“Jamie…”
“So… Y’know. I have a hard time writing things now.”
“Jamie, I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah… it was bad.”
“Did the police find the guys?”
Jamie shook her head.
“And the thing was, nobody knew why, you know? Why it happened. The police, people, everyone kept saying it was random. Because… I couldn’t tell them. Because I couldn’t have her family thinking she died cause she was gay when they didn’t even know she was gay… And she didn’t want them to know,” she said. “Fucking bad enough she was killed. I tried telling this one cop and he looked at me like I was crazy. So I didn’t try again.”
“Oh my god…”
“I didn’t even know her name. I know it now. I carry it with me everywhere,” Jamie said. “Her name was Paige.”
She had a sip of her beer. It felt good and calmed her racing heart.
“And this is why I almost fainted in your office that first day. And this is why I can’t write anything beautiful anymore.”
She looked at Penny.
“She died because of me.”
“No, Jamie. It was a terrible, random thing. It just happened.”
“So, you see - I feel like I can’t write anything beautiful because I’m fucking terrified that if I say too many true things, even about an art gallery in Florence, somehow the whole fucking awful story would come out. And everyone would see what I did.”
“Jamie, you didn’t do anything. You kissed someone. People do it every day.”
“Anyway, so there’s a true story.”
A fat tear slipped down her cheek.
Penny got up and moved in closer. Sliding down next to Jamie. Jamie felt Penny’s hand brush a tear away. Then another.
Penny hugged her.
“Jamie, I’m so sorry,” she heard Penny whisper in her ear. “I’m so sorry.”
Jamie let go of the hug first. “It sounds worse than it is,” she said. She pushed out a smile, which didn’t really take. “I mean I’ve been living with it. I just don’t talk about it.”
“Jamie…” Penny whispered. “Let me tell you something.”
“…Is it about how I unnerve you?”
Penny smiled. “Would that make you feel better?”
“Maybe.”
“Jamie… Look. Here’s what they don’t tell us in this life,” she said. “They’re so busy telling women how to be perfect and raise a family and use a Bissell carpet sweeper. But no one tells you you have to be fucking strong as hell to get through this world.”
She slid her hand into Jamie’s. Holding her hand.
“Jamie, I have lived every day of my life feeling like I somehow could have stopped something I couldn’t have stopped. Like it was my fault. And maybe it was.”
Penny let her eyes find Jamie’s.
“There are things you just have to fucking bear. Not everyone has them. But some people do.”
“Lucky us,” Jamie smirked.
“Listen,” Penny said. “I believe that pain opens up a capacity you would never have had before. It’s awful but it’s true.”
“Excaliber. Steel is iron pounded in flames.”
“Something like that.”
Jamie smiled. She brushed away a tear. “And in the meantime?”
“There’s…” Penny thought about it. “Tosca at the Met. There’s Frankenthaler and Rothko. There’s Ella Fitzgerald. There are books…” she said. “There are fucking books…”
“Yeah.”
“They’re not words, they’re fucking alchemy.”
Jamie smiled. “That is so fucking true.”
“Damn right it is.”
Penny leaned back against the fire escape. She squeezed Jamie’s hand and pulled it into her body. Holding her hand like she was holding all of Jamie.
The two of them sat there side by side looking out into the darkness.
“Life, Jamie Brennan,” she whispered. “Can be a cruel fucker.”
“I like it,” Jamie smiled. “Who wrote that?”
Penny turned to face Jamie. So close she could kiss her.
“…I believe it was Plato.” Penny’s mouth was right next to Jamie’s, her voice now a whisper. “It sounds better in the…original Greek.”
Everything in Penny’s body said kiss her. Instead, she turned her face away and leaned back against the fire escape, holding Jamie’s hand.
“You’ll be okay,” Penny whispered.
“I hope so.”
“I know it.”
“I’m glad I met you, Jamie Brennan…”
“I’m glad I met you too.”
There were so many more words inside Penny. “I think you’re brave and beautiful. I love the sound of your laugh and your voice. You calm this stormy part of me that nothing else will touch. And If I could, I would give you everything I am. But I can’t. And that’s terrifying and let’s just leave it.”
Penny stared out at the darkness from the courtyard and felt the warmth of Jamie’s body next to hers. Something in her felt safe and seen.
Not alone. For the first time in forever, she didn’t feel outside something. She felt inside. Belonging somewhere. Or to someone in the middle of the darkness.
She listened to the sounds of the city in the blackout. A car alarm on 10th Street, a laugh and a shout from a nearby unseen apartment with the windows open.
She felt Jamie’s fingertips on her chin. She turned to face her. They were so close, their mouths were already inches from each other. And with that, Penny leaned in and let her lips find Jamie’s soft lips. Tentative and sweet. Tender.
And for the first time in her whole life, she understood what they meant by fireworks from a kiss. Everything in her body came alive. A whoosh of energy that leaped from the center of her stomach up to her heart and down between her legs.
“Oh my god…” Penny whispered into Jamie’s lips.
She let her hands slide up and down Jamie’s body as they kissed. The softness of her warm skin under her t-shirt. The swell of her breasts. The heat that came off her. It was so different than kissing Davis or any man before. It was impossibly soft and warm and welcoming.
Penny pressed her body against Jamie’s. Their kiss got more heated.
“Let’s go inside,” Penny whispered.
47
Darkness. Heat. A candle by the bed.
Hands, tongues, sweat, wetness…
“Do you… need to know anything?” Jamie had said when they started, lying on the bed, Penny on top of her. She was pulling Penny’s shirt up over her head.
Penny slid her hand inside Jamie’s shorts as she climbed on top of her on the bed, spreading her legs with her knee….
“Oh, don’t you worry. I’ll figure it out,” she whispered with a smile.
Jamie lay back and let Penny do just that.
48
8:45 a.m.
Penny woke up with sunlight streaming in and sweat sticking to her body.
She opened her eyes and looked around, taking in where she was: Where she was was lying in bed next to Jamie Brennan.
A feeling of clarity washed over her. A sorrow. It wasn’t regret. But it wasn’t joy. It was reality. Literal daylight.
I live with someone. I have been married for ten years. I have another life.
She propped herself up on her elbow, looking at Jamie who stirred and opened her eyes.
She looked beautiful lying there with her long body. Her blue eyes soulful and shining with the bits of sunlight in them.
Penny leaned over and kissed Jamie on the forehead. She climbed out of the bed slowly. Hoping Jamie wouldn’t say anything - wouldn’t make this be something it wasn’t. Or make it not be the beautiful something it was.
But Jamie just lay there, looking at her. With her arm up over her head on the pillow, like surrender.
“I should go,” Penny finally said.
Even then, Jamie didn’t speak.
And P
enny was grateful for it.
“Coffee?”
“No thanks. I should head out.”
Twenty minutes later, Penny was dressed and Jamie was making a pot of coffee in the back of the apartment.
The fan was blowing in the window. Penny glanced at her watch. 9:15 a.m.. Power was back on.
She stood by Jamie’s desk in the living room part of the studio and looked around, taking in everything of Jamie Brennan she could.
The light coming through the window brushed the room with a softness like an Italian movie. There was an exposed brick wall with a poster from a Robert Rauschenberg exhibition at the Whitney in 1973. There were books and little bits of art in refractions. A Metropolitan Museum postcard of a Manet painting of a female Toriador leaned against the lamp on the desk. Spanish style, French painter. Above the desk, a picture cut out from a magazine of Alexander Calder making a tiny circus lion out of wire. Next to it was a handwritten poem on a piece of graph paper.
Penny leaned in and read the poem. She knew in in the first two words. It was e.e. cummings. The one about the girls who go to the seashore and all the magical things they find.
She looked around. There were bookshelves filled with books. Steinbeck, Salinger, Jane Austen, Joyce Carol Oates, Baudelaire, poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The short stories of William Yates, art criticism books, a few by Roland Barthes.
Penny scanned her eyes over Jamie’s work area by the window - a cute makeshift desk comprised of a piece of wood and two saw horses. Very cool. Industrial chic.
On the desk, a small curved black lamp with a metal coil neck, very Bloomingdales c. 1966, hovered above a yellow Olivetti typewriter that had a page in it but no words typed yet. A file folder filled with papers labeled ‘recent’.
Penny loved this desk.
She loved this apartment. And the details that made up a life: Art, books, poems, photographs. Jamie Brennan was here in these details. It was all how she filled herself up with the world. And then wrote of the world she was filled with..
“You sure you don’t want some coffee?”
Penny turned. Jamie was walking towards her with a mug of coffee in her hand. She looked different. More beautiful. More grown up than she had the day before. Alive.
“No thanks,” Penny smiled. “I should run.”
Where Penny was wearing last night’s black dress, Jamie had slipped on a thin blue tank top and grey drawstring shorts. Her long legs and bare feet. She had her hair up.
The whole picture was sexy. Penny looked away.
She pointed to the file. “Is this your work?”
“Oh – that’s just notes. Stuff I write when I’m trying to write,” Jamie said. “Not for publication,” she laughed.
Penny glanced at the file, thick with pages. She ran her hand along it like it was something treasured.
“Can I read it?”
Jamie’s eyebrows raised. A smile crept across her face.
“Uh, sure,” she said. “Why not?”
She placed her coffee mug on her desk, opened the file and had a look at the top page. “I don’t know if there’s anything remotely good in here, “ She laughed. “But if you want.”
Their eyes met. Penny saw the flecks of sunlight in Jamie’s blue eyes that made them shine. She glanced at Jamie’s mouth. Her soft lips.
Jamie handed her the folder. “Just don’t hold it against me.”
Penny remembered the words from last night. The beautiful words of the terrible true story Jamie had told her.
She flashed on he warmth of Jamie’s body next to her on the fire escape. And the softness of their kiss. And the sex. To say it was the best sex of her life would definitely do it a disservice. It was heat and sweat and deep connection. In a world with no place for these feelings to belong. Not in her world at least.
“Jamie…”
Jamie’s quick smile turned wistful. She glanced away, then back to Penny.
The two of them in a weighted silence.
“Penny, let’s not.”
“But I feel we should talk about-”
“We don’t need to”
“Last night was - ”
“Yeah.”
“And I wish it - ”
Jamie held up a hand. “- Me too..”
Penny laughed. “Well, I’m glad we could have this talk.”
She looked at Jamie’s delicate hands wrapped around her coffee cup.
She wanted to say so many things. She wanted to say “Thank you for telling me what happened to you, I’ll keep it in my heart.” “You make me feel loved and like life is sweet and possible.” “Your body turns me on - I want to go back to bed with you and stay there forever.”
But none of those words made sense in the stark light of a new day.
“I should go,” Penny said.
She gave Jamie a quick hug.
“Thanks for everything, Jamie.”
“You’re welcome.” Jamie casually sipped her coffee. She raised an eyebrow. “It was worth it to see you in shorts.”
Ten minutes later, a rickety taxi whooshed up an empty Park Avenue South towards Grand Central. Penny leaned back on the worn-in back seat, the open window blowing morning air in her face.
The driver turned and spoke over his shoulder.
“You get caught in the blackout?”
He was an old-timer with a flat cap and coke bottle glasses. Peering at her in the rearview mirror. It was a regular cab with no plexiglass like there was in Checkers.
“Yes,” Penny said. “Like so many I’m sure.”
“Nice to be heading home then.”
She leaned back in the seat and he turned the volume up on the radio. WNEW. The swell of a big band, the announcer was talking over the song’s intro.
“The lights are back on in the city that never sleeps… And here’s Frank Sinatra with You Make Me Feel So Young…”
Everything in New York seemed back to normal. She peered out the window as the blur of Park Avenue whooshed by.
She twirled the wedding ring on her finger as if it would have an answer.
She closed her eyes and felt the warm wind on her face.
No one tells you the moment you’re about to ruin your life. And either way - stay with him, go with her. It was done.
49
“Babe! You survived the great blackout of ‘77!”
11:20 a.m. and Penny was standing in the hallway of their Scarsdale home.
“I did.”
She plunked her car keys down on the console table in the front hall and stood in the doorway facing into the living room. Davis was in his chair sipping coffee and reading the Times.
“Thank God you’re okay.”
Her sprang up from his chair and made his way over. Slipping his arms around her.
He kissed her on the top of the head.
“I was worried about you.”
Penny let herself be held. Finally she spoke.
“I have to have a shower and go in to work.”
She heard him laugh through his chest. “Jesus Penny - work can wait till tomorrow,” he said. “Let someone put out the embers first.”
He looked into her eyes. His grey eyes crinkled with concern.
"Are you alright? Was it bad?”
“I’m okay, really,” she said.
“They’re saying there were riots.”
“Apparently.”
“You were okay?”
“I was fine.”
“You want some coffee?”
“I’ll make some.”
Penny stood there, looking into the living room.
Davis walked over and sat down in his chair again.
"Just say the word and I'll make you a fresh pot."
She knew that was one of those things he said knowing he wouldn't have to do it. That used to bug her. This morning she couldn't care less.
She stood there feeling Jamie Brennan’s body on her body, which made no sense. Feeling Jamie’s kiss on her lips. Ber
eft suddenly without her. Like someone had torn off the front half of her body and she needed to be covered again.
All the way home on the 10:06 am train ride back to Scarsdale from Grand Central, Penny stared out the window and twisted her wedding ring.
And the more she tried to think of other things, the more last night’s sex flashed in her mind.
Jamie Brennan’s touch. Her heart. That mouth, that kiss.
There were other commuters in yesterday’s work clothes heading home that morning on the 10:06 to North White Plains. She tuned out the conversations and the stories from the night before. She stared out the window at the tenements of Harlem as the train trundled by. She could see smoke in the distance from fires the night before. Broken store windows and garbage strewn streets and trash cans. Police cars and burned out cars.
Last night there was looting and riots and fires all across the city. And she had missed it all.
She stared out the train window. The impossible thought that kept appearing in her mind, on this morning of mayhem, was the only one that wanted to be heard.
Because from the moment Jamie Brennan kissed her, everything in her life made sense. The not belonging. The crushes. The outside-ness.
And here on this train, the impossible thought would not be silenced.
“Oh my god…I’m fucking gay…”
The never belonging. The nameless want. The silly crushes on women so easily chalked up to infatuation. The way she felt about Connie. The switch that went on in her body and her heart the moment Jamie Brennan walked into her office that first day.
And then last night. The best kiss she’d ever had. The best sex she’d ever had. The most her she’d ever felt.
And in that moment as the train ambled along the tracks towards Fordham Road in the Bronx, she all at once got it - the reason why her heart had never felt settled or seen.
“Jesus. I’m fucking gay...” she whispered again.
But her next thought made a lot more sense in this post-blackout world that made no sense this morning.
“Well, this won’t do at all.”
And she came up with the plan.
A secret self. People did it. They lived double lives as secret selves. And that’s where this self would go. Into a box and put on a shelf. Because she couldn’t give up everything she knew. She had gone through that once when her parents died. Never again.
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