Clio Rising Page 6

  “I’m not picky,” I said, knowing that wasn’t true. I still wanted Hallie, but more than that, I wanted someone both to be her and to obliterate the painful memory of her. “I just want someone I can talk to. This woman I went home with on Gay Pride seemed fine at first, but then she turned out to be a freakin’ cop who couldn’t even understand why anyone would want to work in publishing.”

  Barb patted my arm in a protective, big-sister way. “We’ll get you fixed up. I’ve been here almost six years and I swear I’ve met every dyke in town. Slept with a fair number of them, too. Let me think about it. I know some really smart women.”

  I blew my nose into my napkin and started cleaning up. I couldn’t imagine why Thea had warned me against Barb, and now I realized I didn’t want to.

  Chapter 7

  That night, I fell asleep with an empty carton of lo mein in bed beside me, although I had no memory of saying goodnight to Barb or of crawling up the ladder to my bed or of eating more food. I awoke to a grease stain on the sheets and the distant sound of a phone ringing. It took several minutes before I realized it was a real phone, my phone, not some phone in a dream or down the hall. The machine didn’t pick up and Barb was making no move to answer it, so the phone whined on and on like a cranky baby.

  “You don’t answer your phone?”

  There was no mistaking that voice, but I was unaware Bea had my new home number.

  “Sorry. Somebody forgot to turn the machine on last night.” The “somebody” must have been me; Barb’s door was wide open and she was nowhere in sight.

  “It’s almost noon,” Bea pointed out in a tone that suggested I was flushing my weekend— and probably my youth— down the city sewers. “Clio Hartt phoned me this morning. She says she’s working on something new.”

  Clio had said she didn’t want Bea to know about her “idea,” so I was confused but played dumb. “Really?”

  “She doesn’t want to tell me anything about it yet. Did she mention it to you?”

  I didn’t know if this was entrapment or if she really was in the dark, but I continued my charade. “Not a peep.”

  “She wants you stopping by more often,” Bea continued. “She says you calm her, and she’s actually able to work after you’ve been there.”

  My cheeks felt hot at the thought that I might be facilitating Clio Hartt’s artistic output.

  “Now I can’t spare you as much as she would like,” Bea said. “She suggested five days a week, but I told her you do have a job to do for me.” She paused to take a noisy sip of something, and the sound made me crave juice for my dry mouth and coffee for my fuzzy head. “Has she told you anything about her finances?”

  “No!” The idea seemed distasteful, like rooting through Clio’s underwear drawer.

  “I was just wondering if she could afford to supplement your pay. I’ll have to call her lawyer.” There was another hesitation, maybe as she performed calculations in her head. “Well, never mind. If Clio is really writing a new book and somehow your presence helps that process, then I want you stopping by more often. When are you with her?”

  I recited my schedule, and she added two late mornings to it. “Combine it with your lunch hour,” she said. “Start bringing her lunch.” She also tacked on a weekend afternoon that she’d pay an extra twenty bucks for.

  “You know, Bea, she doesn’t eat much. I bring her groceries, but she never wants anything but milk and bread, sometimes Cheerios or a Hershey’s bar. I don’t know how she does it. I’d starve.”

  “Well, start bringing her something tantalizing. She was talking to me about home again, so maybe some good old Southern cooking. How are your grits?”

  I bragged that they were deliciously creamy, which was a lie. Not only was I a Southerner who disliked the texture of grits, but I had no idea how to prepare them.

  “Eggs and grits would help her keep her energy levels up for . . . whatever it is she’s doing. It’s settled then. You’ll start the new schedule this week.”

  “You mean this week as in next week, or this week as in today?”

  “Today. It’s high time you got up anyway.” More sipping noises. “And Livvie, I will expect you to inform me about her progress. I’m paying you to babysit a legend, so part of your job is to keep me in the loop. This is as important for the agency as it is for Clio. A new Clio Hartt book would be . . . well, I can’t think about that yet.” There was a little shudder in her voice, like she was hearing the ka-ching! of bookstore registers.

  “I will tell all on Monday,” I finished, but I was already talking to dead air.

  • • •

  At D’Agostino, I located a container of “Original Instant Grits” that was closing in on its “Best By” date. The label promised you only needed to add water and cook for five minutes, which sounded like something I could handle. When we were growing up, I avoided the kitchen, except when called to dinner or taking my turn washing dishes. “You’re as bad as a guy,” my sister Sue complained. She, Brenda, and Gaynelle all became experts with starch and fat, and their husbands had the expanding waistlines to prove it, but my own forte had turned out to be finding the cheapest, most convenient takeout.

  “Miss Bliss! What a nice surprise!” Clio said when I arrived in mid-afternoon, as if she hadn’t called Bea that morning and demanded my presence. Having been there so recently, it almost felt like I’d never left. “What’s in the bag?” Her face lit up like it did for the blue manuscript box, and I steeled myself for her disappointment.

  “Bea said you were craving a piece of home, so—” I pulled out the grits container with a flourish. “Ta-da!”

  She grabbed the cylinder from my clutches. “Oh my! I haven’t had grits in years. Who knew you could buy them up here? I sincerely appreciate the thought. Would you make me some? There’s margarine in the icebox.”

  The grits really did cook in five minutes, and I melted a plump glob of Parkay into them. Clio didn’t keep salt in the apartment because of her blood pressure, so I’d brought a takeout packet from a nearby deli— what were grits without the bite of salt? Clio took her first forkful of the goopy mixture and looked perplexed, as if she expected it to taste like grits.

  “Well, it’s not my mama’s, but then it wouldn’t be.” She scooped up another bite and examined it before plopping it into her mouth. “Where’s yours?”

  “I ate already,” I said, hoping she didn’t hear my stomach rumble.

  “You got to at least have a taste. Grits are home, Miss Bliss.”

  She invited me to find a spare fork and dig in to her own helping. I would have thought that too intimate for a woman who recoiled when we brushed arms, but our shared heritage broke down her defenses.

  The grits tasted like buttery sawdust, and I put my fork down after one bite. “I’m not much for grits,” I said. Clio dawdled over the serving, eventually eating about a third of it.

  “It was lovely of you to think of me,” she said, sitting back in her chair. “It’s nice to have a touch of the South. This city is a lonely place. You know what I mean by that?”

  I said I did, although as a newbie I was still enamored of New York’s bigness, its loudness, the helter-skelter pace. I could walk down to Christopher Street at all hours of the night and find something to eat or drink, or a store whose door was always open to shoppers. Many weekends I’d roamed on foot, taking in the city’s landmarks, its colorful denizens, drinking up the atmosphere; it was nothing at all for me to stroll from the Chelsea piers to the Brooklyn Bridge. One Saturday afternoon, Gerri showed me the delights of a ride on the F train to La Papaya, a woman-owned café in Brooklyn, and I’d repeated the subway trip several times the very next day for the few grand moments when the train emerged above ground and the Statue of Liberty peeked out at me through the grimy windows.

  But there were other times, too, when I lay immobilized in my loft bed or sat writing postcards home, wondering how I had ended up in such a foreign city, where many of the people I me
t were obsessed with the “right” things to say and do. Gerri derided the lesbians she called “The Shoe People” because they looked down at your shoes before deciding if you were worth talking to. And there were the times when I wandered to Ariel’s alone, looking for companionship but finding only dancing and beer.

  Clio stood up more steadily than was usual for her, and I knew the intimacy of the moment had passed. “I need to work now.” It was a gruff dismissal, given how happy she’d been moments before. “I don’t think I’ll be wanting grits again, but I feel a rush of inspiration just the same.” At the door, she tossed out a challenge: “If you happen on any pimento cheese in your travels around the city, you be sure to bring that my way.”

  • • •

  With my weekend obligation to Clio under my belt, I knocked on Eli’s door. A radio hummed from inside, so when he didn’t answer, I gave it another rap.

  We’d been best buddies the night before, but his manner that day was tense and testy. He hissed down toward his feet, “Get back, Remmie.”

  “Hey, Eli,” I said, trying for casual even though his about-face was unnerving. “Want to grab something to eat? My treat this time.”

  “I’m in no mood to be social,” he said.

  “Oh, okay. That’s fine. Sorry to bother you.” My ears burned, but as I started backing away, his tone softened.

  “Wait, Livvie. I’m sorry. There was another AIDS memorial today. Fifth fucking memorial in a month. I am so sick of hearing people read Auden poems.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, although the words sounded trite even to me.

  “We’re all sorry,” he said. “We’re just one big old sorry bunch.” Fat drops gathered in the corners of his eyes, and he dabbed them away with his finger. “I should go. I’d like to hang out again some time. Try me next week. With any luck, nobody else will have died.” He clicked the door closed, and I heard the soft purring of Remington on the other side.

  • • •

  When I got back to Fifteenth Street, Barb was still not home. The answering machine’s counter was blinking a bright red “2.”

  “Hey, Liv, it’s Gerri, what’re you doing, buddy? You want to grab something at Mi Chinita? Call me.” Gerri’s voice sounded a little too high, a little too jovial. I also noted that she didn’t mention Renee, which seemed odd for a weekend night. Fridays and Saturdays, it was written somewhere in the Book of Couples, were reserved for girlfriends. I erased her first message and listened to the second, which was much less cheery.

  “Hey, Liv, are you home yet? Give me a call, okay? I need advice really, really bad.” There was a long pause, filled with a sigh. “It’s Gerri.”

  “Family and friends, that’s all you got,” was my mother’s saying. Although of course there was the glitch of what happened if family didn’t understand you because you weren’t a carbon copy of them, and you felt alienated from your own blood. Friends were the constant, so I picked up the receiver and dialed.

  Gerri and I met at Mi Chinita, a diner on Eighth Avenue that served a combo of Chinese and Spanish food. It was the best of two worlds, where you could slurp wonton soup and munch on a side of fried plantains.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell Gerri I’d picked up a hot dog on the way home from Clio’s and wasn’t hungry. The place was empty so we nabbed a booth toward the back and ordered Cuban sandwiches. Behind her glasses, dark circles ringed Gerri’s eyes.

  “I don’t even know where to start,” she began. “I couldn’t sleep last night. I almost called you, but—” She rubbed her eyes, like she was trying to stop them from leaking tears. “Have I told you I hate it that you live at Barb’s?”

  When I first announced that I was leaving the Parkside, that I’d found a great share, Gerri had been thrilled. But then I divulged whose apartment I was moving into, and her face clouded. “You should have asked me,” she had said. “I know Barb better than you do.” She’d insisted on relating one of Barb’s most egregious acts— how Jill, Barb’s current lover, had been her roommate Jenny’s girlfriend first. “I bet she told you Jenny was leaving to be a screenwriter, right?” She made the sound of a “you lose” horn on a game show. “Heartbreak city.”

  “Why is she still in the salon then, if you hate her so much?” I had asked.

  “Thea said if we tossed her out, we’d lose Jill, too,” she replied, then muttered something about Renee thinking Barb was brilliant.

  Now I found myself in the awkward position of defending Barb. “Barb’s not all bad,” I said. “We actually hung out last night.”

  Gerri perked up. “You were with Barb last night?”

  “Yeah, she was off from work. She had some really strong pot and we smoked it and ordered Chinese. I don’t know that we’ll be best friends or anything, but she acted pretty normal.” The image of postcoital Barb flashed into my mind: except for those wax burns.

  Relief washed over Gerri’s face as our Cokes arrived. “Well, that’s good to hear. I thought . . . well, I won’t tell you what I thought.” She sipped noisily. “Renee and I had this big fight, and she stayed somewhere else last night. First time since we’ve lived together. It freaked me out.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Where’d she go?”

  “I have no idea. She still isn’t back.” Our Cuban sandwiches arrived next, and Gerri just stared at hers.

  “We met at Ariel’s after work,” she said. “She was late, as always, really out of breath and kind of flushed. And her kiss was, well, halfhearted. It missed my mouth.”

  Guiltily, I took a bite of my sandwich.

  “So here’s the thing you don’t know. Renee and I aren’t technically exclusive.”

  “I’m not sure what that means, not technically exclusive.”

  “It means last year we decided we could sleep with other people— with certain rules, like, no sleeping with friends. Well, Renee’s the one who suggested it, and I thought it was just theoretical, you know? Like, sure, we’re committed to fighting the patriarchy, so wink wink, we’re nonmonogamous.” She sucked on her straw. “I never thought we’d actually do it. I mean, we’re friends with pretty much the same people, so they’d be off-limits, and who’s going to sleep with a total stranger? Besides, I thought we were happy.”

  The thought flashed through my mind that “technically” Gerri and Barb were far from friends, but I suppressed it.

  “So she told you she slept with somebody?”

  “No, I accused her of it,” Gerri said. She bunched her napkin into a ball and squeezed it. “Okay, I accused her of sleeping with Barb. She screamed at me and denied there was anything going on, and then she stormed out.”

  “Oh, wow,” I said. “Wow.”

  “And now you tell me Barb was home with you, so I feel like a total asshole. I need to find Renee and apologize.”

  I nibbled at my sandwich, not sure what else to do.

  “I feel so helpless.”

  “Maybe she’s staying with a friend. Who’s that girl at Hunter she studies with?”

  “Pam?”

  “Yeah, Pam. You could call her.”

  Gerri gripped her glass. “You know, I’ve only met Pam a few times. I talk to her on the phone when she calls for Renee, shooting the breeze, you know, but we aren’t friends.” She stopped suddenly. “I wonder if ‘technically’ . . .”

  “Renee wouldn’t do that.” The image of Renee darting out of Fifteenth Street replayed in my mind.

  “She’s never walked out, Liv, not even after our biggest fights. And we’ve had some door-slammers.” Gerri hunched forward, staring at me in a disconcertingly full-on way that made me lean back in my seat. “What should I do?”

  When it came to advice, I was no Dear Abby. I could listen well and express appropriate sympathy or outrage, but my only “relationship” had sputtered on and off in secret for eight months. I had no idea how real couples worked, and my crumb of guidance was a stretch.

  “I’d wait it out,” I said. “She’ll come home. I kn
ow it’s hard, but it’s not like she can just leave. She’ll cool down. I mean, y’all have a history.”

  To my surprise, Gerri nodded, taking some comfort from my tepid counsel.

  I finished about a third of my sandwich, feeling full to bursting. “You should get yours to go.”

  “You take it.” She paid (“I invited you”) and excused herself to run home in case Renee called. As I waited alone for the to-go container, bile rose in my throat. I had kept vital information from Gerri, my first real friend in the city. Betrayed her, really, something I would never have dreamt of back home. Gerri had befriended me, had helped me get my job, had welcomed me to the inner circle of her salon. And why had I avoided telling her what I knew? Because I was settling in on Fifteenth Street. It was starting to feel like I could have a place there, and I didn’t want to jeopardize that by giving Barb away.

  On Eighth, I offered the sandwich to a homeless guy with two straggly mutts, whose homemade sign read simply, “HUNGRY.”

  Chapter 8

  Needing to get very drunk, I fled to Ariel’s like I was escaping a fire. I’d earned an extra twenty by working with Clio that afternoon, so the plan was to get so wasted I’d wobble home— maybe with a good-looking woman in tow.

  The place had a dull pulse by the time I arrived. In the back room, where the dancing happened, the DJ had finished setting up, choosing “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” by the Eurythmics as her opener. The steady, pounding rhythm before Annie Lennox’s rich contralto burst from the speakers set my head bobbing as I waited for my shot and beer at the bar.

  “Hey there,” I heard, and felt a light tap on the shoulder. Thea from Gerri’s salon stood behind me, although I did a double take because I didn’t place her at first. When we had met at Gerri’s a few weeks back, her hair was shoulder-length and braided, but now it was cropped close to her head, showing off wide-set brown eyes and high cheekbones. My heart sank a little because I didn’t want to talk about the book group, or Barb, or Gerri, or lesbian literature.