Blue （1979）
“What’s going on? I asked, yawning. “Sue P, what are you doing here?”
Jackson turned to me, his exasperation evident. “She’s looking for MJ. For some reason, she thinks she’s here.”
“Is MJ here?” Sue P asked me.
“What? No. Why would you think she’d be here?”
“You’re always together.”
Before I could respond, she sat on the sofa: to say she crumbled onto the sofa would be a more accurate description.
“What’s wrong, Sue?”
“Nothing. MJ’s mother called a little while ago wanting to talk to her, and I have no idea where she is, so I just thought she’d be here. Do you know where she is?”
“Actually, I don’t.” I didn’t want to point out that it was Valentine’s Day.
“Oh, dear. Oh, dear!”
“Where’s Faiz,” I asked, looking around.
“In his dorm room, sleeping, I imagine.” She looked at me in exasperation. “Why does everyone act like Faiz and I are always together?”
“Because ya are, Blanche, ya are always together,” Jackson drawled in his dead-on imitation of Bette Davis. I tried to think of a time when I’d seen one of them without the other; couldn’t.
“Do you really think MJ is OK?”
“I do.”
“OK. I should probably get back home. Night.”
This morning, when MJ slipped into her usual seat beside me in the lecture hall, I glanced at her. She didn’t look any the worse for wear, so I said, “So, you weren’t abducted by aliens?”
“Oh, yeah, that,” MJ said.
“Good Valentine’s Day?”
“Yeah.” One word, said with finality. Then, softening her tone, she added, “Sorry Sue P woke you guys—”
“It’s fine. Everything OK?”
“Yeah, I called my mother this morning.”
“This morning?” I raised my eyebrows. She ignored me, suddenly finding the class syllabus riveting.
“Did she ask where you were?”
“Yeah, of course,” she said. Then she added nonchalantly, “I told her I spent the night with you.”
“You told her you were with me?”
“Well, yeah. I couldn’t tell her where I actually spent the night.”
“What did she say?”
“She asked if we were serious.”
“About what?”
“Us, silly.”
“Us?”
“Oh…”
“Apparently, I talk about you so much, she thought we were dating—oh, don’t look so horrified. There are worse things than dating a girl.”
Name one, I wanted to say but bit my tongue.
“So, what did you tell her?”
“I told her it wasn’t like that. I told her you’re gay.”
Oh, and?”
“And now she wants to meet you. You and Jackson are invited over for a swim and Easter dinner. You must come, otherwise she will think I lied about being with you and assume that means I’m the whore of Babylon. Or something.”
“Wait,” I said, “You have a pool?”
She shot me a look. I retreated.
“So—if you weren’t with me—and we know you weren’t—where were you?”
“Professor’s here,” she said, pointing. “And you know how testy she gets when people talk in class instead of scrambling to gather the pearls of wisdom she’s dropping.”
MJ is poetic sometimes and notoriously evasive about her love life always. She insists that because she wants to be a reporter and an anchorwoman, people need to be more interested in what she has to report than in what she does.
Sunday, April 15, 1979, University City—MJ’s father is a lawyer; her mother is an interior designer, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that their house is stunning.
They live in a stately brick Georgian surrounded by towering pines and enormous shade trees—Japanese maple, weeping willows, dogwoods.
A terraced flagstone patio in the back steps down to the deck of a pool filled with beckoning blue water.
Jackson and I hadn’t been swimming since we left Locust Hollow.
Jackson, MJ, and I swam and played half-hearted water volleyball ball while Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell lay on exquisite chaise longues drinking cocktails and talking quietly.
Before dinner, MJ led us back to the pool house so we could shower and change for dinner. Their pool house is bigger than our apartment.
MJ’s mother seemed positively giddy to have two gay guys in her house, seated at her table, which was a forest of floral-patterned Wedgewood China attended by a battalion of Waterford crystal, set ablaze by candlelight.
There were candles on the table in front of us, in the light fixture above our heads, and in the sconces over the fireplace.
The walls were covered in an opulent, hand-painted silk de Gournay wallpaper featuring a landscape filled with toucans, lovebirds, parrots, and macaws alongside jewel-toned serpents, ornate butterflies, and swinging monkeys on a light-blue background.
Throughout dinner, hidden speakers released country music as soft and impossible to grasp as fragrance or a London fog. As MJ’s father poured us wine, Crystal Gayle confided over strings about something or other that made her brown eyes blue.
After dinner, we had coffee and cognac by the pool.
As we drove home in MJ’s hideous burnt-orange Volvo, she confided, “Claude adores you guys.”
“Oh, good,” I mumbled. Jackson was asleep in the backseat, and I was drifting off in the passenger seat, no doubt from the unaccustomed effects of the cognac. I sat up. Rubbing my eyes, I said, “Wait, who’s Claude?”
“My mother.”
“Your mother’s name is Claude?”
“Yes. My grandmother had several miscarriages—all girls—before my mother was born. Apparently, there is an old wives’ tale that dictates if you have ‘trouble keeping a girl,’ you should give your first surviving daughter a boy’s name.”
“Oh.”
MJ glanced over at me. “Go back to sleep,” she said. “I’ll wake you when we get to your place.”
As we were brushing our teeth, I asked Jackson, “Did you have a good time tonight?”
He spat in the sink and said, “I did. But it was kind of strange. Up until tonight, I didn’t realize a world like that existed.”
I understood; until tonight, I hadn’t either. Hearing the wonder in his voice, I vowed to myself that we would come to know that world more intimately, that we would be a part of that world.
Thursday, April 26, 1979, University City—I had lunch with MJ today at the cafeteria for students who lived on campus and signed up for a meal plan.
The first time I’d accompanied MJ here for lunch, I’d been overwhelmed by the sheer amount and variety of food on display.
I got dizzy waiting in line, watching the ladies in hairnets eager to serve, spoons ready, behind heat lamps that glowed red-orange-red like billboards advertising vacation packages to hell, offering culinary temptations for every taste bud, the desserts and ice creams lying provocatively on their beds of ice…
“Dude, are you OK?” MJ asked, nudging me as I stared dumbfounded at the lavish display.
I nodded. “I’m fine. Why?”
“You look like you’ve never seen food before.”
Of course, I had seen food before—but never in such abundance. Back in Locust Hollow, folks would share what they had for meals, but the truth was no one had much. Our planned dinner party is this weekend.
As we exited through a turnstile, I turned to shush MJ while stifling my larcenous giggles as the flatware and crockery MJ had nicked banged together in her purse. My own pilfered goods were quieter and better behaved in my knapsack.
I felt guilty and wondered how I could return the stolen goods after our dinner party.
MJ did not share my sense of guilt. She saw herself as a kind of Robin Hood, redistributing the assets of the wealthy into the hands of the poor, in this case taking from the university and giving to poor college students.
But I was less sure. Surely, our theft would result in higher tuition, which is what universities call their system of taxation.
Thus, I think she was more like a member of Congress, cutting taxes on the rich and making the poor and middle-classes pay for it.
But I kept my thoughts to myself and loved her no less.
As we were making our getaway, we ran into Perils, whose actual name is Pauline.
Perils works behind the chocolate counter and as a bartender at her family’s after-dinner lounge, which specializes in handmade chocolate, unique desserts, and “craft” cocktails.
Because she is always relating some drama that occurred over chocolate martinis and candy sales, I’d nicknamed her The Perils of Praline—so many customers with nut allergies had gone into anaphylactic shock after eating her family’s classic pralines despite multiple posted warnings about them containing nuts, and the paramedics called so often they had finally stopped offering them, substituting a pure chocolate version.
The name stuck but was shortened to Perils.
She is good-natured about her nickname, though, and serves as our resident bartender at our tender soirees, since she is the only one old enough to procure alcohol.
She introduced our little group into the world of adult cocktails—Black Russians, Universes, Moscow Mules—and moderation at a time when our peers were getting drunk, and throwing up Olde English 800, Rolling Rock, and grain alcohol.
MJ shifted her handbag on her shoulder, which was starting to droop from the weight of her ill-gotten gains. Flatware giggled and crockery clapped.
“What is that sound?” Perils asked, cocking her head.
“What sound?” we asked in unison, the very embodiment of innocence.
“So, listen,” Perils went on, ignoring us and popping her gum.
“Saturday, we hosted a wedding breakfast at the restaurant. Fifty people. The bride and groom had their own table in the middle of the room raised up on a little dais they had us build. It was very strange. Something was clearly amiss, but I wasn’t getting disaster vibes—until the bride and groom were served their brunch order. I brought out their order…”
I wasn’t surprised by Perils’ leading role; Perils always plays a leading role in the perilous situations at the restaurant.