Granta 166, page 15
Lucy wore a white tank top in which her breasts stood at attention, like loyal little pets, and she had the cheekbones and eyelashes that Diana associated with rarified, glossy womanhood.
The woman standing beside Diana introduced herself while on the sofa the blonde, Lucy, toyed absently with her necklace. Diana moved toward Lucy and softly touched the edge of the sofa.
‘Excuse me,’ Diana said to Lucy. She and the bearded man beside her both turned expectantly. ‘Could I get you another drink?’
A mild, appropriate blush washed across Lucy’s face. She was clearly used to being sought. ‘Sure. You know,’ she said to Diana, ‘I could use another drink, I’ll come with you. Okay?’ she said to the man, and rested her hand on his forearm for a moment, like a teacher reassuring a young boy that he will be just fine on his own.
Diana smiled, as much at this gesture as at Lucy’s acquiescence. As she led Lucy to the kitchen, her silver ring and the links of her watch gleaming against Lucy’s white top, she turned to see a crestfallen look in the eyes of the man on the sofa – a look that made her laugh out loud.
‘What?’ Lucy said.
‘Your friend,’ Diana said. ‘I think he’s jealous. What are you having?’
‘A gin and tonic, please.’
Diana arranged the bottles and located a knife in a kitchen drawer. She began to slice a lime. ‘I haven’t seen you here before,’ she said, indicating the apartment. ‘How do you know Minta?’
‘We went to high school together,’ Lucy said. ‘I only moved here recently, we haven’t seen each other in years. It was sweet of her to invite me.’
‘I think it was more a favor to us than to you,’ Diana said.
Lucy turned around on her heels, smiled, splayed her hands on the kitchen counter and leaned forward as though she were about to announce a dare. Diana saw that Lucy’s appeal was in the nostalgia of her looks: Hers was a teen beauty, at home nowhere more than in a miniskirt. Even in her bland slacks and loafers she had the flirtatious, dismissive charm of a girl at the height of her popularity, the challenge and invincibility of a team captain.
Diana poured the tonic into Lucy’s glass. When Diana was a teenager, no girl had ever given her the look Lucy gave her now. After an adolescence in which the very fact of her lesbianism had seemed to disqualify her from the contest of desire, she had, in her brief adulthood in the city, finally become attractive. She had natural qualities that hadn’t initially looked like advantages – height, broad shoulders and a face given to brooding – and she had learned to appropriate the mannerisms that made powerful men suspicious and irresistible, chief among them a degree of directness to which the world capitulated almost unconsciously. The spin, the smile, the crush of Lucy’s tits in the tank top: Diana recognized all this now with the wistfulness of a former adolescent boy who had once jacked off, in frustration, to a teen flick. In an hour she would make this bitch come around her fingers, and that’s how she would say goodbye to it once and for all – those excruciating sexless years – the slurs, the nights spent crying, the year she had starved herself and, perhaps worst of all, the relentless, disgusting, unconsummated wetness she had carried around between her legs, which marked her as an animal.
‘You know,’ Lucy said, taking a sip of her fresh drink, ‘I’m glad I came. I’m making friends already.’
Diana came around to Lucy’s side of the counter and placed her hand on the back of Lucy’s neck, where a light sweat had begun to collect. She could feel the thrum of intention beating in her own chest and along the muscles of her arms. There in the warm kitchen she let her ring rest against the first vertebra of Lucy’s spine and later, after the long charged walk to Diana’s apartment, when Lucy was supine on her bed, she felt with satisfaction the moment when the hard alien contour of the ring surprised Lucy, made her hitch her hips up before she could catch herself. Lucy smiled, to show she was game. From there Diana did what she had learned to do: make a girl feel absolutely surrounded, alternately by forcefulness and by utter softness, as though she were smothered in Diana’s desire. Diana could tell which kinds of girls would like this and which would find it overwhelming, and she intuited that Lucy’s capacity to receive passion had been so distorted by her excessive beauty that only a real showing would satisfy her. At the very end she crouched between Lucy’s legs and began to pet her softly, almost as though at any minute she would give it up. She kept at this for so long that Lucy began to shake, to say raggedly, no more, no more until, just a few moments later, she came with a humiliating trembling in her legs, her body splayed and limp like an empty bag.
‘Christ,’ Lucy said a while afterward, wiping her brow. A dank, sweet smell of success permeated the room.
‘You’ve never been fucked by a woman, have you?’ Diana said.
Lucy laughed – a lovely ripple, her breasts shaking – and then she turned, propped herself up on an elbow. ‘Did you really think that?’ she said. ‘Why do you think I came home with you?’
Diana made a neutral face. So who was that man Lucy had been sitting thigh-to-thigh beside, whose forearm she had touched so awfully – someone she teased for sport? The idea made Diana like Lucy better, maybe even grudgingly respect her. When Lucy left it was with shameless grace, the air of having won something flattering and inconsequential.
In the morning Diana made her way out for a coffee. She felt light and free. She was at home in the blare of traffic, roaming across blocks that smelled of bacon fat and sewage. The sun moved over her, confirming her strength. When she checked her phone, she saw that Minta had texted her. I heard you went home with Lucy! she wrote. Isn’t she special??
As Diana ascended the stairs back up to her apartment the word special echoed in her mind and conjured the disheveled hallway, the hush, the sight of Lucy glimpsed across the bay of heads, the spin of Lucy’s body as if she were suspended over a football pitch.
Lucy had been in the city three months. Sure, she said on the phone, she would let Diana show her around. Where did Diana like to go?
‘Well, now that the pools have opened, I like to go to the pools.’
‘You just want to see me in a swimsuit.’
Diana waited for her on Houston Street outside the entrance to Hamilton Fish. The early summer was yellow and jubilant. Lucy arrived wearing a competition one-piece under a denim skirt, carrying nothing but a water bottle and a small makeup kit tied around her wrist. Diana felt a keen satisfaction surveying Lucy’s proportions, the rightness of her shoulders, her waist, even the smart length of her hair.
‘You’ll have to share my towel, is that it?’ Diana said from behind her sunglasses.
The pool was filled with children celebrating their release from school, rowdy and irrepressible. Diana spread her single towel down at the far end and they sat together at the edge, their calves dangling in the water. The pool, protected and bejeweled, spread out before them in its vastness. The sound of traffic on Houston was distant yet comforting.
‘How do you know this place?’ Lucy said.
‘I know all the pools,’ Diana said.
‘Why don’t you go to the beach?’
Diana didn’t explain that she only felt safe in Manhattan, hugged between the rivers, aware at all times of what was up and what was down. She leaned into the reticence which had by now become natural to her, and which took on an air of glamour when paired with bravado. Lucy had no trouble keeping them both entertained. She had a keen memory for what were apparently years’ worth of stolen anecdotes, bar stories, family secrets. Her brother was a frequent protagonist: his troubles, his cruelty, the things he had stolen, the people her father had called to keep him out of prison.
In the second hour, while Lucy’s voice sped along over the contours of past summers, Diana noticed a pair of adolescent girls staring at them across a stretch of shallow water. The girls were long-haired, silky and full of themselves in pink bikinis which presumed more adulthood than belonged to them, and they alternated between whispers and shrieks. ‘But he just did it again the next month,’ Lucy was saying. ‘Can you believe that?’ Across the pool the bolder girl pointed at her, Diana, and gave a high laugh. Diana felt heavy. Her shoulders were too hulking even to remain upright. She hated the girls, their dark eyes and spoiled smiles, and simultaneously she felt grateful to them for their ruthless obedience to the truth. She made the smoothest possible entrance into the safety of the water, so that only her head was visible, and circled around in front of Lucy, shielding her eyes with her hand. Lucy talked charmingly. She hadn’t noticed anything.
As June meandered into July, Diana introduced Lucy to the Manhattan pools. On Saturdays they tried to visit two or three in a single afternoon. As they trekked on the subway from one set of locker rooms to the next, damp-haired and giddy with chlorine, Lucy outshone whatever else was on offer in the growing summer heat. The freckled tan on her chest had no rival. And the fifteen seconds of the weekend Diana cherished most were those in which she spread a triangle of sunscreen onto Lucy’s upper back: She felt the pressure of
Lucy’s muscles straining toward her and the brute inside her shivered. Lucy enjoyed those miserable cold showers at the pool, she laughed at the ads on the subway, she smiled at the idiot kids who raced around her street on scooters and nearly pushed her into traffic while she coolly produced her building key and shouted, like an overworked sister, ‘Don’t forget to drink some water!’ When Diana, ravenous by the time she got Lucy into bed at seven or eight in the evening, bruised Lucy’s hips without meaning to, Lucy liked this too.
Falling in love was the just reward for Diana’s years of stoicism, for all that grief that had not, in fact, been wasted, because it had yielded her this golden future. But doubts arose after Lucy fell asleep. Diana began to have thoughts that hadn’t troubled her in recent years, during which she had been so callous toward women that she had no need to be afraid of them. If it was the case that when she was a teenager she had been greedy, tactless, wounded, ugly – for she must have been all those, to have been so hated – it was inevitable that those qualities were still lying in wait beneath all her established charms, her boldness and her polished style, her significant silences, the shoulders which she had learned to hold just so. Since she had come to the city she had never disclosed to anyone this ghost that clung to her: the person she had been before. While Lucy slept in the cave of her arm, smelling of Coppertone and the lemon juice she combed into her hair, Diana looked around at the possessions which attested to the extremity of her solitude. The clock above her closet was not accurate, since no one consulted it; the costumes which were her city clothes hung flaccid and emptied of their authority. All these allures she pretended to, the allures that had ensnared Lucy, would soon be discarded as false tricks.
This doubt was a slender cup into which Lucy’s desire fell. Didn’t Lucy call Diana first thing on Saturday mornings and sometimes on weekday afternoons, too? Didn’t Lucy ask Diana about her favorite candies and which breeds of dog she admired when they passed gaggles on the sidewalk? Didn’t Lucy let her fingers linger on Diana’s waistband at the poolside? Diana’s mother, a timid woman who was unequal to what life demanded of her, had said only one meaningful thing about what Diana had endured: that adulthood would be more forgiving. Diana had not believed her, but she had prayed that her own skepticism would be contradicted. And perhaps Lucy was proof that her mother had a little wisdom.
While Lucy was on her arm, among her friends, Diana’s doubt struck her as insubstantial, like a memory left over from another world. Nothing fortified Diana so much as attending a party with Lucy. While lounging beside Lucy on that same sofa in Minta’s apartment, at a party later that summer, Diana felt the warm, lazy safety of a lizard in the sun. She was listening to Lucy and Minta talk about their hometown in Ohio. They had known each other in school, but they hadn’t been friends. ‘I always liked you,’ Minta said, ‘but you were just so popular. No one could get near you,’ and Lucy said, teasingly, ‘But you did get near me!’ and the two of them laughed.
‘The whole thing was just awful,’ Minta said. She looked tired and edging past her prime. Smoking had loosened her skin. In her voice high school seemed especially distant, a place far beyond the rivers. ‘Wasn’t it?’
‘Oh, it was high school,’ Lucy said. ‘It’s so bizarre. Nothing about it made sense. Right?’ And she began to describe the hierarchies and misplaced priorities and the intense, impossible passion she had felt inside herself then, all the time, the sense that she was filled with a manic energy which could only be temporarily relieved through athletics or teary conflict-resolutions. She described this with laughter and a little bashfulness, as though it were embarrassing, in retrospect, how important everything had seemed. Then Lucy said to Minta: ‘Do you remember Isabel?’
‘Isabel Walker?’
‘Isabel Garcia. Who came when we were sophomores?’
‘Barely.’
‘The thing I really remember about high school, to be honest, is how in love with her I was,’ Lucy said. ‘The first girl I was really in love with.’
‘Isabel Garcia?’ Minta said. ‘Really?’
By the time Isabel had moved to town, Lucy said, she had been worrying over her attraction to girls. But when she met Isabel it was undeniable. They got to talking during a biology class and met regularly in the evenings, at each other’s houses, for months. At school they didn’t acknowledge each other. God, it was harrowing to think of now, Lucy explained, since she had been so in love with Isabel, and yet at the time she felt she had no choice but to deny it.
Lucy and Isabel had agreed that their relationship would be an absolute secret: Neither of them was interested in being branded among their classmates. In order to facilitate their cover, they agreed that they were allowed to have boyfriends. Isabel was too busy to have a boyfriend; she spent her afternoons playing soccer on the JV team. But Lucy had a boyfriend already, the first in a series, and she really did feel warmly toward him. Their first explorations had been sweet – his inherent gentleness, her obliging fascination with his penis. But her interest in him was not comparable to her feelings for Isabel. Nights after she had spent a few hours with her boyfriend, she would sneak into Isabel’s house, just two blocks from her own, and spend hours writhing on a basement sofa with Isabel. Isabel was madly in love with Lucy, too. Once, Lucy recounted, she and Isabel had stolen some time together in the back of Isabel’s mother’s car in the afternoon, while her mother was inside speaking to an administrator, and Lucy had pulled on Isabel’s jersey in her hurry to dress before Isabel’s mother returned. Afterward when Lucy went to her boyfriend’s house her boyfriend said, What’s that you’ve got on? Lucy was beside herself with fear that he would realize it was Isabel’s jersey and find her out. But he quickly forgot.
By this point people on the couches around Lucy were listening. Her ability to captivate a room could not be attributed to her beauty alone; perhaps it was that fierce energy she recounted from her teenage years channeled into a new adult expression, animating her face and hands.
‘And what happened in the end?’ someone asked. ‘Between you and Isabel?’
It went on like this for a year, Lucy explained, and by then she had a different boyfriend. Isabel never got a boyfriend of her own. She was heartsick. She was starting to suspect that maybe it wasn’t all bullshit between Lucy and her boyfriend – that maybe there was something real in it. While Lucy was with her boyfriend Isabel would text her constantly, and when she failed to respond Isabel would grow by turns teary and livid. She would approach Lucy’s friends in the halls or the cafeteria and ask: Was Lucy all right? Had they heard from her? But her friends hadn’t known that Isabel and Lucy even knew each other, and this made Lucy terrifically anxious. What am I supposed to do? she said to Isabel. Even though we know it’s fake, he doesn’t! What else can I do?
One evening the boyfriend slept over at Lucy’s house. The two of them were woken in the darkness by Isabel standing over the bed. Lucy and Isabel knew all the back routes into each other’s houses, they knew how to find the hide-a-keys and the loose window sashes even in the dark. You sleep with him? Isabel shouted. With him? Isabel had watched them go to bed from the street, through the window. Lucy forced Isabel out of the house before her parents realized, but the boyfriend knew something strange had happened. In the dark he hadn’t recognized Isabel. But he had heard her. Who was that? he asked when Lucy returned to bed. Lucy, in her panic, could only say: My brother, it was just my brother, go back to sleep.
She and Isabel never spoke after that. Lucy’s boyfriend was confused and alarmed, however much she tried to placate him, and could not decipher the truth of what had happened. They broke up. Later, at a party, Lucy’s friends drunkenly accused her of sleeping with Isabel: What are you doing with that girl? they said. Don’t you know it’s obvious? It was the performance of her life, acting as though that rumor was so absurd it could only embarrass those who repeated it. When inwardly, of course, she was terrified of anyone discovering the truth.
Lucy paused and looked at Minta. ‘Did you know, did you hear about me and Isabel back then?’
Minta had heard rumors about Lucy, but there were rumors about girls all the time, she hadn’t believed it, she remembered merely being afraid of the day when the rumor would concern her, Minta. It was clear why Minta and Lucy had been afraid. After that week when she had asked around after Lucy, Isabel was teased and mocked relentlessly where before she had been ignored. Once she was surrounded by a group of boys and dragged down to the pool, where they threw her in the water along with the contents of her backpack.
But – it was strange, Lucy admitted, she had never understood it – if Isabel was targeted for her relationship with Lucy, Lucy herself, after that terrifying moment at the party, was never accused of having anything to do with Isabel again. And in fact, in the years afterward, she slept with other girls at school, very quietly, with none of the obsession or emotion she had felt for Isabel, and no one was the wiser.
