how could she blame anyone for adoring her Peter, cutie that he was? She was happy to know that Lee and Peter were good friends—and nothing more. She even allowed herself to hope that someday Lee’s penchant for dressing up in women’s clothing might wear off on Peter.
More than once, she had thought about enlisting Lee as an ally in her plans to get Peter into a dress, but, really, it was her hope that the idea, when it came, would be Peter’s alone—well, with maybe just a little nudge or two from her in that direction, but without outside prompting. When it happened, she wanted it to be utterly intimate, something private to be shared by the two of them alone. With Lee involved, it would be more of a camp thing; funnier, but less sexy, somehow.
“No, nothing like that,” she said. “It’s just...I don’t know. He seems worried about something, but he keeps insisting everything is just fine.”
Lee shrugged. “I could stop by later and visit. Maybe it’s one of those guy things, you know, that men are embarrassed to talk about with women.”
“I don’t know...,” she said hesitatingly.
“And I am a guy, you might have noticed, despite the muumuu.”
“You may be right,” Teri said with a sigh. “Would you mind stopping by, just to see if he has anything he wants to say?”
“No problema.” Lee was always happy to stop by for a visit with Peter. He knew that his crush on his neighbor was hopeless, but that didn’t hinder him from engaging in his fantasies. Anyway, Peter was a nice guy, and he genuinely enjoyed his company. And he did design the most divine frocks. Once, he’d actually made a special gown for Lee, which was his all time favorite. It was so deliciously tacky. You just couldn’t find dresses like that in the catalogs.
“How’s the writing coming, by the way?” Teri asked.
“Oh, writing.” He shrugged. “It’s like taking a piss in a windstorm, you know: you put a lot out but when you’re done it seems like there is not much to show for it. I’m doing an article on Halloween in the Castro, for the Bay Area Reporter. Yawn.”
“It will be fun, I’m sure,” Teri assured him. “I always love your pieces.”
“Can I help?” Lee asked, indicating the laundry she was sorting. “I’m all finished with mine.”
“Oh, no....” Teri hesitated. She had put Peter’s jockey shorts and the jockstrap that he wore when he jogged into a separate pile. “Well, you could put those in washer for me while I finish sorting out the rest.”
“Gladly,” Lee said with genuine enthusiasm in his voice. He scooped up the pile of dirty underwear. Teri discreetly turned her back while he loaded them into a washer. If he were going to do anything kinky, like sniffing them—which she had been known to do a time or two herself, all those raunchy male scents—she thought she would just as soon not see. What she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her any.
At the washer, Lee paused to take just the quickest, tiniest sniff.
* * * *
“He’s wearing a muumuu today,” Gladys told her husband when she got back to their apartment.
Abner Kravitz harrumphed his disapproval. “Damned fruits,” he said from behind his newspaper. “Maybe it is time we moved. There’s too damn many of them around here, if you ask me. Him downstairs, and that fairy dress designer next door, and....”
“Peter Warren? But he’s married,” she said, opening and closing closets and dresser drawers.
“To a dyke.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Come on, a woman cop? Of course she’s a dyke. It’s one of those marriages of convenience you read about in the papers. Some jobs you got to keep up a front.”
Gladys frowned while she put shirts on hangers. She could not think why a dress designer would need to keep up a front. For that matter, in San Francisco, it did not seem to her like a policewoman needed to worry over much about that sort of thing either. Didn’t she read that the San Francisco Police Department actively recruited from the gay community?
Besides, that nice Mister Warren next door was so polite. And so cute, too. She just could not imagine anyone that attractive being homosexual, not when he could have his pick of women. Even older women, if he was so minded. The other nurses said that young men often liked older women. And the way he sometimes looked at her, she could not help wondering. Really, she wasn’t that much older. And she was a nurse, a professional woman...Men liked a woman they could respect.
“She just needs a real man, is all, that’s all any of those women need to straighten them out,” Abner said. His newspaper rustled as he turned a page. He segued back to his earlier comments. “The problem is, where would we move to in this town? They’re all over the place. You can’t get away from fags and dykes, everywhere you turn. Like flies on garbage.”
“Oh, that reminds me,” Gladys said, slamming the last drawer shut. “Don’t forget to take out the garbage.”
* * * *
Later, when Gladys, dressed in cheery flowered scrubs and sensible nurse-shoes, had gone off to work, Abner remembered the garbage. He tugged the plastic bag from the can and stepped out to take it to the chute at the end of the hall, and there she was, the dyke cop, just getting off the elevator with her laundry.
As he strolled down the hall in her direction, a sock fell out of her basket. She set the basket down on the floor and bent to pick up the sock. Her curvaceous rump made a target too tempting for him to ignore. Abner slid a hand quickly and lightly over it as he passed.
“Whoa!” she exclaimed, straightening and turning towards him. “What’s with the hands, Buster?”
“Sorry,” he said, smirking and looking not at all apologetic. “I tripped. Kind of lost my balance, you know?”
“You know, you can be arrested for sexual assault, Mister Kravitz.” She gave him her cop-glower.
“Look, it was an accident, okay, don’t get your drawers in a knot,” he said sharply. He went past her toward the garbage chute.
“Well, you want to be a little more careful,” she told his back. “People can get hurt in accidents. Real bad.”
“Yeah, I’ll watch myself,” he said without looking back. Like, he was worried about a dyke cop. What was she going to do anyway: tell her fag husband? Who’d probably come over and beat him with a powder puff.
He laughed aloud to himself at that idea. A powder puff. Might be kind of fun, if you thought about it. “Here, hit me here, please, Mister Fag, oh, again, please.” He laughed again.
* * * *
Peter was furious when she told him about the incident. “That creep,” he said angrily. “I ought to go over there and punch him in the nose. Teach him a lesson.”
“Don’t you dare,” she said. “You’d just get yourself arrested for assault and I would have to come bail you out.”
“Maybe. But it would be worth it.”
