More Than a Kiss (4 page)

Conversion Version

"You
like her," Edison said as she opened the door of her ancient Volkswagen
bug.

"Maybe,"
Jordan said, climbing into the passenger seat.

"But
we don't even know if she's family," Edison said.  She started the car,
ground the gears until she found reverse and backed out of the parking space
without looking behind her.  A car slammed on its brakes and honked angrily at
her.  Edison ignored it.

"Does
it matter?" Jordan asked.

"Only
if you want to date her."  Edison steered the car out of the hospital
parking lot and toward the exit.

"Maybe
I can finally get that toaster oven I've always wanted," Jordan said.

"She's
a little on the short side for you."

"You're
going out a one-way," Jordan sai
d.

"So?"

"The
wrong way."

Another
car honked at them and the driver shook her fist.  Edison waved brightly at the
angry woman.

Jordan
said, "I don't think she's waving."

"What
makes you say that?"

"The
pinched red face and the spittle spraying out of her mouth."

"Some
people are so excitable," Edison said.  She screeched tires onto the
street and the angry driver laid on her horn and sped past.  Edison shook her
head and sighed.  "You'd think one-way signs are written in stone or
something."

"Well,
they are kind of the law and all that."

They
drove the next five minutes in silence.  Jordan closed her eyes and held her
breath each time Edison cornered the car without braking.

"How
old do you think she is?" Edison asked.

"Who?"

"You
know who."

Jordan
shrugged.  "Thirty."

"How
do you know that?"

"I
don't know that.  You asked me how old I
thought
she was and I
think
she's thirty."

Edison
frowned.  "Kind of young for you."

"I'm
thirty-two.  It wouldn't be like I was robbing the cradle."

"Your
last one was much older." Edison punched the gas to make it through a
yellow light.

Jordan
braced herself by pushing her undamaged hand against the dash. "Age is
relative."

"I'm
pretty sure she had a straight vibe," Edison said.

"Everyone's
straight until proven guilty."

Edison
took her eyes off the road and looked at Jordan for a long moment.  "So,
what's the verdict?  Are you going to ask her out?"

"No. 
Please watch the road."

"No?"

"No. 
I don't do conversions."  Jordan pointed out the windshield.  "The
road, please."

Edison
looked out the window, saying, "You converted me."

"That’s
your version.  My version is that it was an accident."

"You
make it sound like you tripped and fell on top of me until I came," Edison
said.

Jordan
sighed. "Ed, I don't want to talk about us again.  We're best friends. 
We're better off that way.  And as for the doctor… I'm not going to try to
convert her, that's all, end of story."

Edison
looked doubtful.  She said in an off-handed way that meant it wasn't really
off-handed, "Some conversions do themselves."

It
was true that Jordan had met Edison when she was straight.  No, erase that. 
Jordan met Edison when she wasn't a
practicing
lesbian.  She had hired Edison
to hang some new cabinets in the kitchen.  Only half the cabinets were hung
before Jordan had introduced Edison to the world of practicing lesbianism and
it had been kind of an accident.

Jordan
didn't blame herself.  She blamed her overactive vagination.  If Edison didn't
want to be seduced and taken on the kitchen floor she shouldn't have bent over
like that with her butt crack showing.

Jordan
sighed.  She loved Ed.  But she loved her like a best friend.  The problem was
that Ed loved her like a lover.  Jordan wasn't sure how it had happened, but
Edison had moved into her house kind-of-sort-of uninvited.  Something about her
apartment being flooded and being broke and she worked all day at Jordan's
house anyway and she had more than enough room and her portion of the rent
could be taken out of what Jordan was paying her to remodel.  The problem was
that the remodeling was going on forever.  Jordan wondered if that was
intentional.

Edison
pulled her Bug into the driveway of their home.  They looked at the old house
and sighed.  Once upon a time it had been a beautiful old Victorian but now the
paint was peeling, the yard was overgrown and the windows looked like the
cloudy cataracts of a senile old lady.  If the house were a person it would be
Mrs. Haversham from
Great Expectations.

"I
wish this conversion would do itself," Jordan said, pointing at the house
and referring to the ongoing house renovations.

"Where
would the fun be in that?" Edison said.  "Isn’t putting in elbow
grease and sweat and hours upon hours of work worth having something of your
very own, something special and worthwhile, something to give your life
meaning?"

Jordan
got out of the car.  "Are we talking about the house or the doctor?"

"You
tell me."  Edison shut her car door and headed for the porch.

Blue Amy

Jordan
sat cross-legged on the floor in her drawing studio, in the middle of plastic
tarps, paint buckets and half-painted walls, drinking Pinot Gris out of a
coffee mug and contemplating her own conversion.  There were three distinct
stages of her conversion.

Before
she fell out the window:
 
Jordan did not believe in true love.  She did not believe in romance and happily-ever-afters. 
She thought all that malarkey about love was brainwashing doled out by men to
keep women barefoot and pregnant.  It was so ingrained in the female mind that
even lesbians had contracted it like it was a pandemic flu.

During
the fall:
  The
moment she slipped, the exact moment she reached for something to grab hold of
and there was nothing there and she realized she was hurtling toward earth and
imminent death, Jordan thought of how she was dying too young.  She thought of
all the things she hadn't done yet.  She hadn't traveled to New Zealand. She
hadn't been to the top of the Empire State building.  She hadn't written the
novel that would be her seminal masterpiece.  She hadn't experienced true
love.  That was her last thought and it was the clencher.  True love.  She was
going to die a virgin, metaphorically speaking, of the heart.

After
the fall: 
Jordan
saw Amy in the emergency room.  Maybe it was too many endorphins caused by the
fear coursing through her veins, maybe it was the loss of blood, maybe it was
the full moon, maybe it was the chili peppers she ate for dinner last night,
but whatever it was, Jordan was now pretty damn sure she was in love.

She
shook her head, gulped her wine, and reminded herself sternly that she did not
believe in true love.  She did, however, believe in a second glass of wine. 
She lifted the bottle from between her legs and sloshed more into her cup.

She
looked at the half-painted walls and wondered when Edison would ever get around
to finishing them.  It seemed like the whole house was always only halfway
done.  Edison had steadily worked on projects but was always sidetracked by her
brainchildren – the inventions that she was forever tinkering with.  As a
result, the new dishwasher sat in the middle of the kitchen floor, the guest
room toilet was in the hallway, sheets of drywall were stacked in the living
room and not a single wall in the whole place was fully painted.

Jordan
decided to be proactive.  She jimmied open a can of paint with a screwdriver,
stirred the paint, grabbed a brush, and dipped it into the blue paint.
 
It was cerulean blue and her favorite color.  Edison
stored most of the paint up here in her studio so that when it came time to
paint a room she’d know where, in the mess of remodeling, she had stored the
paint.

Jordan
slapped the paint on the wall with one hand and sipped her wine with the
other.  Well, she tried to sip her wine.  She couldn't hold the mug in her left
hand because of the stitches and bandages.  And pain.  She located a roll of
duct tape, which wasn't too hard because Edison bought the stuff by the case
and left it lying all over the house.  Using her teeth, her knees and her good
right hand, Jordan taped the mug of wine to her left hand.  She gave it a trial
run by raising it to her lips and drinking.  It worked beautifully.  Jordan
thought that Edison should invent something like this - a paint holder that had
a sippy cup attached to it.  She could market it to the depressed artist.  And
weren’t all artists depressed?

Jordan
picked up the brush and smeared some of the blue paint on the wall.  She
drank.  She painted.  She let her mind wander.

Jordan
thought about Amy.  She thought about Amy's face.  She was beautiful in an
unassuming, unpretentious way.  Jordan thought about using Amy's face in one of
her illustrations.  She might be perfect for her book-in-progress.  Jordan had
been working on her children's book for the past year.  She drew picture after
picture but was never satisfied with the end result.  Using Amy's face might
give her the inspiration she needed.

Jordan
had a photographic memory.  She could recall in startling detail every face
she'd ever seen.  That talent came in quite handy in art school when she never
finished a drawing class by the time the bell rang.  She'd simply go home,
finish from memory and hand it in the next day.  This talent would also come in
handy if she were ever mugged or kidnapped or a victim of a senseless crime. 
Which hadn't happened, thank God, but if it did she'd be able to draw her own
police sketch.

While
she painted the wall, she thought about Amy's eyes.  They were beautiful, sure,
but so were a million other eyes Jordan had seen.  The thing that made Amy's
eyes different was that what was behind them leaked out.  Okay, leaking wasn't
the best word choice.  What she meant was Amy had eyes with a depth past the
ordinary blue.  They were a blue so deep that they seemed to get darker near
the center and swallow her up.

And
her lips.  Perfect bow-shaped lips.  Teeth that showed when she smiled.  She
had one tooth in the front that was a tiny bit crooked.  Just enough to not be
perfect.  Cheeks with just a hint of color.  A dimple in her right cheek.  Not
in her left.  Just her right.  Her hair wasn't long, wasn't short, wasn't
straight, wasn't curly.  It defied description.  It was perfect.

Jordan's
thoughts were interrupted by a whirring noise.  She turned and saw the little
remote control car roll into the room, travel across the floor and stop about a
foot from her feet.  There was a manila envelope duct-taped to the top of the
car.  Written on the envelope in Edison's scrawl were the words
Dossier of
Dr. Amy Stewart
.

Jordan
peeled the envelope off the car and opened it.  Inside were several pages of
paper.

"What's
all this?" Jordan called out.  She knew Edison had to be somewhere close
by.

Edison
leaned in the doorway with the monitor sunglasses perched on top of her head. 
She froze when she looked at the wall.  "A better question is, what is
that?" she said, jabbing a finger at the wall.

Jordan
followed Edison's stare and gasped.  She had painted Amy.  A large blue
portrait of Amy on the wall.  She hadn't even realized what she'd been doing. 
She raised her left hand and took a gulp of wine.  She choked.  “It’s an
illustration I’m working on.”

“Uh
huh,” Edison said.  “It looks like a blue Amy if you ask me.”

“I
didn’t ask you.”  Jordan waved the papers in the air.  “You Googled her?”

“I
found out a bunch of stuff."

"Oh?"
Jordan tried to act only mildly interested while her heart pounded.

Edison
looked at Jordan's mug taped to her hand.  "Ingenious."

"I
know, right?"

Edison
took another coffee cup off Jordan's drawing table, poured the dregs of
Jordan’s early morning coffee into an old paint can and filled it to the brim
with wine.

Unable
to look at the dossier, Jordan put the envelope on her desk.  "Are you
going to tell me what you found out?  She’s a murderer?  A black widow?  An
angel of death?  A Lorena Bobbit?"

Edison
took a drink then said, "About what you'd expect really.  She's thirty
years old –
you were right on the nose.  Grew up
here.  Got her medical degree in San Diego, interned in Phoenix, practiced two
years back in San Diego and then came here.  She graduated at the top of her
class, has some awards of excellence – I couldn't understand what they were
for, medical mumbo-jumbo of some sort.  Get this - she volunteers at the free
clinic downtown.  She works for free.  That’s like sick and wrong.”

"Wow."

"Yeah,
wow.  She sounds too good to be true, huh?"

Jordan
drank.  "What do you mean?"

Edison
eyed the painting on the wall, walking from one side of the room to the other. 
"Spooky.  It's like her eyes are following me everywhere I walk."

Jordan
drank, nervously waiting for Edison to drop the bomb.

Edison
took another drink.  "A person can't be that good, you know.  There has to
be a skeleton or two in the closet."

"I
suppose you've found out what these skeletons are?

"I
did find out that she's living with another doctor."

"Living
with?"

"It's
a guy.  A damn good-looking guy, too."  Edison extracted a printed photo
from the dossier and showed it to Jordan, saying, "Here's a picture of them
together.  They went to some formal gala together a couple of months ago.  His
name is Dr. Jeremy Blevins."

Jordan
recognized him right away.  "I ran into him."

"When?"

"At
the hospital as I was walking out the door.  I literally ran into him as he was
coming in."

"Well,
I'm afraid your romance with the doc was short-lived.  She's already
taken."  Edison did not look sorry or afraid.  She looked gloating.

Jordan
picked the brush back up.  She had her back to Edison, but she could hear the
smile in her voice as she said, "You'll have to Kilz that first or it'll
bleed through."

Too
bad I can't Kilz her face from my mind, Jordan thought.  She took a drink and
stared at Amy's blue face and didn't hear when Edison left the room.  Jordan
decided not to take Edison’s advice about the Kilz to paint out Amy’s face. 
Instead, she kilzed the bottle of wine and left the portrait on the wall.  Blue
Amy staring down at her would serve as a reminder.  A reminder to never
again allow herself to fall for the true love myth.