“How could I forget it?. I helped lace up his corset beforehand, which was no mean feat, let me tell you.”
Ben laughed. “Three mai tais, and Dez was sprawled on top of the piano singing Frankie and Johnny,’ to the utter mystification of the better part of Atlanta State’s liberal arts faculty”
Ken laughed. “I take it that when he did this, he already had tenure?”
Lily smiled. “You take it correctly. Dez was always flamboyant, but never foolish.” She looked over at Mimi, who had poked two eye-size holes in her flour tortilla and was wearing it as a mask. “And it was Dez’s kind sperm donation that helped create little tortilla face over there.”
Ken smiled at the little girl. “Hmm...this is quite a byzantine ruse you’ve constructed here. I bet the whole thing’s exhausting.”
“It is.” Lily didn’t realize how exhausted she was until Ken made that observation. It was only now, while she was relaxing in the company of a person with whom she and Ben could be honest, that she fully realized how strained and tiring their other social interactions were. It was only in the presence of other gay people that she and Ben could relax and be a family — the kind of family they really were.
“Yeah,” Ben said, “in Atlanta I used to bitch all the time about the little dramas going on in the gay community ... all the backbiting and gossip. Now that I’m away from all the gossip, though, it’s like I’m dying for some. I find myself calling all the shallow queens I used to bitch about just so I can find out who’s lusting after whom.”
Ken laughed. “I do the same thing with my friends back in Nashville. I also find myself voraciously reading those glossy fag rags I used to make fun of when I lived in the city.”
Lily drained her Corona. “Where do you get those magazines around here?”
Ken grinned sheepishly. “The mailman delivers them ... in a plain brown wrapper, no less. I save all the back issues. If you like, I could bring over the ones I’ve read.”
“You know, I’m scaring myself, but I think I’d really like that,” Ben said, rising to clear the table.
“Me, too.” Lily was helping Mimi out of her high chair. “I’m starved to death for news about my people ... even if it’s just idle chatter about who’s shtupping who.” A prickle of fear hit her. “Of course, we’d have to be careful not to leave those magazines lying around. God, I hate this! It makes me feel so self-loathing, even though I’m not.”
They settled in the living room. Lily had to coax Mordecai off the couch with a Milk-Bone. Since his injury, he had made the couch his own personal sickbed. He would make room for Lily or Mimi to sit with him, but he growled ill-temperedly at Ben or anyone else who tried to join him there.
“You know,” Ken said, sitting on the couch next to Ben and draping his arm around Ben’s shoulders, “when Ben told me what you were doing, I really objected to it at first. It seemed to me that you were just catering to other people’s prejudices.” He watched Mimi stacking her wooden alphabet blocks. “But then I started thinking: If you fought the custody battle as an open lesbian, you’d lose your daughter. Mimi would lose her mother and be raised as some kind of psycho-Christian. Everybody would lose in that situation. And while I’m uncomfortable with this level of deception ... well, some things are just too precious to lose, even if it is to make a political point.”
Lily nodded in agreement. “Yeah, sometimes I think I’d be a better person if I’d made myself a martyr for the cause of gay rights, but the thing is, I wouldn’t just be sacrificing myself. I’d be sacrificing Mimi, too, and sentencing her to the same miserable, oppressive upbringing her mother had.”
Without warning, the front door swung open, and a female voice drawled, “Knock-knock! Hello?”
