she’d started out as a set carpenter. In her late twenties, she moved to assistant stage manager at an Off- Broadway theater she seemed to think Jenny should have heard of. Jenny assumed, but was not sure, this was a promotion. Several years before Anna came to Lake Powell she’d been promoted to stage manager. The money wasn’t bad, she said. That surprised Jenny. She’d been under the impression that everybody in theater who wasn’t on Broadway or the West End was starving.
Other than the job litany, Anna didn’t open up.
“Open up,” Jenny mocked herself. “I am becoming a moron,” she announced to the celery as she swept it from the cutting board into a pale green Melmac bowl with a burn trough on the edge where some jerk had used it as an ashtray.
“Open up” was one of a plethora of canned phrases that had flopped into Jenny’s vocabulary like a smelly old sardine to keep company with “closure” and “rebirth,” getting in touch with inner children, and the rest of the language of self-absorption. Jenny was fluent in psychobabble. Psychologists had made large sums of money trying to help her pin down the precise abuse she had suffered as a very small child—too small to remember it, or so traumatized she blocked it, naturally—that could explain why she didn’t like men.
It was all on her own, without a shrink in attendance or a self-help book in sight, that she’d realized she did like men. She just liked women better. Men were best in a bar fight or when heavy objects needed to be moved from point A to point B. Should she ever become a choir director she would want men to sing the bass parts, and maybe the tenor, though she supposed women could be found for that if one looked hard enough.
Men looked better than women in business suits. She’d gotten a lot of argument on that issue but held to her beliefs. Business suits were designed to make the wearer look important, imposing, rather like a powerful block of pin-striped cement with a stick up its ass.
This was not a good look for women.
Men won in contests of strength, in business-suit modeling, and when auditioning for Philip II in Giuseppe Verdi’s
Women, plural. Sighing, she glopped peanut butter onto the celery, silently declaring it a salad. In her experience lesbians, more than most people, were good and true and honest. They wanted partners, trust, cats, turkey-baster babies, and mortgages.
Grabbing the big spoon from the peanut butter jar, she walked toward the front door and the porch picnic table. Womanizer, Romeo, Casanova, tomcat, playboy, ladies’ man, lady-killer, swinging dick—there were a lot of roguish, obliquely charming terms for men who just loved the chase and the sex.
There were only a couple she could think of for women of that ilk. Nymphomaniac, the implied insanity right there in the title. Whore, everything implied in the title and none of it vaguely charming or flattering.
Jenny spooned a crunchy, creamy gob into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. Maybe not “swinging dick.” That was more a military thing and, now that she was considering it, made no sense. It had to be a size thing, she decided. To suggest a pendant was swinging was to suggest it had length and heft. “Bobbing dicks,” for instance, would put one in mind of short silly things like Ping-Pong balls bobbing about in a bucket. “Dangling” dicks also lacked the seriousness men felt their penises deserved. Hanging dicks suggested a lack of life or movement.
At one time Dangling Rope was called Hanging Rope because, early on, boaters had seen a rope hanging down a cliff near some possibly prehistoric steps pecked into the rock. The NPS did not have size or heft issues. Hanging Rope was too like a lynching party. They’d changed it to Dangling. Dangling was happy-go-lucky.
Leaning back against the window of her apartment, the table snugged against the wall so a backless bench might be made tolerable, she crunched her dinner and enjoyed the pellucid light sifting from green to gray to blue over the far rim of the canyon. The first star—not the first to show itself, but the first to greet Jenny—did not so much pierce the sky as gently enhance it; no twinkle, all glow.
The second week Anna Pigeon had been in Dangling Rope, Jenny decided to see if she was seducible. She hadn’t decided whether she wanted to seduce her or not, but, as a person of gay consequences, she had learned it was politic to test the waters before bringing flowers and candy. Regardless of how lush and tempting the meadow, a girl had to tread carefully. Land mines were everywhere.
Some gay women gave off a vibe. Lots didn’t. More “straight” women than anyone not a sexual adventuress would guess wanted to be seduced now and again. Sort of like taking Russian folklore as an elective, Jenny surmised; a breadth class, a taste of another culture.
Jenny had plied Anna with red wine and rapt attention and, at the end of the evening, still hadn’t a clue as to which way the woman’s gate swung.
The salad was gone. Jenny wriggled from behind the table and, bowl in hand, looked over the edge of the porch and hissed.
“Hey Pinky Winky, I know you’re there,” she called into the greater darkness between her porch and that of Regis and Bethy. There was no answering stir from their resident rattlesnake.
Anna had been captivated by the snake. At first she’d been taken aback that there were five different species of rattlesnakes in the lake’s environs. Pinky was special; she was a midget rattlesnake, her body smaller than that of most rattlesnakes and of a lovely rose pink color, perfect for blending into the desert floor.
“Won’t even rattle for me?” Jenny asked. After a breath of silence she took her bowl into the kitchen, exchanged it for a bottle of Buckeye, and returned to the velvet of the night. This time she perched on the table, her feet on the bench.
Days in the desert were grand, but nothing compared to the nights. Had the brass been amenable, and the poop visible, Jenny would have started her day at sunset. Anna Pigeon loved the dark—that, at least, Jenny learned the night of her sexual reconnaissance. Jenny supposed a theater person would have to. After the third glass of wine—and given Anna’s size, Jenny half expected her to pass out on the couch at any moment—Anna volunteered that one of the things she loved about theater was that during rehearsal or a performance, she knew precisely where she, and everyone else, belonged, knew what each person’s job was and where they would, or should, be at any given moment. Glen Canyon, she said, made her feel like she’d fallen out of bed and woken up on Mars. Evidently finding this a breach of her personal code of nothing personal, Anna had then bowed like an arthritic old earl and took herself off to bed.
“Shoot,” Jenny whispered, shaking her head. She was obsessing. Not just
At the time she’d thought it absurd. Maybe these many years later those visits were paying off. Since she recognized the symptoms, theoretically, she could avert the disaster.
“Hsst. Pinky,” she tried again, but the snake said nothing.
She managed an entire shower and had nearly completed brushing her teeth without once thinking of the Subject. Mostly, she managed it by worrying obsessively about the possibility her obsessive tendencies had returned, then excusing them due to the Subject’s departure for parts unknown.
“Mea culpa, mea culpa, let’s blame me, let’s blame me,” she sang to the tune of “Frere Jacques” as she knelt naked on the rug in front of the cabinet beneath the sink. Singing, she’d discovered, was the only effective measure one could take to shut out unwanted thoughts.
Over the course of the evening she’d swilled sufficient amounts of beer that if she didn’t find some aspirin and wash two or three down with a quart of water, she was sure to wake up in the middle of the night with a headache. Her hangovers were precocious things and could seldom wait till morning. She opened the cupboard door and started to reach in.
Anna Pigeon’s stuff was still there. Jenny’s belongings were neatly arrayed on the top shelf. Anna, as the late arrival, had been relegated to the bottom.
The unhealthy excitement built. This was a treasure trove for a woman who was obsessing. Anna is gone, she told herself. No harm, no foul. Getting comfortable, she crossed her legs, feet soles up on opposite thighs. Full lotus had been easy for her since she was teeny tiny.
The thrill was coursing through her, making her feel half scared, half excited; the way she felt when she met a new woman or nearly got run off the road by a Mack truck. Instead of leaning down and looking into the floor-level shelf, as she’d done when she’d first noticed it wasn’t cleared out, Jenny reached in blind, like a child putting its
