Who Killed Jenny Schecter? Ch. 14

"No," Lauren said, half sad and half laughing at herself. "No, my story is pretty much as pathetic as yours. Married to my career. Very few opportunities to meet the right lady. Crazy work schedule. Not very experienced, even now. A couple of affairs, nothing really serious. Starting to get worried about the clock, wondering where the years went, wondering what's left. Wondering where she is, Princess Charming, wondering what the fuck's taking her so long to find me. Wondering ... ." She shut up.

"Wondering what?"

A block went by.

"Wondering ... if there's something wrong with me. I'm not ... unattractive. I hope that doesn't sound egotistical, but, you know, I don't think I need a bag over my head."

Carmen laughed, and Lauren grinned. "But do I give off some vibe to other women, stay away from this one, she's crazy? Wondering if I'm too picky. Or too lazy to go out to the dyke bars and lezzie meet markets, although I just really hate that scene. Wondering if maybe it's because I'm a cop, and women don't want to date cops, even lady cops, and I can't say they're too far from wrong about that. It's miserable being in love with a cop, even well-adjusted, straight ones. Yes, there are cop groupies, but I never met a lezzie cop groupie."

"Life is just so unfair that way," Carmen said,

Lauren laughed. "Yes. So I'm left wondering if I should just throw in the towel and stop looking, just buy myself a weapons-grade Hitachi and a couple quarts of ice cream and say fuck it, I give up."

"No," Carmen said.

"No, what?"

"No, don't give up. Don't ever give up." They rode for a while. "There's something else," Carmen said.

"What?"

"There's nothing wrong with you. You're fine just the way you are, and to think maybe you aren't pretty is just plain crazy. But I can attest, first hand, you don't give off psycho vibes. Anybody in her right mind would be more than happy to go out with you. Be your lover. If there's something wrong, it's with the women you've met. And anyway, the lesbian community isn't exactly teeming with stable, well-adjusted, sane, open, available, happy women trying on their Princess Charming outfits. Maybe we're no worse than any other demographic, but we're sure not any better, either. There's a lot of crazies out there, drama queens, stone butches, militants, the power doms, the whole gamut. I mean, Jesus, we're talking about Hollywood and Los Angeles, right? The Narcissism Capital of the World. Anyway, what is it women always say about men? All the good ones are already married, and the ones who aren't married are gay. It's the same with lesbians. All the good ones are taken, and the ones who aren't taken are straight."

Lauren laughed. After a while she said. "Speaking of which, I have this really stupid, pointless crush, but it's never gonna work out."

"Why not?"

"Like you said, the ones who aren't taken are straight. It's this LAPD homicide detective I worked with once. We were both on a task force for a little while, and I just fell in love with her. Cute as hell. Straight as a diving board. And naturally, somewhat damaged. A Reformed Bad Boy girl."

"What's her name?"

"Dani, spelled D-A-N-I."

"Feel like telling me about her, or is she a sore point?"

Lauren made a ffffft noise. "Well, okay. The first thing you need to know about her is I heard of her long before I ever met her. When you're coming up and you get assigned to a new cop house, your new partner often tells you what's what. You know, stuff like who's a good guy, who's a dickhead, who's an ass-kisser, who to trust, who to avoid, that kinda thing. So anyway, I had a partner who was telling me this kind of stuff, and one of the things he said was, if I ever ran across an LAPD cop named Dani Reese be really careful, or better yet, just stay away from her. Run away, he said. She had once been undercover, was sleeping with some low-level informant drug dealer on a case who got her hooked, and then she had to go into rehab, and probably would have been fired except she had major connections upstairs. But, he said, she was bad news and nobody wanted to work with her, so be warned. And by the way, she's an alcoholic as well as an ex-druggie, she goes to AA and NA, but they say she drinks anyway. Okay, that sounds pretty bad, right? A train wreck waiting to happen. Then next thing we all hear is she gets assigned another fuck-up partner who had actually been in jail for, like, 12 years even though he was innocent, and he sued the city and won a bazillion bucks and got his job back as a homicide detective, which she is, too. So what they did was take the two worst, most fucked-up detective partners in all of LA and teamed them together. Next I hear a year or so later she's sleeping with her captain, then she gets abducted by some Russian mobster in some kind of long-running scandal involving her father, who was previously the leader of a SWAT team but he was involved in this big, famous bank robbery shoot-out. I mean this is the kind of stuff that was just routine gossip, you know? And it just keeps piling up a piece at a time. I never really gave her much thought, I just assumed she was just some bad-ass rotten-apple-turned-urban-legend fucking her way up the ranks. Then Marybeth and I both transferred over to the sheriff's department from the LAPD, anyway, and with ten thousand cops in the LAPD I'd figured I'd never run into her anyway."

"Oh, boy."

"Yep, you know what's coming. So one day I get assigned to this special city/county task force for a couple weeks, and I go to Parker Center and we're all in this big conference room, maybe two dozen of us, and I'm one of only three or four women detectives. I'm a little late and most of the chairs are taken but I find one in the back just as the meeting starts. I'm sitting next to this cool, petite brunette, she's pretty quiet and intense, doesn't say much. After a while it comes time to partner up and get our specific assignments, and we both kind of look at the guys sitting next to us and neither of 'em seems interested in even talking to us, much less partnering with a woman, so she looks at me and says, 'Guess it's you and me,' like she already knows she's radioactive, and I say something lame like, sure, you and me. And it's not until we're in the parking lot heading to her car that she says, 'I'm Dani Reese,' and we shake hands and I introduce myself, but in my head I'm thinking, Oh shit, this is the toxic psycho slut I was told to stay far, far away from, and now she's my fucking partner."

"So anyway, we start working the case, and I discover that yes, she's wired pretty tight, but, you know, not in a bad way. She was just trying really hard to keep it all together, like most of us do, and turns out she was a damn good cop. She was smart, thorough, a good listener when suspects or witnesses were talking. She was sober, went to her AA meetings once in a while. No nonsense, no bullshit. She wasn't chatty, by any means, but you know, after a while she loosened up a little, and sometimes we'd talk about stuff."

"And next thing you know," Carmen said.

"Yeah, exactly. Next thing I know, I've got this crush on her. I discover she's nothing at all like the rumors about her, and rumors are usually full of shit anyway, so I shouldn't be surprised ... but I am. She's not sleeping with her captain, hadn't been for a while. She wasn't seeing anybody. She got along okay with her homicide partner and was happy to get back to working with him again when our case was over, but she wasn't sleeping with him, either. And -- how can I say this? -- I just liked her. She was a good person, just ... quiet. A lot of bad shit had happened to her, but not her fault. And yes, she was a little damaged, but who wouldn't be after what she'd been through? Tough enough when you're the son or daughter of a cop, worse when that cop is an asshole off duty, which I understand her father was, and a corrupt cop, too, it turns out. That's more than enough shit to carry around in your overnight bag. And no surprise whatsoever, I'm just as in love with the damaged part as the rest of her. The compassion thing, the 'My love can make you whole' thing. If you let me, maybe I can fix you."

"Let me see, have I ever been that situation? Oh, right. I wrote the fucking book. 'My love can heal you.'"

"The Big Book of Shane."

"Illustrated and annotated. Did Dani know you were a lesbian?"

"I don't know, but my guess is she did, because she never asked me whether I had a boyfriend or anything. We mostly just talked shop, and about our careers, cases we'd worked. We never went out for a beer, of course, because she was on the wagon, and I could never say, hey, wanna come over for a glass of wine."

"So how bad was the crush? Did she know?"

"How bad? Scale of one to ten, maybe an eight. Fuck it. Nine. Did she know? Hell if I know. She never said anything. People frequently don't know when somebody has a crush on you, and sometimes all it is, they just want to get into your pants, jump your bones--"

"Not that there's anything wrong with that--"

Lauren laughed. "No, not that there's anything wrong with that. But sometimes when you get vibes, it's usually just fucking they want, lust, not love. Anyway, nothing ever happened during the case, and when it was over I lost track of her and haven't run into her since. It was just ... every week that went by, it just got worse and worse. I ate my heart out. Christ, she was so beautiful. Dani Reese. Had these incredible eyes. You could just fall into them. And the way she wore her hair back, had this tiny bun in the back. But she always had this strand of hair, usually on the left, once in a while on the right, once in a while both. Hanging loose. And I just wanted, you know..."

"Reach over and tuck it back."

"Yeah. It was like her signature thing, this leather jacket she always wore, and this lose strand of hair."

"Displaying her rebellious, wild side. Sounds like maybe she's your hang-up," Carmen said. "As long as you've got her in your head, you can't think about anybody else. Can't let somebody else in."

"Maybe," Lauren sighed. "Why do we do it? We love the Bad Boys and the Bad Girls. The damaged, the dented and dinged and the broken. Lesbian or straight, we love the ones we can't have, or shouldn't have, and/or can't possibly fix. The more unavailable they are the more we want them. The emotionally unavailable ones. The commitment-phobes. The runaway brides. Sometimes even the crazies. What the hell is wrong with us?"

"Beats the hell out of me," Carmen said.

They let two blocks go by. "Life sure is fucked up sometimes," Lauren said.

"Sure is."

"Ghosts," Lauren said. "Those fucking ghosts."

"Those fucking ghosts," Carmen agreed.

"How do you get rid of them?"

"I have a theory," Carmen said. "I don't think you can do it yourself. I think maybe the only person who can do that for you is the next person you fall in love with. Only she can drive out the ghost of the one before her. You're stuck with Dani until somebody new comes along and drives her ghost away."

"Did you think your San Diego girl -- what was her name?"

"Robin."

"Did you think Robin would drive the ghost of Shane away?"

"I don't think I thought of it in those terms. But maybe yes, I wanted the ghost of Shane to go away. Stay ... and also go away."

They drove for a while.

"Here's a guilty secret," Carmen said. "I met Robin because I cheated on Shane."

Lauren took her eyes off the highway, looked at Carmen, looked back.

"Yeah. Me. Unfaithful. Miss Poster Girl for Lesbian Monogamy. It was supposed to be a meaningless grudge fuck. Shane had cheated on me, went and fucked Cheri Jaffe with this fancy, expensive, glove-leather strap-on with jewels on it, so one night at a DJ gig, out of the clear blue, I thought, what the fuck. There's a cute, quiet chick giving me the stare, you know, and the needle on the gaydar gauge is moving up and up. And I think, okay, Shane, you fucked Cherie, I'm gonna fuck this one and then tell you all the details so it makes you feel like shit."

"Uh-huh. But that's not how it turned out."

"Yes and no. I fucked her, all right, and told Shane, too, on the spur of the moment a couple weeks later, without the details. Shane didn't care about them, just yes or no, did I do it or not." A block went by.

"There seem to be two kinds of people," Carmen said. "People like Shane, they go from relationship to relationship, literally twice a week in Shane's case, and the idea of monogamy, the idea of settling down with one permanent, long-term lover, one life partner, just doesn't seem to mean anything to them. Then there's people like me. Not only do I not want to fuck a thousand women, I don't even want to fuck ten. Not five. Not even two. All I want is just that one single person, and that would make me happy. Shane and I, we used to talk about birds. We even got these matching bird tattoos, on the backs of our necks." She leaned forward, pulled her ponytail out of the way so Lauren could see, then sat back. "It symbolized the fact that birds mate for life. Well, that's me. I just want one person, one mate for life. Shane, she wants one mate only until the sun comes up tomorrow morning and she has to get up and go to work. Then it's time to move on to the next one."

They drove for a while.

"Can I ask why did you agreed to get married?" Lauren asked. "If you knew this about her?"

"Damned if I know. Well, that's not true. I do know. I even knew back then."

"Let me guess. Because you believed she'd change. If you loved her strong enough and hard enough, she would change, and be yours forever. Your love could fix her."

"Yes. Silly, isn't it?"

"I don't think it's silly at all." Lauren said. "It's how I'd want my lover to be. I think it's how I'd be myself."

They drove for a while.

"You know what I learned?" Carmen asked. "I learned that lesbians are a lot like straight women. You know that cliché about how when a man and woman get married, the woman marries the guy hoping she can change him. The guy marries the woman hoping she'll never change, she'll always be the same as when he married her. And they are both wrong, and neither gets what they want. He never changes, and she always does. Well, I think the same thing can happen to lesbians. I wanted to marry Shane, hoping that my love would be strong enough and powerful enough and magical enough to make her change her ways. And she wanted to marry me, hoping I would always stay the same as I was the day we met. So she and I weren't an iota's worth of difference from a straight couple. One partner is the monogamous, loyal, faithful nest-builder, and the other one is out trying to get into the pants of every piece of tail he can find."

They rode for a while.

"What was so special about Dani?" Carmen asked.

"I'm afraid to tell you, you're going to think it's really pathetic."

"No, I'm not."

"I know. But maybe it really is neurotic of me, or something. Anyway, here it is. You know what 'resting bitch face' is? I think there's other kinds, too. Maybe you don't know this about yourself, Carmen, but you're always smiling. You're cheerful and upbeat, and one of those out-in-the-open, what-you-see-is-what-you-get people. You have 'resting happy face.' Dani was the opposite. She was always frowning and brooding. 'Resting unhappy face.' I know it sounds weird, but she always looked like she was in pain, or, you know, was sad, or thinking about some awful thing in her life. She almost never smiled or laughed, but when she did, it was this big fucking surprise, and it lit up the room. But it was because she always had this intense, inward, painful frown on her face, I always felt ... I don't know ..."

"You always felt you wanted to put your arms around her, and comfort her."

"Yes."

"Tell her everything was going to be okay," Carmen said. "That you'd make it okay, whatever it was. That you could make her happy. You could take away the pain. You could make her laugh."

"Ah, so you're a rescuer," Lauren said. "White Knight Syndrome. Me, too."

"Sure. With Shane, in fact. I always knew she was going through life dragging around these awful things, these psychic wounds. Being an orphan. Being abandoned. Even the promiscuity ... that was a kind of injury, too. And if she would just let me love her enough, I could take her pain away. I would give her all the love she never had before. I would give her the home she'd never had, the caring, the companionship, the stability. I'd build a nest for her. Which assumes she wanted or needed a nest, and you know what they say about assumptions. I thought ... I thought love could fix things. If you had enough of it, if you gave it, all of it, well, it would be enough. It would be enough to fix Shane. Repair all those years of hardship and grief. Me, Carmen the Incredible, I had the power, because I had the love, and it would be all I needed. It would be enough. I could give her something she never had, happiness. Contentment."

"But it wasn't enough."

"No. Not even close. So what I learned was—"

"—we can't fix other people," Lauren finished for her.

"No. We can't fix other people. I'm not even sure we can fix ourselves."

"Actually," Lauren said, "I believe that sometimes we can fix other people, just not too often, and only if they aren't too far gone to be fixed. But yes, by and large, I agree with you. There are people we just can't fix, and we have to learn to let them go. We have to be careful not to fall in love with them, and we just have to walk away. We have to let them go."

"Like Dani," Carmen said. "Can't fix her, can't take away her pain, and can't make her a lesbian."

"Like my Dani. And your Robin. And like Shane. Can't have them, can't fix them. You can love them, but it doesn't do any good, and you just wind up getting hurt yourself."

"Yep."

"Fucking ghosts," Lauren said. Carmen said nothing, and looked out the window.