I Came Out for This? Page 4

  She probably would approve of such a place. Unless I’m in it. If I’m in it, she’ll find some derogatory thing to say about it. I have to admit, though, there’s plenty of grist for her mill.

  Today I woke up still not knowing what to do on the big Millennium New Year’s Eve, which is in two days. Yesterday Russell invited me to go with him and some friends to the Mall for the spectacular ceremony and fireworks display, and I said I would let him know. Even though this will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I love being part of historic public celebrations, I still hadn’t talked to Terri about her plans, and I knew she wouldn’t want to go to the Mall with Russell and his crazy friends. I hadn’t heard from her in a few days and I was afraid to call her and learn that she had already made plans that did not include me.

  Instead of calling Terri, I decided to go see her. I got dressed and went trucking over there, but when I got to her building I realized that I was about to kill any possibility of going to the Mall. Either Terri would invite me to spend New Year’s Eve with her and I would have to sit around all evening listening to her moan about how lonely she is, or even worse, she would tell me that she already had New Year’s Eve plans with some other woman and then I would be too depressed to go to the Mall with Russell and his friends. So I just stood there frozen in front of Terri’s building, and then it occurred to me that she could look out the window and see me, so I started walking around the block. I walked all the way around the block, feeling like some imbecile, and when I got back around to Terri’s street I saw her up ahead, walking toward her building in her purple fleece jacket, carrying two shopping bags. She went into her building, and I said, “This is ridiculous,” so I walked up toward her building, determined to ring her buzzer, and then my house mates Johnny and Guillermo appeared from around the corner. They yelled “Joanna!” as though they hadn’t seen me in five years and they scurried up and started telling me about some drag queen getting thrown out of the Green Parrot and the police coming and I wasn’t hearing a word of it. I just kept looking over at Terri’s building, and then all of a sudden she walked out the door. She saw us and she called, “Knadel!” and instead of excusing myself and going up to her I just yelled lamely, “Hey, where ya going?” and she said she had to go to get her watch repaired and walked off toward Connecticut, leaving me there with Guillermo and Johnny and their silly story about the drag queen who was kicked out of the Green Parrot. After a few minutes, they went off to visit a friend and I walked home feeling very disconsolate about my aborted mission.

  I am so indecisive lately. It’s because I’m feeling insecure. Not only is the woman I love always just out of my reach, but I’m in this strange city where I don’t know anyone, living in a house full of derelicts who fuck strange men they find on the street and steal other people’s food from the refrigerator and mince through the house with little pieces of Kleenex in their hair. I’m living a bizarre life, like some character in a Jim Jarmusch movie. At least I’m not one of those Y2K goofballs who are all over the TV news, crowding into supermarkets to stock up on water and canned goods in case everyone’s computer goes kaplooey at midnight. I feel normal compared to them. Honestly, do they really think the banks and elevators and Wall Street and the supermarkets and the water and gas companies didn’t hire enough geeks to prevent the civilized world from coming to an end?

  Something just occurred to me. I’ll bet Terri’s shopping bags today were chock-full of canned food, water, and batteries! In fact, she was probably leading the frenzied pack down the aisles at the Safeway. She’s always concerned about her safety and security. She told me that when we were kids during the Cold War and had to crouch under our desks for those inane security drills that I always thought were like a big game, she took it seriously and folded her arms over her head exactly like they told her to do. I’d better not call her any more today, or she’ll start telling me how many cans of soup she bought, and how many cans of each kind of soup she bought, and I won’t be able to resist making fun of her.

  I’ll wait until tomorrow to call her. If she had made any big plans for New Year’s Eve, she probably would have called and told me.

  I am lying on my bed in my tiny little room, watching the Millennium festivities on TV. Eleven glowing Ferris wheels are lined up along the Champs Elysées. It’s amazing. I don’t want to watch the festivities on the Mall because it will make me sad that I’m not there, so I’m watching ceremonies from other parts of the world.

  I won’t let myself think about Terri having dinner at a chic downtown place called Jaleo’s with the publicity manager at the Bouncing Bear Theater, where she works during the evening. I’m sure that if I had called her early enough she would have made plans with me instead of some dumb woman she hardly even knows. But still it was a big bummer to hear that she’s spending New Year’s Eve with someone else. I asked her if the publicity manager is gay, and she said the woman doesn’t know yet. What the hell is that supposed to mean?

  I was so bummed out after I talked to Terri that I couldn’t get it together to call Russell about the Mall excursion, and by the time I did call him, at 3 p.m. today, he had already left. His lover answered the phone and gave me a hard time: “Child, didn’t he say to call him by two? You know he was going early to get a good spot.” Oh, well, my bad. Did you ever hear that expression? “My bad.” I think it’s one of the most annoying expressions of all time. I’m using it to punish myself for having to sit in this little tiny room all by myself on one of the most momentous occasions of our era.

  I hope Terri doesn’t get the idea to help the publicity manager figure out if she’s gay. But I don’t think she will. She didn’t use the word “date”; she just said she’d made plans with this woman from the theater. I think if she were planning to conclude the evening with a special “nightcap” she would have used the word “date.”

  I suppose it was rude of me to call her at the last minute and ask what she was doing. Oh! There are Roman candles shooting up over Sydney Harbour! It’s really so beautiful. Even though I’m kind of lonely, I’m glad that I’m here and not in that drippy little Cleveland. And I have a bottle of pink champagne that I bought so I can toast myself at midnight. I hope I can figure out how to get the damned thing open. I hope the cork doesn’t go ricocheting off the wall and hit me on the head. That’s probably what will happen.

  Terri is good at opening champagne. She’s very competent with things having to do with the physical world. Like programming digital devices and shit like that. Oh, STOP IT! My bad. Oh, look. Wild dragons dancing on the Great Wall of China. That is so awesome. I wish I were there.

  January 2000

  The first day of the new Millennium started out nice. I woke up with the sun streaming in through my windows, wondering why I didn’t feel like shit, and then I remembered that I couldn’t get the champagne bottle open last night. I lay in bed, trying to decide what to do and then the phone rang and it was Terri, asking me if I would volunteer with her at the R Street mission, where they were having a holiday lunch for the homeless guys. My first thought was, “Harrumph. You take the publicity agent to Jaleo’s and you want me to shlep with you to a mission.” But I agreed to meet her. I always used to volunteer, before I turned into a self-obsessed lovesick blob. Even when I was a teenaged delinquent I volunteered at the Jewish Orthodox Home for the Aged and Head Start. (If you’re Jewish, you can’t be a pure juvenile delinquent. You always have to do something to water it down, like win a poetry contest or become a volunteer or help some teacher start a club for troubled students.)

  I walked over to the mission at 14th and R, and some guys were outside, eating from paper plates. One of them called to me, “Come on in and have some lunch! They got everything in there— ham, sweet potatoes, the works!” He made it sound as though I was about to enter Chez Paul. Terri, who is never even one minute late, was already in there, serving food behind a long table. They did have a nice spread, with baked ham and sweet potatoes and coleslaw and appl
e pie and layer cake. I stood next to Terri and started serving the food to a long line of men. We were joking around with them and the other volunteers, and I was having a pretty good time. But then I couldn’t resist asking her how her New Year’s Eve was and she said, “Wonderful!” I couldn’t concentrate on putting food on plates and dealing with that at the same time, or else I would have demanded to know what was so wonderful about spending New Year’s Eve with some sexually confused woman. But my generally free-floating anxiety hardened into a little red ball inside of me and I did my best to ignore it and kept slapping food on people’s plates. And then I looked up and saw Jerome, Guillermo, and Johnny sitting at a table in the back, stuffing their faces full of food. They obviously had arrived and gotten served before I showed up.

  I was mortified. Even if Terri hadn’t been there, it would have bothered me to see my friends eating at a mission for homeless people. It gave me a kind of instant snapshot of my life, a middle-aged woman with normal ambitions living in a house with bums. And then I was ashamed for feeling embarrassed. I am a devout egalitarian. Every untouchable in India is my brother or sister. Why should I give a shit that my financially challenged buddies took advantage of some free food? But I was thinking, please don’t come up here for seconds. I was so unnerved that I put a slice of cake on top of somebody’s ham. Terri started laughing, then she looked at me and said, “What’s the matter with you?” I said, “Nothing,” but then I saw the boys striding up to us with big grins, and Guillermo was yelling, “Joanna Banana! Joanna Banana!” There was a fourth guy with them, who looked like a prison escapee. I pulled myself together and thought, Come on, Joanna, these are your buddies. So I introduced them to Terri, and Jerome gave me a suggestive look and said, “Oh, so this is Terri,” and I jumped in brightly, “So what are you guys doing here?” and Jerome said, “We’re having lunch. You should try the ham. It’s as good as my aunt’s.” And Guillermo said, “She doesn’t eat ham, you dummy. She’s Jewish.” I assured them that I did eat ham, but that I wasn’t hungry. Terri said, “She eats like a bird,” and the guys went back to their table to gorge on cake.

  After they left, Terri said, “So why are your friends eating at a mission?” That’s how she is. She doesn’t have an ounce of tact. I said, “I don’t know.” And I really didn’t. I didn’t know if they were there because they were taking advantage of free food, or if they really didn’t have enough money for groceries. I suppose it was a little bit of both. Terri said to me, “Doesn’t Jerome work in a men’s clothing store?” And I said, “No, that’s Donald. Jerome is, uh, a sex worker.” She got that expressionless look that I hate, and I was afraid she was going to ask me next what Johnny and Guillermo did for a living. “Oh, they go on burglary raids.” But at least she spared me that. I wouldn’t have told her that anyway. I would have said Johnny was a bartender and Guillermo worked at Toys R Us, which is what they actually did do before they both got fired.

  On our way out of the mission, Terri bumped into another volunteer, a woman she knew from her diversity training gigs, and she started gabbing with her. I didn’t want to hang around waiting for her, so I said goodbye and left. And of course that nice mood I was in this morning when I woke up with the sun streaming through the windows is all shot to hell. I just can’t seem to connect with Terri lately. Something always happens to screw it up. I know that if I had an ounce of self-confidence I would not be fazed by her going out with some drippy woman or seeing my house mates eating at a mission. I could handle it with my normal aplomb. But when I’m around Terri, I have no aplomb. That’s the whole problem with my being in love. I just can’t carry it off.

  I called Terri today to see if she would exhibit an attitude after she learned that I lived with a bunch of street people, and my fears were realized when she used that voice with me. She has two voices, the super-interested one and the preoccupied one. She was using the preoccupied one. I could have told her that I was just diagnosed with terminal cancer and she would have used the same tone, asking me what treatment had been prescribed and how long I had to live. She just goes through the motions of the conversation. I timidly asked her if she wanted to go out for sushi with me tonight, and she said she had “plans.” I said, “With whom? With that woman who doesn’t know if she’s a lesbian?”

  “That’s the one,” Terri said.

  “Are you going to try to help her with her little problem?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Terri said.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” I said loudly. “She sounds like an idiot.”

  Terri got pissed. “She’s not an idiot,” she said. “You didn’t come out until you were forty-five. Were you an idiot?”

  “Yes, I was,” I said. “I was a total idiot. I curse every goddam day I didn’t come out. If this woman is hiding the fact that she’s gay, she is an idiot. She’s destroying her whole life so that people will like her.”

  “You don’t know anything about her,” Terri said. “You’re just projecting.”

  “I am not,” I said. I couldn’t believe how infantile I was being.

  Terri steered the conversation to a less volatile subject and started telling me about getting her furnace serviced and how the guy did something to it and then she had to have some other guy come and fix it, but her conversational maneuver had the effect of pissing me off more because it seemed as though she cared more about her stupid-ass furnace than she cared about me. When she noticed that I wasn’t responding to anything she was saying, she stopped talking and we said goodbye to each other and hung up.

  And now I’ve spent the past six hours since our conversation hating myself for losing my composure over the phone and obsessing over whether or not Terri will try to help what’s-her-name decide whether or not she’s gay. I’m lying in bed, twisting it around in my mind, over and over. If I had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, at least I wouldn’t feel stupid about being so obsessed. For God’s sake, doesn’t Terri have a right to go out with someone other than myself? It’s not as though she’s even had sex with her. Maybe she never will. She doesn’t fuck every damn woman she has dinner with. She went out with that one woman who, she said, had breath that smelled “vaguely radioactive” and she never fucked her.

  I have to stop writing. I have to throw up. It’s because of that leftover samosa I ate after I talked to Terri. I should never eat samosas when I’m upset, especially from greasy-spoon Pakistani carry-outs. Very smart, Joanna.

  Terri called today and invited me to dinner, and I drove over there with my bottle of wine, all frisky and full of hope. It’s been a week since that creepy phone conversation, and I figured she’d probably gotten bored with what’s-her-name and had decided that being with me was a lot more fun. I wore my black jeans, a green silk shirt, and some short leather boots, and Terri answered the door in baggy jeans, an old tee shirt that said “Caribbean cool,” and slippers. But she somewhat compensated for her attire by serving a fantastic meal of grilled salmon, mixed vegetables, and wild rice from scratch. She even made the dessert, two little coconut tarts, and she opened a nice bottle of French wine. She’s a fabulous cook. During dinner, we steered clear of sensitive subjects and talked about Willi, our mutual friend from Cleveland who had introduced us to each other, and then Terri told me about her landscaping plans for her backyard.

  After we polished off the wine, I thought it would be nice to cozy up on the couch, but instead Terri ushered me into her office and fired up her computer and started telling me about all the women she was meeting in this chat room called the “pink palace.” At first, I thought, “Well, she must not be all that excited about the publicity agent if she’s going online to meet women,” but then she started showing me photographs of these women she was meeting and I started getting depressed. I tried to be polite about the photos and said, “Oh, she’s cute” about the first one and “Pretty hot” about the second one, but when she showed me a third one of some redhead I snapped, “She is dreadful. I don’t kn
ow how you can even look at her.” The woman really wasn’t that bad, but I was so furious that it just slipped out. Terri got rid of her, but then, not taking the hint that I wasn’t exactly having the time of my life, she started telling me about this Montana housewife named “Darla” that she was having cyber sex with. For God’s sake. But did I have the good sense to say, “You know what? I really don’t want to do this.” No! I just stood there and pretended to be interested. (When I went home, I called Karen in Cleveland and she said, “You should have just gone home at that point.” Duh.)

  It gets worse. Terri sat me down in her chair and logged onto this other chat room and instructed me to join the conversation. I hate chat rooms and had no interest in doing this, especially since I was with her, but I went along with it. I wrote in “Werm” as an alias, which is Tommy’s nickname for me, and Terri said “Knadel, do you really want ‘Werm’ to be the name you use to meet girls?” I didn’t want to use Knadel, so I settled for “Peeps,” my younger sister’s name for me. Terri told me how to jump into a conversation, and I inserted myself into some puerile conversation about toenail polish (they must all have been femmes), and I started getting bored, having nothing to say about toenail polish, but then Terri said, “If you want to talk to any of them individually, you can arrange a private conversation,” so I selected a woman called BonBon, who was the only one of the group who said she didn’t wear toenail polish, and asked her if she wanted to talk privately. She said okay, and we went into the private room and I tried to flirt with her, but my flirting went over like a lead balloon, and after about one minute she wrote, “Uh, Peeps? I’m really not into continuing this.” And then she left. Fortunately, Terri was in the bathroom at that moment and was not a witness to my rejection by BonBon.