Berkshire Bright Focus...

          Tooie, the Lesbian married me for reasons of her own. I married her because she said yes. Well, that’s not fair, is it? She wouldn’t have said ‘yes’ if I hadn’t said ‘marry me." Why did I say it, ask it, suggest it? Well, I’ll tell you. She was Lainie’s best friend and I couldn’t marry Lainie, so I thought if I married Tooie I’d stay close to Lainie, still have her near me when I needed her there. I couldn’t have been more wrong. That’s the problem, the central problem, when a man marries: he thinks he knows the women close to him, but he really doesn’t. Not at all.

          Lainie was a lot like my mother in some ways. She could look you straight in the eye and make you believe in her. All the while, meanwhile, behind your back she was thinking some things that had nothing to do with what she said to you. My mother never told me the truth about anything, but I didn’t know that then. I didn’t know that, actually, until she was dying and then she told me lots of things. For example, she told me my father was a man I never met. My real father was someone she had known for a short time, a border in her brother’s house where she worked. "He was a traveling man," she told me, "which would account for your love of faraway places." "The trouble with that theory," I told her back, "is that I don’t have a love for faraway places, Momma." "Sure you do," she said, "just like him." "Momma, the only faraway place I love is Montauk Point." "There you are," she said closing her eyes, "just like your papa."

          What she didn’t tell me was his name. She never said why she’d loved him or why he’d left her. She never told me anything except this curious legacy of bloodlust for faraway places. The truth is that right after that conversation I suddenly developed a yen for travel, longed to see Sugarloaf Mountain down in Rio, ached to touch the pyramids in ancient Egypt and wanted to board a ship in the harbor, any ship going anywhere. I told Tooie and she told me to calm down and grab a beer. Then she went out and found a lady who’d sleep with both of us and my father’s yen for distant locations left me forever.

          That was one way Tooie kept me sane. She could always find some woman, some nice woman usually, who’d accommodate us both. I don’t know where she found them; I never asked her. I merely accepted the inevitable and got my kicks and went to sleep.

          Like my mother Lainie told me the truth when she wanted to, when it was convenient for her. She could make me believe a lie if she wanted to do that. She could twist me around her little finger, to coin a cliche. What she couldn’t do, like my mother could do, was make me forgive the lie. My mother was my blood; Lainie was my loins. Blood calls to blood no matter what, but loins are loins and they drift. If Lainie had been my mother, I would have forgiven the lies and laid them to rest, but then she wouldn’t have been my love, only my mother, so the outcome would have been much the same anyway.

          One thing, though. Like my mother I never stopped loving Lainie. That’s the truth.

          But Tooie, that’ s the topic. Tooie the Lesbian whom I married to remain close to Lainie the Liar whom I left but wanted to keep close. I drift, I always drift, when I talk about Tooie and Lainie. How did we meet? Who was she to me that I would ask her, that’s the topic. I’d been seeing Lainie for a while and we’d been sleeping together and I’d been helping her out with some cash now and then because she needed the money. She liked to dress up nice for me, and she didn’t have a job, so I’d give her money when I saw her and the next time we’d be together she’d have something new to wear and to dazzle me with. I liked that. It made us both feel good, I mean really good. So maybe the fourth or fifth time I saw her, she introduced me to Tooie.

          We were in a speakeasy up in Harlem to hear a singer Lainie was fond of whose name I’ve forgotten over time. She was a light-skinned negress with a beautiful voice and a beautiful body. Her hair was died red and against her mulatto-cream skin made quite an impression. I remember she was singing a torchy ballad called "Just Like a Butterfly That’s Caught in the Rain," when Lainie waved to someone across the room. I don’t know how she could make that someone out in the dark of the room, but she did, and the next thing this woman was joining us at our table and that was Tooie.

          "Tooie, this is Mr. Compton," she said. "My friend, Tooie, Mr. Compton."

          "You the guy been buying Lainie pretty things?" she asked me.

          "I guess I am," I said.

          "You got swell taste, Mr. Compton," Tooie said.

          "Well, thanks, but I don’t really buy the things, Lainie does. I just let her have some money to use."

          "I meant your taste in Lainie, Mr. Compton, forgive me if I’m not clear."

          "Isn’t she something," Lainie added, "saying sweet things like that?"

          I bought her a drink and she said a few more nice things about me. Then she was gone again.

          "Nice friend you’ve got there, Lainie," I told her.

          "She’s been my pal for ever so long."

          "How’d you meet her?"

          "We were school chums. She was in my class and I was way out of hers." Lainie giggled as she said it.

          "What does that mean?"

          "Well, you see, Mr. Compton, it’s like this. It was the sixth grade at school and she was in the next row over, one desk behind, so she was in my class. But I was a real girl and she was just a lezzy. So she wasn’t anywhere near me, I was way out of her class, if you get me."

          "I guess I do," I said, and the singer finished singing. There was thunderous applause and I leaned in close to Lainie. "So she and you are close?"

          "Get that idea right out of your head, Mister," she snapped at me. "Tooie is a friend, that’s all. Nothing funny goes on with me with her like me with you."

          "Okey-dokey," I said, pulling back, sitting up straight.

          "You wouldn’t want me like that, would you?" she asked me.

          "No. I like you like you are. I like you as my girl."

          "You don’t like the idea of sharing me around, do you, Mr. Compton?"

          I know now that I should have asked Lainie, right then, to make an honest man of me and marry me, but I let it go by. I didn’t take the plunge as it were, to coin another cliche. Instead, I asked her a different question.

          "So you and Tooie are close friends and share your secrets, I guess, so what did you tell her about me?"

          "I told her you were real sweet, and real kind."

          "Is that all?"

          "No." She gave me that coy smile I loved and still love to this day.

          "What else then?"

          "I told her that if I wasn’t to marry you sometime, then she should and get herself some sweet and kind respectability."

          "Marry your friend the Lez? Why would I do that?"

          "‘ Cause you’re the nicest guy I know, is why."

          "I don’t get it," I said to her "Why would you want me to marry someone else?"

          "I don’t know if I can marry anybody," Lainie said. "I really don’t know. It’s a big thing, you know. It’s not like having a kid, it’s a real commitment. It’s like giving up the life and making a new one with one other person only. That’s a hard job if you ask me."

          "You don’t know what you’re talking about," I told her. "My mother married my dad and they made a go of it and they had me and they had my brother and they had a life. Not so difficult, see?"

          She gave me a soulful look, sad and deep and very intellectual. She took a deep breath and picked up the pearls I’d bought her myself and stuck them in her mouth and ran them back and forth across her lower teeth. Then she dropped them onto her bosom.

          "Mr. Compton it isn’t always like that," she said. "And don’t you believe it for a second."

          "You sound bitter," I said.

          "Do I? Do I, really?"

          Just then the red-headed singer started another song I loved and I got a little lost in the lyrics. It was the Gershwin hit, ‘S Wonderful, a song that really hit home just then. I sang along with it, hoping Lainie would get the idea from the song, if not from me:

          " ‘S wonderful, ‘S marvelous, you should care for me."

          "Oh, Mr. Compton," she said, "you know I care for you."

          " ‘S awful nice, ‘S paradise, ‘S what I long to see."

          "Mr. Compton, you can see it whenever you want to see it."

          "You’ve made my life so glamorous...."

          "That should be my line, Mr. Compton."

          "You can’t blame me for feeling amorous..."

          "Like I feel for you."

          I took her hand in mine and stroked it with my fingers while I held it fast. I was in love, I guess, and I really felt it just then. I don’t know if it was the music or the booze or the lights, but I really felt it.

          "You don’t sound bitter now," I said to her.

          "I’m not bitter," she replied, "just angry. It’s the life, I guess. Sometimes it gets to me."

          "Your life is okay with me," I said and I know now that was my undoing, because I had no idea what I was saying or what she was saying. I thought I was proposing to her and she thought I was agreeing with her about her choices. That was the mistake we both made. The big one.

          Later, in her room, when I saw the photo of her and the little girl I knew I had been a fool and that I couldn’t have the purest princess in the world for my own. She was someone else’s already, had been someone else’s and could never really be mine.

          Her words came back to me about her friend, Tooie the Lesbian, and it occurred to me that someone like her could be true to one man, because she didn’t even want one man. And knowing her I could be close to my Lainie and never lose sight of her. I just knew that I couldn’t be close to her like I wanted to be, so second best would be the best choice for me.

          That was before I knew that women can take you for a ride, before my mother told me about my father. That was before I knew who I really was, down deep. So much before.