Jean Copeland
I peeked at Lily from the kitchen, studying her dark chocolate eyes behind her rhinestone-encrusted glasses. Perched on the corner of Martha’s sofa, she looked pensive after our discussion about the book club choice that week, The Great Gatsby.
“Lily, you haven’t said a word since we finished,” Carol said. “Something you’d like to share with us?”
Lily, soft-spoken and ripe with ageless beauty, offered a slight smile. “Even though I’ve recovered from the cliché of a cheating husband, I’d be lying if I said all the infidelity in Gatsby didn’t remind me of Frank.”
“Me too,” I chimed in as I helped Martha gather the dessert plates and coffee cups. “Cheating wife, I mean.”
Carol shot me a playful look. “Yeah, Erin, you’re recovered, all right. That’s why you still commune with this old lonely hearts club every Friday night.”
“I beg your pardon,” I said. “It’s a book club, and I come for the stimulating literary discussion and Martha’s strudel.”
Lily looked at me with a grin.
Carol glanced out the window into the rainy night and turned to Lily. “I hope it won’t be flooded or icy under that bridge when I take you home.”
“I’ll take her home,” I said. “She’s on my way.”
She really wasn’t, but for that sweet face, I would have chauffeured her to Canada.
* * *
A glass of chardonnay was my compensation for the ride home. Lily built a small fire in her family room and lit a Douglas fir candle. The recessed lighting low, the stage was set for seduction—if only she had been so inclined.
Halfway through her first glass, Lily curled her feet under her on the sofa and brought up Gatsby again. “I’m really enjoying the novel,” she said. “I could never have appreciated it in high school the way I can now—the whole idea of being haunted for years by a lost love. Oh, it gives me the chills.”
I nodded. “Unlike in tenth grade, I’m actually reading it all the way through without Cliff’s Notes. Even for a cynic like me, totally down on relationships, I couldn’t help getting swept away by the tragedy of it—how we’re all just ‘boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly to the past.’”
“Oh, I love that quote,” she said. “The one thing I don’t like is how Fitzgerald doesn’t show us a thing that went on between Jay and Daisy when Nick left the room. What did they say? What were they feeling? That was the most exciting moment in the novel. Why would he skip over it?”
I shrugged. “I think leaving it to the readers’ imaginations heightens the sense of possibility. Haven’t you ever wanted someone so bad that it made you…”
She shook her head.
“Well, no doubt you will. It gets everyone, eventually.” I felt sad for her. How could someone have been married for twenty years and not know that feeling?
“Hey, can I make an odd confession?” she said. “I never thought of gay relationships as being the same as straight ones.”
I shrugged, not surprised. “What did you think happened in them?”
She shrunk into the plush sofa and hesitated. “I used to think they were just about sex. In my defense, I grew up in the white bread capital of the Midwest.”
I grinned. If it were anyone else, I would’ve been savagely offended, but her candor was adorably innocent. “I should be so lucky. Obviously, you’ve never heard of lesbian bed-death syndrome.”
She shook her head and recoiled as though it were a contagious disease.
“Sparing you the unpleasant details, I can assure you gay relationships are as real and wonderful, and awful as yours.”
“Oh, I know that now. You must think I’m so ignorant, but honestly, I’ve never had a problem with gays, and I’m all for marriage equality.”
I teased her with a handshake. “I guess now we can be Facebook friends.”
She giggled and slapped my hand away. “I can’t believe how comfortable I am around you. I feel like I can talk about anything.”
“I feel the same way. You seem surprised.”
“It is a little surprising if you think about it. I’m straight and a mom, soon to be a grandmother. We’re just very different people.”
I twirled the stem of my empty glass. “With one major thing in common. We’re both rebuilding our lives. I may not have had kids with Vanessa, but I spent almost fourteen years of my life with her. I thought we would be together forever, and then at forty-one, I found myself starting over.”
As she nodded, Lily’s olive skin shone in the glow of her white Christmas tree lights. “When you told me about Vanessa, it felt like you were describing Frank and me, especially when you said it wasn’t just Vanessa you lost; it was your whole way of life. Another person rips it out of from under you, and you’re left to piece it back together on your own.”
I agreed, wishing I could touch her. “I couldn’t piece together a life I’d built with someone else. I had to learn how to live without being half of something.”
“I’m finally figuring out how,” she said, straightening her posture. “My sister keeps trying to fix me up with guys she knows, but I keep saying no.”
“It’s only been eight months.” The prick of jealousy surprised me. I enjoyed seeing Lily every week at Martha’s, and we had started texting or talking on the phone a few times a week. A new guy in her life would pose a serious block to that situation.
“At first, all I thought about was finding someone else,” she said. “Frank wasn’t alone. I didn’t want to be either—more like I was afraid to be. But now I actually like it.”
“I’ve been single for almost two years,” I said. “I love the freedom. I’m getting to know who I really am, which is something I couldn’t do with my identity tangled up in Vanessa and me as a couple.”
“Do you know what’s really going to suck?” she asked.
“Never meeting anyone ever again and dying alone?”
She giggled. “No. Christmas. Christmas is going to suck.”
I nodded. “Your first Christmas alone.”
She nodded, too. “Thanksgiving wasn’t so bad because my daughter and her husband came to my sister’s, and we all had a nice time eating and drinking—lots of drinking.” She offered a devilish grin.
“Why can’t you do that on Christmas, too?”
“They’re driving down to my son-in-law’s parents in New Jersey. I can’t complain. He’s spent the last three up here with us. Besides, it may sound weird, but Christmas has always been such a romantic holiday to me.”
“Did you and your husband have some special tradition?”
She gave a vague shrug. “There’s something so romantic about cuddling on the couch with all the lights out, nothing but the fireplace and Christmas tree, a mug of hot chocolate or a glass of good wine. And then maybe it leads to love making. I’ve always had the fantasy, but reality never quite lived up to it. I’m afraid I’m such a hopeless romantic that it sets me up for disappointment every time.”
Silence hung between us as I fantasized about acting out every part of Lily’s reverie with her. “Wow,” I finally said. “I don’t think I’ll ever look at Christmas the same way again. Thanks for making me dread the next five weeks.” I winked at her.
“Well, maybe we can have a special holiday book club meeting with the girls closer to Christmas. I’m sure Martha would appreciate the company, too.”
“And if Martha’s strudel won’t ease the ache of a spouseless Christmas, nothing will.”
She grinned as she poured us refills and raised her glass to mine. “Here’s to Martha’s strudel.”
I chinked my glass against hers. “And to great friendships that keep us sane,” I said and hid a sappy smile behind a long sip of wine.
She licked her lips after the toast and drew her eyeglasses back into her hair. Suddenly, everything sexy about her came alive. The way my body tingled, there was no doubt that if I pursued this friendship, I’d ring in the New Year in a support group instead of a book club.
* * *
Over the next week, I sent Lily a few texts that danced precariously between sincere compliments and shameless flirtation, the latter of which I diffused with smiley faces and an over-abundance of “lols.” When my toes did shuffle over to the flirty side, she seemed almost ambivalent.
“I’m in my late forties, about to be a grandmother in two months,” she said as she picked through pink layette sets during our first Christmas shopping venture. “I’m not sexy at all.”
“Lily, don’t you know what a cougar is? It’s a sexy, older woman.”
“I know what it is. I just can’t believe you think I’m one.”
As she bent down to examine teddy bear feety pajamas, her delicious décolleté peeked out from her V-neck sweater.
“Trust me,” I said. “You meet all the criteria.”
We were at a critical juncture in conversations like this. As I became more and more brazen with my remarks, her tolerance level bent to accommodate each one.
“You’re a very attractive woman, Erin. I don’t get why you’re still single.”
“I have discerning taste. I’m very happy to wait for Ms. Right.” I was proud of myself for sounding so smooth, until the stack of boxed baby booties I was leaning against toppled to the floor.
She snorted with laughter as I scrambled to gather up and restack the boxes. “I get a kick out of you,” she said.
I shifted my coat and bags of gifts from one hand to the other, following Lily as she drifted around racks of baby clothes. As “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” filled the stuffy department store, something, maybe a lack of adequate oxygen supply, dared me to lean toward her and whisper, “If you were a lesbian, would you go out with me?”
“Oh, it would definitely be you.”
I’m not certain if it was the response itself or the speed and conviction with which it was said that shocked us more. She stopped browsing, and we exchanged glances like we were back in high school and the teacher caught us passing notes.
“Uh, I’m going over to men’s fragrances,” I stammered. “I’ve gotta try to upgrade my dad from Old Spice this year.”
“Okay, uh, I’ll pay for these things and meet you over there,” she said, avoiding my eyes.
* * *
In the car heading home, we were suddenly Fitzgerald scholars, examining Gatsby’s enduring social relevance and deconstructing Myrtle as a metaphor for the common woman oppressed by the white, well-heeled patriarchy—anything to steer us out of the Valley of Awkward. As we neared her street, I caught her looking at me. My better judgment vanished like the moon behind snow clouds, and my mind schemed for an invitation in for a nightcap.
“I’m so glad it’s Friday,” I said “I can sleep in tomorrow. You feel like stopping somewhere for a quick drink?”
“I have wine at my house—unless you want something else.”
My heart and I shared a secret smile. “No, wine is fine.”
As we nestled on opposite ends of Lily’s sofa, I found myself less able to curb my desire for her after each sip of Malbec. I studied her lips forming each word, imagining my fingertips touching her skin, my mouth falling on hers.
“Do you feel okay?” she asked. “You look a little flushed.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m fine.” I pressed my fingers to my hot cheek and steered her attention back to the intriguing conversation we’d started after Gatsby on the way home from the mall. “So other than traveling, what else is on your post-Frank bucket list?”
She giggled. “Post-Frank—I like that. Let’s see, I don’t know. I’d like to think I’m open to adventure of any kind. What do I have to lose, right?”
“That’s what I always say.”
“What have you come up with?” she said.
“Um, I think I’d like to try snowboarding and visit Greece to see the ruins and, well, I think I should just leave it at that.”
“Why? What else is on that list?” She narrowed her eyes and grinned.
I played along. “I better not.”
She kicked my foot from her end of the sofa. “Just tell me.”
“Nah, you’ll get mad.”
“Why would I get mad at what’s on your bucket list?”
“It involves you.”
“Now you better tell me, you jerk.”
What a turn-on when she got feisty like that, and I was feeling reckless from the wine. I hesitated, just long enough to stir up some drama. “To kiss you.”
Lily’s jaw seemed to come unhinged.
“See? I told you I should’ve kept that one to myself.”
She laughed nervously. “No, I’m glad you didn’t. We said we could tell each other anything.”
“That’s what we said.”
She grinned, shaking her head.
“Ever think of adding ‘kissing a girl’ to your list?” I said.
“No, I never had—until recently.” She stretched her legs on the coffee table and sipped her wine.
“Would I be the girl you’d want to kiss if you wanted to kiss a girl?”
She laughed out loud. “That sounded like lyrics from a Julie Andrews musical.”
“Oh my God, it totally did.”
After I sang the line in my best Julie Andrews falsetto, we collapsed into laughter.
Once we calmed down, I said, “So you’ve thought about it?”
She nodded, staring into the fire.
“Would you slap me across the face if I kissed you now?”
“Slap you? What’s a kiss between friends?” She shrugged coolly as her fingers dug into the fringe throw pillow clutched to her chest.
I blushed as I whispered, “If we’re going to get anywhere, you have to come closer.”
“Duh,” she said with a smile. She set her wine glass on the end table and scooted over.
I leaned over and kissed her gently, savoring the hint of Malbec on her lips, expecting her to back away. Instead, she took my hand and pressed it on her cheek as we kissed. When I flicked my tongue against hers, she responded with a soft moan. I eased her down against the decorative pillows, and she grabbed my face with both hands and kissed me harder.
“I love how your lips feel,” she whispered. “You’re so soft.” She caressed my back and then squeezed me to her.
“All girls are,” I said in her ear.
“But you’re the only one I’ve ever made out with.” She slipped her hands up my shirt, digging her fingers into my skin.
When I bit her earlobe, she squeezed me tighter.
“We should stop,” she said.
I made a half-hearted attempt to sit up, but she wouldn’t release her grip on me. She searched my eyes as though in them she could solve a million mysteries
She kissed me again, and for a while, we helped each other forget all about a lonely Christmas.
* * *
After she shifted to her side, I draped my arm over her like a blanket, waiting for her afterglow to fade and to be ushered out the door, baby, no matter how cold it was outside.
I woke with a chill to the dying embers and checked my watch.
“Lily, I have to get going,” I said, lifting her arm off me. “It’s almost four.”
“That late?” She slurred her words, still half asleep. “Why don’t you stay?”
Anticipating the particular awkwardness of a morning-after breakfast, I declined her offer.
I drove home to the hum of tires hugging asphalt and icy wind through my cracked window, pondering the numerous reasons our night together would likely end our friendship. I hoped it wouldn’t, but what if she woke up and in an attack of guilt resented me for seducing her?
I spent all Saturday starting and cancelling text messages to her. Finally, about nine that night, I picked up the phone and called her.
“I’m not sure whether to tell you how much I enjoyed last night or apologize,” I said.
“Don’t apologize. It was wonderful.”
“Then you don’t hate me?”
She chuckled softly. “Not at all, but I haven’t been able to think straight all day.”
“Nice pun.”
“What? Oh, ha ha. Speaking of that, does this mean I’m not straight anymore?”
I had my suspicions of what it meant, but I felt compelled to reassure her. “Oh, I don’t think so, Lily. One experience doesn’t decide whether you are or aren’t anything.”
“But I enjoyed it—I mean I really enjoyed it, more than I ever did with my husband.”
I felt so petty grinning into the phone, but how could I not at a revelation like that? “I don’t know. Maybe he just wasn’t the greatest lover.”
“I was with a couple of other men before I married Frank. I don’t ever remember feeling like that, and I don’t just mean physically. The whole experience was so different, so emotionally gratifying.”
I loved what she was saying but hated the distress I heard in her voice. I sighed. “I don’t think I have the answer to what you’re asking me, Lily. Like I said, one experience is nothing to get nervous about. Lots of straight people have tried it.”
“But I bet not so many straight people felt like this the day after.”
“Like what? Guilty? Violated? Degraded?” I said it half-joking, only half.
She chuckled. “No, you fool. Quite the opposite.”
I wanted to ask for clarification, but I didn’t. I liked the sense of possibility in leaving it to my imagination.
She exhaled deeply. “I should probably stop thinking so hard about it.”
“Right, and, hey, now you have something you can cross off your list, too.”
“Hmm, I wish it was that simple. Last night was much more than just a bucket list adventure, Erin. That I know.”
“For me, too.” After a brief silence, I said, “Well, I guess I’ll see you Friday if you still want to go to Martha’s.”
“Of course I want to go. Erin, I hope this isn’t going to ruin our friendship.”
“It won’t for me.” I sounded confident, but I couldn’t imagine how I could be near her and resist reaching for her hand or her irresistible lips. After making love to her, I realized I had been in love with Lily before we’d even kissed.
“It won’t for me either,” she said. Yet the week came and went without as much as a text from her.
* * *
By Friday afternoon, the text I’d been driving myself crazy waiting for all week finally arrived. She asked if I could pick her up earlier than usual so we could talk over dinner.
As I waited for her to broach the subject, Lily pushed around more of her Caesar salad than she ate. I was convinced I was the cause of the glass of pinot she ordered instead of diet Coke. She remained quiet. All I could do was prepare for the inevitable.
“Erin,” she said.
Here it comes, I thought. “Hmm?”
Her mouth opened, but nothing came out. And then, “How is your wrap?”
“Spicy. Want some fries?” Suddenly, I wasn’t hungry for any of it.
She shook her head. “Erin, I can’t stop thinking about you.” She looked into her plate and jabbed her fork into a grilled chicken strip. “And I can’t believe some of the things I’m thinking.”
“I’ve been thinking about you, too.”
She dropped her fork in her dish and scratched her chin. “I mean I’ve tried to stop, to focus on other things. God, I really want to kiss you again, but I know I shouldn’t.”
“It’s okay. Look, I never expected to be more than your friend anyway.”
“How can I have a relationship with you? I’m not a lesbian.” She pushed her plate away and dabbed her mouth with a napkin. “But I keep thinking about being with you again, making love with you. I want to make love to you.” Her eyes grew dark and dreamy. “This feels like one of those movie romances where the woman gets all breathless and swept away. I always thought those stories were just in some writer’s imagination, but that’s how you make me feel.” She let out a deep sigh. “That probably makes me a lesbian, huh?”
I smiled and pointed a long French fry at her. “Probably.”
Her eyes widened.
“I’m teasing, Lily. Look, you’ll figure this out eventually, whatever there is to figure out.”
“I don’t know. I just know I love being with you and talking with you and kissing you. But I don’t know what it means. I don’t even know what I want it to mean.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t see each other for a while, you know, so you can process all of this.”
She sat up straight in the booth and sighed. “I think that’s a good idea.”
Wait a minute. I just said that to be polite. She wasn’t supposed to take me up on it.
“I hope you understand,” she added.
What could I say? Yes, I understood, but I was also crushed. The inventor of the bucket list never stipulated that all wishes were subject to cruel and swift cosmic irony.
“I understand,” I said. “Maybe we should skip Martha’s tonight, too,” I added, indicating the snowflakes in the streetlight. “It would be really inconvenient if I had to crash on your couch because of the roads.”
“You wouldn’t be on my couch. That’s the problem.”
I glanced out the window again. “No, the real problem is that only one of us sees that as a problem.”
“I’m sorry, Erin. I just don’t know what to make of all these crazy feelings. This is the last thing I expected to happen to me.”
“Do you think I expected it?”
“No, but at least you’re used to this kind of thing with a woman,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been totally broadsided.”
“I can imagine. But who can really anticipate what’s going to happen next in life?”
She lifted an eyebrow. “I haven’t cared much for surprises since the last one was Frank walking out on me.”
“Would it have hurt any less if you knew it was going to happen?”
She shrugged and looked out at the snowflakes piling quietly on the windowsill. “I could’ve braced for the fall.”
* * *
The following week, Lily declined my invitation to pick her up for book club. In fact, she wasn’t going at all. “I’m helping my daughter wrap Christmas presents,” was her reason.
“Who wraps anymore? Isn’t this the age of the gift bag?” I replied in jest, but there was no giggle on the other end.
I knew it was an excuse. I knew I had to give her space, as much as she needed, forever if she needed that. As the holiday drew closer, I went to the drug store and leafed through the remaining Christmas cards—‘for my wife,’ ‘a new love,’ ‘seems like we’ve always been in love.’ When was Hallmark going to cater to the sorely underrepresented market of those who fell in love with someone they never should have slept with? It was impossible to find a generic card that expressed my feelings. I settled on a ‘thinking of you’ card with a classy silvery bulb on it, wrote by hand what burned in my heart, and left the rest to serendipity and the US Postal Service.
* * *
Christmas night we sat on barstools around Lily’s kitchen island, sipping amaretto-laced eggnog. After a noisy afternoon with my large family in my brother’s small house, the soothing hum of a Sinatra Christmas CD smoothed out the edges the amaretto missed.
Lily took a sip of her drink and licked the hint of foam off her lip. “So was Santa good to you today or did you get coal?”
“Santa brought me the best gift ever last night—your text.”
“Your card was beautiful,” she said. “And since three weeks away from you have done nothing to help me forget you or move on, it was something I needed to do for myself.”
“I’ve missed you, Lily. I don’t know if I should say that, but it’s true.”
“You should say what you want to say.”
I offered a cautious grin. “I will if you will.”
She exhaled deeply. “I’m happy when I’m with you, Erin. I’ve felt that way even before we slept together.”
“Me too.” I put my hand on hers, and she grabbed hold of my fingers.
“Remember when I told you I used to think being gay was just about sex?”
I nodded as my skin tingled with the recollection of our passion.
“Now I realize I wish it was that simple.” She paused as her lip quivered. “My heart has never missed anyone more, my body’s never craved anyone, and my thoughts have never been so involved with anyone until you. I’m in love with you.”
I took her by the waist and kissed her like I was about to wake up from the best dream ever.
We walked into the family room where the fire blazed. She stopped me by the tree and kissed me in the glow of its white lights. “Thanks for making me love Christmas again.”
We sat on the couch, and she pulled me into her arms. “By the way, I think I now have a pretty good idea of what went on between Jay and Daisy that afternoon.”
“That Fitzgerald,” I said, shaking my head with a smile.