“That’s not all that unusual.”
“No, you don’t understand! I didn’t do it because I wanted it, because I desired you. I did it to find something out.”
He didn’t say anything. She turned toward him. “I owe you a full explanation. Let’s sit down.”
“You don’t owe me anything, Karen.”
“Oh, but I do.”
“Not really. If you want to get dressed and go home, then that’s precisely what you should do.”
“No, I want to talk.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“I have to talk. If I could just unwind for a moment first. Would it be all right if I got under the shower for a few minutes?”
He smiled. “Cold showers only work for boy scouts, dear. Yes, of course you may use the shower. I’ll wait for you.”
She scooped up her clothes from the bedroom and hurried into the bathroom and got under the shower. The significance of the shower was not lost on her, and she knew it must be clear to him as well. She was taking a shower now for the same reason that she had taken endless showers at the Rainier Arms. To cleanse herself—because she felt so very unclean.
You found out, she told herself. You acted like an idiot, you lost yourself in yourself and forgot that there were other people in the world.
She had been all right when it was just acting, going through the motions and enduring caresses and feigning passion. But near the end her passion had not been artificial. Near the end, when he gave her the kiss that Rae had bestowed so often, when he bestowed the caress that one woman would bestow upon another, her passion had been perfectly genuine.
And when he stopped playing the woman and moved to play the man, her defenses were down. She had lost control of the game, she could not play-act any more. Her reaction had to be a real one, a true one. And now she knew what she was and what she was not.
But what a dreadful, dishonest, inhuman way to find out!
He was waiting in the living room for her. He had made a cup of coffee, and she sat down gratefully with it and sipped it. She felt a little better now. Calmer, once more in control.
“I have to tell you things,” she said. “Adrian, do you remember when I told you a boyfriend of mine had walked out on me or something? I don’t remember the details…”
“Yes, I remember.”
“All right. It wasn’t a boyfriend, it was a girl friend. The girl I had been living with for some time. I’m a lesbian, Adrian. Or at least I was then. And oh, let me start at the beginning, it’ll be easier that way.”
This time she told him everything. She didn’t gush like a fool because she was calm enough to exert a little control over the flow of her words. But she started with Ronnie and included everything important right up to the present. She told him things that no one else knew and he listened without an interruption.
“So now you know it all,” she said finally. “From a mistress to an attempted suicide to a lesbian to a drunk to a pervert to a recluse to what I was tonight. I never meant it to come out this way, Adrian I swear I never thought it could be like this, the way I reacted. I thought that I would just…just let you make love to me, and if it was unbearable I would simply endure it, and if it was good so much the better, and…oh, it sounds harebrained now, doesn’t it? I thought that if nothing else I would at least find out about myself one way or another. What I was, what I wanted, all of that.”
“And?”
She looked at him.
“Well?” he said. “Didn’t you find out?”
“I don’t understand, All I did was do something horrible to you and make a fool of myself and—”
“Listen to me for a moment.” He looked down into his drink, then looked up at her again. “You went through a fairly intense period of auto-analysis, Karen. I can’t believe that you failed to realize one thing—that you’re most apt to feel guilty because you want to feel guilty.”
“I know that.”
“All right. It applies tonight, too. There’s no earthly reason why you should blame yourself on my account. Whatever for? Do you think the fact that I’ve been denied a thrill is going to give me either a bruised ego or cancer of the prostate? It won’t. I will live through it. I have lived through it.”
“But—”
“Wait a moment. And if you think that it will lessen my opinion of you, that I will either hate or despise you, you’re also mistaken. No such thing, Karen. I find you at least as admirable as before, if not more so.”
He finished his drink, set the glass down on the coffee table. “Let me continue,” he said. “You’ve said that tonight was essentially a scientific experiment, correct? You can take it further than that. It was a successful experiment. It gave you an answer—not, perhaps, the answer you may have hoped for, but the answer you needed to have. Item: you found lovemaking with a man endurable but unpleasant, endurable so long as you kept your emotional guard up, as long as you held yourself in careful control. Item: you found lovemaking suddenly exciting in a situation where consciously or unconsciously you were able to react as though it was a woman who was making love to you. Item: in this state, with the control removed and the reins out of your hands, the sudden shocking prospect of sexual relations with a man drew an honest basic unconscious and wholly legitimate reaction—you rejected it entirely. Conclusion—”
“I’m a lesbian,” she broke in.
“So it would seem. You could have gone to a psychoanalyst for five years before you got so revealing a catharsis. Five days a week at twenty-five dollars a visit—do you realize you’ve just saved yourself sixty-five hundred dollars?”
She managed to smile.
“So you’re a lesbian,” he went on. “You were prepared to accept that possibility before, weren’t you? Is it harder to accept it now?”
“No, I guess not.”
“It’s not horrible, you know. In the theater it’s not even unusual enough to be considered interesting. If you were a minister’s daughter in Horse Dropping, Montana, then you’d have a problem. If you had a conventional sense of sin you’d be caught up in something of a conflict. But you strike me as a generally pragmatic person whose moral principles are more or less limited to the Golden Rule. It may bother you to hear this, Karen, but I don’t think you’ve got much of a problem any more. I think you’ve solved it, and done so very well.”
She took a sip of coffee, set the cup down in her saucer, took a cigarette and let him light it for her. She sat for several moments in silence, smoking the cigarette, finishing the coffee.
Finally she said, “You’re right, Adrian. Everything you said. I should have seen that myself, shouldn’t I?”
“You would have, sooner or later. You were in a state of shock.”
“Yes, and I probably still am. Adrian, what should I do now?”
“Get some sleep.”
“I mean—”
“I know what you mean. What should you do as far as the girl is concerned? Rachel—is that what you said her name was?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think you should do?”
“I don’t even know what I think tonight.”
“Well,” he said. “First of all, it’s not a decision you have to make tonight. But I think you should probably go to her, if only to find out how you feel and what you really want. If nothing else, you must realize now that people don’t exist in a vacuum and that decisions can never be made in a vacuum. Do you love her?”
“I don’t know. But…”
“But what?”
“It’s a place to start, isn’t it?”
“That’s right”
“And if it works, fine, and if it doesn’t—”
“Then it doesn’t, Karen. And no harm done to anyone.”
“And they all lived happily ever after,” she said slowly. “Exactly. And in the meantime, because it is very late and you would not want to make an old man worry about you, you will go into the bedroom where our little drama unfolded a
nd you will go to sleep while I have another drink or two prefatory to stretching out on the couch. And no arguments, no you-take-the-bed-and-leave-me-the-couch please, if you don’t mind. Just humor me. Unless you would be nervous sleeping under the same roof with a man.”
“Oh, don’t be silly.”
“Then the bedroom’s yours. You’ll like it better this time. You were a bit confused and disturbed before.”
“I probably still am, but at least my mind’s working a little better now. Everything’s worked out right, hasn’t it? But I’ll always be sorry for using you that way. No matter how you say it doesn’t matter, I’ll always feel a little badly about it.”
His eyes probed hers; “Really?”
“Yes.”
“Because you used me,” he said, as if quoting. “Such a silly term. Everyone uses everyone—that’s what interpersonal relationships are, nothing but a grandified term for mutual exploitation. But let me explain something for you. You hurt me—how? With a few minutes of sexual frustration? I’ve been over that since a couple of moments after you scurried out of the bedroom. Completely over it.
“But I’ll tell you something. I may never get over feeling so enormously flattered that you cast me as the guinea pig in your small experiment. That out of the entire world you very scientifically singled me out as the man with whom you would investigate love. Hurt me? Karen, dear Karen, you’ve given me a glow that will never entirely wear off.”
“I don’t understand…”
“Of course you don’t,” he said “You couldn’t possibly understand. But someday you may. In thirty rears, or forty, you may.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
He was up and out of the apartment before she awoke. It took her a few moments to orient herself. Then she showered quickly, made herself a cup of coffee, and left his apartment. It amused her to notice how incomplete it felt to go out without having read the Information Please Almanac for 1954. As though she’d gone out without putting on her shoes.
She rode a bus downtown to Twenty-Third Street and Second Avenue, then hesitated on the corner for a few moments, waiting, preparing herself. When she was as ready as she felt likely to be she walked to Rae’s apartment, to the apartment they had shared.
And if she doesn’t want me? And if we try and nothing happens for us? And if…
Bridges. To be crossed when she reached them, and not before.
She hesitated again in front of the building. It was still early enough so that Rae might be asleep, she thought Rae had always liked to sleep late. Maybe…
No. No stalling.
She marched bravely up the steps and into the hallway and rang the proper bell and waited, waited. There was an answering buzz to open the inner vestibule door, and she opened the door while the buzzer sounded and walked quickly to Rae’s door. Their door. The apartment’s door, at any rate.
And knocked on the door.
The girl who opened the door was not Rae at all. She was short and dark and slender, with very large eyes made larger still by an abundance of dark eye-shadow. Then Rae had moved, she thought. Now how on earth could she find her? And how did she get out of the lease?
“Can I help you?”
“No, I’m sorry,” she said, recovering. “I’ve made a mistake. I was looking for the girl who used to live here, I didn’t know she’d moved.”
“You mean Rae?” She started. “She had a morning meeting with an editor. You’re not Karen, are you?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Rae talked about you. I…uh…my name is Lois. Karen and I…say, would you like to come in for a cup of coffee? I mean I don’t want to keep you standing out in tile hail like a Fuller Brush Man.”
“No, thank you, but don’t bother.”
“No bother, really. You sure?”
“No, I don’t have the time,” she said.
“I see,” Lois shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She said, “Uh…Rae and I are…uh…together now. I don’t know just how things wound up between you two or anything, but—”
“We’re just old friends,” Karen said.
“Sure, but the thing is—”
“I just dropped in to say goodbye,” she went on. “I’m going to the Coast. San Francisco. And I didn’t want to call, you know, because we’d been so long without seeing each other, and the way we broke off. Well. You understand.”
“Of course.” The girl seemed relieved—a possible complication had turned out to be nothing of the sort. “Listen, you’re not going to run off, are you? Because Rae ought to be home in an hour or so, and she’ll be sorry she missed you.”
“I wish I could stay, but my flight’s leaving in an hour and a half and it takes almost an hour to get to the airport. I left all my things at the East Side Terminal and now I have to cab over there and get there in time to make the limousine connections. You’ll tell her I came over?”
“Oh, of course.”
“Good.” She smiled. “I’m sure you’re happy together?”
“Very,” Lois said.
“I’m glad to hear that.”
How nicely you carried that off, she told herself, turning the corner and heading north on Third Avenue. How very nicely you managed that. How poised you’re becoming, how glibly you handle yourself. Flying to San Francisco, limousine connections, just dropped in to say good-bye—how very Bette Davis.
Unless it’s painful, my sweet.
The line sounded in her mind, the private cliché, and she remembered what they had been to each other and what they had shared, the laughter, the love, the good times, all of it.
It would have been easy enough to dramatize, to pause in a doorway and wipe tears from her eyes, to smile bravely, to choke back a sob. She was unable to do it, however.
Because it was no time for sorrow, no time for tears. She felt no sorrow, not now. No pain, no loss, no sorrow. She had not been hurt, she had lost nothing.
What had she told Adrian last night? That Rae might be a place to start. No more than that. If there was something for them to take up together, all well and good, and they could try the shoe and see if it pinched or not. And if there was nothing, so be it.
She was in no desperate need of anyone. Before, after she left the hospital, loneliness had been painful; now it was not. Before, after all of that hurt and in the midst of all that confusion, she had been starved for love; now she was not. If love came along, fine. If she had to wait awhile, also fine.
No sorrow. No tears.
And, until the right thing came at its own pace, she had as much as she needed. Her room at the Rainier Arms had been comfortable all along; it would be as comfortable now. Brooklyn had been an ideal place to live; it would be just as ideal now, and the slight inconvenience of a subway ride each morning and night would not be such a dreadful cross to bear. She still had her hotplate and teakettle for morning coffee. She still had her copy of the Information Please Almanac for 1954. She would be working days—and working hard, learning, advancing—but she would still have her nights for the library and concerts, and she would still have the weekends for long walks and visits to empty churches.
It’s worked out, she thought. It’s worked out right.
She looked at her watch. It was almost eleven, and there was no need to wait any longer, no need at all. She stepped to the curb, hailed a cab, gave the driver Leon Gordon’s address. She had told him she would start Monday morning, and it was just Wednesday now; he would be surprised to see her.
She lit a cigarette. No tears, she thought, none at all. And she blew out smoke and let her face relax in a smile. She had had enough of sorrow, she thought. She was all better now. She was alive.
A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR
In 1963 I was living in Tonawanda, New York, a suburb of Buffalo, where I grew up. My then-wife and I moved there from New York City in early 1962, when our daughter Amy was practicing blowing out candles in anticipation of her first birthday. We’d been there a little more than a year when
a second daughter, Jill, was born. (There would be a third daughter, Alison, but she doesn’t come into the picture until 1969. I’m mentioning her here and now because I don’t want her to feel neglected.)
At the time I was writing a pseudonymous book each month for Nightstand Books, and I wrote an extra book the month Jill was born so that I’d be able to pay the hospital and the obstetrician. And some months before she said her first word (it was either translucent or phlegmatic; her mother and I remember it differently) I had a disagreement with my agent that led to the abrupt termination of our relationship. As Nightstand was a closed shop, its entire list furnished by the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, I was going to have to figure out a way to make a living.
So I became a lesbian.
Now I suppose it’s possible to argue that I’d been one all along. My first novel, written in the spring of 1958, was published by Fawcett Publication’s Crest Books imprint; it concerned a young woman who’d come from her college graduation to Greenwich Village to have a sexual identity crisis. (I called it Shadows, and put my own name on it; Crest called it Strange Are the Ways of Love, and picked Lesley Evans as a pen name for me. Someone at Crest chose “Leslie” for its sexual ambiguity, and someone else changed the spelling to resolve the ambiguity. It was my first book, and I didn’t know that you didn’t have to let publishers push you around like that.)
I’d written that particular book because I figured I could. Over the preceding year or two I’d read perhaps a dozen lesbian novels, along with a pair of popular nonfiction works by Ann Aldrich, who turned out to be one of a great many pen names for Marijane Meaker. I’d been writing and selling short stories, mostly to the crime fiction magazines, but I wanted to write a novel. One morning I woke up with a hangover and the germ of an idea, and by the end of the day I had a chapter-by-chapter outline. A few weeks later I sat down and wrote the book. It took no more than two weeks; I was right to see very clearly that it was something I could do. My agent sent it to Crest, the premier publisher of that sort of book, and they took it. So there.
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