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“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.”
“Thismorning?” 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 apool?”
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 alongsidejewel-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.
