chapter three
Sure: the word with which Mal accepted her offer, without bothering to negotiate the rent.
What had Laurie expected? It was an apartment, not a grand gesture. An ordinary Victorian where they quickly formed a cautious coexistence with the mice in the walls and commiserated about the poor insulation on colder nights.
Everything was fine, except for that Sure— it was everywhere .
Can you take out the garbage? Sure.
Do you mind splitting the HBO subscription? Sure .
As if splitting chores and bills wasn’t a requirement of cohabitation but a favor Mal was granting her. The first time they went in to work together on the BART, Laurie turned to say something—just as Mal stuffed in earphones and closed her eyes to catch a little more sleep.
They didn’t come home together. Mal went out drinking with the guys. She’d invited Laurie once, but they’d talked shop the whole time and Laurie was reminded of being sent to the kitchen while the men watched the game. Now she stayed home, painting tulips and redbuds and crabapple trees from memory, or reading a bodice ripper that made her wonder why she’d put up with bad sex as long as she had.
Mal wasn’t deliberately inconsiderate. She simply lived in her own world, bent over her laptop screen or lost in a book, so the ordinary concerns of the world rarely reached her. A month into living together, a lightbulb in the kitchen started to flicker. When Laurie asked Mal about it, she said, “Oh, it’s been doing that all day.”
“Why didn’t you change it?”
Mal gave her a blank stare. “Where do we keep spare bulbs?”
“In the closet over the washer. Could you get one?”
“Sure.”
Laurie bit her lip and considered her words. “I could use help taking care of this place. It’s hard to clean under the tub, and I can’t reach the bookshelves.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Mal said.
Two days later, Laurie came home to find a small, squat Latina woman standing on a chair and vigorously waving a feather duster over the bookshelves.
Sneezing, she knocked on Mal’s door and entered to find her reading on her mattress. She hadn’t bothered to buy a bed. She picked from a small bowl of almonds by her side on the floor, like a Roman emperor.
“Who’s that?” Laurie asked.
Mal grinned, looking entirely too impressed with herself. “I found a house cleaner from the immigrant labor collective. Isn’t she great? Her name’s Dolores. She’ll be here once a week.”
“What’s her rate?”
“I’ll take care of it,” Mal said, again.
Laurie was thinking up non-passive-aggressive I-statements that might help clarify the issue with just hiring a house-cleaning service without talking to her, when Mal lifted her head out of the book. “Oh, I meant to ask, are you going to Nick’s party tonight?”
“Are you?”
“I have a date.”
Laurie’s eye twitched. “The guy from the Symphony?”
Mal had taken her there soon after they moved in together, offered the extra ticket casually, as if she could easily find someone else to take it if Laurie refused. Mal had no idea what music meant to her. Of course, once they were there, someone caught her eye and she left with him after the concert while Laurie took the BART home alone.
Mal made a face. “No, he tasted like cigarettes. Such a disappointing crash. One minute, we’re listening to Tchaikovsky, the next we’re kissing in an alley that smells like piss while he tells me he’s allergic to latex.”
A smile tugged at Laurie’s lips. “Nobody ever lives up to the imagination, do they?”
“I met tonight’s guy in line at Bluebottle,” Mal said. “I have no expectations beyond a good taste in coffee.”
“I wonder if that heightens or lowers a man’s anxiety, to know you need nothing from him.”
“I think any guy who wants me to need him is barking up the wrong tree,” Mal said with a smile. “I refuse to need people I can’t pay. That’s exploitation.”
Laurie turned to go, a sudden prickling in her gut telling her to leave before this conversation cut any deeper.
· · ·
Nick’s house was at the top of a hill in the Castro, and as Laurie climbed she watched cars struggle up the steep incline in fear and trembling, as if they might be struck down by a vengeful heterosexual god.
She milled around the crowd of jeans-and-hoodie techies holding a red plastic cup full of fancy white wine—leftovers from a work summit she’d organized. The men ignored her in favor of lounging on their bean bags to play video games, so she wandered through the house pretending to look for a friend, when a woman walked in wearing a dark-rose leather bandage dress with Gucci heels, promptly creating a center of gravity around herself unlike anything Laurie had ever seen.
“Ah, Sophia’s here,” Nick said, without looking up from his video game. “Only two hours late this time.”
The woman in question knelt beside him and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
“Hey Nicky.”
She didn’t wait for him to acknowledge her, but instead got up from the ground without touching her hands to the floor, a feat of quad strength Laurie could only marvel at. Sophia went into the kitchen and proceeded to fit an entire taco laden with guacamole into her bow-lipped wine-red mouth while a dozen people watched her like a reality TV show.
“ That’s your ex?” someone asked Nick.
“When she was straight,” he said. “Pre-IPO.”
The other guy whistled.
Laurie went into the kitchen, suddenly aware of the fact that all her clothes had come from the thrift store. Sophia’s eyes landed on her, and she blushed all the way down to her chest.
“You’re new,” Sophia said.
“I’m Laurie. I work with Nick.”
“You’re far too cute for this crowd.”
She couldn’t say a word. She hadn’t known attraction could feel like this, a wild and uncontrollable nausea that made her want to throw up or run away. She dashed out of the kitchen before she could embarrass herself, but no matter where she went, she couldn’t seem to keep Sophia out of her peripheral vision.
The round of video games ended with shouts of triumph and despair, and the bean bags were cleared. Some pop hit started to play out of a network of wall-mounted speakers, and Sophia took the middle of the dance floor. She danced in Nick’s arms, her back against his chest, content to be held there.
“Lucky dog,” someone muttered. Laurie knew better. There were few things as torturous as staying close to someone who wasn’t actually yours. Sophia was using Nick, as if he were a parking space she wanted to make sure stayed available.
Maybe the bitter burn in her stomach was something else altogether.
The song ended, and Sophia broke Nick’s embrace. “Oh my God, is it already ten? I need to head out.”
“I guess you wouldn’t be you unless you had to get to at least three parties on a Saturday night,” Nick said.
“Robyn’s only in town for this weekend. I haven’t seen her since South by South West last year.”
Sophia started making her way to the exit, saying goodbyes to an endless line of awkward men whose names she botched with endearing abandon.
“Wait, Robyn?” someone asked Nick. “Isn’t that the girl she left you for?”
Laurie went to Nick’s bedroom, where she’d left her coat. She interrupted two people in a make-out session, apologized more for her own discomfort than theirs (they didn’t seem to care), and put on her puffy coat. It was probably as red as her face and made her look like a skewered apple. She didn’t say goodbye, since she doubted anyone had noticed her presence. She ran to the MUNI stop and saw Sophia standing there, staring into the light of her phone, annoyed.
“Everything okay?”
Sophia looked up. Laurie immediately regretted asking. It was ingrained in her to help.
“I don’t suppose you want to go to another party? Robyn’s plastered, and she’ll get awfully clingy if I seem unattached.”
Laurie wanted to say that she probably wasn’t dressed right for Sophia’s kind of party, but the words that actually came out of her mouth were, “Would she believe someone like you was with someone like me?”
Sophia frowned. Then she touched Laurie’s cheek, quickly and tenderly.
“Oh, kitten,” Sophia said, and kissed her.
Laurie froze at the electric tingle on her lips.
“Yeah, you’re coming with me,” Sophia said as the MUNI arrived.
They went to a nondescript building in SoMa where a warehouse had been converted into a club with high ceilings. Along the walls were a number of king beds, with the warehouse center cleared to allow an aerialist to perform acrobatics on a silk rope.
“White sheets?” Sophia said. “We are living on the edge.” She led Laurie to a bed where three women were sitting with their backs against the wall. Each of them was lovely in that unreal doll-like way of Marina and Los Angeles girls, and Laurie soon discovered Robyn was the one with waist-length blonde curls and legs so long they glowed like gunmetal in thigh-high leather boots.
A waiter came by with tiny pieces of sourdough and caviar and a bottle of wine. One of the other women on the bed shifted slightly to show more skin, but if the waiter noticed he didn’t so much as twitch in response.
“You’re cute,” Robyn said. “Not Soph’s usual type, but then who is.”
“That’s a beautiful corset,” Laurie said, desperate for something to say.
“Do you like it?” Robyn asked, preening. “I only got it today. Soph, she likes the corset. You’ll have to get her one.”
Sophia’s eyes went dark. She pulled Laurie away from Robyn’s grasp and into her lap.
The aerialist appeared, wearing what appeared to be a sequined bathing suit. She stroked herself with the silk fabric that hung from the ceiling, then easily climbed the rope to dangle upside-down from about fifteen feet in the air.
Sophia sighed against her back, putting one arm around Laurie’s waist. With the other, she fed her some of her own wine.
“It’s just a sad imitation of Paris,” Robyn said. “Soph, remember that night in Montmartre with the chocolatier?”
Laurie smiled. It was awkward, clear, understandable, Robyn’s lunge at a shared memory—it wasn’t unlike Cam’s attempts to pull rank over her with Will, an older friend asserting their territory. A sad imitation of intimacy. She didn’t mind. After all, this was all just a show.
“Hm,” was all Sophia offered.
“I don’t know how you can stand this city,” Robyn said. “A bunch of suddenly rich schoolboys who can’t meet your eyes, and innocent Midwestern girls who call the city San Fran and think they’re suddenly cultured because they’re drinking red wine out of a bottle, not a box.”
Sophia pulled Laurie’s head back onto her shoulder and kissed her bared throat.
“Look at how responsive you are,” Sophia said, seeing her skin blaze. “We’re going to have so much fun together, aren’t we kitten?”
Sophia’s arms came up around her, pulling her into a cuddle. Inexplicably, Laurie relished the obvious jealousy on the other women’s faces. She wasn’t usually like this. As a child she’d once stopped running in a race because the other kids seemed to want the candy more. But then there was that flash of memory from the Symphony—a predatory grin, a spark in Mal’s eyes, a conspiring whisper, before she left Laurie’s side: Want. Take. Have.
“San Francisco has its perks,” Sophia said, and kissed her right over her hammering heart.
· · ·
The next few weeks were a reckless dream. There were parties in the Haight where the boys dressed in tutus and glittered stockings, and the girls wore leather or nothing at all. Sophia, it turned out, worked not for a Unicorn but for a stock market Darling, a tech company that had already started trading publicly, turning twenty-somethings into overnight millionaires.
They no longer had to work, any of them, but they chose to anyway, driven to mean something, to not let their newfound wealth grind down their souls. So they wore Swarovski on their feet and earrings made of recycled CDs; they bought VIP tickets to concerts to have the kind of backstage intercourse with the band that involved a discussion of lyrics rather than sex. They drove back from Hearst Castle arguing animatedly about the aesthetics of a Greek outdoor pool or a Roman indoor bath, then plunged, high and laughing, into the ocean at Half Moon Bay.
Laurie never told Mal about any of it, and if her roommate noticed the dark circles around her eyes or the residual glitter that clung to their hardwood floors despite Dolores’ efforts, she never said anything. Laurie resented Mal’s lack of curiosity as much as she dreaded having to tell her at some point. Would Mal have judged her? Probably not, but that was another kind of problem: she’d understand and accept her actions when Laurie couldn’t yet. She was still swirling in the sweat and sparkle of those weeks.
Right before the office holiday parties that would close out the year, in the changing room of Dark Garden, she struggled with the corset Sophia had chosen for her. It was delicately boned in the lightest blush-pink, but as she tried to figure out the hooks and ribbons she came across the price-tag and her mind went white.
“I’m coming in!” Sophia called, walking past the velvet curtain.
Laurie clutched the corset over her chest.
“Don’t be shy. Let me help.”
She handed it to Sophia, who undid the lacing and stood behind her, wrapping the bone. Laurie held the front in place, gasping when the ribbon pulled too tight.
“God, look at you,” Sophia said. “We have to get this.”
“We can’t. It’s almost eight hundred dollars. Where would I wear it? And I don’t have anything to wear it with .”
“Shh,” Sophia said. “What have I always said about money?”
“That nothing turns you on more than destroying it in the service of beauty.”
She was dead serious about that. She’d told Laurie her fantasy, that she wanted to love someone so much that she’d run to them through the mud, Manolo Blahnik heels be damned. As far as Laurie was concerned, if you knew that you were the kind of impulsive person who might end up running in mud or fainting in the grass, you had no business buying the kind of heels that might mean broken ankles, but she knew better than to say anything. Among the Darlings, she was the crazy one for seeing something wrong with Agent Provocateur lingerie in the dryer or nacho crumbs on the Ligne Roset couch.
Something niggled at her, beyond the talk of money, like a mouse in the corner of her vision. Sophia never kissed her in front of her techie friends. When they went to DNA lounge, they danced as a group. Laurie wanted to ask: Would you run through the mud for me?
She said instead, “You don’t have to do this. I’d be just as happy staying home.”
“I want everyone to see you,” Sophia said. “And I want to see you in the satin gown I got you, knowing you’re wearing this corset… and nothing but this corset underneath. And when my idiot colleagues inevitably end the evening by stumbling into you with a plastic cup of cheap beer, I’ll take you home and rip the dress off you before we’re even out of the limo.”
Laurie’s skin kept no secrets, but at the image Sophia wove she started shaking, unable to get enough air with the corset on.
“You’re overwhelmed, aren’t you, kitten,” Sophia said, stroking her hot cheek. “Let me help.”
Those three words were enough, always, to turn her mind blank and her body pliant. They were a comfort, taking away hard decisions about what she ought to say or do to hold Sophia’s interest, cutting past anxieties about how much she’d spent on her. Let me help meant letting Sophia dress and undress her, touch her, kiss her, spoil her, possess her completely.