Passing Remarks

Two things happened to Rosemary early that summer: she won $30,000 playing keno at the Hakoah Club and she fell in love with a woman much younger than herself. Thus, laden with luck, she entered her fifty-first year.

Billie had started turning up at the beach, parking her motorbike in front of Rosemary's house. Sometimes she'd come with friends and sometimes she hadn't. On one such lone evening Billie found herself hassled by a landlocked lout with a hard-on who wanted to know where she got her muscles and her attitude. Billie was deciding what to do to him when a wild and curly wave delivered Rosemary to her feet. Seizing the moment, Billie held out her hand, raised her up and kissed her in a manner the boy and any others bobbing about like tea bags between the flags could not possibly mistake for sisterly.

Of course these dashing beginnings can take you different ways. It's all in the timing and in this case Billie had timed it right. Rosemary was bored. She was dull and sick of it, though the dullness had served its purpose by blunting those bits of desire left over after Lyn had gone back to America last year. She knew this new thing could cause her pain. It seemed like bad luck and it seemed like good luck. Why me? was the question she'd wanted to ask but didn't because in these heady zones it is better not to ask questions to which you do not already know the answers. They dispensed with ritual--that is to say, possibly, a lunch and the trading of recent sexual histories--they just walked back to Rosemary's place and did it.

From then on they met in secret. They met passionately. Rosemary grew thinner, neglected her friends, drank a bit too much, waspermanently wet between her legs, and had never felt better in her life, or not for a long time anyway.

Then Billie didn't phone and didn't come round for a week, which was okay but then it was two weeks and it wasn't. In that fortnight Rosemary was supervising the renovations she was having done on her house thanks to her keno winnings and at work she was winding up her year. While she did these things she thought about what she knew about Billie--she'd dropped out of law at the end of her second year, was now working as a waiter at a cafe in Darlinghurst, and sang with a funk band sometimes.

Late one night the phone rang. She wanted Rosemary to come to this club she was at. She gave directions.

"Can't you come here?"

"No. Listen, just come, will you? We've got to talk."

"We can talk here."

"No."

Rosemary went. She parked and walked to the club. At the hole-in-the-wall entrance she paid the cover charge and the babydyke on the door wearing a T-shirt reading I CAME, I SAW, I'M BORED grabbed her hand and stamped her wrist.

"What does it say? Queer?"

"Only in certain lights," was the reply. Rosemary would have liked to inquire further into the meaning of this but she was anxious to find Billie. She wasn't at the bar. Try the packed dance floor. There she was, and she'd seen Rosemary. She'd caught the woman she was dancing with by the arm and pointed Rosemary out to her. The woman laughed. Rosemary smiled. She leaned against the wall and waited. She was fifty years old. She knew how to wait.

Billie and Rosemary sat at a table. Billie told Rosemary she'd stayed away because she'd wanted to be sure about what she wanted from this relationship. She wanted to wake up next to Rosemary in the morning quite often, see movies, go shopping with her, and meet her friends and if she couldn't have these things then clearly this thing wasn't going anywhere and they might as well stop it now.

"It doesn't have to stop," said Rosemary, and Billie took Rosemary's hand and led her to a dark room, to a mattress on the floor where Billie whispered, "Darling, raise your hips," so her lips and tongue could provide the pleasure they both sought.