by Amy Hoffman
I waved Baby’s check at her, and she gave me a hug. “Good for you, sweetheart,” she said. “I knew something positive would happen today. It was in the horoscope.”
Janelle didn’t believe in horoscopes and neither did I, but we had begun following the one that came out in the local weekly. It was unusually specific and insistent; sometimes it seemed to be directed at particular individuals. I had read mine that morning: “How big can you dream? How much can you accept? Love and money will come your way when you conquer your fears. Quit making excuses!” We occasionally spotted the astrologer driving around town in her van, which had the All-Seeing Eye of Providence painted on the side. “I guess I should pay more attention,” I said.
“Word,” said Janelle. “I had a lucky day too.”
“New client?” I asked, remembering the horoscope’s prediction of money.
“Better,” she said. “I went for a mammogram this morning. At the clinic in town.”
I gasped. “I’m so sorry, Janelle. I forgot all about it.” As I had been flirting with Baby on the phone, Janelle had been stripping down to her underwear and putting on a hospital johnny. Opening in the front, please.
“It’s okay,” she said. To my relief, she seemed genuinely calm. “It’s still clear.”
She ran out to buy a bottle of wine to celebrate our various accomplishments—“A good bottle,” she admonished me, and I didn’t ask her what it cost—and after dinner we had a hilarious time rolling around in bed, with me feeling unusually sensitive all over my body. She kept me away from her breasts. “Sore,” she said. Just as we were nodding off, she murmured in my ear, “Love you—baby.”
Uh-oh, I remembered. But I woke the next morning feeling simply grateful for the sun shining through the window and the pigeons hooting and Janelle beside me, sleeping on her back with her arms thrown over her head, in the pose, if she had been upright, of someone reacting to a nice surprise, so I woke her by sucking on her nipples and for a change she liked it, and we both had a couple of orgasms before breakfast. Then she left for the office, and I sat down at the work table I had set up in our little spare room, but instead of getting started on Baby’s jewelry order, I became lost in thoughts of Baby herself.
And of Janelle. When I had first started dating her, Roger had asked me out for coffee, saying he wanted to get to know me. Actually, he wanted to warn me. “Nora,” he had said, “you seem like a good person, and I can tell I’m going to like you. But do not fuck this up.” That was what I reminded myself of now—because I could see I was on the verge of getting myself into just the sort of trouble I had told Baby I wasn’t looking for. I had been in triangles before—what lesbian hasn’t?—and I thought I knew better than to carpe diem. As you grabbed for that shiny new thing, you were likely to lose both it and the one you already had. I had become older, wiser, weightier. Like a truck, I required more room to clear the corners, I thought.
Yet, must that require avoiding new acquaintances and experiences? I asked myself. And if so, why had we bothered moving? With such rationalizations, I picked up the phone and hit redial. “Wanna go swimming?” I asked my new friend. If that’s what she was.
“It’s December.”
“I’m aware of that,” I said. “I’m going to go every month.”
“Ah, one of those,” said Baby. “You’re on.”
Pink Towel
Baby cheated. She showed up wearing a wet suit. Gorgeous, it made no secret of her belly and butt.
The day was sunny and cloudless, with a hard, steady wind. Even at Herring Cove Beach, which is on the bay, so somewhat sheltered—on the clearest days you could see all the way to Plymouth, and a tower belonging to the nuclear power plant, or maybe it was Boston, and a harmless skyscraper, depending on whom you asked—there were whitecaps and rolling waves breaking onto the shore with a clatter of pebbles. The gulls were swinging wildly back and forth, and farther out you could see the telltale splashes of a flock of gannets dive-bombing mackerel. Sitting in the car with the heater blasting, I had been trying to see the scene as a late August afternoon with the wind kicking up. But the cold outside was palpable.
I stuck my head out the window. “No fair,” I yelled to Baby.
She came over and leaned on my car for balance while she yanked off her boots. “What?” she said, attempting to tuck all her hair into an old-fashioned rubber bathing cap decorated with yellow daisies.
I jumped out of the car and stripped down to my speedo. “I have to do this fast, or I won’t go through with it,” I said and took off down the beach. My extremities must have frozen instantly, because I couldn’t feel the rocks underfoot. Everyone complains about them; some have paranoid theories: “Of course the gay beach is the one with the rocks. You don’t see any rocks at Race Point.” I hoped Baby was following behind me, but I didn’t turn around to look. Without stopping, I flung myself into the sea.
Rush of green bubbles. White foam. Salt taste. Crash up from freezing water into freezing air. Breathe in. Breathe out. Whah! Flail to shore. Run back over pebbles.
Baby was standing next to my car holding open a big pink towel. “That was fast,” she said, enfolding me in the towel and vigorously rubbing my arms and back to warm me. After a moment, I took it from her to dry my hair.
When I looked up, she was strolling down to the water. She did a little knee bend, a leap up on the rebound, and dove into a wave. Her yellow head popped up in the trough, and she stroked leisurely back and forth along the shoreline a few times. I watched her, and the gulls and the gannets. How did they stand it? Finally she emerged and picked her way up the beach to the car. “Refreshing!” she said.
Even back in my dry clothes, I couldn’t stop shivering. “I guess this isn’t for me,” I admitted.
“You don’t have hypothermia if you’re still shivering. You’ll get used to it. Let’s go for coffee; it’ll warm you up.”
“You’re wearing a wet suit, red boots, and a flowered bathing cap,” I pointed out.
“Keeping your head warm is the key. And this is P-town, my dear. No one will look twice. But if you don’t feel comfortable—”
“It’s not that,” I said. “I’m freezing. I need to put on a sweatshirt and a pair of warm socks. And Janelle will wonder what happened to me.”
“Cold feet and a guilty conscience,” said Baby. “I must be getting somewhere.”
“I have work to do,” I insisted. “For you, your shop.” I turned the key in the ignition.
“Work it good, then,” said Baby.
When I looked in the rearview mirror, she was wiggling her fingers good-bye. She saw me noticing and blew me a kiss. Trouble indeed. On the way home, I kept thinking about that towel, and what might have happened if it hadn’t come between Baby’s hands and my skin.
As I said, in Provincetown I became a cad.
My Heart
I thought maybe a different perspective would help, and I called Roger. “I’m doing what you told me not to, Roger. I’m fucking up. Save me from myself!” He still lived in the city, running the old rat race. We had begged him to come to Provincetown with us when we decided to move, but although we were serious, he never seriously considered it. People move with their lovers, but not with their friends, not even with those they consider their “gay family,” as Roger and Janelle and I had toasted each other on many occasions.
Roger taught third grade, and every afternoon on his way home, he stopped at the gym and worked out for an hour and a half. We had never known him to have a steady boyfriend, and although he would moan about it sometimes, he was actually quite pleased with his life. He had lots of sex, lots of friends, his apartment was pristine, and if he wanted to walk out of a movie, he didn’t have to explain himself to anyone.
“I haven’t heard from you in weeks,” said Roger. “Now you call. Something’s up. But do I care?”
“It hasn’t been weeks; it’s been days,” I said.
“Weeks, days,” said Roger. “Einstein said
time is subjective.”
“Oh, he did not!” I said. “And if he did, he meant the cosmos, not Brooklyn.”
“Perhaps,” said Roger. “I was out late last night with Blaze, and then this afternoon my charges were blessed with such a surfeit of energy—”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Blaze? Isn’t that a name for a horse?”
“An animal of some sort,” Roger agreed. “Finally I had the little angels run a race around the schoolyard, and the girls’ team won, which caused a predictable uproar. I allowed a do-over, and of course the girls won again. I’m fried. How is the beautiful and charming Janelle?”
“That’s why I called,” I said. “You’ve got to help me. I’ve been flirting. We went swimming, and she rubbed me down with her towel.”
Roger sighed. “My dear,” he said. “You are a fool. And I would hate to have to give you up.”
“How can you say that so casually?” I gasped.
“Janelle wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “I was her friend first.”
“But I’m not leaving her!” I insisted. “I don’t want to leave her! I’m thinking brief affair.”
“I sympathize,” said Roger. “But you lesbianas are so strange about these things.”
“What if she never finds out?” I asked. I had been giving a lot of thought to logistics. Janelle worked predictable hours in her office. I stayed home, responsible for nothing much but dinner and Baby’s jewelry order. Which I would of course have to consult with her about.
“In that village you’re living in? Are you tripping? Talk about a fuckup waiting to happen,” said Roger. “Don’t break my girlfriend’s heart. Especially after everything she’s been through.”
“What about my heart?” I decided to lay on him all the rationalizations I had come up with, to see how he took them. “It would just be an interlude. I’ve been through a lot too. Look how depressed I was. Janelle’s not easy.”
“As I’m well aware,” said Roger. “Well aware. But I mean what I said. And by the way, I don’t think that’s called your heart. At least, that’s not what we learned in biology class. Get a grip, girl!”
That was unhelpful, I thought as I put down the phone. I was trying to figure out who else I could call but realized absolutely no one was going to tell me what I wanted to hear; I wouldn’t even tell it to myself.
Asparagus
Annoyingly, Roger was right. Of course it wasn’t my heart that was throbbing, and it wasn’t love that I was looking for. I had that, and I thought I knew enough to hang onto it. All I wanted was a short shock, a jolt, a sizzle. A little thrill.
I was arranging and rearranging beads and pieces of beach glass into pleasing shape and color combinations on my work table when the phone rang. Hoping it was Roger, apologizing, or some nicer, more sympathetic friend, or at least a telemarketer I could yell at, I grabbed it.
“How about coffee today?” asked Baby. “I’m wearing street clothes, and it’s pretty warm out.”
“Um . . . um,” I said. I had no excuse. Or didn’t want one. “Come over here. I do great work with a French press.”
“A French what?” said Baby. “I’ll be right there.”
I put down the phone, and it immediately started ringing again. Maybe she’s canceling, I thought dejectedly. Maybe she’s canceling, I thought hopefully.
“I’m going to swing by the Stop & Shop,” said Janelle. “Want anything?”
“How about a bunch of asparagus?” I said, naming an impossible vegetable. Janelle enjoyed the occasional time-consuming grocery hunt. “We haven’t had that in a while.”
“Because it’s almost winter, honey child,” she pointed out.
“You can do it,” I said. “See if they have local, not those dried-up sticks from South Africa.”
It’s amazing how fast a life can change. One day, I was half of a peaceful, loving couple; the next, apparently, a libido-driven maniac. I almost called Baby back to cancel. Then I rationalized. Surely Janelle and I had gone way beyond patriarchal notions of ownership and jealousy. We enjoyed a deep and, we believed, abiding love, so much so that in all our years together, we had never actually sat down and had the Talk: open or closed; don’t-ask-don’t-tell or tell-all; exceptions such as professional conferences, high school reunions, encounters outside of a two-hundred-mile radius. For a lot of people, geography made a difference. I had a friend—she admitted to certain issues with intimacy—who had arrived at an understanding with an ornithologist who spent six months of each year in Antarctica. “Every pot has its cover,” my grandmother would have said, in the unlikely circumstance that she had been inspired to comment on lesbian fidelity.
I heard a tak-tok-tak-tok coming down the sidewalk and went to look out the front door. Baby smiled and wiggled her fingers hello. “I have to tell you something,” she called.
“You’re married,” I said. Of course, I realized. The whole exciting mess had been a big delusion on my part.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’ve had too much coffee already today. If I have any more I’ll get a headache.”
“Tea?” I offered.
“Actually, just water would be fine.”
“Water?” I said. No one drank Provincetown water. It caused terrible stomach cramps. Only the tourists asked for ice in their drinks. Some year-rounders also mistrusted the jugs of house brand from the Stop & Shop. There was a rumor that the night manager filled them from a secret tap at the back of the parking lot.
“You have some Poland Spring in the fridge, don’t you?”
“I’ve learned that much,” I said as she entered my home and fell into my arms. I extricated myself to shut the door behind her, then took her hand and led her into my studio. It was a tiny room, under the eaves, not constructed to accommodate two full-grown, active adults, careening and rolling around it, banging into my work table, scattering beads and beach glass all over ourselves. At one point, with Baby kneeling above me, I held her breasts in my hands, then pressed them together to suck both nipples at once—a trick I hadn’t been allowed to practice in a while. She moaned and arched her back and then collapsed on top of me, trapping my arm between us, but I was able to work my hand down her belly and slide a finger around her clitoris.
Oh,” she gasped. “Like that. Just like that. Oh, good girl.” We rocked together, Baby periodically shuddering and murmuring in my ear, “That. Oh, that,” until finally she sighed deeply and lay still.
Then she touched me, and it was—I don’t know—like the ceiling fell in. I had never heard of lesbian premature ejaculation, but that first time with Baby, wham. I came instantly and hard. I may have momentarily lost consciousness. I took her hand. “No more,” I said.
Baby didn’t seem disconcerted. We lay still for a while, then she sat up, shook out her hair, and said, “My, my, Nora Griffin. You surely are something special.” She leaned over and gave me a final smooch. “Oof. My back. Stay right there, sweet thing. I’ll just wash up and let myself out.”
I let her go. I lay on the floor of my studio in a stunned condition, while my new paramour tak-tok-tak-tok-ed out the front door and down the street.
Once she left, the floor started to feel uncomfortable, but I considered staying there and allowing myself to fall into a deep sleep—only because I didn’t want to analyze what had just happened, or anticipate what might happen next. No, not what had just happened—I forced myself to think the words: Sex. With Baby. It was inconceivable, even as the facts proved otherwise. The disarranged furniture. The beads on the floor. I hadn’t had sex with anyone but Janelle for a decade, and I swore to my good angel that it would never happen again.
Except maybe, whispered the other angel.
I sat up quickly, brushed a few pieces of beach glass off my shirt, and went into the kitchen to find a glass of water and the broom. That’s when Janelle came home.
“Oh. Hi. Hi there!” I said.
“Why are you looking at me funny?” asked Janelle. “And why
are you talking so weird? Are you high?”
“Of course I’m not high. And I’m not looking at you funny. I’m just looking. You walked into the room.”
She noticed the broom in my hands. I rarely did nonemergency cleaning, and she followed me into the studio, where I madly started sweeping. “Wow, what happened in here?” she said. “You’re a mess, sweetheart. Your shirt’s buttoned wrong. Come here and let me fix you.”
I had no choice. I put down the broom and walked over to her, and she put a finger under my chin and lifted my face to hers. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t meet her eyes. And as she looked at me, her expression changed from concern to comprehension.
“You have that look on your face. I’d know it anywhere,” she said slowly. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
“Janelle—” I said stupidly.
“Don’t talk to me,” she said. “You have purple lipstick on your collar! I thought that was just a dumb song.”
“I love you, Janelle,” I whispered.
“Liar!” Janelle exclaimed. “I told you, don’t talk to me. Don’t say my name! Just get out of my sight! Get out of my house! This is my house!”
“But—” I attempted. Although I had nothing to say for myself.
“How could you do this?” she cried. “Now, of all times! Like I don’t have enough to deal with!” She grabbed me, and with one hand around my bicep and the other on my back, she pushed me down the hall and out the front door. “Get! Out! Now!” she yelled. “I thought I could count on you. You’re nothing to me anymore! Nothing!” She slammed the door after me. At certain bad moments, I can still feel the imprint of her palm between my shoulder blades.
There I was, standing on Commercial Street, with nothing but the clothes on my back. I went back and tried the door, but she had locked it. Unfair, I thought. She hadn’t even bothered to ask for my side of the story—whatever that was. I could have concocted something if she had given me a chance. Pounding on the door, I shouted, “Hey, Janelle, come on, it’s freezing out! This is my place too! What am I supposed to do?” In a minute the neighbors would be peeking out their windows to see what the commotion was about. Some dykes. At it, as usual. “I’m sorry!” I offered pathetically.