Club Storyville (31 page)

“Ariel,” I declared, because I had made a promise to myself, and a vow to Ariel she didn’t know about. If I was going to be with her, I was going to own it. I wasn’t going to lie. And I was never going to be ashamed to say her name.

Every bit as shocked as I anticipated, Scott stared at me with a look I suspected was similar to the one he wore as he watched the mortar that took his leg off come in. Remembering every word he and Edward had ever said about poofs and queers outside polite company, I wondered what Scott would choose to call me when the truth sunk in.

Watching him open his mouth, I braced for it, his judgment, to come, wondering if I could endure it when it did. “Is that it?” he asked, sinking back against the bench, a soldier at ease, and, laughing in distress, I was sure he wasn’t comprehending what it was I was telling him.

“I mean, that’s not nothing,” Scott went on to assure me he did. “It’s everything. But is that what you’ve been so afraid to tell me?” he asked, and I knew he didn’t just mean since he’d been home, but since I had cried on his shoulder on the porch swing.

“You’re not… bothered?” I risked asking, though the words I had to discard in my mind to get to the question – disgusted, repulsed, ashamed – gave me little hope I would ever find comfort in my own skin again, and, feeling the tears that ran down my face, they didn’t turn to relief until Scott shook his head.

“No,” he said. “A little jealous maybe.” But I didn’t believe him until he waved me over to the bench, pulling me closer like nothing had changed when I sat down too far away. “You know what, Lizzie?” he said. “I left here thinking I knew everything about everything, and I came home knowing I know nothing about anything. I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong or you’re a bad person, if that’s what you think.”

“Would you have felt that way before?” I questioned him, though I knew I didn’t want to know.

“I don’t know, Lizzie,” Scott admitted. “There are things that change people, that make them a little better. That’s good, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I uttered. “It’s good.” And it occurred to me it didn’t matter what Scott might have said before he went off to war, because I couldn’t even know what I would have done or thought if I had never gone with Ariel to New Orleans.

“Do Mom and Dad know?” Scott sounded scared for me.

“Yes,” I nodded, looking off toward the house, worried Mama had cornered Ariel somewhere and gotten her fangs in her.

“What did they say?”

“Daddy wanted us to stay,” I told Scott, and, nodding, he didn’t seem half as surprised as I had been. “Mama hasn’t said anything. She’s ashamed.” No other word that fit, I was forced to use it, regardless of how it made me feel.

“She worries what other people think,” Scott summed up Mama’s entire life.

“Of course, she does,” I returned.

True to Daddy’s word, though, Mama also hadn’t said anything when she walked into the living room one night and caught Ariel and I kissing. Blinking, as if she couldn’t quite compute lesbian affection, she simply turned around and walked back out of the room.

“Well, that’s one way to get privacy,” Ariel had uttered in the aftermath, and, laughing, I had kissed her again.

“She’s not wrong to worry,” Scott declared, and I knew that was true too. “People are… they can be cruel, Lizzie. Are you going to be able to handle this? Can you take it?”

“Better than I can take being without her,” I responded, feeling more convinced of Scott’s true opinion when that made him smile.

“Will you let me marry Ariel?” he asked, and the question completely unexpected, it was also surprisingly unwelcome. Anger and envy warring within me, I felt as if Scott was trying to steal Ariel away, though I trusted he would never do such a thing.

“What?” I breathed.

“If I marry her,” Scott returned reasonably, “there will be nothing for anyone to think.”

“What if you meet someone?” It was the first good reason I could find against it.

“Who’s going to want me?” Scott said, looking toward the folded pant cuff where his leg used to be, and it wasn’t like him at all, to imagine the worst possible future.

“Scott, you could still have…” A normal life, that was what I was going to say, but the offer turned bitter on my tongue, because Scott could have that, but I couldn’t. He could even marry Ariel if he wanted, regardless of the fact he didn’t love her, not the way I did.

“Let me protect you,” he said. “Please. I can keep you safe.”

Scott was so dedicated to the idea, though I hated it, I couldn’t just tell him no.

“I’ll ask her,” I said, accepting that it would make things easier on everyone, eliminating so many questions, suspicions and worries, I at least had to let Ariel have a say.

“A
bsolutely not,” Ariel’s say was loud, and I thought her head would twist clean off her shoulders in response to Scott’s offer.

“He just wants to help,” I said, though with admitted difficulty as Ariel pulled her clothes off in the moonlight that streamed through the window. Watching her skin appear patches at a time, I wondered if I would ever get used to the sight of her undressing.

“I understand that,” Ariel said. “And I understand how it might make things easier.” Pulling her shirt from her wrists, she shook it out in her bra before turning to put it on a hanger. “I don’t want to make this harder on everyone, but I won’t marry someone I do not love.”

Jumping as my fingers touched her skin, Ariel was surprised at how I had been drawn across the room by my need to touch her.

“Okay,” I said, but it wasn’t how I felt. I wasn’t okay with Ariel not wanting to marry Scott. I was elated. Because she was mine, and I had shared a lot with Scott in my life, but I had no desire to share her that way, even if it was only in name and on a piece of paper.

Ariel’s arms sliding over my shoulders, her lips met mine with an urgency that always assured me she truly did want to be there, despite the difficulties we were bound to face, that there was enough wonder between us to counteract all the sacrifice.

Ariel was never going to marry. Neither was I. It was something we would simply both have to give up to be together.

F
eeling the metal band turn beneath my fingers, I know I need to take it off of her, before it falls off and gets lost, but Ariel has a sense for that ring. Every time I’ve asked someone to remove it, her hand tightens into a fist like she’s ready to punch out whoever tries.

Nan told me the world changed, but I don’t think even she would have guessed how much. Because Ariel and I did get married after all. Some of our younger friends helped us get back up to New York three days after the law went into effect.

We went by train. It seemed appropriate.

The oldest people at our city hall, we were ushered to the front of the line to applause and a quip we might not make it to married if we had to wait very long.

“That’s all right,” Ariel responded to the jokester officiant. “Why do you think we came up here so fast?”

And sixty-seven years after we said ‘I promise you forever,’ we finally said ‘I do.’

A
riel and I had survived the Cold War and the Lavender Scare of the McCarthy Era. We watched the world change under the Civil Rights movement.

If there was a single moment in history I wished Nan had made it to see, it was when Rosa Parks decided to hold her ground on that bus.

Later, in 1963, when black people marched on Washington, yet another Desmond Caster, Cousin Desmond’s son, stayed with us with some of his college friends on their way through Richmond, and, though Mama was still clinging hard to the ways of the past, I knew if Daddy hadn’t died four years earlier, he would have seen the business of the world changing.

That was the same year Scott married Melinda. She had served in the Army Nurse Corps in Korea, and they met at the VA when Scott was getting fitted for a new prosthesis.

“I knew you’d just been looking for your own nurse this whole time,” I teased him when he told me he was going to propose.

“Well, you swear by yours,” Scott returned, watching Ariel and Mama argue about something across the room. “I figured, I should take it as a lesson.”

When he moved out, I really expected Mama to go with him, to seize the chance she at last had to get away from Ariel and I and the curse we’d brought upon her house.

She was settled where she was, though, that was what Mama said.

Men went to the stars, just like Ariel told me they would, there were riots at Stonewall, and the Civil Rights movement closed in around us.

Not long after Scott’s kidneys started to fail, AIDS grew into an epidemic. They were still calling it GRIDS, gay-related immunodeficiency syndrome, as if the being gay was the cause, when Ariel came to me just a year after she retired.

“I want to go to New York,” she said.

“All right,” I responded, because it wasn’t so unusual for us to just go. We had been to New York before, to Chicago to visit Ariel’s mother in her nursing home, to Florida, to California, and back to New Orleans several times. We even took Scott when he wanted to meet Desmond. “When do you want to go?”

“As soon as we can,” Ariel said, hesitating for a moment. “I want to move there.”

“Move?” I remember thinking she was crazy. It wasn’t that I had never thought of moving someplace other than Richmond and Nan’s big house. I had just reached an age when I didn’t think it was going to happen.

I understood why, though, Ariel wanted to go. At the time, the disease posed a terrible risk to anyone who worked around it, and she thought she should be the one to take it, instead of younger nurses who had more life left to live, and, since it was considered a gay disease, she knew no one else would care.

Melinda’s hands were full with her own work and taking Scott to dialysis, and since I was retiring from teaching to go with Ariel, I would have little to do, so, when it came down to it, Mama had missed her chance to get away from us.

“I ain’t lost a thing in New York,” she said when we told her she was coming with us. “I’ll stay here. I can take care of myself.”

“You cannot stay here alone,” I responded.

“I don’t want to go up there with all those people!” Mama said, but it wasn’t just numbers with Mama. It was the types of people that scared her, so many, so unlike her, as if she was a model human being.

“Maybe she’ll die soon, and won’t have to worry about it long,” I griped to Ariel after a particularly heated argument in which I told Mama she was going if I had to tie her up in the trunk to get her there.

“Don’t say that,” Ariel said softly to me. “You’ll regret it when she’s gone.”

Realizing Ariel was thinking of her own mother and how we’d gotten to Chicago just a little too late when the nursing home called to tell Ariel she should come, I felt the raging guilt I deserved.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s all right,” Ariel responded. “I mean, tying your mother up in the trunk for the duration of the drive sounds like an ideal way to travel to me, but I’m sure there are several laws against it.”

T
he sound of the door startles me, and my hand flies to my heart. It’s failing, I can feel it, and it has been for a while, but my reflexes, at least, are still good.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Are you okay?” the young black woman asks me, putting her hand on my shoulder. She’s a big girl with a bouncy personality and dark curls that bounce right along with it.

“I’ll live,” I tell her, and I know that’s what she worries about. One of us tied to life by a thread, the other just damn old, I know the staff is never sure which of us will go first.

“You’re her wife, right?” the woman asks me, and, after nearly three years, I find I still can’t get used to a term denied me for more than sixty.

“Yes,” I say. “I am.”

“How long have you two been a couple?” she asks in a rather intrigued way, and I know it’s because someone so young can’t get her head around ever being as old as Ariel and me.

There was a time I couldn’t have imagined it.

“Seventy years,” I answer.

“Seventy years?” the girl looks positively aghast. “What were you, two, when you met?”

Snorting, I feel Ariel’s ring turn in time with the roll of my eyes.

“Don’t flatter me,” I reply, and the woman laughs along with me. “Are you a nurse?” I ask her, because I have been spending a lot of time at Ariel’s bedside these days and I don’t remember ever seeing her.

“No, Ma’am,” she says. “I just come to visit.”

“You come here to visit my wife?” I send a warning glance her way.

“It’s very professional,” she assures me with a smile.

“What do you do when you visit?” I ask her.

“I just talk to her,” the woman says. “Sometimes I sing.”

“What do you sing?”

“R&B,” she answers. “Popular music.”

Shaking my head, I encourage her not to start, and she laughs again, not a single hard feeling at my dismissal of her repertoire.

“Do you know ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’?” I ask, turning the ring right on Ariel’s hand.

“No, Ma’am, I don’t,” she sounds apologetic.

“If you get a chance, learn it, would you?” I whisper. “It’s Ariel’s favorite song.”

A
IDS truly was a suffering disease, but its greatest suffering wasn’t the pain, or even the stealing of one’s life. It was the stealing of one’s dignity.

“It’s not the medicine they need most,” Ariel said one night after a particularly difficult day in which two of her patients had succumbed, more to the loss of hope, I knew she thought, than to their sickness. “It’s the belief they haven’t been abandoned.”

So, when she worked her shifts, I started going to visit her patients, dragging Mama with me, much to her distaste. For weeks, she sat silent in the common room at the hospice, trying not to be touched. Then, one day, just like that, she started talking to the people with whom she was forced to share space.

I wasn’t around to see how it happened, but I imagined one of those handsome, young gay men found something to say that Mama wanted to hear, and she couldn’t help but say something back.

For the first time, I realized Mama could actually be friends with people beyond the social niceties she had always exchanged with other ladies out of obligation.