“After a pitch like that I would’ve guessed you’re in advertising. I’m ready to book.” I shake her hand gently, snapping myself out of an awkward gaze.
Her smooth, rich caramel skin frames a set of piercing amber eyes and full, raspberry-glossed lips wrap gingerly around the rim of her steaming cup of coffee. For the first time in months, I praise Aphrodite for keeping me single for so long.
“So what brings you here?” she asks, eyeing the mixed fruit I piled high atop a wheat bagel. “Business woman or did you just hear there’d be a bunch of party girls crammed into one big-ass convention room for the weekend?”
“Gee, and I thought I was so good at passing,” I joke, stuffing a square of honeydew melon in my mouth.
“Gee, I didn’t know twenty-first century white girls had reason to try,” she fires back, her wit nearly upstaging a radiant smile.
“I run an online catalogue company,” I reply, trying to mimic Poetess’ cool. “I sell action figures, T-shirts, calendars. Whatever unnecessary item you need, just go to Tammy’s Trinkets dot com, your one-stop, shop-at-home crap superstore.”
She swallows and snorts a laugh simultaneously, covering her mouth to avoid showering me with coffee. I wouldn’t have minded. It would make a wildly authentic excuse to prolong the dialogue.
“I’ll have to check it out some time,” she says, moving down to grab a smear of cream cheese for her blueberry bagel.
“That’s an interesting name…Poetess. Is one of your parents a writer?”
“My father’s a professor at Georgetown. He teaches the Harlem Renaissance. Huge fan of Langston Hughes but never did have a son he could name Langston. Guess the Man upstairs was looking out for me on that one.”
I smile as she nibbles the tip of a strawberry impaled on a plastic fork.
“You here with anyone?” she asks, examining the unbitten portion.
Small talk or reconnaissance? I can’t tell, but I guess I can hope anyway. “No, I’m here alone. Just needed a little tax-deductible weekend away from everything.”
She sucks the rest of the strawberry off her fork with narrowed eyes. I think I just got my answer. “Well come on then,” she commands with a tilt of her head. “Let’s go grab us a table near the exit.” Her tailored Donna Karan pantsuit hugs every inch of her tall, slender frame. I trail a few steps behind, deciding the best sight San Francisco has to offer is wiggling right in front of me.
By four p.m., I’m squirming in my seat. The speeches are running long and out of the ten thousand glances at Poetess I’ve stolen since lunch, she was nodding off during at least two of them.
“Hey, Poetess,” I whisper as guest speaker, Lois Rothchild, senior editor of Women in Business, drones on about the insidiousness of the glass ceiling in corporate America. “Wake up. Gloria Steinem is gonna lead the group in stoning a corrupt male corporate executive.”
Stifling a yawn, she discreetly clasps her fingers and stretches stiff arms toward the floor. “Tammy, what in the hell are we doing growing moldy in here? I mean we’re in ’Frisco, girl.”
Next thing I know we’re slipping out the side exit, Poetess leading the way with an impromptu plan to take over the city. We stop off at her room first so she can change into something outrageous for the evening.
“I’m a travel agent. I know where enough five-star restaurants and dyke bars are to keep us living large for a year,” she brags, turning to unbutton her silky blouse after tossing the suit jacket on the bed.
She absently faces the mirror as she pulls the blouse out from her pants. I catch a glimpse of her candy-apple bra displaying tight, magnificent cleavage above firm, chocolaty abs. A tingle ripples between my legs. She smiles back at me from her reflection. I whip myself around toward the door to hide my complexion, which by now is more crimson than her bra, erasing any doubt as to whether I’d enjoyed the view.
“Uh, Poetess, I think I’ll go press the elevator button,” I mumble, eyes tracing sage and purple rectangles in the carpet.
“Tam, pull up a chair if you want. I used to model underwear for catalogues. It doesn’t bother me a bit.” She grins as she slips off her dress pants.
Who needs Vegas? I’ve hit the jackpot right there in ’Frisco. I smile at her free spiritedness. “Sorry for leering,” I confess, “but you do have an amazing body.”
“Thanks.” She winks as though she’d heard that one a million times. She then draws up a clingy black Vera Wang, jumps into a pair of sparkly silver Manolo Blahniks and runs her fingers through wild jet curls. “Outrageous enough?”
“For both of us, which is good because charcoal gray and pink are as wild as I get,” I reply, feeling more like Poetess’ bodyguard than her dinner companion.
“We’ll see about that,” she drawls, grabbing my hand and nearly tugging my arm from its socket.
The Café is the Castro neighborhood’s premier gay/lesbian dance club featuring three bars of top-shelf booze, a jam-packed dance floor, an outdoor patio, and of course, a line snaking out to the curb on weekends. In that outfit, all Poetess needed was her faux supermodel attitude, and we sashayed from the back of the crowd right through the front doors. Heads collided as we entered, and I knew they weren’t gaping at me, or were they? Throughout dinner at Charanga, which consisted of a multitude of unpronounceable tapas or appetizers, I sipped sangria and drove myself to distraction wondering why she was wasting her weekend with me, Clammy Tammy, as I was known in high school. Here she is, this vibrant, exotic woman and she sticks herself with a bland, self-conscious gal from Paramus bent on kicking her own ass for letting her tanning membership lapse.
“I love how that v-neck contours your body. Why don’t you lose this jacket,” Poetess insists. In the middle of the dance floor, she peels it off my shoulders, wraps it around me and uses the sleeves to draw me against her.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather dance with a woman with some rhythm? There’s a nice pick over there,” I suggest, pointing to a chic African-American lovely undulating in a cheetah print spandex one-piece and a spectacular afro like Link’s from The Mod Squad.
“Are you generalizing all white folks as bottom-lip-biting, vanilla robots on the dance floor?”