Beggar of Love by Lee Lynch Page A

Yankees cap, was hanging around the restaurant shooting at customers with a toy rifle. “Out,” she told him when he’d worked himself into a noisy frenzy. “Go shoot the tourists.” He seemed to like that idea and rushed through the door. Jefferson had stayed at school for the break, to play ball, and carouse, and to avoid Angie and her parents’ world. “Well?” Glad asked.
    “Would you believe I got mugged?”
    “No,” Gladys said, sweeping away to another customer.
    Jefferson had dreaded this moment for months. She could not truthfully explain her eye without talking about her gayness, but what good was this connection with Glad if she couldn’t? She watched her clear a booth, noticed the wrinkles going deeper and deeper into Glad’s skin. Glad’s age touched her. She couldn’t think about losing her some day. At the thought, fear, magnified by last night’s liquor, grabbed hold of her.
    “Glad, I didn’t mean to and I’m not really like that, but unfortunately I got in a fight,” she said on impulse. She’d learned to blot out her fear, sometimes with liquor, sometimes with recklessness. If she pushed Glad away now by coming out to her, she wouldn’t have to fear losing her later. Like when she drank, she couldn’t turn back. Her hands reached to Glad, but she pulled them back. No touching, she told herself. She was coming out to Gladys—she couldn’t choose a worse time for her lesbian hands to touch a straight woman. Was this why her father drank, to ease the tension of continual self-control, to keep the monster of his gay self in a cage? She wouldn’t live like that. She clenched her fists and plunged on. “I was drinking in a gay bar.”
    Glad didn’t bat an eye.
    Jefferson’s smile felt like melted wax hardened across her face. She rubbed her tight knuckles against the pale blue coffee mug. “I’ve been hanging out with this girl. Her high-school girlfriend showed up drunk. They’re from Staten Island. The little slimeball started shouting and shoving. I told her to calm down. Before I knew it she popped me one.”
    “I hope you popped her back,” Glad said, eyes twinkling. She massaged one of Jefferson’s hands and opened it, finger by finger, till it relaxed.
    Jefferson licked her dry lips, let herself breathe. “You don’t care?”
    “Who, me? Why should I care who you’re screwing?”
    Jefferson felt herself blush to hear it put that way, with Glad’s usual bluntness. Her acceptance was so simple, like a gift; so natural, like a mother’s love. Not for the first time in this coffee shop tears came to her eyes.
    “Jef, poor Sam’s going to go broke supplying you with napkins.”
    “Hey,” she said, gulping. “I never cry.”
    “You could have fooled me, kid.”
    “Except here,” she corrected herself, giving Gladys an embarrassed little smile.

Chapter Ten

    Margo was unlike anyone Jefferson had ever known. A year after they met she was exciting, an exotic foreigner, intellectually challenging in a way that had never before interested Jefferson, sexually demanding—and knew more than she had imagined could be done with a body. She felt like she could do a master’s thesis on lesbian sex after the first few months of stolen nights she spent with Margo. The woman liked everything and anything and then some. She had porno pictures and a deck of dirty tarot cards and books.
    Yet more and more Jefferson felt sick to her stomach after leaving Margo’s infrequently washed bed linens to attend a class. She was nostalgic for Angela’s loving and considerate desire, while Margo was all about exciting herself to orgasm as often as possible. Margo made her feel like a fantastic lover, and it was true that she was learning a lot, but, geeze, Margo, she wanted to say, could you call me by name now and then so I don’t feel interchangeable with every other dyke in New York? Once in a while she had to go out with girls her own age, if only to show off what she now knew and to