Damn Straight Page 3

  Yep, Dinah Shore was a classic. Then she got divorced and founded a charity golf tournament that grew into a major professional event. She'd passed on, and the championship was now officially "The Kraft Nabisco," but people still called it the Dinah. Among lady golfers, that trophy is the Grail. Why? For one thing, it's an invitational. You can't play your way in; there's no qualifying tournament. So it's like the men's Masters, exclusive and tough and historic, always on the same course. The first major of the year—and the most significant. You win the Dinah, you're The Woman, all year long. You're the broad who can get the job done.

  And if you watched the tournament on TV, you'd have no way of knowing what a grand time everybody was having off the course.

  Being a golfer, I'd always thought it'd be fun to go to the Dinah, but who had the dough for a vacation like that? Plane ticket, rental car, motel, tournament passes, party tickets—I could live for months on what a vacation like that would cost.

  "Trube, it occurs to me that you don't even golf."

  "Golf has nothing to do with it." She looked at me with sudden sternness. "And how are you fixed for love? Ready for some action, or have you met some little sexpot down the canned goods aisle at Farmer Jack's?"

  I shuddered. "Whhf. Love? Real love? Hell. It's not that I don't try. God knows I try. But—I don't know, maybe I was born to suffer. I've sent away for membership information on various cloistered orders. That might be the answer."

  She laughed. "If we lived in the Middle Ages, we'd both be in the cloisters."

  "No other choice."

  "And all the other nuns would be falling in love with your earnest face and your way with the lute. Hey, play me a song."

  I got out the old mandolin and tuned her up. Choosing a flexible plectrum, I played a few tunes: "O'Donnell's Hornpipe," "Drowsy Maggie," and a sort of swing version of "Nine-Pound Hammer." It felt good to loosen up my hands. The familiar thin tones of my instrument made me feel grounded after a long day.

  Between songs Truby remarked, "That little thing's more beat up than ever. Still sounds sweet, though."

  I rubbed at a scratch on the mandolin's flat spruce face. "Yeah."

  Truby really liked the hornpipe.

  "Hornpipes are cheerful by definition," I said. "And on that note, I'm going to bed."

  .

  Donning her yoga leotard and bright-pink headband, Truby cooked a stack of marvelous pancakes in the morning, and we more or less got ready for school. She had a French press pot, from which the most wonderful coffee flowed, making me rethink my trusty stove-top percolator.

  The sun was creeping over the edges of the West Coast, turning the ocean from slate to thunderous ultramarine. A fresh breeze blew in through the casement windows in the kitchen. White waves stroked the beach, where I could make out a few joggers and their dogs.

  "We're going to Carla and Meredith's tonight," said my friend, spooning hot buttered banana slices over the thin cakes.

  "Boy, do those smell good. Who are Carla and Meredith?"

  "Women I sort of know. Carla's in makeup. Meredith manages Genie Maychild. They're having some people over, and I slightly begged Carla to let us come."

  "This Meredith manages Genie Maychild?"

  "Plus, I think, a few other golfers. Lona Chatwin, for one."

  "What day is this, anyway?" I asked her. "Friday?"

  "Yes, dear heart."

  The tournament would start with practice rounds and charity benefits on Monday, then the real championship would run Thursday through Sunday. Truby told me she'd arranged to take next week off from work and had called in sick early this morning.

  "That'll be believable," I said.

  "You forget what a wreck I've been. They'll believe it. I don't care, anyway. Christ, my life is at stake here."

  "Your sex life, anyway."

  "One and the same."

  She was looking better. A certain grim sorrow, or tension, had evaporated overnight. We'd both risen early to watch the dawn come up. She showed me a few yoga stretches.

  I'd brought Todd out to the living room. He seemed to like the place. At one point he sidled naughtily over to a stereo speaker cord. A firm, "No, Todd," was enough to remind him of his manners, instilled by me through careful training. He was five years old now, almost middle-aged, but he still had the same patient, inquisitive personality that had made him such a good friend from the beginning.

  While the last of the pancakes cooked, I feasted my eyes on the Technicolor vista past Truby's Sub-Zero and her Viking and her Waring and her Dualit. She owned all the good brands. Out in the water, black fins cut this way and that, catching the sun. "Are those sharks or dolphins out there, past the surf line?"

  Without looking, Truby said, "Dolphins. How long can you stay?"

  "I guess a week." I thought of the dismal late-winter cloud cover in Detroit. "Week and a half. Do you suppose we could go to a museum today?"

  "I'll drop you off at LACMA this afternoon, but then I'm going shopping. I want something new for tonight." She looked at me and I could tell she was thinking, You could use some new clothes yourself. But I didn't want any, and she could tell that, too.

  "Now," she said, "I'm ready for lesson one." We moved to the living room, where we sprawled and began to metabolize our breakfasts, with fresh coffee as a digestive. "What's gaydar, and how do I get it, because I'm going to need it, right?"

  "Forget gaydar," I told her. "It's simply a matter of paying attention. And it's not infallible, anyway. You begin by ignoring guys. When I say guys, I mean the kind of guys who feel they're the center of the universe. That's the first big step for you. They hate that, by the way. I think one reason men can't handle lesbians is that lesbians ignore them, and they're unnerved by that. It's so bizarre to them to be ignored by women that they perceive it as hostility. They get deeply uncomfortable. Then they get pissy."

  "My God, you're right."

  "At the Dinah, and I'm sure at this party tonight, whichever direction you walk in, you're going to bump into gay women. If you want to work fast, you're going to need a system to separate the—well, the Bordeaux from the Mad Dog. I've developed CUPCAKE. It's very effective."

  "I should be taking notes."

  "No, just listen."

  "Cupcake."

  "You see a woman; something about her appeals to you. Maybe it's just looks, for the moment. Before approaching her, use this simple quiz. Does she look chipper? C for chipper: By that I mean does she look as if she likes to have fun? Is there a spark in her eyes, something there in her face besides just beautiful curves? Then, does she appear to be unattached? Any partner lurking around, on the way back with a cup of punch? U for unattached. P is for piercings."

  "Piercings. As in—"

  "Does she look as if she just escaped the Spanish Inquisition? Call me a dinosaur, but having an up-close conversation with someone with eyebrow piercings makes my stomach feel funny."

  "What about a pierced tongue?"

  "I went on one date with a woman who had a tongue stud. All through the movie she clacked it around her teeth."

  "I have to ask, what was the movie?"

  "Oh, God, some Japanese epic she wanted to see. With all the colored uniforms. Then—well, those things are supposed to be great in bed, you know, but I guess she wasn't very practiced. Either that, or I was too afraid something unfortunate would happen. God probably wanted to punish me for going to bed with her on the first date. So I make it a point to check for piercings. You can't see certain ones, of course, but my research suggests that a lot of visible facial piercings indicates a high occurrence elsewhere."

  "P for piercings."

  "Yes. C and A are for cognitive abilities. This is beyond chipper. Is she just standing there waiting for something to happen, or is she engaged with what's going on? Could she sell you a set of encyclopedias? Does she look like the type who sends in her Publishers Clearing House entry?"

  My friend's laughter swirled around the room.


  "Cognitive abilities," I repeated. "Now, a very important letter, K. Can you picture yourself kissing her? Yes or no? If the answer is yes, and if you're still E for enchanted, then go for it. Make eye contact and talk to her."

  "CUPCAKE."

  "CUPCAKE. Chipper, unattached, piercings, cognitive abilities, kiss, enchanted. Now, there are sometimes exceptional cases where your knees suddenly go weak, and you don't need this CUPCAKE stuff."

  "Tell me about your ideal woman," Truby said. "What kind of woman would you like to meet this week?"

  I thought for a minute. "I guess I'm at a point where I'm looking for someone extraordinary. I mean, I'm past 'Oh, God, it's great to be in bed with a woman,' or 'Wow, it's great to be working on a relationship.'"

  "What would she be, ideally? Come on."

  "She'd be chipper—well, she'd be a CUPCAKE, plus she'd be doing something exceptional with her life: She'd be inspiring. She wouldn't just be working as a drone, beneath her capacities. She'd be challenging herself to do better, always striving for something important—whether it's inventing some new vitamin, or being a great kindergarten teacher, or competing in a tough business, or competing against herself. Someone who presents herself honestly and who isn't afraid of hard work, or being wrong, or being human. Someone who can take a hammering from life and come back up smarter and tougher and just as loving. Someone who would let me love her."

  Chapter 5

  The party was in Bel Air. As Truby gunned her Jetta around blind curves, I looked at the street names and tried to remember where the Manson murders occurred. The evening was fine. A golden dusk was settling over Los Angeles, making the city look friendlier. Windows flashed in the low sun. The air was gloriously warm, pouring in through the sunroof.

  "Meredith is supposed to be good friends with Billie Jean King," Truby said. "I hope she's there. Of all the women in sports, I'd like to meet her the most. She's done so much."

  I agreed. "But the one I'd really like to meet is Tonya Harding."

  "Tonya Harding?" Truby honked out a laugh at that. "Why, for God's sake?"

  "I'm serious. I think she's fascinating. There she was, a champion athlete, and she decided that winning was worth the price of her soul."

  "And she succeeded in destroying herself."

  "I wonder what she's like these days. Whether she's more, you know, introspective."

  Carla and Meredith's house, looming over a crescent drive, looked as if it'd been built to the specifications of a film producer with a very small penis. Everywhere you looked, there were things sticking up: columns and obelisks and turrets and spires. Very 1930s, very grand.

  A kid in a red jacket took the car keys, and we walked into a marble foyer where another rent-a-kid stood ready to take our wraps, had we any, which we hadn't.

  Then on into an enormous room furnished with antiques and hulking postmodern pieces, all mixed together. On and around the furniture women of all different shapes and sizes and ages had draped themselves, all beautiful, all wearing extremely stylish clothes. They stood or sat, holding drinks and one another, talking above the music, which was coming in from somewhere outside. I'd never seen so many attractive women at one time in my life, except for when I climbed a tree above the crowd at the Michigan festival.

  Beyond the windows I could see the dusky sky, a swimming pool, more women gathered there. Other rooms opened off the main one, all spilling low-key party sounds.

  "Do you know any of these people?" I murmured to Truby.

  "No, I don't think so. There's Carla."

  A short woman with smiling eyes came over to greet us. Truby introduced us, and as we shook hands I delivered my usual warm "How do you do?"

  "Welcome," she said, then quickly scanned my clothes down to my shoes. I'd thought I'd looked fine in the mirror in my room at Truby's, but now I knew otherwise. This was not an unusual experience for me. There were other women in the room wearing—as I was—blue jeans and plain linen blouses and brown shoes, but their whole look was different. Expensive, was what it was. Their clothes fit as if they'd been custom made, even the jeans. I hadn't asked Truby how much she paid for her new outfit, a brilliant Chinese-red sleeveless tunic. In silk, over a pair of gorgeous translucent white slacks. Manolo Blahnik shoes, I saw the label.

  Carla said, "That is charming."

  "Um?" I said.

  "'How do you do?' That's what I meant. Nobody says that anymore. You're not from L.A., are you?"

  "I'm from Detroit."

  "That's in the Midwest, isn't it?"

  "Pretty near, yes."

  All women love shoes, especially dykes. Is this a widely known fact? I guessed that my twice-resoled Weejuns made me look like a runaway from a Brownie camp. There were some gorgeous shoes in that room, I tell you.

  Sweeping us by the arms, Carla introduced us to her partner, Meredith, who had the determinedly game expression of a not-natural-born hostess—and who also couldn't seem to help checking out my shoes. Maybe I'd been misinformed about this bunch, and they were actually a coven of foot fetishists. I didn't see anyone famous.

  Carla introduced us to a few people standing nearby. I truculently waited for any of them to look at my shoes, but none did.

  Truby and I separated, and I made a casual beeline for a table near the center of the room, to look at something that had caught my eye when we came in. It was a food table, and the main feature was an amazing ice sculpture of a bag of golf clubs. The life-size bag was sculpted in the round, and the club heads sticking up were clustered together in a realistic bunch. I tried to make out a brand name, they looked that good. It looked as if a caddie had stood the bag there among the prawns and portobellos and gone off to sneak a smoke.

  As I stood there admiring it, a young server in a hot black bodysuit swung by and said, "Champagne?"

  "Mais oui," I replied, relieving her tray of a shimmering flute. She gave me a little glint. Her eyebrows were minky, her figure graceful. I smiled back, enthusiastically, and she moved on, glancing over her shoulder.

  There was, in the air, a sense of anticipation. A sense of possibilities, the feeling that we're here to celebrate an important event, we're going to have a good time, we're beginning to have a very good time, and we're being just a bit cautious to get this thing started off right. Something especially good might be ready to happen.

  I noticed a few pale left hands in the room: the tell-tale sign of an avid golfer.

  The appetizers looked good. There was a slew of vegetables crafted to appear architectural, like a sort of carrot-henge. A zone of cool air hung over them. Then there were some miniature, incredibly elaborate sandwiches that you'd be too embarrassed to eat anywhere except in a house like this. I enjoyed it all for a minute, drinking my champagne, then I moved over to look at a small bronze sculpture of a leaping woman.

  My plan was to sort of edge around the pedestal, inspecting all sides of her, then from her cover, scan the room for famous people, and perhaps pick out a friendly face to approach.

  As I admired the statue—and I thought it was good, lively and free—I listened to the voices in the room, catching a few fragments.

  "On top of that, we won the drawing for the free cruise, so we're going to Alaska at the end of—"

  "Don't know when I could fit it in. I've got soup kitchen on Tuesday, literacy on Wednesday, crisis line on—"

  "So I said to her, they do not owe it to us to stay together. Puh-leeze!"

  I thought about women's voices. It always brought me up short when I met a woman who consciously modulated her voice. You know, that—well, is it an East Coast thing? A straight thing? An I'm-a-good-girl-therefore-I-speak-mellifluously thing? I knew a lot of gay women with unmodulated voices. And I heard a lot of unmodulated voices in the room. A healthy sound, it seemed to me.

  Someone grabbed my shoulder and I jumped.

  It was Truby. "Okay, Starmate, what do you say?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "I mean what d
o you say first, once you've found a CUPCAKE?"

  "Christ! You make eye contact. And then you just say something. You talk to her. Get her to talk to you. Listen to her. Offer to get her something."

  "But she's a complete stranger."

  "Didn't you ever approach a guy?"

  I looked at her, in her brand-new little crimson number, her clear face shining, her quick knowing eyes. "Don't answer," I said. I was glad I'd never had any bawdy feelings for her; we were so close it would've seemed incestuous. "All right, you say something un-wisecrackerish like, 'I like your earrings,' or 'That's an interesting scarf—did you design it yourself?' With a friendly tone and a smile, for God's sake, you can say anything, even if it's really lame. You can talk about the weather. Then listen. If you like what you hear, keep up the conversation. When she asks how you're doing, be ready with something upbeat like, 'Fine, I got out for a little sun today, and it was great,' leaving her the opening of 'Oh? Where did you go?' Look, Truby, you're not going to blow it. You don't go boringly on and on about yourself."

  "That's all most men do. Theo said he wanted a woman with a good sense of humor. What he really wants is someone who'll sit there and laugh at all of his witty comments."

  "Quit thinking about Theo. Where is she?"

  "Out by the pool, where the music is. Do you realize it's a live band?"

  "Oh! No, I hadn't."

  "They're called Hannah and her Sisters."

  "Oh."

  "They're exceptionally famous, I was just told. Genie Maychild's out there, too."

  "Go on, now."

  I went back to studying the sculpture, slowly shifting to a casual survey of the room, when again someone took my shoulder from behind. I turned sharply, in annoyance, elbow out, ready to bark something at Truby, and felt my elbow hit a firm stomach at the wrong height. I looked up to see a tray of full champagne flutes tilting toward my head.

  It wasn't Truby, it was the champagne server, and I saw the sexy grin disappear from her youthful face as she struggled briefly to reposition the tray beneath the shifting glasses, then I saw her give up as gravity asserted itself. There were perhaps a dozen servings on the tray.