Beggar of Love (14 page)

After winning the intramural golf tournament, graduating from Hunter was a letdown. Playing golf, Jefferson had gotten a kick out of the hush of the onlookers when things got tense on the green. She’d been such a devoted team player, but somehow, with the friends in her life, with school, with required sports and hitting the bars and Margo, then Lily Ann, then Ginger and those in between—she had nothing to give a team. What does the team player do when her team is gone? Mope, she discovered, until she went out for golf. Shining in sports was like food to her, not something she could give up. Her solution, in her junior year, was to hike down to Brooklyn on the subway and play the Dyker Beach Golf Course with a woman who commuted to Hunter from the area. Rain or shine or snow they played or met at a driving range to practice.

Graduation, in comparison, was noisy. Between her and Ginger, they filled a whole row of seats. They’d had to scramble for extra tickets, which the out-of-towners and international students had been willing to share or sometimes sell. Ginger’s three older brothers were there because Jefferson had bought their tickets, and her dad and mom and her Aunt Tilly, who lived with them. Jefferson’s parents and grandparents were there—she was the only grandchild—and also Gladys from the coffee shop had arrived with a bunch of flowers, which Emmy now held.

Angela had asked to come. Her beautiful, lively Angela, who was now hitched to another Dutchess girl from Jefferson’s side of the tracks, Tam Thorpe, a distant cousin of Jefferson’s. Somehow, despite Tam going to school, they had gotten the money together to buy the Snip’N’Shape beauty salon. Angela, of course, had lots of customers because she knew everyone from her father’s candy store. Tam was a Dutchess Academy graduate and was an object of fascination for the wives of the movers and shakers in town. Jefferson remembered, as she watched Tam and Angie approach, that rough time after she moved to the dorm in the middle of her freshman year and gradually stopped seeing Angela. She hadn’t had the decency to break up with her, but kept telling Angie she was too busy to see her.

One night, the fall after she and Ginger became lovers, they had, for once, been at their dorm-room desks, typing papers. Ginger had called, “Come in,” at the knock on the door. It was Angela. Jefferson introduced Angie to Ginger, and that was when Angela first introduced them to Frenchy. Angela hugged Jefferson while Frenchy posed in the doorway, tapping a Marlboro out of a crushproof box and lighting up with a silver Zippo, engraved with the initials F.T. They had stopped by, Angela told her, because Frenchy wanted to check out Angie’s first girl. Later, she guessed Angela visited to let her know she wasn’t home being a sad sack, that she had another lover and didn’t need Jefferson. Anyone could see, Ginger had said, that this Frenchy person was too hung up on Frenchy to stick with any girl for long.

Tam was a better match for Angie: bright, good-looking, as good a dancer as Frenchy, and a little on the sulky side, her eyes never leaving Angie. Jefferson hoped they’d make it, like she and Ginger would. After all this time, though, she couldn’t say what made her split up with Angie. Maybe she was a little like Frenchy herself, but this time she would be true to the vow she’d made herself, to be a one-woman woman.

The truth was, Angela’s tactic worked. After the visit to the dorm, Jefferson did call Angie up now and then to talk, and she did visit her at the shop whenever she went up to Dutchess. She loaned some of the money that she came into when she turned twenty-one to Angela and Tam so they could add stations in the shop to rent to other hairdressers. Tam had been hired for Jefferson’s old job and was doing the part-time college, full-time print shop route too. Her parents had money, but her dad was a boot-strap kind of guy and liked Tam’s approach—leaving home, moving in with a friend, supporting herself while her family paid her expenses at Barnard. Jefferson’s guilt over leaving Angela was eased by introductions to the lovers who followed.

Angela and the coffee-shop waitress, Gladys, who were meeting for the first time, hugged Jefferson and cried and told her they were proud to watch her graduate. Jefferson wanted to crow: she liked making them proud. Her parents were hanging out with her golf buddy’s family, and she could see her father demonstrating his swing for them. He was sober today—so far.

She went over to Lily Ann, whose mother was on her arm and smiling widely at everyone. She was surprised at how little Lily Ann’s mom was.

“You take after your father?” She raised her hand flat in the air as if measuring Lily Ann’s height.

Lily Ann introduced her to Mrs. Lee.

“Congratulations,” she said. “You’ve got a smart, hard-working kid here.”

“Oh, don’t I know it,” said Mrs. Lee, who launched into an obviously often-repeated series of smart things her daughter had said and done since she’d been one month old.

Jefferson had managed to become friends, maybe best friends, with Lily Ann. They’d had some hot and heavy months together, and it had been more than sex, but Lily Ann was smart about them too. She knew they weren’t meant for each other and told Jefferson she wanted to get into the gay social life now so she could eventually meet her dream woman. “Probably,” Lily Ann said, “she’ll be like my mama: small and made of steel. And,” she teased her, “though you’re a hunk, J, she probably won’t be a white girl.”

“If she’s a woman of steel, Lily Ann, she won’t be a white girl,” she joked back.

They said all this in front of Mrs. Lee. Back in freshman year, Lily Ann couldn’t wait to tell her what she’d discovered with Jefferson. Lily Ann and her mom were that close. Jefferson marveled at someone who didn’t have to hide what she was. All the time she was marching in the graduation ceremony she wanted to be marching up to her parents to come out to them, but her makeup really did not include steel. While they all waited for the “Pomp and Circumstance” moment, she pulled out a pink Spaulding ball and got a game of hit-the-nickel going. The graduating class had been told not to wear jeans or sneakers, but she’d never understood where they got off telling her how to dress. She’d chosen her black hightops and darkened the white soles with a charcoal pencil she’d bought for a sophomore-year art class. If her parents hadn’t noticed, the muckety-mucks on stage wouldn’t.

Margo was in the crowd of teachers. She’d managed to get through one term of German class with her and then switched to Spanish with a male instructor. She’d used her high-school Spanish, which was pretty good, to meet the prerequisites. Margo didn’t speak to her, nor she to Margo, for the next three years. Now, with graceful, gorgeous Ginger in her life, she wondered how she could have become entangled with the plump, permed professor.

It was Margo’s staring silence that distressed Jefferson. The silence reproved, described abandonment, maybe envy of her evident happiness. There she was with young, lovely Ginger and not with Margo. She thought Margo might complain aloud, attack her verbally, or make it clear that she felt betrayed. That might have been better, she thought, better than the cold knife of disapproval in Margo’s gaze and in her frozen lack of expression, verbal or in gestures. When Angela felt she’d been denied her due, she’d whined, cajoled, complained, and accused, but that was unusual for a lesbian, Jefferson realized. They were more like Ginger or even herself, who tended to avoid confrontation and the risk that the closet door might swing open. A grown woman who had revealed herself so fully to a freshman as Margo had was a walking accusation and needed no words. The things she’d asked from Jefferson for her own pleasure—Margo was now facing down Jefferson’s memories. Was she wondering if Jefferson despised her? Probably, but really, she thought, Margo despised herself for trusting someone who now might share Margo’s secrets with the slim, graceful dancer by Jefferson’s side.

If there was a punishment on the books for allowing another woman to be that vulnerable to her, it was this silence and Margo’s loud gaze. And the memory, not of the acts of pleasure, but of the suspicion that something about herself was broken. How else could she have walked away from Margo and Angela, vanishing from their lives with no explanation? She didn’t even want to think the woman’s name today; the sight of her reminded Jefferson of the revulsion she had felt.

Something had gone too far, something had gotten out of hand. Again, it wasn’t the greedy lust of the woman or the touch of shame she felt at complying with her more imaginative requests. Something had been taken from her, perhaps by her own doing, her own complicity in cheating on Angie, sleeping with a teacher so much older than herself, learning to lie to someone she loved and who trusted her. In high school, they’d loved with the complete trust of children. She worried not only that she’d destroyed that part of herself, but that she’d done the same to Angie. Now that she knew she was capable of betrayal and inflicting pain in order to have what she wanted, she suspected everyone else in the world was capable of the same thing. She’d discovered that she couldn’t trust herself to honor what she’d thought she’d believed in. How could she now trust anyone else?

Or had she only lost her innocence, a perfectly natural loss that would have happened eventually with or without Margo?

It didn’t seem to matter; she realized that she was angry at Margo. No, she thought, running her fingers back through her short hair, she was experiencing a rage that befit being raped. Despite Margo’s passivity when they were lovers, Jefferson had been interfered with, not Margo. She’d certainly lost some possibly nameless quality. She sensed its absence. There was something she was not giving Ginger now that she’d known how to give Angela before Margo.

She returned Margo’s glare, the two of them in their ridiculous black robes, and curled her hands into fists. She left the safe circle of her friends and family to step toward Margo, then watched as Margo shrank back very slightly and peered around as if for protection before she turned and wove her way through the other professors, who were still milling around, as if finding their places in line was beneath them.

She turned back to her family, but they were looking past her. She felt the dean approach before she turned.

“Excuse me, young lady,” he said. “What do you have for footwear?”

Margo, she thought immediately. Margo had spotted her gym shoes and spoken to the dean. That’s when it hit her: Margo had always had this power and had always used it to control her. That annoying Everly Brothers hit, “Kathy’s Clown,” popped into her mind. Margo was getting her revenge by trying to make a clown of her.

She came to something like attention. “Sorry, sir. I’m a PE major. I don’t own anything else.” Lying came so easily now.

“Young lady,” the dean ordered, “find yourself footwear in compliance with the dress code or you won’t be accepting your diploma onstage.”

She saw that too-familiar look of her mother’s, the expression she wore at horror films. The Jeffersons had paid for this day and she knew they wanted their moment in the sun.

Gladys’s feet were almost Jefferson’s size. She swapped her sneakers for low pumps. Gladys coached her in walking for about two minutes, making a joke of it, making it fun. Jefferson swept across the stage in her clown shoes, in front of Gladys, her parents, Angie, Ginger, and Margo, with her head high. Instead of giving in to humiliation, she treated this wearing of the ridiculous heels for the first—and last—time as a gym exercise. If she could win a tournament, certainly she could meet Margo’s mean challenge.

During the next few years after college, Jefferson was no less in love with Ginger, no less determined to live her life with Ginger. She still went though the horrible doldrums that had followed her out of childhood. She drowned the awful sinking of her moods at the bars and, sometimes, with the excitement of the chase. It had started with Taffy, but then, still in her junior year, Jefferson had found Patti so cute, and a senior, already out at school. Patti had slipped love poems to Jefferson in their history-of-music class. Jefferson had already known that material inside out from growing up with the parents she had and had been bored.

Drinking coffee together after class, Jefferson told her she was involved. Patti ignored this. Patti had a car. She was a golfer too and drove Jefferson and her golfing buddy to the course where they played as a threesome. Ginger, with her jobs and rehearsals and performances, could never go and had never played golf.

One day, Patti had a flask with her and by the time she pulled into a spot down by the water, deserted in winter, Jefferson was raring to get her into the backseat. She made love to Patti quickly, but would not let Patti under her clothes. The thing with Patti was over within weeks, when Patti, infuriated that Jefferson wouldn’t split up with Ginger, tricked her into getting out of the car at one of the old stone-faced gas stations on the Henry Hudson Parkway and drove off. Jefferson had a flask of her own by then and, high on a combination of the half she drank after their game and her new secret freedom from secret Patti, she bounded through the streets of Washington Heights until she found the A train.

Jefferson got off at Ginger’s stop and rented a hotel room. It felt so good to have Ginger in her arms that night. Her naked back, the firm curve of her waist, her undemanding desire were all so familiar and right that Jefferson knew she would never be attracted to another woman again. She was twenty-two by that time and much better at knowing what she wanted.

In her senior year, that Thanksgiving night when Minerva Castle, the little Englishwoman who helped Grandmother Jefferson, led her to her live-in room to show her the awkward but flattering sketches she’d done of Grandmother, Jefferson was drunk, like her father and mother and grandfather downstairs.