Beggar of Love

Chapter One

Ginger wasn’t coming back this time, Jefferson felt it. She didn’t blame Ginger, but for the final break to come over a mistake, a misunderstanding—the pain of it pummeled her. She’d only gone to Shirley’s room to finish apologizing and to get to know her without sex hanging them up. Then they walked around the corner to the coffee shop as Jefferson had originally planned, as she told Ginger she would. She was bursting with herself when she got home.

“I’m home, Ginge! I really had a good time seeing Shirley,” she’d planned to tell Ginger. “Talked and laughed with her without once feeling like I had to seduce her.” It was so good to be free of the compulsion to get physical with a woman. She’d finally unloaded some of her guilt. For so long she carried it around in an imaginary old cloth sack she dragged by its drawstring closure everywhere she went.

She’d bounded up the stairs instead of waiting for the slow elevator, unlocked the door to the apartment, and went in, panting, smiling, ready to shout, “I’m free!” First she’d stopped drinking; now she knew she was serious about being faithful. They’d celebrate with a bottle of sparkling cranberry juice.

“Ginger?” she’d called into the hollow-sounding apartment, startled when the refrigerator made the clunking sound that signaled a defrost cycle.

She could hear Ginger’s heavy Bronx accent as she read the note Ginger had left. “I ran into Elisa from Hunter,” it said, “at the recital. She saw you at the Hotel August in the elevator with another woman. You promised I wouldn’t have to endure this again. I should have known better. This time I’m really done.”

Since then she’d heard nothing. Ginger’s Aunt Tilly had barred her from Ginger’s dance school. None of their friends had heard from Ginger. Jefferson couldn’t sleep; the line between consciousness and unconsciousness became more and more thin. So here she was, on a personal stakeout, spending winter break watching Ginger’s dance school for signs of her. In years past, waiting to meet Ginger, she’d gotten friendly with the waitresses in the restaurant where she now sat hunkered in her worn brown leather bomber jacket by the window, and they kept the coffee coming as she watched across the snow for a chance to explain that, this time, she hadn’t strayed. If she’d lost Ginger again, what had been the sense of getting sober and staying away from other women? She ran both hands through her hair, combing it back. Oh, sure, at the program they’d tell her she’d done it for herself, but who was she without Ginger?

She’d always loved the city in the snow. It tamped down the noise, the traffic, the hustle. The snow was deep enough that each infrequent vehicle drove in the tracks of the last one. Everything wore a clean icy tarp about two inches thick. Buses were sparse and no passengers waited at the stop down the block. New York was as much at peace as she’d experienced it since the last blackout.

The next blow came like a roaring avalanche. A car pulled up outside the Dance Loft and Ginger, bundled in the pouffy coat with the fake fur collar Jefferson had given her last year, hurried to it, wheeling her huge green suitcase. Their gay friend Mitchell Para got out and opened the trunk. She’d never thought to call him.

He hugged Ginger, long and tight, then loaded the suitcase while Ginger went back to the doorway for—oh, no, she thought. All her luggage? What was going on? Mitchell was following Ginger now, shadowing her, not six inches away, his arms outlining her, as if to protect her or to shepherd her to the building. Ginger’s face looked like it belonged on an injured athlete, the pain was so obvious. Was she sick? No, you didn’t haul four suitcases to a hospital. Had one of her brothers fallen at a building site? No, that didn’t make sense either. Four suitcases? Had she packed every one of her prized collection of flip-flops?

Mitchell opened the door for Ginger and then got in the driver’s seat. Jefferson should have been lunging out of the restaurant to catch Ginger, but she sat there and watched Mitchell lay his arm across Ginger’s shoulders, draw her to him and kiss her. Jefferson stood, but within seconds, all she could see of them was the roof of the car, darting into a side street.

Breathless with shock, she stepped outside and looked for a taxi. But Ginger could be going anywhere: Mitchell’s place, out of the city, out of the state, out of the country. She imagined herself foolishly shouting, “Follow that car!” and lowered her arm. She slumped against the bare little tree beside her, a ginkgo she’d watched city workers plant two years ago. She clearly wasn’t wanted on Ginger’s voyage. Ginger had every right not to wait around for an explanation after so many of Jefferson’s lies.

She charged across the street and through the gate of Ginger’s Washington Heights Dance Loft. It was the only building in the area with chain-link fencing around it; with its red stone walls, it resembled a little armory. Despite the weight she’d been putting on for the last ten years, again she sprang up the flight of wooden steps two at a time to the second floor. Ginger’s two instructors were holding classes. Aunt Tilly was at the reception desk. Jefferson placed her hands flat on the desk and waited in silence until the old woman looked up. Still formidable, she had to be in her eighties by now. She’d retired as a school secretary and come to work part-time when Ginger’s enrollment ballooned.

“You need to leave,” she told Jefferson. “Ginger doesn’t want to see you.”

Jefferson was streaming sweat and unzipped her leather jacket. “Where did she go?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.” Aunt Tilly averted her eyes.

Aisha was a student who had started taking lessons at the Neighborhood House, where Ginger first taught. A hefty, clumsy, but determined adolescent back in modern dance classes, Aisha now emerged from the classroom where she taught modern dance herself. Jefferson always thought of Aisha as an elongated butterfly who had emerged from her cocoon of baby fat. Several preschoolers in ballet slippers trailed her. Jefferson hugged her, then followed her into the girls’ changing room.

“Do you know where Ginger went?” she asked.

Aisha had an apologetic expression as she shook her head. “Ginger called me and Ronna”—the other full-time teacher—“into the office and introduced us to Milly Falls.”

“Ginger’s old teacher from college?”

“That’s her. Milly’s on sabbatical. She’s taking over Ginger’s classes for a while.”

“While Ginger—”

“I don’t know, Jef. She didn’t tell you neither?”

“I wouldn’t be asking if she had,” regretting immediately that she sounded irritated at sensitive Aisha.

“Don’t get all odd about it. All’s I know is I saw your bud Mitchell hanging around night and day, like some old manly husband to her. I always thought he was as gay as us. I got to tell you, Jef, I have never seen Miss G. so stone-cold all-business. It’s been like her heart seized up on her and her face froze this last week. Especially those eyes. I have seen warmer eyes on a damn statue.”

It should have come to her the minute she saw Ginger with Mitchell and the suitcases, but it didn’t hit her until Aisha, with her puzzled words, spoke the eulogy for their decades of love. The giant oak of herself fell to the ground, uprooted by the ice storm that had hovered over every lover since the beginning of time.

Was this what Ginger felt every night Jefferson didn’t come home or returned reeking of the scent of calumny? Ginger was beautiful, but what she’d taken for quietness in Ginger had become a savage coldness in recent years. Had Ginger felt this way while staring through their apartment windows at the iron balcony railing, fenced into a relationship full of spikes and bars? Was there a way to survive this devastation?

The city under its dirty crust of snow looked shredded and ravaged. Jefferson, spent in every cell of her body, walked the nearly sixty blocks home, every street bringing back a pulverizing memory of Ginger, every side street the one into which Ginger had disappeared. She felt as if she was crawling all the way.