"I don't want to see Mitchel , Gab. I want Ginger."

"So you fol ow him."

"Home?"

"Maybe he's not going home. Maybe they're staying with friends. You know, til they think they're safe at his place."

"Maybe he moved," Lily Ann said.

"So now we have three places to watch? His apartment, if it's stil his. His work, if he stil works there. Someplace new, if we can fol ow him to it."

"Right," Gabby agreed.

"Listen," Lily Ann said. "It's not like this has to be twenty-four-hour surveil ance. We stop by and watch a while on our way to and from places. We check in the night before to see who goes where."

"What about me?" Gabby said. "I live a block from work at the Femmes."

"Hey, right. You keep listening. Maybe he'l show up in the bars. Or contact someone in the community. Put the word out. These are our people. We al hate these make-'em-straight groups."

Jefferson said, "I should be making these plans, not leaving it to you."

"J, that's like saying somebody burned in a fire should heal herself. You're injured, practical y critical. You need to let us be your nurses."

She shrugged. "Okay, but I get to feel guilty."

"Have at it."

"You femmes are much stronger than us butches. And more honest."

"No doubt about it."

"Hey," Gabby said, "you're supposed to argue about that."

Chapter Twenty-Four.

Mitchel Para's day job was in a building on the West Side. Instead of hanging around it, risking a return of the despair inactivity brought on, Jefferson decided to storm the office. Mitchel had explained that it was a smal food-brokerage firm cal ed Faster Foods that had been founded by his straight, cigar-chomping brother Morton. No one was at the front desk, so she peered around the paneled part.i.tion that screened seven men at desks clumped so close together she couldn't imagine they'd be able to hear anyone on the headsets that clung to their heads. Every one of them was smoking. There were two doors with frosted windows, both closed to the warm spring air. Her heart beat faster to think Mitchel might be inside one of those offices.

One man looked up from his computer screen. "Help you?"

"Mitchel Para?"

He motioned to the office behind him on his right.

Jefferson threaded her way through the desks, waste baskets, and electrical wiring. Cla.s.sy place to work, Mitch, she thought and buried her hands more deeply in the pockets of her hoodie. The men barked into their phones, punched at keyboards, yel ed questions at each other. She breathed in so much cigarette smoke she coughed as she knocked on the door.

"Yeah!"

It wasn't Mitchel , but a shorter, heavier look-alike who had adopted the shoddy day-old-beard look.

"I know you?" he asked.

A trembling started inside. "Jefferson. I'm a friend of Mitchel 's. Is he here?"

"What kind of friend doesn't know he's on his honeymoon?"

Her face went cold. Now she was trembling al over. "Honeymoon?"

"Might as wel be. Shacked up with a woman, no phone, announced he would be gone two months."

"Where?"

"The Caribbean? Brazil? Who knows with my meshugana brother? Why? He owe you money?"

"No." She'd tried to come up with explanations on her way there, but not seriously, half expecting to see Mitchel , to hear that Ginger was staying with him until she found her own place. "Who did he abscond with?"

"The little faigele final y got himself a woman. What's her name, some Irish redhead."

She reached to the desk to steady herself.

"You want to leave a message?" He was watching her. "Hey, wait a minute. You're the two-timing girlfriend. The one she was leaving, aren't you?"

When Jefferson didn't respond, Mitchel 's brother said, "You people. I don't know what's wrong with you. Sleeping with anything that moves. You girls are as bad as the guys."

"Where did they go?" she asked again, refusing to break eye contact.

"I need this like loch im kopf. I can't tel you. Mitch would break my neck."

"I want to know she's safe."

He gave a disgusted-sounding laugh. "With my brother, believe me, she's safe."

She placed her hands on the desk and looked down at the man. "I can go to the police, tel them I think she's been kidnapped."

"What are you doing? Threatening me?" He careful y chose a cigar. "You think the police would rescue a woman who went wil ingly with a man and bring her back to a creature like you? They would laugh you out of the station."

She thought of a hundred things to say, but they were al lame. He was right. She wanted to threaten him, to hit him until he told her. Why not? What did she have to lose?

"Are they here in the city?"

"Maybe."

"I'm not playing games, Para," she said, her anger building.

"Good. Then why not leave before me and my brokers decide to play games with you."

"You're a real sweetheart, aren't you," she said, poking his arm hard with an index finger.

"Did you say you're leaving?"

She moved abruptly away from his desk. Did he cringe? There was an old wooden desk chair behind her. Its springs creaked as she sat in it. "I'd love to leave, but I haven't gotten what I came for yet."

"Al right already. They're in the city. At Mitch's place. You have the address?"

"Don't bul s.h.i.t me. They're not at Mitchel 's."

"Okay, okay. They're upstate. The family has a cabin up in the Catskil s. That address I'm not giving you. Not that the address would help. It has an electronic gate and a stone wal twice your height, topped by shards of gla.s.s. If you found it, you'd never get in."

With a feeling of great exhaustion and that threat of returning despair, she sat back in the unsteady chair and folded her arms, silent, thinking she'd need a ladder and some blankets to protect her from the gla.s.s. "I'm not leaving until you give me what I need. And I don't mean lies."

"Fine. No big problem. You sit there while I tel you what I think. G.o.d made us to mate with the opposite s.e.x. What you and my brother do is a perversion. Your lives are filth. Your whole existence is about satisfying your basest physical urges, like animals, and you never produce children, the whole reason behind those urges. You spread disease and you lead children into ugly lives like your own because you can't stand being alone in your ways. This Ginger was probably a very normal person until you debased her."

Instead of tel ing him to shut up or walking out, she listened. So this was how straight people thought of her. She wondered briefly if they could be right and if losing Ginger was her punishment.

She sat there like a weighted punching bag enduring its blows as Mo went on.

"It's sick, this hang-up you people have with the same s.e.x. You know it can be cured, yet you do nothing. Mitchel has gotten help. Our rabbi sent him to a group that cures this curse and he's now his natural self. Too bad he didn't cure him of his love of goyim, but I won't go into that."

She kept her eyes down, hugging herself. The more Mitchel 's brother talked, the closer he was getting to spil ing the beans.

"Our congregation is supporting my brother in every way," and he named a large synagogue Jefferson had heard Mitchel mention.

She shut out Mo's words as she searched her memory. It was in Brooklyn where Mitchel had grown up. He'd driven them past the beautiful old building and told them how much he wished his family, conservative Jews, would wake up and smel the coffee. More and more the conservative movement was turning toward acceptance, but not his family, he had said with a curse of disgust. Now she was getting a taste of what Mitchel had gone through. And Ginger's Catholic family must have preached the same general disapproval, though she had never come out to them. "Why break my mother's heart?" Ginger had asked, while Jefferson wondered if Ginger's stony mother even had a heart that could break. "They'd think I was going to hel and that I would never meet them in heaven."

Jefferson could say nothing. She had never come out to Emmy and Jarvy either; it hadn't seemed worth the effort. She figured they knew and didn't want to get into it either. Since Ginger always had to go "home" for holidays, she went to her family alone too, if she went at al .

Mo was stil lecturing when she decided that he wasn't letting anything else slip out. Without a word, she rose to go.

"Here," Mo said, thrusting a pamphlet at her. "You can get help too. My people can refer you to your own groups."

"What is this?" she asked, and read aloud, "'JONAH is a nonprofit international organization dedicated to educating the worldwide Jewish community about the prevention, intervention, and healing of the underlying issues causing same-s.e.x attractions. JONAH: Jews Offering New Alternatives to h.o.m.os.e.xuality.'"

She banged the rol ed-up pamphlet against the desk and looked at this man, sick to her stomach. "What is their problem? What is your problem?

This is none of your business-their business." She looked at the back, which referred to something cal ed NARTH, National a.s.sociation for Research and Therapy for h.o.m.os.e.xuality. "You're nuts," she said. The address for JONAH was in Jersey City, practical y on the other side of the Hol and Tunnel.

They'd been watching the wrong place up in New Rochel e. Honeymooning in Jersey City? Not my Ginger, she thought, and smiled at Mo, poor obsessed Morton Para. Feeling tal er than when she arrived and more hopeful, she stomped in her best butch manner out through the clutter of barking men and their electronics.

Chapter Twenty-Five.

Whenever she thought about Ginger with Mitchel , which was endlessly, Jefferson felt as if she was the burning wick of an explosive.

Dry-eyed for the most part, shriveled with regret, she waited for the suicide bomb in her heart to go off. Only the routine of teaching and being with her friends kept her intact. She battered herself with questions: How could she have been so stupid? The drinking, the chasing, her silent sulking because she never came with Ginger and Ginger didn't real y try, never asked. She should have talked about it with Ginger instead of letting it become her wedge between them-she had driven Ginger away. Glad had been right. It shouldn't have been a big deal. o.r.g.a.s.ms were wonderful, when they came, but not as wonderful as the rush of pleasure to hear a lover cry "Oh G.o.d!" or cal her name over and over: that was love!

At the same time, Ginger was so absorbed in her work, had for so long spent al her spare time on performance. Ginger, she thought: named for a dancer. Ginger had spent her whole life living up to that name. It was how she begged for love, by giving her heart to dance, the only way she could earn her mom's smiles and brags. They'd had this in common, the way they spoke with their bodies. She tried to put her feelings into words, but she'd never been articulate enough. She'd always spoken to women through lovemaking and stil wanted to express herself with her hands. That's when she knew, instinctual y, how to say what she wanted; that was the language she spoke.

But she couldn't blame anything on Ginger. Dance was her work, her pa.s.sion, as Jefferson's seemed to have been that constant search for love, or what pa.s.sed for love. Maybe Lily Ann and Gabby were right: it was as if she was making up for Ginger's inattention by finding subst.i.tutes. Fil ing up on cake because al she got of steak was the bone. It was so hard, though, to admit she'd chosen wrong, that Ginger had been bad for her. She tried now to remember the good parts, but they were overshadowed by the harm-the harm to both of them.

She'd been about to ring Gabby's buzzer. They were driving across the Hudson to nose out the group Mo had told her about. They would attend a meeting. Lily Ann had refused. She was afraid she would lose it.

What had occurred to her was the coincidence. Ginger had given up her occasional performances because her body hurt too much and she'd be depleted for days afterward. Then this thing with Mitch. Were they related? Of course they were related. But how?

Because something was missing in Ginger's life? In Ginger?

Could it be that Jefferson chose Ginger because Ginger couldn't give her what she needed? It sounded like it real y was the search she loved, more than Ginger or the other women. Like she real y was in love with the seduction, with getting rejected over and over and repeating al the exciting feelings with someone new. What would she do with love if she got it? Be satisfied? Turn it down? Look for more? Even her body, she thought, refused to let go with Ginger. There was a safety in holding back. Now, she saw, she'd let herself in for the biggest danger of al , losing almost thirty years together.

She was doused in a sadness as pervasive as spil ed cheap perfume. She'd never needed Ginger to love her; she'd wanted only to be a beggar of love.

During the long nights of her sleepless solitude, she realized that she didn't know whether Ginger had tried and she'd repulsed her with her wandering, or if Ginger was incapable of loving her. Of loving another woman, a man, anyone. If she found Ginger, if Ginger ever came home, could they be fixed? While they were stil together, a part of her had looked forward to the blameless end of a relationship so tangled she didn't see a way to unravel it. She should be grateful that Ginger walked out. Then there was the other question-could she even stand to touch Ginger after...after a man. It disgusted her, what men and women did. Would Ginger al ow that to happen to her? She didn't even let Jefferson go inside her because it hurt and brought her no pleasure.

On Sundays, long ago, Jefferson would open her eyes toward the bedroom window and the bright or pewter sky over the city. It was morning, it was New York; al she had to do was rol over to Ginger and she'd know she had a perfect life.

She would rol over. Ginger would stir. Jefferson would make sure her hand was warm, then cup it over the ridge of Ginger's hip bone, one of the s.e.xiest parts of a woman's body. She'd learned that if Ginger moved into the palm of her hand, the signal was green. She'd press herself to Ginger's side and move her hand firmly across her bel y, then up to the far shoulder and guide her until they were mouth to mouth. Sleepy Ginger would pout into her kisses while Jefferson's hands traveled her body. Biggest morning thril ? When Ginger's light fingers found her back and dug in, encouraging her. Nothing like it. Nothing like it on earth. Were they stil on earth?

The long dancer's body was the earth in itself, and Jefferson the explorer. She never wanted to lose this pleasure and always stayed open to new ways, new heights where she could lead them. She heard the music of the night before and let its beat move her. Stroking today, stroking Ginger's face, her arms, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, stroking til that hip bone rose and she met it with her fingertips, stroking down, down the hol ow.

Sometimes Jefferson wondered about these magical feelings. Why was she so hung up on giving them to women? What in her makeup brought lovemaking to the forefront of her life? It wasn't o.r.g.a.s.m for herself; something in her erupted when she made a woman come, maybe a kind of emotional o.r.g.a.s.m.

Ginger wasn't one to get al mushy after s.e.x like so many women seemed to do. Declaring life-long devotion, undying love-al of that. Jefferson was, but never let it out to the other women. That was part of the reason she wished she could finish with Ginger. A feeling of closeness and devotion might wash over her, might take. Would Ginger be repel ed by an emotional declaration? As much as she revered Ginger now, it was always a little dicey, knowing where Ginger's boundaries lay. Ginger could be a miser of love.

Some lesbians, she'd found, were so afraid of her pa.s.sion she had to hide it. She didn't know if they'd had bad experiences with men-or with other women-but she'd had to temper expressions of desire around them, had to move slowly and watch for their eagerness or apprehension. Ginger had no problem with s.e.x, when she al owed it, but emotion sent her scurrying deep inside herself.

She'd have no plan to put her mouth where her hand was, but would find herself burrowing in, getting her cheeks as wet as she could, breathing in Ginger's sweet-tangy smel , tongue reaching into her as far as it could go. One day she indulged in something she'd never imagined doing, but Ginger's digging fingers told her it was a right move. She thrust to the beat of the music in her head, wondering what Ginger was thinking, aware the roots of her tongue were tiring, wondering if Ginger thought at al at times like these.

She'd asked her what she thought when she was al alone on stage dancing, and Ginger had told her she was high, high, high. Her thoughts were in the heavens. Her thoughts pa.s.sed way out of words. And that's what she sounded like now, humming, keening real low, little blips of surprise at the sensations, and then it al combined into a resonant, deeply satisfied sound that made Jefferson smile against the soft, relaxed pulp of her girl.

"Orange juice and eggs for a sunny-side-up day!" she'd cried when she entered the kitchen, showered, naked, dry white towel wide like a cape so she could wrap naked Ginger and dance her to the shower. Ginger laughed when she got high-spirited like this, although she had a limited sense of humor; she wasn't good at making laughter, but did give in to it. She'd step in the shower again with Ginger, soap her up, rinse her while Ginger did her own glorious copper hair with green Prel , French-bunning it, ponytailing it, and they'd hug and laugh, slick against each other.

Sundays shone always, even when the weather tried to dim them. She loved crossing town to walk in the park with Ginger. Glowing light shirt, blue jeans, Ginger in loose purples and blues. Years and years of Sundays ahead of them, exploring, lol ing, part of the scene, happening on festivals, bal games, lovers. Sunning on the rocks, lesbian reptiles, they cal ed themselves in their early years. Jefferson would climb a tree, Ginger would run off, she'd race to catch up and usual y find her at the zoo. They'd buy ice cream, spend a while talking to the animals, everyone smiling around their streak of youth and beauty.

And dancing. Humming and dancing on the paths, on the Great Lawn, Sheep's Meadow. Dancing past the cabs at Eighty-sixth Street, dancing on the bridges, dancing in the fountain, dancing with the Alice in Wonderland statues. It felt like they were stil making love Sundays when they used to go out, wherever they went. It was always summer on Sundays, even when they ice-skated at the rink.

She tried not to think about that weekday she came home early and the lovely light-skinned boy Ginger danced with came out of the bedroom. He'd been trying on Ginger's outfits to dance a women's part in a drag bal et. She wouldn't go to see the bal et with Ginger. She'd felt something wrong there.