"Naughty, naughty," said El is. "I didn't come over here to knock you off the wagon. How about if I put you in a cab and out of temptation's way?"

She reached over and gave him a little touch on his col ar. "How could you not know Mitchel ?" She described him.

"Oh," El is squealed, "you mean Mitch the b.i.t.c.h!"

"He looks like I said?"

"Yes. I heard he was experimenting with a woman. He used to have the wildest parties at his place upstate."

"Did you ever go?"

El is laughed. "Go? I'd stay for days at a time, hon. We used to cal it gayboy Para-dise."

"Do you know where he is now?"

"You think he's got her up there?"

"No. I went and checked."

He was gazing at her as if sizing her up. "I'd guess you can take care of yourself, but honey, Mitch the b.i.t.c.h can turn mean in a heartbeat. Why do you think we cal him that?"

"Al the more reason to find him."

"Al right then. But be careful."

"If I had a gun I'd tote it along-"

"Tote it? What are you, Cowboy Jefferson?" El is said. "Can I change your focus a bit? I want to introduce you to someone-I saw her come in."

She crossed her arms in front of herself as if to ward off a vampire. "No! No matchmaking."

"Matchmaking? What do you take me for? I have a social life to keep up and she looks like she's free for babysitting."

She shook her head, but she was smiling.

El is hugged her. "I know what you need, girlfriend, so you sit back and let your Uncle El is make it happen."

She was surprised to see that the very young woman El is brought back with him was wearing a skirt and even more surprised when she felt herself snap right out of her funk.

"This is Brandi. Brandi, this is Jefferson."

"How old are you?" Jefferson asked. She was being tired and peevish, but real y wasn't in the mood to charm an eighteen-year-old into bed. Let someone else teach the kid the ropes.

"Ta," El is said, and swept away like a lady in a skirt with a train.

"Twenty-six," Brandi answered.

"You sure?"

Brandi said she was. Jefferson told her to sit down, then went and got Brandi another drink. It was polite to do so, she told herself. How much money could a twenty-six-year-old have?

As it turned out, Brandi had no reluctance to tel her about her cool job at a start-up software company for $55,000 per year and many other details of her life, her family, her inner thoughts, her s.e.xuality, and al of her past lovers' names. She invited herself home with Jefferson, had a cab cal ed, and snuggled close to her on the drive.

Brandi was little and cute and funny and aggressively worshipful. How could she resist? Upstairs the woman peered at everything, as if to memorize the details of an older d.y.k.e's magical life. Jefferson emerged from a quick shower to find Brandi stretched naked on the bed, smiling and waiting.

Jefferson sat on the edge of the bed and stroked Brandi's face. "Was I ever this soft?" she asked aloud.

"You're stil soft," Brandi said, and gave a quiet laugh, then placed Jefferson's hands where she wanted, rubbing against them with an arrhythmic excitement that felt fairly frantic to Jefferson. Brandi's rhythm seemed out of sync with her own. Was it possible that Brandi had no rhythm? Could she dance?

Stil feeling tired, Jefferson made a few half-hearted moves to get control of the situation before she gave up and let Brandi arrange, then rearrange them as if to some feng-shui pattern, making little chortles and mews al the while. She hated the term, but once in a while she'd found herself with a woman who had to control what was happening, who ran the f.u.c.k from the bottom. Was anyone more frustrated than a butch thwarted in her lovemaking?

Brandi moved two fingers inside her. Jefferson stayed her hands and said into her ear, "I'm more your outside-stimulation kind of woman."

When Brandi put tongue to her and manipulated her at that jagged irregular pace, she felt no pleasure, but Brandi came within seconds after Jefferson's middle finger made contact. Came with a kind of shimmy, saying, "Mmm, mmm, mmm," like she'd discovered a particularly good flavor of ice cream.

"Jefferson, Jefferson. That was so good."

Jefferson felt like a giant vibrator, set to high speed. Surely now, after her release, Brandi would chil out, stop fussing over Jefferson and let Jefferson make love to her. It's what turned her on most. Or maybe, she thought with a growing panic, Brandi was always like this. How could she get her to leave tonight? Leave now? Brandi was one too many in a long life of one too manys.

She was going to tame this one before she left, though. She kissed her and touched her and let Brandi do her thing, but this time, when Brandi had found a height of excitement Jefferson recognized by her sounds and moving hips, she gently encircled Brandi's wrists with her hands and held them down above the woman's head. Brandi squirmed and wiggled in pleasure, as if she'd hoped Jefferson would be at least this forceful. Her last act was to lower herself onto Brandi's mouth. The girl whipped Jefferson's c.l.i.toris around with the point of her tongue until Jefferson, by meeting the tongue at her own rhythm, flattened it into a soft round shape she could rub against until she came, no matter what Brandi wanted.

After Brandi left, a few hours later, Jefferson felt empty, empty, and wandered around the apartment. It too felt empty, empty without Ginger.

Chapter Twenty-Seven.

She couldn't imagine Ginger sitting with the women in a synagogue. Surely she wouldn't go so far as to agree that Mitchel was better than her because he was male. He didn't even have the courage to stay gay.

Her mind played with this question and with al her questions about Ginger the same way her tongue toyed with the s.p.a.ce in a tooth left by a dislodged fil ing. She couldn't even fil the s.p.a.ce with other women. After that irritating night with Brandi, she'd lost the desire for them.

Three times her phone had rung in the past week and the cal er had hung up. Could that have been Ginger, interrupted while trying to reach her? She refused to let her escape next time and, as a consequence, felt like a fool more than once when she announced abruptly that she would meet the cal er at their bench that Sat.u.r.day at one o'clock. Ginger would know she meant the bench by Morris Park in the Bronx where they spent so much time together when parted for the school holidays. Gabby, Lily Ann, and a fel ow teacher had al been confused at her desperate shouting into the cel phone when they cal ed.

It had been a magic, welcoming bench. Back in col ege, Jefferson would ride the train up to Dutchess, do Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter dinner with her parents and grandparents, then take off for the city as soon as she could. She'd stay in her grandparents' Manhattan apartment. When Ginger was able to get away from her family for only a little while, Jefferson would hop the subway and they would meet at the bench in Morris Park. She remembered one day when they sat there in heavy coats, boots, gloves, and hats, lifting their feet to offload snow and brushing it off each other's shoulders. While gay lib had touched their world, it hadn't made them feel like they could do anything but hold hands if they didn't want to get beaten up.

She had probably heard every anecdote Ginger could remember from her childhood during those rendezvous. And to this day she could re-experience the deep, but romantic melancholy of their partings, the sight of Ginger walking away though the snowflakes, apartment buildings ringing the island of their park, the twilight fading and lamplight spotlighting her until she was gone.

She went up to the Bronx on the next Sat.u.r.day morning and treated herself to pizza at Patricia's, some of the best in the city. She was glad to be doing this. Inaction left her feeling helpless. Feeling helpless risked a mood of disaster.

By twelve thirty she was on the green wooden bench, a black iron-rail fence at her back, the Village Voice dance page open on her lap. In her brown bomber jacket, the leather worn to tan in some spots, cracked beyond the help of regular applications of saddle soap, she skimmed the paper for Ginger's name as she skimmed the street for her face. Did she real y think for a minute that Ginger would show up? They'd had such fun here during col ege, sneaking around, stealing touches, scanning pa.s.sersby for other gay women. What had they thought? That they could fol ow them to some secret meeting place? Something like that. Back in the 1970s there was stil a thril to the whole being-gay thing, like they were some kind of outlaws clothed in nothing but their s.e.xuality.

She waited, nodding greetings to walkers, especial y the kids, some of whom might have been in her cla.s.ses if her school was in the Bronx. The neighborhood was stil heavily Italian and they had always felt relatively safe from observation here, an area seldom visited by the Quinns, who lived several blocks away. On Sat.u.r.day afternoons the neighborhood was hopping. In the three hours she spent sitting, pacing, remembering, and dreaming, she searched hundreds of faces. None of them was Ginger's. As the sun moved lower in the sky, she became chil ed and paced back and forth in front of the bench to keep warm, as miserable as she had ever felt in her life. When the streetlights popped on, she left her station and walked back to Patricia's.

She got two more pizzas, packed in dry ice, then rode the subway back to Manhattan, feeling like a nitwit. She'd gone al the way into Manhattan and was halfway through walking to the apartment, snow flurries making the sidewalks a little slick, before it occurred to her that she might not have been alone.

Had Ginger driven by in a cab, a bus? Had she approached from behind and withdrawn? Maybe, if she did this every week, Ginger would come forward.

And maybe she had lost her mind.

There were no more hang-up cal s. She'd e-mailed Dutchess to confirm that neither Angela nor Tam was trying to reach her. They concluded the person on the phone had probably been a complete stranger, misdialing and frightened away by her mad invitations to the bench. Nevertheless, the next week she went back. It rained that second Sat.u.r.day and the wait was even gloomier than the first, except for the pizza breakfast. Sometimes she thought she was acting out a fantasy, a screwed-up lesbian version of An Affair to Remember, and sometimes she felt the pul to that bench so strongly she knew it had been Ginger trying to reach her.

Why was she even doing this? She'd tried so hard to be what Ginger wanted that she'd lost herself along the way. She shook her head. What Ginger wanted was, to Jefferson, a moving target. As if, she thought, as if I knew-could ever know-how to make Ginger happy.

She developed a cold after the trip, which seemed stuck at the bottom of her throat, deeply rooted, both itchy and painful. Cough as she might, she couldn't dislodge it. Tonight she'd use Vicks, but not today, not when she might see Ginger. She'd had cal er ID instal ed on her phone at home and cal forwarding to her cel . She held the cel in her gloved hand, inside her jacket pocket, ready in case Ginger phoned.

She was at the bench over two hours that third Sat.u.r.day, using tissue after tissue to staunch the runny nose she'd final y developed, when Mitchel Para, in a long black overcoat, jaywalked toward her.

Rage made her stand; she almost left, but she felt so weak from being sick and, real y, what choice did she have?

He stood in front of her.

"Where is she?"

"Home. With her family."

She didn't know how to respond.

"She's sick, Jefferson."

"Sick? How?" An icy bitterness spread through her chest. She hated what he was saying, hated that he, his history with Ginger so relatively recent, knew more than she did. She grabbed the lapels of his fancy coat. "What did you do to her?"

Mitchel pul ed back. "Chil , girlfriend. Let's not get into recriminations. She needs us. Both of us. She doesn't want to die in her childhood bedroom in the Bronx."

"Die? She's going to die?"

Why did it seem like Mitchel got some satisfaction from tel ing her, "She's been very sick."

"There was nothing wrong with her when she was home. Nothing," she emphasized.

"Don't look at me like I gave her something." Mitchel wrapped his hands around his upper arms. "It was an aneurysm." His teeth chattered when he spoke.

She was trembling with anger. She wanted to hurt him with her fists. "And it didn't kil her?"

He sat quickly next to her on the bench, his coat pul ed close around his thighs. "Listen, Jefferson, it's not what you think. Nothing happened between Ginger and me. We thought it might, but no, it was a last struggle with our own natures. Meanwhile, she'd been holding her stomach off and on for weeks, and I thought it was because of the fight she was having inside. Final y she admitted to a tremendous pain in her gut and down her legs. She was nauseous and I could hear her in the bathroom throwing up violently in the night. I knew it was no little bug. A few nights ago she said her heart was doing a NASCAR. She felt al cold. I didn't even cal an ambulance, broke every speed record getting her to the hospital. They did the surgery immediately."

"Did it hit her brain?"

"No. It was..." he said it slowly, as if the words were foreign to his tongue, "it was an abdominal aortic aneurysm. They said she can recover completely."

"And she wants to see me?" she asked, furious that she had to ask Mitchel what her Ginger wanted.

He looked away. "Not exactly, but I know Ginger's miserable in her parents' apartment." He seemed to take a deep breath before asking, "You want her back, right? Couldn't she move back home with you?"

"I can't believe I'm standing here talking to you like you have equal stake in Ginger. I've been with her almost thirty years and you, next to that, you're nothing to her."

His look seemed to hold both pity and disgust. "It wasn't long, but I was absolutely with her. Focused on her. Faithful to her in every way."

He knew that wasn't something she'd been able to give Ginger until recently. Or maybe gotten from her. What had Ginger given Mitchel ?

"You need to understand," he said. "Ginger's a performer, like me. I know her through and through even without your thirty years."

"Right. You're Mitchel the elusive. I remember. A typical dancer. Focused on yourselves, your careers, only half there for us mortals." He arranged his face into a look of deep regret. "You want to bail," she said.

"Not at al . Ginger needs you. Needs us."

"Any particular reason she's not moving in with you?"

"Jefferson, she doesn't want me. I was, I don't know-her midlife crisis, I suppose. When she heard you were seeing some woman again she lost it."

She pounded her fists on her thighs. "I wasn't seeing anyone. I was making amends. It's part of living sober. It was something I did to be more wel for Ginger."

She remembered practical y begging Ginger to get checkups, and Ginger, who never did want to pay for health insurance, promising to go and then, caught up in student rehearsals and performances and al the administrative details of running a school, neglecting her health year after year. A memory was coming back to her. Hadn't Ginger once told her about aneurysms running in her family? Someone-her grandfather had dropped dead of one, and an aunt, real y young too, younger than Ginger. She was lucky to be alive. And now, out of nowhere, Jefferson had the choice of nursing Ginger back to life or never seeing her again. Some choice when she was trying to accept that Ginger didn't want her.

She shook her head. "You wanted Ginger enough to lure her away from me, but not enough to give up your sweet little career for her."

"You're right," he answered. "I'm as self-absorbed as Ginger. It goes with the territory."

"Self-absorbed? No, my Ginger isn't that bad."

"Yes, she was, Jefferson. Is. And has always felt guilty about it, about not giving you enough of herself."

"She told you that?"

Mitchel nodded and rose as if to go.

She was stunned by the news of Ginger's feelings of guilt. Ginger knew she'd been holding back from her. They'd both held back. Poor Ginger. Was that something they could fix? She realized that hope was raging in her heart again. And she hated it. Hope was a golf bal . Too much of the time you lost it in a sandpit, a pond, or the woods, but once in a lifetime you swung a crazy long shot and got a hole in one.

Almost to herself she said, "When I was younger I swear I had no clue what was right and what was wrong, but now, Mitchel ," she looked up at him, "I think you and I both know exactly what we need to do."

"You're right, Jefferson. I've learned where I belong and who I'm real y responsible for."

As Mitchel darted away through the traffic, she wished she carried a stash of poison darts to fling into his back. d.a.m.n Ginger. She could have said something, could have tried to work it out. How many times had she berated Ginger in her head for letting her get away with sleeping around on her? Now she knew Ginger was so involved in herself she simply hadn't been paying attention. It was funny how much she was like Jefferson's mom, both there and not there: the perfect lover if you didn't mind getting your love at arm's length.

Mitchel had taken the path; Jefferson leapt the iron rail and jogged to the street. Finding a cab near the Quinns' building would be nearly impossible, but Ginger was going home with her. Today, if she could swing that hole in one.

Chapter Twenty-Eight.