Beggar of Love (7 page)

The verse—or Margo—instilled in Jefferson’s chest a heat she thought had cooled forever the day last summer Mr. Tabor met with her father to explain why she and Angela must be separated. She’d been right all along to fear every shadow, every odd look, every innuendo about her tomboy ways: the aftermath of their exposure had been sheer hell. They asked her why she was like this and she said she didn’t know. That was true. She just loved loving Angela as much as she loved Angela herself.

In the hot summer weeks before her eighteenth birthday she’d felt incurably cold, an exile in her town and from society itself. She’d been too humiliated to show her face on the streets of Dutchess to look for a job and had spent her days idle, on the maple four-poster bed at Grandma and Grandpa Thorpe’s roomy old house, up the hill from her parents’ home where she felt constant disappointment sweep through the house like a searchlight.

There was no place to hide. An enormous cherry tree shaded her window. It was filled with trilling birds whose enterprising, energetic, and comical comings and goings kept some deep and silent force within her alive with the hope that life might have some intrinsic value for a kid like her. Every time she began to measure methods of suicide, some little gray bird would crane its neck as if to peer in her window, or would burst into a song worthy of an opera hall, or would disappear deep into the branches, absorbed by its own busy life.

She was too ashamed to face meals downstairs and lost eighteen pounds from her spare frame, eating only when she slunk to the kitchen late at night to consume leftovers. The thought of Mr. Tabor’s cherry Danishes turned her stomach sour with guilt. Yet on the August day that she reached eighteen and went immediately to the bank to empty her savings account, she didn’t gnash her teeth and beat her breast in torment. That final decision she’d made about moving into a dorm at Hunter—well, she wanted her girl. She’d go into the city and sign up for a couple of classes at night to get started. She was defying her parents. She felt like a bird with a beak full of nesting material doing what came naturally as she rented a rinky-dink apartment on the first floor of a big pink house, then waited in an alleyway down the street from the candy store until she saw Angela.

“I wish it could be an engagement ring,” she’d whispered, waylaying Angela and taking her into the alley, “but I hope this will do.” She presented the lease and watched as Angela scanned it. They hadn’t seen or spoken with each other since graduation day when, leaving the grounds of the Academy for the last time, she had seen Angela across the street, smiling and applauding her in gown and mortarboard. She’d had to avert her eyes or cry in front of her parents.

Today Angela’s face slowly flushed. She looked up at Jefferson, eyes narrow.

“The birds gave me the idea,” Jefferson explained. The heat was smoldering inside her. “First they make a nest. Everything follows from there.”

“Do you have a job?”

“No, Angie.” She feasted her eyes on Angie, felt one flame, then another lap at her insides. “Nest first, then job and furniture and family fireworks and gas hookup—and love.”

Mischievous delight replaced the apprehension in Angela’s eyes as she cocked her head like a little bird peering in. “Not necessarily in that order?”

They could not touch, but their eyes locked. Oh, the inferno in her chest. She was sweating. “Definitely not in that order,” Jefferson responded. For the first time in weeks she rode her bicycle around town like a triumphant racer, swooping around corners, pedaling uphill without slowing, exploding through empty intersections as if fleeing demons, racing as if rushing into her future.

They moved in the next day.

The family fireworks came next. Appalled, Jefferson’s family refused to pay for night classes. She should have made a clean break right then, insisted on leaving Dutchess, but Angela wanted to stay and work things out with her parents.

“It’s true I’m not the daughter they planned,” Angela had explained, as much to herself, it sounded like, as to Jefferson. “How can I deprive them of the only kid they’ve got?”

They stayed in town and found whatever work they could: babysitting, waitressing, selling magazines. They made love daily, before rising, after work, in the middle of their nights, all sleepy and passionate. She was determined to put herself through Hunter if she had to commute for ten years so she could stay with Angela. They began to feel the strength of their wings and determination when Angela got a job she liked, almost full-time, assisting a photographer. Jefferson was hired as a layout and paste-up person in the little print shop. She learned to operate the press, bill customers, and drum up business so well that they offered to train her as a backup manager. Arranging hair, applying makeup, and warming up customers for the photographer convinced Angela that she could succeed as a beautician if she could save up the money for school.

All through the fall when Jefferson was supposed to have gone away to college, Emmy and Jarvy, smelling of alcohol fumes, hammered at her to live a normal life and demanded her presence, without Angela, at holiday dinners. Giving up Angela was not an option, but their efforts—we’ll send you to school, we’ll get your grandparents to revoke your trust fund, how about a year in France—kept her in constant turmoil. She couldn’t help but compare the difficulties of her life now with the relative ease of surrender.

Without consciously doing so, she schemed constantly and silently for ways to spirit Angela along if she capitulated and moved to the city to enroll full-time as a PE major at Hunter in the spring. How, she wondered, could she get her hands on the trust money before she was twenty-one? Every other solution involved leaving Dutchess. Angela would not go. The Jeffersons’ disdain of Angela and of all things gay was like the Hudson River air, whose damp grew a constant stinking crop of mold in the backs of closets in their apartment. She still loved Angela, but she had also started to feel trapped again.

Angela gave in first. Her father, resigned to her choice of mate, offered not only to put her through beauty school, but to help finance a shop of her own when she was ready. Angela would have to stay in Dutchess and help out at the store when she wasn’t in school. And Jefferson, well, she could feel—as Margo, the German professor she would soon meet, recited—her dampened heat rekindle, but it had nothing to do with Angela, who was waiting at home for her. Jefferson’s father had finally agreed to give her the money he’d be paying for a dorm so she could keep the apartment and continue to commute to Hunter for the winter semester instead. When Jefferson began commuting, only a short train ride separated her from Angela, but in the stark, dead winter, Angela seemed farther and farther away.

As if Margo had dropped a gauntlet in the middle of the cafeteria table, Jefferson touched her hand—she had become quite a toucher since Angela—and said, “I really like this piece we’re reading in lit class.” She found it in her text and read about the salley gardens and the poet’s love with little snow-white feet. The woman told him he ought to take love easy, but Yeats said he was young and foolish, just like she knew herself to be. He called the poem “An Old Song Resung” so she figured she was in good company.

“Yeats. I would never have taken you for a Yeats lover.”

She felt herself flush with this dishonesty; she wasn’t a poetry lover at all.

Margo’s laugh, despite her frail-looking form, seemed to carry her whole life force up the column of her long pale throat and past her pouty-looking lips. Jefferson would have sat in the cafeteria for hours talking about books and poets, but she had the train home to Dutchess to catch. There was an irony in having persuaded her father to pay her tuition at Hunter College. She hadn’t left Angela, or cloistered herself in Dutchess, but sending her to the city every day was a brilliant move on her parents’ part. It had taken her back into the larger world, exposed her to promises of urban adventure she found harder and harder to leave as train time neared.

“Immemorial sap.” Later, on the train, while passing through the sleety February darkness of Dutchess County, she tasted the words like a delicacy. “Mounts in our arms when we love.” Had it been Margo’s rendering that made those the sexiest words Jefferson had ever heard? Margo Kurtz was a lesbian, she could feel it in her bones. No, that wasn’t where she felt it at all. Given the chance, she wanted the experience of Margo. But she should avoid her if she was to stay with Angela.

Angela was lying on the couch smoking and watching
Happy Days
on the TV that Jefferson’s parents had given her last Christmas. Jefferson laid her books on the dining room table, shook herself out of her wet trench coat, and went eagerly to Angela.

“Wait,” Angela said, hand up, laughing. Jefferson waited, trying to make sense of the figures on the screen, but her mind was on the salley gardens of Yeats, which had immediately evoked her early days with Angela. Perhaps, by defending Yeats, she was admitting to being a novice. The less accessible Rilke brought to mind Margo’s pouty lips. What color was her lipstick? Kind of a crushed raspberry, so that her lips looked stained rather than painted. She ignored Angela’s proscription and sat beside her on the couch, craning her neck to kiss her laughing girl.

“Holy smoke,” Angela said when Jefferson sat up. “What brought that on?”

Angela opened her arms and Jefferson wrapped hers around her, squeezing tight. Cold and wet after her walk from the station, she felt like she was being blown away and needed to hold on tight. The apartment wasn’t very warm in winter. “I haven’t seen you since seven this morning. I missed you.” She wasn’t altogether convinced this was true, but certainly wanted it to be and kissed Angela again, touching tongues, unbuttoning the top button of her blouse.

“Do you want your dinner?” Angela asked, stepping away. “I’ve got soup on the stove and Bisquick biscuits waiting to go in the oven.”

“Too many dishes to resist,” she said, pointedly fondling a breast.

“Not really. I got my period and I don’t feel very romantic.”

“Oh.” The deflation was compounded by a recent history of Angela’s rejections. It was no wonder Margo got to her; she was plain frustrated.

“If you really want to—”

“No, no.” Jefferson felt like a half-dressed nymphomaniac on the cover of a dime-store novel. “I’ll bring you a bowl of soup.”

Angela’s attention was caught by the television. “If you’ll put the biscuits in the oven? Three-seventy-five for twenty minutes.”

Later, while washing the dishes, Jefferson struggled with the sap that rose in her soapy arms. What did Margo do when she got home at night? Probably she went back out to a coffeehouse where she talked with poets about the mysteries of life—and love. Was there someone Margo loved? Or else she wandered the streets of the city, filled with the kinds of longings Jefferson had. Did she ever think of Jefferson?

Angela got ready for bed as Jefferson began her homework.

“What are you studying?” Angela offered her cheek for a good-night kiss.

“Research for a paper on the poetry. Remember, I read you some?”

“I know I’m a dummy, but I can’t tell one from the other. Were they the poems about England?”

“That was Wordsworth.”

“He made me want to travel.” Angela looked toward the plaid drape closed tight across the window that helped keep out the cold. Was that what Angela dreamed of these days? “Do you think we ever will?”

“I’ll have summers off once I start teaching. Angie, Angie,” she said, excited, “I know what we’ll do. We’ll train someone to run your shop by then.”

“What does all that poetry have to do with phys ed anyway?”

“Literature is part of the curriculum. I have to take it.”

Angela was gazing at the drapes. “Seriously, let’s start dreaming about where to go, all right, baby?”

She slipped an arm around Angela’s slender waist and pulled her close, nuzzling her belly with her nose.

Angela stepped back, her voice tight. “Not right now, baby. The cramping.”

“I’m sorry.” Jefferson turned to her books to hide the tears that leapt to her eyes. Maybe she was near her time too. There was no reason to feel rejected. Angela was sick tonight, wasn’t she?

At the bedroom doorway Angela stopped. “Jefferson, are you going to your grandparents’ for Easter?”

They’d be playing the newest opera recording they’d bought. The house would smell like honeyed ham. The dessert Jell-O would shimmy on a flower-patterned plate. She tried to keep a wary tone from her voice as she said, “You know I have to spend the afternoon there.”

“Just checking. I’ll go to my parents’.” Angela closed the bedroom door almost too carefully. Jefferson had complained about the violence of doors slammed in anger.

She’d heard the hope, then disappointment, and finally surrender in Angela’s few words. They went through their tug-of-war each holiday, Angela ready to make a partial break from her parents, Jefferson too full of guilt. Would there ever be a time they could stay home, cook their own turkeys and hams, maybe next fall go in to see the Thanksgiving Day parade together?

She sighed into her cup of coffee. How could they love each other, be each other’s family, be all they could be to each other and to themselves while their parents were still alive? The cloud sat so heavily on her she stared at her books more than she worked on her report.

When Thanksgiving came and Angela arrived back from her parents’ place on Cannon Street, she fell crying into Jefferson’s arms.