She opened her eyes involuntarily, moved one arm and looked at her scars. “Ronnie,” she said quietly. “Why?”
“I don’t know why I asked. Did you…was it good with him? The bed part of it?”
“You want to know too much.”
“I—”
“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. She sighed, sat up, yawned. “That didn’t come out right, mean it the way it sounded.”
“I ask too damned many questions.”
“It’s just that I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I know.”
“It’s all…history, really Do you have another cigarette?”
Rae handed her the pack. She took a cigarette out and Rae lit it for her. She drew on it, inhaled, blew out smoke, sat for a moment, then drew a second time on the cigarette. “Do you want to know something? I can’t remember what it was like. I honestly cannot remember, can’t picture it. Not the sex in particular. The whole affair. Living with him, the life we had, everything. I could tell you what I did and the people I knew and where I worked and how I spent days and nights, all of that. I don’t mean I’ve lost any memories. But I can’t feel it. Do you know what I mean? As though it happened long ago, ages ago, and I can’t get the handle of it.”
“As though it happened to somebody else?”
“Yes. Almost that way.”
“It did, you know. You were someone else, Karen.”
“Because it was before tonight?”
Rae shook her head. “No. Much as I’d like to take the credit for the transformation, I’m not nutty enough to believe that one little experience could work that complete a change.”
“It wasn’t a little experience.”
“What I mean is—”
“It was a big one,” she broke in.
“Clown. Braggart. No. Not because of tonight. Because of the way you were shaken up, and the way you almost killed yourself, and the way you came out of it—everything, all of it. People don’t live through all of that and come out the same as they were when they started. My older brother was in the Korean War. He was eighteen when he went in and twenty when he came home, and eighteen from twenty is two, and if you think he had only aged two years in Korea then you must have rocks in your head. It was more like ten years. He looked older and he talked older and he acted older. Everything. It’s not how long you live that changes you. It’s what you live through.”
She thought of Ted. “I have a brother,” she said. “He’s in the service now. Somewhere down south. I don’t even know where.”
“Honestly?”
She nodded. “We’re not very close. I don’t know why not. He’s all I have left, really, but we don’t keep in very close touch. He’s not the type to write letters. I actually don’t know where he is.”
“My brother and I were very close.”
“What happened?”
“He died.”
“Oh, I’m sorry…”
“Don’t be silly. It happened ten years ago. He was in one of those battles in Korea, he was shot at day after day, he killed…oh, too many Chinese to keep track of, I mean it was just constant slaughter from what he told me. Three times he killed men with a bayonet. He was wounded twice. All of this, you know, and nothing killed him, he got through all of it.”
Rae put out her cigarette. “Then he came home and in a couple of years he died of a ruptured appendix. Isn’t that ridiculous? People don’t die of that any more. But his appendix ruptured without any warning and he didn’t know what it was and didn’t get to a hospital soon enough. They operated, and there was a postoperative infection, and they just couldn’t knock it out. They always can, you know. They use antibiotics and that’s the end of it. But nothing worked, and he was in that silly hospital for three weeks, and I kept telling myself that he would get better because that’s what happens, people get better. Then he…well, then one morning he just died, actually. That’s what happened. And it has never made the slightest bit of sense to me.”
She looked at Rae and tried to think of something to say. The silence was overpowering but there were no words with which to break it. She had a lump in her throat and a dull pain at the back of her eyes as if she might begin to weep at any moment. She crushed out her cigarette and the moment for tears passed.
Rae said, “Well, I don’t know why I got on that kick. The special Rachel Cooper finesse. Always get a love affair off on a firm footing by turning the conversation to the most morbid topic conveniently at hand. I wonder why I went on like that. I suppose it’s like any old wound. You have to pick the scab from time to time to see if it still bleeds. I think it still does, Karen? Could we sort of lie together now? I just want to be held.”
And then they were suddenly lying on the bed. She held Rae in her arms and felt the warmth of flesh pressing flesh. She looked into the blonde girl’s eyes, and their gaze locked, and suddenly Rae began to weep. Karen held her close, very close, until she was at once crying herself. Weeping uncontrollably, shedding her tears for a nameless loss.
It was good to hold another and comfort her while she wept. It was good to be held in turn and sob out all the hurt and fear and acid that was so bad when kept too long inside. Their nakedness was sexless. Their breasts touched, their loins were in warm proximity to one another—and yet, new as this all was to her, she was entirely unconscious of any taste of passion. Sex was simply out a part of it now just warmth and need and tenderness.
The tears came for a long time. And when they stopped there were no words. Just the closeness, the warmth.
The love.
This was love, she thought. This, she told herself, was what it really meant. Just this—far more than the kissing and stroking and the rest. Just this. This was love as she had never known it and had not even capable of imagining it. Not what she had had with Ronnie—that seemed in retrospect like a nasty caricature of love at best. This was something new, something rather glorious.
I am in love with a girl, she thought. And incredibly enough I am not bothered by it. I do not think it is wrong or evil or awful or dirty. I am not afraid of it. I, square and unworldly Karen Winslow, am in love with a girl.
A lesbian.
No, that was too easy. She could not be so easily labeled like a bug impaled upon a pin and mounted on a board. She could not simply identify herself with a tag reading Lesbian, a hand nametag to tell herself and the world who she was, There was more to her than that. She was not simply a lesbian. She was a girl who happened to be in love with another girl.
Her mind swam in idle circles. She was warm and comfortable and wanted to stay just as she was forever.
“I don’t want to go,” she murmured.
“Don’t go.”
“I just want to go to sleep.”
“Yes.”
“Like this.”
“Yes.”
“In your arms, like this.”
“God yes.”
“Rae? I love you, Rae. Isn’t it fantastic? I love you, dear, darling, darling Rachel.”
“I love you, too. Go to sleep, baby.”
“I am in love with Rachel Cooper. Do you really hate it when I call you Rachel? I think it’s a beautiful name, really. But I won’t say it if you don’t like it. I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do and I’ll do absolutely nothing that you do want me to do. I am so silly. I am really very silly, you know.”
“Go to sleep, silly.”
“Yes. Yes, I think I will go to sleep now.”
There was something else she wanted to say but she couldn’t figure out just what it was. She hugged Rae tight and searched her mind for the thought and swam slowly off into sleep.
CHAPTER SIX
The weekend was a parade with a brass band, a circus with all three rings swinging at once, a nonstop whirl that kept her head swimming. They spent every moment together, leaving the rooming house only when they had to, venturing outside to grab a quick meal around the corner or pick up cigarettes at the drug store
on Saturday night, to scurry over to the liquor store on Third Avenue for a fifth of scotch.
The bottle did not quite last through Sunday. They sat and talked and drank and made love and rested and talked and kissed and drank and made more love. It was mostly exciting and mostly wonderful. There were moments, though, when a tiny corner of Karen’s private self withdrew from all of the hilarity. Now and then she would sense an element of utter insanity in all of it, a quality that would sooner or later catch up with her and drown her. Other times the clouded vision was a little less apocalyptic, and she would merely tell herself that it was not nearly so wonderful or marvelous as it seemed, that they were just two young women who found each other’s company vastly preferable to loneliness and who, as an extra measure of delight, had discovered that it was oodles of delight to crawl into bed and have fun together. But neither the occasional shards of fear nor the flashes of sobriety were enough to take the edge off the thrill of it all.
She had never known her flesh could sing this way, had never dared to dream that physical love could be so enormously fine. It was not that she had ever regarded herself as frigid. She had always felt that she loved Ronnie, that she responded to him, that he fulfilled her. It only stood to reason that a frigid girl would not go live in sin with a man and fall apart at the seams when he left her. And had always rather enjoyed what they did in bed.
You don’t know what love is…
The song ran through her head more than once that weekend. Because it was true, she had not know what love was, what it could be. She had never experienced the delight that Rae brought her, the warm security, the new passion, the deep and stirring joy.
And the love they shared was so much more even than that. She and Ronnie had rarely talked. Oh, they had spoken, had found things to say to each other, but there had never been the kind of conversation in which she felt that any real contact was being made, any genuine communication. No sense that all the wires were plugged in, no true exchange of thought and feeling.
She and Rae had this. By Sunday night, through all the drinking and laughter and love, she had told Rae everything there was to tell about herself, everything that made up the person that was Karen Winslow.
“Not very interesting,” she said. “I’m afraid I haven’t done much, or gone anywhere, or anything. Just plain Karen.”
“…an ordinary guy…”
“Uh-huh. Not a glamorous commercial artist.”
“There is very little that is glamorous in the wonderful world of commercial art.”
“You’re glamorous.” She sighed. “How did you get here, Rae?”
“You have a way with the non sequitur. How did I get where?”
“Here.”
“I told you last night, or were you too drunk to remember? My gym teacher corrupted me. I wanted to improve my volleyball game and she wanted to play with the two volleyballs that I kept under my sweatshirt. I was vastly overdeveloped at a tender age. Don’t you recall all the gory details?”
“The scene is indelibly etched upon my memory.”
“Your mammaries? It was etched on mine, actually.”
“That’s not what I meant, though. Not how-did-you-get-here figuratively, meaning how did you turn queer. I don’t like the word queer. I mean how-did-you-get-here literally. Meaning here, this place, like here.”
“New York? Everybody gets here. People wind up in New York the same way maggots wind up at the bottoms of garbage cans, and the parallel is truer the more I ponder it. I don’t—”
“I mean to this precious rooming house, stupid.”
“Oh. Here.”
“That’s what I said, isn’t it?”
“Undeniably.” Rae yawned. “Do you really wanted to know? We could turn off the lights and do something obscene.”
“Later.”
“No doubt. You really want to know?”
“Unless it’s painful, my sweet.” She said this last line very Bette Davis, and they broke up at once, laughing like children. It seemed to both of them like the funniest thing in the world. For weeks they would introduce the line into conversations whenever it seemed to fit, and it always made them collapse with laughter.
And, later, after laughter and after love, Rae said, “Nothing dramatic about it, kitten. Not even a shattering love affair. I’ve had those, God knows but not for ages. Doesn’t that make me sound depressingly old? Or revoltingly depraved. You may take your pick. No, what happened was I’d been too long in the Village. It got to the point where the entire world was bordered on the north by Fourteenth Street and on the south by Houston. If I went north of Fourteenth my nose bled and if I went south of Houston I got the bends. And it was every day the same people, the same routine of gay bars and gay parties and gay clothes, everything religiously gay. We even shaved our legs with gay blades. That’s a joke, sort of.”
“It’s terrible.”
“Devastatingly awful. Well. Gay people and gay places and all, they all add up to fun for awhile, But enough is enough. For me, at least. Enough got to be too much. I found out something about myself. I found out if I let myself design my whole world around this one element of gayness I was just taking myself and putting myself in a box marked queer. I was making that the whole body and soul of life, see? I was a lesbian first and Rae Cooper second, and I was having none of it. It’s a very convenient copout, being gay is, said the nice lady.”
“You lost me.”
“Don’t you see? Not that there’s a particular reason why you should. But look—you can take that one label, Gay, and you can put it on yourself and excuse every other part of your life. You concentrate everything upon all the special areas or homosexuality. You pity yourself for being a member of a depressed minority group. It really knocks me out the way all of the faggots keep screaming for equal rights. That’s the battle cry—freedom now. It would kill most of them, Karen. And it would kill us, too. We wouldn’t be able to pity ourselves. Or laugh at all the ‘in’ jokes that are only funny because no one else gets them. Or…oh, I don’t know. Is any of this making any sense?”
She nodded.
“I was in an apartment, on Waverly Place. Between engagements, you might say. My lease came up for renewal, and I decided that I just did not want to stay there any more. The place was too big for me, and I’d blown all the money I’d saved up because I was going through this awful lazy period and not taking any work and just spending what I’d saved, and I couldn’t afford to pay rent on the place by myself any more. And I wasn’t about to fall in love at the drop of a skirt just to get half my rent paid. You’d be surprised how often that happens. There’s nothing like an unbreakable lease on an expensive mausoleum to make a girl ready for love. It’s amazing. I think apartment leases are the most powerful aphrodisiacs of modern gay society.
“Well. I got out of there and couldn’t find anything I wanted, and then it came to me that I wasn’t going to find what I wanted in the Village or Brooklyn Heights or any of the usual places, because I had a yen to get clear of all the old haunts. I’d been staying in hotels while I was figuring all of this out, and then I decided it was about time to get something a little more permanent than a hotel, and I wound up here. See what happens when you ask a very simple question, baby? You get a sermon for an answer.”
“I love you, Rae.”
“That’s a nice baby.”
“I do.”
“It won’t be forever, Karen.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It won’t though. Nothing ever is. Nothing is forever, always is a lie. You remember the song?”
“Yes, I do,”
“Pure poetry, and pure truth.”
“Do you remember the next line? In the song?”
“Not offhand.”
“I can only love you till the day I die,” Karen said. “That’s close to forever, isn’t it?”
“Ah.” A soft, lazy smile. “Perhaps.”
Rae was still sleeping in the morning when she left for he
r job. Leon Gordon’s new office, she discovered, was significantly more impressive than his old one. New steel furniture replaced the battered oak desk and chair she remembered in the office where she first met the theatrical agent, and the office was located in a better building at a more impressive address. But Gordon himself looked and sounded the same.
“You’re here,” he said. ‘That’s good. That desk’ll be here, you’ll sit right there, see? There’s two rooms, this one here which is the anteroom and my own office in back. I’ve been trying to figure out what’s the best way to use you. What I want you for is something classy to sit behind the desk and to pick up the phone when it rings. But there’s other things. I’ve got this place fixed up pretty cute. Here, sit down there, got it?”
She sat down behind the desk.
“Now there’s two things you got to do. One is when the phone rings, and you pick it up and say, ‘LeGo Associates, good morning.’ Or good afternoon or whatever the hell it is. Then when they ask for me you ask who’s calling, and you say just a minute, please, and you press the button which is Hold. See?”
“I see.”
“Then there’s this switch on the side of the desk. Underneath. Find it?”
He pointed out the switch for her. “You flick this,” he said, “and there’s a quick buzz in my office and the lines open up and I can hear whatever you say out here. Then when you tell me who it is on the phone, and I say whether I’m in or not. If I’m in, I take the call, or otherwise you get rid of him. You got that?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a funny thing,” he said. “A friend of mine, he books a lot of very big jazz musicians, also some of the newer folksingers. He hired this one girl and I thought he was going to go off his nut. The trouble was she couldn’t tell a lie. A little George Washington. It would bother her to say he was out when he was in, and either she just told people the truth or she would blurt around like a nut and they would wonder what the hell was up. It made her uncomfortable, lying. A very religious girl, and Sam hated to fire her, but what do you do? You get me? She was doing him no good at all, but at the same time she was willing to work, she was a nice kid, and how the hell could he come out and fire her because she was honest? See?”
Enough of Sorrow Page 5