Hastings kept detailed records of every cover he painted, the top of the page read. These notes were discovered last year at the bottom of an old filing cabinet. A team at the College of New York’s publishing division is in the process of transcribing the handwritten notebooks. Selected scanned images appear below.
A page full of yellowed scans followed. Abby enlarged one and squinted. Each of the small notebook pages had a book title, an author, a publication year and a description of the cover painting.
“Sin on the High Seas,” the first one read. “Adam Kane, 1965. Blond girl in bikini smoking marijuana cigarette w/ brunette in shorty jeans watching in background on dock.”
Whoa. Abby knew which book she wanted to read next.
“I have it!” Ken boomed from the back, startling her. “Look what I found!”
He coughed again as he strolled in and held out a plastic sleeve with a thin, tattered paperback inside. Abby reached for it cautiously.
There it was. An ancient, crumbling copy of Women of the Twilight Realm.
There were Paula and Elaine, crouched on the bed, just as Lawrence Hastings had painted them. The colors had faded over the decades, and a rip had been torn through the left side of Paula’s face. Marian Love’s name was in a small, barely legible font across the top, and the words “Never Before Published!” ran across the bottom, much larger than the author’s name. The sleeve was sealed, so Abby couldn’t turn the pages.
“It’s a first edition,” Ken said proudly.
This was it. It wasn’t an ebook, or a reproduction. Some woman, decades ago, must have boldly walked up to a drugstore counter and bought this book. It might have been her only lifeline to who she really was.
Now that she was holding it in her hands, the book felt like Abby’s lifeline, too.
A warm, sizzling sensation settled over her, and Abby realized she was officially obsessed.
She knew this feeling well. Falling into a new obsession was like falling in love. This story, these characters—they were hers.
She’d had plenty of obsessions before, but this one felt different, somehow. Maybe because the characters on a TV show or in a movie were just cute actors in goofy costumes, but Marian Love was real.
“It’s in great condition, considering.” Ken pointed down at the cover. “Plus, look what someone wrote on the back.”
Abby turned the book over carefully, not wanting to risk damaging the flimsy paper any further. The back cover was so worn she couldn’t read the text that had been printed there. Plus, someone had taped a piece of paper across the top, years ago from the look of it.
Abby peered down, trying to make out what was written there. In faded pencil, the handwriting said, “Marian Love, local author.”
There was no way. Abby couldn’t possibly be that lucky. “Does this say ‘local’?”
“Looks like it.” Ken grinned and plopped back into his seat, wiping his nose. “It’s news to me.”
“You’re saying she lived here?” Abby shook her head. “The book takes place in New York.”
“Well, I’m sorry that I don’t have more solid information for you. I’m not even sure if local definitely means DC—it could be that this copy was shipped
to us from somewhere else. Still, if the author was local, then I bet that helps you an awful lot with your school project.”
Was it actually possible Marian Love was just a few blocks away right now?
Maybe Abby could meet her. Maybe she could go over to her house sometimes after school, and Marian Love could give her advice. She could definitely use some.
“How do I find out for sure?” she asked Ken. “Should I try to track down an old DC phone book or something?”
“That wouldn’t help you, assuming she published under a pseudonym. She wouldn’t have listed the name Marian Love on any official documents.” Ken was still smiling, but his eyes were starting to water. “I’d recommend you talk to my colleague Morgan Herbert. She teaches at Montgomery College, and she’ll probably know a lot more than I do. I can give you her number.”
“That would be great, thank you.”
“I should warn you, though...” Ken sneezed again as he scribbled down Morgan Herbert’s information. “If the author you’re looking for was local, then she’ll probably be even harder to find than if she wasn’t.”
“What? Why?”
“Well, DC was a scary place to be gay in this era.” Ken shrugged, as though he was apologizing for it. “Frank Kameny and the other local activists didn’t get their work going on a large scale until the sixties, and it was dangerous to be out even then. The city was even more dominated by the federal government than it is now, if you can believe that, and the government rooted out anyone on their rolls who was at all suspected of being gay. They kept lists.”
“What, like McCarthyism?” Abby had watched a George Clooney movie about that once.
“Exactly. McCarthy himself was even a part of it for a while. It was known as the Lavender Scare, because it happened at the same time as the second Red Scare, but it actually had a much bigger impact.”