Beggar of Love by Lee Lynch

well-defined cheekbones and jawline of certain models. Her nose was slender and straight, perhaps a little long, with a decided, but not unattractive, little dip at the end of it. Lovers liked to play with the slightly pointed tips of her ears. Her eyes looked lost in dreams until, drawn up in a smile, they seemed hardly able to contain some secret impish jubilance that only intensified when a woman smiled back at her. At the same time, Jefferson’s eyes had a slant of sadness to them, and it was that contrast that made them so memorable.
    As young as she was, Jefferson’s was a graceful, proud figure with an air of competence worn lightly: command without effort and easy, easy laughter. It was obvious why she’d always been selected captain when she was on a team, yet when crossed, or troubled, her silence cowed everyone around her. She was slender, but solid; she was not masculine, but you couldn’t picture her in a dress or nightgown. She wore her clothing loosely, but it was well cut for her body and tended toward muted solids and subtle stripes with jeans and, at work, shorts that did not hide her powerful thighs. She did not walk, she strode. She neither flaunted nor hoarded the money in her family.
    Jefferson loved to dance, and disco was at its height. She would have liked to wear a white suit and black shirt and be the star of the dance bars, but that would require time away from school and sports. Angela came down to the city about once a month to see her arrogant older girlfriend, Frenchy, a tiny butch woman in black jeans, a button-down shirt, and a denim jacket, with her hair cut like Elvis Presley’s, who played a miniature John Travolta, but danced so well with Angela no one laughed at her. After Jefferson finished breaking up with Angela completely, she spent more time with the German professor, but Margo wanted Jefferson at her side or on top of her every minute she wasn’t in a classroom so Jefferson made herself scarce.
    Ginger Quinn was a junior in physical education when Jefferson was a sophomore, so it wasn’t until they roomed on the same floor that she really noticed Ginger. The woman might or might not be gay, but she obviously lived to dance—and danced to live too. She was putting herself through college by teaching kids at a dance school in Washington Heights, not far from where her family lived in the Bronx. The more Ginger didn’t notice her, the more she watched Ginger: in the lounge, at the dining hall, in the gym, and at modern dance performances around town. She’d go up to Ginger after each show and compliment her.
    The third time she went to a performance, she’d been so down, she almost couldn’t get herself together enough to don a clean shirt—white with light blue stripes and a starched collar from the laundry down the street—and black cords. She pulled her leather bomber jacket off as she entered the storefront art space where Ginger was dancing in the West Village. The minute Jefferson saw her, her gloom lifted. Ginger did a dance choreographed for a poem set to music, by that guy Yeats again: “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Jefferson remembered it from class and got tears in her eyes again because it reminded her so much of her family’s vacation cottage in New Hampshire. She wanted to introduce Ginger Quinn to her lake.
    When Jefferson approached Ginger afterward the woman seemed to snap awake, as if she’d been in a trance. “You go to Hunter?” she asked Jefferson.
    After a little chitchat she said, “Ginger, there’s a women’s bar a few blocks from here.” She gave the smile that won over, she’d learned, not only the mothers of her friends, but the young women to whom she found herself attracted. “Come have a drink with me.”
    Ginger hesitated.
    “I’m your biggest fan,” Jefferson said. “The poem you danced to made me cry.”
    That had been the right thing to say.
    She never forgot her pride the first time she walked into a gay bar with Ginger.