When he ejaculated in her mouth for the first time she spat the semen all over his stomach and groin. She would have sworn there were quarts of the stuff. She was horrified. But even as he was apologizing and pawing at the fanned-out strings of semen linking her lips to himself, even as she was watching his dumb play on this harp, a pulse was drumming between her legs and she was like a bomber of Berlin, gaping down from the stratosphere at the splendid aftermath, saying to herself, “Look at what I just did!”
Did he ever kiss
her
down there? Seventeen years later Harmony would put the question to her. “Are you crazy?” Doris would answer. She could imagine almost anything but she could not imagine Gordon nuzzling her like a dog. Until Harmony came along, she had thought it was pretty far-fetched that any woman was loved in this way. She wasn’t even sure that it was legal. It had to be slightly demented, she thought, the desire for somebody’s lips on your private parts. Yet there it was, sideswiping her during sex with Gordon, springing up in
her dreams where nine times out of ten the kisser was a woman. In one of the first of such dreams the woman was her great-aunt Beatrice! The sleeping Doris thought, “Oh, well, Aunt Beatrice is dead,” and decided to enjoy herself. She woke up aghast, climaxing.
These dreams continued all her life, once or twice a week.
She’d be at a home-and-school meeting or at the beauty parlour, and suddenly she’d be in a clinch with a woman. As in dreams where you’re naked in public, nobody paid attention. Furthermore, the climaxes that rocked her awake made the ones she had with Gordon feel like minor aftershocks. So she wasn’t talking about nightmares. A lick of shame maybe as she emerged from the smoke of the dream, but shame wasn’t inevitable. Could she help what she dreamed?
Could she help what she daydreamed? About the time that Gordon stopped making love to her (it was before then, but here’s the version she lives with) she would be attending a home-and-school meeting for real, no dream, and find herself staring at Harriet Barker and imagining her ironing or cleaning her oven in a see-through black negligée. Harriet was the tall, thin, sophisticated type. Only if Doris dressed her in a sexy nightgown and stuck a cigarette in her mouth could she conceive of her doing housework. When Harriet wasn’t there, Doris gazed at Libby Burt, who was trim and perfect, a little Dresden doll smelling of Jergens lotion. Libby she liked to imagine hanging laundry in white underpants and a white lacy brassiere. Pouty, sighing Libby, bending to pick up a towel, standing on tiptoe to peg it to the line.
For at least a year that was as far as it went. Visions of beautiful women doing housework in their underwear and nightgowns. And then one day she put herself in the picture. Showing up unexpectedly, being invited in. (No wonder when Robin knocked at her door, she knew what to do!) And then her dream women weren’t even ones she was acquainted with.
Women on the bus, receptionists, nurses, women she spotted as she tore through magazines for coupons. Women who were only drawings! The ScotTissue woman in her tight zebra pants and red sweater with the white fur collar. The Hertz rent-a-car woman! “She’s Got the Hertz Idea,” the ad said. What did that mean? Stupid with longing, Doris tried to decipher the caption, as if the woman herself might have been the author, but the message was impenetrable. The woman had the Hertz Idea, that’s all that was clear, and because of this idea the woman’s lovely forehead was perspiring, and her mouth was wide open, and her tongue—red as her lips—was sticking out as if to catch raindrops.
Whether she could help them or not, Doris’s daydreams did shame her, though not to the degree that she put up much of a fight or was tormented. A rictus under her heart was all it really amounted to, a few seconds of adjusting to the evidence that she was one way and the world was another. She might have fretted more than that but there didn’t seem to be any point. Daydreams like hers were comparable to seeing crazy shapes in clouds—Winston Churchill wearing a poke bonnet, say. What was the chance that that mile-wide Winston Churchill head up there was going to start bellowing, “We shall fight in the fields!” and terrorize innocent bystanders? Until she met Harmony she would have said that she was more likely to win a million bucks than she was to kiss another woman even on the lips let alone below the neck.
So Harmony was a miracle. The absence of shame and guilt was a miracle. There was fear, but only afterwards and only of being discovered. Under Harmony’s hands, Doris’s body turned to bells. She could just lie there, blameless, as Harmony instructed her in the declension of her own flesh. “What’s this?” Harmony asked, touching Doris’s nipple. The nipple chimed.
“My breast,” Doris said shyly.
“Your nipple,” Harmony corrected. She cupped her hand over Doris’s crotch. “This?”
“You know.”
“Lie still, Baby Lamb. What? What is it?”
“It’s… down there.”
“Cunt,” Harmony said.
Doris gave an embarrassed laugh.
“Say it,” Harmony said. She meant business.
“Cunt,” Doris said out loud for the first time in her life.
Harmony stroked her with one finger. “This?”
“Beats me.”
“Lie still. I never knew such a jittery woman. You don’t know what this is?”
Doris shook her head.
“That’s your labia. Your labia majora, to be specific.”
“Labia majora,” Doris said, feeling like Tarzan.
“Labia minora,” Harmony said, moving on.
Sex was something else altogether. Slithery, equatorial. For Doris it almost restored her belief in God, because the lyrics that entered her head as she approached orgasm were from her old Sunday-school hymnal and because after her orgasms she found herself inspired to sing them (with Harmony humming along in a loose vibrato), feeling that at last she really understood “glory on high” and “joy divine,” and what it was to be hallowed and unburdened. On the train home the phrase “abomination of desolation” kept occurring to her. She couldn’t sleep. Come dawn she’d be standing between cars watching the endless basting of the sky by wires and poles while every love song ever written got an airing in her brain. Harmony had told her that lesbians were not as few and far between as Doris had thought, and maybe so, but Doris doubted the same could be said of women who decorated your breasts with gold leaf. She wondered whether, if she bought some gold leaf, she could talk Gordon into plastering it on her. “Well then, Sweetie, what
about drizzling me with honey and licking it off? After the kids are in bed, I mean.”
Unlikely scenarios were Doris’s specialty, but this one was out of her league. Anyway, Gordon wasn’t Harmony, even if you drank too many rum-and-Cokes and kept your eyes shut. By the same token, Harmony wasn’t Gordon. Nobody was anybody else, although people resembled each other and linked hands like paper dolls.
If she knew this, then why after all these years did she persist in thinking of Cloris Carter as another Harmony La Londe? As Harmony but with Robin’s urgency? There was harm in that. And harm in thinking of herself as herself nine years ago. No roaring heck in the looks department, but a big draw for Negro women. The afternoon of Gordon’s heart attack when Doris pressed her hand on Cloris’s arm she may have felt she was overstepping the bounds but at the same time she believed that Cloris felt nothing of the kind.
B
illie Holiday on the portable record player—“Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer.” On the silver chesterfield Doris and Cloris drinking iced tea and taking another stab at the shortbread cookies Doris brought over almost six weeks ago now. Talk about stale. Cloris cracks them like nuts between her front teeth. “Hmm-mmm,” she says. She is kind. Stupendous. Wearing mauve slacks and a short-sleeved yellow blouse today and the countless silver bracelets that make cyclones of her arms.
It’s a half hour since Doris arrived in her black mourning dress. The dress is for Cloris’s sake, to milk the loss. (That still makes it a loss. Doris has wept as much as anyone would for a mother who in the last year of her life went through her photo albums cutting out her daughter’s head wherever it appeared and substituting Queen Elizabeth’s at an appropriate age, which didn’t always guarantee a match in size.) Doris is now regretting the dress. It’s too tight under her arms and it’s sticking to her like tar because the heat wave may be finished outdoors but not in Cloris’s bachelor flat above Hollywood Dry Cleaners. A laurel of beads at her hairline seems to be the full extent of Cloris’s perspiration, whereas Doris feels like an irrigation system. She’s been thinking of getting the show on the road, asking whether Cloris would mind if she took the dress off and hung it in the bathroom to dry, except that what if two seconds later the phone rings and somebody is dead? One of the girls this time? You don’t have to be superstitious to acknowledge that things happen in threes.
No, here’s what’s really holding her back. What if Cloris isn’t game? A month ago she would have sworn that Cloris was. Why? She can’t remember why she was so sure. She can’t believe she was that trusting. A wide-eyed kid reaching for a sparkler when the odds are it’s a blowtorch. Careful, she’s telling herself now.
Careful
is the lone lyric in her brain, so paramount it doesn’t need a song.
She is still thinking of Cloris as another Harmony but she’s taking into account that Harmony was starting her menopause before she woke up to women, and Cloris can’t be much over thirty-five. For the sake of describing Doris’s state of mind you could say that she is keeping three running tallies: Looks Good, Looks Bad, and Can’t Tell. Under Looks Good is Cloris at the door crying, “Doris!” as if they were sisters separated for years, and then hugging her so hard her spine cracked. Cloris laughs and says, “Lord, I snapped my husband’s rib that way,” and this (the husband, not the injury) is under Looks Bad for the second or two it takes her to add that she ditched that bastard in Detroit. The photograph on top of the TV turning out to be her brother goes under Looks Good. As does Cloris seeming fascinated with whatever Doris says. Under Can’t Tell is, does she look at everyone like that? (Like Joan does, come to think of it.) The whites of her eyes are webbed with red veins. Is that genetic or from suffering? Under Looks Good is that when Doris loses her train of thought for the second time because of Cloris staring at her and she blurts out, “Your eyes are something else,” Cloris laughs with her mouth opened as wide as the Hertz rent-a-car woman’s.
A moment later Cloris’s face is all sadness and sympathy. She wants to tell Doris how sorry she is about her mother dying. A beautiful crooning in the back of her throat as she clutches Doris’s hand (Looks Good). She says she can’t even think of
her
mama dying. “That woman is my rock of ages,” she says. For a moment this Looks Bad—she’s a church-goer—but
it turns out that, like Harmony, she lost her faith because God is a man and she’s had it with men. “They’re all lowdown snakes.” Looks Very Good, although Doris feels obliged to point out that there are exceptions.
“I’m talking about white mens, too,” Cloris says. She frowns at the floor and then her eyes swivel back up to Doris’s.
“Mainly
white mens.”
“Oh, white mens can be s
?BS
,” says Doris, adopting Cloris’s plural as obliviously as she adopts other people’s accents. Her tone suggests that she has a personal anecdote or two up her sleeve. She doesn’t really, but she could easily invent a few on the spot.
Cloris declines to ask. “Amen,” she says, reaching for a cookie. She shakes her arm and the bracelets start up like a field of crickets. “You got a fine man by the sounds of it,” she says.
“Gordon? They don’t come any better than Gordon. Our girls just adore him …” She sighs. “But, you know…” Sighs again and looks straight at Cloris, jamming desire into her eyes.
Cloris looks back, looks hard. Telegraphs red lightning. It goes on for so long that Doris believes they must have crossed the line and she is this close to saying “He
is
a man” when Cloris says, “Seems there’s not a man alive doesn’t have some
but
trailing after him. He’s a good provider,
but
he’s one mean jackass. Oh, he’s handsome, Lord knows,
but
is he lazy! More buts than a damn ashtray.” She laughs. Boulders moving underwater. She has the one gold cap, no fillings that Doris can see. What white teeth.
Doris pretends to laugh along. She fans her thighs with her skirt. Then, suddenly fretful, she stands and starts moving around, saying, “Don’t mind me, I’ve got ants in my pants.” She fingers the starched collar of Cloris’s nurse’s uniform hanging on the back of the bathroom door. Goes over to the kitchenette and taps a line of boxes on the counter. Cheerios,
Frosted Flakes, Ritz Crackers, Pillsbury cake mix, Dash detergent. The trouble is, she needs Cloris to make the first move, but if Cloris is new to this then it’s up to her and she just doesn’t have that kind of nerve.
“That’s for damn sure,” Cloris says. She is talking about having come to Toronto for the better pay at Sick Children’s Hospital—she’s a pediatric nurse—and to start her life over, but the prejudice up here is going to take some getting used to. It’s not the hateful kind, it’s the plain, dumb, happy kind. Her superintendent calling her “Jemimah.” The whole hospital taking it for granted that she and the one black intern on staff must be messing around like a pair of dogs. Doris shakes her head, clicks her tongue, half-consciously registers “black” for “Negro,” all the while breathing deep to ward off the fit she feels approaching. Some kind of convulsion, could be sneezing. It’s an oven in here. Now she’s panting. Maybe it’s a stroke, the third calamity turning out to be
her
dead.
“Sit down, honey,” says Cloris. “You look hot as a griddle. By the window. Here, I’ll turn the fan on you.”
Doris sits, the “honey” working on her like a shot of whisky. It’s been so long since a woman called her honey. Is it a pass? What does
she
think? Make it a pass, she nevertheless prays, already dying for another one, more sweet talk. Cream Cheese, Baby Lamb, Mango Juice, Honey Baby—Harmony’s names for her were a gourmet meal.