Eliza’s eyes were red-rimmed and her cheeks were blotchy when she showed up in the makeup room a half hour before airtime.
“Honey!” cried Doris, rushing over and putting her arms around Eliza. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
“Oh, Doris,” Eliza whimpered. “Remember that girl I told you was writing me? The one with cancer? Well, she died.” The tears began to flow again.
As she held on to Eliza, Doris, ever professional, glanced up at the wall clock. There was a lot of work to do in a relatively short time if Eliza was going to look decent on television tonight.
“Here, sweetie, sit down.” Doris calmly guided the anchorwoman to the chair. As she listened to Eliza’s story about Sarah Morton’s father’s call canceling the meeting, Doris went to the mini-refrigerator under the counter and pulled out an ice pack. It was imperative they get that eye swelling down.
Eliza leaned her skull back against the headrest and Doris squeezed drops of Visine into the anchorwoman’s troubled eyes. Closing her heavy lids, Eliza felt the soothing cold of the frozen blue ice mask. She sat quietly for a few moments while Doris clucked over her and massaged her neck and shoulders, wondering why she was taking this so hard. Eliza hadn’t even met Sarah Morton.
“You’ve got a lot on your plate right now, Eliza,” said Doris gently. “Everything will work out. You’ll see.”
Eliza reached back to pat Doris’s arm, knowing full well that Sarah’s death wasn’t the only thing that had put her into such a state. Hearing about the tragedy had just pushed her over the top. It brought up all the old memories of John’s death and struck the most terror-filled chord of all. The fear of losing her own Janie. With everything going on in Eliza’s life right now, she was vulnerable and she knew it.
Tonight they wouldn’t be able to get away with merely airbrushing Eliza’s beautiful skin. More corrective measures would be necessary. Doris expertly dabbed at each dark pink blotch that scattered across Eliza’s face and then smoothed a creamy foundation to even things out. Blush and powder followed. With the eyes she took even more special care. The ice pack and Visine had only been able to do so much.
Doris brushed taupey eyeshadow over Eliza’s lids and outlined them with a fine aubergine eyeliner. The plum color made the blue of Eliza’s eyes pop out, taking attention away from the bloodshot white parts. She applied a darker brown powder along the orbs, to give the eyes depth and drama. On the middle of the eyelids, Doris defied the general rule among makeup artists not to use sparkle on television, ever so lightly brushing on a bit of shiny light peach glitter and thereby adding warmth and life to Eliza’s tired eyes.
“God, Doris, you deserve an Emmy for the job you did tonight,” Eliza said in wonderment as she looked at the final result of Doris’s labors in the brightly lit mirror that covered the wall in front of them.
Eliza rose tiredly from the chair and air-kissed Doris on the cheek, careful not to smudge the lipstick Doris had so painstakingly painted. Eliza squared back her shoulders and stood erect
In a half hour, she could go home and gather Janie in her arms.
As she walked across the studio, Eliza wore a marine-blue dress that covered her knees. Good. Finally she was listening to him.
But the dress was sleeveless. He didn’t like that.
“Hey, Meat! How ‘bout another beer here?”
He grudgingly turned away from the television set and grabbed the empty mug from the gleaming bar top. He pulled the lever to fill the glass from the Budweiser tap and he tried to block out the loud conversation that filled the crowded bar. Yeah, he cared about how the Giants were doing in preseason, but from six-thirty to seven, all he wanted to hear was Eliza’s voice.
Now an annoying newcomer to the bar was asking him how he had come to be called Meat.
“It’s a nickname I got in junior high,” he grumbled.
“Because of your size, I guess,” the unknowing customer supposed, eyeing the beefy arms protruding from the striped polo shirt.
“Yeah, that, and because my last name’s Bacon.” Meat turned back to the television set. He wasn’t going to be telling the clown that he had been relieved when he was christened “Meat” by the guys on the JV football team. He hated his real first name, couldn’t stand it all through grammar school when the nuns insisted on calling him Cornelius even though he had repeatedly asked them to call him Neil. In a classroom filled with Johns, Josephs, Kevins and Tommys, the kids teased him mercilessly about his weird, old-fashioned name, but his mother and father, always the cowards, weren’t about to go into school and chastise the sisters.
Meat chuckled to himself. Cornelius Bacon Sr. was dead now and his son hadn’t shed a tear. He had despised his father for his timidity with the outside world. Always playing by those pathetic rules of his that never got him anywhere. Back and forth, back and forth every day to that job at the post office, always insisting that while a government job may not make a man a millionaire, he would have a good retirement and medical insurance for the rest of his life. But the joke was on the poor slob: he dropped dead of a heart attack two months before he was set to retire.
The good thing about it was that his mother didn’t have to worry about money now, and that meant she wasn’t looking to him to kick in to support her. She got enough from the government each month to cover her needs and go to bingo at the church twice a week. She was satisfied with that.
She wasn’t satisfied, though, with the way her son made his living. Tending bar was not respectable as far as she was concerned. She nagged him about it whenever she called him. He should get a solid, dependable job with benefits.
“Not for me, Ma,” he droned time after time. “I don’t want any suits bossing me around.”
A man should be a man, and set down his own set of rules.
Eliza looked beautiful as always, but Abigail Snow detected something different about her eyes tonight. There was a sadness to them and Abigail ached to reach out to her.
Leaning back in her chair in the promotion office, she told herself again that she had to get over this obsession with Eliza. It wasn’t healthy. Abigail had stopped talking to her therapist about it, sensing that Dr. Flock was beginning to think she was really going over the deep end in her wishful relationship with Eliza. But with no other woman in her life, Abigail’s fascination with Eliza grew and grew.
It wasn’t that Abigail wasn’t trying to meet someone else. But it was difficult. She had posted her picture and biography on PlanetOut.com, one of the Web sites featuring gay “personals,” and she had received many responses. But when she actually took the step of meeting the women for dinner or drinks, she was always disappointed.
A soul mate was hard to find.
Abigail thought about her last girlfriend, Cosima. The year they had been together had started out wonderfully. They shared the same love of the outdoors, spending weekend afternoons hiking out in New Jersey or cycling and Rollerblading in Central Park. In the winter, they had driven out to the Poconos to ski or stayed in the city, catching a movie or just staying in together, Abigail reading while Cosima cooked delicious Greek meals. Abigail had reveled in those long, leisurely, companionable Sunday afternoons.
Abigail had cared about Cosima, but Cosima had found someone new.
The lesbian community was a small world. Everyone seemed to know who was with whom. Abigail had heard from her friend Shannon, who spent July and August in Sag Harbor, that Cosima was totally in love with the woman for whom she had left Abigail. Shannon had seen them, hand in hand and inseparable, at several parties during the summer. It was clear they were mad for each other.
Abigail’s sadness only deepened when Shannon well-meaningly suggested they go together to the Chubby Hole some Friday night. It would be a kick, Shannon said, to go to a lesbian strip joint. Fun to have a few drinks and watch the G-string-clad women dance. According to Shannon, Abigail needed to get out and have some laughs.
Abigail doubted that erotic dancers would make her feel better. She wanted someone to love, someone with whom she could have an emotional connection.
Someone like Eliza.
Each time their work put them together, Eliza never disappointed Abigail.
Eliza was her dream woman. Intelligent, witty, beautiful and so feminine. Abigail, who had long ago come to grips with the fact that she was butch and preferred taking the more aggressive role, fantasized nightly about making love to Eliza.
She had to get over it! Accept the fact that Eliza Blake was not gay. She had been married and had a daughter. Everyone around KEY News was aware that she and Mack McBride were romantically involved.
But Abigail still held out hope. After all, she had been married once herself. Many lesbians she knew had been in heterosexual relationships before they realized and accepted that they were gay. Maybe that could be the case with Eliza.