Clio Rising Read online

  She kept me after my actual “quitting time,” as the men in my family called it. As the fall light began to fade through Clio’s window, my stomach growled audibly. Clio brought out a box of saltines on the brink of staleness, which dulled my hunger (I made a note to buy her a fresh package), and then she kept on plowing through the papers as if determined to unveil everything in one session.

  Together we compiled a list of the stories she thought she had written, with vague publication dates (’32 or ’33?) and their possible periodicals; but she wasn’t sure of anything except the ones she had copies of. “You’ll have to track them down,” she said dismissively, as if that were the easiest thing in the world to do when you had no idea where to start.

  And the “new” work was baffling. In one stack, which on the face of it appeared to be a story of maybe fifty pages in length (A Clio Hartt novella! I thought), I saw that several of the pages were in fact the first page that she kept starting over, honing and revising until it bore little resemblance to the original. Even the title suggested uncertainty about the work, devolving from “All This” to “The Less We Know.”

  “This one . . . it’s not there yet,” she said, her face lined with confusion. “It’s heading somewhere, but it needs time.”

  “Is there, you know, a finished draft?” I asked.

  “I just told you— it’s not there yet.” She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. Her breathing was so shallow, I wondered for a moment if she’d fallen asleep sitting up, the way my Meemaw sometimes did. But then her lids snapped open and she pushed herself away from the desk.

  “Enough,” she announced. I didn’t know at first if she meant the session was enough or if she’d had enough of trying to explain her work to someone as unskilled as me. “We’ll pick this up again tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow is Saturday,” I said. “Tuesdays and Fridays are the days I stop in.”

  “That won’t do. I’ll need more of you than that. Bea will simply have to free up your time, pay you extra.”

  “I don’t know, Miss Hartt. The agency’s so busy, and I’m the only assistant.”

  “She will allow it.” Clio handed me the near-empty sleeve of saltines, presumably to take with me as a bonus.

  Chapter 6

  Through the glass panel in the front door of Clio’s building, I spotted her neighbor Eli struggling to negotiate his entrance. Wearing a button-down shirt and a tie, a bulging leather satchel slung over one of his shoulders, he looked like he’d come from work. He balanced two bags of groceries on his hips while trying to manage his keys at the same time. “Shit!” he said, as he dropped one of the grocery bags, and cans of Friskies Buffet careened across the courtyard.

  I hadn’t seen Eli since my first visit to Milligan Place, although when I passed his apartment, no matter what time of day, jazz music seeped out from under his door. “Hey, Eli!” I called out. “Let me help you there.”

  At first he couldn’t seem to place me, but then his face registered recognition.

  “Oh, hello!”

  “Livvie Bliss, Miss Hartt’s . . . helper?” Some people didn’t understand Bea’s term, “gal Friday,” and I didn’t know what else to call myself. From my talk with Clio that afternoon and evening, though, it looked like I might have scored a promotion.

  “Of course!”

  I circled the courtyard with him, retrieving the cans. “This looks like the last one,” I said, plopping a can of Chicken and Tuna into the grocery bag. “Oops, no, there’s another one by that bush.”

  “You’re a lifesaver,” Eli said, with a dramatic gesture toward his heart.

  I had a sharp memory of my friend, Michael, one of the first friends I made during Freshman Orientation at college. He had a theatrical way of touching his heart and bowing slightly when he greeted someone. It was Michael who showed me a copy of Ruby-fruit Jungle tucked onto a shelf at the college library: “This is what girls like you read,” he’d said in a conspiratorial whisper that made me shiver. I was only beginning to understand myself in that way. Later that year, Michael’s folks turned him out of the family when they found out about him and another boy, and he headed to San Francisco. “You’d love it here!” he’d written to me. “Gay people everywhere!” After a while, though, the postcards stopped coming.

  The thought of Michael made me grab the bag Eli had set down in the courtyard. “Here, I’ll help you get these things upstairs.”

  His apartment was the mirror image of Clio’s, but with framed artwork and grown-up upholstered furniture, like Gerri and Renee’s. Between the windows was a compact dining-room table and chairs made of sleek, dark wood. How nice to daydream while you’re eating, I thought. Most often, I ate hurriedly on the street on my way somewhere or in my loft bed.

  “Wow, pretty place.”

  “Most of this belonged to Curt,” he said, without explaining who that was. Instead, he greeted a small tuxedo cat, a tiny thing about half the size of a normal feline, with paws no bigger than quarters. “How’s my beautiful boy?” The cat wrapped himself around Eli’s ankles, emitting a delicate purr.

  “What a cutie,” I remarked. “How old?”

  “Probably two. I got him at the shelter, and they weren’t sure.”

  “I thought he was just a baby!”

  “He was abused, locked up in a crate, so he didn’t grow properly, they said.” Eli’s voice thickened with emotion. “His name is Remington.”

  “Like the show?” I’d caught a few episodes of the detective series Remington Steele on Barb’s TV. I had a little crush on Stephanie Zimbalist.

  Eli looked confused, and I noticed then that his apartment didn’t have a television, at least not out in the open. “Like the typewriter,” he said. “Curt had a collection of old typewriters, but I had to sell them all.”

  It was another past-tense reference to Curt that dangled between us.

  Eli took the bag of cans from me and removed one for Remington. “Well, I guess I should get going,” I said, not wanting to disrupt their dinner. “I need to grab something to eat.”

  “Oh, why don’t you stay? I owe you for helping me. I was going to feed Remmie and then order in. Do you like Thai? Let me treat you. I would love the company.” He cocked his head toward the door. “Unless you’re afraid of being called back across the hall by you-know-who.”

  My only plan for the evening was to pick up a couple of slices and then head to Ariel’s to meet Gerri and Renee. It was too early to dance, though, and Thai food— although I’d never tried it— sounded more enticing than greasy pizza. Plus, Clio was probably working or asleep already, so I agreed to a quick meal.

  Instead, it turned into a two-hour gabfest. We were both talkers, and the pace at which we spilled our lives out in front of each other over spring rolls, pad thai, larb chicken, and a spicy green curry dish was equaled only by how fast Gerri and I had become friends. Eli was from North Adams, a mill town in Massachusetts, so we had the suffocation of small-town life in common. Plus, he was as gay as me. He’d moved to New York so Curt, his lover, could take a job at a major law firm and he could try his luck as a stage designer, and they’d lived in a spacious place on the Upper East Side. “Easily five times the size of this,” Eli said.

  When I gingerly asked about Curt, who was obviously no longer in the picture, Eli mumbled that he had died a year earlier.

  “It was quick and horrible. I can’t say any more,” and he shut down the topic before I even had a chance to express my condolences.

  He shifted to safer subjects with what passed for lightness. It turned out he knew more about Clio than I did, having engaged her one day in conversation about her early experiences with the Provincetown Players. She’d shared some stories before clamming up: “How do I know you won’t sell this to a biographer?” she’d asked him.

  “That sounds like her. But, you know, I’m embarrassed I have no idea who the Provincetown Players are,” I admitted.

  “Really? Susan Glaspell?
Eugene O’Neill?”

  “Well, I guess everybody knows O’Neill,” I said with swagger, although I’d never read any of his plays.

  “They started a theater company in Provincetown, but they eventually moved it here, to the Village. Clio was trying to be a playwright then. That’s where she met Flora. Flora designed some of their sets and had some plays produced, too.” He sighed. “I saw Flora’s watercolor designs in a book when I was at Yale. Absolutely stunning.”

  The sun had set by the time I looked at my watch. “Oh, man, I should go,” I said.

  “Hot date?”

  “I wish. I’m supposed to meet some friends at a bar.”

  “Well, knock on my door any time. I mean it, Livvie,” he said. His loneliness was palpable, a hand reaching toward me, and I wondered how many other people he’d lost besides Curt. I almost invited him along, but what would a gay guy do in a bar jammed full of women? Instead, I promised we’d have dinner again soon.

  Leaving Milligan Place, I decided to drop the blue manuscript box off at Fifteenth Street. What happened next was all about timing: If the box hadn’t weighed me down, or if I’d said no to dinner with Eli and gotten home hours earlier, I might have been spared a lot of trouble.

  • • •

  As I turned the corner from Fourteenth Street onto Seventh, I spied Renee on the west side of the avenue, but she didn’t see me. Her head was down and she looked like she was on a mission. Or maybe she was just very, very late once again. I thought about waving and calling out to her— after all, I was supposed to meet them soon— but instinct made me watch her fly across the avenue and head uptown toward Ariel’s.

  She had been on Fifteenth Street, that much I was sure of. My block of Fifteenth Street. There was nothing on my block but walk-ups laced with webs of fire escapes, and a few storefronts like a Chinese laundry where I got my button-down shirts washed and pressed at the bargain rate of fifty cents each. It made no sense for Renee to be there unless she had taken it as a shortcut from somewhere farther west. I decided that must have been it and proceeded on my way home.

  So far, sharing an apartment with Barb had suited me. Although I had even less space than at the Parkside Evangeline, it had been put to ingenious use. My “bedroom” consisted of a corner area that was no more than eight by nine, with plywood walls and door. A sturdy loft bed took up most of the square footage, with a desk, bookshelf, and clothes rod all squirreled away underneath. It was snug and dark, but it was mine, and I’d spruced it up with decorations from Womanbooks that I would have never dared display at the Parkside. One spare wall sported a poster-sized photograph of two naked women in a passionate embrace, while the back of the door held several prints of Georgia O’Keeffe’s colorful vagina-like flower paintings.

  The share suited me, too, because Barb and I rarely crossed paths. She worked the night shift as a legal proofreader in the financial district and was usually in transit when I arrived home from the agency. Because I’d left Eli’s so late, I assumed she’d be long gone by the time I turned my key in the lock.

  I could hear the music as I wound my way up to the fourth floor. Barb had an impressive collection of women’s music albums. She told me to treat myself to a listen whenever I wanted, and I had spent quite a few late nights getting to know Holly Near, Meg Christian, Ferron, and Cris Williamson. Now the sultry sound of “Sweet Woman” drifted into the hallway.

  In the dim light of the living room, I saw a sea of candles arranged on the old trunk Barb had converted to a coffee table. A bottle of Chianti and two Looney Tunes jelly jars-turned-drinking glasses rested nearby. As my eyes became accustomed to the dim light, I saw Barb herself, naked, in the middle of the living room floor on a silky lavender sheet, a hand between her legs.

  “I am so sorry!” I said, wondering if Jill was in the bathroom or if Barb simply had an elaborate masturbation ritual. “I will be out of your hair in a flash.” We’d discussed staying cool and loose about each other’s sex lives, with Barb requesting a heads up when I intended to bring someone home. No sock on the door kind of thing, just a casual warning. Because it was her lease, the assumption was she could entertain pretty much whenever and wherever she wanted. Since I’d lived there, Jill had been over a handful of times, and their noisy lovemaking filtered through my flimsy walls.

  “Oh, hey, Carolina. I thought you were already at Ariel’s for the duration,” she said, removing her hand but not bothering to cover up. I’d already seen her naked plenty of times, because she seemed to prefer walking around the apartment in the altogether. “It’s okay. You missed the show. My guest just left.”

  And then I remembered Renee’s determined scramble across the avenue.

  “Did you run into her downstairs?” Barb asked, standing up. My mouth had fallen open a little and I closed it with effort. I tried not to stare at a dollop of hardened wax on the fleshy mound of her breast.

  I shook my head.

  “You can level with me,” she said. “We’re adults.” She flipped off the record player mid-song.

  “I didn’t see anybody,” I said, trying to sound as blasé as I could. All I wanted was to get past her and into my cocoon of a bedroom. “And if I had, well, it wouldn’t be any of my business.”

  She polished off the wine in a Bugs Bunny glass and smiled. “Thanks. I appreciate it. Hey, I knew this was going to work out.”

  I remained calm on the outside, but my blood surged. I wondered how I would ever look at Renee again. Or Gerri! As her friend, should I tell her? Or was this part of an arrangement of theirs I didn’t know about? It was 1983, and on one of Barb’s albums Alix Dobkin trilled, “I’m not mo-no-ga-mous any-more.” I wasn’t one to cast stones anyway: I’d spent as much time as I could pleasuring my married professor.

  Barb picked up the wine bottle and inspected the level. “You want some, Carolina? There’s a Foghorn Leghorn glass in the cupboard that would suit you just fine. Go grab it, and I’ll throw on a shirt.”

  • • •

  I ended up not going to Ariel’s that night, leaving a message on Gerri and Renee’s machine that I’d been held up at work. Barb and I polished off the Chianti, and then she brought out beer and a pipe. My second experience with pot wasted me right out of the gate. To get my own weed, Barb advised, I just had to go to Washington Square and listen for the guys muttering “sensi, sensi” under their breath. I could score a nickel bag on my lunch break.

  “But it’s not real sensimilla,” she pointed out. “That shit’s rare. I had it during the summer I spent in San Francisco. It doesn’t have seeds. This stuff is loaded with them. Still, you can get pretty fucked up for five bucks.”

  It wasn’t long before we were rummaging through the fridge and the cupboards for anything edible, even though I’d had ample food at Eli’s. In desperation, Barb found a takeout menu and called out for Chinese. While we waited, munching from a bag of Doritos, I worked up the courage to ask questions.

  “So, does the wax hurt?” Her shirt had fallen open a little in our kitchen search, and angry red blotches covered her chest.

  “You never tried wax?”

  I said I hadn’t, but maybe she already guessed I was a sexual novice. I’d only been intimate with two women— recently the Brooklyn cop, and earlier Hallie, who had occupied my senior year. Our lovemaking had never veered toward the exotic. In what was probably our wildest time, and that was toward the end, I followed her instructions and fastened her wrists loosely to the headboard with a silk scarf. But nothing we did ever hurt, and I wondered what the attraction of pain was.

  “You need to get around more, Carolina,” Barb said, interrupting my memory. “The wax doesn’t hurt if you know what you’re doing. The higher you hold the candle, the less heat. And you’ve got to use the right candles— none of that scented shit. I buy plain white tapers by the box at the Second Avenue Bazaar.” She tugged at her shirt and glanced down at the marks on her chest. “These look bad right now, but they’ll fade in a couple hours.�
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  Barb arranged the takeout containers buffet-style on the coffee table. We sat next to each other on the futon couch, and I dug into my second dinner. Through generous bites that she hid demurely with her hand, Barb began grilling me.

  “So what’s your story, Carolina?” She wielded her chopsticks like a pro, while I resorted to a plastic fork.

  “My story?”

  “Yeah. Why don’t you have a girlfriend? Seems like you’d be a catch.”

  My eyes got misty from all the wine and pot and beer, and I put my fork down suddenly.

  “Uh oh,” Barb said. “Broken heart alert.”

  I wiped my eyes on my paper napkin but stayed quiet, my heart rising into my throat.

  “Tell Uncle Barb the whole nasty story.”

  I took a deep breath and let it spill out. “It’s really short and not too nasty. I fell in love with a married woman, my professor, but she didn’t identify as gay. The end. Now she’s there— with her husband— and I’m here.” There was a nasty part— the afternoon Hallie’s husband, Tom, came home early and I made a dive out their bedroom window; the F-bombs flying as the two of them screamed at each other in the living room; the cruel digs Hallie and I exchanged when she ended it. I wasn’t ready to share any of that.

  “Straight girls,” Barb said, with a knowing shake of her head. “They’ll screw you every time. Literally and figuratively. I know more lesbians than you can count who’ve been crushed under the heels of straight chicks. You need to meet dykes— women who’ve made up their minds which fucking team they’re on.”

  “That’s one reason I’m in New York.”

  “And you haven’t found anybody? You must be pretty picky. What’s your type?”

  A picture of Hallie flashed into my mind— just tall enough to nestle under my chin, a little pear-shaped. She didn’t turn heads, but instead blended into the landscape like someone’s aunt or sister. But she had a way of tossing her amber curls with a laugh that rippled up from her toes.