Waltzing at Midnight (22 page)

Let’s see if you have the balls to tell me to my face what you think of me.”

Tanya looked around the room with a look of self-satisfaction on her face. “Well, Rosie, you may have balls, but I most certainly do not.” She thought she was pretty clever, but nobody laughed, so she continued. “You made it clear to all of us during the election that your values are not necessarily compatible with ours. I mean, you brought in all of those ‘people’ to help you. It demonstrated your true colors, and I was just reminding the commission of that.”

“Rosie,” interjected one of the women nearest our end of the room, “Tanya is not speaking for the rest of the commission. I want you to know that.”

“Thank you, Kathy. I’m well aware of that. Tanya has almost never spoken for the rest of the commission. Tanya has always spoken for herself. She has, in fact, been a constant source of embarrassment for this commission. I can’t say how many times I’ve had to apologize for her or fix something she’s bungled.”

“You don’t run this commission,” Tanya said defiantly.

“And neither do you. And you never will because there’s no one in this room who respects you.”

Tanya puckered her lips in an attempt to appear unruffled.

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I was afraid she would fight back, would hurl insults at Rosie. I didn’t want to hear it. But she was silent.

Rosie, taking a deep breath, said, “I can’t work with Tanya any longer. She doesn’t want to work with me, and the fact that she called this meeting and expressly excluded me is reason enough to think that we’ve come to an impasse. Everyone here is familiar with our work. I’m going down to the lounge for a drink. You all just stay here and let me know when you reach a decision.”

“You’re giving us an ultimatum?” the elderly man asked gruffly.

“I’m telling you to face reality. One of us has to go. We can’t do the work we’re here to do if we can’t get along with one another. If you agree with Tanya that I’m an undesirable element, I’ll graciously resign, on the spot.” With that, Rosie turned, I opened the door for her, and we left. She glanced at me outside in the hallway, her fierceness dissipating. Then she shrugged and led the way downstairs.

“How was I?” she asked, sliding up to the bar.

“Formidable.” She ordered a cognac. I ordered a Diet Pepsi.

“What if they choose her?”

Rosie laughed. “That won’t happen, Jean. That lot has been bellyaching about Tanya for years. If it comes down to a choice, what can they do? They’re going to choose me. I’m doing this to teach Tanya a lesson, to teach her that money, ultimately, can’t compensate for lack of ability.”

I hoped her confidence wasn’t misplaced. I didn’t want to see her beaten down again. The first time I’d seen that, I’d fallen in love with her. The second time, who knew? I might throw myself on the tracks in front of a train.

We’d been at the bar ten minutes before Robert came down and sat beside Rosie. “So they’ve chosen you to be the soother of feathers,” Rosie surmised.

“Look, Rosie, Tanya’s very upset. This is her favorite cause, you know that. And she’s been with the commission for over thirty years. She’s a founding member, for God’s sake. You can’t just chuck her out.”

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“If you’re all that sorry for her, let her stay.”

“But we can’t lose you. There’s nobody up there who would choose that.”

Rosie shrugged. “Robert, I’ve neglected to introduce you to Jean Davis, administrator of the Vision Partnership. Jean, this is Robert Boch, an art professor at the junior college.”

I reached around Rosie to shake his hand. He seemed annoyed to be momentarily derailed, but I was thrilled to hear myself being introduced that way. It sounded so authentic. It sounded important. And Rosie said it so nonchalantly, as though it had always been true.

“So what about it, Rosie?” Robert continued. “Don’t make us do this.” Rosie sipped her cognac, deliberating. I’d never seen Rosie wielding power this way before. I knew she had it.

Obviously, she never would have been able to run for mayor if she didn’t. She had enough power in Weberstown to destroy some important people if she was inclined to do so. I waited with as much apprehension for her decision as Robert did.

“Do this for me, Robert,” she said at last. “Go back and tell them I’m intractable, that I’m furious and unreasonable.”

“Oh, come on, Rosie.”

“Now, wait. Tell them that you recommend putting the decision off until next month. That way I’ll have a chance to cool off.” He grinned. “You want her to suffer.”

“I didn’t say that. I said I was too angry to be reasoned with.

And with a month’s reprieve, that will give Tanya a chance to apologize and perhaps placate me.”

“Okay, Rosie. Thanks.”

After he’d gone, I asked, “What are you going to do?”

“Let her stew for a while.” Rosie was still angry, I could tell.

She sipped on her drink and didn’t look at me. I still had the feeling that I, more than Tanya, was the cause of her unpleasant mood.

“Why did you want me to come with you?” I asked after several minutes.

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She turned to look at me coolly. “Because you need to understand what it’s like in this world of mine, where you never know when you’re going to be called upon to defend yourself because somebody wants to use your difference against you.”

So, in her mind at least, we were still in this thing together.

Or maybe she was trying to turn me away by showing me that it wasn’t all fun and games. Maybe she didn’t think I knew how serious it was, that I hadn’t been paying attention for the last three months.

Rosie continued. “People won’t be direct about it. They’ll attack you behind your back. Tanya’s not the only bigot in that room, just the dumbest. There are people much harder to defend yourself against. And you don’t even know who they are because in our modern world, it’s no longer acceptable to be anti-gay.

Well, I’m grateful for that, but it does make it a little harder to recognize them. In the old days, they were the ones bashing your head in with a baseball bat. Now, the homophobes have had to go underground. Even Tanya knows that she can’t come out and say, I don’t want Rosie on the Commission because she’s gay. In fact, I doubt if Tanya cares about that one way or another. Her real beef with me is that I’m not afraid to point out her failings and she’s intimidated by me. But she can’t use that, so she thinks she can use the other against me, that she will be able to rally a few people to her side with that. And she’s probably right. I have to put a stop to it before she has a chance.”

I remembered her asking me the day she was outed whether or not it mattered to me. I remembered her being relieved it hadn’t. She was vulnerable to the disapproval of others, even her inferiors. It was a brave front, the face she’d shown to Tanya. Thank God Tanya didn’t realize the power she had. At that moment, I felt a deep affection for Rosie. I loved her, her strengths and her weaknesses, and I didn’t give a damn about the Tanya Lockharts of the world.

I looked around and saw that the bartender was still some distance away. “I love you so much, Rosie,” I said.

She stared, her eyes wide and moist, but said nothing. The 165

look on her face was complicated, conveying a range of emotions which were hard to interpret, but which certainly included ambivalence, maybe even fear. I was dismayed to see this. What did it mean exactly, I wondered. Did she want me to stop loving her? Or was she afraid that it wasn’t enough, not real enough or strong enough or pure enough? Why did she never tell me what was on her mind? There was obviously plenty to say, from the look in her eyes.

I wanted to put my arms around her. I wanted to kiss her eyelids and her lips and drive all the fear and doubt out of her mind. As I gazed at her, I felt an uneasiness in my fingers and my mouth. I remembered acutely what it felt like to touch her bare skin. Her lovely ear and a tantalizing glimpse of her collarbone beckoned me.

Ever since I had first felt the renegade urge of my body to possess this woman, I had been both amazed and alarmed by this awful splintering of myself. My nerves and muscles were driven by some force that I neither recognized nor controlled. They had their own agenda and left me with the cognitive ability of an infant or an imbecile.

No doubt this agony of my body had become apparent on my face because Rosie looked even more alarmed and then slowly shook her head.

My hand covered hers where it lay on the bar, gripping her fingers. There was nothing in my head or my heart at that moment but this woman, a woman who may as well have been a hurricane gripping me and sweeping me up into its raging currents.

“I want to be alone with you,” I said urgently. “Can we go to your place?”

“No,” she said, pulling her hand away. “You said you wanted to cool it while you sort this out. And I agree. So cool it.”

I closed my eyes and tried to shake myself free of my desire.

“I can’t think straight when I’m near you,” I said.

“That’s the best argument I can think of, then, against being with you. You need to think this through rationally. You need to make well-considered decisions. Besides that, how can you even 166

ask me?” Her voice was low but insistent. “You’ve been carrying on as though you’re the only one involved in this thing. Did it ever even occur to you that I might want you as much as you want me? You can’t just turn me on and off at will. I do have feelings, Jean.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, taken aback by her accusatory tone. She was right. I hadn’t been considering her feelings at all. I was too overwhelmed by my own. “But, to be fair, Rosie, you haven’t been expressing your feelings. You haven’t said anything at all about how you feel about us, other than you had a good time in bed with me, I mean, and that isn’t very helpful.”

“I’m trying to let you work it out on your own. I’m trying not to put pressure on you.”

“Maybe I can’t work it out on my own. Maybe I need your help.” In the lobby of the Ramada Hotel, we spoke quietly at an unoccupied bar. Could anyone guess, I wondered, from our gestures and expressions, that we were lovers?

Rosie looked tormented. She threw up her hands in exasperation. “Of all the ironies in my life, this has got to be one of the biggest. At the exact moment that I’m so far out of the closet that at last I can do what I want with whomever I want wherever I want, I get involved with a married woman.” I saw her glance at my ring finger and the wedding band that represented my unavailability.

“If I leave Jerry…” I began.

“Jean, I know you want some kind of guarantee from me.

You want this process to be easier than it is. You want to know what you’re going to get if you give up what you have. How can I possibly tell you that? I don’t want you to give up your life for me. I want you to give it up for yourself. I can’t promise you that there’s a fairy story ending for us. And, to be brutally frank about it, if you can’t reconcile yourself to being a lesbian, there’s no chance at all for us. That’s the real issue, not my feelings, and that’s why I’m trying not to pressure you. No matter how much I want you in my bed, in my home, and in my life, I have no influence over your ability to find and embrace your ultimate 16

identity. That’s something everyone has to work through on her own. Only you know what you can live with.”

I had never seen Rosie this out of sorts, not even when she was brought down by Holloway’s public proclamation. Now, she seemed to be splintered, even wrecked. And I had done this to her.

Perhaps her heart was more vulnerable than I had imagined.

“I wish to hell that I’d met you two years from now!” Rosie said, swallowing the last of her cognac.

Well, I thought, the woman can’t be accused of keeping her feelings to herself today. But, in the midst of all of that, she did actually say that she wanted me. As much as I wanted to hear something about that fairy story ending, I knew she was right, and that was the best I was going to get. I sat staring at my wedding ring, the sparkle of diamonds diffused through the tears that had begun to accumulate. That ring, I thought, doesn’t just represent my tie to my husband. It represents legitimacy and a connection with my children, my parents, society at large.

When she dropped me off back at my office, her mood was less harsh, more compassionate. “I know this is hard for you,” she said, “but I have a lot of faith in you. I know you can do whatever needs to be done. You’re in a fight for your life here, and I don’t think you fully understand that yet, but I know you’re strong enough to face it. And, believe me, I’m on your side.”

Although I was left feeling forlorn, the events of the day had revealed something new and important to me. I wasn’t the only one suffering. Rosie, too, was in a state of painful limbo, waiting to see if I would, if I could, choose to embark on this new life. I was ashamed of myself for being so self-involved that I hadn’t even considered that this could be true. Why had I assumed she was indifferent, that her emotions were somehow more superficial than mine? She was more stoical than I was, but maybe, inside, she was just as devastated. Certainly, today she had shown me that emotional side of herself in a way I hadn’t seen before.

As always when I saw that Rosie was unhappy, I had an overwhelming desire to fix it. I’d do almost anything to see her smile at me again.

16

That first week at the new office, I threw myself into the work as if it were a life raft. By the end of the week, the Partnership had no unanswered correspondence and no outstanding business to attend to. I had designed what I thought was a professional-looking flyer for Career Day. I e-mailed it to Rosie and her reply came back within the hour.

“Perfect. Send it out.”