Clio Rising Page 7

  “Hey, Thea. Wow, you got a haircut! Really cute.” I forced some down-home friendliness that I wasn’t feeling.

  “I needed a change,” she explained. “The extensions were looking ratty.”

  “Well, it suits you.” I wasn’t sure what to say next because I barely knew her, and I retreated into small talk. “So, fancy meeting you here.”

  “Yeah, imagine that, seeing a lesbian in a lesbian bar,” she said in a teasing tone. “I usually go to Déjà Vu, but I was in the neighborhood and wanted to dance, so-o-o . . .”

  “I guess I should get around more. I’ve never heard of Déjà Vu. What’s it like?”

  “Mostly women of color,” she said. “Different music, different vibe.” She flashed me a half-smile that I couldn’t read.

  “Well, I hope you like the music here. I just love this song.” I thought that might be the end of our superficial chat, but Thea seemed to be in no hurry to move on.

  “You look like you want to dance, too,” she said, her smile taking over her face. “Shall we?”

  I said sure, because I did want to dance and I liked her— just not in the way that I wanted to like someone. By the time she got her beer, though, the song had wound down and we stood on the dance floor facing each other. I shrugged in a goofy way, and she said, “Let’s see what’s up next.” The DJ slid into “Walking on Sunshine” and we went with it.

  I loved to dance, but once when Hallie and I danced to the radio in a motel room near Hendersonville, she had observed that I moved like a drunken penguin. Thea didn’t seem to mind my stilted moves; in fact, they made her smile deepen so I exaggerated them for her benefit. She herself was more fluid as she alternated between smooth slides and quick trots. I felt more uncoordinated than usual, partly because I realized I hadn’t danced with a black woman this way before. There was my friend Nikki in college, and sometimes we danced in her dorm room, but she had a boyfriend and it was all just friendly girl stuff. After a few songs, I was inwardly congratulating myself on being a broad-minded New Southerner.

  The DJ started playing “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which Thea and I opted to sit out. “I’m not a very good dancer,” she said, pulling a couple of chairs up to a rickety table.

  “Well, you’ve got me beat.”

  “Not hard to do,” she said with a laugh. I’d never known what a “twinkle in the eye” really looked like, but Thea had it. “I love the way dancing makes me feel. Kind of, I don’t know, expansive.”

  Hallie had used to say she felt “capacious” when she moved to music. Remembering that word, which I hadn’t thought about or used in months, made me miss her again, and I didn’t want to, so I downed my shot, sucked on my beer, and surveyed the dance floor for her replacement. No one stood out.

  “I’ve always been better at singing,” Thea said, as my eyes scanned the room. “I sang in the choir back home.”

  The “home” part brought me back to the table. In my short time in New York, almost no one had talked about “back home” except Clio. It seemed like most people in the city were looking to forget they had had a “home” somewhere else. There was no trace of an accent in Thea’s voice, so I asked where home was.

  “Charleston. But I moved up here for college and then grad school and just didn’t go back. Not yet, anyway.”

  “A fellow Carolinian!”

  Even as I said it, I suspected we’d had different upbringings. Thea seemed so poised, so sophisticated, I pictured her with a lawyer father, a mother who’d gone to a women’s college. I’d never been to Charleston, but I heard it was a ritzy town.

  “I don’t know about you,” I said, “but it’s weird for me sometimes, being the only Southern girl in the room. Like I’m some kind of zoo animal.”

  Thea mulled that over. “For me, it’s more about being the only black girl in the room. Like at the salon.”

  I nodded like I understood, but I hadn’t considered how being surrounded by white women might feel awkward for her, even at her friend Gerri’s. The two of them had been tight since they met at a reading at Womanbooks.

  “Or being the only out lesbian,” Thea added. “My grad school adviser is this big ol’ feminist, but she actually told me never to come out if I wanted an academic career.”

  “No!” I said.

  “Sometimes I think, where’s my place?” She stopped for a second, as if weighing how much to tell a virtual stranger, but she must have felt comfortable enough to continue. “And then here in New York, there’s not just one place, you know? There’s Barnard and the salon and Déjà Vu—” She ticked them off on her fingers. “And you got to be different people at each one, so you end up suppressing some piece of you.” She’d shared something that felt big, and I held her eyes for a moment in recognition.

  “I know a little bit about what you mean,” I said. “Like at the salon, before you came? I laid this humongous egg when I mentioned my family going to church.”

  “That is such a no-no,” she said, laughing.

  “You know, I was in the choir, too.” I lowered my voice and sang the word Alto.

  “Nice. Methodist or Baptist?”

  “Baptist.”

  “Me, too,” she said, clinking her bottle against mine. “We are abominations together.”

  “You know, this is going to sound funny, but I actually do miss it some Sunday mornings.”

  Her eyes sparkled again at that. “Girl, you have got to be cool to sit in a lesbian bar and admit to missing Sunday service.”

  When the DJ played “Tainted Love,” we were on our feet again and stayed there through “Rock the Casbah” and “Physical.” By then, most of the women in the bar were singing along, and I could hear that Thea had a bell-like soprano that would have worked better on a stage somewhere. “Wrong key for me,” she said, with an embarrassed grin.

  “No, you have a great voice.”

  Soon I was on my second shot-and-beer combo and getting looser, singing out “Don’t go around breaking young girls’ hearts!” louder than anyone else in the bar. A cute blonde in strategically ripped jeans danced up next to us and purposely bumped into me. In the spirit of dance clubs, I turned toward her, mimicking her moves. When the much slower “Sexual Healing” came up in the DJ’s queue, the blonde leaned over and asked me to slow-dance. But because the music was so loud, her suggestion was more of a scream than a flirtatious whisper. “Are you two together?” she asked, nodding toward Thea.

  “Nah, just friends.”

  I looked over at Thea, whose smile now seemed more forced than before. She pointed to our table and mouthed what looked like “sit this one out.”

  The blonde, whose name was Wendy, was hot and needy. Within three dances, she said she was going to Miami Beach in a couple of weeks to see her grandfather and invited me along. “We could get you some really cool outfits,” she said, sizing me up. “You wear men’s pants? Maybe a twenty-seven?” It turned out she was an assistant buyer at Macy’s with a twenty percent discount. She wasn’t Hallie, or even a likely replacement, so I peeled myself away, saying I didn’t get vacation days yet because I’d just started a new job. “That’s it? We’re done?” she asked, incredulous. Her face contorted into an unattractive frown; she hadn’t planned on going home alone.

  I could have gotten laid, and I was badly tempted. At the same time, I’d now compounded my guilt over Gerri with a brand-new guilt over abandoning Thea. It wasn’t like me to ditch a friend like that. When I noticed Thea wasn’t sitting at our table, a surge of disappointment surprised me. She’d been so easy to talk to, where Wendy had been a struggle. I circled the room, scanning for Thea’s new ’do, realizing that she had been one of just a few black women in the bar.

  • • •

  Back at the apartment, I found Thea’s phone number in Barb’s address book, which sat underneath the answering machine on our kitchen counter. When she wasn’t under the T’s, I searched every page until I found “Thea Greene” on Manhattan Avenue. I wasn’t e
ven sure where that was.

  The traces of alcohol still circulating in my system made me bold enough to dial, although I was hoping for the answering machine. I thought I’d leave a friendly message apologizing for abandoning her, then asking her out for coffee. But on the fourth ring, a now-familiar voice answered. When I said, “It’s Livvie,” Thea was quiet for a moment.

  “I thought you’d be busy,” she said finally. “What happened? You strike out with the blonde?”

  “She wasn’t my type,” I said, trying to regroup from the verbal slap.

  “Oh,” she said, “your type.”

  “I looked for you, but you must have left.”

  “Long ride uptown.”

  “I want to apologize. For leaving you like that. I don’t do that to friends. I hope we can still be friends.”

  She was quiet again.

  “Thea?”

  “Look, I get it. The ‘type’ thing. Black girls are friend material, not girlfriend material. Even when they pass the paper bag test.” I knew that “paper bag test” meant being light-skinned, but I had never heard anyone talk about it out in the open like that. “Believe me, that’s nothing new,” she continued, her tone clipped and dry. “Amazing that it still surprises me.”

  “Thea, I—” I had intuited her interest in me, but I hadn’t let myself believe it. In the world where I grew up, a liberal-minded white girl’s friendships might cross color lines at school, but those black friends wouldn’t be invited home. And people of different races never dated each other unless they were looking for stares, rude remarks, or violence.

  “We should hang up now,” Thea said. “You’ll just say something to try to make yourself feel better, and I’ll get mad and try to take you down a notch, and then we never will be friends and someone will have to leave the salon because it’ll be too uncomfortable. So let’s say we’ll see each other there in a few weeks, okay? Talk Alice Walker all afternoon. Keep it nice and polite, like our mamas would want it.”

  My hand trembled as I replaced the handset.

  Chapter 9

  October 1983

  “Come in, come in!” Clio said, breathless. “I need to show you something.” She grabbed me by the sleeve of my oxford shirt and jerked me inside her apartment, a surprisingly rough tug for an octogenarian.

  “Could we open the windows?” I asked. “It feels stuffy in here, don’t you think? Some air would—”

  “Those old windows don’t open more than a crack.”

  She was right. Someone had painted and repainted them so many times I could only force them up a few inches, and the exertion it took made me break out in a sweat. “This isn’t good,” I said. “I’ll have to—”

  “Forget the windows, Miss Bliss, and sit down.”

  I rolled up my long sleeves as Clio shoved loose papers in front of me. That morning in the office, I had reported to Bea that Clio had amassed pages of new writing, but I hadn’t gotten a good look at them. I didn’t want to admit yet that she seemed to be rewriting and revising more than generating new material.

  Bea had got testy with me. “So get her talking!” she said, not appreciating the precarious position I was in as a lackey. “The woman likes you. Take advantage of it.”

  The pages in front of me were yellowed and curled at the edges, letters from various literary journals and magazines addressed to Miss Clio Hartt at an address on Rue Something.

  “These will help in your search for my stories,” she explained, and my heart sank a little. Bea was more interested in new work than reprints. But at least it was a better start than we’d had the week before, when Clio offered up only vague years of publication. Maybe some savvy reference librarian at the New York Public Library would locate the issues for me. “That’s not all of them, unfortunately, but I’m still looking.”

  “Oh, great,” I said.

  “I thought you’d be happy. I’ve saved you so much work.”

  “I am happy, I am! This is great, Miss Hartt, really,” I said, trying to whip up more enthusiasm than I was feeling. “How’s the . . .” She looked so deflated that I hesitated to mention the new work. “. . . story you’re working on? What’s it called again?”

  “Oh, that,” she said with disdain, taking the chair next to me. “I’m working on something else now. It’s called ‘Madame Louise.’”

  During our marathon meeting the week before, she’d derided an editor named Louise who wanted to publish her stories, and yet here she was naming a story for her.

  “Is she, you know, a madam?”

  Clio stared at me, open-mouthed. “Of course not! I do not write pornography! It’s simply a courtesy title, like ‘Miss Hartt.’” Then, after a pause: “You really should learn some French.”

  “So, does the story take place in Paris?” I asked, to change gears. Plus, Bea’s voice was playing in my head: Get her talking.

  “I started it in Paris, but I couldn’t . . . oh my.” Her voice was small as a child’s who needs an afternoon nap. “I couldn’t seem to see it anymore. I remember our apartment so clearly, and Sylvia’s bookshop and Natalie’s place in the Rue Jacob, but the city itself is fading away, Miss Bliss. I’ve lived here such a long time.” A tingle ran up my arms as I realized she was talking about Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company and Natalie Barney herself.

  “Well, does it need to take place in Paris?”

  She grimaced, like I’d gouged an open wound.

  “Well, of course, it needs to take place in Paris! That’s where we all were!”

  Did the “we all” refer to just her and Flora, or someone named Louise, too, or maybe their circle of friends and colleagues? My question about Paris got her so riled I decided to hold my thoughts and make her a pot of coffee.

  When I handed her a cup just the way she liked it, she regretted her earlier tone without apologizing for it. “I don’t mean to be cross, but my writing goes so slowly.”

  “Maybe if you told me the story,” I suggested. “Would that help?”

  She peered at me over her cup, mulling the offer. But she finished her coffee before she replied and I sat there like an obedient servant, waiting for instructions.

  “It might help,” she said. “Let’s see where that takes us.”

  Monday was supposed to be one of my “visit Clio at lunchtime” days, and I needed to get back to the office to finish typing and mailing contracts. I excused myself to use Clio’s phone and dialed Bea first, but she was either on the phone or at lunch, so I tried Ramona. When I related that I would be late because Clio needed me, Ramona’s anger snaked through the line.

  “The typing doesn’t do itself, Livvie!” she snapped. “It’s stacking up. This is your job! You weren’t hired to be Clio Hartt’s personal assistant.” Then she threw in a threat: “Bea’s not going to like this one bit.”

  “But she’s the one who gave me more hours with Clio,” I said, a little snippier than I intended. “You can ask her. If she’s there.”

  She said, “I have to go. Unlike you, I have work to do,” and hung up.

  When I turned back to Clio, she had fallen asleep in her chair, empty coffee cup in her lap. I got scared that she’d passed away right then and there, but when I came up right next to her and leaned in, her breath was warm against my cheek. My closeness startled her awake, and she yelped, “What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

  “Just . . . making sure you’re OK,” I said, with a sheepish grin.

  “I hate to disappoint you, but I’m not dying today. Now let’s get started.”

  • • •

  It had been a year since I’d read Clio’s masterpiece, The Dismantled, which was one of Hallie’s favorite books. She and I had dedicated almost a month to it during my “Modernist Writers” independent study— a course I’d cooked up to get closer to her— as I wrestled my way through circuitous sentences, some of which went on for nearly a page. “But the language, Livvie!” Hallie had said when I balked. “These are some of the mos
t glorious sentences you’ll ever read in the English language! Forget Joyce! This . . . this is Modernism.”

  Aside from its challenging syntax, the novel’s plot was a bummer. It followed the downward trajectory of an on-again, off-again relationship, in which the main character, a woman named Vivien, sank further and further into depression and alcoholism as her married lover, Marisa, had sex in turn with a man and a woman, a woman, and finally a teenaged boy. In the end, Marisa left Vivien for a mature French female aristocrat, simply known as “La Comtesse.”

  The sex was suggestive, not graphic; it didn’t come anywhere near Henry Miller, but it was colorful enough that the novel had been banned in its day. And the prose, however tame in comparison to other books, had been hot enough to inspire me to kiss Hallie right in her office, launching our “special relationship.”

  Although I couldn’t recall every plot twist, I remembered enough to realize with alarm that the story Clio related to me in her apartment that afternoon was virtually identical to The Dismantled. The only thing that seemed different were the characters’ names: Vivien was now Viola, Marisa transformed into Madeleine, and “La Comtesse” got a downgrade in status and became “Madame Louise.” Hence, the proposed title.

  Clio outlined the plot in detail for a full fifteen minutes until her voice rasped. I fetched her a cup of reheated coffee, which bought me time to mull over what I was going to say when she inevitably asked my opinion.

  “What do you think?” Clio said, her eyes especially wide. “I know it’s rough. But I think it could work. It might even be a novel. And you see now, of course, why it has to take place in Paris.”

  I didn’t see anything of the sort, but I held that thought. “Madame Louise” sounded like high relationship drama to me— the kind of dysfunction we now sang along with at Ariel’s: “Some of them want to abuse you/Some of them want to be abused.” Paris served as an atmospheric backdrop, but I had no trouble imagining something similar playing out in 1980s Greenwich Village.