Beggar of Love (15 page)

Minerva offered her more wine. She knew where that would lead; it always led there. Women were so hungry. Especially the mousy ones like Minerva, who she would never associate with sex or guess would be interested in being gay. Yet they were the most wild for touch and release.

“You’re gay, aren’t you?” Minerva Castle had asked. This was a woman in her thirties, exotic with her British accent and disproportionate breasts, kind of a lightweight in the brain department, but earnest and kind. “Me too,” she said when Jefferson came out to her.

She missed Ginger, but of course neither could present the other at home for the holiday, like a straight couple. They hadn’t even talked about the possibility. Jefferson found herself being made love to in Minerva Castle’s twin bed. She didn’t like it this way, preferred giving pleasure to receiving it, but Minerva was determined. The woman’s clammy hands and oily facial skin had put Jefferson off, but the experience was exciting and she couldn’t help responding. Minerva preferred penetration, so she didn’t have to reciprocate orally and felt as if she hadn’t been unfaithful. Minerva also liked a little anal penetration, just with Jefferson’s pinky.

“Where did you learn that?” Ginger asked, breathless, when she used that trick at home.

“Honors Sex 300, Princess,” she’d responded. “Miss Parsons teaches it on Saturday nights.”

“Miss Parsons?”

Jefferson gave Ginger an exaggerated wink.

“Sure. You’re kidding. I’m so gullible with you, Jef.”

“Miss Parsons would wet her gym shorts. I can’t imagine her—I mean, can you?”

They laughed, then Ginger tried it on her, but Jefferson couldn’t come. She never could with Ginger, as if her emotional excitement was on a different track from her sexual response. She didn’t let on to Ginger, of course. She never wanted to hurt Ginger.

She looked forward to seeing Minerva Castle on holidays. The woman made no demands on her time or company outside of bed, but one day in Jefferson’s senior year Grandmother teased Minerva about her boyfriend the gardener. Minerva, usually as pale as Grandmother’s chicken broth, turned the same pink that orgasm gave her. Jefferson was repelled. Every time she saw Minerva after that she wanted to drench her in bug spray.

Ginger lived with her parents the year Jefferson was a senior. She had already graduated, but couldn’t find an apartment she could afford and still survive. It was tough because they’d been so happy rooming together at school. Jefferson fought with Emmy and Jarvy to live off campus at the family’s city apartment, but they wanted her to wait until she had a job so she didn’t get used to depending on them. They did agree to buy her a car, a 1971 Chevy Nova.

It had been Uncle Stephen’s, then Cousin Raymond’s. It was old and smelled of cigarettes, but Jarvy had the transmission replaced and the engine overhauled. All that year, it carried Jefferson and Ginger back and forth to the family place on Saturday Lake in New Hampshire, through the depth of winter in the snow and ice. Ginger had to drive what they called their chariot of ashes then because Jefferson had a horror of losing control of the car in weather, and Ginger, though Jefferson had to teach her, was a born driver and sailed through the worst storms, fearless, as if it was high summer.

After Minerva, there was no one but Ginger her whole senior year. She and Ginger had three seasons of love by the fireplace at the lake, three seasons of isolation on the long drives, during the long nights and on Saturday Lake after the tourist season, then in early spring as soon as the lake thawed. Classes were a dream to be slept though when she got back. Ginger had been able to find only part-time work during the week, teaching dance at the Neighborhood House, and without college performances, her gigs were few. They planned for her to give private lessons after Jefferson graduated and after they went to France and the British Isles that summer. Jefferson had already been offered a job teaching at a classy private school in the city through someone her mother knew. Her parents planned to let her live in her grandparents’ apartment then. Ginger could move in and only have to help with utilities. She could rent a loft space for lessons.

When they visited the house in New Hampshire that winter, they learned to keep their clothes on until Jefferson got a fire started and Ginger made up the Castro Convertible in the living room. They lived on deli food and takeout that they’d gather on their way out of the city. She made sure she scheduled classes offered only Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday so almost every week they would have four days together, a nine-month-late honeymoon on the lake, watching the red oaks lose their leaves, the bright red winterberries arrive, ice fishers suited up for the freezing air, and lilac bushes bursting into lusty bloom. Sometimes they hiked or boated or ice-skated, but mostly they stayed in the knotty-pine house with nothing but their nubile minds and splendid bodies to entertain them. Jefferson had never been happier.

Despite the way dance displayed Ginger’s body, she had that Irish-Catholic shyness about moving around the house naked and shocked Jefferson the first night she donned a granny gown. Now she knew why relationships died. Someone put on a granny gown or one quit drinking when the other didn’t. A curtain closed and shut one person out, or a curtain opened and revealed too much. The first time she saw Lily Ann Lee’s breasts with the moles on them, it shouldn’t have mattered and didn’t for a while, but now they were friends instead of lovers, partly because Jefferson could live without ever seeing that body nude again. Everyone, she thought, has a right to her own aesthetic.

Ginger’s body was beyond compare. Jefferson could spend days, weeks, years of her life watching Ginger walk, bend, reach, scratch her bottom. The gown smothered the fire in her, but there was so much more to Ginger and to what they had together. With praise and encouragement someday Ginger would get over that self-consciousness. Would it be too late by then? Or would she automatically pull a granny gown over her own eyes, look away or not see what she was looking at?

When they were together they were by turns comfortable, playful, sexual, but mostly asleep. During the week Ginger was all about dance. As much as she adored Ginger, as close as Ginger came to being everything she could want in a woman, sometimes she felt like she was married to Tinker Bell.

In those early years, they didn’t have sex, they made love. Ginger was open, eager, easily roused and satisfied. She followed Jefferson’s lead as pliably and as gracefully as she danced. Ginger professed her love, collapsing like a telescoping cup into something like a loving little animal, warm, so close she might be under Jefferson’s skin or curled around her heart. She whispered her ardent feelings and passionate promises of forever. Ginger made it clear that she knew their bond was beyond breakable. She used the term “soul mates” and Jefferson agreed that they were, although she had somehow imagined a more consistent devotion on both sides.

She would get out of bed while Ginger slept—afterward—and sit down with the bottle of Jameson. She’d sip it over two ice cubes and replay the way tall, willful Ginger went all soft and yielding in her hands that night. The contrast excited her beyond anything she’d ever experienced and she felt like a top-of-the-line lover—creative, sensitive to Ginger’s every desire, as if she were an extension of Ginger’s perfect body, as if Ginger was some other self she could please.

Yet the next morning she could find little sign of her fiercely loving Ginger. With Ginger’s mother’s disappointed coldness—she’d gotten her first job as a chorus girl on Broadway when she became pregnant with Ginger—and her father’s work-above-all ethic, where could Ginger have learned that sweetness can carry over into the daylight hours? She probably had all she could do to save the loving little kid she must have started out as from withering completely. With Ginger turning to a will-o’-the-wisp come daylight, Jefferson felt a little less guilty about her own absences, like she was entitled to them, damn it.

Ginger worked hard and spoke of quitting performance, opening a dance school. “I want to earn my keep here,” she told Jefferson, though with Jefferson’s teaching wage and her family’s deep pockets, they weren’t hurting. Ginger picked up money giving dance classes, especially after school hours and on Saturdays, when Jefferson was off.

“Keep performing,” she urged Ginger. “Princess, it’s your dream, your mom’s dream too, and I’d miss watching you dance.” In truth, she’d been bored at the last few performances, but Ginger didn’t have to know that.

“Sure. As long as I have a steady income,” Ginger had answered.

“But you’re a dancer. How could you cut that off? If I had a talent like yours and didn’t use it, I’d fade away.”

“Teaching is a talent too, Jef. And coaching.”

“Teaching is a job. Maybe some day there will be gay softball teams to coach and I’ll love what I do, but right now, it’s part of my job. A fun part, but nothing like your name up in lights.”

“I can’t get satisfaction out of dancing unless I know I’ll have solid ground under my feet, like you do.”

“I can coach till I go blind and deaf, Ginge. You won’t be able to dance that long. Now is when you need to be performing.”

“I don’t know.” Ginger moved away from her and crossed her arms. “Of course I want to perform forever, but I’m an ironworker’s daughter from the Bronx. I know my limits. Do you see my brothers getting all artsy? Joseph can draw like he was born to make a living doing portraits on Sixth Avenue in the Village. He and Kevin followed my father into the union. It’s their best shot in this life. We’re not in with the people who go places. Maybe if I’d been a tiny bit more talented, well connected, more of a hustler, more outgoing, maybe I could reach the big time and earn enough to keep me for the rest of my life, let a husband support me—”

“I’ll support you, damn it.”

“I know you would, sure, but I couldn’t live with that. You’ve got your own way to make. Your family may have money, but you’re not the idle rich. If you supported me I’d feel like a failure. I need to prove I can succeed in the dance world, and if I can’t do it as a dancer, I’d like to do it as a teacher. I have to ask myself, too, how long can I realistically keep up performing? What will I do when my body gives out?”

“You don’t believe enough in your own talent,” she said, not asking the hard question: why did Ginger think it was all right to be financially supported by a husband, but not by her?

“My biggest talent is work. I watched my dad rack up the overtime year after year, with no life beyond work except a beer, the TV, early to bed, never a complaint. He was my model, his are my values. It’s how I earned college and paid my way through. It’s how I got his respect. I couldn’t believe it the other day when he said he’d borrow on his retirement to invest in a dance school when I’m ready.”

Had she been attracted to Ginger because she thought Ginger would be some kind of star? Okay, a little bit. Maybe there was a spot of tarnish now, but it wasn’t like Ginger would have to give up dance to be a used-car salesperson or something. She’d seen Ginger teach at the Neighborhood House and she was good. She had the nine little ones in her beginning tap class moving like mini-Rockettes. Even the really heavy teenager in Saturday-morning modern dance was learning to carry her body gracefully, thanks to Ginger. She couldn’t knock it. Ginger clearly delighted in giving away what she knew and loved, just like Jefferson got into it too when she was teaching.

“I have a girl in one of my classes,” she told Ginger. “Gilleberta Konic, tall, so skinny you think her stick legs might snap out from under her. Gilleberta’s the daughter of someone at the UN. I watched her learn to dribble a basketball, weaving this way and that, lunging after the ball, tripping on it, bending so low it was rolling, not bouncing. I figured she’d be okay when she started pulling herself out of one of her rolls by lifting the ball like it was glued to her fingertips. I felt so damn proud to see Gilleberta out on the gym floor doing double-ball power dribbling. I knew I was doing the right thing, teaching PE.”

“I don’t know which way to go, Jef.”

“Yeah, you need a compass.” She considered saying aloud that she’d like to borrow it when Ginger was through, but how do you tell your lover that you need a moral compass?

Ginger was in her thirties before she did throw the towel in on her performance career and accepted her dad and Jefferson’s offers to help start a school. The Neighborhood House had wanted to hire her full-time, but she would have had to take on all kinds of recreation classes other than dance. Once Ginger made her decision, she got to work. She went up and down probably every block in Washington Heights, where she’d been working, looking for studio space. Jefferson had scored a job as a swimming instructor for the parks department that summer, but got off at three and would go look at the spaces that appealed to Ginger.

Once they found the spot, a second story on the edge of West End Avenue with level hardwood floors, a plate-glass window across the front for natural light, and wall space for mirrors and bars, she helped Ginger clean, paint, and polish the floors. This would be the most time they would spend together for several years. Ginger opened her little school and not only taught, but marketed, did the bookkeeping, the cleaning, grant writing, scholarship research, and kept up some classes at the Neighborhood House. The hours by the fire were gone, as were nights without the granny gown. Jefferson yearned for her as intensely as she had before she’d introduced herself at Ginger’s performance. She felt like something left to mold at the bottom of a barrel.