Julia Watts - Wedding Bell Blues

Lily and Charlotte’s best friends were Desmond and Ben, who lived in the condo adjoining theirs.

Ex-lovers whose personalities were as different as RuPaul’s and Bruce Bawer’s, Desmond and Ben had continued to share the same living quarters even after they had stopped sharing a bed. It was as if they had decided that now that they were no longer lovers, they would be brothers instead — with a special emphasis on sibling rivalry.

On the evening Lily and Charlotte had naively thought their baby’s conception would take place, Lily had made a pan of her famous eggplant parmesan while Charlotte had gone out to buy the biggest jug of decent wine she could find. That night, after Lily, Desmond, Ben, and Charlotte had eaten dinner and swilled down enough wine to giggle away any awkwardness, Lily had set two black hats on the coffee table, one labeled sperm and one labeled egg. The slip of paper drawn from the sperm hat would determine the sperm donor; the egg hat would reveal the biological mom’s identity. Since Lily and Charlotte’s cycles were in sync, they figured they were equally likely to conceive.

“Who gets to pick?” Charlotte asked.

“Well, one of the boys should get to pick from the sperm hat,” Lily said.

“You do it, Ben. I’m too nervous. I feel like I’m a game-show contestant or something,” Desmond said, his amethyst pinkie ring glittering as he poured himself another glass of wine.

“Oh, for god’s sake—” Ben closed his eyes, picked a slip of paper out of the hat, unfolded it, and glanced at it. “It’s you, Dez.”

Dez leaped out of his chair and began dancing around the room, singing, “I get to be the patriarch!

I get to be the patriarch!” The sight was made all the more comical by the fact that Dez’s large body was clothed in a purple flowered caftan at the time.

“Are you girls sure you want him to be the father?” Ben asked. “I mean, what if the kid turns out to be a boy? Do you really want a son prancing around with Dez’s genetic material?”

“Oh, I want you to listen to her,” Dez said. “Just because she’s got a closetful of Tommy Hilfiger, she thinks she’s the butch one.” He turned to Lily and Charlotte. “Any objections to the kid calling me Big Daddy? It’s what Ben used to call me...once upon a time.”

Ben looked down to hide his red cheeks. “Shut up, Dez. It’s the girls’ turn to draw.”

Lily held out the egg hat, and Charlotte shut her eyes, selected a slip of paper, and glanced at it.

“Omigod! It’s me!” she whooped.

Ben laughed. “The queen and the diesel dyke! What kinda morphodite are you two figuring on making?”

Lily smiled. “Fortunately, a normal child was never what we were shooting for.”

“Well, I, for one, am completely comfortable with the idea,” Dez said. “This child will be yet another fine collaborative effort between Dr. Charlotte Maycomb and Dr. Desmond Reed.”

Colleagues at Atlanta State University, Charlotte and Dez had collaborated on a number of academic papers and one book, The Lust That Dared Not Speak Its Name: A History of Nineteenth-Century British Homosexual Scandals.

After another round of wine, Lily, Charlotte, and Dez retreated upstairs while Ben flipped on the TV to catch the financial report on CNN. Once they were upstairs, Lily presented Dez with a glass jar.

“Oh, so now that you’ve wined me and dined me, you want me to put out, is that it?” he said.

“I guess that’s about the size of it. Uh...maybe you’d like to use the spare bedroom. Charlotte and I will be in our room whenever you’re, uh, ready.”

“Give me that issue of Premiere with Mark Wahlberg on it, and I won’t be a minute.”

Four minutes later, Dez knocked on Lily and Charlotte’s bedroom door. “Here it is, ladies — my cuppa, cuppa burnin’ love.”

Lily gingerly accepted the jar, and Desmond bowed out of the room, with the comment that he was confident they had things under control from there. Lily did her business with the turkey baster, and then Charlotte stood on her head because she had read somewhere that it aided conception.

But the evening of eggplant parmesan was not to be the night of conception. Only unlucky teenagers get pregnant after just one ejaculation. Soon Charlotte, Lily, and Dez had done the jar-and-baster routine so many times that they lost all their self-consciousness. It became a running joke. One afternoon Lily had rung Dez and Ben’s doorbell and greeted them with, “Excuse me, but could I trouble you for a cup of sperm?”

On their last attempt, Dez delivered his jar to their door and said, “This better do the trick. The hair I’m growing on my palms is starting to cause some painful friction.”

It did the trick. And nine months later, little Artemesia Gentileschi Maycomb (Mimi for short) was born. Lily, Dez, and Ben were all present in the birthing room, although Ben had to excuse himself to throw up when he saw the placenta.

Charlotte and Dez had lived long enough to see Mimi’s first birthday. And if it hadn’t been for Dez’s morbid fear of airplanes, they might be alive still. But he refused to fly, so if he and Charlotte were going to attend a conference, no matter how far away it, they always rented a car. So instead of flying into Miami for the gay/lesbian studies conference, they drove, and the rainy roads of southern Georgia robbed Mimi of her Mommy and Dezzy, Lily of her lover and her friend.

Lily gently shook her daughter’s shoulder. “Wake up, sweetie. Time to go see your grandma and grandpa.” Who are batshit crazy, she thought, but obviously she wasn’t going to say this to a one-year old.

“Mama?” Mimi’s blue eyes, the image of her mother’s, were droopy with sleep. “Mick.”

“I’ll get you some milk, Mimi-saurus.” She supposed it was lucky that Mimi had been weaned from breast milk just before her first birthday, since the only kind of milk Lily could provide for her came in a can.

She carried Mimi downstairs and heated up some formula. After Mimi had sucked it down, Lily changed her diaper and brushed through her unruly baby hair — more out of habit than because it did any good.

Lily sighed and wished for a drink, a joint, an excuse. But there was no time for the first two, and her mind was too clouded by grief to think up an excuse. She grabbed her car keys and Mimi’s diaper bag.

It was time to go to church.

CHAPTER 2

Lily felt empty and unsettled as she drove out of downtown Atlanta and into Cobb County. She imagined it was much the same feeling native New Yorkers got when they crossed the line into New Jersey: the feeling of being among “them” instead of “us.”

Downtown Atlanta had character, history, and the tolerant do-what-you-want quality of the city.

Hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurants sat next door to gay leather bars. You could see the church once pastored by Martin Luther King, the Margaret Mitchell House, or (if your tastes ran to the morbid the street corner where Ms. Mitchell was fatally hit by a taxi. The junk-food establishments even had character and history: the Varsity, where comedian Nipsy Russell had once worked as a carhop, and the Majestic, the seedy all-night diner where Jack Kerouac used to kill time.