Twilight Girl (8 page)

A flutter of wings and an organ chord, resonant and tremulous. Lon approached the redwood table convinced that whatever words came to her would fall far short of her meaning. Mavis, eyes on the curved bottle, did not see her. Not until Lon had swung her legs over the bench on the opposite side of the table.

"I didn't think you'd ever come back here," Lon said. It was an abrupt thing to say, but she had not expected to be subtle or clever.

Mavis looked up then, but took the time to find a cigarette before speaking. "Nobody called to ask me to," she told Lon. Her voice sounded husky, yet softly modulated, with no trace of the Georgia pine-country dialect

"I figured Sassy might not appreciate it if I called you." Lon felt a rush of warmth at so precisely admitting her interest.

"I thought that. I thought, when you didn't call, that was it."

Had Mavis thought about a phone call? Had she come tonight because...?
Because of me,
Lon told herself. And the implications were almost unbearable; like dry matches inside her, waiting for the poof and the sudden flame.

"I called a cab," Mavis said almost listlessly. "Told the man to drive here. Must have had some reason."

"Sassy didn't come?"

"We fought. Sassy had a date with her fiance and I wanted to come here. I didn't mind her going out—he's living with his father in La Jolla for the summer. Only gets into L.A. alternate weekends. I didn't mind, but Sassy wouldn't drive me here. Came anyway." Mavis recited in a jerky monotone now, puffing at the cigarette between sentences, like some mechanical speaking-machine exuding smoke. Yet something more than smoke and lifeless words emanated from her. A something that stuck in Lon's throat: something hard and sweet, like candy half-swallowed.

"Don't you care when Sassy goes out with a—a man?"

"Didn't care tonight did I?"

"But she cares what you do. Will she know about tonight About you?"

"Yeah. Yeah, she'll know."

"What will she do?"

Mavis pulled lazily at the cigarette, then snubbed it out in the aluminum pie-plate ashtray—the only kind Rags' customers didn't take home as souvenirs. "You ask a good question, baby. Ask me that one later."

Her tone jarred Lon, implying a malevolence that made Sassy Gregg hateful, suddenly. "Will it be worth it? I mean—if you did come to see me?"

"Depends. I liked the way you talked. That island of yours—that got me. Dream islands, they shouldn't ever be found. Keep yours in the talking stage, baby."

"Oh, but some day I'm really…"

"My daddy had an island. Only his was Detroit. Man, he thought when he ran from Georgia he'd come to paradise just because he could ride the front end of a street car. Trouble with real islands, they're peppered with booby traps." Mavis turned her head to one side speculatively. "You diggin' this bit, girl?"

Lon waited for more before committing herself. Nothing forthcoming, she ventured, "I haven't given much thought to the Island lately."

"Shouldn't give up a refuge like that baby."

"Oh, I didn't give it up. I've been hoping to talk to you about it again. A lot of people would have laughed at me, hearing about it as you heard. In a way, you did laugh. I can't explain why it was different, coming from you."

"That was why you wanted to see me again? That was the big reason?"

Lon sensed the level, penetrating stare and averted her interrogating eyes. "Only one of the reasons, Mavis."

"Since then you've found that other island. Right, baby? Lesbos. Now there is an island!"

Lon confessed ignorance once more, and it seemed incredible to her, as Mavis wove the spell of words, that Lon had not read or heard of the lyric poems written six centuries before Christ nor of the true priestess of their cult who had written them. Sappho. The impassioned verses, Lon learned, had been addressed to lovely virgins whose preparation for high-born marriage included Sappho's tutoring in music, poetry and the dance. Poems Lon had read and loved, but none such as these. And islands... she had read adventure until she could have walked the distant beaches and known where she stood. Yet, Lesbos—and Sappho! They would have made pure and joyful beauty of that night in June when her own schooling began, there where the luminous heart bled from night-glowing thorns. Through the magic of the ancient story to which Lon now listened ran a contrapuntal theme—a surging, violent hatred of the teacher who had defiled this noblest of all loves! As if Violet, by her gross ignorance, had cheated Lon—cheated her cruelly.

"Crazy Greek island," Mavis concluded. "And Sappho... man, she had it made! Read somewhere that she jumped off a cliff out of love for some male cat named Phaon. But I don't buy this. That's the censor board steppin' in to clean up the story. Either that, or she went all-out to convince the neighbors she was double-gaited. The way Sassy's doing tonight."

Lon ignored Sassy's name and thus needed no explanation. "Lesbos," she whispered dreamily.

"Yeah, Lesbos. Named our whole club after that island. But it wasn't all gimmicked up then, baby. Butch, fem, straight, single-gait, double-gait. It's jazzed up now and we call it gay. Back then, it was love and poetry, natural as the night dew." Mavis looked across the room at the dance floor, rocking in frenetic movement. Looked her contempt and said, "We still mess with the poetry and we call this dancing. But something's gone, baby. And we've tried to compensate, making a thing out of being sick."

"It must have been wonderful in those old days," Lon said. "If you were the way I am, and you loved somebody, it wouldn't seem...." She waited a long while and then whispered the word, "Dirty. Somehow, I never thought about it that way. Until just now, hearing you talk about the way it ought to be." And blurted suddenly, "With Violet, it's dirty!"

"You're not thinking gay, baby. You're not calling it love."

Now Mavis approached ridicule again. Lon could never be sure she was not being laughed at—never even be certain that the girl as much as knew her name; saying "baby" impersonally, as Mavis might say it to anyone. And Lon longed to hear the sound of her own name from the girl who drew her with a magnetism removed from the words she spoke. "Do you call it love, Mavis?" Lon asked.

"Haven't used the word for a long time. Loved my mother. Till mama died of T.B., waiting for my daddy to take off his white collar and earn some doctorin' money. But he was out preaching brotherly love. Getting rocks thrown at him, being so brotherly. Just one more Georgia nigger spoiling Belle Isle for pure-white picnics."

"I used to wish I could love my mother. I don't know—she's never really hurt me. It's like she was never there. Like she didn't exist."

"You couldn't breathe and not love mama," Mavis said, not hearing Lon. "And he wasted it all. Wasted all that love. She'd teach piano to kids in the neighborhood, coughing so hard their folks wouldn't let them come back after a while. Loving him, too. But knowing he was wasting his words, wasting her love—and some day mine would be wasted, too. I bawled out my last love words over an installment-plan coffin." Mavis returned from that painful flower-smelling room in the past. "Love," she said, with controlled venom. "That's dying slow!"

And it was with a half-hopeful melancholy that Lon asked, "You must have cared about someone since then."

"Married a man. Educated black... good man. He had me with my head in a book more than in bed. And I tried, baby. Tried. But it was nothin'. Nowhere."

"And after that?"

"During that. His sister came around. School teacher. What was I? Eighteen? Not much more. She used to lean on the piano while I played, like Sass does now. Leaned closer all the time, all the time." And now Mavis closed her eyes to recall or to blot out a memory—Lon could not be certain which. "It was like Mama leaning there, counting out the beat, rocking just a little to keep my time. Then it was like mama holding her little kid. Pettin' her baby, saying, 'Never mind, honey, it's all right, it's all right.' And that's how they found us, a long lot of lovin' days after that"

"Who found you?"

"Bill and my daddy. Walked in, just like that We were never careful." Mavis opened her eyes then, slowly. And Lon blinked to hide the mist in her own. "It wasn't just a daughter breaking his heart, baby. I was a beauty, he told me. I had learning. Had a talent sewed up in my hands. I had a power to win some love for my people and I broke the faith. Well, Bill was a man. That makes understanding come hard, but he was big. He must have made it. But my daddy—he cried for a lost Joan of Arc and took back my last name. No place to go but the honky-tonks because, baby, I was dead."

"But there were others, weren't there?" Lon asked the question timorously, hating whatever others there might have been. "Other... butches?"

Rags came by then and they ordered Cokes, though the bottle before Mavis was barely touched. "I wasn't buying any," Mavis replied when the pasty proprietress had left them. "Sassy... Sassy's something else again. I wonder, is it because she carries a bigger woe? Is that why I stay with her? Or is some kind of hate in me making me wait around like a vulture? Maybe I've got all those Push Days saved up inside me."

Push Days. Was she expected, Lon wondered, to know what this meant? No, apparently not for Mavis stopped only for a quick sucking breath. "Woman in Chicago once told me... maybe it's just a story... one day a week back there, the colored women would shop downtown. Came in bunches, shoving white women aside in Kresge's aisles. Accidentally on purpose. Bumping anything on State Street with a light skin. Never really hurting, but getting some kind of release for what was inside. I never went and I don't know anyone that did. But I watch Sassy and her misery—sometimes it's like having all those Push Days rolled into one. It does me good."

And it was time, then, to wonder why Sassy Gregg, who had looks, money and Mavis, should be an object of pity—even a tormented, vindictive pity. "You must be wrong, Mavis. What reason would you have to gloat over Sassy… or feel sorry for her?"

"No reason I plan to talk about" Mavis said with unexpected firmness. Then, before Lon could react to the curt statement, Mavis went on, "But Sass and I have our moments. Except when I'm remembering she's a collector. Surprised she didn't flip over your purple passion-flower. Sass collects anything that's different. Jaded taste-buds, see?" Mavis laughed the quick needle laugh that always died as it started. "As she'd say—
literally
jaded. Then I cain't he'p remindin' her she's messed up wif a li'l ole nigrah gal who know all a-bout Miss Gregg. Engaged-to-marry Miz Gregg!"

"Don't talk like that. And don't talk about her so much!" The jealous impulse engulfed Lon too suddenly to be squelched. "Talk to me about—oh, Sappho. I'd like to read some of her poems."

"I'll see that you get them. Then there's Renee Vivien. She was born in Hawaii, come to think of it. Can't seem to get away from islands."

"What about her? Who—?"

"Gay poet. Either everybody who writes poetry is gay or everybody gay writes poetry. This one wrote in French."

"I wouldn't understand that."

"I remember one in English. Mentions another place where Sappho made out Mitylene."

"Tell me."

"Takes the right mood," Mavis said thickly. This time the soft black eyes captured Lon's with a fierce joy, a wild communication, at once tender and agonizing. Whose hand it was that moved first, Lon could not be sure. But in the meeting of eyes and clasping of fingers she found the words, the choked and swallowed words—setting them free now with an awed reverence. "I love you, Mavis." Their eyes held fast and something incendiary darted between them, but the older girl was silent. "You'll say I can't. Not this soon. You're thinking it's just an excuse—the gay excuse. But I knew that first time. Even before I learned what it's like... between girls. I knew." And the words exploded from her again in an anguished burst: "I love you!"

Slim, dark fingers tightened around hers. Pressure of the moist warm palm.
Oh, God, someone so beautiful, so bad, so unloved—so hopelessly necessary to love!
And Lon waited, breathless, for the response that would echo what could be seen in the almond-shaped eyes, felt in the delicate hand. Waited for the sound and no sound came. Until, at last, the soft voice whispered in on kitten feet saying what Mavis could not say in her own words, because saying it meant dying slow. And Lon listened not to the poem she had been eager to hear, but to a gentle voice, now beloved:

Those we love have scorned men...

And we have the power

To be at once lovers and sisters.

In us, desire is less strong than tenderness,

And our mistresses could not deceive us,

Because it is the unfathomable in them which we love.

Our days, without modesty, without fear or remorse.

Unfold in slow, majestic harmony,

And we love as they loved in Mitylene!

* * *

The lyric hung between them, leaving nothing more to say. And then, like the splintering of stained glass in a cathedral, Violet had joined them. Mavis drew her hand from Lon's to reach, she made it seem, for a cigarette.

"Oh, hi, doll," Violet squealed as though she had not seen Mavis earlier. "I said t' myself, Jeez, if it ain't that cutie pie that was here before with that... What the hell was her name?"

"Sassy," Mavis said flatly. "Sassy Gregg."

"Well, funny thing, I was jest talkin' t' some a the kids and they said how come I haven't had a party fer ages? I always give these real crazy parties, kid. So I thought why don't I invite you an' that what's-her-name?"

It was a new turn in Violet's one-track mind and it left Lon dumb. A party. Violet had been stewing at the bar, wringing her brains for a new maneuver and here it was. Here she was, too, ignoring her promise not to get in Lon's way and trusting Lon less with future arrangements now that the cotton-candy mind had spawned an idea.

"How 'bout that, Lon? We'll have a real blast!"

Lon cursed Violet with her eyes. Still, another chance to see Mavis soon...