Recognition (10 page)

You wanted this
, I told myself.
You’re the one who gave up a comfortable life in the Terran Sector
to become an Eclipsian. Nobody forced you. But it had happened so
quickly there had been no time to think it through or imagine what
I had chosen.

Two days ago—
two days ago!
—I had
been a Terran, working as an information manager, living in a
heated apartment, rarely venturing farther than the Protectorate
Headquarters a short walk away on Terran-style paved sidewalks. Now
I was riding on an animal, a sturdy little mountain pony suitable
for a woman traveling in hilly terrain. My clothes were drenched, I
was shivering under my borrowed cloak—I who am never cold—and I was
near the end of my strength. When, late in the evening, we reached
the gate of La Sapienza, only the quick action of a sympathetic
guard prevented me from landing flat on my back in the mud as I
dismounted.

My one friend was gone soon enough. The
guards who had escorted us were dismissed with thanks and directed
to a hostel in the nearby town.

Once inside the great hall I was too
exhausted to take in much of my surroundings. What looked like an
enormous company had turned out to welcome me, the unique Terran
woman, gifted enough to merit admission to this citadel of
knowledge, but they were a blur of faces and strange compound
Eclipsian names. ‘Gravina Ertegun, for all her sardonic amusement
at my lack of conditioning, recognized my state of near collapse
and sent me to my assigned room. I gobbled the tray of food that
had been left for me and, peeling off my sodden clothes, fell
gratefully into the soft bed piled with blankets and topped with a
quilt.

I had thought I would be too nervous to sleep
in a strange place, wondering what I had let myself in for, but I
was out before I had time to think. For once, I was in a room that
was cold enough for my body to relax, and the twenty-six-hour cycle
of the Eclipsian day left me time enough to sleep out and wake up
naturally, refreshed and ready for new experiences.

Almost ready. I opened my eyes to see a
non-human being staring down at me with round, feral eyes. It stood
on two legs, but slightly crouching, like an ape. It was covered
with fur in a mottled gray and black pattern, and had a long,
ringed tail like a lemur. The face was a disturbing mix of features
and expression: part cat, part primate—and part human. I shut my
eyes and lay still. Perhaps the dream would fade if I ignored
it.

And now for something completely
different!

Like most readers, I enjoy many different
genres and styles. T.T. Thomas sets her pitch-perfect stories in
the world of California lesbians, just long enough ago to seem more
exotic than Eclipsis to this 21
st
-century
Brooklynite. Her writing is witty without being arch and sexy
without being coarse.

Here’s a preview of Thomas’s
Two Weeks at
Gay Banana Hot Springs
.

By

T.T. Thomas

Dear Diary,

G.U.T.A.S.A.H.B. (This will be the official
acronym for Got up, Took a Swim And Had Breakfast).

So! GUTASAHB (pronounced goo-ta-sob), and
then a quick fluff and fold of the psyche,
a.k.a.
a phone
call to Mother who was preoccupied or afflicted--I never can
discern which, but she is rarely anything but either. The
distinctive line between the two concepts, after decades of
squinting at it, blurs badly for eyes too myopic to have the watery
sexiness near-sightedness causes in its earlier stages, right after
night blindness but a good quarter century before cataracts.

After the phone call, in which l concluded
very little, if anything, could ever be done to help Mother, I
jazzercised my way into the dressing room and proceeded to prepare
myself for yet another in an on-going series of positively grueling
luncheons at Daddy’s club, hoping against all hope I wouldn’t run
into Daddy. I didn’t realize what I would actually run into was far
worse than mere Daddy.

When l slid open the closet door, a flaming
red silk shirt and pants from somewhere in France screamed to go to
the club, so of course I ignored them. I reached to the back of my
closet and pulled out a five-dollar outfit of virginal white. The
razor-sharp, double-pleated trousers and manly-tailored jacket were
picked up at the Pasadena branch of the Salvation Army.

How were any of us to know that a few years
later, the Army outlets would be merely one of the many and ever
popular recycled clothing boutiques outsmarting the name-brand
retail chains by a score of a hundred to one? For me, it was a
choice between the Army outlet and St. Vincent de Paul’s, and
everyone knew the Catholics did not wear expensive clothes to begin
with, making these same clothes all the more dilapidated by the
time they reached charity. Conversely, while the Protestants’ style
was a bit too conservative for my tastes, the Pasadena Protestants
bought expensive conservative, so basically what I had was a barely
worn Hart, Schaffner and Marx white summer suit instead of a
thread-bare, standard-issue, blue blazer and grey slacks suitable
for Sunday Mass.

Once every few months I’d tell my mother I
was going to visit a friend in Pasadena, casually adding if she or
any of her friends had a few items for the Salvation Army, I’d be
happy to drop them off. Numerous 32 Regulars never saw
Pasadena.

My mother was not completely pleased with my
standard dress drag, but she once allowed as how I carried it off
with a certain naturalness. Surprisingly, she seemed unconcerned
that my stylistic eccentricities had earned me a minor degree of
infamy among her friends. I never knew whether to be amused or
alarmed when more than one woman of mother’s circle would look at
me as though she had just seen her husband, mistaking his old suit
for him. It’s probably a good thing more men do not realize how
many women do that. Oddly enough, I never saw a single male
recognize his old suit when I was wearing it because most emperors
have no idea what becomes of their old clothes.

To this brazen display of recalcitrant cross
dressing, I backpedaled plucklessly and added a modestly divulging
sleeveless silk shell mistakenly shipped to the local K-Mart store
on a day when I mistakenly wandered in. It was a lot of look for
the buck.

While I had not actually met the men I was
planning to out man, I had heard much about them. None of it was
kind, or even average, which, in my family, is the same thing.
Also, if I don’t like a name, I tend to hate it, and I’m not big on
moderation either. So, naturally, I had some serious attitude
adjustment work to do when I first heard the name Chester Simpson.
It sounded too sincere, and too much sincerity makes me nervous. An
accountant lately heralded from Houston, Simpson was to be
accompanied by his erstwhile client, a certain Baron Hotchkiss.
There’s a name for you.

Baron, called Bo, was hardly a real baron, so
the down-home nickname was clearly an unnecessary gesture of
reverse affectation. I felt as though I had no earthly use for
these two men, that they were somehow an imposition in my otherwise
well-manicured life. Ah, the lies I told myself.

I kept repeating to myself the end did
justify the means, and these two men had the fiscal solvency after
which I thirsted, some would say lusted; however, all metaphorical
commingling involving carnal desire and cash on the line makes me
skittish always has. The rich and the poor know what I mean.

I suppose my attitude about this upcoming
lunch could be called opportunistic posturing, or just attitude,
since after all, I was the one who needed the money. Still one must
never appear as though one is coming from hunger, as it were,
though I do favor mixing the money and food symbolism over all
others. Speaking of motivation, I hoped my mother’s life-long
insistence on civility would help me to keep the more desperate and
pathetic edges of panic out of my voice. I hoped, too, the response
to me would be civil and not so utterly kind as to humiliate me. Of
course, these days, it is no longer possible to accurately predict
good or bad behavior by either good or bad manners, which is
somewhat of a shame for the simple reason it was easier when one
could.

Anyway, as I performed this ritual of vanity,
I mentally reviewed the contents of the report prepared for me by
my father’s accountancy corporation relative to the Messes. Simpson
and Hopscotch. All accountancy corporations handling a rich man’s
affairs have at least one enterprising young upstart who is willing
to go to quite extraordinary lengths to aid the rich man’s
someday-to-be-rich daughter. The young idealist who decided to
hitch his wagon to my star was Jerry Sweeney. Thus did I receive
the rather extensive and wonderfully informative report on my two
lunch mates.

Simpson, it seemed, had been a college chum
of Hopscotch, and although the former finished his studies, the
latter did not; nevertheless, it was Simpson who went bankrupt and
he reputedly did so with the Hopscotch dough, a veritable small
fortune amassed through some shady speculation on shale deposits
underneath the Merrimac Caverns in Missouri.

The James Gang once lived in the caverns when
the boys were on the lam from marshals who forgot to look down. Bo
was fascinated with the gun-slinging, felonious activities of
wild-west crooks. That should have been an early clue all was not
O.K. at the corral.

But we had a singular common bond. After all,
I’m a blood relative of Daddy, one of the biggest swindlers of the
century, a chronic condition brought about no doubt, by his direct
descendant lineage from Sally H. Butler his great-grandmother, who
shot and wounded her boyfriend, a sheriff in Jacksonville,
Illinois. According to the gossipmongers, she had found him
in
flagrante delicto
with the local milliner’s wife who,
alarmingly, was a man. I always thought those old-fashioned hats
had more feather boas going on than any real woman could credibly
consider comfortable.

While perusing some old west memorabilia in
which the shale deposits were mentioned, Hopscotch came up with the
idea for Merrimac Cavern Shale and Oil Holding Company of Missouri.
The MerriMac, as it became known in brokerage circles, held the
lease to some of the oldest shale deposits in North America.

What potential investors heard, however, was
that the MerriMac was the best-kept, moneymaking secret this side
of the Atlantic. Hopscotch knew people hear what they want to hear.
Armed with a phone script that would become a prototype for the
telemarketing mania of the late eighties and nineties, his phone
jockeys began calling the preferred list of clients whose
outstanding common denominator was they had fallen for scams like
this one in the past.

How do I know this? Daddy is a partner in a
brokerage house, somewhere on the East coast, and he was
discounting before it was fashionable. The combination of discount
and deference is too much for many people to resist.

“It’s a numbers game, Ret,” Daddy always
said, adding, “If you call enough fools, someone’s gonna agree to
pay the phone bill. Don’t forget that,” he said. I thought of my
currently past due phone bill and wondered for the millionth time
if I were adopted.

Before anyone could say MerriMac a dozen
times, the stock was practically a blue chip caliber issue.
Somehow, despite everything being technically on the up and up,
nobody made any money except Hopscotch. Simpson subsequently
squandered the same money on numerous deals that went tapioca.

In the end, though, friendship being what it
is these days, with everyone so terribly flighty and awfully damn
forgiving about it, if you ask me, Hotchkiss simply prevailed upon
Simpson to find one final investment opportunity.

Frankly, I didn’t give a tinker’s damn about
either man’s spiritual integrity, so long as they maintained some
semblance of mannerly mediocrity, and, of course, came up with the
money necessary to save the Gay Banana. The situation with the
mortgage payments could have been worse, I suppose, but only in the
sense it was unlikely a bank I owned would foreclose me--or rather,
a bank I would someday own, which is almost the same thing, isn’t
it?

“Not exactly,” commented Mr. Walters, the
banker. “Naturally, we wouldn’t dream of foreclosing on you until
every single courtesy has been extended.”

Bad news delivered in mild tones makes me
feel as though I’ve underestimated the extent of the damage and
what I’m hearing is, in fact, tragic news I haven’t yet grasped. I
asked Mr. Walters to
qu’est que ce
the phrase “has been
extended.”

“That would be about five to seven weeks,” he
calculated, “...uh, from the end of last month.”

As I think now of that day I sat nervously
across from Mr. Walters, I realize neither of us, then, really
thought things would reach disaster proportions. Before hitting
bottom, we both assured me, I would raise the money to save the Gay
Banana from the itchy hands of its original owner, Daddy.

Yes: Daddy. I was supposedly given, and I use
the verb lightly, the Gay Banana as a test of my ability on a
microeconomic scale to someday run Daddy’s macroeconomic Empire.
Well, one woman’s gift is another man’s sport.

Having given me the chance of a lifetime,
Daddy then proceeded to give me the scare of my life. Without
warning, explanation or apparent justification, he became obsessed
with running me out of business. Even his own business associates
thought his behavior strange and bizarre.