Warm and Willing

by Lawrence Block

  “I’m open now.” She felt giddy, ready to break out into foolish laughter. She danced into the middle of the room and threw her arms wide apart. “I’m a flower,” she said. “See my pretty petals? I’m a flower in full bloom.”

  “You’re a little idiot whom I love.”

  “So kiss me. Be a bee and steal my precious nectar.”

  “I think you’re a little bit crazy.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Not very.”

  “I feel so young,” she said. She got a suitcase from the closet, opened it on the bed and began throwing things into it. “I’m twenty-four and I feel about seventeen. How old are you, Megan?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Just a year older than me. You know so much more.”

  “Clean living.”

  “You make me feel like a child, sometimes. Have you slept with very many girls?”

  “You’re the only one.”

  “Seriously. Have you?”

  A pause. “Not so many.”

  “Is that something I shouldn’t ask? I’m sorry. I just want to know everything about you, that’s all. Were you ever with a man?”

  “Yes.”

  “You weren’t married or anything?”

  “Hardly.” A long sigh. “I was young, very young, and in college, and there was another girl, and we made love. I was too young to know what I was doing, I guess. And then I was very scared. You know how it is at that age. The most important thing on earth is to be like everybody else, and here I was so obviously different from everybody else. I couldn’t let myself believe that I was really different. I managed to convince myself that it was a question of adjustment. That I could be perfectly normal if I tried hard enough.”

  “Heavens.”

  “Uh-huh. Oh, I tried, all right. I very nearly got pregnant in the process. I tried with half a dozen different men, tried my damnedest to feet something more profound than boredom and disgust while they grunted over me.”

  “And it didn’t work.”

  “Of course not. It took a while for me to understand what I am, and to accept it. It may be hard for you.”

  “It isn’t now.”

  “But it may be.”

  There were three suitcases and an armful of coats and dresses. They carried everything downstairs and Megan hailed a cab. They rode to her building. Rhoda paid the driver and they carried the suitcases and loose clothes inside and upstairs to Megan’s apartment. Their apartment now. The Apartment of Megan Hollis and Rhoda Moore.

  She took half the closet and one of the two dressers in the bedroom. She hung her toothbrush in the holder in the bathroom, put one of her towels over a towel bar. She came out. Megan was holding two glasses of red wine. She took one and they touched glasses.

  “Hello, roommate,” Megan said.

  “Hello, lover.”

  They drank deeply.

  Megan did not refill the glasses.

  They turned and looked at each other, and Rhoda felt passion flow through her flesh like an electric current. From that moment on neither of them spoke. Words would have been in the way.

  They walked to the bedroom, bodies brushing lightly together as they walked. They left the lights on, undressed quickly and efficiently, and they turned to look at one another, and passion caught Rhoda by the throat and shook her. She looked at Megan, at Megan’s body, and she thought that she had never seen anything beautiful or so desirable. She moved toward the blonde girl, her hands outstretched, groping. Megan stood still, waiting. Rhoda’s hands fastened on Megan’s shoulders, moved down over her bare arms, slipped over silken skin to embrace Megan’s full and beautiful breasts.

  They sank together to the bed, wordless, breathless. Their mouths met in a kiss, and their tongues tangled and the world went black and white and black and white. They kissed, and their bodies were drawn sharply together, breasts against breasts, belly against belly thighs urgently drawn against thighs, loins speaking love to loins.

  Rhoda was caught up in it all, unable to think of anything, unable to do anything at all but surrender herself entirely to the waves of desire that dominated her. She moved on the bed, aching to embrace the totality that was Megan, mad to touch everything, to kiss everything, to give pleasure and get pleasure until the world sank under the sea. Her lips found Megan’s breasts and teased them into a turbulence of love. Her hands stroked the sheer silk that was Megan’s hips and thighs. Her fingertips were alive with the shimmering glory of Megan’s secret beauties.

  Her hands were fierce with Megan’s breasts. Her mouth was busy, planting a trail of burning kisses along a perfectly formed leg.

  Pleasure screamed in the night. The bed rocked urgently. The peak of passion was sharply etched, clear and beautiful, and sleep came fast on its heels.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The weekend had the quality of a dream. Time was suspended, thoughts were never pressing. Sometimes they strolled together through Village streets, walking easily side by side. And no one could tell a thing by looking at them, Rhoda thought. They walked together like two friends, and nobody could guess that they were so much more than that.

  The walks were an education in themselves. She had lived in the Village for several months, had walked back and forth over these streets, but when she went walking with Megan she felt as though she had done that walking with her eyes closed, or wearing blinders. There was so very much she had simply failed to notice.

  The men and boys who loitered by the western rim of Washington Square at twilight. “Gay boys,” Megan told her. “Male prostitutes, mostly. Young ones who sell themselves to older men, for a meal or for money. They tend to have a more cavalier attitude toward sex than we do, kitten. They’ll go for hit-and-run love or even buy it on the market place. Pickups in filthy men’s rooms-that sort of thing. You rarely find girls like that. We tend to be more long-term in our love affairs, we sensitive lesbians.”

  A small dark coffeehouse on Sullivan Street. “No one ever goes there, Rhoda. Not for coffee or companionship. I understand they sell mescaline there. It makes you hear sounds and see colors, it creates psychotic hallucinations. It’s not strictly illegal, like narcotics, but it’s only handled on the black market. I’ve heard they sell marijuana there, too, but I’m not sure of it.”

  A subterranean bar on Barrow. “One of ours, honey. A dyke joint. That’s one of the more compelling names for girls like thee and me, you know. Dykes, lessies, butches, lady-lovers-they call us the nicest things. This place is more refined than most. No dancing and not too much in the way of a butchy element. A lot of the uptown career girls come down here, and it’s all right for a quiet drink. Places like The Shadows on Macdougal are so cruisy that you have to be very hard-up or very scummy yourself in order to tolerate them, but this place isn’t bad at all.”

  A girl passing by. “Did you see the way she looked at us? I’ve seen her around but I guess she doesn’t know me. She was trying to decide about us, whether or not we’re gay. You didn’t notice, did you? Gay girls can’t afford to be obvious. Just a glance, a stare held a moment too long, subtle signs like that. Like passwords.”

  There was a whole world in the Village she had never known, a furtive homosexual underground with its special places and its own recognition signs, and she was becoming a part of it without ever having been aware of it. A men’s shop that catered exclusively to male homosexuals, a beauty shop where a crowd of gay girls got their hair done, gay bars, a gay coffeehouse, a gay restaurant. These weren’t necessarily meeting-places, Megan told her. They were refuges as much as anything. When you were more or less obvious about your homosexuality-a short-haired butchy bull dyke, a mincing queen-you ran into trouble even in the Village. You wanted a place reserved for your own kind.

  And even if you weren’t obvious, you needed the relaxation of gay society. “I know a gay man who works at Manning and Roblin,” Megan had told her. “A public relations outfit, and a good one. He comes on completely straight up there, l
ives a masquerade five days a week from nine to five. When he’s done with work he wants to unwind. He doesn’t mince and he doesn’t wear lipstick, but he likes to go to a place where he doesn’t have to pretend to be something he’s not.”

  The walks and the talks filled her in, let her see more of the Village as a whole and the little subculture of which she was becoming a part. But they did not spend all their time walking. For hours on end they were at Megan’s apartment-no, their apartment, for she lived there now. Mornings, she would awake before Megan and go into the kitchen to cook breakfast. Cooking had been that part of her marriage she had most enjoyed. She had a knack for it, could follow recipes or invent her own. But cooking for Tom had been a joyless pastime; he approached all food as if he were an automobile and the food were gasoline, mere fuel for his engine. There had been no cooking facilities in her Grove Street room, and with only herself to cook for, she had not missed them.

  Now she was in her element. She cooked for Megan, a girl who was able to appreciate good food. And a girl who loved her, and whom she loved. This made a difference. Saturday morning she made omelets with crisp bacon on the side and a pot of strong fresh coffee. Saturday night, late, she tossed a salad together and they killed a bottle of chilled wine with it. Sunday she baked a cake.

  “So domestic,” Megan said. “I ought to marry you, kitten.”

  “We’d shock some poor judge.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The best part was neither the walks nor the cooking. Even the lovemaking, deeply exciting, profoundly satisfying, was not the most important aspect of that weekend. They went to each other often that weekend, found new ways of giving and taking pleasure from one another, made the world go away and leave them alone in time and space. But even more important were the lazy silent times, the quiet and peaceful times when all that really mattered was the fact that they were together.

  Lying in bed in the afterglow of love, sharing a cigarette, talking not at all. Sitting in the living room with a record on the hi-fi and a bottle of wine open on the table before them. Or sitting with eyes locked together, eyes proposing and eyes accepting in the preliminary overtures to yet another trip to the bedroom and to center of the physical universe.

  She had not known it could be so fine. Not merely the sexual part, which was something very special, but the whole idyllic notion of being loved and in love. It had not been like this before, and she doubted that it could ever have been like this with any other person, man or woman. Only with Megan, only with the two of them together.

  So happy.

  Sunday night Megan said, “There’s a party tonight. But let’s not go to it.”

  “What kind of party?”

  “Some girls I know.”

  “A gay party?”

  “Of course. We’re a congenial lot, you know. None of us can stand being alone very well. Parties every weekend, more often than that if you really like to stay in the swim. I could take you and show you off if you like. Let everyone see what a lovely lover I have. You don’t want to go, do you?”

  “No. Not tonight.”

  But later she said, “These parties, Megan. What do you do at them?”

  “Sit around. Drink. Chat cattily, talk about who is going with whom, and who just jilted whom, and other pertinent gossip. Speculate on the sex lives of political figures and Hollywood stars. Clever little bitchy chitchat like that. What did you think?”

  “I just wondered.”

  “No orgies, if that’s what you meant.”

  “Why, I-”

  “I’m kidding. Just parties. Some people usually drink too much, and some girl goes on a crying jag, and a couple may break up or two singles may decide to go home together and share a closet.”

  So much talk about couples breaking up and new couples forming. She wondered at one point how many lovers Megan had had before her, how many girls like her had shared Megan’s bed and Megan’s love. She told herself it was silly to think about it, sillier still to be jealous. She couldn’t be jealous of a past love, or an affair that was part of a lover’s history. That was before she knew Megan. It was over and done with, it no longer existed.

  Yet it hurt to think about those former loves. They paraded through Rhoda’s mind, a long column of girlish silhouettes, each one a symbol of love that had been designed to last forever and that had flamed briefly and died. Megan didn’t talk about them. Once, though, she alluded to the last girl she had lived with, the one for whom she had bought the green red-veined heart. “It won’t last,” she had said, “She’s a flighty thing. It won’t last a month.”

  Could love end that quickly? And if those affairs could be so ephemeral, how long could she and Megan stay together?

  Forever, she told herself. And she pushed the problem from her mind. This was easily done; she was in no mood for problems.

  Monday, on her lunch hour, she stopped at a small jewelry shop, around the corner from Heaven’s Door. She spent a full half hour looking at everything in the shop until she settled on a small gold circle pin an inch across. On the back, she had the jeweler engrave Forever. And, on the lower rim, your rhoda.

  She went straight home after work. Megan was waiting for her. She gave Megan the pin, and the blonde girl looked at it and kissed her and laughed and handed her a small, gift-wrapped package. Inside was a silver cigarette lighter, small and chic, with Rhoda Moore engraved on its side in Spenserian script.

  Thursday night the phone rang. Megan answered and talked for several minutes. Her face was slightly drawn when she hung up. “I don’t feel like staying home tonight,” she announced. “There’s a good movie at the Waverly. A double feature, two old Humphrey Bogart movies. Let’s go.”

  Megan relaxed in the movie. They held hands through the show. It seemed very odd, at first, holding hands with Megan in the theater. There were other people all around them, and at first she felt tremendously self-conscious, as though everyone could see them and what they were to each other. But that was ridiculous. The theater was dark, and no one was watching them the first place. She gave Megan’s hand a squeeze and relaxed and watched the movie.

  Afterward she was ready to go home. She was tired, she had work the next morning. Megan wanted to stop for a drink.

  “We’ll see some people. You don’t have any friends, kitten.”

  “I have you.”

  “You should know more people.”

  “Why?”

  “You should. A little company wouldn’t hurt. Bobby called me this evening, wanted to come over.”

  “Who’s he?”

  A smile. “She. Roberta Kardaman, Bobby for short. Just a friend-she said she heard I was going with someone and she wanted to drop over and be introduced. I told her we were going out.”

  “Oh?”

  “She said she’d be at Leonetti’s tonight. That’s the place on Barrow Street, the cellar bar. I think I pointed it out to you.”

  “Yes.”

  “I told her we would drop by. It’s not far, it’s almost on the way home. Do you mind?”

  “No.”

  “Bobby was never anything to me, if that’s what you’re hesitant about. Not my type. Believe me, it’s very brave of me to let you meet her.”

  “Why?”

  “She’ll probably make a play for you.” Megan smiled. “She used to go with a girl named Rae. They broke up, oh, months ago, and Bobby’s been alone since then. And pretty miserable most of the time. I didn’t want her to come over because I thought she might make eyes at you or make some sort of approach.”

  She was hurt. “You know I wouldn’t-”

  “It’s not that. I thought you might be uncomfortable. But I like Bobby and I don’t want to dodge her. If I see her tonight at Leonetti’s, there’ll be other people around and I don’t think she’ll do anything gauche. She may undress you with her eyes. Do you think you can stand it?”

  “I hope so.”

  “You love. How did I ever find you?” Then, her tone more seri
ous, “We won’t stay long. It’ll do you good. This is a new world, gay society, and with the lousy marriage you had and the months of hibernation, you have to learn how to handle yourself in a social pattern like this. I don’t mean which fork to use, not that. But there’s a whole ritual, a whole pattern of social relationships and friendships and everything else. It wouldn’t be fair to you if I kept you to myself all the time.”

  “I wouldn’t mind that, Megan.”

  Leonetti’s was in the middle of a darkened residential block, occupying the cellar of a dingy brownstone. The bar itself was dimly lit, with dark corners and small tables set far apart. The bartender was the only man in the place. He was a tall Italian, bald, with a round face and implausibly innocent eyes. Four or five girls sat at the bar. Half a dozen couples occupied the tables.

  Heads turned their way when they entered the room. Rhoda stiffened inside, tremendously self-conscious. The wraps were off now. Here, with Megan at her side, everyone in the bar knew at once that she was gay, that she and Megan were lovers. People might speculate in the Village streets, but here there was no room for doubt. If she and Megan had not been gay, they would not have come here.

  She wanted to turn and run. But Megan took her hand and led her easily across the room, passing tables where girls sat drinking. Some of the drinkers continued to look at her. Others lost interest and went back to their drinks or their conversations. She took a breath a leaned slightly against Megan. They found a table far at the rear and sat down opposite one another.

  “Bobby’s not here yet,” Megan said. “Well? How you do you like the place?”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I shouldn’t have brought you. You aren’t ready, are you?”

  “I-”

  “Promenading down the center aisle while all the butches stare at us. Like a slave auction. What are you drinking?”

  “You order.”

  The waitress was a slender dark-skinned girl who knew Megan by name. Megan ordered scotch sours for both of them. The waitress nodded and left. Rhoda took a cigarette, gave Megan one, lit them both with the little silver lighter Megan had given her. She blew out a cloud of smoke and let her eyes scan the room. No one was staring at them now. The girls at the other tables seemed more natural. Just other girls, she told herself. Like her. Like Megan. Others who lived in the same special world. They ought to inspire sympathy, not fear.