The Sunday List of Dreams (19 page)

23.
Tell the people you love that you love them. Do it more.

T
he bathroom on the fifth floor of Geneva’s office building is like a palatial harbor for every woman who has discovered its location. There are three extra long and extremely soft couches, spotless sinks, wicker baskets filled with plush blue washcloths, scented lotions, stalls as wide as most Manhattan apartments, flickering candles that smell like the earthy forest after it rains in central Wisconsin, and a cluster of chairs that have doubled as Jessica and Geneva’s office for as long as Diva’s has been in business.

Jessica, unaware of what is happening at this very moment at Diva’s with her mother, has claimed their usual meeting spot—the two big chairs next to a waterfall—an absolutely real and wet waterfall in the women’s restroom. The first time she heard running water in the bathroom, and turned to see the floor-to-ceiling masterpiece, she wanted to strip down and jump right into the decorative display, reminded of the rippling sound of the waves along her favorite beach in northern Indiana, the beach her mother and O’Brien took her to so many times as she was growing up. Jessica loves the cascading sound of the artificial oasis. And sometimes, while she waits for Geneva to free herself from the chains of the numbers and figures that keep her partner tied to her desk in her accounting world, Jessica moves the big chair close to the pool and dips her fingers in and out of the water that tumbles down and then miraculously rotates right back up to the top of the falls.

“There’s something sexy about water,” she told Geneva the first time they claimed the room as their permanent meeting place. “It drives me wild.”

“It’s wet, for one thing,” Geneva had suggested.

“I think it makes me want to let go,” Jessica said, as she touched the falls for the first time. “Makes me remember being a kid, back when not much bothered me.”

“What changed?”

“Life. A broken heart here and there, my parents’ divorce, college loans. The usual stuff. Just like everyone else,” Jessica answered, lost in the rise and fall of the water.

“You need to let go, baby,” Geneva offered.

But Jessica had held on. She held on to her potent and remarkably powerful need for success in the business world. She held on to her notions of love and sex that were apparently much more freeing for her customers than for herself. She held on to a small box that was locked and sealed with her heart and inhibitions, and where she kept the key to that invisible box was a secret, even to her. She held on for a very long time to the notion that her mother would never accept her, that what she did would never be enough, that it was best to not merge their lives.

This day—with hours of work stretched out in front of her, with unsolved problems, the rising strain of staffing an upcoming festival and this wild party that is being designed to launch Diva’s and Geneva and her into a new national orbit—the water makes her pause. She cannot stop herself. Jessica leans back, slips out of her lovely black heels, rests her head on the back of her chair and pushes her left hand into the water.

Then she groans with pleasure.

Her right hand is riding on her thigh, Jessica Franklin Nixon is smiling, her legs dangle like toothpicks in the wind and for the first time in a very, very long time, she is thinking about sex. Not her customers having sex, not her mother having sex, or Geneva or someone she sees on the subway—but herself.

A whisper of wind, a breeze from a slight movement right in front of her, makes her open her eyes. Startled, Jessica opens her eyes to see Geneva standing close, hands on hips, smiling as if she has just witnessed the landing of a vehicle on Mars.

“Geneva.”

“Jessica.”

“Where were you, baby?” Geneva asks.

“I was just sitting here,” she explains. “Waiting for you.”

“Jessica, did something happen in New Orleans?”

“Lots of things happened in New Orleans.”

“Did you sleep with someone?”

“What the hell, Geneva? When would I have had the time? Are you kidding?”

“Girl, you have been nothing but a pent-up piece of work for a very long time,” Geneva tells her. “You sell sex toys but I bet you never use them, and when the heck was the last time you had a date? And this business with your mother. How did it go?”

Jessica longs to jump inside of the waterfall and stay there for a year or two. She has not had a date in longer than she can remember, and when she thinks of dating it is men who make her turn sideways, not women, or maybe not women, and yet there is this unsolved canal that leads her right back to her old female flame, Romney. Why?

And her mother. Better. Getting better. Not the best. But a bridge she thought was uncrossable has been half crossed and Jessica has begun whittling away at the wedge she placed inside of her own heart to keep her mother away.

Geneva is studying Jessica as she shuffles several file folders from one hand to the next. She’s waiting patiently for Jessica to speak even though she knows that Jessica has no idea what to say. She looks at her watch, feels the lunch-hour meeting time eating itself up, launches into her noon lecture.

“You are clueless, aren’t you?” Geneva asks Jessica.

“What the hell do you mean?”

“For a woman so business-savvy and out there and attractive and feisty, you are like a 14-year-old girl, woman. What happened to you?”

Jessica sits up. A small fire ignites itself somewhere deep inside of her bloodstream and she wants to bop Geneva in the head, or maybe start a water fight in the bathroom they use as an office refuge.

“Tell me, wiseass, just tell me. Stop all this dancing around whatever’s bugging you. We have a lot to do.”

“Let me explain it with a story,” Geneva says, kicking off one shoe so she can curl her foot underneath her. “If I said you were in heat and we just got on with our business here, you’d probably never speak to me again.”

“How poetic,” Jessica says sarcastically, stretching back to where she was before Geneva entered the picture. “So I’m in heat, am I?”

Geneva quiets Jessica by holding up her hand and then launches into a story about a friend of hers, Elaine, who discovered her sexual attractiveness one day sort of by accident. Elaine was on a business trip and, like Jessica, the woman was all business. She never paid any attention to the physically passionate part of her life, beyond a rare date or romantic fling that gave her about as much satisfaction as a trip to the dentist. And then one day she was reading a novel on an airplane and the book had a section in it about a woman just as sexually dead as she was.

Jessica looks up at Geneva with a mocking smirk. Her “get to the point” face does not make Geneva hurry. Geneva happens to think this is an important discussion and she happens to know there was some serious flirting going on in New Orleans—by Justin, the factory manager, if not Jessica. She also happens to know that being satisfied in every arena of your life is truly important and that Jessica has not been satisfied with a man, a woman, or with herself for a very long time. But she is getting close.

“The book made Elaine think,” Geneva goes on. “She thought about missed chances, about rapture, about the fact that she might miss her sexual peak—as if such a thing is possible—that she might be attractive now and not the following year.”

Jessica is listening. She doesn’t really want to, but she is listening because this morning when it was her turn in the bathroom she had done that very same thing, just after she finished worshiping the new door that her mother had put up, a door that she was able to close behind her.

That morning, hands on the sink, totally naked, with absolutely no makeup on her face, before she hopped into the shower, Jessica Franklin Nixon looked at herself. She ran her fingers across her forehead, turned her head first to one side and then to the other, backed up so she could look at her ass, her flat stomach, the way her thighs and calves had miraculously held their athletic shape since high school, and then she ran her hands down the entire length of her body. “My body,” she said aloud, as if she had never seen herself before, never felt her own skin under her fingertips, never dared to caress herself in a way that someone else might think was sexual.

“I am beautiful,” she told herself, haltingly at first and then, after a few seconds of deep breathing, of reaching inside of herself, as if her body was a pillow and she was fluffing herself up, she said the three words again and she believed them. “I am beautiful.”

And then she thought of her mother.

While she moved into the shower and washed her hair and kept her mind on a track that was as distant and unfamiliar as a wild kiss, she thought of the years her mother had given away. Years of sleeping alone, of no romantic involvement, of never addressing what must have been at least an occasional sexual desire. Jessica thought about that and she wept.

Jessica wept not just for her mother but also for her own missed chances. She wept for the years she had lost when she could have known her mother, called her a friend, put her own hand back inside of her mother’s heart and life. She wept for not being ready for Romney and for walking away from other chances at love. She wept for knowing, finally knowing, what the ache inside of her—in that now hollow spot just at the top of her pubic bone—must be.

Sexual longing.

Desire.

The need to be touched.

The ability to let someone slip inside of her not only physically but any other way she wanted them.

Lust.

Every single thing she tried to help her customers embrace.

Jessica cried for having realized her loss before it was too late, before she missed a good year, before her hips swelled and her breasts fell and she could no longer harness her sexual and physical and mental power and then she stopped herself right in the middle of that thought and grasped the idea that her mother, pushing 60, was sexy and had just lured Burt Reynolds into the bushes. She thought about her last professor, a lusty woman of 69 who had two lovers, a trail of ex-husbands, and a list of men and women who would have loved her in a second if she would have them. She thought of her manufacturing consultant in downtown Chicago, a woman 55 years old, who had a lover of 23. And then Jessica cried some more.

She cried quietly, a steady stream of lovely tears that fell from her face onto her firm breasts and into the water that poured down her body. Jessica realized that her tears were like her shower—a cleansing—an awakening that collided with her sorrow for having put something so valuable, so real, so important, on a shelf for such a long, long time.

When she stepped out of the shower, dried herself off and looked once again into the mirror, Jessica saw someone new. She saw a 30-something woman who was sexy, hot, alluring, powerful, beautiful. She felt the way she did when Romney had held her, talked to her, simply looked at her, and she felt a surge of energy that seemed to change the color of her skin, the way she stood, how she knew she was going to attack the day and its multiple problems, how she moved and stood and even looked out the damn window.

Jessica Franklin Nixon was indeed in heat and she intended to stay that way the rest of her life. In heat and needing so much to tell her mother she loves her, that she is sorry, and that she gets the message she has been working so hard to share.

“So,” Jessica says, smiling in a way that is unfamiliar to Geneva. “What happened to your friend?”

“Everyone started hitting on her,” Geneva replies. “She put down that damn book, which we should probably sell at the store, and she took in a breath and she was a changed woman, a woman who embraced her sexuality, who knew she had it, who wanted it and so did everyone else who looked at her or came within a one-block radius of her sexually charged self.”

Jessica throws back her head and laughs and Geneva says out loud, “Oh, yes, baby, just like that,” and Jessica laughs again, heartily, and parrots her words, “just like that,” and then she tells Geneva that she knows exactly what she is talking about, what her friend Elaine had discovered.

“Truth be told, baby, men
and
women have been hitting on me for a while now,” Jessica admits. “If you stay long enough, and we don’t switch back to our business discussion, you’ll hit on me too.”

“In your dreams, honey,” Geneva shoots back, laughing. “I’ve got my hands and mouth and pretty much everything else full at my house. Besides that, you saucy straight girls are too slow, and you are
definitely
too short for me.”

“Hey, Geneva,” Jessica asks, scooting her chair forward just a bit and totally disrupting her business meeting seating chart, not to mention her usually business-driven, anal life, “Can you tell, really?”

Geneva likes the new Jessica so much she wants to dance around the bathroom. The two women have worked so closely for such a long time that there isn’t much they don’t know about each other. Jessica has been the mastermind planner and she’s had fun driving to this Diva place, but Geneva knows more than Jessica does about balance, about keeping your pie plate full all of the time, about making certain all the corners of the world are filled.