Warm and Willing

by Lawrence Block

  “Did you ever-”

  “Oh, of course. Everybody was hysterically promiscuous down there, and she was working her way through everyone who could speak English, and an occasional Mexican for laughs, and she got to me after a while. I never liked her much but I found her…well, fascinating, in a pitiable sort of a way. We weren’t together long. Then a month later she killed herself. She was only twenty-two years old. She was messy about it, awful about it; it was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen in my life. There was a party, everybody drinking. In the middle of everything she took a gun from her purse, a revolver, and she shouted something about this being the biggest kick of all, and she stuck the gun in her mouth-”

  Her heart was pounding. “Don’t say it.”

  There was a time while neither of them said anything. Rhoda finished her coffee, lit a cigarette. In her mind’s eye she could see that girl, faceless but very real to her, playing her little desperate scene in the middle of a party, picking just the right dramatic moment for announcement and, before anyone could do anything, the act itself.

  “Rho-”

  Bobbie’s eyes were wide, deep. They caught hers and held them.

  “Rho, now.”

  The bedroom was almost stark in its simplicity. A Hollywood bed, a maple dresser, a worn rug on the floor. Two chairs, a night table. Walls that needed painting. Bobbie turned on a small lamp on the night table, and killed the overhead light. “I used to be afraid of the dark,” she said. “Can you believe it?”

  “But you’re not now.”

  “No. But I want to see you.”

  They lay down on the bed with their clothes on and kissed. Bobbie was the aggressor, which was as she had known it would be. Bobbie ran her hand over Rhoda’s face, let her hand trail downward to cup a breast gently through the layers of clothing.

  This should be a tense moment, she thought. And yet it wasn’t. It took her a moment to realize why this was so. She was taking a new lover, moving from Megan and moving to Bobbie, and yet now, in Bobbie’s arms, she did not feel that any break was being made. But the reason was quickly obvious. She had already become as intimate with Bobbie as she had ever been with anyone. She had committed herself in every way but physically, had developed an emotional rapport with Bobbie that had been tempered by Peg Brandt’s attempt at suicide. What they did now, what pleasure they gave one another in bed, called for no basic change in their relationship. She was not betraying Megan now; she had already betrayed her by what she said and by what she felt. This was no new betrayal. This was only frosting on the cake.

  She lay quite still while Bobbie undressed her, removing her clothing piece by piece. The air in the bedroom was cool on her naked flesh. She sighed when Bobbie held her bare breasts, moaned softly when Bobbie ran a hand over her slender legs.

  Oh Then she was alone upon the bed. Bobbie had drawn away from her. Rhoda turned her head, opened her eyes. Bobbie was undressing by the side of the bed. She unbuttoned the gold blouse, shrugged it from her shoulders. Her hands reached behind her back to unfasten the bra and remove it. Next her hair-she let it down, and the rich chestnut mane spilled over her shoulders and hung to the sides of her breasts.

  She looked like a goddess, Rhoda thought. Bared to the waist, fullbodied and magnificent, wide-eyed and beautiful. And her face showed nothing-neither happiness nor sorrow, neither excitement nor boredom. Nothing at all.

  Bobbie took off the rest of her clothes. The tight black slacks, the panties, the shoes. And then she turned to look directly down upon Rhoda, bathed in half-light by the nightstand lamp, and her expression went from blank seriousness to embryonic passion. “My Rho,” she said, “I love you so very damned much.”

  “Oh-”

  “How soft you are, how soft and warm. And how lovely. I could look at you and touch you forever.”

  She had known it would be this way, with Bobbie leading while she followed, with Bobbie bestowing and Rhoda receiving, submitting. She lay still, eyes half-lidded at first, then completely shut. She lay still and quiet, and Bobbie did magical things to her.

  Bobbie nuzzled her breasts, caressed them with trembling fingers. Rhoda’s breasts seemed to swell from the touch. Bobbie kissed her there, and Bobbie’s clever tongue coursing over her soft breast-flesh was an agony of yearning aching passion. Bobbie tongued Rhoda’s nipples into stiff longing, caught up each erect nipple in between her scarlet lips and sucked on them like an infant, and yet not like an infant at all. Rhoda’s flesh quivered. The muscles in her legs and feet were tied in knots, all bound up and tense. She wanted to shout, to shriek.

  “Oh, God. Oh, yes, there. There-”

  All her flesh sang. Bobbie’s hands, Bobbie’s lips, everywhere, doing everything. Everything, everywhere, all.

  Fancies: She was a violin and Bobbie was playing songs on her body, wild melodies that twisted and soared. Bobbie was coaxing music from her and she was trembling in Bobbie’s hands. Fancies: She was ice aflame, burning with blue fire. Fancies: There was no time, there was no space, there was no world, there was merely this.

  Till human voices wake us and we drown.

  In the morning she called Mr. Yamatari and said she was sick and could not come in. Then she called Megan and managed, somehow, to get though the conversation. At first Megan cursed her and called her a vicious little tramp, and then Megan cried and begged her to come back, and finally Megan swore eternal love and said she could not live without her. But Rhoda did the only thing she could do, telling Megan over and that she was going to live with Bobbie and that there was nothing else she could do.

  “You’ll want your clothes.”

  “I-”

  “Give me an hour to get out of here. Then come over and help yourself. I still love you, Rhoda. And you love me.”

  She said nothing.

  “And always will. Because you never forget the first, darling. The first one everybody always remembers. Oh, kitten, we were so good for each other. What happened to us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “People never do, do they? But this is the way a first affair should end, with you the one to break it up. Otherwise it hurts too much, kitten. Oh, come back to me. Oh, Rhoda-”

  Silence. Then Megan said, “I’m sorry. Give me an hour, I’ll be out of here. Goodbye, Rhoda.”

  The connection was broken. She put the phone down, reached for a cigarette, lit it. Her eyes were fixed on the small silver lighter, her name engraved so neatly upon one side. And she thought of a small gold circle pin. On the back, Forever. Below that, Your Rhoda.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Outside, snow was falling. It wasn’t sticking to the pavement yet, but she had heard a weather report earlier which had said that it would turn colder after midnight and that there would be two to four inches of snow by morning. The announcer had said something about having a white Christmas after all. But there was no way to tell, she thought. Christmas was two weeks off, and this was the first real snowfall of the season. There had been flurries now and then, but nothing more than that. There might or might not be snow for Christmas, and she didn’t particularly care one way the other.

  She was sitting alone at the bar in Leonetti’s, nursing a drink, watching a cigarette burn itself out in the ashtray. The place was crowded. Most of the tables were taken, and over a dozen other girls crowded around her at the bar. She knew most of them but didn’t feel like talking, not to them or to anyone else.

  She sipped her drink. It was mostly melted ice now, flat and tasteless. She looked up. The bartender was down at the other end of the bar, busy with a complicated cocktail. She stubbed out her cigarette and drained her drink. She glanced at the window again, at the falling snow outside. Bobbie would be coming soon. Bobbie would join her, and they would take a table and have few drinks together, and maybe drop over to somebody’s apartment for more drinks and some food and conversation, and then home, and then to bed.

  All at once she stopped thinking and closed her eyes and list
ened. Leonetti’s was jammed, and she had been sitting at the bar with her thoughts turned inward and her ears turned off, the crowd noise shut out. Now she let the voices come to her, let herself be immersed in the glut of sound.

  So many girls all talking at once. And, with the rush of their voices, with the strained urgency that crept into their hectic conversation, she was overwhelmed by a feeling that the whole scene was slightly pathetic, pathetic and even laughable. A bar filled with girls, a whole mob of lesbians who had nothing better to do than waste their time in a bar with others like themselves. And the bar was filled with them simply because it catered to them. The drinks were overpriced, the decor unappealing, the service nothing remarkable. But the gay girls flocked to it because they were welcome there. That alone assured the bar’s success.

  Gay. She almost laughed-it was as though she were catching the deeper meaning of that merry word for the first time. So elaborately gay, so determined to maintain the appearances of joyous exhilaration. Heavy drinking, raucous laughter, wild jokes, never a dull moment. Unless you stopped to catch your breath and realized, startled, that all of the moments were slightly dull.

  The bartender came and filled her glass and took her money. She did not sip this one so very slowly but knocked off half of it in one quick swallow. Gay? If they were all so gay, what were they doing at Leonetti’s? If they were all so profoundly happy, why did they fight so much? If life was such a bed of roses, why did they slash their wrists?

  Gay.

  She and Bobbie were gay, all right. And in love. But they were also screaming at each other half the time and sulking the rest of the time. She didn’t know why it worked out that way but it did. They still loved each other, more than ever, and it looked as though they would last-for a long time, if not forever.

  But the fights were hell. Jealousy started some but not all of them, and both of them were equally capable provoking jealousy and of being moved by it. The jealousy fights, though, were at least a confirmation of love. The other fights were madness. One would want to go a party, one would want to stay home-and in minutes one would be yelling and the other crying. Or she would complain that Bobbie never did the dishes, or Bobbie would complain about Rhoda borrowing a dress without asking, or Rhoda would say something about the omnipresent Siamese cat. Anything could start things going. Any spark was dangerous when you lived in an oil refinery. Two weeks ago, she remembered, Ed Vance had come to see her again, if only to prove that his skin was as thick as his heart. “You stood me up awhile ago,” he told her, grinning. “I thought I’d give you another chance. How about it, Rhoda?”

  She brushed him off quickly and brutally, telling him in very definite terms that she was not interested in seeing him, that she would never be interested in seeing him, and that she would greatly appreciate it if he would make a point of avoiding her in the future. Not even a man like Ed Vance could misinterpret her this time. He stepped back as though he had been slapped, and she caught anger and fury in his eyes. Then he forced a smile. “You’ll never know what you’re missing,” he managed, and then he got out of there.

  And when she told Bobbie, the tall girl exploded in her face. She had thought they would laugh about it, about the fool Vance was making of himself, but Bobbie didn’t laugh.

  “You must have led him on,” she said.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “You’re just trying to hurt me. Making love to me and flirting with a man at the same time. Men don’t make passes at a girl unless they think they have a chance. They leave me alone.”

  “Well, maybe-”

  “Maybe I’m not as attractive as you are? Is that what you were going to say?”

  “I just-”

  It had been one hell of a battle. But the next day when she came home from work, Bobbie gave her a small white gold wedding band, plain and simple. “You wear this, darling,” she said. “Let the men think you’re married and they won’t make passes at you. I’m sorry, Rho. I was a bitch last night and I’m sorry-”

  Fighting and making up, crying and wiping tears away, hurting each other, loving each other. Gay? Oh, very gay. Sure.

  She fingered the plain gold band on her ring finger. A lot of the girls wore them, she knew. Sometimes girls exchanged them as a sort of symbolic marriage; more often they merely wore them as she wore hers, as a convenient way to ward off predatory males. Her own wedding ring, the one Tom had given her, would have done as well. But the day the annulment came through, she took it off and dropped it down a sewer grating.

  She finished her drink. Bobbie would be coming soon, she thought. She wished the girl would hurry. There were girls all around her, a whole mob of girls just like her and just like Bobbie, and she still felt so thoroughly alone that she wanted to cry.

  They wound up the night at John’s on Bleecker. She and Bobbie, Lucia Perry and Peg Brandt, Grace and Allie, Megan and Jan Pomeroy. The young Italian waiter winked happily at them and pulled two tables together and they sat together eating pizza with mushrooms and anchovies and drinking cold beer. The blackness of Rho’s mood had left when Bobbie arrived at Leonetti’s.

  She had slowed down on the drinking then, and now she just felt relaxed and happy. It was the first time she had been with Megan since they separated. She had run into her now and then, with the first meeting between them awkward and the second one forced and uneasy, but now they were able to relax at the same table. But it still felt strange to her, Meg was a girl she had loved, a girl she lived with, a girl she had finally left. And now they were what? Friends. Just that.

  She knew how it had been with Megan after the break-up. The blonde girl finished her decorating job, pulling it through on sheer willpower. She hurled herself in her work, got home late at night and drank herself into a stupor, then got up the next morning and went back to work. Once the job was out of the way, Megan stayed blind drunk for six days. Two weeks and three days after she stopped her heavy drinking, she went to bed with Jan Pomeroy.

  Each of the girls kept her own apartment. Neither of them even expected their affair to last for any great length of time. “We’re enjoying ourselves,” Jan had told Bobbie once. “We’ve known each other for ages and I’ve always liked and admired Megan. But we’re not making any marriage. When we stop being good for each other, or as soon as either of us finds someone else, that’s it. No tears.”

  It was an unlikely combination, Rhoda thought. Jan was as religiously homosexual as ever, and Megan had always thought of the hollow-eyed girl and her romantic notions as something of a joke. But they seemed to be good for each other. And she was glad Megan had found somebody to take her place.

  Now Megan was talking about a job she was thinking of taking. “This woman wants her living room redone,” she said. “She wants a very plush effect, like an apartment for one of those Doris Day movies. I know just how to give her what she wants.”

  “Aren’t you going to do it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so, because it’s not my kind of thing I mean, I would have to put together a room that I wouldn’t be able to walk into without getting slightly dizzy.”

  “But if she’s happy-”

  “Megan’s the great artist,” Peg Brandt said. “Chockful of artistic integrity. Something I can’t afford to have, incidentally. We folks up at McClellan Products Gazette just do what we have to do. No long words in the crossword puzzle, no bosomy girls in the cartoons, and no expression of opinion that isn’t the precise opinion of one Harvey McClellan. I envy you, Megan.”

  Lucia hurried to bolster Peg. “Now stop it,” she said. “You’re in a different field, that’s all. You don’t want to be artistic in your job, Peggy, because it’s something else. It’s being professional that’s important, in doing the job the way it ought to be done. And everybody knows you’re tops.”

  There was a momentary lull. Rhoda drank beer straight from the bottle and put the bottle down on the table top. “I wish I could do something,” she said.

  She
must have said it more plaintively than she meant it. Everyone was looking at her.

  “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I just don’t do anything. Megan is a decorator, Peg is an editor, Lu models-”

  “And Bobbie drinks.”

  There was laughter. “I’m serious,” she went on. “What do I do? Oh, Bobbie doesn’t work, I know, but she’s interested in a whole load of things. She reads like mad, she writes poetry-”

  “Bad poetry,” Bobbie put in.

  “And what do I do?” She shrugged. “Nothing. I go to work and stand there like an idiot selling ugly things to tasteless people, and I come home and relax, and then I go to work again. Anybody could do what I do. I have a college diploma, but I could work as well for Mr. Yamatari with a fourth grade education.”

  “Not everyone works at something interesting,” Bobbie said. “I don’t. The only job I could get would be something like yours, and I don’t need the money, so I don’t work at all. And an awful lot of girls have jobs that don’t do anything but bring them income.”

  “But I’m not involved in anything-”

  “Oh?” Grace winked broadly at her. “And here we all thought you were involved with Bobbie.”

  “You know what I mean.” She took a cigarette, lit blew out smoke. “I wish I were caught up in something, all excited about something. It wouldn’t have be terribly artistic or anything.”

  “Maybe you could open a shop,” someone suggested.

  “A shop? What kind?”

  “Anything. Antiques, clothes, jewelry. Some little shop that reflects your inner self.”

  “That’s a beautiful straight line,” she said. “I won’t bother with a punch line. But it takes a fortune to open a place, doesn’t it? And I don’t know the first thing about business.”

  “What to know?” Jan Pomeroy was talking. “You buy things and sell them, and you try to sell them for more than they cost you. That’s all you have to know about business.”