Return to Lesbos

by Valerie Taylor

  Erika shrugged. “What has to happen will happen.”

  “You could be somewhere else when it happens.”

  “Don’t nag.”

  The halls were dimly lighted, fifteen-watt bulbs with a crusting of flyspecks. The wainscot and door frames were of gloomy dark wood. Frances ran a hand over the stair railing and brought it away smudged with greasy dust.

  In Erika’s room the bulbs were bright and the woodwork had been dusted, but everything was old.

  The bed sagged, the scrim curtains had been washed several times too often and hung limp at dusty windows. Erika said defensively, “Anyway, the bed’s clean. I take the sheets to the laundromat myself. And there is a plastic cover on the mattress.” As though heartbreak could be endured, but not dirt.

  “Are you hungry? I have soup. Or I can go to the store.”

  Frances sighed. “I don’t want to eat for at least a week. All that pizza. All those sour pickles.”

  “The store closes at nine,” Vince reminded them.

  “It can’t be that late!”

  Erika glanced at the alarm clock on the dresser. “Twenty minutes after nine. It stays light a long time now.”

  A good thing too, for lonely women who had trouble sleeping. Frances knew what it was like to dread the long winter evenings when darkness settled down before five, and ten o’clock felt like late night. She said, “It was a good day, wasn’t it?”

  “While it lasted,” Vince said. “I have to go, dolls. David might not miss me, but he will worry about the car.”

  They stood apart, listening to him clattering down the stairs. Frances said, dreamily, “Vince is sweet.”

  “My best friend.”

  They looked at each other. It was a self-conscious moment: there were too many things to say, and no way to say any of them without inflicting hurt. Frances felt embarrassed, as though she were being thrown into intimacy with a stranger. Her arms prickled with sunburn, her face felt dusty, she was conscious of vague aches here and there. She said stiffly, “If you’ve changed your mind and don’t want me to stay, I won’t.”

  “This is such an ugly place. I wish we could sleep outdoors. It would be nice when the stars came out.”

  “We’ll go on a camping trip some time.”

  “Don’t talk to me about some time.”

  She let that lie. The obvious next step was to say, “Then you come home with me.” Erika was expecting it, waiting with a look of bright expectancy. Frances considered what would happen if she took Erika into that house—with Bill’s clothes and shaving things all over the place, the connubial double bed, haunted by Bill’s lovemaking; the dread that Bill would be home any minute. Furtive, sneaky. It was impossible at this delicate point to explain that yes, she had a husband (twenty-one years, for God’s sake), and no, she certainly didn’t love him, never had; and yes, she planned to leave him as soon as she could gather up enough courage. And yes, she did love Erika with all her heart, but in the meantime she had been going to bed regularly with this man.

  It was impossible. She hoped, not too brightly, that Erika was taking for granted a flat shared with a friend (purely platonic) or an aging mother. She considered saying, “We could go to my place, but it would disturb my mother.” No good, she was a poor liar.

  She said, “Do you want to go to a hotel? I have enough money.”

  “I hate hotels.”

  They looked at each other. Erika said, “Nobody could really love me, not anymore. It was different with her. She needed me—and besides I was a different person then.”

  “I need you too.”

  “You want me. It’s not the same.”

  Frances said rather crossly, “There’s no law against wanting, is there? Or both at once. It’s so silly to fight like this. If you want me to go away, say so and I’ll go.”

  “I’m going to make some coffee.”

  Let her; it would give her something to do. Frances sat down on the side of the bed and slipped off her loafers. She sat smiling a little, looking around the room.

  The closet door stood open on a collection of dark skirts and tailored blouses, a heavy coat, and one rather shabby tweed suit that looked limp on its hanger. Shorts and slacks hung on hooks. Beneath, a pair of snow boots, a second pair of sneakers—like the ones she was wearing, but white—some loafers and a pair of black pumps with low heels, rather run down. That was all. Not exactly what the well-dressed white collar girl wore, if you could believe the movies.

  In addition to the alarm clock the dresser top displayed a comb and plastic hairbrush, lipstick, jar of cold cream; also a small spiral notebook and a green fountain pen. Frances guessed that if she were to open the drawers of the dresser—one of those bosomy old numbers with a swinging mirror—most of them would be empty. She also guess that everything Erika owned would be plain, and old to the point of falling apart, and this would be due not to her poverty—teachers in the public schools don’t earn much, but they do buy clothes—but because she didn’t care. Or she was trying to punish herself for something. For being alive, when Kate was dead?

  Erika came back with the pot of water and put it to heat on the little electric plate, moving absently, going through the familiar motions with her mind somewhere else. “It takes a long time to heat,” she said, a hostess making conversation. Frances said, “It always does.” This coffee bit was bringing back her first visit to Erika’s room, the evening that started with such high hopes and ended in an early departure and no progress at all. She wished she hadn’t thought of it.

  Erika said suddenly, “I’m afraid.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “What have you got to be afraid of?”

  “Losing you.”

  “That’s no loss. I really am not worth having.”

  “You don’t know a thing about it.”

  Erika looked at her somberly. “I wasn’t going to see you again. I seem to have no willpower.”

  “That’s good.” Frances got up from the sagging bed and walked barefoot across the floor. The rug was gritty under her feet. Erika turned away from her, reaching for the two plastic cups. Frances stood looking, not at her but at the coffee fussing and spitting inside the little glass dome. “It needs another minute or so.”

  “That’s right.”

  Frances gave her a sharp look. The calm and rested look of the afternoon was gone. Erika’s mouth was narrow with apprehension; the skin seemed stretched thin over her cheekbones. Frances said, “Don’t look like that. I’m not going to do anything you don’t want me to.”

  “That’s what I hate about it,” Erika said sullenly. “I want you to stay. I want you to make love to me, damn it. I want you to be a little bit violent.” She looked at the floor. “It’s all wrong. My body has no right to do this to me.”

  “Not wrong at all, no more than eating when you’re hungry.”

  “I don’t mean that way. I never could see why any kind of loving was bad, not as long as the people like each other. But now I don’t want to want anybody.” She shivered. “It’s a mess.”

  Frances took the cups out of her hand and set them down on the table. She put her arms around Erika and held her close, feeling her begin to tremble. She said, “Believe me, all I want is for you to be happy. Do you have to think ahead all the time? Can’t you be happy right now?”

  When the mind holds back, the only way is to persuade the body.

  She smoothed back the fair hair that curled in damp weather and when Erika perspired. It was in tendrils now. With one arm she held Erika close against her while she unbuttoned the cotton shirt and ran and inquiring hand over the smooth skin of her sides and breasts. Erika’s breathing deepened. Her small hard nipples stood up rigidly, and the beating of her heart accentuated in the fine, thin cage of her ribs. She said in a thready whisper, “Oh God, darling.”

  One thing about summer, Frances thought light headedly, there’s not so much to take off. She managed it with one hand, still keeping Erika in the cir
cle of her other arm, pressed close against her. The torn blue shorts fell to the floor. She sent her own skirt and two bits of white cotton to join them.

  “You don’t want the light off, do you?”

  “No, I like to look at you.”

  Under the pink cotton spread, the sheets were smooth and warm. She turned the top one back, the spread with it. She pulled Erika to her so that their bodies fitted together like parts of one person. They moved together, with no thought left and no feeling except the need and the excitement that rose higher and higher in both of them, like a flood, until it drowned out everything else.

  When her hand reached the most secret place, she found Erika open and warm and ready for her. “Make me,” Erika said. Her eyes were shut tight but her face was intense with desire. “Make me do it. Don’t stop.”

  15 IT WAS DAY. FRANCES RAISED UP ON ONE elbow to take a closer look, not sure that the light pressing against the window wasn’t moonlight or the glow from a street lamp, hoping against hope that she had only dozed off for an hour or two. She had to go home. She wondered whether Bill would be half drunk and triumphant, with a contract in his pocket, or disappointed and quite drunk. She wondered whether it was, maybe, two in the morning with a full moon.

  But she knew.

  It was after six. She knew even before she rolled to the edge of the bed and looked at the clock. There was a morning freshness in the air, and some small bird had begun a well-meant chirping in the tree outside the window; it was his reiterated complaint that had broken into her dreams. Delivery trucks were rolling down the street on their way to replenish grocery stores and butcher shops. It was full morning.

  Early light lay over the room like cold water, neither hiding nor softening the beat-up old furniture but only adding a layer to it, like a coat of transparent varnish. She puzzled a moment over something on the floor beside the bed: a heap of clothes, left there when she began to catch and hold Erika’s moment of unwilling passion. At the memory, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. I didn’t think she was going to make it, Frances thought with a small smile, but we got her over the hump that time.

  No man would have had the patience; many girls wouldn’t. She didn’t know, yet, what it would be like next time, whether Erika’s reluctance on the brink of completion was a part of her pattern or whether it was the last stand of her death wish. She might wake up feeling wonderful, melting with happiness. She might wake hating herself and everyone else, ready to burrow deeper into loneliness because she’d had a breath of joy and it was more than she could bear. Some people were like that. It was a chance you had to take.

  Erika slept. She had hardly moved since Frances snapped off the light and pulled up the sheet, as they lay sweaty and short of breath after the final and most terrible effort. Erika’s body barely lifted the thin material. She breathed slowly, lying on her side with her knees pulled up as though washed ashore by a strong tide. Her face was calm and open. Frances felt a wave of tenderness for her, as though Erika were a child who had been sick to the point of death and was past her crisis.

  She wanted to stay here, to turn over and lie close to Erika, to take the girl in her arms and feel the soft sweetness of her and marvel over the way her body was put together. It was impossible. She had to get out of here and go back to a house where she didn’t belong, where an angry and baffled man would be waiting for her. At the thought of the trouble she was about to stir up, her skin crawled. But there was no help for it. She had reached the point of no return.

  For all the pleasure she felt with her accomplishments in bed, she was tired. Her eyes ached, her neck was stiff and her teeth felt fuzzy. One good argument in favor of living together, she decided, was to have a toothbrush handy when you needed it. She needed a bath, too. The idea of the tub across the hall, grimed by God-knows-who, revolted her. Even if you scrubbed it shiny, the ghosts of a hundred other tenants would still be there. This for the gentle Erika was not to be borne. I’ll get her out of here, she resolved.

  She was sitting on the edge of the bed, trying to gather enough willpower to get dressed, when she realized that Erika was awake. She turned around. “Hi. Did I wake you?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I have to go now. I’ll come back as soon as I can. Maybe before noon.”

  Erika shut her eyes again. “I’ll be here all day,” she said in a small pleased voice. “I don’t want to see anybody but you.”

  Frances leaned over and kissed her neck. Erika opened her eyes. “You don’t have to ask me today, do you?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Go now, so you can come back.”

  There was nobody in the hall or on the steps; the building was still asleep. When she stepped on the porch she could tell that it was going to be another sultry day. The sun was well up and there were men on the sidewalk with lunch buckets, going to work; even a few women in jeans and bandannas.

  In the next big block, she could see the Rexall sign and the big red A&P sign glistening in the early sunshine. A man was carrying a tier of big flat pans into the grocery; the top one was filled with sweet rolls in cellophane. The sight made her hungry. She thought it over, looking at the electric-eye door after he had gone in. Bill would be at the Regent Street house, sullenly awake or soddenly asleep depending on how much he’d had to drink. In either case she was in trouble. She felt she could face him, since it was the last time; but not without a cup of good, hot coffee.

  The drugstore was closed, but the all-night diner a couple of doors away stood open to the early sun and wind, mixing a smell of frying grease with the dawn breeze. She went in. Two Mexicans were having breakfast at once end of the counter, speaking softly in Spanish. She sat down at the other end, seeing the counterman look at her wrinkled clothes and uncombed hair but not caring much what he thought. “Just coffee, black.”

  He would figure that she’d been out all night and was hung over—but it was her own business, and hers and that of whatever man had kept her up until this hour. Hell, he might even be sympathetic if he knew the real story. She looked closely to see if he might be one of the boys and decided that he wasn’t.

  For the ten-thousandth time she wondered why people pry into other people’s private affairs. Maybe because they’re not satisfied with what they have? The happy ones don’t care what you do, they may make a joke about it but they’re not mean, they wish you well. It was the cold bitter ones, the women—oh, the women could be evil, the ones who had never been stirred to any real emotion, they had to make trouble for anyone who seemed happy. Those, and the ones who want a girl but are afraid to admit it even to themselves, and then men who beat up gay boys because they have to be reassured of their own maleness. They’re the ones who make trouble. The cold ones and the scared ones.

  The coffee was hot and good. The counterman brought her a tiny bottle of cream, the way they always did, and she pushed it aside and concentrated on the hot, bitter goodness. Wondering why coffee was always good where a lot of men ate and terrible at women’s affairs; the more genteel the function, the weaker the coffee. It was one way to keep her mind off the moment when she would have to face Bill.

  She got up stiffly, leaving change on the counter, and walked back into the bright sunlight. Dreading the thought of returning home and facing Bill, she waited nervously on the corner for the Main Street bus. When it came she got on it and sat down behind two young girls in workingslacks, their hair pincurled under flowered babushkas. The spent the ride making up their faces. Femininity victorious on the assembly line.

  She was afraid. Might as well admit it. She had never been this afraid in the days with Bake, not even when she thought she was planning to leave Bill and move into Bake’s apartment, because Bake was strong. Bake would take care of her. But Erika, although she had a resilient toughness of her own (or how would she have lasted this long?), needed to be looked after just now. It was up to her, Frances. She had to be brave enough for two, and God knew she wasn’t built for
it.

  She transferred on Main Street where the counterman had said, and sat glumly looking out of the windows at the still-closed stores and the big gloomy churches and bright little eating places hot with electric lights. Rooming houses and small factories skirted the business district; then modest family houses and then, coming into the open, the comfortable greenness and gentility of the neighborhoods where the well-to-do lived. Bill was right. Most women would think they were lucky to live out here in the snug, smug suburbs.

  I’m not one of them, she thought with a qualm of pure fright. Never was, never will be. It’s no use knocking myself out trying.

  Her block was stirring awake. Women would be fixing breakfast in their bright modern kitchens; the live-in maid was a thing of the past for all but a few; machines did the work. At the worst I could be somebody’s cleaning woman, she thought, half meaning it; I’m neat and handy around a house. I wouldn’t starve.

  She put her shoulders back and marched briskly up to the front porch, with a briskness calculated to show anybody who might be looking that she was not only sober but happy and full of self-confidence.

  Bill was up. An almost empty fifth of bourbon was on the small table beside him, and his face had the mauve puffy look it got when he had too much to drink. He looked up when she came in, looked away, and then stood up to face her. He said, slowly and a little thickly, “It’s about time, you tramp.”

  She wanted to lie. She had always lied to him before, all of her good resolutions swept away by fright. Pa had looked like this when he came home on payday, drunk on the grocery money. A fear learned early lasts long. It was skinny little Frankie Kirby who stood holding onto the doorframe of the Regent Street house, as she had clung to the door in the dingy little company house.

  But only for a moment. She thought of Erika, smiling and half-asleep, waiting for her to come back, and her hands tightened into fists in the folds of her skirt. Do this for Erika. If she failed now they would both go down.