by Radclyffe
It was 1:35, she saw on the tiny gold watch Tam had given her that morning. From most of the houses came the scent of turkey and herbed stuffings. Like her family, the Tabors, they would sit down to dinner at 2:00 p.m.
Maybe next year, or the next, Tam would see that saying no to their families did not end the world. Angela felt saddest about losing the big, warm, noisy holiday meal. Someday her mother and Aunt Rosa would be old and she could offer to cook the turkey. Maybe Aunt Rosa would come over then to fill her home with her big laugh, and her mother would bring her worried nagging. Maybe by then they wouldn’t mind so much about Angela being with Tam. If she only knew some gay people, she would invite them all, stuff the house, lure Tam away from the cold, conniving Thorpes with the hot smell of holiday turkey. At least her own family, no less pigheaded about her and Tam being lovers, had it out, yelling back and forth about who was wrong.
It was colder at the marina, where the river sloshed gently against the wooden piles as it ran toward the Atlantic, but it simply was not Christmas without a walk by the water. She didn’t want to walk later when she might run into the Tabor clan. That would be too sad. From a marsh to the east of Maple Beach rose a heron, long-legged and bottom-heavy. A few were year-round residents, like the rest of us working stiffs, Daddy would intone during every Christmas walk. He tried so hard to use American slang, his accent still as awkward as the lumbering heron’s take-off. A smattering of mallards swam under and around the floating docks. Angela tossed them the handfuls of table scraps she’d been saving. Christmas dinner, she thought, as she watched them grab and squabble, quacking at one another.
She didn’t want to dwell on the fight she’d had with Tam last night about Christmas. It had been too ugly. Tam had never seemed cold like the rest of the Thorpes before. Her good looks had been deformed by fury and conflict. Her compact, confident body had been slouched in on itself. Tam had turned out to be, so far, as unforgiving as the Thorpes were.
Angela had only asked Tam if they could talk about the holidays. Without anger, she’d added. At the shop when a knotty problem came up, she and the other hairdressers would hash it out, often over a few hours, as they worked. Like the day she’d learned that the guy who supplied her with everything from shampoo to capes was closing up and retiring to Florida. They’d all chewed on that until one came up with a place she’d heard was good, another spent time with the yellow pages, another called a relative who owned three beauty parlors, all about the same size as her own. Each suggestion had its merits and when she’d objected to all the new paperwork if she used more than one supplier, Maxine had volunteered to do some ordering and Karen, as it eventually turned out, had taken over the books altogether.
“Why shouldn’t talking about our problem at home work as well?” she’d asked Tam.
Tam’s voice was barely louder than a mumble, a certain sign of anger. “You just want to bring me around to your way of thinking.”
“That’s not true! If we put our heads together we may come up with a new solution.”
“There is no solution,” said Tam into her textbook, “new or old.”
Angela was standing at the windows, about to close the drapes against the darkening sky. “Tam, we don’t know that.”
“Angie,” Tam commanded, holding up her book and the blank page of a notebook. “I’m trying to study.”
“And I’m trying to get you to give a little time to solving a miserable mess that gets in our way at least four times a year, honey.” She knew she had stooped to pleading. “Ignoring it won’t make it any better.”
Tam closed her book slowly, marking her place and squaring corners with her notebook. She turned toward Angela, eyes still hard and voice all too low. “All right. So talk about it.”
Angela felt silenced, as if Tam had thrown up a wall and simultaneously drained her of will and strength. She sat on the wooden arm of their plaid couch and folded her hands on her knees. “Tam,” she said with great sadness, remembering the tomboy freshman with the pixie haircut she’d first seen in high school, “we won’t get anywhere if you’re angry.”
Tam stood and threw her arms in the air. “First you want to wheedle me into something I think is dumb. Now you tell me how I’m supposed to feel while I’m doing it. Anything else you want, baby?”
“What is wrong with you? I’m not asking for the moon. We’re two grown-up people, Tam. Lovers. We ought to be able to have a discussion.”
“Lovers? Lovers?” Tam cried. “You call this being lovers? Every time I’ve come near you for the past six months you’ve shrunk away like I’m some kind of monster.”
“Which is one reason I think we have to talk this thing out.”
Tam stared at her. “Are you saying this holiday mess has been freezing you up?”
“Don’t you think our families are coming between us?”
Tam wouldn’t look at her. She stood, mute, twisting her fingers like someone being called on the carpet. She looked up once, then slumped into her chair.
“Maybe it’s a fact of your life, Tam, but things are about to change for me.” Tam looked up quickly, a frown drawing her eyebrows together. Without planning to, Angela said, “I’m not going to spend Christmas Day at Aunt Rosa’s. I’ll spend it alone if I have to.”
“See?” Tam said, her voice sharp. “Wasn’t it easier for you to just announce this, this ultimatum and not pretend we decided it together?”
Angela wanted to push Tam into the Christmas tree, into that deep piney scent, so the lights and bulbs would smash into tiny pieces, like their lives together. “You want to know when I decided that, Tam?” she challenged. “I decided it as I said it. I don’t know why you think I’m plotting against you”—oh, no, the tears were coming—“but I’m not. I’m only loving you.”
Tam glowered at her. Angela did cry, hiding her face in her hands. She heard Tam leave the room. Drawers opened and closed. Good, she remembered thinking, she’s going to bed. They often made up in bed, cuddling.
There was something about the pure intimacy of cuddling, its undemanding safety, that made sex feel like it was more about loving than at any other time. Tam was such a complicated person, with all the hang-ups her family had instilled in her and her ambitions and beliefs—and her choice to stay in Roosevelt with Angela and support herself through college rather than take her parents’ money. It was heavenly when she stopped working, studying, and balancing all her worlds long enough to simply lie with Angela in her arms. They’d talk and laugh, kiss now and then, just be close. As the feeling of closeness deepened, Angela could feel them merging. Sometimes they would fall asleep like that, but other times, at a certain point, a spark would leap between them and they’d find themselves on fire for each other.
“Tam,” she would say. “My darling.”
The word “darling” never failed to ignite Tam. Her body would seem to gain heft and broaden. She’d feel like Tam could carry her across the river in her arms on a rope bridge in a hurricane, wild beasts at their heels. Instead, Tam became the hurricane, hands flying like wind, lips and tongue like warm rain pelting her skin. She felt like a love song when she touched Tam’s soft skin, her feathery hair, her pellet-like nipples that required so little to stand at attention. When Tam took over, though, it was as if Angela was the violin, Tam the bow; Angela the piano, Tam the talented fingers; Angela the drum Tam played with light rhythmic sticks and brushes.
Those were the times Angela surrendered herself, let herself be played, left Tam to find her own release. She was only part of this phenomenon that was Tam impassioned. What Tam did to her excited them both. When Tam finally entered her with those strong, swift, seeking fingers, Angela’s body relaxed as if it had been longing for just that, and she opened wider. Orgasm was a long note of unearthly pleasure.
Her tears had stopped. She huddled in a corner of the couch, exhausted and not yet ready to go to Tam.
“I’ll see you after dinner tomorrow,” Tam had said, moving swiftly thro
ugh the living room. Before Angela could say or ask anything, Tam had been gone, an old airline bag in one hand, a shopping bag of gifts for the Thorpes in the other, and the scent of frigid air blowing into the apartment. Angela did not rise from the couch for hours that night. The Thorpes, she thought, would be triumphant to have Tam, obviously upset, spend the night. It wasn’t until she got into bed by herself that she went icy with the question: did Tam really go to her parents’ home?
As she walked through the park in the cold light of Christmas afternoon, a flock of crows grew raucous in the taller trees. She realized that she’d just replayed the whole miserable argument yet again. She still did not know where Tam spent last night. Twice before she’d stayed away all night, but she’d called and said she had so much work to do at the library that she was sleeping on the teacher’s couch again, the teacher who had taken her in during a snow storm one night last year.
Cannon Street was utterly deserted. She shivered. The day wasn’t raw, but it wasn’t warm either. Every shop was as familiar as her face in the mirror. The books in the window of the rental library always looked so enticing. The mock wedding cake at the baker’s made her long for the wedding she’d denied her mother. Would life have been easier in this rough time with Tam if they’d been blessed instead of shunned? She envisioned her dapper, boyish Tam, hair cut to a perfection of wave and d.a., in a black tux, that sullen, too good-looking face above a bowtie and stiff white collar. And herself, all in satiny white, a delicate lacy cap atop her multitude of tiny curls, arm in arm with Tam.
The mock wedding cake in the bakery window, she noticed, needed dusting. Down the street her family’s candy store, closed today, looked forlorn without the newest generation of brats hitting one another, or slurping cherry Cokes, the current neighborhood rage, through straws. She stood in the middle of the sidewalk feeling bereft. Five years ago, love had transformed the world. The grass had looked greener, the river bluer, the birds had sounded as excited as she’d felt.
Tam was as delicately handsome as ever, but being touched or touching her seemed forced when they had this anger between them. And at them. It wasn’t that she thought of Mommy crying or Daddy’s hurt, puzzled face every time she kissed Tam, or of the railroad station cleaner who still leered at her after catching her all those years ago with her first lover, Jefferson, making out in what they’d thought was a deserted hallway. It wasn’t that she thought, when they made love, about what Tam had lost by coming to her, or that she dwelt on the fear of what would happen if her customers knew what she was. The bed got awfully crowded, though, with all of them hovering, bound and determined to have their disapproval heard.
She dreaded returning to the empty flat. They would be sitting down to dinner at Aunt Rosa’s. Someone would ask who was saying grace. Bald Uncle Bert would cheerily cry out, “Grace!” His ever-scowling brother Martin would fold his hands and say an earnest blessing, then pandemonium would take over with the passing of too many dishes at once, one of the uncles pulling out a flask and pouring a shot into Grandma’s tea, and some little cousin spilling cider on the good holiday tablecloth. She was thirsty. Her feet were cold. Her lower back ached. And she felt alone, as if Tam was never coming home.
She turned toward Aunt Rosa’s. The cold had seeped through her car coat and into the gaps left between its barrel buttons. The river smelled fetid right here, where the factory disgorged its waste. She needed some sort of family, didn’t she?
The playground lay between Cannon Street and Aunt Rosa’s. As she approached, hands in her pockets, knuckles against the bristles of the hairbrush she always carried, fingers curled around the cold metal cylinder of her lipstick, collar turned up and buttoned against a rising wind, she could hear the sound of someone slapping a pink spaldeen against the handball court wall. Tam loved handball. She’d beaten the boys in school enough times that they wouldn’t risk certain humiliation.
The cold wind was making her eyes tear. She walked on, regretting her need to go to Aunt Rosa’s. She felt, despite Tam’s decision, like she was betraying Tam, and herself, because this was wrong, this denial of their little family of two. The sound of the ball got louder. The players were really smashing it around the court. Kids, whacking the heck out of new balls they got for the holiday.
Had Tam spent the night with her family? Was she seeing someone in the city? She had a whole life at school that was separate and probably filled with temptations: girls who were more educated than Angela, older women who would find Tam irresistible, bars where she could meet other lesbians. She laughed at herself; what else did she want to worry about on Christmas Day?
The handball players were on the other side of the court, behind the concrete wall. Aunt Rosa’s was just beyond. Should she turn back? No, she wanted to see the kids enjoying their new spaldeens. It would be a kind of Christmas celebration for her, sharing that little joy. Then she wouldn’t need to join her family. She’d go home, make some hot chocolate, and be there when Tam arrived, a light dinner awaiting her after the holiday meal. She’d walked off her loneliness and felt good. Everybody had conflicts around holidays, theirs were just a little more complex than some.
An old airline bag leaned against the fence, a shopping bag filled with wrapped gifts beside it. That Christmas paper looked familiar. She knew the bag too. What was Tam doing here, not with some college girl, not with the Thorpes?
Tam kept playing as she walked onto the court. “I thought you were at your aunt’s,” Tam called.
“I almost gave in, but then I saw you,” Angela said. “What’re you doing here, Tam?”
“Waiting to catch you on your way home from your aunt’s. I, ah, stopped by the house. You weren’t there, so I figured—”
She felt a smile take over her face. Tam had known she’d give in and go to her family. “Oh, Tam,” she said, moving forward into her arms.
Tam whispered to her, “I told my family it wasn’t right, tearing us away from each other on the holidays. I gave them a choice: both or neither. I left their presents there and came home.”
She asked, “Then what are these?”
“Gifts I didn’t give them. I think there’s enough here for your family. I thought you could run in with them.”
They had stepped away from each other, conscious as always of the windows lining the streets to either side of them, of the danger that the wrong person would be looking out a window at the wrong time. The automatic jolt of fear was there, as usual, but Tam’s announcement that she’d stood up to her family, stood up for being with her lover, seeped into her like heat.
Her teeth stopped chattering. For the first time in a long while, she wanted nothing more than to go home and pull Tam into the bedroom, onto the bed, and bury her mouth between Tam’s legs till the bed rattled with their passion. Tam’s round eyes, with a slant to them that increased with her smile, went all soft the way they did when she wanted to make love.
“First,” Angela told Tam, “first, we’re going to Aunt Rosa’s. You’re going to give them their gifts. If they don’t insist we stay today, they’ll regret it for a year. What do you bet we get asked for cherry pie on Washington’s Birthday?”
“Wait a minute,” Tam objected, laughing. “What about champagne on New Year’s Eve?”
“Hot dogs for the Fourth?”
“Spaghetti on Columbus Day?”
Angela stopped at the steps to Aunt Rosa’s and straightened Tam’s collar, handed her hairbrush to her. “I’ve missed you, my darling Tam,” she said.
“I thought we were going to split up,” Tam told her, eyes filling with tears.
She shook her head no. “Let’s go break the ice—not us—shall we?”
Tam pulled her lips between her teeth the way she did when she was nervous.
“You can do this,” she told Tam. She pictured the long-legged, heavy heron that had lifted itself to flight before her eyes. “I love you for doing this.” She followed as Tam took the stairs to Aunt Rosa’s two at a time.<
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Romantic Devil - Ali Vali
ALI VALI lives right outside New Orleans with her partner of many years. As a writer, she couldn’t ask for a better more beautiful place, so full of real-life characters to fuel the imagination. When she isn’t writing, working in the yard, cheering for the LSU Tigers, or riding her bicycle, Ali makes a living in the nonprofit sector.
Ali has written The Devil Inside, Carly’s Sound, The Devil Unleashed, Second Season, Deal With the Devil, and the forthcoming Calling the Dead (available in November 2008).
Romantic Devil
Ali Vali
Emma Casey stood at her front door and kissed her son Hayden good-bye as he left for school. Her younger child Hannah was somewhere behind her, making the household staff earn their pay by trying to keep both her and everything within reach of her small hands in one piece.
The routine of school, child care, and taking care of her partner Cain kept her busier than any full-time job, but it was something Emma cherished after her self-imposed exile. Acceptance of her life and the woman she shared it with had come only after she’d walked alone for too long. Derby Cain Casey was the love everyone dreamed to find, but she was also the head of one of New Orleans’s crime families. To Emma she could’ve been the devil incarnate and it wouldn’t have mattered. Emma had found her place and it was at Cain’s side. Now she had to only work to prove herself to Cain so that they could move on from her mistakes to share a better relationship than they’d had.