Talk of the Town Too Read online

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Publications from Bella Books, Inc.

  The song ended and the D.J. announced the next would be a slow one and that it was time to find a partner or cuddle up to the one you’re with.

  “Do you want it to be over?” Megan asked, praying the answer would be yes. Rafferty deserved someone better.

  “With Emily?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course I do. I just can’t believe she’s here.”

  “Then dance with me,” Megan said, holding out her arms.

  “Megan, it’s a slow song,” Rafferty said, turning slightly red.

  “So?” Megan knew she was pushing, but with Rafferty one had to be aggressive or she would slip through your fingers. She wanted to hold her. She wanted to feel her body close.

  “And you’re a straight woman in a gay bar.”

  “And you need to lose an old girlfriend,” Megan said, grabbing Rafferty as the music began. Rafferty did not protest, Megan noted. This was a step in the right direction.

  “This is not good.” Rafferty glanced nervously over Megan’s shoulder.

  “I don’t know about that. You smell really good and you have a nice butt.” Megan slid her hand down Rafferty’s backside.

  “I think you’re pushing boundaries.”

  “You can sue me in the morning,” Megan said, pulling her closer and thinking this was the nicest slow dance she’d had in a while.

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  Copyright© 2004 by Saxon Bennett

  Bella Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 10543

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  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  First Edition

  Editor: Christi Cassidy

  Cover designer: Bonnie Liss

  ISBN-13: 978-1-931513-77-7

  To my Beloved for her love and patience.

  It’s hard raising a proper lesbian.

  Acknowledgments

  I have to give thanks and praise for the undying support and patience of my editor, Christi Cassidy. Christi’s eye for detail is impeccable and her ability to straighten out my fictional muddles is amazing. Despite the tumultuous nature of our relationship, she is always right. She keeps me focused, on task and exacts a sense of discipline from somewhere in my wily nature that amazes even me.

  Chapter One

  It was a hot April morning in Phoenix, Arizona. Gigi Montaigne sat on the front porch of her white stucco house. She put on her faded black high-top sneakers after she had given them a good shake to make sure there were no cockroaches lurking in their depths. One traumatic experience was enough, and now she always shook out her sneakers. She went to get her bike that was stashed behind the faded red Ford pickup that now served as an ornament in the driveway. The last time she had the truck towed home she vowed never again to stand by while the mechanic peered in at the engine and made weird noises that always cost her a lot of money. She had parked the truck and bought a very nice mountain bike, which was promptly stolen. From then on she purchased crappy bikes from the thrift store and charted how many days it took before someone stole them. Now it was a game. This bike was a clunker from the Fifties and had lasted exactly thirty-one days in her possession. This was longer than most of her girlfriends, except for Alex, an ex-lover who’d lasted months into years.

  Gigi looked wistfully over at the dead jojoba bush that lay uprooted in the front yard. Alex had run it over trying to get Mallory to the hospital after she had walked through the closed sliding glass door. This happened a year ago, when Mallory found out that Gigi had had a torrid affair with Mallory’s girlfriend, Caroline, and was the reason behind Caroline’s sudden disappearance five years ago and her reappearance nine months ago.

  Gigi’s whole house was a testimony to her guilt-ridden, tumultuous past. Now Caroline was staying at her house, and if her guilt could incarnate itself and sit in her living room each evening when she came home, that’s what Caroline was to her.

  As she rode off Gigi glanced at the house again. Her grandmother had left her the money to buy a house because she hated the nasty apartments Gigi had lived in after her mother threw her out of the house for being gay, for being an abomination against God. Her grandmother had died two years ago, and Gigi still missed her and thought about her often. Her mother, Rose, was a staunch Roman Catholic and her daughter had become everything she feared. They were no longer speaking. Gigi was not speaking to Alex, either, or to Mallory, or to Caroline—or rather, they weren’t speaking to her. It was like she was walking through her world with ciphers for companions.

  She rode down the sidewalk on Indian School, for to brave the car-laden street was to flirt with suicide. Gigi always stuck to the sidewalk. As she passed under an overgrown, pigeon-infested queen palm tree, a bird pooped on her shoulder. Her white T-shirt now looked like a piece of a Jackson Pollock painting with odd strands of brown, gray and yellow. Gigi stopped and looked up.

  “You stupid motherfucker,” she screamed up at the tree and the bird. “Neither one of you is indigenous to this place so what are you doing here in the first place?”

  A passerby in a car leaned over and said, “Actually, the pigeons were brought over from Europe in hopes they would be a good food source for the poor people living in the newly developed cities after they had been forced off their farmland. I don’t know about the palm trees, probably some botanist trying to give the place a sense of the grandeur that other Western towns lacked.”

  Gigi grunted at him and nearly got run over crossing the street. By the time she got to work at Danielle Morgan’s Photography Studio she was fit to be tied.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Danielle asked as Gigi leaned over the sink in the photo lab and tried to scrub the pigeon shit off her shoulder.

  “I’m not having a good day,” Gigi muttered.

  “Is that bird poop?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact it is, from an immigrant pigeon from the era of the robber barons.”

  Danielle laughed. “I didn’t realize we had pedigree pigeons here.”

  “Neither did I until some stupid fuck in a car gave a history lesson after the incident.”

  “Only here, in wacko land, would that happen. Have you seen the latest aura photos we took the other day?”

  “No, I’ve been kind of busy trying to get poop off.”

  “Here let me help you—oh, no.”

  “What?” Gigi said, getting panicked. “It’s in your hair.”

  Gigi looked at her boss. Danielle had long, dark, curly hair that framed her Madonna-like face. At forty-five, she was in a long- term relationship with a woman she was madly in love with. She played soccer every week and had a great body. Gigi wanted to grow up to be just like her. “You know this growing-my-hair-out thing isn’t working.”

  “It is. You just have to get it past your ears and then you can tuck it back. Look, you started with no hair, and that spiky look has really gone by the wayside. Trust me.”
>
  “You know, if you weren’t my mentor I’d still be selling dildos at the Castle Boutique, cruising women and having spiky hair,” Gigi replied.

  “That’s why you came in for counseling at the Women’s Center and that’s why you met me. You needed to change, Gigi.”

  “I know. Speaking of counseling, remember I have my appointment with Dr. Kohlrabi at three.”

  “I know. We just have to get through twenty-five pimply-faced seniors before then.”

  “I still think dildos are better.”

  Danielle smiled. “I never said change was easy or fun.”

  “Did I tell you I talked to God last night?”

  “Now, that is a good thing.”

  Later that afternoon Gigi sat in Dr. Kolhrabi’s office studying the African masks on the wall. She decided that they gave her the creeps. She understood the point of them being there. Freud had had them in his office. Dr. Kohlrabi’s office was a direct descendant of Freud’s with its heavy old desk, leather couch and wing-back chairs. It was a therapy thing but it did not inspire confidence. Freud, she decided, was a pervert with weird ideas about women. At least Helen Kohlrabi was easy on the eyes. She was in her late forties, had shoulder-length blonde hair and soft brown eyes, and she was thin. She wore these little red plastic glasses over which she looked at you. Still, Mallory appeared to have been cured, so Gigi felt obligated to give this a try. Her life was still in shambles and she needed it fixed. She missed Mallory, she didn’t know what to do about Caroline, and in some strange way she missed fighting with her mother. To top this off, God had visited her.

  “So what’s been going on lately?” Dr. Kohlrabi asked, apparently noticing Gigi’s agitation.

  “The usual messed-up stuff that keeps me from living a full life,” Gigi replied.

  “And what would that be?” Dr. Kohlrabi inquired.

  “I haven’t said anything to anyone because it’s too weird.”

  “Isn’t that what I’m for?”

  “Yes and no,” Gigi said, squirming uncomfortably on the leather couch. She was always hot from riding her bike and her thighs stuck to the leather. It was 100 degrees outside, dry but hot. She pulled at her shorts.

  “Why don’t you just tell me what’s bothering you and we can sort through this together,” Dr. Kohlrabi gently prodded.

  “You have to promise you won’t laugh,” Gigi replied.

  “It would be very unprofessional of me to exhibit jocularity,” Dr. Kohlrabi assured her.

  “What?”

  “I won’t laugh,” Dr. Kohlrabi said. She picked up her pen and a yellow legal pad.

  “I talked to God last night.”

  “Lots of people speak to God, in prayer, in interior monologues, in delusions. What kind was yours?”

  “Not like any of those. One minute I was asleep on the couch and the next minute I was standing out in the middle of nowhere, like some Martian landscape, talking to God.”

  “You were asleep and dreaming. Why do you find that so alarming?”

  “I had my shoes on and they were covered in soil, the same kind of soil that I was standing on talking to God.”

  “Do you usually sleep with your shoes on?”

  “No, but nowadays I sleep whenever I can fall asleep. I was on the couch and next thing you know I had dozed off, drooled on the arm of the couch and had a little chitchat with the big lady upstairs.”

  “God is a woman?” Dr. Kohlrabi asked, raising her eyebrows.

  “According to God, she is whatever you want her to be. As she puts it, she becomes eye candy. For me she became a compilation of dykes fashionably dressed in Tommy Hilfiger.”

  “God is a lesbian,” Dr. Kohlrabi said.

  “Does that rock your Orthodox Jewish world a little to the left?” Gigi asked, actually curious.

  “As I have told you I’m an agnostic Jew,” Dr. Kohlrabi said, peering over the top of her glasses. “And we’re not here to talk about me.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Well, God says she doesn’t really have a body, or gender, or sexual orientation, but she does feel closest to women because they’re more intuitive. She doesn’t quite get how all the priests are men when they’re so void of the spirituality that comprises life.” To her own ears it sounded as if she were describing some casual conversation she’d had with a friend.

  “Did you ask God any particular questions?” Dr. Kohlrabi was still jotting down what Gigi had said.

  “Yeah, I asked her why we’re here. I figured I owed it to the philosophy majors. I used to date a woman who was always yammering on about the purpose of life.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She asked me if I remembered that beer campaign that used the line ‘Why ask Why.’ She came up with that and slipped the hint to an advertising guy. She thought it was pretty funny.”

  Dr. Kohlrabi looked up from her notes. “What do you think that means?”

  “I think that everything is just here, like God is here, like the universe is here. God doesn’t know why she exists any more than we do. We’re all just part of it.”

  “Does that make you feel better?”

  Gigi thought about it for a moment. “It does. Not that I was pondering the question much. You know I’m basically an eat, sleep, shit and fuck kind of girl.”

  “I see,” Dr. Kohlrabi replied rather tersely.

  Gigi glanced up at the clock. “Well, I got to go,” she said.

  “Your time’s not up,” Dr. Kohlrabi replied.

  “I know but I’m spent,” Gigi said, getting up.

  “Got a date with God?”

  “No, but I do have something to do.”

  “What might that be?”

  Gigi didn’t want to bring up this topic today, but she said, “I’m meeting my father. He wants to talk, but I have to meet him in undisclosed locations so my mother won’t know. I’m off-limits, as you know.”

  “What do you suppose he wants to talk about?” Dr. Kohlrabi inquired.

  “How I might go about patching up our relationship,” Gigi said, reaching down to tie her errant shoelace.

  “Is that possible?”

  “Only if God makes me an Angel.”

  “Maybe you could ask her next time you see her.” Dr. Kohlrabi set down her pen and pad.

  “Yeah, like that’s going to happen again. Do you think it was just a whacked-out dream?” Gigi asked seriously.

  “That would be my best guess. But if it does happen again put a good word in for me.”

  “Sure thing, until next week,” Gigi said, rubbing the belly of the Buddha statue on Dr. Kohlrabi’s desk.

  “Why do you do that?”

  “For luck. A better question would be why does a Jew have a statue of Buddha?”

  “One never knows what or who is truly a child of God.”

  “Covering all your bases?”

  Dr. Kohlrabi nodded.

  Gigi sat at the bar in the Hard Rock Café shoving a hamburger in her face while her father, Paulie, told her about her mother’s latest attempts to reunite herself with the church. Gigi studied her father’s reflection in the mirror behind the bar. He was a middle- aged man with a receding hairline and heavily etched crow’s-feet around his eyes from spending so much time on the golf course. She was convinced he’d taken up golf just to get away from her mother. How they had sex together to produce her still boggled her mind. She couldn’t even begin to imagine her mother in the throes of passion. She had her father’s full lips and his eyes but she had her mother’s nose. Thank God, for her father’s nose was rather thick with a slight bulb on the end. Her mother’s was thin and shaped like the Italian aristocrats of old.

  “She’s really trying hard to convince the church elders that it was all your fault.”

  “Great! So what do you want me to do about it?” Gigi asked, dumping a bunch of ketchup on her fries.

  “She wants you to go to the bishop and tell him that you tricked her and then fall on your knees in penance,�
�� Paulie replied. He took a sip of his beer and then licked his lips where the foam had landed.

  “That’ll be a cold day in hell. Why couldn’t our family have been Baptist or something instead of getting all caught up in this Catholic crap? If I was a Baptist I might be seen as a challenge, not as an abomination.” Gigi tucked a piece of her hair behind her ear.

  “I like your hair longer.”

  “It’s really getting on my nerves.”

  “So the answer is no.”

  “That’s correct,” Gigi said, dunking another fry and popping it in her mouth.

  “I think she misses you, you know.”

  “Yeah, right. I miss you, though. Maybe I could ride around with you on the golf cart.”

  “No can do. Your mother has spies at the club and they’ve been warned to keep a lookout for you.” He golfed every Saturday and Wednesday afternoons at the club with his accounting partners. Her father was a number-cruncher and Gigi still couldn’t balance her checkbook. Financial prowess was obviously not genetic.

  “Damn it. She has her fingers in everything.”

  Her father smiled. “I guess we’ll have to stick to clandestine meeting places.”

  “I love you, Dad.”

  “Take care, kid.”

  They got up and her father snagged the bill. They pulled on it until it ripped in half and her father got the end with the amount. “It’s my treat.”

  “All right,” Gigi said. She gave him a quick hug and left.

  As she rode her bike home, Gigi thought about how she had duped her mother into bringing the church elders to an art exhibit she was putting on. It was supposed to be a show extolling the virtues of the Virgin Mary but instead it was a series of desecrations depicting how Mary had been used by the church to represent something she was not. Her mother had subsequently been shunned by her parish, her most valuable social circle. She had wanted to get back at her mother for loving her religion more than her daughter, but the aftermath was more than Gigi had anticipated. Even her father had given her a good talking-to but in the end he understood why she felt so much animosity toward the church. Her father had accepted her being gay without much ado. He had sighed heavily, coveted other people’s grandchildren, and then went on with his life with a Zen-like stoicism that things just were the way they were. Gigi admired this about him.