Being the Steel Drummer Read online

  We took Washington Street to 11th and turned left through the middle of the Mews. The tall wrought iron fence that enclosed the burial ground was two blocks north. We walked swiftly against gusts of February wind, then entered the open cemetery gate and took the gravel path.

  Kathryn said, “We’re moving very fast.”

  I knew she wasn’t talking about our stride. “Is it too fast for you? Do you want to slow down?” I asked her sincerely.

  “I’m concerned that it’s too fast for you. I’ve invaded your space. I’m building onto your home. I made you meet my mother, and God knows I can barely stand her myself,” she said emphatically.

  “I like it,” I said honestly.

  “Does anything scare you?”

  I smiled and shook my head a little. It wasn’t that nothing scared me as much as I wasn’t quite ready to tell her what did. The clingy pathetic part of me that I try so hard to hide began an internal monologue about how I had abandonment issues. But that was all way too co-dependent and not the thing a tough Private Eye should share.

  She looked at me seriously for a long moment and then said, “We have to talk.”

  “Oh crap,” I tried to say evenly, “you’re going to break up with me.”

  “What? No, no, where did you get that idea?”

  “Well, you said, ‘We have to talk.’ It’s the classic prelude to a Dear John Letter. Nothing good ever comes after those four words.”

  Kathryn looked carefully into my eyes for a moment, then said evenly, “Calm down. I’m not breaking up with you. I just think we should talk about rent.”

  “What do you mean rent?” I asked. “You mean like a place you want to rent or Rent, the musical?”

  “I mean that, if I’m going to live with you, then we need to talk about finances. I should pay you something for rent and a portion of the utilities.”

  I was totally caught off-guard. We’d already agreed on her rent payments for her office on the fourth floor, but I hadn’t even considered rent payments for our living space. I had to wrap my brain around it. This is a good thing. Grown-up, serious, equal. After a few moments I mentioned a figure for the monthly rent and said we could split the utilities on the loft.

  “And could we have a year-long lease?” she asked softly.

  “Really? Sure.” This made me profoundly happy. I tried to act adult about the whole thing but I had an urge to grin. Good thing I was wearing a scarf; I could muffle it. Of course if she bailed on living with me, she could move into her office, but still...

  Kathryn said with a sigh as we walked on holding hands, “I’ve always hated the beginning of the semester. Nobody knows where their classrooms are, or anyone’s name. Schedules are all new and confusing. Everyone feels lost. It’s so easy to misstep or say the wrong thing.”

  “But it’s also an adventure. You learn delightful new things. The tension is exciting and full of surprises. Sometimes you discover worlds you had no idea you’d enjoy. And there’s so much future to look forward to. There are always risks when you’re starting something new, but...”

  Kathryn stopped and hugged me so hard it took my breath away.

  When I’d first met her I’d found her sexy and beautiful, but she’d seemed aloof and almost unapproachable. She’d opened her vulnerable side to me. It was a secret part of her few people knew. But I couldn’t take it for granted. Her stern, intense academic personality that could be both icy and fiery was part of her nature and never far away.

  Kathryn shifted back in my arms. I could see a burning glint in her eye as she said, “Maybe I can sneak out of the retreat at about ten and come home tonight.” It was the first time she’d called the loft home.

  “At the moment, I can’t imagine anything more magnificent,” I said. She smiled and leaned against me as we walked on.

  The graying sky seemed thick. It fought the light of day. A cold wind stirred up the smell of snow in the air, freezing our cloudy breath. The skeleton fingers of leafless trees reached toward each other. Wind stirred them and they became spider legs flailing toward a trapped fly.

  “This is a perfect place for an Edgar Allen Poe recitation, maybe Annabelle Lee?” I said.

  “No, I don’t like it,” she said shaking her head. “That line: I was a child and she was a child. He was writing about his thirteen-year-old wife, whom he married when he was twenty-seven. If he’d written, She was a child and I was a pedophile, it would have been more apt. Scholars are so desperate to excuse Poe’s immoral behavior that some insist they never had sex. It’s as absurd as insisting Lesbian poets in Boston Marriages didn’t have sex or that Oscar Wilde wasn’t Gay because the word Gay hadn’t been coined. No, that’s wrong, because it’s comparing Poe’s improper behavior with a child, which would have sent him to prison today, to someone’s sexual orientation that would be perfectly legal and morally acceptable today.”

  This was Kathryn’s analytical side, which I liked just as well as the erotic one.

  “I wrote a paper once,” said Kathryn, “on Poe’s poor choice in life companion. Virginia Clem was not only too young for him; she was the exact opposite of the kind of person who could have supported his work.”

  “You’re committed to this anti-Poe position?”

  “His words are interesting, but I can’t separate his life from his work. It’s part of my Coordinative Biography thesis. It’s a theme I’ve been writing about for a long time. It’s the basis of my new book and the theory on which I’m basing the Women in the Arts major. I’ve told you about this before, haven’t I?

  “It was the subject of the lecture you did when we were in Florida. You were brilliant.”

  Kathryn snorted.

  “No really, Kathryn, do you ever really look at the faces of the students when you’re speaking? They were hypnotized by you. It was remarkable. I was paying attention, too. Coordinative Biography simply contends that people’s lives are inextricable from their work. I’ve always thought that, but the way you were explaining it was fascinating. The examples were so creative and yet exactly on point. I can see why you have so many fans.”

  “Shall I take that to mean you aren’t just interested in my body?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “It amazes me how many people, usually straight male WASPs, who routinely fall in line with the antiquated theory-system of normative standards that excludes even the most logical variations of relationships. I’m tired of having to defend the obvious.”

  “Shall I recite a Lesbian poet whom you don’t have to defend?”

  “Yes, yes, please do!” she smiled. “Maybe Anne Whitney; she was part of the Harriet Hosmer-Charlotte Cushman crowd, wasn’t she? Dim Eden of delight. In whom my heart springs upward like a palm.”

  “Yes, she was, but I was thinking a little later. How about:

  I caught sight of a splendid Misses. She had handkerchiefs and kisses. She had eyes and yellow shoes she had everything to choose and she chose me.

  In passing through France she wore a Chinese hat and so did I.

  In looking at the sun she read a map. And so did I.

  In eating fish and pork she just grew fat. And so did I.

  In loving a blue sea she had a pain. And so did I.

  In loving me she of necessity thought first. And so did I.

  How prettily we swim. Not in water. Not on land. But in love.

  How often do we need trees and hills. Not often.

  And how often do we need birds. Not often.

  And how often do we need wishes. Not often.

  And how often do we need glasses not often.

  We drink wine and we make well we have not made it yet.

  How often do we need a kiss. Very often and we add when

  tenderness overwhelms us we speedily eat veal.

  And what else, ham and a little pork and raw artichokes and ripe olives and chester cheese and cakes and caramels and all the melon. We still have a great deal of it left. I wonder where it is. Conserved melon. Let me offer it to you.

  Kathryn clapped her gloved hands. “Love Song of Alice B! You know,” she laughed, “the first time I heard that Gertrude Stein poem I was a vegetarian and I was thoroughly repulsed because I thought she really meant eating veal!”

  “It still kind of ruins the euphemism for me, too.”

  “Maggie, how did you ever find time to learn all these poems?”

  “It’s a little early in our relationship for honesty. It could spoil the effect, but I’ll chance it. I had a job in a furniture factory during college. I had to power-sand panels. I wore a dust mask and earmuffs. It was dull, so I learned a new poem each day. I’d recite the lines over and over as I sanded until I knew them by heart. Each afternoon I’d practice the poems I’d already learned. It made me happy to go to work. I did it when I was on the highway patrol too. Does that spoil the romance for you?”

  “No, it is romantic. I like to think of you studying love poems all day.” Kathryn’s voice turned curious. “And were you doing this to impress some specific woman?”

  “To impress you. I hope it’s working.”

  “Oh, it is!” said Kathryn laughing.

  “So how did you learn your poems?” I asked.

  “Catholic boarding school.”

  “Wait, you’re not Catholic.”

  “My mother felt it would be a good influence on me. She was wrong. It was a prison. My father liberated me after a year.”

  “That must have made you angry at your mother.”

  “Uh, yes. You know the movie Bambi? That was my favorite movie in my teen years.”

  I snorted. “It’s good that you can make jokes about it now that you’re all grown up? Isn’t it?”

  “Is it?” she asked dryly.

  “But you learne
d all those poems.”

  “The only bright moments had to do with a rather serious crush on the beautiful young nun who taught poetry.”

  “An ounce of perversion is worth a pound of cure.”

  “It certainly is,” said Kathryn in a provocative voice. “I promise I’ll tell you about it some time, late at night, as a bedtime story.”

  We left the road and zig-zagged past plots toward the place where Farrel and I had seen The Lost Bride.

  Kathryn looked up at the sky and then turned slowly around. She said, “So many emotions have been expressed on this little piece of ground. Historians find it so simple to presume that emotional life was vastly different 140 years ago. It’s a tribute to Evangeline that Merganser spent a fortune on beautiful sculpture of her for everyone to see, but to put it in this mournful spot.”

  I could feel what she meant. The cold steady breeze that rustled the branches over our heads carried the echoes of deep sorrows and fleeting joys. The loneliness, the relief, both cruelty and freedom, even the need for revenge were all such a part of this place.

  I sighed. “Of course, trying to frame love in the context of today and apply it to the past is tricky, but I agree, it’s just as dangerous to presume today’s context doesn’t apply.” I reached for Kathryn’s hand and we walked together glove in glove toward the east along a gravel-covered path.

  Kathryn asked, “Do you think Cora was right about couples?”

  “You mean when she said that it takes two people to end a relationship?”

  “Yes,” Kathryn said softly.

  I thought about my two previous committed relationships. Both had lasted a few years and had ended because we’d each gone our separate ways. But then there was Carrie, short term but remarkably intense. I’d thought it was the beginning of something lasting, but I’d woken up one morning to find her gone. The brief good-bye note had no explanation.

  Long before that, when my mother died, I’d felt the dark cloud of abandonment paralyze my emotions until they were unfrozen a few years later by my father’s new wife, Juana Martinez, and my new sisters, Sara and Rosa. They’d made me laugh and love again. But Farrel was right. Years later, when Carrie left, I tried to be tough, but it made me shy about giving my love away. At least I could understand that, even if I couldn’t talk about it.

  But Kathryn had done much more than unfreeze the heart of a lonely little girl. She’d lit a flame in me that I’d never known. Once Farrel told me that when she fell in love with Jessie she was able to look into her future and see Jessie with her. I didn’t understand at the time but now, with Kathryn, I knew exactly what Farrel meant. Still, it didn’t make this any easier; it made it harder. Because it mattered.

  I squeezed Kathryn’s arm. I said, “When Suzanne Carbondale left Gabriel he was totally shocked. Suddenly she was just gone. And I guess that’s why Jessie is still so angry. Suzanne didn’t just leave Gabe; she left everyone. It sure seemed like a one-sided break-up.”

  Kathryn nodded a little bit and then said simply, “There must not have been much communication between them. Or do you think there was someone else?”

  I shrugged. “You never really know what’s happening between two people. Sometimes the two people themselves don’t know,” I said looking steadily into her eyes.

  “We’ll have to be sure that doesn’t happen to us.” She smiled and stroked my cheek again with her gloved hand.

  “OK, so next time don’t wait until the last minute to tell me you have to go to some meeting, when I’m counting on an afternoon of hot erotic thrills! I wouldn’t have been annoyed at you.”

  “You sound annoyed,” she said with a touch of amusement.

  “But not at you. I can coast on anticipation.”

  “Maybe we can think of something to tide you over... other than just anticipation,” whispered Kathryn close to my ear.

  We were passing the tomb that Farrel and I had peeked around the night before. There in front of us was the monument of Evangeline Fen. It was blue-white in the waning afternoon sun. On the high granite pedestal, the figure was almost as ethereal as it had seemed in the moonlight. It wasn’t just a beautiful lost woman, it was a moment frozen in time.

  “It’s such a familiar face. No doubt about it,” I said. “Your little figure has the face of Evangeline Fen.”

  Kathryn was speechless. She moved closer, looking up at its gentle curves. Evangeline was fully draped in an off-the-shoulder cloak. Her delicate feet and ankles were bare. She was poised to run, with her head turned slightly to the side, one bare arm back, and the other slightly forward with a hand extended in a beckoning gesture. The features were still crisp and clear, though more than a hundred years of the city’s acid rain had tried to dull them.

  Kathryn turned and spied the recently toppled headstones. “This statue shouldn’t be out here exposed to vandals. At least no one can reach her head,” she said. We’d seen a number of lower statues with their heads broken off.

  “She seems kind of at home here, though. She was very beautiful. Amanda and Judith were certainly right about that,” I said. A gust of wind stirred some dead leaves at the statue’s base. I looked at my watch. I said, “It’s ten after twelve.”

  “Twelve-thirty is just the check-in. I’ll call and tell them I’ll be late. Let’s see if we can find some of the other Evangeline statues.”

  She turned in place, searching for other figures in white stone. To the south, at the intersection of two major paths, was a small tomb with another statue of Evangeline Fen in front of it. We went to it. The sculpture was half the size of a real person, but also on a high pedestal. She was seated with her head tilted back, wearing a traveling cloak wrapped around her body in graceful folds. Her left arm was draped across her lap. Her right hand pointed gracefully with all her fingers toward The Lost Bride statue less than thirty feet away.

  Kathryn walked around the statue to view it from all angles while I stepped closer. The face was so realistic she seemed about to speak.

  “She looks like she knows a secret,” I said.

  “Mmmm, yes, and kind of smug about it, isn’t she,” said Kathryn.

  Kathryn paused and looked around. “It’s so quiet here; there’s privacy with all these yews,” she said in a low voice. “So, Maggie, do you think it would be unseemly if we found a little... um... satisfaction, here?” Kathryn firmly pushed me against the wall of the block building.

  “It’s twenty degrees and we’re in a cemetery,” I said incredulously.

  “We’ll keep our coats on. And really, Maggie, in this garden of souls’ 200-year history, I’m sure we won’t be the first moonstruck couple to find a private corner in this otherwise hallowed ground,” said Kathryn, giving me a look that was so hot it could have melted the wrought iron fence and brought a few of the corpses back to life.

  “Maybe making love in it actually makes it hallowed,” I suggested, setting the bag of sculptures next to the wall.

  “You say the most inspirational things!” said Kathryn, slipping my glove off and drawing the back of my hand to her warm lips.

  The logic that usually controls my brain was draining away. I found myself ignoring the freezing cold, ignoring the public place, ignoring the kinkiness of doing it in a boneyard. Carpe Diem.

  I moved Kathryn back into a niche in the tomb wall that was sheltered by yew branches and slipped my hands into her coat and under her sweater as I kissed her throat. I undid the clasp of her bra.

  “Oh!” gasped Kathryn as I cupped her freed breast and brushed her nipple with the cold pad of my thumb.

  “Officer, I swear I wasn’t going over fifty.”

  “You still have to be searched.” My mouth found hers; she gently bit my lower lip. I could feel her lips curve into a smile as I undid the top button of her jeans and unzipped them. I wrapped one arm around her as my other hand moved under the silky fabric and into the increasingly moist place between her legs. She stiffened as I explored.

  “Oh, mmm,” she murmured, pushing down her jeans for more access.