Hard Love (19 page)

Somehow campfires, bars, and peanut butter sandwiches didn’t seem like they ought to belong to the same weekend experience. We looked around, a little lost. “Let me get Diana; she’ll be happy you’re here.” He went halfway back down the stairs and yelled to a gangly girl with short brown hair who came running over carrying a guitar case.

“These are your two!” Bill Murdock told her, and then said to us, “See you guys later. Gotta find my dancing
shoes.” He turned and walked on down the wharf into a room at the end.

Diana sprinted toward us like a big-footed puppy. “Hi! I guess you’re John and Marisol. I’m glad you came. I wondered if you would.” She smiled first at Marisol, and then, briefly, at me. She seemed nervous, or maybe a little shy.

“Thanks for inviting us,” I said.

“This is a great place,” Marisol said. “Right on the water.”

Diana nodded. “Bill’s parents own it, but they don’t open for tourists until June, so they’re letting us camp out. You wanna find a room?”

We followed her down the creaky deck that passed in front of an odd assortment of doorways of all sizes and colors. Each room had a name plaque tacked over the entrance: Gooseberry, Puddinghead, Pussywillow, Lilliput.

“What do the names mean?” I asked.

“Oh, those are the names of Bill’s mother’s cats. Past and present. Almost every cabin has a cat name, although she had to throw in a few dogs, down at the far end, when she ran out of cats.” Diana knocked on Pussywillow’s door and opened it a crack. “Anybody in here?”

“Occupied!” came the shout back.

“Sorry.” We moved on down the walkway. “I should have known: Pussywillow is always popular. I don’t think anyone is in Pumpkin though.” She climbed up a ladder to a second story hut that was perched slightly askew on top another cabin. The view from up there was spectacular: All of Cape Cod Bay sparkled in front of us.

“Yeah, this one’s free,” she said, ducking her head to enter through the tight doorway. “Do you mind staying in one, or did you want two separate places? It’s getting a little crowded already.” Her face was devoid of expression; she didn’t want us to think it made any difference to her.

I looked at Marisol. There was nothing I wanted more, and probably nothing she wanted less. “I don’t care. Stay in one place?” I tried to imitate the careless indifference of Diana Tree, but was not at all sure I succeeded.

“It’s fine for now, anyway,” Marisol said, dropping her pack and looking around the little yellow room, betraying no emotion. Three little monkeys with their hands over their eyes and ears and mouths.

“So, are you hungry?” Diana asked. She had a way of looking up through her thick fringe of bangs so that she never seemed to be looking directly
at
you. It was a kind of protection, I thought.

“Starving,” Marisol admitted. We followed Diana out of Pumpkin and back down to the office, which also housed a small kitchen. She got a loaf of bread out of the refrigerator and a jar of jelly to complement the peanut butter on the counter. “There’s not a lot of food here,” she said apologetically. “Some people are going into town to eat, although most of them are going to the bars.”

“Gay bars?” Marisol asked. She was already spreading a sandwich for herself. I peeled a banana, even though my heart’s plummet into my stomach had already filled it up.

“The dance bars are mostly gay, but anybody can go. They’re the most fun.” I looked closely at Diana. Was she
gay too? How could you tell? There weren’t any obvious signs. Maybe that’s why some gay people
gave
you signs, like Birdie with his campy chatter, so you didn’t make a mistake. Not that knowing had helped me any with Marisol.

“We’re not twenty-one,” I told her.

“It doesn’t matter. Lots of the zine people aren’t. As long as you don’t try to buy booze, they won’t kick you out.”

“What are we waiting for?” Marisol said.

“What does this have to do with zines?” I griped. I hadn’t come all the way out here to go drinking. Or even dancing. Not that I had come to the tip of this peninsula only to hear the advice of my fellow scribblers either. At this point, I’d have to say my true motivation had something to do with the desperation caused by admitting my future looked as desolate and depressing as my present. Whatever was going to happen out here, I was going to be part of it.

Diana shrugged. “Tonight is just to get to know people. Tomorrow Bill has a program planned. But if you’d rather stay here and read over the zines everybody brought, you can do that.” She pointed to stacks of zines on the floor next to a sagging couch. “Or maybe you’re tired.”

“Oh, no,” Marisol said. “Gio’s never tired. He wants to go dancing, don’t you, Gio? I think we should all go!”

“Okay.” Diana looked pleased. “I think most of our group were head for Butterfield’s. They have these retro nights when they play oldies and disco songs and stuff. They’re great to dance to.”

“Let’s go!” Marisol couldn’t wait to surround herself with other gay people, to show me how gay she could be once she’d ditched me. She wanted me to see her lesbianness in action. (Lesbianity?) It was the last thing I wanted to do.

“Lead the way,” I said, smiling at Diana.

Chapter Fifteen

I’d never seen any place like Butterfield’s. Dark, crowded, and smoky, like you imagine bars will be, but with an enormous dance floor full of all sorts of odd types stomping and grinding to seventies disco music, that dramatic stuff with the beat so heavy it’s like a punch in the gut. There were men dancing with men and women dancing with women—that was no shock—but there were also couples that I couldn’t have guessed
what
the gender combination was. Half the clientele were pierced, dyed, moussed, muscled, and tattooed. I felt like I had a neon sign flashing over my head:
NAÏVE STRAIGHT KID
.

Nobody paid any attention to us. Diana located a small table where six or seven zine people were gathered, Bill Murdock among them. There weren’t any seats left, but Bill jumped up to make introductions. I was standing next to Marisol, but I think I would have felt the sudden magnification of her force field from across the room. There were four women sitting at the table, three of whom stared intently at Marisol, trying to decide if what they suspected was true. For her part, Marisol locked onto each of them as Bill said their names (Sarah, B.J., June) and she couldn’t seem to move past them as the other names were announced.

Due to the tight quarters, Sarah and B.J. were sharing a chair. June moved over and motioned to Marisol to share hers. Marisol sat down carefully, cheek to cheek with June, looking just a little shy. Shy? Who was she kidding? There wasn’t a shy bone in that body. Was there?

I tried to hear what June was saying. Apparently she’d read
Escape Velocity
and was snowing Marisol with how great it was. Sarah and B.J. were seconding the motion; it was a big hit with the lesbian contingent. (I believe
I
was the first person to tell her how great her zine was, but who was I anyway? Just some straight, untrustworthy
male
.)

“I wish I’d had such a strong sense of myself when I was in high school,” June said. I figured she must be in her early twenties. She rested her arm on the back of the chair they were squeezed into and tipped her head in Marisol’s direction.

“I’m almost finished with school. Just a few more
weeks,” Marisol assured her. “Then I’m free!” In an unusually girlish way, she flung one arm out to the side and tossed her head back. She seemed so young and eager I hardly recognized her.

“Do you want to get something to drink?” Diana asked me. I’d almost forgotten she was there. “You can get soft drinks at the bar too.”

It was more than I could bear watching Marisol and June flirting with each other. “Do you want to dance?” I asked Diana. It wasn’t an answer to her question, but she seemed happy with the suggestion, and we moved out onto the dance floor. I guess I wanted Marisol to see me with somebody else, see me having a good time without her. Except she wasn’t paying any attention.

At first I felt self-conscious jerking around to that silly music, but the beat gets inside you, and pretty soon I just gave in to it and let go. I wasn’t ignoring Diana; I could see she’d abandoned herself to the music too. Her hair flopped down into her face, and she mouthed the words to a song I’d never heard before. We were pretty wild, I thought, although in that crowd, nobody noticed.

It was almost impossible to be heard over the music, but between songs I asked her, “Do you come here a lot?”

She shook her head. “Not much. I live in Truro, next town down, and I don’t get the car often. Besides, most of my friends don’t like it here.”

“Why not?”

“The gay thing. It makes them uncomfortable.”

“You don’t mind, though.”

She shook her head. “I like people who aren’t afraid of themselves.”

I would have asked her more, but another song started booming. Finally we took a break and got drinks; it was a little less noisy at the bar, which was behind the biggest speakers. It was then I noticed Marisol dancing with June, not wild like Diana and me, but slowly and sensuously, teasing each other, their eyes locked together. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t.

Diana was taking it all in. “Marisol is gay,” she said.

It wasn’t really a question, but I nodded.

“I read her zine, so I knew she was, but then the two of you … I thought there was something going on. I wasn’t sure.”

“We’re just friends,” I said, turning toward Diana and ripping my eyes away from Marisol’s gyrating body.

Diana smiled. “She’s pretty.”

I chugged the rest of my ginger ale. I was beginning to think this weekend could be hazardous to my health. “You know, I’m kind of tired. I think I’ll just go back and crash for the night.”

“Mind if I walk with you?” Diana asked. “I’m ready to cash it in too.”

“Sure. Just let me tell Marisol I’m going.” Okay, I admit it was an excuse to talk to her and to interrupt whatever was going on between her and June.

I wound my way between the dancers and stood next to them, but it took me a minute to get Marisol’s full attention. “What?” she finally screamed at me over the sound system.

“I’m going back. With Diana.” Wouldn’t hurt to let her know I wasn’t alone either.

“Okay. See ya.” That made a big impression. “Oh, Gio!” she called, and I spun around. “I think I’m going to bunk in with June and Sarah and B.J. They’ve got a big cabin and there’s room.”

“More the merrier,” June said, grinning this better-to-eat-you-with grin.

“So, if you don’t want me to wake you when I come in, you can just move my pack down to … which one are you in?” she asked June.

“Queen Victoria. It’s underneath Pumpkin and down one doorway,” June explained.

“That way,” Marisol began, then leaned in breathtakingly close to me so I could hear without her shouting, “if you get together with Diana, I won’t be in your way.”

“Diana?” I said, blowing my cover. “I barely know her.” I guess she was hoping I’d found somebody, too, so she wouldn’t feel so bad about deserting me.

“You could
get
to know her. She seems like she might be your type, Gio,” Marisol said, smiling.

“And how would you know that?” I said as sarcastically as possible. I’d had enough of her patronizing crap. Let her sleep wherever she wanted to. I turned around to stomp out, and would probably have forgotten Diana altogether, except she was waiting for me and fell into step as soon as we got outside the door.

“Marisol’s sleeping in the lesbian tent,” I announced, sounding crabbier than I meant to. “I have to move her stuff down to Queen Victoria.”

“I know which one that is. I’ll show you.”

You could hear the music from Butterfield’s for a good block down the street, but gradually it faded out. As we got away from the downtown area, the stillness surrounded us like liquid.

“Wow, it’s so quiet here, you can almost
feel
it,” I said.

Diana nodded. “It has something to do with begin surrounded by the water, I think. There’s no place like this.”

“You’ve lived here all your life?” I asked, remembering the details all of a sudden, how her mother had died when she was young. Ten, I thought I remembered. The same age I was when Dad split.

“We moved here when I was six. My dad’s a songwriter, which doesn’t bring in a lot of money, but you can live pretty cheaply in Truro. He does gardening for people during the season, then takes off to write songs all winter.”

“That sounds like a good life.”

“I think so. But my older sister and brother don’t. They’re more like Mom, I guess. They couldn’t wait to grow up and move away.”

“Your mother didn’t like it here?”

“She made a deal with my dad. She’d live here for five years so he could try out the songwriting thing, but then he’d have to move back to Boston with her and teach music theory again. She was a singer; she missed all the concerts and stuff in the city. But she only lived four out of the five years, and Dad never left.”

“So what happens to the songs he writes?”

“Sometimes he sells one. Mostly he plays them on the piano or I learn them on the guitar. He likes that.”

We’d reached the Bluefish Wharf by that time and stood looking out over the water for a minute. “I’m lucky we were here,” she said. “It would have been much harder to deal with her death someplace where I didn’t have quiet and water and dunes to keep me company.”

It was nice to just stand there in the dark, looking out over the harbor. By now I was pretty certain Diana wasn’t gay. As a matter of fact, I had the feeling she kind of liked me, which was nice, but nothing I felt like doing anything about. If I couldn’t have Marisol, I didn’t want anybody.

“So where’s Queen Victoria’s hovel?” I asked at last.

“I’ll show you.”

I followed Diana down the wharf and, sure enough, Queen Victoria was very near Pumpkin. I got Marisol’s pack down and tossed it in the door. “So much for that,” I said, whacking my hands together nastily.

“June can seem a little abrasive, but she’s really nice,” Diana said, reading my mind. “She lived in Provincetown a few years ago, before she moved to New York City. I know her because she worked for my dad one summer, in his gardening business.”