Hard Fall

by Pascal Scott

  Stone couldn’t resist a small chuckle at the “something sensible.” Emily had tilted her head back and forth as she said it. Stone imagined Emily making the same gesture to her father.

  “Is he part of Bryson Industries, too?” Stone asked.

  “Oh, no, he didn’t want anything to do with the family business. His passion was medicine. His older brother Steve took over when Granddad died. Dad was still in college. No, Steve made himself CEO, and Dad was happy to switch his major from business to pre-med. He’s been a surgeon at St. Mary’s in Hammond since forever.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Stone said. “Your father wanted you to major in business, even though he himself hated being a business major when he was in college. You would think he would have been more sympathetic to your point of view.”

  “He thought he was looking out for me,” Emily explained. “‘You can’t get a job with a BA in women studies.’ That’s what he told me. What he really wanted was for me to take up medicine, like him. But I had no interest. At all. Although I did the next best thing, in a sense. I fell in love with a doctor.”

  “Oh?”

  “Only trouble was that she was a lesbian. Dad wasn’t too keen on that fact.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “And she was one of his colleagues at St. Mary’s.”

  “Jesus,” Stone said. “When was this?”

  “Five and a half years ago. I was seventeen.”

  “Precocious,” Stone said. “And how old was she?”

  “Forty-three.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yes, that was another problem for Dad, the age difference. Which is how we came to choose Santa Cruz when it was time for me to apply to college. Dad was happy to send me off to the West Coast to get away from Janie.”

  “Janie, the doctor?”

  “Yes, Dr. Jane Elliott. If things had been different, I could have been a doctor’s wife by now. So to speak.”

  “Wow.”

  “Exactly. Relationships are so difficult when you’re young,” Emily finished with no trace of irony.

  “Or not so young,” Stone said.

  Emily ignored Stone’s sarcasm or failed to notice it, Stone wasn’t sure which. Emily sipped her wine, examining Stone with those intense eyes. She had accentuated them with eyeliner, shadow, and mascara, all that girlie makeup stuff femmes used to attract butches.

  “I want to hear about you,” Emily said after a few moments of silence. “Are you from San Francisco?”

  Stone tried to find a way to sit on the hard, wooden seat of the booth.

  “Yeah, I’m a rarity. I’m sixth generation. My great-great-great-grandfather came here in 1849 prospecting for gold.”

  Emily’s eyes opened wide. “Did he find any?”

  “Well, yes and no. He found gold, but he blew it on liquor, gambling, and prostitutes. He never married the hooker he got pregnant, although she took his name—McStone. He was part of the Irish Potato Famine, you know, that wave of nineteenth-century immigrants coming to America, ‘the land of plenty.’”

  “It’s interesting history,” Emily said. And she did seem interested.

  “Mom is the genealogist of the family,” Stone continued, sharing more than she usually did with strangers. “She was an immigrant, too, but from Tijuana. She was here illegally.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. When the INS threatened to send her back to Mexico, Dad married her. They had been going out for a while. He was in the service. There’s a black-and-white photo of them in their bedroom—my dad in his Navy whites and mom in a nice dress and heels—and you wouldn’t recognize them from the way they look now.”

  “You’re close to your family?”

  “More or less. They don’t approve of my ‘lifestyle.’ They live in the Mission. I’ve got a younger sister who’s married to a Neanderthal in construction. They live across the Bay, in Oakland.”

  Stone shifted again. Too much self-revelation was making her uncomfortable. “How about you? You close to your family?”

  “Unfortunately, no. Last year, Dad married a gold digger—speaking of gold—and we haven’t been close since then. I didn’t even go to the wedding. It was my personal protest.”

  “How do you know she’s a gold digger?”

  Emily gave Stone the look you might give an innocent child.

  “She’s three years older than I am, for God’s sake. She’s totally a trophy wife. Why else would Helen marry a man old enough to be her father?”

  “Love?”

  “Not likely,” Emily responded. “Unless you mean the love of money.”

  “Yeah, but that’s a hard love to fault. It’s always people who have money looking down their noses on people who don’t.”

  What the hell, Stone thought before adding, “I’ll bet you’re letting Daddy pay for your education.”

  Now Emily appeared to be uncomfortable. “I am letting him pay,” she admitted. “I have a trust fund, but I’m contributing. I work.”

  “You do?”

  Stone was genuinely surprised. From what she’d seen of them, trust fund babies avoided work on the principle that nearly all of it was beneath them, a luxury unavailable to working-class kids like Stone.

  “Yes, I’d like to be able to disassociate myself from Dad’s support entirely, but I’m not able to do that while I’m in school,” Emily said.

  “Where do you work?”

  Emily’s cheeks flushed a deep shade of red. “I have several reasons for choosing the job I have,” she began defensively. “The work pays well, it’s woman-owned, and it advances my academic studies.”

  “Do tell.” Stone leaned in, putting her elbows on the table. “And what is this mysterious job?”

  Emily took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I work as an exotic dancer at the Kitty Club in North Beach. You may have heard of it.”

  “Oh, my God,” Stone said, falling back and sideways in the booth as she broke into a belly laugh. “Oh, my God.”

  Emily glanced around the room, blushing furiously, before returning her gaze—now set in a scowl—to Stone.

  “Why is that funny?” Emily demanded.

  Stone righted herself, sitting up straight and regaining her composure. “I just don’t see you as a nudie dancer. I mean I do—you’ve certainly got the body and the looks—but it’s like…someone with your background…a preppie for God’s sakes…I just don’t see it.”

  Emily squared her shoulders and sat up a little straighter. “There are valid reasons for working in the sex trade,” she said more confidently. “Number one, it pays more than a woman can make elsewhere, and until the day we break through the glass ceiling, women will continue to make less than men in the workplace.”

  Emily was counting on her fingers. They were long and slender, like her legs.

  “Number two, men exploit women’s sexuality all the time. What’s wrong with women using our bodies for our own purposes?”

  Emily didn’t wait for an answer to what was clearly a rhetorical question.

  “Number three, I plan to write my thesis on the power dynamics of interactions between lesbian exotic dancers and their male clients. I intend to use immersion as my methodology for my qualitative research. My personal experience and direct observation have led me to conclude that in the context of the peep show, it is the women and not the men who hold the power. The men appear to be dominant and the women submissive, but in reality, the opposite dynamic is true.”

  Emily took a sip of wine to indicate she had finished. She looked at Stone, waiting for her reaction.

  “Wow,” Stone said. “So, just so I’m clear. Your point is that it’s all right to show your— uh, shall we say your private girl parts?—to a bunch of horny men if…” and here Stone mimicked Emily, counting on her short, solid fingers, starting with her thumb, “one, you make good money at it; two, you’re doing it on purpose; and three, it advances your academic career. Is that about right?”

&nbs
p; “Well, I wouldn’t phrase it exactly like that but, yes, basically, that was my point,” Emily said.

  “You really are from Hammond,” Stone responded. “But you’re San Francisco now. You’re more San Francisco than a lot of us who were born here.”

  Emily looked at Stone quizzically. “I don’t know what that means exactly, but I’ll take it as a compliment.”

  ****

  Stone escorted Emily the short distance from the Outlaw to the front door of her apartment building at the corner of Collingwood and Eighteenth streets, walking curbside the way she had been taught by older butches. At the front entrance, Emily waited, standing in the moth-dotted yellow light under the front stoop. She was wearing flats, and with Stone’s two-inch-heeled cowboy boots, they were nearly the same height.

  “Thank you for a lovely evening,” Emily said.

  “You’re very welcome.”

  Emily closed her eyes and tilted her face slightly as her red lips parted just a bit. Stone knew what she was asking, and it was not an unreasonable request. This was 1987 in the Castro. Nobody was going to drive by and shoot you if they saw a girl kissing a girl good night. Still, Stone did nothing. When she realized that the kiss wasn’t forthcoming, Emily opened her eyes and righted her head with a questioning expression.

  “Maybe we can do this again sometime,” she offered.

  “Maybe,” Stone said noncommittally.

  Emily tried one more tactic. “Would you like to come up for a drink?” she asked, as if this thought had just occurred to her.

  What was it that Stone’s mother always said?

  “Al mejor escribano se le va un boron.” Even the best scribe makes a smudge.

  Because suddenly, impulsively, despite everything, despite her resolve and best intentions, despite knowing better and swearing that she wouldn’t go there again, Stone heard herself give in to the two things she had been fighting all evening.

  “Ya got beer?” Stone asked.

  “Yes,” Emily answered. “Actually, I do.”

  Chapter Three

  Stone wasn’t exactly certain when she had fallen in love with Emily or even if it really was love and not just infatuation. All she knew for sure was that for two years she was happy, happier than she could ever remember being before Emily walked into her life. And then suddenly, abruptly, everything changed at once.

  It happened early one foggy morning in October 1989 when Emily didn’t come home from her shift at the Kitty Club. Three a.m. came and then four and five. Stone sat staring out of the bedroom window of their Victorian across from Dolores Park, waiting for Emily’s van to pull into the driveway. A hollow of dread was carving a dark hole in her gut. Instinctively, she sensed the worst had happened. She was right.

  On Sunday, October 22, a body washed up on a beach in Pacifica, eighteen miles south of the Golden Gate Bridge. A woman walking her dog stumbled upon what was left of the decomposing corpse that was still recognizably female by one waxy, grayish breast. The morbid discovery was made five days after the Loma Prieta earthquake, when law enforcement across the Bay Area was preoccupied with the aftermath of the 6.9 magnitude disaster. By the time the remains were identified as those of Emily Bryson, more than a month had passed since Stone had filed the missing person report. The medical examiner ruled it a suicide. The San Francisco Police Department closed the case.

  It wasn’t suicide, that was something Stone knew for sure. And it wasn’t an accident. It was murder. It was the job. Emily had made a commitment to the job before she had made a commitment to Stone, even though Stone still didn’t like it, didn’t like that Emily danced five nights a week from eight to two at the Kitty Club, undulating naked in a long red wig, bending over and spreading her legs as the men behind the glass partitions jerked themselves off. Despite all that, Emily didn’t give it up. In fact, she fought for it. She was a feminist sex worker, she had told Stone from the beginning, and since the summer of 1989, she was a unionized one, as well. San Francisco was the only city in the country where she could say that. And anyway, Emily argued, it was just until graduation, until she got her MA in women studies and a teaching position.

  Looking back, of course it was easy for Stone to see that she should have insisted. She should have made Emily quit the club. But Stone didn’t insist. She gave in. What could she do? And now Emily was dead.

  Chapter Four

  Stone spent the Thanksgiving after Emily’s death alone by choice, turning down invitations from her family and Marcus and a few other well-meaning friends. Her mother had shown up anyway at her front door, leaving Stone’s father in his Crown Vic with the motor running while she delivered plastic containers filled with turkey, sweet potatoes, cornbread, and chocolate cake. Stone put it all in the refrigerator. She didn’t feel like eating.

  Instead, she paced from room to room until she found herself in the other bedroom, the one where Emily kept her belongings. Nobody had come to retrieve them, not even Dr. Bryson when he had flown in from Indiana to take Emily’s body back to Hammond for burial. Stone had learned about his visit later, when she was updated by the police on the results of the postmortem exam. Stone had been the last to be notified about the discovery of the corpse on the beach and had only learned the autopsy findings because she had pestered Detective Murphy, calling him daily for new information. Stone wasn’t next of kin to Emily; she wasn’t anything, officially. She was just the reporting person, “the roommate.”

  By the time Stone was told the results of the autopsy, the body had been identified and claimed by Emily’s father. It was gone. Just like that, Emily was gone forever. Stone had felt her heart sink into the cavity of her chest until she could barely breathe. She would never see Emily again, and the memory of their last words, their last kiss, their last moments of lovemaking was all she would ever have.

  She started with the closet, thinking it would be the easiest. She would donate the clothes to the women’s shelter in the Mission. Stone pulled out a silky white blouse and looked at the buttons that were pearl with a rainbow iridescence. Some memory stirred that Stone couldn’t bring into focus. Without knowing why, she brought the material to her face. It felt cool and smooth on her skin, and it smelled like Emily. It smelled like soap and rose water.

  The hurt began in Stone’s belly and swelled up to her heart and from there to her throat, where it stuck. Before she could suppress it, a sob had forced its way out of her mouth, and the tears had started again. Hurriedly, she put the blouse back on the rack. She wasn’t ready.

  ****

  Maggie Dunn had a laid-back manner and sincere, kind eyes, and her voice was as soothing as a waterfall. She was an SFSU graduate whom Stone remembered from her admission process several years earlier as a second-career applicant. Stone seemed to recall that Maggie’s first profession had something to do with art. Maybe she’d worked at a museum or a gallery. Stone had noticed Maggie’s ad in a recent issue of the Bay Times, one of the city’s gay newspapers. Margaret Dunn, LCSW. Depression. Anxiety. Relationship Issues. Gay/Lesbian Individuals and Couples. Stone had about as much faith in therapy as she did in twelve-step programs, but she was desperate. Grief did that to a person.

  “What brings you to therapy today, Kathleen?” Maggie asked.

  Maggie’s office in Noe Valley was very Zen. There was a cascading water fountain next to a bonsai plant on a glass-topped rattan table. A framed silk screen of Japanese blossoms in gold leaf hung on a cream-colored wall. The sofa was bamboo with white cushions that sank when Stone sat down. Maggie sat in a rattan rocking chair on a cushion of the same cream color.

  “Stone,” Stone corrected. “Nobody calls me Kathleen except my father. You can call me Stone.”

  “Stone,” Maggie repeated. “And you can call me Maggie.”

  “Maggie, you probably don’t remember me, but I processed your application to State a few years ago. The department of counseling graduate program. You went to State, right?”

  Maggie tilted her head inquisi
tively. “You have a great memory. I think I remember you. That’s impressive that you remember me out of all the applicants you must see every day.”

  “Sometimes I remember. Sometimes I don’t,” Stone said.

  The truth was Stone never forgot a pretty face.

  “Going back to what brings you to therapy today…you say on your information form that you’re crying ‘too much,’ and you can’t sleep. Both of these symptoms are very common in people coming to therapy, so I want to assure you that you’re not in any way weak by seeking help.”

  Stone nodded, although she wasn’t sure about the weak part.

  “Now I’m wondering, when you say you can’t sleep, do you mean you have interrupted sleep? You have trouble falling asleep? Or are you literally staying awake all night?”

  Stone molded her backside into the cushion. “I go to bed exhausted around eleven, and I fall asleep. But then I wake up at 3:00 a.m. almost on the dot, and I can’t fall back to sleep. I’m getting by on maybe four or five hours of sleep a night. I’m tired all the time.”

  Maggie lifted a pen from a lined notepad she held in her lap. Her clothing—loose yoga pants, an Indian tunic blouse, and Birkenstocks—matched her office décor. Around her neck, she had double looped a mala made of tiger-eye beads.

  “Do you mind if I take notes as we talk? I find it helpful.”

  Stone shook her head to indicate that she didn’t mind. Out of habit, she twirled the Celtic commitment ring on her left hand.

  “Now I’m wondering how long this has been going on. This waking up at three in the morning.”

  “Since Emily disappeared. Emily was my lover. She went to work one night at the Kitty Club and never came home. The Kitty Club is a peep show in North Beach. She was usually home by three.”

  “In the morning?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And how long ago was this?”

  “She went to work on the night of October 12 and never came home.”