Lucky in the Corner (6 page)

One of them, though, is not dull. According to the block letters on her paper nametag, she is
PAM
. She’s very tan. There’s a slight list to her stance, a confident, relaxed quality in her expression. She is, Nora suspects, someone conversant in the language of seduction. She has the look of someone who has run a long gauntlet of women but come out unscathed, instead has left the gauntlet battered and bruised. She’s postbutch—narrow black pants, black sneakers, a black rayon camp shirt. Where the collar opens at her throat, a silver chain is visible, a semiserious chain that rides the line between jewelry and statement. There’s a small hickey under the chain. Actually, it’s a neck that’s hard to imagine without a hickey.

She has a crewcut.

Nora tries to picture this woman in a job. Deep-tissue massage therapy. Dog training maybe.

To the ordinary eye, she wouldn’t appear to be doing anything provocative at the moment, only standing in the middle of this reception, holding a plastic glass of Country Red, nametag stuck to her shirt. It’s only to Nora that she is alarming, the alarm an echo from the past. It was precisely women like this who brought Nora out. Neo-vamps adept at using mischief and mayhem to draw not-so-very-straight women like Nora out of worn grooves of marriage and fidelity. There was a time when she desperately needed these women, needed their sullen smoldering, needed the chaos they provided, needed them to call and then not call, to drive her crazy and use up all her available nerve endings on their superficial and transient interest in her. Assembled, they provided a swaying rope bridge out of some jungle movie, unraveling beneath her as she went, creating so much drama and suspense around her transit that arrival on the other side, the initial point of the journey, turned out to be rather anticlimactic.

Eventually she ran through these women, and arrived at Jeanne. At first Jeanne was attractive simply for who she was not. Not a morning dope smoker, or an all-night cokehead. Not someone who flipped out in the middle of making love, and left. Or someone who, if Nora talked to another woman at a party, was suddenly standing there, like a Sicilian husband, holding Nora’s coat.

When Nora approached her, Jeanne stood still, waiting both to hold Nora and to steady her. And all these years since, she has maintained this unswerving posture. What she offered, continues to offer, is a connection in which love is given the opportunity to flourish. She is never capricious with Nora’s heart.

They each came into the relationship looking for something big and permanent. They were in their midthirties then, old enough to be dragging around tattered histories of grim dating, awkward near misses, hopeless affairs, less-than-successful longterm connections. In Paris, Jeanne had lived with a woman for a few years, an orthopedic surgeon she met by way of a fall on slippery steps. Nora, of course, had her marriage behind her, a terrible mistake, with Nora bearing the entire weight of its failure. Both she and Jeanne came in with complicated reasons for wanting to make good this time.

One of Nora’s reasons was her daughter. She wanted to link up with someone who would help her create a new home for Fern, and from the start, without hesitation, Jeanne understood that a life with Nora would also include Fern. And somehow, with her charm and good nature, she moved into a position that wasn’t presumptuously parental or even stepparental, but rather provided Nora and Fern with a buffering presence between them. Nora knows Fern’s adolescence would have been even rougher-going if Jeanne hadn’t been there to simmer things down, smooth them out. For this alone, Nora is hugely indebted to her. No one else could ever occupy Jeanne’s place, which has been achieved through so much shared history.

Not that their relationship is a monolith; it still, even after all this time, sorts out into its good and bad days. There is still a lot of push and pull—a subtle handing over and taking back of power, control, confession, intimacy that sometimes seems so terribly interesting. In other moments, this seems a more fatiguing way of doing things than might be necessary.

The fundamental tone of their partnership, though, set by Jeanne in the very beginning, is one of kindness. This simple measure has made Nora a more considerate person. She used to be thoughtless in small ways—late without calling, forgetful about plans made. Now when there’s something important to be done for Jeanne, Nora writes it on her palm, then checks her hand at the end of the day. She has a sign taped to her desk that says,
CHECK HAND
.

Sometimes they arrive at larger differences, but weather these with a tacit understanding that there are borders on disagreement, that no argument will explode into something truly threatening. At the center of the love Nora holds for Jeanne is a sense of safety—from terrible craziness rising between them, and from the rough side of life. Also from women like this one here at the reception, from her attraction to these women. Which has already come into play—warm liquid flooding her joints, an intransitive sense of urgency. (Something must be done, but about
what?)
Nora sees that this collection of old, familiar symptoms is probably what has inspired her interior pause to mark the merits of her relationship with Jeanne.

She has to be on guard against herself because even after all the years away from women like this, Nora can still hear their soft, deliberate footfalls as they pace the perimeter of her desire. She can still, given about two seconds, come up with a fairly detailed scenario—something fast and wordless in a gas station rest room along some deserted highway. Or something in a motel room backing onto railroad tracks. Sheets still wafting up sex recently transacted as well as the promise of more to come soon. The scene also includes drinking Cokes from small, icicle-cold bottles from a red 1950s cooler outside the door. Drinking Cokes and smoking Camels.

She gathers herself up, readies her handshake, and tries to get down to the business of greeting students. Her radar is still on, though, and so there is no surprise at all, not so much as an instant of wondering whose fingers have dropped lightly on her forearm.

She turns around.

“Someone...” the woman, Pam, says, “I hate to bug you, but someone told me you were the person to talk to about getting a parking permit for the semester.”

“Oh. Right.” Nora loses her sure footing for a moment. Pam waits patiently while Nora pulls a couple of sentences together. “Come by my office before your first class. My assistant handles the passes.” She immediately regrets having used the words “handles” and “passes.”

Pam nods, shyly. This shyness throws Nora off-balance; she was expecting swashbuckling. Shy is trickier.

“Actually,” Nora says, “come by if you have any questions or problems at all. That’s what we’re there for.” She feels good about having come up with this bureaucratic plural. As though her office is hopping with peppy, uniformed staffers, ready to give efficient, impersonal service.

“Oh, I’m not expecting a problem,” Pam says. “I’m only taking pottery.” She looks down at the floor again.

Nora feels an old power flood through her like a narcotic. She has had so much training in this part, is so adept at its extremely small moves. Simply continuing to stand here looking at this woman who can’t look back, not letting her gaze fall or drift is, in itself, a move. The trick is to keep whatever is said or done hovering over the blurry line between something and nothing. These are skills she learned during the women before Jeanne. Surprisingly, they don’t feel at all creaky or withered from lack of use. Rather, they seem greased up and at the ready, as though she has been working out in some secret gym, at night.

“With all your responsibilities,” Pam is saying, “I suppose you need to introduce yourself to some of the others, the other...” “Students,” Nora says. “Yes, I suppose I should.”

While Pam heads off toward the refreshment table, Nora searches for a familiar face, any colleague will do. Instead she finds herself being nodded at by Mrs. Rathko, who was apparently on her way over anyway to say “Disappointing turnout. If only you’d gotten those flyers to me a little earlier.” She goes on in this rueful vein for a while (what a pity they’ve been sabotaged by the weather, and she’s already gotten so many withdrawals for the semester ahead). When Nora finally manages to disengage and is free to scan the thinning crowd, Pam is gone.

She herself stays until the ice melts around the cans of pop, and the buffet runs out of everything but a scattering of carrot sticks, and the students have diminished to a self-sustaining group of perhaps a dozen, chatting in small clumps. Still, even though three-quarters of an hour has elapsed, she is not really surprised when she comes out the front door of the Student Union, to find Pam sitting on the ledge to the side of the stairs. Her shirt is soaked through in places, stuck to her skin at the collarbone, deeply stained at her armpits.

“First,” she says, “let’s not say anything about the heat.”

“Okay,” Nora says, idling in neutral. “What’s second?”

“Oh man, I didn’t have a second thing.” Pam runs a hand over her damp, bristly hair.

Nora feels a drop land on her cheek. She loses track of what Pam is saying. It’s not important. The hair is what’s important, its dampness. Nora pushes an internal
PAUSE
button, freezing the little scene that pops up when she puts a picture of Pam together with the concept “damp”: they’re in the bathroom of the railroad motel and Nora is pulling a shower curtain aside, handing Pam a towel, then playfully reneging.

In the real world, on the steps of the Union, hoping she has missed only half a beat of real time, Nora tries to find a conversational analogue of throat-clearing, tie-straightening, cuff-tugging. “Well, then. I hope you enjoy your class. Have some fun.”

“I’ll make you an ashtray,” Pam says, not joining in the straightening up. She’s still in the motel room, lazy between the sheets.

“I quit smoking,” Nora says.

“You might start again, though.”

Night is falling. Nora pulls her car out of the lot behind the Administration Building. She hears on the radio that large patches of the North Side have had their power knocked out—payback for having sucked up all the available electricity with a few million air conditioners running on high. Everything looks normal and regular for a few blocks, then lapses into darkness. It’s a little scary, also fascinating, to sail along a daily route made eerily unfamiliar by minor catastrophe. Nothing is quite itself. Block after unlit block, here and there a candle or flashlight visible in a window, on the street a sweep of headlights. Amateur anarchists splash in the water gushing from uncapped fire hydrants. Ancient beaters ghost by, heading toward the lake with their windows rolled down and mattresses strapped to their roofs. On the radio, she hears that the parks and beaches are filling up with a temporarily transient population looking for a cool spot to spend the night.

Sailing through all this, it occurs to Nora that if anything were to happen between her and this woman, they would already have this little piece of history in place, something to refer back to, a meteorological marker of their beginning.

FERN LIES ACROSS HER BED
waiting for her next call. The heat wave has forced her to work from home. Harold’s power is still out. She called and found him in a rare downcast mood. He had to cancel the canasta club and had two trays of Crab Rangoon appetizers spoiling in a dead refrigerator.

‘I’ll just hang over here, then,” Fern told him. With any luck, her mother and Jeanne will be late getting home. Even though she has all the windows on the sun porch open, and has stripped down to gym shorts and a tank top, the heat presses on her with dead weight. For Lucky, she has been running a tea towel under cold water, wringing it out, then draping it over his back. He moves
very
carefully, to keep his tea towel in place; he understands that the towel is crucial.

They don’t have air-conditioning. All three of them hate its artificial feel and the sealed-in quality, and, really, on all but a few days of summer, they’re perfectly fine with the ceiling fans. When an unbearable stretch comes along, they usually cave in and call Sears, only to find they’re sold out. And then the heat breaks and they completely forget about air-conditioning for another year.

And so now, Fern tries to lie absolutely still waiting for the phone. When it rings, she husbands her limited psychic energies, cuts to the chase by almost immediately telling the caller she sees a reunion with a loved one. “Someone who has gone away. There’s a long journey involved. By sea.”

“Where do you see me?” the caller asks. “What sea?”

Fern thinks he might be an exception to the rule, a straight guy, older. He has an affected accent. She imagines him wearing an ascot, his hair in a comb-over.

“I can’t tell exactly,” she says, treading until she sees what direction this call will take. “Someplace you’ve always wanted to go.”

“Greece?”

“Yes.” Without even trying, she can feel the Greek sun beating down on ancient temples. No, too hot. She moves toward the cool water. “I see small islands with white houses. Silvery fish pulled from the sea in heavy nets.” Fern tries to fill in the blanks with whatever she can remember from Jeanne’s travel magazines and the few times she has eaten down in Greek Town. She decides against bringing flaming cheese into the picture.

“And this is going to be soon?”

“Within the year, yes,” Fern says, her voice vibrant with confidence. It is this tone, she is sure, that makes her so successful, brings so many repeat callers to ask the Star Scanners operator for Adriana.

“Are you Greek yourself?” the caller asks. She’s not crazy about dealing with a straight guy. Women and gay men are truly interested in the future. With straight guys, sometimes their interest slides off the future, onto Adriana. Fern listens carefully to his breathing, tries to determine if this one is whacking off. Sometimes there’s confusion along these lines. They think “900 number” and “woman” and put them together in a faulty way. She suspects this caller falls between the rows, neither interested in his Greek odyssey nor in something sexual with her. He is probably just lonely.