by Nicole Conn
“Boy you are from the burbs, aren’t you.” Adrienne was condescending.
“Personally, I think it’s a defect of nature,” Tara pronounced with finality.
Claire could endure no more. She brought in her wine glass, set it down with emphasis and turned to her. “Well. Who would better know about defects than a southerner, Miz Tara.”
Claire made her exit leaving them in utter silence.
****
Claire walked in the moonlight back to the cabin. She couldn’t get it off her mind. Lesbian. Letting the word float through her mind, the ramifications digging somewhere beyond her subconscious, she almost tripped over a large stump.
She let herself into the cabin and stood in the middle of the dark living room. Noel was still at Maggie’s. She knew she shouldn’t but something about the woman, the tall handsome woman’s containment of her own essence drove Claire to a curiosity to understand something, anything about her. Her being a...a lesbian.
She crept towards Noel’s room.
It was very much as she expected. Contained. Everything in its place. Orderly. Claire stopped when she saw the beautiful artwork adorning the walls, orchestrated around one full-length oil painting of a nude female whose arched back and muscular movement made it feasible the form might storm from the canvas. She found herself propelled towards it.
She studied it for several moments and then gingerly, apprehensively put her hand to the lines of the woman’s neck, tracing the sinewy musculature to the edge of her breast.
The painting made her think of two young girls, both thirteen, at a private slumber party. She and her best friend, Janet, in their full-length cotton nightgowns, scrubbed clean and pretty. They laughed and played, teasing each other, until Claire’s hand had reached over and something about the way she touched Janet’s forearm made them both stop. They had become very serious as Claire followed the line of her arm up to the soft cottony envelope of Janet’s very young breast. Claire remembered that later, as she lay very still next to Janet, Janet’s breathing had been as shallow as her own, and neither of them had slept a wink.
“She was a client.”
Claire jumped back from the painting and her ancient memory. She was so off-guard that she could not turn to face the woman whose room she had just invaded.
“We enjoyed the best of the barter system.”
“They’re good.” Claire continued to stare at the painting, composing herself. “Strong. Energetic.” She finally turned. “I didn’t mean to intrude. I was just...”
“Wondering?” Noel smiled.
Claire returned the smile briefly with her eyes.
“I’m beginning to think you’re right about those meetings.” Noel sighed as if with an old frustration.
“Women can’t help themselves. Latent bitchiness. Must be in the Y chromosome.”
There was an awkward silence. Claire felt she should leave. She took a chance and looked at the handsome woman studying the painting. As usual, she was dressed in a smart blazer, navy blue with an angora cream turtleneck sweater underneath. Claire wanted to touch the soft material. She cleared her throat. “You know we’re outnumbered.”
“Hmmmm?”
“Well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but we are surrounded by dangerously bizarre women.”
They both laughed. Claire knew she should leave, but somehow couldn’t. “How about a nightcap?”
As Noel considered the offer Claire found herself desperately wanting this woman who had annoyed her so much to accept the invitation.
“Scotch OK?” Claire felt shy.
“Scotch is particularly OK.”
****
Claire rummaged about in the hutch as Noel built a fire. Maggie’s own proclivities to drink made her generous in the stocking of beverages. Claire pulled out an unopened bottle of Chivas Regal, her father’s favorite, and joined Noel who had made herself comfortable on the pillows in front of the hearth. Claire sat, poured them both a drink. They toasted silently.
“I’d say you’ve got balls, but you’d probably take it wrong.”
“What?” Noel was confused.
“Tonight. Being so...” Claire searched. “Out.”
“Oh, that. Well, it would hardly do my readers or patients any good if I cowered behind protocol.” Noel took a contemplative sip of her scotch. A light rain began to fall. Claire huddled closely to herself as she began to warm by the fire. She watched Noel’s profile in the flickering shadows and thought what a uniquely handsome woman she was. Androgynous. Her chiseled features made her appear stern as she stared into the fire, but when she turned and looked directly into Claire’s eyes, the openness in her eyes softened her visage.
“It isn’t a problem is it?” Noel’s voice was careful, tentative.
“Not for me.”
“Some women...they—”
“Don’t worry. I have no inner homophobia... that’s what you shrinks call it right? Inner homophobia?” Claire teased good-naturedly, and showed Noel a side of her that few seldom got to see—the genuine, when she didn’t feel the need to be acerbic or biting. Claire felt suddenly exposed. She turned her attention to the fire and felt her edge return as she posited in a more serious tone, “I’m into whatever feels good for the moment.”
“And after that?” Noel countered.
Claire took a slow swallow of her drink. “I wait for the next moment.”
A lazy gull floated nonchalantly above the crashing waves then darted in, flirting with danger. Claire scouted its motion as she stood on the precipice of a jutting rock overlooking the coastline, at the end of a small rocky path that wrapped around either side of the recessed beach. She stared at the waves, entranced by their volatile motion, then glanced to her left—the south—watching the tide rush over the sand, and thought about further south. The city.
A city full of swarming egos and inexhaustible friendliness. A city where celebrities banded together to save the planet from extinction but in their hectic schedules left their basic human values behind in the last meeting they took. A town filled with stereotypes and caricatures. You couldn’t aspire to a more redundant equation, except television already had. A town without trust.
And speaking of trust, there were the men. Plenty of men. Her first experience at seventeen. No one ever believed she had remained a virgin until she was seventeen so she stopped discussing it altogether. It even amazed her now. But escaping her mother and Jake at the age of fourteen, she spent every hour of life simply trying to survive: waitressing, electrical assembly work, telephone solicitation—any number of equally reputable experiences all pockmarked her resume as she wrote it all down in the nights, endlessly, repetitively, redundantly, spewing out her experience, reliving every ugly nightmare until she had exorcised the worst of it.
During those late night hours she discovered the merits of drink to ease the pressures of the day. At first all she could afford was rotgut wine and cheap Potters Bourbon while she scribbled long and furious, instilling an illusory sense of inspiration with each passing glass. She was not inordinately fond of liquor but somewhere along the line she had grown attached to a romantic ideal of the disheveled writer and her bottle; presenting the image of herself in her younger, more idealistic years as a latter day female Hemingway, adopting his live-hard, play-hard lust for life. Then when her life became a different breed of playground full of cynical and cutthroat playmates and her sexual dance card became a roulette game of chance, she had found that the best way to absorb it all was to blur the edges of reality with a drink or two, making fun of it and herself.
After years of rejection, her first manuscript, a cynical novel mimicking The Catcher in the Rye as seen through female eyes, became a national best seller. Critics called it “a hot, sexy page turner.” She had filled it with foul language between a young man and woman who couldn’t decide whether they wanted to get married or live in blissful sin, all the while surrounding themselves with sexual playmates until the heroine or an
tagonist, depending on one’s point of view, became pregnant. The advance had more than paid the bills. The book’s success snagged a hefty option for a TV movie, and resulted in her acquiring a snarly agent who’d cut up studio suits for hors d’oeuvres, gnaw on them over dinner meetings, and spit them out the next time they “did lunch.” This paved the way for her second and third books which had led to the overwhelming success of Life Can Ruin Your Hair which made her a sort of Gloria Steinem of the unpolitical eighties “gimme” set who approached life without any regard for ramification. Now she could live comfortably, she had achieved recognition, she was well-thought-of in most circles even if sarcasm got the best of her when she drank a bit too much.
Claire had never been what she would term “sexually promiscuous,” until Life stormed the nation. She spent too many nights in empty hotel rooms on tour and too little time attempting what she had become terrified to even contemplate: writing. Really writing. A novel that made a difference. She suspected that her talent was wasted, if she indeed ever had any, and after a time she decided that spending endless hours agonizing over it was an additional squander of time. Instead, she would go to the hotel’s bar, to sample the “local color.” She met an enormous variety of men and experienced the spectrum of wonderful and not so wonderful lovers.
“Wonderful” was a term she tossed about casually when she gauged her lovers. There was awful, bad, OK and then those rare specimens who were actually considerate and concerned with her pleasure as well as their own. There were even a few who were “wonderful” conversationalists but horrific listeners. When it first occurred to her that sexual exploits were at best utterly inconsequential, the realization shook her very foundation. She had grinned weakly, remembering Woody Allen’s proverb that there was no such thing as “a bad orgasm.” But she was fairly certain the physical sensation all the storybooks were alluding to, what the old standards had crooned about for decades, and even today’s drippy ballads screeched at anyone who cared to listen at ear-shattering decibels, was not what she was experiencing. And it was in that private moment when she knew something was missing and terribly wrong.
But she kept the seed of that knowledge firmly cloaked in darkness. And on the rare occasions she let it see the light of day, she became so frightened by the emptiness of her life that she immediately tucked it back into the recesses of her subconscious. She began to take great pride in her absolute autonomy and to contend that her male escorts were merely a means to an end.
But there was a new emptiness she had only recently recognized and one she could not gloss over. And the nagging question she asked herself more often than not these days: Now what? She shook her head, not willing to think of it. A modern day Scarlett O’Hara. I’m dealing with it, one part of her argued. The other simply looked north.
About a mile out a large rock caught her fascination and before she knew what had compelled her, she found herself heading towards it.
****
If she were to describe this place she would call it a magical forest in a childhood fairyland, so removed from her real life was this sanctuary of dark and forbidden forest. She had been following the rough path down the ravine of overgrown blackberry vines, when it appeared—the mysterious and enchanting isle of somber shadows, quiet stillness, where she came to sit for long periods, in contemplation, or writing. The only light that streamed through the towering evergreens and overgrown fern life reflected off her gold pen as she now dashed several lines in her journal.
I don’t know why I remembered this about Erika, but she hated grapes. That big fruit bowl they gifted at the hotel, she wouldn’t touch them. She ate everything around them, the kiwi, bananas, oranges, fed me strawberries so sweetly.
They had spent a glorious weekend at the Columbia Gorge Hotel “nestled romantically in the gently wooded forests with a spectacular view of the river” or so the pamphlet had promised. It wouldn’t have mattered if they were in a dungeon, Noel thought at the time. They had ordered room service and made love the entire weekend, laughed, talked and giggled, and the few moments they did stare out the window, the heaving river was indeed spectacular. But Noel only had eyes for Erika’s profile, the sweet tilt of her head, those brown eyes that brimmed with tears, so full of surprise and wonder every time Noel made love to her, as if she had given her the most incredible gift in the world. And each time Erika would hold her closer. And, finally, at the end she sobbed, anguished moans as Noel held her protectively and told her there was nothing to worry about. Erika insisted Noel didn’t understand, couldn’t understand about her life, the insanity of her situation.
Noel stroked her face calmly. “We’ll work on it together.”
“Yes.” Erika had replied weakly.
“That’s all that matters.” Noel tried to buoy her strength.
Erika grasped her frantically. “Promise.”
“Promise.”
“No matter what.”
“Erika.”
Now I remember. It was Claire. She was eating grapes at Maggie’s the other night, and then again this morning. But she doesn’t exactly eat them. It’s more like a savoring process, as if hunger had nothing at all to do with her eating of them...simply the way she enjoyed slicing them in half with her front teeth, then sucking the pulpy juice from them.
I suppose it could be quite sexy the way she eats them.
Oh, God! What am I doing here? Maybe this place no longer serves its purpose. There are simply too many memories. Why did I have to take my haven and introduce E. to it? Now, everywhere I turn, I see her and us last year. I can’t get any work done. Of course, it doesn’t help having the annoying Ms Jabrowski lurking in the shadows. And Maggie. I could wring her neck. She couldn’t actually have thought Claire would take my mind off E?... OK, let’s be fair. She has her moments. She can even be charming. Bottom line, I’m hoping she’ll get fed up with the lack of pace and go back to LA where she belongs.
Noel sighed, closed the journal. She studied her surroundings without really taking them in. She emerged from the cavernous, wooded area and followed a path that overlooked Arcadia beach. She saw the rock out there. Her rock.
****
Claire approached the rock from one end and Noel from the opposite direction. As they both rounded the ocean boulder from either side, they discovered, simultaneously, a gaping rift that split it cleanly in two. There was a small path of sand, between, just wide enough to maneuver through.
They caught sight of each other in the same instant. For a moment, neither spoke. Claire slowly approached Noel, then stopped.
Noel felt foolish as she mumbled, “I…I was taking a break.”
“It’s not a crime.” Claire smiled as she had the previous night, sincere. Her eyes were engaging as she moved forward.
Without words they began strolling companionably and silently along the tide.
After some time, Claire lit a cigarette. “She gets to you, doesn’t she.”
They both stopped then, sat on a rock. Claire prodded, “How can anyone like you take her seriously—”
“The Tara O’Haras of this world are the unwitting champions of patriarchy.”
“Oh shit.” Claire baited her playfully. “A PC Queen.”
“Do I sound like I’m giving a lecture?” Noel grinned.
“Do you ever not?” Claire’s eyes teased. She got up, touched Noel’s arm, an invitation to follow her.
They walked for several hours, not saying much, simply sharing their isolation. Noel found herself feeling comfortable around Claire for the first time. Her edge had softened. There was something about Claire’s quiet sincerity that engaged Noel, and she found herself enjoying Claire’s curiosity and probing questions. At certain moments when she would catch Claire unaware there was an almost childlike eagerness in her face that belied the sarcastic cynicism and conveyed instead an untamed wild expectation that life was an experience to savor.
A monolith appeared around the bend in the coastline, set against a
craggy backdrop whose edges had been softened by the constant lull of the incoming tides. It might have gone unnoticed but the golden sun cast a clay-rust hue to its exterior, throwing dramatic shadows behind the slender tapered form.
Noel walked around it several times. “It belongs in an art gallery.”
Claire assessed its abstract form. “It’s a woman.”
“She’s celebrating.”
“What?” Claire walked around the other side of the form so that her face was just in the shadow. “What is she celebrating?”
“A million years of beauty.” Noel indicated the rock’s view.
“The keeper.” Claire moved a step forward to touch the exterior and then to the side.
When the amber burnt sun caught Claire’s face, Noel caught her breath. She clearly saw the ancient heritage, the firm jawline and wide-berthed cheekbones—a warrior, female Indian warrior, wild and tempestuous, ruled by primal need and desire.
Claire caught Noel studying her. “She’s beautiful isn’t she.”
Noel kept her eyes steady on Claire. “Yes. She is.”
****
“...and after that?”
“I studied in England. Oxford.”
“So that’s where the form over function comes in.” Claire needled her, but gently. They were skirting the water’s edge as they strolled, aimlessly.
“Perhaps.”
“Why psychiatry?”
“I...I thought I’d be good at it.”
“Are you?”
“I think so.”
“What do your patients think?”
“Honestly?”