Shine of the Ever Page 7

  “We’re so gross,” Kate said. “I would be sicked out by us, if I wasn’t so happy.”

  Angie eyed their reflection in the mirror over the bar. “We’re pretty.”

  “I’m just here to plant the seed of envy in other bitches’ hearts,” Kate said dramatically. She flicked her hair over her shoulder.

  “It’s working for you,” Angie said. She nibbled the lime wedge from her drink. “I’m happy too. I can’t believe it’s been two months.”

  “Two moons.”

  “What’s your favorite thing about us?” Angie asked. Please don’t say our honesty.

  Kate smiled at her in the mirror. She’d lined her top and bottom lashes and her eyes were huge, delicate as moths. “Do I have to pick a favorite? Okay, I’ll play. I like that you’re patient with me.”

  “Nobody’s ever described me as patient.”

  “But you are,” Kate said. “I love that we’ve been seeing each other for two months and I feel like you just take your time with me. You don’t try to get me to change. You’re not texting me all the time.”

  Maybe they weren’t girlfriends, if that’s what normal girlfriends did. Angie mentally reviewed her texting frequency: usually once or twice a day, something cute or funny. Should she have been trying to see more of Kate? Was her interest not clear enough?

  Kate went on about her need for independence and her busy schedule, and Angie’s heart started to ache in her chest. Maybe this was breakup talk, which she wasn’t prepared for since she’d been so focused on Kate’s potential rejection of her physical history, and in true Pisces fashion she had gotten lost in the current of those thoughts and totally forgotten that Kate’s version of the relationship, if that’s even what they were doing, might be different or even in conflict with her own.

  She tried to focus on Kate’s words, but everything felt slippery and strange. She could sense Venus rising over them, luring her out of hiding. She regretted saying yes to a date. She should have listened to her horoscope and stayed away from Kate and the feelings that Kate evoked in her. In an hour, Venus would position itself over her, and then what? It was supposed to be the planet of romance, but Angie felt its influence piercing her, forcibly peeling back the many protective layers she’d constructed around herself. It hurt. Vulnerability comes from vulnus: a wound. A fish with bloody gills.

  She took shallow breaths through her mouth and tried to listen to Kate, who kept talking as though nothing was wrong.

  “I’m just intrigued by you,” Kate was saying. “Usually I get bored so quickly. People get all up in my life, try to tell me all about themselves. You’re different.”

  “I am?”

  “It’s great,” Kate said, and leaned over, and her cheek was by Angie’s. “You’re great,” she said in Angie’s ear.

  She stroked the goosebumps on Angie’s arm.

  “You,” Angie said, but she was smiling, and Kate was a Scorpio, the unstoppable sign of sex, and she knew exactly what she was doing. Their fingers interlaced on the bar.

  “The other thing I like is that you don’t have to explain everything. Or make yourself more interesting. Ever had that happen? With my ex, sometimes, it was like she was reading me a user manual. All those bells and whistles. Features included in this relationship.”

  “How long did you date her?”

  “Long enough to figure out that I don’t want bells and whistles.”

  Angie smiled. “What do you want?”

  “I want to take our time. I want all your time and I want to take it slow.”

  What that was code for, Angie wasn’t sure, but later, in Kate’s bed, Kate showed her that slow did not mean a chaste or restrained knowledge of the body. She lifted Angie’s skirt and put her mouth on her and then kissed her and then put her mouth down there again, back and forth with Angie’s hands in her hair, unsure of whether to pull or push because it felt so good. Sheets the color of hemoglobin too. Even though they had the light on, too, for a change, Kate lit a row of candles by the bed. They left sultry trails of wax on their metal stand that dripped down toward the carpet. Kate dropped the spent match into the wastepaper basket and knelt by Angie.

  “What’s this?” she said. She traced one of the flat, white, soft scars on Angie’s labia.

  Angie sat up, propped on her elbows. Her legs were open. She looked down at Kate, who rested between them. “Surgery scars.”

  Kate looked at her. Her fingers moved over the skin, gently, feeling the length of the incision. “Does this hurt?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “I’m not your first?”

  “No.”

  “You’re mine.”

  Her body covered Angie’s like a wave, and their limbs mingled, pressing so closely that soon even their skin was the same temperature. Angie’s lover moved against her, rocking them both, until Angie could feel Venus in transit above them. This time, she didn’t try to slip away. She let the bright star pull her up from this body she loved, her beautiful body with its quirks and depths. As she and Kate flared up together, the sheepskin rug began to smoke, but she couldn’t stop, couldn’t think, couldn’t even be afraid. She felt herself bursting open. She began to cry out. It felt so good, to trade who she’d pretended to be for someone who was loved, universally, and the blaze was brighter and brighter until she could hold nothing back, and its heat held all of her and Kate, illuminating every tender place.

  Redhead

  Lisa loved Tennessee Williams until she had to teach him. Watching a dozen bad Blanche DuBois monologues made her want to hit herself in the head with a goddamn hammer. Conflating volume with emotion, her students dialed up the drama. The high, creaking notes that they injected into their stage voices irritated her. They couldn’t project. They forgot their lines. Most of them had never even heard a real Southern accent and sounded as if they were auditioning for The Beverly Hillbillies.

  “He was a boy, just a boy, when I was a very young girl,” twelve times in a row. Over and over. Each one trying to outdo the others for gravitas. None of them seemed to grasp the revelation at the center of the monologue. Lisa wanted to scream, He killed himself because he was gay! But the magnitude of that didn’t register. They’d never heard of Matthew Shepard. Gay marriage was legal. Ellen DeGeneres was out. Nobody seemed to care about queerness in this generation. It didn’t mean anything to them.

  By the end of workshop, Lisa was brutally frustrated and couldn’t stand to go straight home. The students clustered into little groups, giving each other critiques. Instead of staying to talk, Lisa headed for a quiet restaurant a block from her apartment. Class had destroyed what little concentration she had (that was the thing about students; they took up all her energy) and she needed someplace quiet to sit, offstage.

  She sat at the counter and took the laminated happy hour menu from between the salt and pepper shakers. She read the cocktail list, knowing she wouldn’t order anything from it. She knew enough not to be an actress who drank; it never ended well. She was better off picking at a dish of cashews while the dishwasher told jokes with the cook over the divider between the bar and the kitchen. After a while, the server put a Diet Coke in front of her.

  She looked at the traffic, the cars with cloudy windows and buses passing at twenty-minute intervals. Portland was a perfect setting for a play, because it was a place where nothing ever seemed to happen. Within its static, lovely landscape were quiet spots to sit, protected from the noise and opinions of other people. It was a good place for someone who was tired of being looked at.

  The bar had a television, of course—relatively small and discreet. They were everywhere these days. The screen showed men in felt hats dragging an iron statue off its pedestal. Lisa shook her head. Show business was politics, and politics was show business.

  The server changed the channel, settling on a nature program. A mother whale and her calf nuz
zled one another in Hawaii’s blue, bath-temperature waters.

  “Soup,” the server said. “Future soup.”

  “What?”

  “In Japan. They hunt whales.”

  “I thought it was just sharks,” Lisa said.

  “Nobody is out there trying to save the sharks.”

  She shrugged. “I guess.”

  “You vegan?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t start. It’s a slippery slope. Next thing you know, you’re allergic to gluten and wondering why your acupuncturist won’t return your calls.”

  She laughed. “You speak from experience?”

  He crossed his arms and frowned at the whales on TV. “You know how big that baby is? The size of a school bus, at least.”

  “If only they had a way of defending themselves,” Lisa said. His patter was good, better than most of her students’. Or maybe her end-of-day fatigue was lowering her standards; her voice felt lazy and thick.

  “It doesn’t pay to taste good,” the server said. Shaking his head, he went into the kitchen.

  A woman in a red wool coat walked past the windows, paused in the doorway, and shook her umbrella. Lisa glanced at her, then turned abruptly away. Shana was the only other new hire, still untenured. She and Lisa had started at the same time—mercifully, not in the same department. Shana taught a class on women’s political history, plus a French class five days a week. She insisted on teaching Cixous and Irigaray in the original, even at a state university. Her shoes and clothes were conspicuously expensive. She had strawberry blonde curls that grew like bed springs from her head. She lacked screen appeal. Her eyes searched the corners of a room, ratlike, before coming to rest on what was right in front of her.

  Shana, meeting Lisa, had said that she’d been an actress too. She’d had a bit part in a raunchy comedy flick. The role recurred in the TV spin-off’s pilot but was so small that it was written out of the first season. She hadn’t done anything after that. She “wasn’t moved to try the stage,” she said, which was “all Portland really offered.” Which was a way of not saying I failed at acting.

  “Is that you?” she asked now, sliding onto the stool next to Lisa. “I thought so.”

  Lisa took a preparatory swallow of her soda. “I was just leaving.”

  “Oh, stay. Just for a few minutes. I’m sure we’ll find something to talk about.”

  Lisa sighed. She had noticed that Shana, like God, worked in a series of unlikely coincidences, always coming closer than she was wanted.

  “Actually, I do have to go—I’ve got a meeting.”

  “With whom?” Shana’s eyes snapped onto Lisa’s face, watching for any twitch, any hint of discomfort.

  Lisa was mystified by Shana’s competitiveness. Lisa had experienced this kind of jealous bullying and measuring-up when she worked in L.A. She didn’t understand the point of it, so she did what she’d always done and simply detached. All semester, she’d just floated away when Shana took a pointed interest in the number of classes Lisa taught, how many students attended and how much they liked her, her upbringing and where she had gone to school, her merits as an academic, where her papers were published (online or in print), and her successes (romantic or professional). Lisa kept her at arm’s length, listening but not hearing what Shana had to say.

  “The head of something. I don’t remember,” she lied. She didn’t have any such meeting, but Shana didn’t need to know that.

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Shana said. She smiled, as though to be conciliatory. “You don’t have anything to worry about, do you?”

  Lisa finished her Coke much faster than she would have liked and stood to go. “I wish I could stay longer,” she said.

  “Always nice to catch up,” said her rival. “Do you have my phone number? We should get coffee soon. Something less impromptu.”

  “I have it,” Lisa lied as she darted for the door. “Don’t forget your umbrella.”

  But she was angry, walking home—at feeling discovered and by someone she avoided as much as possible. The unspoken rule was, if you were both queer, you had to be friends or like each other. But that was another thing that had changed with mainstream acceptance, Lisa thought. It wasn’t a big deal to be gay anymore, and that meant we didn’t have to stick together the way we used to. Assimilation took away the fun of playing us versus the straights. Community was something that only happened at dance clubs, Madonna concerts, and the annual AIDS walk. That kind of togetherness was a holdover from the eighties in every way. Shana repelled her. As far as Lisa could tell, Shana was incapable of making or maintaining friendships with other lesbians.

  Lisa went home and managed to get her brother on the phone at their usual time. He was in rehab again, so she cheered him up by pretending to be Judy Garland, Kermit the Frog, or Ronald Reagan. He adored her voices and sometimes made requests: Do Marilyn Monroe piloting a 747. Do Mel Gibson, sharing at an AA meeting. She loved making him laugh; it was about the only thing she felt good about today.

  They talked on the phone for half an hour, all the time he was allowed. She pretended to be a Scottish weatherman, forecasting snow in Tahiti that looked like wee sheep sprinkling from heaven. Jeremy gasped for air.

  “I’m going to pee,” he hiccupped.

  “I don’t see golden showers on the radar,” Lisa said in her bad Sean Connery accent, and her brother almost dropped the phone, he was laughing so hard.

  She didn’t tell people her brother was a heroin addict anymore. She’d brought it up in a technique class once, and one of the other students had said, Wow, I’m jealous; you’ll always have something tragic to work with. In L.A., that was the only reason to care about the people in your life. They became your motivation while you tried to make your lines feel real.

  A few days later, just as she passed the oversized plaque with Portland State’s name on it, Lisa saw a flash of cardinal out of the corner of her eye. She barely had time to blink before Shana slipped in beside her: a sneak attack.

  “Going to class? I don’t know how you survive without an umbrella,” Shana said. Hers covered herself and Lisa as well. Lisa found herself immediately missing the feeling of rain on her coat. Shana’s voice drowned out the rain’s intimate patter with its nasal dullness. Lisa had to concentrate to catch Shana’s words; she hadn’t had enough coffee for this.

  Shana went on, rapid-fire, without waiting for a response. “Not sure if you heard, but my department is sponsoring a gala on campus. It’s a Women’s March fundraiser with some amazing speakers. Angelina Jolie is doing the keynote. I got you a ticket, so we can go together. I wanted to tell you yesterday, but you weren’t at your office hours.”

  Lisa didn’t tell Shana that she’d met Angelina before, and Uma and Meryl too, ages ago, on a job in Los Angeles. She avoided the implicit comparison: They were real actresses. She didn’t measure up to Shana’s idea of what a performer should look like. Lisa didn’t do wardrobe. Lisa was never in character, while Shana was always performing.

  She said, “I had a migraine and had to go home.”

  “You get a lot of those; have you gotten it checked? I hope you’ll have a makeup time, if you haven’t already. Our department has had some really strict crackdowns on adjuncts who come up short on their term requirements. It would be awful to lose your fellowship because you had a little headache.”

  “Migraine.”

  “I’ve never had one. It’s mind over matter to me.” She flashed a big smile at Lisa. She was close enough that Lisa could have seized her lower lip in her teeth and yanked her greasy grin right off her face.

  “Feminism is very au courant. It’s a provocative topic. You can come to the event, right? I put you on the guest list, so please don’t make me regret it.”

  “I’m not really up on current affairs,” Lisa said.

  “It doesn’t matter how c
urrent you are. I just don’t want you coming down with some affliction at the last minute. It’s a very exclusive list. They couldn’t even announce the time and location until this morning because of security issues.”

  Lisa sighed. This was not an invitation; it was a summons. Shana would not take no for an answer, had made it impossible to do anything except comply.

  “Of course I’ll come.”

  “Oh, good. There’s a reception after. I’m wearing red, since that’s my signature color. Everyone will be wearing something professional looking, so I think I’ll go vintage. You can wear black or dark purple and you should probably try to be at least a little sexy. You know, to make up for how you dress during the week.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, just look at you.”

  Lisa looked down at herself. She was wearing brown corduroys, her favorite red shoes, a blue blouse with tiny anchor shaped buttons, a light blue cardigan, and her oversized black raincoat. Her hair was messy, the way she liked it, and, aside from her customary dab of lip balm, her face was bare. She felt naked, exposed. She looked like what she was: a gay acting teacher in her late twenties, a blank screen ready for projection.

  Shana’s idea of whom she should pretend to be made her furious. Who was she, to decide Lisa’s role like that? Lisa was not going to put up with it. This was the other thing about being the only other lesbian on campus, you ended up making concessions to another woman that you would never, ever make to a man. If Shana had been male, Lisa would have reported him. But she was community, which made Lisa feel trapped and frustrated. She could never say no, because Shana was always right there. This fact made Lisa so angry that she had to pause outside her classroom door to wipe the anger off her face. When she walked in, she was composed again, ready to act her part. She impersonated a theater professor who still loved Tennessee Williams. Her itchy feeling began to melt away.

  “Williams compares Blanche to a moth or uses candlelight and lanterns to suggest her fragility,” she explained. “Onstage, you are using the same gestures you perform when you’re sleeping, eating, or doing anything that feels ‘natural’ to you—but you’re doing it deliberately. This code is embedded in every action and inaction of yours in a performance. The audience can see it. They’re looking for it. Every word that you speak reveals your character, even as your mimicry reinforces the separation between these behaviors and your true, original self.”