“Recently? Why?” She punched the slot machine button again, while someone who had won much more than a dollar hollered like a happy wolf elsewhere in the casino.

  “I’ve only ever dated women. You didn’t know that, did you?”

  “No, not really.” It looked like she wanted to say more, but then the slot machine caught her attention again.

  “Oh! Another dollar! Yea!” She looked at me. “I remember you went around with that guy from the morgue a lot. We thought he was your boyfriend. What was his name?”

  “Marty. He was my shield against probing questions about my social life. I know you have at least one child. Do you have more? Did you get married?” I pulled the lever again. Nothing.

  She nodded and told me about her husband Dan and her two other daughters and one son. Dan had died five years before.

  “His death was a shock to me and the kids. He was diagnosed with stomach cancer in April and was dead by the end of May. I knew that some cancers could do that, kill so quickly, but Dan seemed indestructible.”

  “I’m so sorry, Joyce.”

  “Thank you. Oh look! I won another dollar!”

  She stared at the slot machine and hit the button again. It was clear that she didn’t want to say more about her husband. I didn’t push. I figured she’d tell me more when she wanted to, and it wasn’t really my business. We were friends once, but it had been a long time. When she was five dollars up, and I was out twenty, she turned to me and said she was done. I said I’d leave too.

  “I don’t want to be any poorer,” I said.

  We walked away from the flashing lights that were so alluring. I could see how someone could lose hundreds in a slot machine before they knew what hit them. We hugged goodbye and agreed to find each other the next day.

  As I fell asleep that night, I remembered more about Joyce and why she made me smile.

  Ever since I’d been old enough to know that there was an outside world, I had been dying to get away from Fort Wayne. Small town Indiana was not a good place for anyone who was slightly different, and I knew I was very different, although I wasn’t always entirely sure how. I was thrilled when I was accepted into the nursing school affiliated with the old Cook County Hospital in Chicago, but I was surprised by how homesick I felt those first couple of weeks at school. I missed my parents and my old friends. I missed saying good morning to random people walking down the street. I just missed home. Turned out the reality of an exciting outside world was overwhelming, at least at first.

  I barely knew Joyce. I barely knew anyone, but she was the one who found me weeping in a stairwell. She took me to her room and made me a cup of tea. When she told me that she had come all the way from Hawaii for nursing school, I felt like a big baby. After that, she, a few other out-of-towners and I started hanging out together. I had liked Joyce a lot then, so I was glad when Marty started introducing me to Chicago’s gay nightlife. I’d begun to feel very attracted to her and that frightened me. Telling her how I felt about her then was just too dangerous.

  ***

  Sunday: At sea, day 1 of tournament

  Anne Marie and I played well, losing only one game in our group. During the lunch break, she excused herself to chat with a woman with short brown hair and olive skin who didn’t seem to be one of the euchre players. Frankie said that the woman, whose name was Sheila, had chatted up Anne Marie at last night’s dinner.

  “Really? I didn’t see that,” I said.

  Frankie pushed a thick piece of bread through the remnants of pasta sauce on her plate and snorted. “Of course you didn’t. You were caught in the Joyce vortex.”

  “That’s what she’s calling it. Your infatuation with Joyce. The Joyce vortex,” Carol said as she gently nudged Frankie in the ribs and grinned.

  “Very clever,” I said, heavy on the sarcasm.

  Leaning closer to me, Carol said, “So, in nursing school, did you and Joyce play naughty nurses together?” She winked at me in what she thought was a suggestive way but succeeded only in looking like she had developed an unfortunate nervous tic.

  “Naughty night nurses. No. How about naughty nightingales? You know? Florence Nightingale? She was a nurse, so naughty nightingale nurses. Oh, I like that better. Wait—” Frankie continued to elaborate on the theme of alliterative nurses up to no good. I ignored her. “You know my father actually wrote a nurse romance book in the 1960s. High Flight Nurse. I bet I can come up with something better than that.”

  I stiffened up and took a deep breath. “No, Carol, we didn’t. Joyce and I were just friends. That’s it. Just friends.”

  Now Carol looked a bit put out. “Oh, that’s too bad. So no stories about nursing students in their underwear having a pillow fight that dissolves into giggling and a heavy petting session?”

  I shook my head no. I was mildly annoyed with their teasing, but, honestly, she had created a beautiful image of Joyce in my head. I had never seen her in her underwear, but all of a sudden I could see her in a pair of those giant nylon lacy briefs that were so popular at the time. The image made me happy.

  “Well, make something up then! I need to hear a story like that right now,” Carol said.

  I noticed she shot Frankie a look of exasperation at that point. Maybe after 30 years they had hit lesbian bed death, and at least one of them didn’t like it? I was about to ask Carol to elaborate when Anne Marie came back to our table just as Frankie was coming up with more nurse porn titles.

  “Naughty Night Nurses’ Nipples Annihilate Neo-Nazi Nincompoops,” Frankie said triumphantly. “Actually, my dad also wrote Hong Kong Nurse, but I think that was it for him.”

  “What on earth—?” Anne Marie said as she sat down.

  Carol said, “Frankie was imagining what Hannah’s time in nursing school was like.”

  “How is this connected to Hong Kong? Is Joyce from there?”

  “No, she’s from Hawaii, and the reality of nursing school in no way matched Frankie’s imagination,” I said.

  “More’s the pity,” Carol said.

  I asked Anne Marie about Sheila. Turned out she had followed two of her siblings on the cruise. They were the euchre players, not Sheila.

  “We’re not doing anything special for dinner tonight, are we?” Anne Marie asked.

  I saw Joyce and waved. “Special? No. It would just be dinner. Why?”

  “Sheila has invited me to dinner with her and her sister and brother. They want to go to the Brazilian steakhouse restaurant on board. I’d like to go with them.”

  I watched Joyce move through the restaurant. Her gait was smooth, like the 19 year old she was when we first met.

  “It’s all right if I go to dinner with Sheila?”

  “What?” I was puzzled, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of Joyce.

  “I said, it’s all right going to dinner with Sheila tonight?”

  “Of course it’s all right. This is our vacation, your vacation. You can do whatever you like. You don’t need my permission.”

  Anne Marie looked irritated. “I wasn’t asking for your permission. I just wanted to make sure that—”

  “Hi!” Joyce had made her way to our table. “Oh, sorry. Am I interrupting something?” She was wearing a short-sleeve lavender button-down shirt with a peter pan collar, and she looked just as cute as the day before.

  Anne Marie gave her a tight smile. “Absolutely not. Excuse me.” She got up and hurried away from the table. I wasn’t really sure what that was about, but I guess my friends were right. I was in the Joyce vortex once more.

  “I’m really sorry if I interrupted anything.” Joyce looked after Anne Marie. “Is she all right?”

  I shrugged. “I guess so. Sit down. Please.” I indicated the chair vacated by Anne Marie.

  “Thanks,” she said as she took a seat.

  “You remember Frankie and Carol.”

  “Oh yes, of course. How did you do today?”

  Carol gave a thumbs up. Frankie, thankfully, was no longer coming up with titles for nurse porn.

  “We’re still in it to win it,” Frankie said. “And you?”

  “Sam’s a better partner than I thought he’d be. He gives the impression of not taking anything seriously, but he’s a ferocious competitor. Look, I was wondering if you’d like to come with me and Kristen to the Cirque du Soleil show tomorrow night. I hear there are still a few tickets available. It’ll be fun. It’ll be nice to catch up, and Kristen wants to see if she can get any more information out of you about me before she came into my life.”

  Carol kicked me in the ankle and gave me a wink, but I tried to ignore her. I said that the show sounded like a great idea. I gushed about how I’d always wanted to go to a Cirque du Soleil show, but, honestly, Joyce could have asked me to join her at the opening of an envelope. I would have said, “yes.”

  ***

  Monday: At sea, day 2 of tournament

  Joyce and I saw each other only in passing throughout most of the day, and I didn’t let thoughts of seeing the show with her later distract me from euchre. Even when I was dealt a not-so-good hand, I tried to see the possibilities to win. From the time when my mom and uncle first started teaching me how to play, I’ve always found euchre an absorbing way to pass the time. By the end of play, Anne Marie and I had made it into the championship round, which would happen on Friday.

  “Oh my Goddess,” Anne Marie said. “We did so well today! What if we actually win the tournament?”

  Winning wouldn’t make us rich, but we would get another cruise and a little bit of cash. I wouldn’t say “no” to that. And, oh yeah, we would get bragging rights back home.

  We walked back to our suite down the long cruise ship hallway. The doors all looked the same. A cruise ship was basically a floating hotel, but some doors were cracked open, revealing inside ship rooms without windows and crowded with three sets of bunk beds. Others opened up into sunlit rooms with balconies. A steward was delivering champagne and sandwiches to one room. An argument, although I couldn’t discern about what, was going on behind another door.

  I was just going to shower and get ready to go to the Cirque du Soleil show, which also included dinner. I didn’t have much time, but I asked Anne Marie what she was doing tonight, just making conversation as we walked.

  For a reason I couldn’t begin to fathom, she took several moments to answer. She seemed to be waiting for something, although I wasn’t sure for what. I assumed she’d be doing something with Sheila, who’d been hanging around wherever we were playing much of the day.

  “Oh, just dinner with Frankie and Carol. Same old, same old.” She paused. “And Sheila.”

  “That sounds great!” I wondered why she seemed so hesitant to tell me about Sheila coming to dinner. I was happy for Anne Marie. It had been a long time since she had dated anyone casually or seriously. I was beginning to wonder if she had taken a vow of celibacy. Not that there was anything wrong with that, but I got the sense that celibacy was not something she really wanted. Anne Marie sighed as I let us into our cabin.

  I started to undress before taking a shower. “Something wrong?”

  “Nope,” she said. She changed the subject and started chatting about the parasailing excursion she had signed up for when we got to Cozumel. “The pics look so beautiful. I can’t wait.”

  Weeks ago, while we were in the thick of cruise planning, Carol had mentioned to me, almost in passing, that she thought Anne Marie still had a thing for me. Still? Carol had looked at me and asked if I were really that stupid. “She’s carried a torch for you for years. Where have you been?” she had said. Now that I thought about it, I knew that Carol was right. From time to time, I had wondered if Anne Marie had a crush on me. I never asked her because I thought that would be too embarrassing for both of us, and I didn’t want to be in a position to have to tell her that I wasn’t into her.

  “Well, have fun tonight.” She was halfway out the door.

  “Oh, okay. You too.”

  ***

  Over a dinner of grilled rosemary lemon salmon with a side salad and garlic mashed potatoes, Kristen kept trying to get more information about her mother out of me. I didn’t think I had much more to give. I certainly couldn’t remember any dirty secrets, but then the lights went down. The show began. We watched amazing performers hang from floating rings by their arms or their necks or their ankles and fly from one end of the room to the other. Sometimes they were on a trapeze, sometimes on a…well, I don’t know what they were on. I assumed the performers were human, but they moved their bodies like they could decide not to have bones or joints at that particular moment.

  Joyce, Kristen and I stopped by the piano bar afterwards, still gabbing about the glitter-clad girl who squeezed into an impossibly small martini glass and the clowns that were nothing like the clowns we had ever seen before. At one point, Kristen strolled off to chat with a group of people who looked to be about her age. Then Joyce turned to me with a mischievous look on her face.

  “Now we can really talk,” she said.

  And we did, although much of the talk, in my point of view, wasn’t as salacious as Joyce seemed to think it was. She was really interested in hearing about all the gay pride marches and parades I’d gone to over the years. I shared anecdotes about my experiences at several of the parades I’d been to in Chicago and the one time each I’d been to pride in New York and San Francisco. I talked about how miraculous and terrifying the first pride parade in Chicago in 1970 felt and how the Chicago parade had gotten so large that I didn’t go anymore. The Dyke March was smaller and more manageable.

  “But the women are so young. They seem so free. Seeing them makes me so happy and a little jealous.”

  Joyce told me that she started going to San Francisco pride marches with a good friend of hers, a fellow nurse named Eric, and Eric’s friends, in the 1980s. The first time she went, she hadn’t told her husband. In subsequent years, she did. He hadn’t been happy about it, but he knew better than to try and stop her from going, she said. I could tell that going to pride with Eric was a fiercely held and cherished memory.

  “There were six of us, including me, going to those Pride marches, starting in 1981. Each year, there’d be one or two new someones, a new boyfriend here and there, but the core group of us six remained the same. They’re all dead now, Eric and his friends. HIV/AIDS, you know. I’d bring him soup. Eric loved my miso soup. At the end, he wasn’t eating much. The last time, he left the soup untouched. I sat with him. He smiled a little and whispered about detasseling corn. He grew up on a farm in Nebraska.” She paused and added softly, “That was the last time.”

  I put my hand on hers and squeezed gently. “I am so sorry, Joyce. That was a tough time.”

  “Thank you.” She squeezed my hand in return. “What about that guy who we thought was your boyfriend? Is he—?”

  “Alive? Yes. Still alive and kicking. We talk occasionally. Marty attributes his survival to his chronic hemorrhoids.” I chuckled. “But I did lose a few friends to the plague. I cared for some AIDS patients too. I think I was angry all the time during the eighties when AIDS hit and into the nineties. So much ignorance and inaction in the beginning. We couldn’t even get anyone to care, and we were dying.”

  She nodded in quiet agreement. She understood how I felt. She’d been part of the epidemic, too, in her own way, and then she talked about her husband—how they met, how she knew she was in love with him and would marry him.

  “He liked for me to tell him stories about my family. It didn’t matter if I’d told them to him many times. He always liked hearing them because they made him laugh.”

  ***

  Tuesday: Port of call, Jamaica

  When I originally signed up for the excursion to Dunn’s River Falls, I was really glad that Anne Marie was coming with me. Then when Joyce told me that she was coming, too, I was over the moon. I was still glad Anne Marie would be on the excursion, but now I knew it would be great with Joyce coming, too. Kristen was going snorkeling, but I wondered if Sheila would be joining us, which would make it even more fun.

  Anne Marie, Sheila, Joyce and I did go to the falls, a beautiful spot with bright green slightly cloudy water that glowed in the sunlight and rushed loudly down layers of rocks. The air smelled of coconut and sunshine, and people from other cruise excursions were already there climbing to the top in shin deep water to the sound of a kettle drum band playing in the background.

  Anne Marie and Sheila decided that they would climb up the falls. Joyce and I decided instead to explore the adjacent path lined with tiny, vividly pink flowers and brilliant green foliage. I couldn’t have told you the name of anything, but I saw shades of red, yellow and orange that would have pushed the limits of any high definition TV. We reached the river at the base of the fall, all the time feeling a gentle breeze. The sight and sounds of the water were so wonderful, and I liked just being with Joyce. We took off our shoes, leaving them on the shore, and strolled into the river. She was mischievous and had a knack for catching me unawares and then sprinkling me with a handful of water. We didn’t get soaked, but we took a break when we didn’t want to get any wetter. We found a quiet spot to sit, and she told me more about her husband. They seemed to have had a good marriage, for the most part. She missed him still. She admitted that she had had a hard time for a couple of years after he had died.

  “I don’t cry anymore when I think of him. Mostly, I smile. Sometimes the memories of him make me laugh,” she said.

  She asked me if I had found happiness with anyone.

  I told her about Caroline Jane Monette. Everyone who knew her always called her C.J.

  “We were young when we met, still in our twenties. When we met, it was at a party, my God we were attracted to each other right off the bat. I saw C.J. and everything else dropped away. It was just her. She felt the same way about me. We were really happy together, especially in the early years. But we were both addicted to drama. I never knew I had it in me until I met her. My family just wasn’t like that. C.J. and I got into epic fights, nothing physically violent, but we’d yell and scream. She would throw things occasionally. I think we turned little irritations into big dustups because then the makeup sex was just as epic as the fighting.”

 

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