Getting Off

“Well, it sort of works. It’s a mental thing, I guess, but it sort of works.”

“And that’s what you did? You let this biker guy blow through you?”

“The feeling I had,” she said. “I just sort of let it pass on through. It stopped being sexual, and then it just went away.”

“Wow.”

“I know, it’s hard to explain.”

“That woman I saw? In the Pike Place Market?”

“Still thinking about her?”

“I mean, I never could have approached her. It’s one thing to think of it and something else to act on it.”

“I know.”

“I keep thinking I want to try it with a woman. I’m like, Well, if Kim were here, yadda yadda yadda. But you’re not here, and what am I gonna do, walk into a gay bar?”

“You could.”

“I know I could. There’s one I keep driving past. I don’t even slow down, but I keep finding excuses to drive past it. Kimmie, tell me the truth, okay? Have you ever been with a woman?”

“No.”

“And here we are, a couple of phone sex buddies, and we don’t even know what we’re talking about. Except we sort of do, don’t we?”

The place she found was just off Beale Street. The windows were blacked out, and an unobtrusive sign told the establishment’s name: The Daiquiri Dock. There was nothing to suggest that it might be a lesbian bar, but she evidently sensed something, and lingered in a doorway across the street. And, sure enough, the door opened and a pair of visibly gay women left arm in arm. She stayed where she was, and another woman turned up and walked into the bar, and two more followed shortly thereafter.

She could have a glass of white wine. Get a sense of things, then go back to her room alone.

And that’s what happened, except that it was two glasses of red wine, not one glass of white. She bought one, and a woman who said her name was Sandy insisted on buying her the second. Sandy wasn’t very attractive, there was a stolid quality to her that she found unappealing, and anyway Sandy lost interest and went off to study the jukebox selections. A couple of other women glanced her way, but she kept her face unexpressive and let her body language suggest that she just wanted a quiet drink.

Back in her hotel room, she began loading her clothes into her suitcase. She wasn’t quite ready for this, but she was getting there. She’d get a good night’s sleep, leave town in the morning. And in the next city, or the one after that, there’d be a lesbian bar and she’d be ready.

TWENTY-FIVE

St. Louis, on a quiet street near Carr Square, within sight of the famous Arch. Another city, another lesbian bar, and when she’d scouted it out the previous evening she hadn’t even allowed herself to cross the threshold. Instead she’d spent the better part of an hour in the diner diagonally across the street, nursing a cup of coffee, watching through the fly-specked window as women passed in and out of Eve’s Rib.

Now and then, a man. Not a mannish woman, there were plenty of those, but occasionally a man entering or leaving, sometimes accompanied by a woman, sometimes alone. One of these — alone, shoulders slumped, hands in pockets — reminded her for a split second of Sid.

Sid from Philadelphia, who of course was not from Philadelphia, and was probably not named Sid. Sid the Cipher, Sid the Unfindable, the one remaining name on her list of Things to Undo. Sid who, just by existing, kept her from — what?

Living her life.

But this wasn’t Sid. It was just a man who looked disappointed, as if he’d expected to find the secret of the universe in a dykery, and—

Oh, for Christ’s sake. That’s why they called the place in Memphis The Daiquiri Dock, even in the utter absence of a Caribbean motif. Daiquiri=Dykery. It had taken her a week and a few hundred miles to get the joke.

She shook her head, finished her coffee. Then she’d returned to her hotel room.

Tonight she was back, and dressed and groomed for the place, more femme than butch, but certainly no housewife, no sorority girl, no cheerleader. Just a woman looking to meet a woman.

Missy, she thought. Tonight her name would be Missy.

And tonight she didn’t hesitate. She went inside, made her way to the bar.

While his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, the man led the woman to a booth with a good view of the bar. He sat down opposite her and breathed deeply, watching the women around him. And they were all women; he hadn’t seen another man since he crossed the threshold.

He said, “God, I love this place.”

“You love what we find here.”

“And the place itself. This bar, and others like it. I like the atmosphere, Jesus, I like the way it smells.”

“You like dyke bars because you like girls,” the woman said. “That’s the smell you like. You like the way they smell, and their softness, and how they yield, how they give in. How they submit.”

“Well,” he said.

The bar was called Eve’s Rib, and you had to be looking for it to find it, tucked away on a side street on the edge of the warehouse district. It catered to lesbians, but men were not unwelcome, so long as they didn’t make unwelcome advances to the women customers. There was a sad-looking older gentleman he’d seen there once or twice, always by himself, always wearing a suit and tie, always with a glass in his hand. But the fellow wasn’t here this evening, and he himself seemed to be the only man.

His name was Brady. That was his last name, but it was all anyone ever called him. He’d never cared for his first name, which was Winston, and had thought of changing it from Winston Brady to Brady Winston. Or perhaps to Brady Brady. With B for a middle initial. B for Brady, naturally.

He was tall, and he’d maintained the same weight effortlessly in the twenty years since college. He didn’t care that much about food, sometimes missed a meal. He didn’t run or go to a gym or do martial arts, but he somehow got enough exercise to maintain good muscle tone. The only thing he could be said to work at was his suntan, a deep bronze tone courtesy of the beach in the summer and a tanning salon in the winter. He was handsome, with strong facial features and high cheekbones, and he knew it, and knew the tan added to it.

His hair was dark, with just a touch of gray at the temples. He hoped it would stay like that, but knew it wouldn’t. A touch of gray was all right, it was even an asset, but he didn’t feel ready for a full head of gray hair. Maybe he’d dye it, if it came to that. But in any event he’d preserve the gray at the temples, because he liked the effect.

On the jukebox, an Anne Murray record ended and a K. D. Lang record followed in turn. A waitress came to their booth, took their drink order. She was neither tall nor short, a little thick in the waist but not objectionably so. She came back with two glasses of Chardonnay, and Brady watched her walk off.

“I wouldn’t mind,” he told the woman.

“Hands off the help.”

“Oh, I know. It was an observation, not a suggestion.”

“Anyway, she’s Girls Only. It sticks out all over her.”

“Not the only thing that sticks out.”

“She wouldn’t like it,” the woman said, “and you’d try to make her like it, but it wouldn’t work.”