Chapter Three

“You know, the whole lunch excuse sounds flimsy to me,” Sasha announced as they sat on bar stools at their favorite sushi joint that night munching edamame, spicy rolls and nigiri. Luis, a fellow associate from her firm, sat with them, checking out restaurant visitors in the mirror above the bar.

“I’m with you, sistah,” he said, and held up his hand to Sasha for a high five. They were always doing that—something from work, they said. Apparently most of the attorneys at Martin, Felpausch and Stein were former college athletes. Luis said he thought the partners in the firm had a rule against hiring non-athletes. Fortunately that rule didn’t extend to people of color or flaming homosexuals, both groups that he was happy to represent.

“Don’t sistah me,” Sasha said, ignoring his raised hand.

Luis and Eleanor exchanged a look. “Not yet,” she said, and he nodded.

“What’s not yet?” Sasha asked.

“Nothing,” Eleanor said quickly. “Back to me and my celebrity crush. What reason would Tessa Flanagan have for inventing an excuse to have lunch with me?”

“Obviously she wants to sleep with you,” her roommate said, checking herself out in the mirror. The week before she’d had her extensions removed, and now her short hair stood up from her head in a baby ’fro.

Eleanor snorted. “Tessa Flanagan does not want to sleep with me, as much as I might wish she did.”

“Please,” Sasha said. “You know you look good. This is your longest dry spell since high school, isn’t it?”

Frowning, Eleanor counted the months since she and Laurie, her girlfriend of three years, had called it quits. They’d broken up right after Eleanor’s mother’s funeral. She’d thought it strange that they’d made it through the stress of the final year of her mom’s life and only then split up. Strange until she ran into her newly ex-girlfriend at Dyke Night wrapped around Justyn, her “best friend from work,” only a week after Laurie moved out of their Davis Square apartment.

“Yeah,” she admitted, “it is.”

“How long has it been?” Luis asked.

“Five months.” The unconsummated tryst with the girl from the club (Jess? Jasmine?) two months earlier didn’t count.

“Dios mio,” he said, and crossed himself.

“You’re not Catholic,” Eleanor said.

“Maybe not, but I am a drama queen.” He looked hopefully at Sasha, who smiled and held her hand up. As he slapped it, he nodded at Eleanor. “Bingo.”

Whenever she drank vodka, Sasha started slinging around the high fives willy-nilly, as if she were channeling an alternate reality version of herself. Tonight’s tipping point appeared to be one and a half vodka tonics consumed in just under a half hour.

“You guys don’t seriously think I have a chance with her, do you?” Eleanor asked.

Sasha shrugged. “Not if you don’t grow some cojones and make your feelings known, chica.” Another high five.

The conversation moved on to the prevalence of Spanish words in Mexican-phobic Southern California and the tendency of any dominant culture to misappropriate parts of the subculture it longs to destroy.

“Wait,” Sasha said, “you’re saying that in this case I represent the dominant culture because I called Elle chica?”

Luis nodded as he caught the eye of an attractive twenty-something with shapely biceps and a six-pack evident beneath his shimmery shirt. “Precisely.”

“I don’t think so. Black women get paid the least and have the most violence committed against us,” Sasha argued. “Not to mention we’re viewed by men primarily as sexual objects. We’re at the lowest end of the totem pole in this country.”

“There you go again, misappropriating,” Eleanor said. When Sasha stared at her, she added, “Um, totem pole? If any group of people occupies the lowest end of the totem pole, it has to be Native Americans.”

Luis smirked, and reluctantly, Sasha smiled. “All right, the Indians win. You know why black people are so happy in Southern California?” The other two shook their heads. “’Cause there ain’t no big trees. My people don’t go camping for that very reason. You’ve seen the movies. Always some redneck hiding behind a tree with a shotgun.”

“True dat,” Eleanor said, and ducked as they chucked empty edamame shells at her.

Later, after Luis had left with the boy in the shimmery shirt and Eleanor and Sasha had gone back to their apartment to watch Ghost Whisperer on DVR (a guilty pleasure that could never be revealed in front of their other Smith alum friends, they agreed), Eleanor sat on the couch next to her roommate, wondering what Tessa Flanagan was doing. What was her life like? A house in the Hills, a live-in couple to watch her daughter and cook their meals and, presumably, clean up after them. Then what? What did Tessa Flanagan do after her daughter was in bed on a Friday night?

At that moment, Tessa was fielding a phone call from her agent. “I told you, Michael, no. Retired means retired.”

“Come on, sweets,” he said, his silky voice cajoling. “You know these offers are going to dry up if you keep toeing that party line.”

“Fine with me,” she said, scrolling through the onscreen guide on the television in her bedroom. Tonight was one of Ama and Dani’s regular nights off, so she and Laya had made veggie lasagna for dinner and cleaned up the kitchen before bed. Fridays were her favorite night of the week, a chance to spend some quality time with her daughter and decompress from a busy week. Which was what she’d been doing before Michael had made a pest of himself, calling her cell phone and land line repeatedly until she finally picked up.

“Are you sure?” he asked. “We’re talking six figures for a one-time guest appearance. You like everyone involved in this show. Good politics.”

She wavered for a moment. The exposure might be good for the foundation. Then again, there would be plenty of time later to make appearances that would be more meaningful than a guest spot on a sitcom. “I’m sure,” she said. “But tell them I’m flattered they thought of me.”

“Will do,” Michael said, and sighed audibly. Actors weren’t the only ones fluent in melodrama.

After they hung up, Tessa set the TV to a classical music station and reached for the stack of books on her bedside table. She was a glutton when it came to reading fiction, from cheap paperbacks to new hardcovers, always switching between three or four at a time. She preferred to read paperbacks in bed—hard-backed books got so heavy. But right now she was working on the new Sarah Waters novel, only available in hardcover.

Like Waters’ last novel, this one was a departure from her early works, well known and much loved lesbian romps through Victorian England. As she read the first chapter, Tessa found herself longing for the sexiness of Tipping the Velvet, or the mystery of Fingersmith. Ironic, she thought, that she was loathe to allow the British writer to reinvent her writing when change was what she craved herself.

Tessa had never planned on an acting career, or even dreamed of one. When she turned eighteen in the middle of her senior year of high school, she’d graduated early, packed her belongings in a single bag, and left the latest in a long line of foster families. She’d been saving her babysitting money secretly for years, waiting to leave Chicago, a city that had left her with few genuine connections. The only adult who had seemed to take an interest in her was a math teacher at the high school she’d attended sophomore year. Looking back, Tessa was pretty sure that Leticia Williams was a lesbian, and had always wondered if the young teacher had recognized the inner queer in her. But one person in eight years of foster families and new schools was not enough to tie her to Chicago.

The potential destinations on her escape list demonstrated little creativity: New York or Los Angeles, both cities where she could lose herself in the masses. Since her birthday was in January, one of the darkest, coldest months in the aptly named Windy City, the choice was easy. In L.A., no one would ever have to know what she came from. No more pity or poorly disguised trepidation in the eyes of the adults who had read her case file, no more taunting from her foster siblings. She couldn’t wait to build a life where no one knew who she was. Ironic, she thought again—for despite the fact that she was decidedly recognizable the world over, no one actually knew her, except perhaps her daughter.

A few intrepid members of the press, sensing in her back story a snow job, had tried to track down names and addresses of the relatives she’d invented. But without her real name, they didn’t have much to go on. And Flanagans, it seemed, proliferated throughout the Northeast United States. Her birth certificate was a closely guarded secret, and Tessa publicly claimed to share her Irish father’s last name, while the relatives she had (allegedly) lived with belonged to her mother’s side. She’d looked different in high school, too—she’d worn her hair in a tight braid, and unfashionable glasses and a tendency to eat when she was upset had made her the proverbial ugly duckling. Not until she reached L.A. and cut her hair, slimmed down and bought contact lenses did she begin to blossom into her pre-star self.

Only her agent, publicist and business manager knew the truth about her past—except that wasn’t entirely true. Tessa was aware of at least two cases where someone who claimed to have information had approached her management team, but nothing had come of either situation. So far, at least, it appeared she’d managed to create a new life that couldn’t be traced back to the old one.

That was partly why she’d had Laya. Selfish and potentially wrongheaded, maybe, but she’d longed for one person in the world connected to her by blood and genetics, a child in whom she could see herself. Once she’d held her daughter, though, as soon as she’d cradled the tiny, defenseless creature in her arms, it didn’t matter anymore why she had decided to have a child, only that she was a mother. Not that the press saw it that way. During her pregnancy, the paparazzi had made such a concerted effort to uncover the father’s identity that Melody had finally issued a release stating outright that Tessa had used an anonymous donor.

This was, in fact, the truth. She had purchased sperm through a high-end clinic in Switzerland that specialized in working with couples and individuals for whom privacy was a major factor in family planning while money wasn’t. She’d pored over the clinic’s catalog, finally deciding on a donor with a similar genetic makeup so that her baby would look like her, not a stranger they would likely never meet. Then she’d called Michael and Melody and told them she needed a good fertility doctor, one who was both accustomed to celebrity clients and willing to make house calls.

Since she was youngish and healthy, the fertility doctor Melody put Tessa in touch with suggested they try basic artificial insemination a few times, just to see what happened, before resorting to more extreme hormone manipulation. During a break between film projects, Tessa had the sperm shipped to the doctor’s clinic. The next time she ovulated, he drove to her house, canister stored in a portable cooler, and, with a nurse’s assistance, inseminated her right there in her own bedroom. Apparently women in her family were fertile—she’d gotten knocked up on the second try. She hadn’t felt any different at first, so when she missed her period two weeks after the second insemination attempt, she was sure it had to be a mistake. But no. The half dozen home pregnancy tests she took indicated what a blood test confirmed—she was going to have a baby. What had been theory was suddenly on the verge of becoming reality.

Her pregnancy had been without complication of any kind, which was a good thing—she’d had to work through week number thirty-three on a movie that had been planned for over a year and a half. The film’s producer wasn’t thrilled about her inflated abdomen that had to be camouflaged in shot after shot, and Tessa didn’t blame him. But she’d genuinely believed getting pregnant would take longer than a mere six weeks. As soon as news got out, her normal paparazzi shadow turned into a dedicated following. Melody’s press release, viewed by some as just another celebrity subterfuge, had helped tame some of the craziness. But even so, prognostications of all types continued about Tessa’s decision to have a baby out of wedlock.

She didn’t particularly care what anyone else thought about her having a child on her own, though. For the first time in her adult life, she felt as if she’d made something good happen. Unlike her acting career, which had happened to her, she’d chosen to be a mother. Laya had been wanted, and Tessa planned to spend the rest of her life demonstrating that fact.

Stretched out on her king-sized bed with one of their cats curled against her, Tessa tried to focus on the words on the page before her. But she couldn’t quite envision the straight characters Waters had chosen to give voice to this time around. Or maybe it was just that she was tired of straight people, sick of hetero culture imposing itself everywhere she turned—on billboards, in magazines, even in stories about her, for God’s sake. Her sexuality was an open secret among the Hollywood elite, but the movie-making machinery operated on the assumption that if middle America, its main consumers, found out that its favorite action hero liked handsome boys, or that the queen of romantic comedy preferred women, those actors’ market shares would plummet.

Tessa wanted to believe that this was an outdated notion, that average Americans wouldn’t care if their big screen heroes and heroines were homos. But she knew that homophobia was still legal in most states, gay civil rights were routinely voted down by a majority of citizens (California’s Proposition 8 was only one example among many), and gay-bashing was still regarded as boys just being boys in plenty of towns and cities across the country. So she’d let Michael and Melody talk her into staying in the closet, and she hadn’t denied the fabricated gossip that linked her with various male celebrities, some of whom had closets of their own to camouflage.

Only sometimes, like today when she looked into Eleanor Chapin’s eyes and read the attraction there, when she felt that tingle that comes when you’re close to someone whose body chemistry matches your own, on days like today she wanted to bust out of her closet and tell the straight world where it could go. Tell her viewing public that they didn’t own her. But instead of holding an impromptu press conference, she holed up at home, turned on the incredibly complex alarm system Michael had had installed (how did heat detectors know the difference between animals and humans, anyway?), and, after Laya was safely tucked into bed, escaped into lesbian land via film or fiction.

Tonight, though, Sarah Waters wasn’t cooperating. The need to escape hetero land unassuaged, Tessa set the novel aside. She stepped into slippers and padded along the wood floor out into the hallway, past Laya’s door—she poked her head in to make sure her daughter was asleep in her treehouse bunk bed—and down the hall to the library. When she was growing up, she’d never had any books of her own, and had had to content herself with worn paperbacks and cracked hardcovers from the public library. Now that she had more money than any one person had a right to, she bought books whenever she liked, so many that she’d had one of the bedrooms in the house converted to a library complete with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a ladder on wheels that swiveled around the high-ceilinged room.

She turned on the light and enjoyed the frisson of pleasure she always experienced at the sight of so many books. One of her studio-sponsored assistants had offered to alphabetize the collection, and Tessa had accepted gratefully. Now she trailed her fingers across the book spines closest to the door. Authors with M names. She moved left, checking spines as she went until at last she came to W. Finding the book she wanted, she turned out the light and returned to her bedroom, stopping once again to look in on her sleeping daughter. She loved Laya with a depth that sometimes surprised her still. Since she’d become a mother, she finally understood what the phrase “unconditional love” truly meant. And understood that it wasn’t something she’d had much of in her own life.

Back in bed, she snuggled under the covers and opened her trade paperback copy of Tipping the Velvet. She leafed through the pages, pausing to read a snippet here, a phrase there. When she came across the scene where the main character, Nan, spent her first night with the alluring Lady Lethaby, she closed her eyes. It had been way too long since another woman had touched her. Who would have thought a kindergarten teacher could arouse such heat?

But she had, and now the question was what Tessa should do about it.

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 718