The Blue Moon Review - Fiction

"I fell in love with a woman. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing, but I happened to be living with my boyfriend at the time."

I fell in love with a woman. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing, but I happened to be living with my boyfriend at the time. Not only that, but this woman was younger than I was, a mere girl--and I was her boss. So all in all, falling for her was not a case of spectacularly good judgment on my part. Although, come to think of it, I don't have any idea what falling in love and good judgment have to do with each other.

It all started during the Democratic National Convention. My boyfriend had a night job with variable hours. A job at which I could not reach him by telephone. One night I decided to tape something for him. I stuck my hand in a drawer and pulled out an unmarked tape. I popped it in the VCR to make sure it was blank.

It wasn't. It was cued up to this part where a young woman with greasy long hair was performing oral sex on a black man with this huge....well, let's just say, he was a very large black man. The young woman gave quite a performance, actually, interrupting the action only to make comments such as, "Oh, you're so big."

I watched for a while and then pushed the stop button. The Democratic National Convention came back on. I punched eject and replaced that tape with another one, also unmarked. Similar scenario. I watched for a while, then punched stop. The Democratic National Convention came back on.

I repeated this pattern for a number of tapes, alternating the Democratic National Convention with my boyfriend's home pornography library. Somehow or another all the tapes were cued up to the same point in the plot the first one had been.

The tapes were of very poor quality. They looked second generation, that is, taped from another tape, and the picture quality was really not very good at all. I started to feel disgusted and kind of sick to my stomach, probably not entirely due to the substandard cinematic quality. I never did find a blank tape.

Normally, I would have turned to my boyfriend with a disturbing discovery of this magnitude. He and I had a system for dealing with each other's distress and it worked pretty well.

I defended myself against the world with opinions of varying obstinacy and he tolerated them quite amiably. If I went off on a rant, distress-induced or not, he let it ride, bemused, unoffended. He didn't argue, chime in with comments, or ask me what was really going on.

In return, I didn't push him or shove him around trying to get him to express himself. I didn't interrupt his motorcycle repair or redneck guitar music to ask how he felt about things. I took for granted that his feelings, whatever they might be, were just fine unless one of us felt the need to state otherwise.

However, the dirty videotapes in a drawer discovery seemed to have brought us to a situation where our system didn't work. I couldn't for the life of me come up with an opinion on badly-done pornography that would be the slightest bit helpful. Nor could I imagine what my boyfriend could do if confronted with my discovery except to try to explain it. Which was the very thing we'd developed a relationship to avoid.

So I decided to handle the flaw in our system by ignoring it. All I had to do, I hoped, to regain peace of mind was NOT THINK ABOUT VIDEOTAPES OF ORAL SEX.

Not easy, as I discovered at work the next day. My co-workers, being bleeding-heart social worker liberals with jobs at a federally-funded social service agency for the disabled, had an unquenchable desire to discuss the Democratic National Convention at length. Every time a Democrat said something about spending public funds on anything even vaguely bleeding heart, excitement rose through the ranks of my agency and erupted the next day into earnest and voluble support. Which was only natural as we were stuck performing good works at public expense in the heart of Texas, the only state, I believe, with a hunting season on people who spend public funds on anything other than their own enrichment.

As I was a social worker by accident and not training, I didn't aspire to the relentless sincerity of my colleagues. But I was a cynic, which is the same thing as being a closet bleeding heart. So ordinarily I was a Democrat, grouchy but loyal, if only to avoid being a Republican. Unfortunately, though, every time someone mentioned politicians, I found disturbing images flashing through my mind along with a distinct sensation of being disgusted and kind of sick to my stomach.

A number of my cynical, non-social worker friends seemed to have a similar reaction to the convention, possibly not for the same reason. Although, times being what they were, they too may very well have found themselves unhappily envisioning Democrats having oral sex. Be that as it may, by the end of the convention I was quite desperate for something to think about besides politicians and pornography, which is where the pipsqueak I fell in love with came in.

I was under a lot of pressure at the time, as you can well imagine, being hemmed in on the one hand by campaign commercials, and on the other by a young girl with beautiful blonde hair. And this girl, well, for one thing, instead of being earnest and full of pity for the handicapped, was uninhibitedly self-absorbed in the way that only a gorgeously young student with a summer internship can be. Also, she didn't have a beer gut, unlike the entire male population of my town.

Furthermore, this girl seemed interested in me, in a flattering, upturned-face kind of a way I hadn't experienced in a long time. When she sat beside me, apparently thrilled to be initiated into the ways of being an Intake Specialist, I could feel the molecules between us rearranging themselves into an excited buzz.

My job was to listen to mangy and quarrelsome disabled people in physical, emotional, or economic pain as they tried to explain why their lives were so screwed up. Although being in chronic physical, emotional and economic pain would pretty much seem to explain it right there, our clients never seemed articulate enough to get this point across.

The gorgeous young pipsqueak watched me navigate the shoals of our clients' intellectual confusion with quiet awe. Since we were a referral agency, as opposed to an actual useful one, she conscientiously took notes as I told them that there was nothing we could do about their pain, not to mention their screwed-up lives. However, we would cheerfully give them the names of some people who could. In between not really helping people very much, I'd make jokes and the girl would laugh.

I'd be lying if I said I remembered exactly how the affair itself started, other than one day she expressed the touching conviction that I really did care about the mangy and quarrelsome clients I displayed endless patience with. Also, she touched my arm and the hairs stood on end.

Soon we were walking through the park at lunch, arm in arm, and she was kissing me tenderly on the cheek for dessert, so delicately that my face burned for hours as though branded. All the neurons of my skin became chronically electric with gossipy excitement, ceaselessly chattering about the girl with pale, creamy skin.

It was this kid's first lesbian affair. Of course it was mine too, but then I hadn't been walking around thinking I was gay. She had though, so the whole thing meant something different to her than it did to me. When I looked at her I saw companionship and comfort. When she looked at me, she saw training wheels.

So she climbed aboard her starter bike and we wobbled our way through something resembling a relationship. The sex, it turned out, went nowhere. I've had better fantasies. In fact sometimes had them while we were engaged in our exploratory gropings.

Then again, that's the point of fantasies, isn't it? To be better than what you're really getting. It'd be kind of stupid to sit around fantasizing things that were just, say, mediocre compared to your real life, wouldn't it? Anyway, we did a little of this and a little of that, and I honestly don't think I could have been arrested for any of it, not even under the regressive Texas penal code.

In between the thises and the thats, we lay on the crumb-speckled throw rug in her apartment, talking about things. Things like her physically disabled parents, and my mentally disabled ones. She didn't seem to want pity, and since pity tended to horrify me, that suited me just fine. I liked the way she talked tough and had a fragile face, and stuffed her tiny little feet into thin little cowboy boots.

We spent six months hanging out together, doing the most wonderfully mundane things. We'd have pizza delivered and eat it. Go to movies. Go to restaurants. Walk around. Lie around, fool around, sit around. And so on.

One night I was over at her place just after my period had started and I had to use her bathroom about every fifteen minutes for hours. This is the stuff our memories were made of.

If all this wasn't extraordinarily fulfilling, I was still under the impression that it was worth something. And thanks to his handy night job and the lack of telephone communication, my boyfriend didn't suspect a thing. I was always very fair to the pipsqueak at work (and to everyone else as well), so no one there seemed to suspect anything. I think. I hope.

Thanks to a computerization project I had foisted on our agency, I had a whole gaggle of fresh-faced social work interns to supervise. This was courtesy of the local university, which had the only school of social work in the entire region, with the sometimes frightening result that every summer our town was awash in newly-minted social workers ravenous to do good. I enjoyed the kids and they certainly were helpful in dragging our agency into the 20th century.

Meanwhile, I'd started calling the pipsqueak on the telephone whenever she wasn't with me, to engage in long, hushed, furtive conversations full of drama and intimacy. I didn't know how we'd come to the point of drama and intimacy, but however we got there, I was absolutely miserable.

She was happy. She kept telling me how happy she was, not with me, with herself, with how good things were going for her. I couldn't understand how anyone could talk so much about how happy they were with themselves.

She began to explain things to me with an unceasing, insistent guilelessness that was eerily reminiscent of my therapist mother. We'd be talking on the phone and I'd get this heavy feeling in my midsection as if I was talking with my mother. It was that bad. And I'd do her like I'd do my mother, just keep hanging on with infinite patience combined with a sensation of infinite persecution.

I was already known as a pretty patient person with the quarrelsome disabled and fresh-faced interns, but my job hadn't even begun to plumb the depths of my apparently pathological patience. I seemed to be dipping into some kind of black well of selflessness even more dangerous than the usual social worker manipulative altruism I had always tried so hard to avoid.

Why I chose the poor pipsqueak to project my evil martyrdom onto, I don't know. But once I started, it seemed there was no stopping me. The worse I felt being around her, the more I'd tell her I'd do anything for her. I was desperately in love, as desperately as any wifebeater.

I tried to impress her at work. In fact, thanks to the computerization, the happy gaggle of interns, and some demonstrable results with our clients, I actually got a promotion. I was so stressed out by my desire for the pipsqueak that I tossed away my agency's touchy-feely ethos and started demanding that our clients actually follow their Client Protocols. In other words, I told them the next time I made an appointment for them at Social Security to appeal an SSI reduction, they damn well better show up. On time. Which, startled and somewhat frightened, they did. Which, surprisingly enough, actually helped.

By now I had impressed everybody I knew but the pipsqueak. So I raised the stakes. I put a deposit down on a new apartment. Promised her I'd move out on my boyfriend, quit my impressive new job and live whatever kind of life it was she might want me to lead. I told her I was ready to make the break--to give up everything for her.

Of course, I didn't really want to. Deep in my miserable heart, what I actually wanted was to end the affair and start my life over with the flawed pornography-prone boyfriend. But I couldn't. Because, unlike the amiable if secretive boyfriend, the pipsqueak didn't seem to love me.

The more convinced I became that she wouldn't care if I broke things off, the more difficult it was to imagine actually doing so. She was my girlfriend, dammit, and she was going to care about me, at least one woman in my life was going to before I died, and I was going to continue this improbable affair until I got what I wanted no matter how absurd things got. Like a vehicle in a pay lot, I couldn't leave until officially validated.

But no matter how many bloody tentacles of longing I threw in her path, she couldn't, wouldn't do it. Although, for all the hell I know, she may have been trying the whole time and I wouldn't let her. As was becoming obvious to me by now, sometimes when you're in a relationship you really don't know what the hell you're doing.

Unable to leave and not all that thrilled about staying, I packed my parachute as if I was going to make the big jump into a committed lesbian relationship, purchasing all the necessary equipment, my heart beating like a maniac. I kept pacing around nervously, as if I was really going to do it, but I couldn't get myself out of the airplane.

The pipsqueak, however, undertook to solve the practical problem of my ambivalence. By dumping me.

She just told me one day how she wanted to move to Albuquerque and join this womyn's commune that was into a lot of neat stuff and there was this older woman there who was really cool and really, like, you know, wise and everything, and really giving and loving, and it was just a really neat atmosphere and she thought she could grow a lot there and it'd be really good for her and she could be accepted and find herself and everything.

So I just sat there, in my car, while she told me this, with my jaw hanging. I felt like crying. All the time knowing I'd rather live in a dog pound than in a womyn's commune. Hell, truth to be told, I didn't even like women that much. Certainly not in large quantities.

So now I'd had my failed fling with sisterhood and realized there was just no way. My jaw was still hanging open and I was picturing this place where twenty or thirty people like my mother might congregate at once and spend all their time with each other, explaining things. I was starting to feel kind of sick to my stomach.

So I just said, "Okay, if that's what you want." She got out of my car and we didn't even hug or kiss goodbye or anything.

It was the last time I ever saw her. I was quiet for a long time after that. Frighteningly quiet. My clients were now religiously following their Client Protocols in the anxious and touching hope that if they did I might actually start talking to them again.

My boyfriend was gently cautious with me, saying nothing about whatever little secret I was obviously harboring. Sometimes when he'd talk to me, trying to coax me into having an opinion on something, he'd put his hands up, palms toward me, as though simultaneously soothing me and cautioning me against hurting him. I was moved by the gesture and let him have his space, his loneliness, just as he let me have mine.

Then one day, thanks to my agency's now fully functioning computer system, I got an e-mail from the pipsqueak. She had been hanging around town, I'd heard, two-stepping in the girl gay bars, getting her feet wet, so to speak, in the lifestyle to which she aspired.

The subject line of the e-mail was "Albuquerque." The text was "leaving in a red truck." That was it. I stared at the computer screen for awhile. Then I quit e-mail, got up, and stared out the window. After a few moments, I picked up my coffee cup, and went out on to the funky old patio of our funky old building.

There I lit a cigarette and took a nice long drag. I sighed loudly, as though relieved, as though reconciled. I might have been thinking about Democrats and pornography, pipsqueaks and disappointment, or I might have been thinking about the quiet comfort of a gentle boyfriend with a variable night job and a tolerance of opinions. Or maybe I wasn't thinking about anything at all.

Victoria Bazeley, a native Californian, emigrated to Texas where she did a stint at The University of Texas. She returned to California to earn a Masters of Professional Writing from the University of Southern California. She lives in Los Angeles, where she labors on the website of a large entertainment conglomerate.