After Delores Read online

  a novel by Sarah Schulman

  Arsenal Pulp Press Vancouver

  AFTER DELORES

  Copyright © 1988 by Sarah Schulman

  Introduction copyright © 2013 by Sarah Schulman

  Arsenal Pulp Press edition: 2013

  First published by E.P. Dutton, 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from Access Copyright.

  ARSENAL PULP PRESS

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  Vancouver, BC V6A 1Z6

  Canada

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  Lyrics from “Bad Girls” by E. Hokenson, B. Sudano, D. Summer, and J. Esposito. Copyright © 1978 by Sweet Summer Night Music, Rick’s Music Inc., and Earbourne Music.

  Excerpt from the poem “Of Mere Being” by Wallace Stevens reprinted from The Palm at the End of the Mind by Wallace Stevens, edited by Holly Stevens, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., publishers.

  Copyright © 1971 by Holly Stevens.

  Excerpts Patti Smith reprinted from Babel, Putnam Publishing Group. Copyright © 1974, 1976, 1977, 1978 by Patti Smith.

  Lyrics from “Can’t Help Falling in Love” by H. Peretti, L. Creatore, and G. Weiss copyright © 1961 by Gladys Music.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.

  Cover photograph: Nan Goldin, “Empty beds, Boston” (1979); Cibachrome, 30 x 40 in (76 x 102 cm)

  Author photograph by b.h. Yael

  Book design by Gerilee McBride

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Schulman, Sarah, 1958-, author

  After Delores / Sarah Schulman.

  First published: New York, Dutton, 1988.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-55152-516-7 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS3569.C5393A47 2013813′.54C2013-903261-4

  C2013-903262-2

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  INTRODUCTION TO NEW EDITION

  Here and Yet, Not There

  Sarah Schulman

  “Hilarious …Hard-core. Makes Bright Lights, Big City and Less Than Zero seem thin and dated.” —Publishers Weekly

  After Delores came out of a vibrant, intense underground of gay women who, in the 1970s and 80s, had been rejected by their families and contexts but refused to give up their homosexuality. There were all kinds of prices one paid for refusing to be subdued; they included poverty, marginalization, and a raw danger that comes into focus when all protections are withheld. There was a physical danger from living without visible ownership by men. Walking down the street alone or with other women, having women coming in and out of each other’s apartments, not having access to men’s money and prestige—all of these anti-social actions telegraphed a vulnerability to exploitation, violence, and derision. Punishment from the outside world, whether active degradation or passive indifference, became combined with abandonment by family: the absence of familial love, understanding, interest, support, and material and emotional structure. This produced a kind of desperation, a desire to exist when one was not supposed to, especially on her own terms. There was desperation for money, for a sense of safety that could never be accomplished, for a place of rest that was not possible. And the only moment when recognition held a glimmer was with each other—equally deprived and equally determined. The women who had the integrity to be out enough to live their sexuality paid a price in every other realm of their lives.

  I now see how that produced a kind of emotional anarchy. If no one cared about what happened to you, then no one cared about how you acted. There was no one more demeaned in your universe than the other gay girls around you, and so replicating the violations she already experienced from her family, from the movies, from her job, was normalizing somehow. Being unaccountable to another lesbian was perhaps the only dominant culture behavior available. So everyone just stood by and let it happen. They simply didn’t believe that lesbians should be accountable for their actions. It’s the flip side of exile: anonymity. Families were back in Michigan or Jamaica or the Bronx or Scarsdale, no one who knew you was watching, and the only ones who were didn’t matter. And yet queer people always needed each other for love and for sex, and for someone to talk to while everybody else in the world was back home for the holidays. I remember Thanksgiving as the busiest day of the year for gay bars. The level of undeserved emotional punishment experienced by queers created an intensity around existence that the protected could never comprehend. It was from this reality that I wrote After Delores.

  • • •

  “A rare and insightful look into the lesbian mind.”

  —New York Times

  After Delores was the first modern lesbian novel to have a rave review in The New York Times, written by Kinky Friedman, a singer with a band called The Texas Jewboys, who also wrote detective novels. The review was titled “She Considered Boys For About Five Minutes,” and he compared me to Kafka. With this observation, he simultaneously recognized the quality of the writing while acknowledging how new and unusual the novel’s point of view was. This, in 1988, was considered to be a good thing. It was very exciting. For the first time in a long time, lesbian readers learned about a book through mainstream media, and our novels were given a capital L … for literature. There was a rise in stature, opportunity, respect, and therefore, possibility. The book’s recognition inspired the publication of other novels with lesbian protagonists over the next four years, thus expanding American literature’s range of character, experience, and perspective. After Delores was translated into eight languages and was widely read and shared around the world.

  But by 1992, this new open-minded environment for lesbian fiction had come to an end, contained by the vagaries of niche marketing. Rarely again would an authentic lesbian novel be reviewed at such a high level by a straight man; it provided too much legitimacy and was too normalizing. Huge retail chains like Barnes & Noble took books with lesbian protagonists off the fiction shelves and stuffed them away in the “Gay” section. Unspoken quotas were imposed by mainstream media outlets on how many lesbian books could be reviewed, forcing such books to compete against each other instead of being evaluated on their literary and intellectual merits. All of this resulted in an unpredictable paradigm readjustment where writers were suddenly allowed to be out of the closet personally and still achieve recognition, but only so long as their books did not have lesbian protagonists. And soon novels with lesbian protagonists disappeared from the mainstream, while lesbian authors who did not represent themselves in their books were allowed to thrive. This, of course, produced a chilling effect, in which talented fiction writers became fearful of writing lesbian novels that they saw as unpublishable, and a plethora of MFA
programs that quickly became necessary to having a serious writing career were unable to provide lesbian students with support and knowledge to write and publish novels based in universes where the author, herself, could also exist. Today, very few novels with lesbian protagonists are written and only a handful are published by mainstream presses, yet it is much, much easier for lesbians and queer women to be out as editors, publishers, and critics, as long as they don’t support lesbian fiction. While lesbian characters exist with more frequency in mainstream books by straight authors, I often do not recognize these characters. We became representable by others, and invisible to ourselves.

  Just a word on form. My first novel, The Sophie Horowitz Story (1984), was the third lesbian detective story to be published. The first was Angel Dance (1977) by MF Beal (a pseudonym, I suppose), followed by Barbara Wilson’s Murder in the Collective (1984). Our lives were a mystery anyway, so the attraction by early lesbian writers made sense. But the choice of genre reflected a desire to be part of popular culture without giving up the authenticity of suspense and threat and romance and pursuit with which we all co-existed. The prototype, of course, is Patricia Highsmith, in particular her book The Price of Salt, the best-selling lesbian novel of all time, published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. In Highsmith’s books (Strangers on a Train, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, etc.) she told us “who did it” right away; the story lay in the perpetrator’s guilt. By the time I got to After Delores, the detective format was dark. Not only was I also in the urban world of “noir,” but I’d gotten there by escaping from the tyranny of positive images that had started to dominate grassroots feminist publishing at the time. Ironically, it was the mainstream that was allowing the pain and contradiction to show, even more ironically because it confirmed their pre-existing prejudices of lesbians as sinister. So truthful, more complex representations were briefly possible in the mainstream because they misinterpreted our contradictions as signs of pathology and not oppression. Even more “ironically,” as lesbian content got pushed out of the mainstream, the field overflowed with lesbian detective novels to the point of banality, because we—ever internalizing how we are viewed in dominant cultur—now believed that we did not deserve literature and allowed ourselves to be contained within a genre that has always been considered second-rate.

  So now what?

  Today, literally twenty-five years after the book’s initial publication, it would be impossible for a novel with a lesbian protagonist who is as honest, irreverent, eccentric, and alone as After Delores’s is, to be published by a mainstream press. And yet we must keep writing these novels, because it is only by presenting innovative material that gatekeepers become accustomed to it and eventually let down their guard. I don’t want to live in a world in which the majority of lesbian representations are family-oriented, celebrity-focused or (shudder), cutesy. Do you?

  1

  I WALKED OUT in the snow trying to get away from Delores’s ghost. It was sitting back in the apartment waiting for me.

  Snow was powdering up the sidewalk, but I’d seen too many winters to be surprised by how beautiful they can be. The sky became sheets of clear plastic that moved alongside me through the streets, turning the city into a night of transparent corridors. I walked through it to a few more beers, different places, and ended up at a big, gay dress-up party in the basement of an old public school.

  There, the winter night that had been walls turned into men and women dancing together and by themselves and not dancing. One more drink and the skin on my face went numb. Then, for the first time that day, I could relax. That’s when I saw Priscilla. Some girl was dressed up as Priscilla Presley in a long black wig and miniskirt wedding dress that said, “I’m a slut but I’m really a virgin,” just the way Elvis liked it. She was so hot in that dress I surprised myself, watching her sashay around the hall handing out autographed pictures of The King and swallowing Dexedrine. When I caught her watching me, she came in like a close-up and said in the sweetest Texarkana voice, “Honey, take me for a ride in your Chevrolet.”

  “You look good in that dress,” I said.

  She was smiling then but I knew she was deadly serious.

  “How good?”

  “Real good.”

  It was all happening so quickly I was almost surprised when Priscilla walked me into a chair and pushed her breasts into my face. I slid my hand down the slope of her ass to the mesa that was the top of her thigh, and then pulled on the rubber seat of her panty girdle, letting it snap back with a slap.

  Once we were out on the dance floor, it got even hotter. I’d never gotten so hot so fast for a girl I didn’t know before. She wrapped me up in her pink tulle veil and I could hear the crinkling of polyster as our bodies rubbed together.

  “You really do it for me, Priscilla.”

  She looked up from her orange lipstick and tons of black eyeliner, smelling cheap like “Charlie” or “Sen-Sen.”

  “Honey, you got strong arms. My daddy is a military man and I know power when I feel it.”

  The music stopped, letting everyone mingle again, but now and then she’d look my way and I knew for sure how hot it was going to be.

  There were maybe a hundred people there that night, but all I saw was Priscilla; otherwise I sat in the chair preoccupied, like sleep or just waiting. In that chair I dreamed that all my teeth were falling out into my hands. I kept trying to stuff them back in until I woke up to Priscilla standing over me, red and shaking. Her demeanor was gone. So was her accent.

  “That bitch,” she said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  I thought she was talking about me.

  “That bitch in the leather jacket. That woman fucked me and then she fucked me over and I’m going to give her hell for it right now.”

  She flicked her bracelets down her wrist in a way that let me know Pris was just an old-time femme. She was ready to walk right up to Ms. Leather Jacket and slap her face, provoking a huge scene. Priscilla’s blood was boiling. She stamped her feet.

  “Oooooooh, that bitch.”

  “Pris,” I said, getting straight right away. “Before you let her have it, why don’t you change out of your costume?”

  “Goddamn that bitch, she can’t get away with this.”

  “Pris, darlin’.” I put my hands on her shoulders. “Get out of the costume. You’ll feel better.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah. She’ll never take you seriously in a white mini wedding gown. Come on, I’ll help you change.”

  As we slipped into the heatless back room and she took off her wig, I realized that I had better get a grip on my drinking so I wouldn’t keep ending up in situations like this one. She stepped out of her dress and left it lying in a heap on the floor. She washed the makeup off her face and put on her real makeup, took off her orange heart-shaped earrings and put on a nice shirt and nice pants. Then she went to tell that girl where to get off.

  There was such a general clamor complete with queer goings-on in that room that night that no one noticed at first when Pris began to yell. Once they caught on, though, everyone pulled back and hung out unabashedly watching them go at it for a while. Ms. Leather was squirming, straining like a big dog on a short leash, trying to get the hell out of there. Pris didn’t give a shit about what anyone thought of her. She just kept lashing away, not letting up for a second. I could tell from her face it was all rat-a-tat-tat. Some of the dancing fags enjoyed it for the dish effect, while most found the whole catfight rather messy and unfortunate. But I was happy. Something about it was exciting to me. If you waited for the right moment you could eventually get revenge. Before that night, I’d never considered fighting back. I was still afraid of consequences. But I got off on Priscilla’s wagging finger, her swaggering shoulders, her mouth moving so fast it flew off her face. She was doing a dance called getting even. It had been a long time since I’d gotten a thing for anyone besides Delores, but maybe Priscilla was a fairy godmother with a bad case
of fifties nostalgia. That’s when I started thinking that I might have a dress-up fetish. But what kind of girl would want to dress up for me? I could practically come just thinking about that. But she wasn’t really Priscilla Presley and that was that.

  By the time Ms. Leather had crawled home and the mess was all cleaned up, I was deep in a dream and stayed there until Pris tapped me on the shoulder and we ended up back in the snow.

  “This is a worthless winter,” I said. “It doesn’t give you anything. Not quiet, not stopping traffic, not everything white. Nothing.”

  Pris didn’t have proper winter boots, so her feet must have been sopping in those thin things with the spiked heels. Still, she enjoyed the sky full of snow, her face shining in the streetlight.

  “Delores walked out on me,” I told her.

  “Let me guess,” she said with a Miss Thing tone in her voice. “She hurt you real bad and all you need is someone to take you home and make you feel better.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t have to.” She was clapping her hands, catching the snow. “I’m little and I’m cute and enough women have told me that’s all they want that I now know that’s all anybody wants.”

  “You want a beer?” I asked, ’cause I wanted one myself.

  “Buy me a slice,” she said, leading me to a pizza parlour run by stoned Arabs with big grins. It was yellow plastic, too much light, with posters of Yemen and grease-stained wax paper everywhere. Under her leather gloves were five long and polished nails on her right hand and three long polished nails on her left. The index and middle were cut, not chewed, to the cuticle.

  “Southpaw?”

  “I’m a left-handed lover,” she said thoughtfully, holding her hand up to the fluorescent light. “When they grow too long, it’s depressing since I don’t like to go without. But don’t get me wrong, I do believe in love.” She had a dreamy teenaged smile on her face. “Want to know what I know?”

  “Sure.” My voice came out like rancid butter.

  “Okay, here it is. Priscilla Presley’s philosophy of lesbian love. First, mistresses are fine, but when it gets too serious there’s only room for one at a time. Two, it’s got to be as over in your head as it is on paper. Three, everybody needs time between affairs to remember who they are. See how easy life can be?”