Love & Lies: Marisol's Story (20 page)

“Oh, my God,” Birdie said, throwing his head back.
“Did you
see
him? He looked right at me!”

“He was looking at me,” Damon said with certainty.

“I don’t
think
so!” Birdie said, hands on his hips.

It gave them something to argue about until we got to Bubala’s, the restaurant where I’d gotten us reservations.

“Can we eat outside? Please?” Birdie begged the hunky guy at the desk. We were escorted to a table near the sidewalk, where we could watch the singer across the street, dressed in drag and belting out torch songs, accompanying himself on a portable keyboard. The food was so good Lee and I could ignore the boys’ heated discussion about what kind of wig looked best on a tall man with a five o’clock shadow.

“I never imagined there was any place like this,” Lee said. “With the ocean and the dunes and the art galleries and all these
gay
people! This is heaven on earth.”

“I know,” I said, nodding. “That’s why I wanted you to see it. There are a lot of us, Lee, and we know how to have fun!”

The dinner was great, and I even managed to talk Lee into sharing some tiramisu with me afterwards. Since Birdie was watching both his own weight and Damon’s, they left before dessert arrived to go look at some paper lamps in a nearby shop.

Once we were alone, I found myself stealing little glances at Lee while she was eating. She looked so relaxed, and happier than I’d ever seen her. Her face was glowing from the afternoon sun, and when she looked up and saw me watching her, her slightly embarrassed smile was adorable.

“You’ve been so great to me, Marisol. I know I keep
thanking you and it sounds dumb, but I really mean it.”

“Come on, Lee. You don’t need to—”

“I know I don’t, but I want to. I
have
to.” She put her hand on my leg under the table—it was just a light touch, but it seemed electrified. “You probably know that I have kind of a crush on you. I guess it’s because I’m so new at this, but I can’t quite read your signals. Last night, at your parents’ house, I brought up Olivia because I was hoping you’d tip your hand a little, but you didn’t. I mean, are you really
with
her or what? You told your mother it was not a big deal, so I thought maybe . . . I don’t know, I think you like me, but maybe you just want to be friends. Anyway, I wanted to tell you, if you were open to more than that . . .” She let the sentence hang in the air.

I was afraid to look into her eyes, and if we’d been alone, I don’t think I would have dared. But at the noisy restaurant, with Birdie and Damon across the street, and tragic falsetto tunes being belted out a few yards away, it seemed safe.

Wrong. What I saw in her eyes was the same thing I’d seen in Gio’s eyes the night of the prom last spring. Hope. Sadness. Love.

When Gio had told me he loved me, I’d gotten mad at him. He knew I was a lesbian, knew it was never going to happen that way for us. And he’d pushed it anyway. I’d seen it as male arrogance or heterosexual balls, that he thought I could be straight, would
want
to be straight, for him. But now that I’d announced my emotions to Olivia, I realized how hard it could be to hold back those words when they
were ready to come out. Why shouldn’t Lee hope that our friendship might become more than that? It might even have happened, if I hadn’t met Olivia.

I was determined not to hurt Lee, not to ruin our friendship the way I’d almost ruined it with Gio. I squeezed her hand and scooted my chair closer to hers.

“Thank you,” I said. “You’re already a great friend, Lee, and I hope you always will be. But the thing is, I
am
still seeing Olivia, and it’s pretty serious.”

A veil fell over her eyes. “It is? You never talk about her.”

I tightened my grip on her hand. “Well, I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

Lee looked into her lap. “You knew how I felt?”

“Lee, I’m flattered,” I said. “And you know I like you. Hell, I wouldn’t have asked you to come on this weekend if I didn’t like you a lot!”

She nodded. “I know. It’s fine. I just kept telling myself that if you were bringing me to Provincetown and not her . . .”

“Maybe, if I hadn’t met Olivia . . .” I said, hoping she would fill in the blank. Instead, she just looked into my eyes, a penetrating look, as if she were searching for all my deep-down secrets.

And then, I don’t know quite how it happened, all of a sudden I leaned in and kissed her. At the moment it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Inevitable. And she kissed me back, and for about thirty seconds I totally forgot what I was doing.

Eventually panic arrived, but it was just a little late. I broke off the kiss and sat back in my chair, my heart thumping.

“Whoa,” I said. “That was . . . I shouldn’t have . . .”

“No, I know,” Lee said, picking nervously at her bangs. “It was my fault anyway.”

“It wasn’t anybody’s
fault
,” I said, waving away her apology. “I mean, hey, what’s a kiss between friends? No big deal, right?” I licked my lips and found that the taste of her still lingered there.

“Right.” Lee smiled weakly but didn’t look at me. She pointed to the chocolate-coated dessert that stood between us. “You haven’t eaten any tiramisu,” she said. “Don’t make me eat it all.”

I picked up my fork but barely knew what to do with it.

“Olivia must be great not to mind you coming down here without her,” Lee said, as she chased a blob of cream around her plate.

I try so hard to be truthful with people. I used to think it was easy—I took pride in my policy of honesty-at-any-price. But the older I get, the more it seems like telling the truth isn’t always such a straightforward business. Sometimes it’s hard to know exactly what the truth
is
. And sometimes it takes a lot of explanation to get at the actual truth. True is not always the exact opposite of false.

“She probably
would
mind if she knew you were here,” I said, finally. “She wasn’t happy that I was going at all, so I didn’t fill her in on all the details.”

This news perked Lee up a little bit. “Oh. Would she be jealous if she knew I was here?”

Would she? Was she jealous when she thought I was going with Gio? Or was she just angry at my disloyalty?

“She’d be hurt that I didn’t tell her,” I said, ducking the question.

Just thinking of her seemed to bring Olivia’s ghost to the table. I could feel her watching me, taking in the situation. Had I lied to her? Sort of. But hadn’t it been necessary? What if she hadn’t understood the truth? She certainly wouldn’t have understood why I’d kissed Lee. I hated thinking about how angry Olivia would be if she knew that, but, like it or not, the thought of her had invaded my heart. Which made the tiramisu taste a little bit off.

Thank God Birdie hadn’t seen the kiss. At least I’d be spared his pronouncements on my shameless behavior. Why had I kissed Lee? You don’t kiss someone when you’re trying to convince them that you’re serious about someone else! It was the way she’d looked at me, so seriously, as if I meant so much to her. I couldn’t resist.

But when you’re in love with someone else, you
have
to resist. For God’s sake, I’d hardly kissed anybody before this week, but now that the switch had been flipped, I was apparently willing to kiss everybody! No, that wasn’t fair either—there
was
something between me and Lee, but it was something I couldn’t let myself dwell on. I had a girlfriend; I didn’t need another one. It wasn’t fair to Olivia
or
Lee.

When we walked into Butterfield’s at ten thirty, the place was just starting to fill up. Diana had told us that things didn’t really get going until around eleven at the dance bars. She and Gio showed up about fifteen minutes after we did, and we managed to commandeer a table right on the edge of the dance floor, where we could watch the action.

Birdie and Damon started dancing immediately, both of them big show-offs with limited abilities—the kind of dancers you try not to get too close to for fear of being whacked in the head by a far-flung arm. Gio and Diana danced too, more sedately but not without their own sexiness, while Lee and I held down the table and watched the choreography in an uncomfortable silence. Gio and Diana came back first, breathing heavily.

“You two should dance now,” Diana said. “We’ll guard the table.”

“I’m not much of a dancer,” Lee said.

“That’s what I said the first time I came here too,” Gio told her. “Nobody cares what you look like. It’s just fun.”

She looked nervously at the dance floor, now filled with sweaty bodies gyrating to “I Love the Nightlife.”

It was Lee’s hesitance, that shy puppy quality, that I found attractive. Oddly, she was the exact opposite of Olivia in that respect. I really wanted to dance with Lee—what harm was there in a little booty-shaking, anyway? Maybe it would help us get past the weirdness of the kiss.

“What kind of music is this?” Lee wanted to know.

“Disco,” I said. “And this is one of the last places on earth it hasn’t been outlawed.” I stood up and put out my hand. “Come on.”

“Why don’t you dance with Gio?” she said. “I’ll watch.”

“We’ll all three dance together,” Gio said, hauling Lee from her seat. “That way I won’t look so boringly heterosexual.”

I turned to check on Diana to see if this was okay with her and was happy to see that she seemed fine with the idea—
obviously this weekend was making her feel more secure about her relationship with Gio. I took Lee’s other hand and we pulled her out onto the floor.

Gio and I jumped into the music, each of us holding one of Lee’s hands. But it only took her a minute to fling us off and start to dance on her own. She was a perfectly good dancer, although a little embarrassed at first. But as the music pounded into our hearts, all three of us threw off our inhibitions and boogied like crazy. We danced from the edge of the crowd into the middle and out on the other side, our arms waving in the air. Lee’s smile looked genuine again, which was a big relief—she seemed to have absorbed both my rebuff and the confusing kiss without too much damage. Just as the song was reaching its fevered conclusion, my eyes swept the crowd at the edge of the dance floor with a challenging look, as if I were saying,
I’m shaking my butt in front of the whole world, and you, chicken shit, are just standing there like a telephone pole.
Because, after all, dancing is 90 percent attitude, right?

But something caught my eye, stopped my gaze from roaming, and held it steady. There was a woman staring at me as I whirled in circles, an
enraged
woman, and she was no ghost. I turned back to look at her again. Yes, indeed, it was Olivia.

Jesus Christ, what was she doing here? As soon as she knew I’d seen her, she turned and plowed back through the crowd toward the door. I stopped dancing so fast I almost fell over.

“Wait! Olivia!” I yelled as I took off after her, but the music was just segueing into an eardrum-bursting version of “If I Can’t Have You,” and everybody started singing along.
It was a good thing Olivia was wearing a red blouse, because it helped me catch glimpses of her as she stalked off. Once we were outside, I yelled to her.

“Olivia! Stop! Let me talk to you!”

She pulled herself up in the middle of the alley and turned to wait for me to catch up to her. I don’t know when I’ve ever seen anybody look that angry.

“I didn’t know you were thinking of coming down here,” I said.

“That’s obvious. I wasn’t ‘thinking’ of it, until I noticed that both you
and
your boyfriend skipped my class this morning. Imagine my surprise to find you both here together, sweating to the oldies.” She spit out the final words: “You lied to me, Marisol.”

“I didn’t!”

She leaned into my face and hissed, “There is nothing I despise more than a woman who pretends to be a lesbian, but then the minute a man shows up, she’s suddenly straight as a ruler.”

“That’s not what happened. I’m not like that! I was planning to come with Birdie and Damon, and Gio was going to visit his girlfriend in Truro. It was a coincidence. When we realized we were all coming here the same weekend, we decided to drive down together, that’s all.”

She stared hard into my eyes, trying to decide whether or not to believe me. “Isn’t that cozy?” she said finally, her voice low and thick as tar.

“It’s the truth.” My eyes were doing their best Labrador retriever impression, begging for forgiveness.

“And where are Birdie and Damon now?”

“They’re inside, dancing. Come on, I’ll show you.”

She didn’t budge. “You better be telling me the truth, Marisol.”

“I am!”

The fury drained away from her, but it left behind a residue of suspicion. “You should have told me,” she said.

“I know,” I said, chewing on my cheek. “I’m sorry.”

“So, is that Gio’s girlfriend?” she said, motioning back toward Butterfield’s. “The one who was flailing around with the two of you on the dance floor?”

“Um, the girl we were dancing with?” I said, stalling for time. It was immediately clear to me that I would have to lie or face further fury. Olivia had met Diana at the arts fair a few weeks ago, but obviously she hadn’t paid much attention to her. So, the question was not whether to lie, but whether I could get away with the lie. How the mighty had fallen.

“Yeah, yes, that’s her,” I said, becoming the liar I had just begged Olivia to believe I was not.

She shook her head. “I thought you were coming down here with two gay guys, Marisol. Not an entire gay-straight alliance.”

“They’re just my friends, Olivia. Don’t be mad at me.”

“How am I supposed to trust you, after this?”

“After
what
? I haven’t done anything!”

“You’ve let me down. You’ve hurt my feelings. You aren’t the person I thought you were.”

Tears started to gush from my eyes when she said that, maybe because I wasn’t the person
I
thought I was either. “I
never meant to hurt your feelings. Please, Olivia! I’m so sorry!”