by Della Martin
For the Mermaid was open to all brackets and all genders, and a mermaid illustrated in oils behind the bar was, according to the inscription, "Just another frail with a crazy, mixed-up tail." Here occasional males gathered to socialize with the gay girls. Yet when the man at the corner organ (licking his lips first, so that they glistened moistly in the candle glow) thumped out a provocative rhythm, the girls danced only with each other.
A big woman in a sweater winked lasciviously at Lon. Then the woman swept Violet into her arms, holding the smaller girl at a comfortable distance, fanny sticking out like a bustle. Violet giggled, everyone hooted. Or screamed or whistled or laughed. And Lon moved away from the bar, tight-lipped as Rags at The 28%, more lost than disgusted, more lonely than resentful. Thinking, if anyone's a freak, it's Violet. And left Violet to dance with the clown.
With nowhere to go, Lon made her way to the bright blue door of the powder room.
No library in all the land dispenses knowledge with the direct efficiency of the public washroom. Lon did not linger long in the three-stalled cubicle of the Mermaid. Only long enough to hear sophisticated chatter, arty phrases that escaped her—and bits and snatches that convinced her further that Violet was a true exception to the loose format of Lesbian society. From the conversations, she pegged one of the thirtyish women as a fashion executive. Another had something to do with script-selection at a major movie studio. A smartly dressed pair argued about the influence of Zen on the contemporary artist. Lon longed to understand and feel included. Among these people, Violet could only be regarded as an amusing but pitiable showpiece. A shame for having come with Violet rose within Lon, intertwining itself with the hopeful reason for having come at all. A girl could be proud to go out with Mavis, who knew so much and was so beautiful that beside her Violet looked like some cheap bauble. Made in Japan and cheap, cheap, cheap! Then, mentally apologizing to the Violet as her anger mounted, Lon stepped out of the line formed before the swinging doors, though someone smiled at her invitingly and said, "Were you next, hon?" Lon stepped aside, mumuring, "Changed my mind," and fled the washroom, feeling eyes on her back.
Across the jammed floor, she could see Violet living it up. The butches were more aggressive here than at The 28%, Lon decided. Well, good. So much for Violet. It was for another face that Lon's eyes screened the crowd; that haughty loveliness entrenched in her memory. Before I leave, she promised herself, I'll cover the beach. It would be painful not to find Mavis, more painful to find her among the couples making out in the Pacific sand. Lon cursed Violet's vanity, the vanity that had rubbed off on her, making the simple, invited phone call so frightening.
A dark alcove broke the symmetry of the room. In it were several booths, shielded from close view by dancing couples. Lon picked her way through the mob, twisting like a halfback to avoid impulsive table-hoppers. A group of girls, their faces barely discernible in the flickering light, invited her to join them as she peeked into their den. "Looking for someone," she excused herself. And a husky voice accepted her apology genially: "Baby, aren't we all?"
A second group, of a tougher species, ignored her completely. Laughing hysterically, they were busy dripping icecubes over the face of a pale, aesthetic-looking young man whose head rolled dizzily against the back of the booth. "We shouldn't laugh," one of the group admonished. "He only gets boiled because he's trying to forget Larry." The water rolled from the pale young man's face and he stirred like a sleeping dog with a fly on its nose. The girls were still laughing as Lon moved away, but one, controlling her merriment, was assuring the others that Larry was a real louse and not worth getting drunk over.
It appeared, at first, that the corner booth was unoccupied. Lon peered into the candleless darkness, seeing the couple then, locked in a jig-saw puzzle embrace. "Oh—sorry!" she said. And regretted in the next instant having spoken, for if she had gone away quietly, they would have never known she was there. Now they knew, and suddenly. They broke the impassioned grip and the larger shadow lurched toward the end of the seat. A throaty, drunken voice demanded, "What the hell you mean, spyin' on people?"
"I was looking for a girl I know," Lon said dully.
The drunk was on her feet, weaving under her enormous weight. Outside the booth, the smoke-screened light caught her face—gray and sharply pointed, as though someone had used it to shovel cement. "You got a goddam lotta crust..."
Something of her newfound male aggressiveness spurted up in Lon. "What makes you think I've got nothing better to do than watch you make out?" She turned to leave and the big butch staggered forward, grabbing a rough handful of Lon's shirtfront.
"Get smart with me, you punk bastard, you'll get a knuckle san'wich!"
"Hands off me," Lon threatened. The sound that had not whined inside her head since the debacle with Miss Chamberlin made itself known, irritating her fury at being stopped. Her fists tightened, one swinging automatically over her head and smashing down against the girl's forearm, breaking the savage grip in a shredding of fabric. The ripped shirt ignited the smouldering fury and she was ready as the thick fist swung toward her in a wild, wide arc. The blow grazed her protecting left arm and her right smashed against the mud-colored face. A smaller shadow inside the booth shrieked, "Gil!" and the big butch, spinning in a feeble effort to strike back, crashed across the booth table. Panting, Lon watched the burly form hang there for one sliding moment, then thud to the floor like a limp sack. The dark blotch forming under the open-hung mouth, she guessed, was blood.
No crowd gathered; it was just a fight. But the icecube girls stood in their booth for a quick look-see, and the butch's tiny friend wriggled out of her seat, sobbing curses, then kneeling to mop at the bashed lover's mouth with a wrinkled head scarf.
Lon walked past the icecube party with a heroic nonchalance, yet uncertain that they were not friends of the fallen foe. "Gil woulda knocked the hell outta you, kid, sober," one of them said. And another, more impressed, argued, "First time I've seen her take the count, drunk or sober." As if that settled the matter.
And Lon made her way to the bar, leaving the blubbering Florence Nightingale with her sprawling patient. Still shaking with the unchained anger and furious about the torn shirt, Lon was nevertheless pleased with herself. As though she had graduated to a higher status in the strange new world to which she belonged—belonged irrevocably now, having defended both honor and the right to search for Mavis. For Mavis was related in some mysterious way to her prideful victory. The right to long for and to search for Mavis...
CHAPTER 7
They gained access to the canyon club and they returned to the beach once more. They invaded another spot in the Valley, open to the public, so that the straight gawkers stared at them as they stared at the other girls who drank cautiously and spoke in quiet subdued voices. Dancing was not permitted in the "open" clubs. And, perversely, Lon dismissed the simple maneuver of phoning the objects of their search, immersed in the drama of seeking Mavis in the darkest corners. Later, she would solace on Violet's rumpled bed where the lace and tafetta boudoir doll watched the ministrations with solemn painted eyes. And a more solemn Holy Mother looked beyond them from the bedroom wall.
But it was in the beer-stale darkness of The 28%, after all, that Lon at last found Mavis. Mavis alone, as palpably alone as only Mavis could be. She sat unobtrusively in the same shapeless black dress, with her slim piano fingers caressing a Coke bottle. Seemingly at peace with her aloneness.
Violet saw her, too. "Oh, Jeez, honey, look who's here!" Her quarry-trained eyes swept the room for Sassy Gregg, yet at the same time she was saying, "Listen, Sassy wouldn' of come back here." Trembling with a new strategy. "Listen, I'll stay aroun' the bar so I don't cramp your style. But remember, fix it up fer the both of us."
A flutter of wings and an organ chord, resonant and tremulous. Lon approached the redwood table convinced that whatever words came to her would fall far short of her meaning. Mavis, eyes on the curved bottle, did not see her. Not until Lo
n had swung her legs over the bench on the opposite side of the table.
"I didn't think you'd ever come back here," Lon said. It was an abrupt thing to say, but she had not expected to be subtle or clever.
Mavis looked up then, but took the time to find a cigarette before speaking. "Nobody called to ask me to," she told Lon. Her voice sounded husky, yet softly modulated, with no trace of the Georgia pine-country dialect
"I figured Sassy might not appreciate it if I called you." Lon felt a rush of warmth at so precisely admitting her interest.
"I thought that. I thought, when you didn't call, that was it."
Had Mavis thought about a phone call? Had she come tonight because...? Because of me, Lon told herself. And the implications were almost unbearable; like dry matches inside her, waiting for the poof and the sudden flame.
"I called a cab," Mavis said almost listlessly. "Told the man to drive here. Must have had some reason."
"Sassy didn't come?"
"We fought. Sassy had a date with her fiance and I wanted to come here. I didn't mind her going out—he's living with his father in La Jolla for the summer. Only gets into L.A. alternate weekends. I didn't mind, but Sassy wouldn't drive me here. Came anyway." Mavis recited in a jerky monotone now, puffing at the cigarette between sentences, like some mechanical speaking-machine exuding smoke. Yet something more than smoke and lifeless words emanated from her. A something that stuck in Lon's throat: something hard and sweet, like candy half-swallowed.
"Don't you care when Sassy goes out with a—a man?"
"Didn't care tonight did I?"
"But she cares what you do. Will she know about tonight About you?"
"Yeah. Yeah, she'll know."
"What will she do?"
Mavis pulled lazily at the cigarette, then snubbed it out in the aluminum pie-plate ashtray—the only kind Rags' customers didn't take home as souvenirs. "You ask a good question, baby. Ask me that one later."
Her tone jarred Lon, implying a malevolence that made Sassy Gregg hateful, suddenly. "Will it be worth it? I mean—if you did come to see me?"
"Depends. I liked the way you talked. That island of yours—that got me. Dream islands, they shouldn't ever be found. Keep yours in the talking stage, baby."
"Oh, but some day I'm really…"
"My daddy had an island. Only his was Detroit. Man, he thought when he ran from Georgia he'd come to paradise just because he could ride the front end of a street car. Trouble with real islands, they're peppered with booby traps." Mavis turned her head to one side speculatively. "You diggin' this bit, girl?"
Lon waited for more before committing herself. Nothing forthcoming, she ventured, "I haven't given much thought to the Island lately."
"Shouldn't give up a refuge like that baby."
"Oh, I didn't give it up. I've been hoping to talk to you about it again. A lot of people would have laughed at me, hearing about it as you heard. In a way, you did laugh. I can't explain why it was different, coming from you."
"That was why you wanted to see me again? That was the big reason?"
Lon sensed the level, penetrating stare and averted her interrogating eyes. "Only one of the reasons, Mavis."
"Since then you've found that other island. Right, baby? Lesbos. Now there is an island!"
Lon confessed ignorance once more, and it seemed incredible to her, as Mavis wove the spell of words, that Lon had not read or heard of the lyric poems written six centuries before Christ nor of the true priestess of their cult who had written them. Sappho. The impassioned verses, Lon learned, had been addressed to lovely virgins whose preparation for high-born marriage included Sappho's tutoring in music, poetry and the dance. Poems Lon had read and loved, but none such as these. And islands... she had read adventure until she could have walked the distant beaches and known where she stood. Yet, Lesbos—and Sappho! They would have made pure and joyful beauty of that night in June when her own schooling began, there where the luminous heart bled from night-glowing thorns. Through the magic of the ancient story to which Lon now listened ran a contrapuntal theme—a surging, violent hatred of the teacher who had defiled this noblest of all loves! As if Violet, by her gross ignorance, had cheated Lon—cheated her cruelly.
"Crazy Greek island," Mavis concluded. "And Sappho... man, she had it made! Read somewhere that she jumped off a cliff out of love for some male cat named Phaon. But I don't buy this. That's the censor board steppin' in to clean up the story. Either that, or she went all-out to convince the neighbors she was double-gaited. The way Sassy's doing tonight."
Lon ignored Sassy's name and thus needed no explanation. "Lesbos," she whispered dreamily.
"Yeah, Lesbos. Named our whole club after that island. But it wasn't all gimmicked up then, baby. Butch, fem, straight, single-gait, double-gait. It's jazzed up now and we call it gay. Back then, it was love and poetry, natural as the night dew." Mavis looked across the room at the dance floor, rocking in frenetic movement. Looked her contempt and said, "We still mess with the poetry and we call this dancing. But something's gone, baby. And we've tried to compensate, making a thing out of being sick."
"It must have been wonderful in those old days," Lon said. "If you were the way I am, and you loved somebody, it wouldn't seem...." She waited a long while and then whispered the word, "Dirty. Somehow, I never thought about it that way. Until just now, hearing you talk about the way it ought to be." And blurted suddenly, "With Violet, it's dirty!"
"You're not thinking gay, baby. You're not calling it love."
Now Mavis approached ridicule again. Lon could never be sure she was not being laughed at—never even be certain that the girl as much as knew her name; saying "baby" impersonally, as Mavis might say it to anyone. And Lon longed to hear the sound of her own name from the girl who drew her with a magnetism removed from the words she spoke. "Do you call it love, Mavis?" Lon asked.
"Haven't used the word for a long time. Loved my mother. Till mama died of T.B., waiting for my daddy to take off his white collar and earn some doctorin' money. But he was out preaching brotherly love. Getting rocks thrown at him, being so brotherly. Just one more Georgia nigger spoiling Belle Isle for pure-white picnics."
"I used to wish I could love my mother. I don't know—she's never really hurt me. It's like she was never there. Like she didn't exist."
"You couldn't breathe and not love mama," Mavis said, not hearing Lon. "And he wasted it all. Wasted all that love. She'd teach piano to kids in the neighborhood, coughing so hard their folks wouldn't let them come back after a while. Loving him, too. But knowing he was wasting his words, wasting her love—and some day mine would be wasted, too. I bawled out my last love words over an installment-plan coffin." Mavis returned from that painful flower-smelling room in the past. "Love," she said, with controlled venom. "That's dying slow!"
And it was with a half-hopeful melancholy that Lon asked, "You must have cared about someone since then."
"Married a man. Educated black... good man. He had me with my head in a book more than in bed. And I tried, baby. Tried. But it was nothin'. Nowhere."
"And after that?"
"During that. His sister came around. School teacher. What was I? Eighteen? Not much more. She used to lean on the piano while I played, like Sass does now. Leaned closer all the time, all the time." And now Mavis closed her eyes to recall or to blot out a memory—Lon could not be certain which. "It was like Mama leaning there, counting out the beat, rocking just a little to keep my time. Then it was like mama holding her little kid. Pettin' her baby, saying, 'Never mind, honey, it's all right, it's all right.' And that's how they found us, a long lot of lovin' days after that"
"Who found you?"
"Bill and my daddy. Walked in, just like that We were never careful." Mavis opened her eyes then, slowly. And Lon blinked to hide the mist in her own. "It wasn't just a daughter breaking his heart, baby. I was a beauty, he told me. I had learning. Had a talent sewed up in my hands. I had a power to win some love for my
people and I broke the faith. Well, Bill was a man. That makes understanding come hard, but he was big. He must have made it. But my daddy—he cried for a lost Joan of Arc and took back my last name. No place to go but the honky-tonks because, baby, I was dead."
"But there were others, weren't there?" Lon asked the question timorously, hating whatever others there might have been. "Other... butches?"
Rags came by then and they ordered Cokes, though the bottle before Mavis was barely touched. "I wasn't buying any," Mavis replied when the pasty proprietress had left them. "Sassy... Sassy's something else again. I wonder, is it because she carries a bigger woe? Is that why I stay with her? Or is some kind of hate in me making me wait around like a vulture? Maybe I've got all those Push Days saved up inside me."
Push Days. Was she expected, Lon wondered, to know what this meant? No, apparently not for Mavis stopped only for a quick sucking breath. "Woman in Chicago once told me... maybe it's just a story... one day a week back there, the colored women would shop downtown. Came in bunches, shoving white women aside in Kresge's aisles. Accidentally on purpose. Bumping anything on State Street with a light skin. Never really hurting, but getting some kind of release for what was inside. I never went and I don't know anyone that did. But I watch Sassy and her misery—sometimes it's like having all those Push Days rolled into one. It does me good."