The Swashbuckler

by Lee Lynch

  Frenchy kissed Edie’s hair and held her close. She could feel a wave of warmth rise through her body and began again to tremble. “Are you cold?” Edie asked.

  “No,” Frenchy answered in her deepest, huskiest voice. “I just want you so bad.”

  Reckless of being in the open, they began to kiss again. The summer air seemed to sit around them still as a wall and they could see stars, the moon over the track. The pillars and roof of the station hovered protectively over them and the wooden bench curved around them like an old grey hand.

  Frenchy made love to Edie as if they were sitting on a living room couch, except that she went under her clothing instead of removing it. She was protective against possible discomforts for Edie to the point of painful discomfort for herself. When she touched Edie’s breast she knew they would finish right there on the subway platform, college girl or no college girl. “Edie, Edie,” Frenchy sighed as she spread her little hand across the flesh inside Edie’s thigh.

  “Frenchy,” Edie said wondrously, digging her fingers into her shoulders. “I don’t know why it took me so long to do this,” she whispered.

  “To come out?”

  “Is that what you call it?” Edie asked between kisses.

  “Yeah,” Frenchy said, “and this is how you do it.” Her hand reached under Edie’s nylon panties. They were bikinis and she imagined them, black and sexy against the white of Edie’s skin. Then she felt the matted pubic hairs, parted them with her fingertips, kneaded the soft flesh beneath and slipped to the cavity of the panties’ crotch. She felt Edie’s wetness where it had soaked through the nylon against her knuckles. She felt her own vagina tighten and loosen involuntarily and reached for Edie’s softer parts as if to find release for herself.

  “Ohh,” Edie moaned, twisting against Frenchy’s slowly stroking thumb. She let her legs fall more widely apart as her skirt rode up her legs. Frenchy parted her inner lips with her index and middle fingers and stroked her swelling clitoris. “Baby,” Edie breathed, tightening. Frenchy began to kiss her face, tiny loving kisses all over, when the train she’d barely been aware of thrust a hot gust of wind against them and stopped behind their bench.

  They held onto one another, not breathing, afraid someone would get off the train and come to their side of the bench. The train pulled out. Footsteps descended the steps at the end of the platform. They breathed in relief, looking at one another, falling onto each other’s lips, desperate to retrieve their passion.

  Although they went through the motions again, Frenchy could tell their lovemaking had a pallid end for Edie. Disappointed, they waited for the next train, Frenchy still touching Edie with passion.

  “Will you be at the bar next Saturday?” Frenchy asked, her mouth nibbling on Edie’s neck.

  “Oh, yes,” Edie replied as if there had never been a question about it. “Will you?”

  “There’s no place I’d rather be if you’re going to be there, sweetheart.”

  “There are plenty of other bars, Frenchy, I’m sure. And girls,” Edie said, pulling away to pat her hair into place. “Now stop kissing me and let me fix myself. I might know someone on the train!”

  Frenchy stepped back, grinning. “Sorry, angel baby. I just can’t keep my hands off you.”

  “No kidding.” Edie smiled back, combing her hair and renewing her lipstick. “Why don’t you come pick me up next week?”

  “Come all the way out here? I don’t get out of work till four. Think of all the time we’d waste travelling when we could be together downtown.”

  “It was being together I thought was important.”

  “Sure, Edie. You’re right,” she said, already missing her walk downtown. “I’ll pick you up. Tell me how to get to your house.”

  “I’ll show you. Take me there tonight,” Edie tempted.

  Frenchy looked eagerly at Edie’s hips, thrust forward with her hands splayed on them. She shook her head. “I can’t. I just can’t tonight.”

  “Why? Do you have another girlfriend waiting for you in the Bronx?”

  “No, Edie, no way. I only got eyes for you, honest. I wouldn’t two-time you. I just got to get home. It’s late already.” She shouted as Edie’s train came in, “Tell me where you live!”

  “Never mind. I’ll see you at the bar. Call me. I’m in the book under my father’s name: Aaron Marks. What’s your number?” Edie cried as she stepped onto the train.

  Frenchy hesitated. She didn’t want to lose Edie, but she couldn’t have her calling her house. “I don’t have one,” she shouted into the train’s closing door.

  The night had cooled. Frenchy pulled her jean jacket tighter across her chest and buttoned it. She crossed to the other platform, aware of the huge dark sky over her, over the whole city that was settling into the night. She whistled a bar of In the Still of the Night. At the edge of the platform she breathed deeply, lifting her chin, admiring the stars.

  The magic had not yet left the night. Wasn’t she, Frenchy, still out on a Saturday night? Wasn’t she beloved of Edie who would soon be dreaming of her? Couldn’t she go right back downtown and find another girl, give her just as much? She thought briefly of Donna at the waitress’ apartment. She bet it wouldn’t be as good as if Donna had stayed with her. Yes, Donna would miss her. She glanced up at the stars once more, hitched up her jeans and threw her cigarette to the platform where she ground it hard under her heel as the train stopped and opened its doors for her. The long ride to the Bronx began. It was with effort that she kept the spring in her diddy-bop as she changed trains.

  By the Yankee Stadium stop Frenchy had unbuttoned her jean jacket and checked her collar for lipstick. She pulled a locket out from under her shirt and buttoned the shirt’s top button, settling the necklace outside it. She rolled down the collar of her jacket and flattened it. At 167th Street she removed her pinky ring and ID bracelet. At 170th she slid her Marlboro box, almost empty, under the seat, glancing around to make sure no one noticed, then took out a stick of Juicy Fruit gum and stuffed it in her mouth. Her face changed as she chewed — from the bold arrogant look she had worn all night, to a wary expression. She clenched her jaw and looked, above the tightly buttoned collar and locket, almost old maidish, like a girl who’d never had a date and went to church regularly to pray for one.

  At her stop Frenchy got off the train demurely, remembering the time she met her next door neighbors coming home from their evening at Radio City Music Hall. She walked up the subway steps, pulling the comb from her back pocket. The cigar shop on the corner was still open, selling Sunday papers, and she used its window to take the point out of her d.a. and to dismantle her pompadour. She whistled I’m Sorry softly as she wound small spitcurls in front of her ears. She walked past her building and glanced up, relieved that no one was at the window. How often she had wished the apartment was at the back. Behind the stairs on the first floor was a cubbyhole, a small hiding place she had discovered as a child, just low enough for her to reach. Her heart raced with the anxiety she always felt here, afraid someone might have discovered and taken her plain brown slipons. She removed them, and squeezed her black boots into their space, patting them goodbye for a week.

  Then, Sunday paper in hand, she flattened her hair one last time, chewed her gum more vigorously before throwing it out, and gingerly ascended the stairs, key in hand. Each step creaked beneath her feet. The four-story walkup needed repairs; even the bannisters creaked. There was no way, it seemed, not to make noise. She opened her third floor door quietly. The little hallway was empty except for the light left burning for her. She slipped quickly out of her jean jacket and headed for her room. Then her mother called, in French, “Is that you, dear? You’re very late tonight. I guess the girls wanted to play rummy all night this week, no?”

  Frenchy stood frozen, remembering that she still smelled of Edie. “Yes, Maman, I’ll be in to say goodnight in a jiffy. I need to use the little girl’s room.” She heard nothing more from her mother and slipped into her own r
oom. She walked to her dresser.

  The Frenchy in the mirror was plain, dull, sullen-looking. She had nothing of the attractiveness that brought girls to the other Frenchy’s arms.

  She hated that image in the mirror and the tiny woman in the other room who made her look like that. But how could she leave her widowed mother? And how could she be anything but what her mother expected when she lived with her?

  “Dear. . .” her mother called as Frenchy slipped off the remnants of her self.

  Chapter 2

  Frenchy Goes to Provincetown

  Summer, 1963

  Frenchy had seen no other dykes yet on this, her first trip to Provincetown, but Rob and his lover Gerald were having a great time cruising the gay men in neighboring cars. The three sat in the Thunderbird in stalled traffic, listening to rock and roll on the radio, Frenchy in the back seat peering surreptitiously through the darkness into the cars around them. The boys passed wine to her and Frenchy took a long draught.

  “Ain’t there nobody living around here?” she asked, shouting over the music. “There’s no lights, no houses, no bars, nothing but cars sitting here in the middle of the night.”

  “It’s the Mid-Cape Highway, honey,” Gerald explained. “Everybody wants to live closer to the water. This isn’t New York, you know, where we’re all piled on top of each other.”

  “Gives me the creeps,” Frenchy decided, “all this empty space.”

  The car rolled forward a few feet. “We’ll be there in an hour,” Rob reassured her. “Then you’ll see all the lights and music and girls you ever dreamed of. It’s better than the Village. And it’s only ten o’clock. We’ll have plenty of time to hit the night spots.”

  Looking dubious, Frenchy leaned back in the seat. Her jeans were wrinkled from sitting, and despite frequent combing, her pompadour was a mess from the wind. She lit a Marlboro, enjoying the click of her Zippo as she closed it. The line of traffic to the right moved slowly past and she heard Gerald belittle Rob for being in the wrong lane. They argued half-seriously for a while. Frenchy stretched her tiny body and ran her fingers through her d.a. as she continued to survey the moving populace around her. A convertible with six women in it came up beside them. Frenchy sat up. They all had long hair. One played a dull folk song on a guitar while the rest sang along. “Goddamned hootenanny,” she muttered. Gerald yelled, “Hoot, hoot, hoot!” out the window. “Goddamned straights,” she sneered, in dismissal of the women.

  Despite the traffic out of New York City, the first part of the trip had been great, the three of them half-blottoed on a bottle of wine, gleefully riding very fast through the cool night and the suburbs of Connecticut, making silly jokes. Recently she’d been feeling restless, as if something was missing from her life. Except for some time she’d taken off to visit relatives with her mother, this was the first long weekend Frenchy had taken in seven years, since she started cashiering at the A&P right out of high school. Her mother had at first complained about being left alone all this weekend; but when Frenchy for once had not bent, Maman had begun to act as if Frenchy’s excursion was all her own idea, insisting that mon petit chou take her little holiday with her card-playing friends. She’d even given Frenchy five dollars to spend with the girls.

  The girls, Frenchy laughed to herself. If Maman only knew. They were hardly the cashiers Maman saw at the A&P. And the last thing Frenchy wanted to do with her girls was play cards. Once in a while, when she was particularly in love and felt the need to see her current femme between Saturdays, she told her mother she was going to the movies with the girls. But this made her nervous, just like the occasional “pajama parties” she claimed to be attending. In the past three years she had spent most of the night with maybe two girls. She felt that spending the whole night with femmes got them addicted to it, made them want to set up housekeeping. Frenchy had her mother to take care of. She couldn’t be getting married. Besides, she liked her life the way it was. Always checking the crowds out for new faces, moving in whenever that felt comfortable. The only rules she followed, still, were to stay away from girls in her own neighborhood and never to step in on another butch’s property. She couldn’t see going home to Maman with a broken nose or razor scars, though that sort of fighting happened less and less among downtown dykes.

  Edie was the only girl Frenchy had considered bringing to Provincetown with her. She’d graduated from college and now taught English in a Queens junior high school. She was a dynamite chick — caught, kind of like herself, between two worlds. Edie didn’t know any gay girls among her co-workers. She lived in the one-family house in Queens her elderly parents left her when they died. Frenchy had been there once and it was as dark as her own place, full of the old folks’ memories. And, like Frenchy, Edie kept her gay life separate from her life in Queens. While she hadn’t found lesbians in her own crowd, she never felt quite comfortable with Frenchy’s friends, either. Edie always feared they would be indiscreet, and the cursing, drinking, fighting and generally low-life women, as she called them, looked at Edie suspiciously, like she was slumming. So she and Frenchy met now and then on neutral ground somewhere and took in a movie or walked in a park. It was a nice change of pace for Frenchy, who could then brag downtown about the “teacher” she went with. And she always had someone to fall back on when she felt low.

  Frenchy was coming down from the high of the wine. After working since 9:00 that morning and not eating dinner, she felt low enough to wish she’d brought comfortable, reliable old Edie with her.

  A yellow sports car, two smiling dykes in it, went by on their right, half in the sand on the side of the road. Frenchy leaned far out the window to watch their progress down the road. “Wow,” she commented.

  “Those girls are just going to get stuck in the sand up the way,” Rob said disapprovingly. “How they got this far is beyond me.”

  But Frenchy meanwhile had drifted into a reverie of the day when she’d have her own sports car and drive her own girl to Provincetown.

  They moved slowly forward, then picked up speed. “I think we’re out of the bottleneck, girls,” Rob said, and they all cheered. They did not pass the sports car.

  Once more Frenchy and the boys began to sing A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall and to pass the wine back and forth across the seats.

  Suddenly they were surrounded with beach cottages. Frenchy felt reassured by the presence of all those dwellings. “Is this Provincetown?”

  “Not quite, hon. These are all straight places.”

  Frenchy had assumed they were. Weren’t all homes straight? She couldn’t imagine owning one. Or even owning a summer cottage like these. Perhaps, when she was much older, she would rent a place like this on Fire Island for a week, but for now she would stay in a room in the guest house where Gerald and Rob were taking her.

  Soon they parked and took their bags into a neat white house filled with closets called rooms. She shared a bath with all the boys on the second floor. It was 11:30 and the house was deserted. She just had time to hang her shirts on the rack beside her bed and look once out the window into someone’s back yard when the boys were back, ready to walk to the bars.

  “Nice room,” she told them as they joined the strollers on the street.

  “We like it. All you need is a bed, right, Rob?”

  Rob was eying a passing boy. “It’s cheap for up here. That’s what counts when you have car payments and parking fees back in the City.”

  The crowd became more obviously gay as the three approached the central district. Frenchy inhaled the salty air. It was good to smell the sea.

  “The straights go home when the shops close,” Gerald explained. “The streets are ours after midnight.”

  Frenchy felt more at home when she realized she’d been cruised a couple of times. Still, she was only mildly enthusiastic when the boys pointed her toward the Ace of Spades, the women’s bar, and left her to fend for herself. She supposed she was very lucky to have gotten a ride up here with them, but ri
ght now she was tired, she didn’t feel lucky at all, and she bypassed the bar to try and revive herself. Perhaps it had been a mistake to come.

  It was almost midnight, but a few women were walking down the narrow road past one prim white house after another toward downtown. Frenchy wished one of the tiny little streets off the crowded main one was empty so that she could comb her hair and work up her self-confidence a little. None of the women looked welcoming. It was chilly this late at night, and she was glad she’d brought her city clothes instead of dressing for a hot beach weekend as the boys had recommended. But then the women were all so lightly dressed. Did she stand out too much in her black jeans and jacket? The girls downtown always said they could recognize her a mile off by her height, her walk, and her “uniform.”

  Frenchy smiled at the thought of her popularity back home and became nostalgic. If only she’d told her mother she was going away for the weekend and stayed in the city instead. Why hadn’t she ever thought of that? Right now she could be leaning on the bar or dancing with some cute new chick from Jersey. Just the thought perked her up, returned some of her confidence. “I’m a big city girl,” she told herself. “Too big to let a hick town like this scare me.” She decided to check out the Ace of Spades to see if it lived up to its reputation.

  It was a real raunchy place. A butch in a man’s sport coat and shades came stumbling out, her femme supporting her at the elbow. The femme was not bad, Frenchy thought, for her age. She was about forty and had a beehive hairdo. Her makeup was heavy. The butch stopped suddenly and turned on her. Frenchy couldn’t make out the words, only the threatening tone. The femme urged her butch up the alley, but the butch wanted to say her piece. As the femme turned to see if anyone was watching, the butch swung an arm, catching her fully on the side of the face. The femme hardly looked surprised. She staggered a little, settled her face quickly from pain to hurt and began to cry. The butch softened immediately, took the woman in her arms and comforted her. They walked out of the alley entwined, the femme groping in her purse for tissues.