The Brutal Language of Love (6 page)

They shot on two consecutive Sunday mornings, before the department store opened at noon. Paige Cox played the role of the young woman buying the bras, while her girlfriend, Andie Rivette, played the sales associate. Benny Parisi played the boyfriend who comes in and kisses the sales associate at the end, but would only agree to do so after Brigitte assured him Andie wasn't butch. “It's gotta look like I'm really kissing a girl,” he warned. “My parents are gonna see this.” And everyone enjoyed working with Raoul who, though no longer in the program, remained famous for a film about a nude woman who enlists a detective agency to help her find her clothes. It was shot almost entirely from the actors' necks up, so there was no on-screen nudity—just heads bobbing along the bottom of the frame and crazy scenery filling the space above them.

In the end Raoul proclaimed Brigitte's shoot a success because Paige and Andie had been
hot
together. “They're the real thing, man,” he said, grabbing his crotch. “You can feel it right here!” He and Brigitte had loaded the last of the school's camera equipment into the bed of his truck and were headed home now, exhausted. Mercifully the temperature had dropped out of the nineties and they were enjoying the breeze, as opposed to Raoul's air conditioner.

“Yeah, but some of that's directing,” Brigitte protested, dangling an arm outside her open window.

“But of course it is! You did a great job, man. I'm just complimenting you on the casting, too.”

Brigitte was dissatisfied. “What I'm saying is,” she said, turning to face him as he drove, “how could I possibly have made a good lesbian film if I wasn't a lesbian?”

Raoul laughed and kept his eyes on the road. “Oh honey,” he said, which he only called her when he was about to deliver bad news, “because you're talented.”

Shirley mayer gave Brigitte an A+ on the film. In
her comments she called it sexy, funny, sad, and true to life. Her favorite part was a close shot of the sales associate's index finger passing over a raised mole on the young woman's back. “Great texture,” Shirley Mayer wrote. At the bottom of the paper she added, “Please see me.”

Brigitte arrived at Shirley Mayer's office thinking Shirley Mayer was going to pronounce her a lesbian, or at least ask her if she was one, then maybe try to help her come out. Instead she seemed irritated, as if she hadn't remembered it was she who had asked Brigitte to come in the first place. For a few moments neither of them spoke beyond initial pleasantries, which reminded Brigitte of therapy and how she could never think of an appropriate opening remark. Often she just burst out crying, or else said something garish like, “I've been tightening up during intercourse.” Today with Shirley Mayer, she suddenly found herself saying, “If you saw my film and didn't know me, would you think I was gay?”

Shirley Mayer pounced on this. “What's the matter? You afraid of being pigeonholed?”

“Of course not,” Brigitte began, but Shirley Mayer cut her off.

“You live with that French guy, don't you? Just make sure you say that in all your interviews, right up front: ‘I live with a man!' You should be fine then.”

“But I wouldn't mind being pigeonholed,” Brigitte said.

Shirley Mayer picked up a paper clip from her desk blotter and threw it at a bookcase across the room. “Oh hell,” she said. “I know you wouldn't.”

Brigitte paused for a moment before asking, “Is something wrong?”

Shirley Mayer sighed. “It was a plot. All those gay scripts. Jojo Mankowski devised a plot whereby everyone would write a gay script and say I made them do it.”

“No, he didn't,” Brigitte said, only because she considered herself to be somewhat inside the loop and had heard no such thing.

“In fact he did,” Shirley Mayer said.

Brigitte didn't say anything.

“I have to assume that neither you nor Paige were in on it.”

“Of course not,” Brigitte said.

“Then why did you write that movie? About the bras? That's what I'd like to know.”

“It's based on a true story,” Brigitte said.

“Yes,” Shirley Mayer said. “Most things are. I'm asking, why did you pick that particular story? You want me to know it's okay with you that I'm gay?”

“No,” Brigitte said. She shifted in her seat.

“Trying to make me feel at home in a room full of right-wing southerners?”

“No!”

“Oh hell,” Shirley Mayer said again, and she threw another paper clip across the room. “I know why you wrote it.”

Why?
Brigitte wanted to ask, but instead she said, “Are you going to get fired?”

“God no!” Shirley Mayer said. “I have proof. A falsified ‘Mayer Memorandum' that begins with ‘No men and women together.' No, being persecuted at a state institution is probably the best thing that could have happened to me. You can't do much better than that.”

Brigitte cleared her throat. “Would you like to have dinner with me sometime?”

Shirley Mayer didn't respond immediately. She repositioned her desk blotter first, then sharpened a brand-new pencil. At last she did something Brigitte had never seen her do, which was to unbutton her suit coat. It fell open to reveal that she wore no bra beneath her off-white silky blouse, and that her breasts were small and round, with pale nipples. “Your movie fascinated me, Brigitte,” she said. “I burned my bras in 1972 and never bought new ones. Now I just wear these stupid coats. It's all the same, though, isn't it?”

Brigitte didn't know what to say.

“Making ourselves presentable,” Shirley Mayer added.

Brigitte nodded then. “Yes. I see.”

“But now women like wearing bras, right?”

“I guess if you have a large chest it might be more comfortable,” Brigitte said, trying not to be obvious about appreciating Shirley Mayer's breasts.

“Oh really?” Shirley Mayer asked. “Is that how you find it?”

Brigitte resituated herself in her chair. “Well, yes.”

Shirley Mayer nodded. “My point,” she said finally, “is that it's a fashion.”

“Oh,” Brigitte said.

“A passing fancy.”

“I see.”

“Which brings me back to your movie.”

“It does?”

Shirley Mayer began buttoning her coat back up. “Your movie deals with something I like to call the temporary lesbian.”

Brigitte watched as the last of Shirley Mayer's breasts disappeared.

She continued: “The temporary—or environmental—lesbian feels attracted to other women only in specialized, often isolated situations, where she doesn't run the risk of condemnation from the general public. I mean, she's not the sort of person who finds herself getting into trouble over her sexuality. She simply isn't that committed.”

“Oh,” Brigitte said. “I guess that wasn't really what I had in mind.”

“Nevertheless,” said Shirley Mayer, “the film succeeds brilliantly at that level. In fact, I know several people who I'm sure would be very interested in seeing it.”

Brigitte nodded weakly. “I'll make you a copy.”

Shirley Mayer smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “And thank you for the dinner invitation. Really. I accept. Just give me a rain check until the end of the semester, after I turn my grades in. Then you, the French guy, and I will all go out and have dinner.”

“Shirley mayer thinks I'm a fake,” Brigitte told
Raoul that night. She had gone to see him at work, a sunken bar in an old bowling alley behind a shopping center.

“How so?” Raoul asked, handing her a glass of beer. He had showered and was sharply dressed in a mod-looking black T-shirt, which usually meant he hoped to go home with one of his patrons after work. Brigitte could tell she was cramping his style from the way he kept glancing down the bar at two giggling brunettes, but she didn't care. She had no one else to talk to.

“She thinks I'm in a phase.”

“A gay phase?” Raoul asked.

“I think so.”

He shrugged. “Maybe you should listen to her.”

“Why?” Brigitte asked, indignant.

“Because man, she's probably right.”

Brigitte sighed. “But I'm proposing that my heterosexuality is the phase.”

“This is too long to be a phase! The phase must be the shorter period of the two. You've only been gay for three months, so this must be the phase.”

The two brunettes got up and left. “Shit, man,” Raoul grumbled.

“Sorry,” Brigitte said.

He leaned on the bar then and lowered his eyelids in a way he knew she found sexy. “Want to make it up to me?”

“No.”

“Shit, man,” he said again, opening his eyes back up and straightening out his spine. “Why don't you go bowl or something? You're too good-looking. You scare away my piece of ass!”

He left to make drinks for a middle-aged couple who had taken the brunettes' stools and were still outfitted in bowling shoes. Brigitte finished her beer and rented a pair of shoes herself. She got a lane and bowled three games alone, each time increasing her score by roughly twenty points. She had just started bowling a fourth when one of the brunettes approached her, an amber beer bottle in her left hand. “Hi,” the woman said.

Brigitte had been standing over the ball return, trying to decide between an elegantly marbled green ball and a plain black one that was easier to carry. “Hi,” she said now, thinking she had an idea of what was about to come. It had happened before—women interested in Raoul wanting to know first if Brigitte was his girlfriend and, if not, would she mind introducing them?

Instead the brunette asked, “How're the bras?”

“The bras?” Brigitte said.

“I sold you some bras a few months ago. At Dillard's.”

Brigitte stopped and took a closer look at the woman. She would have to take her word for it, she decided, for it suddenly occurred to Brigitte that she had spent most of that afternoon in the dressing room with her eyes closed. As much as she had enjoyed their sensual experience, the sight of the two of them in the mirror had made her somewhat uncomfortable. “Oh right,” she said after a moment. “Right.”

“Is it Brigitte?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” Brigitte said, trying desperately to conjure up a name other than Tammy, the one she had given the sales associate character in
36C.

“I'm Hazel,” the brunette said, helping out.

“Sorry,” Brigitte said. “I knew there was a
z
in it.”

Hazel smiled. “Anyway, I thought that was you at the bar.”

“That was me,” Brigitte said. “I was talking to my roommate,” she added quickly.

Hazel nodded and took a seat at the electronic scoring table facing the lanes. Meanwhile, Brigitte picked up the green bowling ball and tried to act as if it were very light. After a few seconds she put it back down again, then proceeded to dry her hands over the air blower.

“So how are those bras working out for you?” Hazel asked.

“Great,” Brigitte said. “They're great.”

Hazel smiled again. “I'm glad.” The lane next to Brigitte's was unoccupied and so Hazel stood up and walked over to the other side of the ball return, facing Brigitte now. She took a swig of beer and covered her mouth to veil a small burp. Brigitte thought she must have been about twenty-five, and noticed that her pelvic bones protruded slightly from her snug, faded jeans.

“Maybe you'd better get off the bowling floor,” Brigitte said, noticing Hazel's clogs. “They're kind of strict about shoes here.”

Hazel followed Brigitte's eyes down to her feet and said, “Oops.” She stepped down from the wooden platform and returned to the scoring bench.

“You could rent some shoes,” Brigitte said. “I mean, I didn't mean to kick you out or anything.” No matter how long she dried them, her hands seemed to keep sweating.

“It's okay,” Hazel said. “I'm really just here for my friend. She likes your roommate.”

Brigitte nodded.

Suddenly Hazel looked concerned. “I can tell her to lay off if you want. I mean, if the two of you are more than roommates.”

“Oh no,” Brigitte said. “He's just a friend.”

Hazel nodded.

“He's just French,” Brigitte said.

Hazel stood up again. She looked at the scoring monitor overhead, which had been indicating it was Brigitte's turn to bowl for several minutes now. “Do you think my friend has a chance with him?” she asked Brigitte.

“Oh sure,” Brigitte said. She hit the reset button next to the hand dryer and the eight pins she had once hoped to convert into a spare got knocked down. She sensed her options in terms of activity on the bowling floor diminishing rapidly, and yet she felt uncertain about stepping off it.