I suddenly felt a hand on the small of my back, and I startled.
Oh no. We hadn’t said good-bye last night at all, had we?
His hand slid up my naked back now, tracing my spine. “Good morning,” Jay whispered in my ear, his mouth close enough that I could feel his breath on my cheek, his thumb caressing my neck.
I sat up quickly and wrapped the sheet around my chest. I faced away from him, toward that annoying too-bright tear in the blind. What had I done last night?
I closed my eyes for a moment, breathed slowly in and out, tried to imagine the path we would’ve walked to stumble back to my apartment from the speakeasy, but I couldn’t remember actually walking that path. In a flash I remembered warm, wet lips pressed hard against my neck. I reached my hand up now and the skin felt tender.
“Catherine,” Jay said my name softly and sat up. He reached for my shoulders, rubbing them gently.
“Just drinking and talking, hmmm?” I said. I most certainly remembered that’s what we’d agreed to, before we’d downed too much liquor and somehow ended up… here.
“Drinking and talking,” Jay repeated. His hand traced back down my spine slowly and I shivered a little. He leaned his face in close to my hair, kissed the nape of my neck. “And this, too,” he whispered. “It doesn’t have to mean anything,” he repeated. “We could just… get together from time to time.”
“Get together?” I laughed a little. “Is that what people are calling it these days?”
“I enjoyed your company last night,” he said, ignoring my sarcasm. “I’ve been alone for months now, and it’s hard to be alone all the time.”
His hand felt kind of nice on my back, and I almost understood what he was saying. What it was he wanted. That finding pleasure with another person was fine and even good, and maybe I wanted it too?
“All right,” I finally said softly, which somehow felt like saying too much, and not enough, all at the same time. But then I added, “Do you mind leaving through the fire escape? I don’t want to have to explain you to my roommate.”
* * *
MYRTLE LIKED TO call me Saint Catherine, due to my very dull （her word） love life.
Oh to be young and single in the city, she would say, her voice exuding the kind of longing that came with being married to a man you didn’t quite love for so many years. That came with wondering how other men might treat her better or believing that, at the very least, I should be able to find one of those so-called good men and she could live vicariously through me. She looked at me and saw so much wasted possibility. I looked at her and saw what I never wanted to become: a woman who was trapped.
But Myrtle was wrong. I was no saint. I was never a saint. There had been men since I’d moved to New York that I’d never dream of telling her about. Not men I’d ever marry. But other men I’d snuck out through the fire escape. Three of them, in fact, in the past three years. One named Jack my first year living here who I’d even dated for a little while until we both lost interest and stopped telephoning each other. Two others I’d met, brought back here for only a night, and then had discarded, just like that. I could not imagine the look on Myrtle’s face if she were to know about these men, these illicit and enjoyable things I’d done with them. But why was it wrong for a woman to want pleasure, with nothing else attached to it? Why did sex have to mean anything more for a woman than it did for a man?
“I’ll call you,” Jay said with an easy smile, as he disappeared out my bedroom window, down the three flights of steps to the alleyway below.
And I thought it was fifty-fifty whether he actually would telephone or not. Either way, I felt okay about it.
Daisy 1920
LOUISVILLE
MOTHER ALWAYS USED TO TELL Rose and me this story when we were little girls, about when I was a baby. I came into this world in December of 1899, just weeks before Governor Goebel was shot and the whole entire state of Kentucky went crazy. We were on the brink of a civil war. Violence erupted in the streets of Louisville, and there Mother was, with a newborn baby girl. Daddy was terrified and wouldn’t let her leave the house, even to take me on a walk down the street in my carriage. Mother said she stayed at home, shut entirely inside the house for the first six months of my life. It wasn’t until summer that she dared to let sunlight touch my skin.
I never knew what I was meant to do in this life, Mother would tell us, until I had this tiny little baby. My tiny little Daisy Fay. And then my whole life was certain. My only job was to keep you safe. My only job was to protect you from this world.