Substitute for Love (5 page)

“If there weren’t so many women dressing the way you do people might think ill of you. But it seems like more than half the women I see are just like you.”

“What do you mean by ill of me?” Holly was amused by her Aunt’s vehement turn of phrase.

“They might think — well, look at you. That you didn’t want men to find you attractive.”

“I don’t — I’m with Clay. I don’t care what people think. I know what I am.”

“Can’t you make a little effort,” her aunt wheedled. “Your hair just needs a little highlight —”

“Lord, no. Too much maintenance.” She had a sudden thought. Wickedly, she added, “The woman who was fired today, you would have approved of her, though. She always looked very feminine. But it didn’t help her keep her job.”

“I’m sure they had good cause. There was no reason for you to act so precipitously.”

“They fired her because she’s a lesbian.” She smiled a little at the way the word shook the air in her aunt’s chilly foyer.

She lost the smile when she realized her aunt had gone pale. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” her aunt said tightly. “They’ll think you’re one, too. Did you ever stop to think of that?”

She had, for a nanosecond. “I know I’m not, so what does it matter?”

Her aunt said crossly, “You are just like her. You just don’t care.”

“I’m trying not to let other people define me. It’s hard work, but I try.”

“Just don’t socialize with this woman, or her kind. Promise me that much.” There was an edge of desperation to her aunt’s plea.

“Sorry, no can do. We’re having lunch tomorrow.”

“Holly, what are you thinking? They recruit — she’ll be after you!” Her aunt was well and truly vexed.

In the face of all that ire, Holly merely shrugged. Finally, she had managed to show her aunt she was independent. She felt petty, then, because her aunt was set in her ways, and she had upset her just to prove she could. “I don’t believe that’s true, and even if it were, they’d have no more success recruiting me than they would you.”

Instead of reassured, her aunt looked even more upset. “How dare you suggest something like that?”

“I didn’t mean — they say it could be genetic, maybe inherited —”

“You’ve upset me, you wicked girl!”

Holly froze, and many years of living with it made her quickly step back. In a heartbeat she remembered that her aunt would hardly strike her now, but for a moment she had been twelve again, and expecting the sharp blow. “I’m sorry, Aunt, that wasn’t my wish.”

Aunt Zinnia roughly opened the front door. “I want you to go.”

Holly went, and after the door closed, she found her wet shoes in the dark and plodded out to the car.

Well, she thought, that certainly went badly.

It was just six blocks from her aunt’s house to the home she’d shared with her mother until the accident. Holly wasn’t sure what made her drive by — it was dark and the rain rendered shadows impenetrable. The little house shared a courtyard with three others, but in the dark they looked like one mass of wet faux adobe under Spanish tile roofs. Theirs had been the one on the far right. None of them looked any different.

She saw an indistinct figure moving in what would be the kitchen window of the house next door to theirs. She could not even tell if it was a man or a woman, but then — with the prick of an unrecognizable emotion — she thought it had to be a woman. Maybe the same woman who had lived next door to them, all those years ago. The right height, but more than that she could not discern. Perhaps the same short hair. Another reason Aunt Zinnia had disapproved of Lily. Lily hadn’t minded living next door to a black woman.

What had been her name? A car came up behind Holly in the narrow street and she had to move on. What had been their neighbor’s name? The harder she thought the more she could only remember thick, sweet hot chocolate, warmth and the sound of voices in companionable conversation.

Drive-thru Chinese, a vegetarian chow mein loaded with broccoli and bok choy, was the answer to the indulgence in red meat. It was too awkward to eat and drive, so she let the rain pelt down as she sat in the parking lot. Belatedly she remembered the new Gypsy Kings, and she turned it up very loud. By the time she finished she had recovered her sense of humor. Aunt Zinnia was a bitter old woman and prone to taking everything the wrong way.

Heading home, she risked taking 22 to 1-5, but had to leave the freeway long before she connected back to the 405. Instead, she followed Barranca Parkway past the Marine Corps air station and caught Culver into the heart of Irvine. She made a quick stop at the organic market near campus, soaking her feet for hopefully the last time that day, and drove through the park to the cul de sac they lived on, just off Turtle Rock Drive.

It was a house they were fortunate to have. Clay’s father had made the large down payment necessary for an affordable mortgage payment. They also lived simply, so Holly had been paying extra every month to be debt-free all the sooner. Living simply was hard to do in a consumerist society, but they worked at it, Clay especially. He didn’t mind wearing mended clothes. She thought guiltily of the mile-high mending stack. That was definitely something she could tackle between jobs.

His stolid Volvo was in the driveway, and Holly had a thrill of excitement, imagining Clay’s approval of her decision to support Tori. Normally he was not pleased with her impetuous nature, no more than Aunt Zinnia ever was.

She set the groceries on the counter and smelled incense. Clay was meditating. Quietly, she did the dishes, tidied the living room, started a load of laundry and watered the plants. Just as she was finishing with the last bank of African violets in the deep kitchen window, Clay emerged from his study.

He looked just as he always looked, unconsciously graceful and at peace with himself. Tall and ascetic, he hadn’t liked it when she said he had perfected the Tortured Thinker look, but it was true. As a teenager, she had found the brooding eyes devastating and they were still attractive. She didn’t like his beard, but it had been a long time since she’d told him so. It grew so thick and fast that shaving was an enormous chore.

“You’re later than usual,” he said.

“I was visiting with Aunt Zinnia.”

“Any luck?”

“Oh no, we had quite an argument. She was upset with me — you’ll never guess why.”

“You spoke to someone who isn’t white.” He turned from the refrigerator with a carton of cottage cheese in one hand.

Holly grinned. “Guess again.”

“You mentioned environmentalism.”

“I’ll give you one last guess. It’s a hummer.” She stowed the watering can under the sink and watched him take a spoon from the cutlery drawer.

“You told her your mother wasn’t a self-centered bitch.”

She laughed. “No, but we did fight about my mother.”

“Then what?” He leaned against the counter and crossed his ankles.

“Are you ready?”

He swallowed and signaled consent with his spoon.

“I quit my job.”

His face went still. “What?”

“I quit my job. Ask me why.” She could not stop grinning.

Flushing, he asked, “Why?”

“Because they blatantly fired a co-worker because she was gay. They even made up some crap about her being tardy, as if that mattered, but it was really because she was gay. I told them if she went, I would go, too. So…” She shrugged one shoulder.

In a flat voice, he said, “You had one of your brainstorms.”

The phrase echoed in Holly’s head, most of all because she hadn’t anticipated it.

When did you send away for the application, he had wanted to know. She replied that it had just seemed like a good idea, and look what it had gotten her, admission to MIT. You had one of your brainstorms, he said firmly. You gave in to an impulse without thinking it through.

“Yes,” she answered. “I suppose I did. It was the right thing to do. It’s not right to fire someone because they’re gay”

“Did you stop to think at all?”

He was out of patience with her. But… but she didn’t know what she had done wrong. It’s always something, Jo seemed to whisper.

She had applied to MIT’s masters program because her undergraduate advisor had urged her to do it. But she hadn’t thought it through. Clay set out the issues for her, calmly and clearly. What good is a master’s degree in something as anti-humanist as mathematics? Math is how they build bombs and waste money on space stations. Math is how they use statistics to pretend homelessness doesn’t exist and that everyone who wants a job has one. Math is how five dollars an hour is equated to a living wage. What was the point of a master’s degree in that? And a doctorate? MIT just wanted her mind, just wanted to exploit her on the altar of capitalism…

His arguments went round and round in her mind.

He walked with her to the mailbox but said nothing, made no gesture. It was her own hand that pulled down the lid, and her own hand that deposited her letter declining the scholarship and degree program MIT had offered. The lid swung shut with a loud clang.

As they had walked back to the student dorm where she lived, he had said something like — no, exactly this: “What kind of job were you planning to get?”

He said it again now. “What kind of job were you planning to get?”

She blinked at him and felt as if she were struggling with a circular reference.

“You made a rash decision and as with all of them, now you have to live with it.”

“I was thinking…” The skeptical look on his face made her voice trail away.

“You haven’t thought about it, have you?” Sighing, he looked so sad. He was thirty-five and she’d known him — or of him — since she was sixteen, ten years and counting. They’d been lovers for the last eight of those years. “What is it, Holly? What would help you slow yourself down so you can consider the consequences of your actions?”

The stubborn thought resurrected itself. “I did the right thing. I had to do it, mostly because I could do it.”

He didn’t say he was at his wit’s end, but he looked it. “Do we have to start over? Do you need more coaching on your breathing, your meditation?”

She felt a jolt of anger and knew he would think even less of her if she let it show. She’d been angry too many times today, starting with Jo. “I don’t feel like you’re hearing me. I did it because it was the right thing to do. I did it because that’s what I thought. And I thought that it was what you would do.”

“We can’t speculate on that. I would never be working there.”

Jo’s voice again. But he likes the paycheck just fine.

How could she have thought he would approve? “I don’t want to fight.”

“I’m not fighting. I’m trying to help you see what you’ve done.”

“I saw an injustice and did the only thing I could to stand up to it.”

“Oh, Holly.”

She had failed. Failed.

Thoughts she never let free began to spin in her head, searching for solutions, to find the value of y, or express the pattern of raindrops down a windowpane — something to make sense.

A simple time calculation told her that if she had gone to MIT, she would have a doctorate by now. She would no longer be receiving grades for her daily life from Clay. Funny that today she had also realized she was the same age her mother had been when she’d been born.

She was floating in chaos theory, where the elegance of mathematics can express the unknown and the unimaginable. You could even not know what a thing was, and mathematics could express the not knowing.

She stared at Clay and said, “I was thinking about going into teaching. I think I would be good at it.”

“We can’t afford for us both to be teachers.”

Surprised by Clay’s grasp of their finances, when he usually refused to mire himself in details, she answered, “I haven’t run the numbers, but it could work.”

“You didn’t think it through, did you?”

“Do you think everything through?”

“I try, because a sense of equanimity is important in a world so out of balance. Our government is controlled by corporations. Our lives have no real privacy.”

She cut him off with, “You hated where I worked. You hated everything about it. Why aren’t you happy I’m out of that place?”

“I am, Holly. I’m just disappointed that you fell back into your old habit of not considering consequences before you took action.”

Impulsively, she reminded him, “We’re together because of that habit.”

He looked puzzled, but the memory came into vivid focus for her.

She wanted to know if he thought she’d make a good college student. He had pointed out, in his serious way, that she’d been taking college courses for the past two years. But it was official now that she was eighteen, she told him, and she would be a full-time student next fall. Her aunt’s reluctance was the only reason she wasn’t already. Clearly startled, he had glanced at the calendar on his desk. She would be an excellent student, he said carefully, if only she could learn to focus her energy. If she applied herself to one thing, had someone to help her concentrate, then yes, she could be an excellent student.

It had been too much to bear. He cared about her future. He was saying how bright she was. She had never heard praise like this before from someone she respected so deeply, or if she had it was so long ago it hardly mattered. She had stopped to see him in his office because she thought the world of him. He was so dedicated to making the world a better place. She had launched herself across his little office, knocking over books and papers in her haste to embrace him, to show him how full he made her heart. Her abandon was the act of a child, but it had taken them to an unexpected corner. Ten minutes later she had no longer been a child, or a virgin.

“I seduced you, in your office, without a thought to the consequences. I don’t recall a lot of reluctance on your part.”

His puzzlement was genuine. “I don’t remember it that way.”

“It’s not important,” she said quickly. But somehow it was.

“This is my fault,” he said suddenly. “I forget that everyone has their part to play in the whole. I expect you to change.”

She didn’t know what he really meant, but it sounded as if he was giving up on her. “I try. Damn it, Clay, why can’t you just agree it was the right thing to do? Can’t you at least imagine what I felt and tell me what you would have done?”