Read Online She's Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan - Free Book Online Page B

GLAHWSTAH.” She had curly dark red hair. She had four horizontal creases in her brow that became deeper when she laughed, which was frequently.
    â€œI want to see you again, Boylan. What are you doing tomorrow?” It was Friday night. She was flying back to America on Sunday. “You want to meet at the Great Portland Street tube stop at one?”
    The hell yes.
    Which was where I was at one o’clock the next day, holding a bouquet of roses.
    I was still there at one-fifteen.
    And one-thirty and one forty-five.
    At two o’clock I threw the flowers in a trash can and walked back toward Fitzroy Square, passing by the London Foot Hospital, singing an Elton John song to myself, an old tearjerker about being stood up called “Come Down in Time”:
There are women and women and some
hold you tight / While some leave you counting the stars in the night. . . .
    Whatever it was Donna Fierenza had seen in me by night, she had lost sight of it by morning.
    That night I played “Come Down in Time” at Mr. Pitiful’s. I didn’t sing it, though. They didn’t like it when I sang in the pub. It was too much like someone talking.
    I got paid twenty pounds out of the till when I finished, and I walked in my long dark coat out into the rain.
    Then I stopped in the middle of the street and thought. Donna had said that she was going to a concert that night down at the Marquee Club in Soho. That was why we’d made the afternoon date instead of an evening one. If I went to the Marquee Club right now, there might be time to find her. I hadn’t waited long enough this afternoon—that was it! Surely she’d showed up after two, crushed that I wasn’t there.
    I turned around and started walking toward the Bakerloo line. Then I stopped.
    I was a woman, or felt like one. What kind of relationship did I expect to have with Donna, even if I found her at the Marquee? Women seemed to detect some sort of inner struggle in me anyway, some sort of feminine streak that kept them from getting too close. Surely Donna had sent me a clear enough signal by standing me up.
    I turned around again and started walking home. Then I stopped. The waves crashed against the boardwalk in Surf City.
Maybe you could
be cured by love.
    I ran through the rain to the Bakerloo line.
    It would have been interesting to watch me, from some high window. A young man in the pouring rain—I
think
that’s a man— with a long tattered coat, long blond hair, walking first one direction, then stopping, then walking the other, then turning around again, over and over, spinning like a top. Then, finally, running off in a new direction. I hoped that it was the right one.
    The Marquee Club was on Wardour Street. The Stones and the Who and all those bands had played there a long time ago. At the time, I was reading
The Two Towers
, and to me, Wardour sounded like Mordor. I was every bit as scared heading down there as if I’d been heading with Frodo and Sam for the Cracks of Doom. And I was out of
lembas
, the elven way-bread. Actually,
lembas
wasn’t the only thing I was out of.
    I entered the club at about eleven. It was a punk club now, and a sign on the wall said FUCK HIPPIES. The crowd was breaking up, and the lights were on. People were heading toward the exits. Alone with my long hair and John Lennon glasses, I walked against the tide of pink spikes and blue mohawks. Somebody hit me in the shoulder and said, “Will ye fuck off, ye gay queer?” He pronounced “gay” so that it would rhyme with “hi,” at least it would in America.
    There, up near the front of the stage, was Donna’s brother, Bobby. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt that was buttoned near his navel. “Hey, man,” I said to him. “Is Donna here?”
    He looked at me suspiciously. It
was
his sister we were talking about. On stage they were taking apart the drums. A guy in a torn white T-shirt yelled at