Chapter Text
INTERVIEW. WEST VILLAGE, NEW YORK CITY. 2011.
“We’re almost ready.”
The young woman behind the camera looks up and offers an apologetic smile.
The interview is off to a slow start and it’s due entirely to her nerves. Her two subjects are an older couple, waiting patiently on the couch. They’re surrounded by photos and knick-knacks collected over their years together, and the young woman they agreed to speak to today is determined to properly frame the shot. She and her assistant have been scurrying around the living room of the rent-controlled apartment, setting up the camera and lighting equipment, and now they’re huddled by a monitor checking their work. Neither of them have noticed the smiles the couple have exchanged periodically, amused by their seemingly boundless energy.
The young woman knows she’s being too exacting. But this documentary has been a side project for a couple of years, and she’s about to apply for a grant that she thinks she has a real shot at. If she wants to include footage from this interview, everything has to be perfect.
“Can you adjust that throw pillow?” The young woman jerks her chin toward the couch. “The yellow one.”
Before her assistant has a chance to move, the woman sitting on the right moves the pillow by a couple of inches. She waves off thanks, and the assistant hustles to check the light one last time before moving to the back of the room.
“Sorry about all that.”
The young woman settles in the chair that they’d pulled over from the dining room and set next to the camera. She exhales, seemingly gathering herself, and her subjects exchange another amused look. They’re both in their seventies now, and they hold hands as they sit, posed next to each other across from a woman young enough to be their granddaughter.
“It’s no problem. We haven’t been in a hurry since–”
“We were your age.”
She offers them a polite laugh, the type they've grown accustomed to from young people over the last decade or so, and looks down at her notepad.
“Can you introduce yourselves? Just your first names to start.”
“Oh, well, I’m Ger–”
“I’m sorry,” the young woman interrupts, her face crumpling in a wince. “But can you address the camera?”
“Oh, of course. My name is Geraldine, and this,” she ignores the teasing pinch to her side, “is my wife, Jacqueline.”
“Our friends call us Gerry and Jack.”
“And how long have you been married?”
“Fifty years,” Gerry answers promptly. This time she flinches at the pinch to her side.
“Two weeks,” Jack announces with a grin, her shoulders back and proud.
The young woman furrows her brow, leaning forward. “Maybe we should back up. Let’s start at the beginning. How did you two meet?”
The two older women turn to each other and smile, warmed already by the memory and the opportunity to share it. This is why they agreed to be interviewed for the documentary after all.
“It was at a bar,” Gerry says, turning back to face the camera. “A bar in Greenwich Village in 1960.”
“1961,” Jack says, patting Gerry’s arm.
“1961,” Gerry repeats. She’s getting older, but she knows perfectly well which year it was. She just likes it when Jack teases her, so she tries to give her the opportunity now and then. “It was a lesbian bar, the kind you’d only know was there if you knew somebody.” She shrugs, laughing as she continues, “It was my home away from home.”
The young woman – a girl, really, in the older couple’s eyes – nods, her expression serious. It will take more than a self deprecating remark for Gerry to make her laugh.
“I was there one night with my friend Patsy, nursing a beer, when Jack walked in. Clearly a first timer. All by her lonesome, too. She was trembling like a leaf, nervous little thing. But beautiful. My God, she was beautiful.”
She looks over at her wife, who beams back at her.
“And I said to Patsy, I said ‘see that girl? I’m going to marry her.’ Like I was in a movie or something. But I just knew, from the first moment I saw her. She was it for me.”
Gerry glances at the interviewer, wishing she could remember her name. Her furrowed brow has melted into a dreamy expression. Gerry smiles. She knew the girl was a romantic. She’s never wrong about these things.
“And in those days,” Gerry continues, making a point to look at the camera, “if you missed your opportunity with someone, you might not get another chance. It was a real risk back then, just to go out to a lesbian bar.”
The girl nods, serious again, but her assistant in the back tilts her head in a silent question.
“You could be arrested,” Gerry continues, figuring she better explain. “If a woman dressed too butch, if two women were caught dancing. Anything they considered deviant. Now this bar was run by the Mafia. And the cops would come by once a week to get their palms greased. There was a red light in the back room they would flash when they knew someone was coming in. All the women would break apart, sit quietly in their chairs sipping their drinks. Sometimes the cops were harmless, just a little flirting with the femmes. Other times, people weren’t so lucky.”
Jack sighs, patting Gerry’s arms. They’d both experienced a night or two like that.
“They could get violent, haul you off in a paddy wagon… The butches usually got the worst of it. And this is when they were getting paid off, imagine if they weren’t getting a dime. So you really didn’t always know if you saw someone one night that you’d ever see them again. People got scared, stayed home. They could move away, and you’d never know. It wasn’t like today, everyone with their phones and the Internet.”
That remark earns her a genuine smile from the young woman.
“You’re such a Luddite,” Jack says, her voice fond. “Tell her the rest of the story.”
“I am telling her. So I see this girl, who looks like she’s about to run any second, and I know I have to talk to her. So I get up, I cross the room and I ask if I can buy her a drink. And she said yes, and we’ve been inseparable ever since.”
Jack smiles at the camera, proud as ever of the fact that it had just taken one look for Gerry to fall head over heels for her.
“And so when you gave different answers about how long you’ve been married…”
Gerry rolls her eyes, but smiles to show that it’s just a joke.
“We have been married for fifty years. In those days, it wasn’t legal because nothing we did was legal. But we had a small ceremony, with just a few friends who were like us. Right in this very living room, in fact. I bought Jack a ring, and everything. We had to tell our neighbors that we were spinster roommates for years and years, but we’ve lived together as a married couple, even if they didn’t know it.”
“But,” Jack says, patting Gerry’s arm again, “we just went down to the courthouse to get married after the state law changed. So technically we’re newlyweds.”
“Yes,” Gerry says, nodding. “So we’ve been married fifty years and two weeks.”
They turn toward each other, and for a moment, everyone and everything in their cramped living room fades away and it's just the two of them.
Jack looks back at the camera first.
“Fifty years and two weeks.”