Maggie's Mirror
copyright © 1995, 1996.
Amy T. Goodloe
do not reproduce without permission
Angie looked forward to the San Francisco Book Fair every year. Whenever she complained about the cost of living in the bay area, her friends reminded her again why she had moved here. "For the culture," they said. "The books, the writers, the people." They were right. Your rent isn't for the actual property you live in, she had to admit, but for the whole area. And she loved the area, and all the people she knew in it, her friends who loved her and supported her, even during the months when she couldn't write.Every year for the past seven years she had been invited to speak on a panel at the fair, sometimes discussing the work of local authors, sometimes reviewing the market conditions for women writers. Being involved on the panels gave her the chance to drum up business for the workshops she conducted throughout the year, and was the only source of advertising she needed, besides the fact that she had written five novels.
But this year Angie wanted a break. She hadn't seen Maggie in almost ten months, but the memory of meeting her at last year's book fair was too strong. Maggie had been everything Angie had ever hoped to find in a lover; she had seemed so perfect, so compatible, the fit "just right," at least at first. "I couldn't have created a character more like my ideal lover than Maggie," Angie had told her friends at the time. She was glad when they chose not to remind her of those words.
~*~
The air was crisp, the sky no longer the cloudless blue it had been all summer, and Angie could smell the rain coming. It always rained the week before the Book Fair, for the first time in months, signaling what little change of seasons there is in the Bay Area. Angie inhaled deeply and went back to work at her desk, preparing notes for the panel discussion.
Angie had been asked to speak on a panel devoted to the creative process, and her topic was "creating believable characters," something she thought she had some talent for. Other aspects of writing were like a craft to her, something she studied and worked hard to be good at, but characters came easily to her. She had created dozens of characters, most of whom were based on her friends and family, although some were projections of the people she wanted to meet but had not yet been able to. Especially the heroines.
After her session on Saturday, Angie and the other panelists greeted a line of visitors, mostly wanting autographs for their new purchases, some wanting advice on technique and the publishing industry and the writing life in general. Last in line to see Angie was a tall, striking woman with dark red hair and light green eyes. She wore a brown tweed suit, with men's pants tailored to fit the curves of her body, and a paisley scarf tied at the throat. The outfit seemed familiar to Angie but she couldn't place where she had seen it before.
The woman stared at Angie, her brow furrowed, her fingers nervously picking at the edges of her notebook. She opened the notebook and scanned the page, and then closed it quickly.
"Can I help you?" Angie said. "Would you like me to sign your book?"
"Oh," the woman said, trying to smile. She reached into the black leather bag hanging from her shoulder and fumbled through several books. "I, uh. I forgot to bring it with me. I have all your books, all in hard cover, at home."
"Even the new one?" Angie asked. Say It Isn't So had just been published, and wasn't yet for sale at most of the bookstores in the Bay Area, although Angie thought perhaps the women's bookstore had received some early copies.
The woman nodded. "I love your writing," she said.
Angie smiled warmly and the woman stopped fidgeting with her notebook. She sighed deeply and relaxed her shoulders. "So," she said, "you're Angela Waters."
"And you are?" Angie asked, flattered by the obvious admiration.
"Oh. Sorry. My name's Margaret Cassady. Call me Maggie." Maggie held out her hand and Angie shook it gently.
"Nice to meet you, Maggie."
"Would you like to have coffee with me?"
Angie agreed, surprising the other panelists, whom she had promised to have lunch with. But Margaret Cassady was a very attractive woman, and she was sure they would understand.
She followed Maggie over to the cafe area, watching her move with an interesting mixture of confidence and insecurity. It was a walk she wanted to capture in writing, for future use as a character study. Or was it just an excuse to appreciate the fine shape Margaret Cassady was in? Angie wasn't sure, and she wasn't sure it mattered. She watched Maggie order an espresso and smiled as she began twirling strands of her long red hair into tiny curls.
Angie ordered a double mocha and a butterscotch brownie and was reaching into her pocket to display the vendor's card that would give her a twenty percent discount when Maggie held up her hand. "Oh, no, let me. Please. It would be my pleasure to buy coffee for Angela Waters."
Angie smiled and eased the card back into her pocket. "Thank you," she said. "And please, call me Angie."
"Angie," Maggie said, and giggled softly.
~*~
Over coffee they discussed the highlights of the fair, and the other panels Maggie had been to. This was her first book fair, although she had always wanted to come to one. She had just moved to San Francisco several months earlier, she told Angie, in order to pursue her dream.
"Which is?" Angie asked.
"To become a writer," Maggie replied.
"Oh? What do you write?"
Maggie looked down at her coffee and stirred it several times. She reached into her bag and pulled out a black compact mirror and examined her teeth.
"Mysteries," she said.
Angie suppressed a little laugh. She had to ask. "Are you a lesbian, by any chance?"
Maggie looked startled. "Yes. Why?"
"How do you like the bay area so far, in terms of lesbian culture?" she asked, not in the mood to discuss the prospects of a career in lesbian mysteries.
"It's amazing," Maggie said, her eyes widening. "So many women. And so many literary and cultural events."
"Yes, I know what you mean," Angie said, although she wasn't sure she had the same events in mind. Maggie was a beautiful woman, just the type Angie felt physically attracted to, but she seemed a little too giddy, and a little too preoccupied with her appearance, like the girls Angie had always fallen for in college, the red heads who broke her heart when they named Danielle Steele as their favorite author.
~*~
After several dates Angie realized that there was more to Maggie than she had first imagined, almost as if Maggie grew smarter and more interesting each time they were together. Over dinner they would discuss books of all kinds, fiction, history, poetry, theory. Maggie's appetite for books amazed Angie, as did her appetite for ideas and language and sex. They would lay in bed together, kissing and moaning in passion one minute, discussing the fine shades of meaning in the word "discourse" the next.
Maggie wanted to know everything about Angie's life, what her childhood was like, how her parents had treated her, when she wrote her first story, how she became a novelist. She was hungry for stories and Angie was happy to feed them to her, finding it a delightful change from her usual role as "listener" in past relationships. She was increasingly amazed with Maggie, with the depth of her mind and the breadth of her insight. She couldn't believe Maggie had just appeared in her life out of nowhere.
"You are like a dream," she said one night, as they lay stretched out on Angie's queen sized bed. Maggie's body was damp with sweat and her breath came deeply and slowly. She lifted Angie's hand and placed it between her breasts. Angie could feel her heart beating heavily. "This is for real," Maggie said.
Angie's friends couldn't understand what she saw in Maggie. They thought she was shallow and silly, always cracking jokes that made fun of others, but Angie knew that she only did that because she was nervous. They didn't know Maggie the way she did, and she was protective of her.
"She's brilliant," Angie told them. "You should hear some of her ideas for stories."
"But what's up with her sense of humor?" Nancy wanted to know. "And what's the deal with the mirrors?" Tina asked. "Have you noticed how often she pulls out that damn compact and looks at herself? What the hell is she so uptight about?"
It was true that Maggie had a bit of an obsession with mirrors, particularly the little black one she carried with her everywhere, but it seemed minor to Angie, just one of Maggie's adorable idiosyncrasies. "She's got an incredible mind," Angie said, feeling defensive. "So who cares if she also wants to make sure she looks great?"
"And she does look great," Joan agreed.
~*~
After they had been dating one month Angie planned a special evening, starting with dinner at their favorite Italian restaurant and ending up with a room full of candlelight and a reading from one of Angie's favorite short stories. After Angie lit the last candle she slipped her arms behind Maggie and began kissing the back of her neck. Her hands caressed Maggie's shoulders and slid down the front of her shirt, which she began to unbutton.
"What are you doing?" Maggie asked.
"What do you think I'm doing?" Angie whispered in her ear.
"Not here."
"What do you mean, not here? This is the same room we've made love in at least a dozen times already." Angie unbuttoned the last button from Maggie's shirt and began to lift it off of her shoulders.
"Give me that," Maggie ordered, taking the shirt from Angie. "I'm sorry," she said, looking at the mirror on the wall, framed in silver metal, "but I have to do this." She draped her shirt over the mirror, making sure the shoulders of the shirt covered the corners of the mirror completely.
"Honey?" Angie asked. "What was that all about?"
"What?" Maggie asked, leaning into Angie and kissing her on the neck. Angie reached behind her and unfastened her bra.
"Is this OK?" she asked.
"Of course," Maggie answered, lifting Angie's shirt over her head. "You are so beautiful," she said, as she guided Angie to the bed and began nibbling on her stomach. Angie forgot all about the book of short stories, her favorite one marked with the embroidered bookmark Maggie had given her.
~*~
Angie's favorite way to spend a Saturday was to wake up late, eat omelets for brunch at Pierre's, and look through the books and magazines at March's Books. It was Maggie's favorite too. They spent almost every Saturday together, looking through the books in the history, literature, women's studies and lesbigay sections. Maggie would sit in one corner and read through several of the books she had pulled off the shelves, while Angie skimmed the journals looking for reviews of women's writing and new books to check out. In the evenings they went to readings, or sometimes to movies or plays, but almost always to something that they could talk about later, late into the night, teasing each other about who could stay up the latest. Angie had always been a night owl, late to bed and late to rise. Maggie said she had been too.
Occasionally they would go to parties put on by Angie's friends, but she could sense Maggie's discomfort around strangers and they wouldn't stay long. Maggie hadn't made many friends of her own since she moved to the Bay Area, but she seemed content with Angie, with the time they spent together and the time they spent apart. Angie needed a lot of time and space alone, to read and write, and Maggie said she understood completely. She was a writer, too, she said.
~*~
Just after Christmas Angie and Maggie drove up Route 1, to watch the angry winter waves crashing into the gray rocks. At Jordan Beach they parked and got out, bundling up in the winter parkas that seemed so out of place in San Francisco. On the beach they chased each other, tossing clumps of damp sand at the other's legs. Maggie ran towards the massive rock at the end of the beach and began climbing it, just as Angie reached her.
"This reminds me of my summer trip to Scotland," Maggie said, "the year after I graduated high school." She was already several feet above Angie.
"You haven't told me about that," Angie said, thinking through the details of Maggie's life that she seemed to know so well. She struggled to climb up after her.
"Oh?" Maggie asked, resting for a moment on a flat piece of rock.
"Did you climb rocks there or something?" Angie asked, as she reached the flat space and sat down beside Maggie.
"Yes."
"And?"
"I forgot."
"Wait a minute, I thought you went to the Offshore Sailing School the summer after you graduated high school, in Captiva, Florida. I remember that because it was so amazing, that you would have been there, when I had my character Alicia go to that very same school in Windy Night."
Maggie zipped her parka up around her neck and shivered. She stood up and began climbing to the next level.
For the first time since she met Maggie it occurred to Angie that Maggie's hold on the truth was less than secure.
"C'mon," Maggie said. "We've got to climb to the top. I can never climb anything half way."
With a chill Angie realized where she had heard those words before. Her character Jill had said that, in Morgan's Birthday. Her mind raced through other details of Maggie's life, through her stories of childhood and college, her past lovers, the vacations she'd been on, the experiences she had lived through. It all seemed so familiar to her. But these were Maggie's stories, her lover's history, so of course she knew it well. Sure there had been the odd coincidence here or there, the time Maggie had dated her ex-boyfriend's ex-girlfriend, just like Alana did in Minus One, and the time she got lost in Mexico and ended up in a whorehouse, which had also happened to Marla in The Way to Hapeville. But Angie had written about common human experiences and Maggie had lived some of them. There was nothing unusual about that.
By the time she reached the top of the rock, Angie had convinced herself that she was just imagining things, that the coincidences were just that. "I'm blurring the lines between my past, Maggie's past and the lives of my characters," she thought to herself. She had always had a little trouble remembering just what had actually happened to her and what she had written about happening to others, so it seemed to make sense to her. And besides, Maggie was so much like the woman she had always dreamed of meeting. She had never thought the dream would come true.
The top of the rock was large and flat, and Angie stood still to take in the view. The ocean was dark green and churning, showing signs of a storm brewing way off the coast. Maggie was sitting on the edge several yards away, looking down at the water. Angie thought she could hear words, but the wind whistled in her ears. She walked up behind Maggie and saw something shiny in her lap. "That damn mirror!" she said, and Maggie turned around quickly. The mirror slid off of her lap and floated through the air, almost in slow motion. Angie stepped to the edge of the rock just in time to see it crash against one of the smaller rocks in the ocean, shattering into a hundred silver slivers.
Maggie stared down at the spot where the mirror first hit the rock and furrowed her brow. She started rocking back and forth and Angie put her arms around her from behind.
"Honey, it was just a mirror," she said. "Look, if you're cold we should go back to the car." Maggie was shivering.
"Dammit," she snapped. "I'm not cold and take your arms off of me. I'm not your child."
Angie stepped back, hurt and confused. Maggie continued to rock back and forth, inching dangerously close to the edge of the rock. Suddenly Angie remembered Helen, from Say It Isn't So, who couldn't resist the urge to jump from high places, and she ran to Maggie and pulled her backwards.
"What the hell are you doing?" Maggie demanded, looking up at Angie from a mess of red hair. The cornea on one of her eyes looked bigger than the other, like it had sprouted some strange growth, and Angie realized that it was a colored contact that had slipped to the side.
"Your eyes aren't even green!" Angie said, as Maggie closed her eyes and tried to squeeze the contact back into place. "Who are you?" she asked.
Maggie sat up. "I'm your lover, Angie. You love me." Maggie's hand was warm on the back of Angie's neck. She yielded to Maggie's kiss and felt the warmth rush back to her wind chapped cheeks. "You love me," Maggie repeated, kissing her deeply and unzipping her parka.
"What are you doing?" Angie asked, even while she began doing the same to Maggie.
"Make love to me," Maggie whispered into Angie's throat, and began nibbling it, making Angie moan.
"Here?" Angie asked, but the question was lost in the wind, and she already knew the answer.
~*~
The day before New Year's Eve Angie's landlord told her he was having a big party in the house and she might want to consider spending the night elsewhere, if she didn't want to be kept up all night by a bunch of drunk gay men.
"Do you think maybe we could stay at your place?" Angie asked, although they had never stayed at Maggie's before. Maggie lived in a tiny one bedroom in the Haight, with only a twin bed, and she didn't like for them to spend much time there. The clutter embarrassed her, she said, and she preferred to hang out at Angie's, so she could pet the cats and spread out on Angie's big bed.
"I guess," Maggie answered. "Doesn't sound like we have much of a choice, does it?"
They had plans to go to a party at Joan and Nancy's house in the Castro, but Maggie knew that they probably wouldn't be there long. At quarter after midnight, Maggie was ready to go and they said their good nights to everyone, wishing them all a happy new year. Maggie hurried Angie into the bedroom and they both undressed quickly and snuggled under the covers.
"No heat," Maggie explained, pressing her body into Angie's.
"I know how to warm you up," Angie said, but Maggie yawned.
"Not tonight," she said. "I'm really tired." And she rolled over to face the wall, with her back to Angie. They hadn't made love since the time on the rock, but Angie felt satisfied just remembering that day. She couldn't remember ever having an orgasm quite that strong.
Angie put her arms around Maggie from the back and tried to go to sleep, but she felt her hips sliding off of the narrow twin bed and she tried readjusting herself. After several hours, Maggie began snoring, and Angie gave up hope of ever falling asleep. She eased out of the bed and slipped into a pair of sweats draped across the back of an old, blue armchair. The mirrors on the walls twinkled in the moonlight, giving the room an unnatural glow.
Angie eased the door open and checked to make sure Maggie was still snoring as she eased it shut again. Angie had never really spent enough time in Maggie's apartment to look around. She had only come in to get Maggie, to help her carry out her laundry or to go to the bathroom, but never just to hang out. She looked around the tiny den slowly, realizing that there were only four pieces of furniture in the whole room, and at least a thousand books. Books were piled everywhere imaginable, along the back of the love seat, over and under the narrow coffee table, on top of the TV. The tiny black bookshelf was crammed full, with books shoved in at impossible angles.
In the middle of the books, on the coffee table, Angie saw Maggie's laptop computer. Up in the right hand corner a green light was blinking and Angie knew that meant the computer was in "sleep" mode, that a simple keystroke would "wake" it up. She sat down on the love seat and looked at the titles stacked underneath the coffee table. In one pile were ten copies of her fourth novel, The Way to Hapeville, all in hard cover. In another pile were several copies each of her other four novels, including the newest one.
Angie looked again at the computer, it's little green light blinking, beckoning. She stared at the door to Maggie's bedroom for a moment, and then touched the space bar. The hard drive spinned to life, brightening the tiny screen and the room. Angie looked up at the walls and saw that they were covered in tiny round mirrors, like the one, or ones?, Maggie always carried with her. There was no other art on the walls, but at least a hundred of the little black mirrors.
She looked down at the computer screen and blushed, ashamed at her curiosity but unable to stop herself. She knew she was violating Maggie's trust, and was about to put the laptop back to sleep when she noticed the unusual names for the folders on the computer's desktop. Each folder had a different woman's name, and they were color coded, forming an elaborate pattern across the tiny window. Near the bottom right corner Angie saw a folder named "Margaret Cassady," and she moved the trackball pointer over the folder and clicked.
The folder opened and the names of dozens of documents appeared. Most of the names she recognized, as titles from various chapters of her novels, but a few were unfamiliar. She double clicked on the one called "The Eleventh Hour" and watched the word processing program launch, and the document open. It was a paragraph from Minus One, describing Jessie Marlowe's outfit: a brown tweed suit, with men's pants tailored to fit the curves of her body, and a paisley scarf tied at the throat. She opened several other files, each with the same result. They all contained paragraphs from Angie's novels, with information about the characters lives and behaviors and personalities. Angie shivered.
She quit the application and put the machine back to sleep. For what seemed like an hour she gazed at the darkened screen, wondering what to do, and then she heard voices. There were at least two distinct voices coming from Maggie's room and Angie's heart raced. She walked quietly to the door and listened. The conversation was muffled and the pitch erratic, as though the two voices were fighting. "There can't be anyone else in that room," she thought to herself, trying to work up the courage to open the door. She pushed on the doorknob gently and peered inside.
Maggie was kneeling on the bed, looking into one of the mirrors on the wall. Her hands gestured wildly by her side as she explained something to the mirror. Suddenly her voice and demeanor changed and Angie heard the other voice coming from the same person. She pointed at the mirror sternly, as if reprimanding it. Angie shut the door and took a deep breath. Her pants and shoes were in the room but she didn't dare go in. She had left her jacket on a hook on the back of the door and was relieved to find her car keys in the pocket.
As quietly as she could she eased the front door open and slipped out, still wearing Maggie's sweats, the front porch cold beneath her bare feet. She sat in the car for a moment and tried to imagine an excuse, a reason she had suddenly had to leave in the middle of the night, without her clothes. She needed a good excuse, something to tell Maggie when she called so that she wouldn't suspect what Angie had discovered. But Maggie never did call.
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