“STET, ARE these twenty percent off, or thirty?” We were doing markdowns, many, many markdowns. The fall season had not been what Stetson had hoped. I pushed through the curtain into the back room, carrying an armload of lime and mustard djellabahs, and found him standing on his desk in the dark, to screw in a lightbulb above. His hair had grown an unruly inch, and this change had seemed to bring another—he moved quickly and unself-consciously now, and he had a strength I’d never have guessed. The day before, he’d picked up the triple mirror and moved it across the room as if it was made of cardboard. I couldn’t lift the corner of it myself.
“How many alcoholics does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” he asked.
“Thirty-five?”
“None. We prefer to remain in the dark.”
“Stetson, that is just not you,” I said.
“Oh, but it was, it was,” he said. “Honestly I feel like just giving those djellabahs away,” he said. “Even I don’t like them.”
“Why did you buy them, then?”
“It was the look for fall,” he said, derisively. “Flick the switch, will you?”
I did, and there was light. “There, a miracle,” I said.
“They look even worse with the light on,” he said, with a sigh that reminded me ugly djellabahs might be his undoing.
“It’s one season, that’s all, Stet.”
“Josip,” he said suddenly.
“What?”
“Josip Dinge. That’s my name. But Stetson Tortola sounds better. Josip Dinge sounds like the name of a drug addict.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I said.
“It is, though,” he said. “I mean, I say alcoholic to pretty it up.” He laughed, then looked straight at me—he wanted me to know. “An honest man would say drug addict, because that was what it was.”
“Once, maybe.”
“A desperate, pathetic man,” he insisted. “It’s something no amount of silk can cover. Something you spend the rest of your life working back from, every minute of every day.”
He took the djellabahs from me and carried them into the half-price bin, his mouth set with workman’s stoicism: salvation would come to him through diligence, if it came at all. Watching him, I felt pure light, as if his confession was a sun rising in the corner and its light was flooding in on us, changing everything, so next minute the haughty mannequins would turn from the window and embrace each other with faces full of grief and hands trembling with tenderness.
I thought: He’s just like me.
* * *
“STETSON,” I said, a few days later. “There’s something I ought to tell you.”
He’d heard the catch in my voice and looked up. “What?”
“I, I’m a lesbian. I’m gay.”
My pen was shaking so that it suddenly made a little graph on a silk jacket, which shocked me. Why should a person as gay and proud as I was shake so, over the revelation of a perfectly natural thing?
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Well, you know, don’t you? I like women—more than—you know.”
“Really?” He looked more baffled than anything else. “You sure?”
“Well, yeah I’m sure,” I said, taking offense, as if he were questioning my credentials. “I mean, my girlfriend’s pretty sure.”
“Your girlfriend.” He sat back against the desk, crossing his arms and taking stock of me, and his manner, which had faded since the day he told me about the drugs, returned. “And who, pray tell, is your girlfriend?”
“Lee Schuyler. She works for the Aetna.”
“My,” he said, looking me up and down the way he had the first day. “I wouldn’t have thought—I mean, not that you can tell—” He was stumbling all over himself. In one minute I’d gone from being someone he could say anything to, to someone he hardly dared look at. I’d only wanted to match his own confiding honesty with my own, and instead I’d opened a door on something far too private—as if I’d tried to send him a valentine and given him a real gory, fatty heart instead. I dropped the pen and put my hands out as if I could grab the words back.
“I’m sorry, Stetson. I shouldn’t have told you.”
“Don’t be silly!” he said, hands to his heart. “You know I’m not like that!”
I knew he wasn’t going to like me less—if anything, he’d like me more—I was a representative of a type of person he of course liked and would stoutly agree with. But I wasn’t Beatrice anymore. Our little alliance, which had developed in its own natural and peculiar way, was irradiated by this news.
“I know you’re a good liberal, Stet,” I said. “It’s not that.”
“It’s just not very Princess Margaret, I guess,” he said.
“I told you I wasn’t Princess Margaret,” I said grumpily. “A princess! Stet, I got on the wrong bus the other day and didn’t have the courage to get off again, so I rode it to the end of the line and took a taxi back for fear the driver would look down on me.”
“You project Princess Margaret,” he said, overruling me. Then he added: “My girlfriend will be interested to hear this.”
Here was a revelation. I wasn’t going to take the bait and ask about her. I felt like bursting into tears and making some angry accusation—though what on earth would it be?
“Why?” I asked, sullen.
“She just will,” he said. “She wants to be a social worker.”
“Oh, so you think I need her help?” I asked with a bitter laugh.
“No, no!” he said, but we couldn’t look each other in the eye. “Of course not!” he protested. “Everyone has the right to love in whatever way—”
“Whatever way,” I echoed, so he could hear his condescension, his little push away.
“I don’t mean it that way,” he said, though. “You’re deliberately hearing something I’m not saying—why?”
“Because you’re saying something you’re not hearing!” I said with great anger. But it was five-thirty. “Go on,” I told him. “I’ll lock up. Go away.”
* * *
“LIKE ME? They loved me,” Ma said on the phone. She’d made some revisions to the job letter, and the guys who were developing the old Parkington place as townhouses were considering her for the front office. “Nobody else can give them the kind of class I do, and that’s what they’re looking for, style, someone who will define the way people see the place. They need chutzpah, and if there’s one thing I’ve got, it’s chutzpah!” She belted this out so grandly, I expected to hear a big chorus come up behind her—Fiddler on the Roof meets Anything Goes.
“It’s the red suit,” she said. “That’s what carried the day.” I heard a thud in the background: her kicked-off pump hitting the wall.
“The red suit?”
Honestly, how did people like me, people who had no sense of showmanship, survive in the modern world? “Red denotes power,” she explained. “A woman in a red suit shows a man she can hold her own, that she’s got the confidence, the ability.”
I saw, in my mind’s eye, a woman in a power suit cowering behind a desk in fear of a ringing phone.
“So, they implied you had the job?”
She laughed. “I showed ’em what I can do for ’em, that’s for sure. They’re the right kind of people—powerful people. Everything clicked, we’re made for each other. Perley took me aside and said he was very impressed. Then he put a piece of ice—out of his bourbon—down the back of my jacket! Now, that’s what I call a good sign … don’t you?”
I took too long to answer.
“Well,” she said, “I think it’s a very good sign.”
* * *
LEE TOOK me out to dinner: she loved to drive me out along the highway service road and let me choose between the steakhouse with the huge neon cactus, the Swiss Chalet, Moby Dick’s, which was built to look like a clipper ship, or the Shamrock, with its real thatch roof—this was the America I was dying to be part of, a vast paved landscape studded with bright plastic replicas of exotic places.
“Tiki Hut!” I said, Tiki Hut being the most ornate, a green pagoda with a dragon breathing real smoke beside the carved doors. Inside, it was lush and dark with a real waterfall at the back surrounded by palms heavy with plastic coconuts and mechanical macaws.
“What do you think?” Lee asked.
“I love it!” I breathed. Before I met Lee, I’d been out to dinner maybe three times in my life. We had a scorpion bowl—rum and tropical juices served in a hollow coconut with two red-tasseled straws. And a pupu platter: crisp fried wontons tied with ribbons of chive, pork pinkened by a sweet marinade and laced on skewers, tiny pancakes, some kind of glistening red roe like beads—a two-year-old’s paradise of edible toys. I twirled my paper umbrella like a top on the table.
“I’ve heard of pupu platters, but I’ve never had one before,” I told Lee, who smiled with secret delight and said, “Try the rangoons.” She had eaten hundreds of pupu platters, she went shopping at the mall, she traveled for work sometimes and thought nothing of landing in Indianapolis or Little Rock, checking into her hotel, ordering room service, or maybe going down for a drink in the bar—unheard-of sophistications.
“Did you call your mother?” I asked.
“Mm-hmm. The blood pressure’s down and they say if he walks a mile a day, everything ought to be fine.” Her father had a little heart trouble and they worried.
“Anything else?”
“No, everything’s fine. She was sewing the badges on Jennie’s Brownie uniform.” Jennie was Lee’s niece, daughter of the CPA brother whose wife, to everyone’s bewilderment, didn’t sew.
“Do you want to drive up and pick apples on Sunday?” she asked.
“You’re amazing,” I said. “How is it you can guess just what I’d want to do most?”
“You’re not hard to please,” she said tenderly.
This was why she loved me. I worked hard to phrase things the way she liked them, to say, “Well, she disagrees with me,” instead of “She’s psychotic!” or “He has a little heart trouble,” and not, “He is doomed, doomed!” She appreciated my effort. It left me without stories, though, so we ate in silence.
“Will you come by LaLouche tomorrow?” I asked.
“Do you think that’s wise?” Lee said. “Wouldn’t it—?”
“Wouldn’t it what?” I said. “I want Stetson to meet you.”
“Why?” she said with a little grimace. I’d made the mistake of repeating his confession to her, because I’d wanted to relive the warmth it had raised in me, but she found it repugnant and had suggested I look for another job.
“Because I want to show you off!” I said.
She shook her head, but a smile of broke over her face, seeing I wasn’t ashamed of her.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’m nothing special.”
It was her ability to say this, to think it, to move through the world every day in the quiet, calming belief that she was nothing special, that fascinated me. I’d had no idea a person could think such a thing and survive.
“Don’t you want to meet him and see the store?”
“I’ve been in there before,” she said.
My fortune cookie said: PEACE AND COMFORT, ALL THE DAYS. I read it with a prick of fear.
* * *
THE NEXT day, awkwardness made friends of Stetson and me—we banded together against it. He got a phone call and I heard him talking quietly and intensely, soothing, pleading, then obstinate, so that I couldn’t help wondering.
“Women!” he said, seeing my curiosity, and I laughed.
“The impossible gender.”
“You said it, not me.”
“It would be sexist if you’d said it,” I said.
“We wouldn’t want that.” We laughed, together.
“I am not in love with her,” he said, and he looked to me with a plea. “I’m not. I mean, I love her dearly, but there’s not that—” He searched for words, finally put his hand up and yanked a fistful of air as if it was a rope let down from a helicopter—a saving thing. I knew what he meant: love that goes beyond reason and pulls you into a new realm—and you’re frightened, and more alive. In all the recent commotion I’d nearly forgotten about this kind of love, but the sight of Stetson’s gesture was such a visceral reminder I had to look away so he wouldn’t see how it moved me.
I nodded. “What way is it?” I asked.
About to answer, he looked with sudden anger at his hands, as if they had betrayed him.
“I don’t know what way it is,” he said. “I think, is it just me? Afraid of commitment, the typical thing? I mean, my marriage (he gave the word marriage a mocking emphasis) lasted six weeks. I was in love with her.”
I smiled ruefully. I knew what he meant, too well.
“Then there was Lisa—we lived together three years…” He shot a quick glance at me, trying to guess how much further he could go … and paid me the huge compliment of continuing. “Though I barely remember it. Junkie love…” He laughed and shook his head. “We were so busy looking for the next fix we never paid much attention each other.”
“That’s a help,” I said, and he smiled to himself, looked down, then gratefully up at me. I loved to hear Stetson confess. He trusted me to trust him. We seemed to be on a brave errand together: trying to step into the swirling mess of life to try and retrieve a few small truths. We had the time for this because few customers ever stepped into the store.
“Now,” he said, “It’s all calculation—will she make a good wife? A good mother? I hate ‘dating.’ I’m always thinking too hard to feel.”
“I know just what you mean,” I said. “And you know, you probably do love—”
“Tracy.”
“Tracy. More than you know.” I was folding sweaters, making a show of competency. So like a man, to torment a woman with an ideal of love like that. He looked at my pile of sweaters with resignation.
“She’s a great little worker, I have to say,” he said. And suddenly. “I love this! You are a woman, and you love women. You’re the perfect adviser.” Stetson was thirty-five years old, but I seemed to know more about love than he did, because he’d lived in twilight so much of that time.
“Well, I wouldn’t say I’ve been a great success with women,” I said.
He smiled at me. “Aren’t we a perfect pair?” The word “we” went straight to my heart. I looked quickly away from him, not wanting him to see he’d made me happy.
“But you think about women all the time,” I said. “You have to, to run the shop. You think about what we want, what makes us look good, how to trick us into buying it—Did you always want to own a clothing store, even when you were little?”
“Nah,” he said, making a face. More and more, we talked like teenagers together, dropping our g’s, saying “yeah” and “nah” and generally acting as if we were leaning against our high school lockers. Not that I’d ever been like that in high school. “I wanted to be a doctor.”
He looked down as if he’d expected me to laugh at him. “Kids always want to be doctors,” he said. “I’d never have got through the math.”
“You’re a whiz at math!” He’d do the week’s accounts in the time it took me to change the vacuum cleaner bag.
“I failed it big-time,” he said. He shook his head. “After my father left, everything was so screwed up, I couldn’t think about stuff like that.” Then he gave me his sidelong, preconfessional glance.
“I always felt like a doctor, with my needle,” he said. “Sooo skillful, tap, tap at the syringe, getting it all just right…”
“Mixing up something for the pain,” I said.
“Idiot.”
“Lost kid.”
“An accident waiting to happen,” he said, but he was looking at me with his eyes wide and his hair sticking up so funnily, he made me think of one of Sylvie’s baby birds, and I wanted to feed him something.
“You’ve done your penance, don’t you think?” He’d worked on a road-paving crew in Kentucky, to pay off his debts after rehab; that was where his physical strength came from, and why it embarrassed him.
“You never finish a penance like this,” he said grimly.
As he walked away, though, he suddenly stretched his arms out and did an effortless pirouette—arms spread wide, head back—in the middle of the store.
“How’d you learn to do that?”
“I didn’t know I could,” he said, looking at me in surprise for a second as if maybe I’d put a spell on him.