by Ann Bannon
Jack got home at five, but she told him nothing. She was gentle and solicitous with him in a way he had missed for a couple of months. She read to him and she chatted with him, and underneath it all was a tremulous fear of disaster that made her feel a great tenderness for him. He seemed vulnerable to her. If she betrayed him she would embitter him more than she was able to imagine. The thought was terrifying.
“Mother, you need a change,” he said when they had finished dinner.
“I do?”
“Leave the dishes and scram.”
She felt a little spark of fear. “Are you kicking me out?’ she asked.
“I sure as hell am, you doll,” he said. “Get thee hence.”
“Where?” His laughter relieved her.
‘The Village. Where else?” And when she stared at him, wordless, he added, “You need it, honey. You’re nervous as a cat. Go on, have a ball.”
“You’re kidding!”
“I’ll give you three minutes to get out of here,” he said with a glance at his watch.
Laura hesitated for a few seconds until he looked at her over the top of the paper again and then she ran, heels ringing staccato on the polished wood floor of the hall, and got her coat and purse. On the way out she stooped to kiss his cheek.
“Jack, I adore you,” she whispered, to which he only smiled. At the door she turned and said, “I’ll be home early.”
“No curfew,” he said solemnly.
Laura went first to the Cellar, a favorite hangout in Greenwich Village. The tourists had begun to stop there by this time, but the gay crowd outnumbered them still and it wasn’t primarily a trap. The prices were reasonable and the decor smoky.
Laura settled at the bar with a sigh of sheer pleasure. All she wanted to do was sit there quietly and look at them…those lovely girls, dozens of them, with ripe lips and rounded hips in tight pants or smooth skirts. And the big ones, the butches, who acted like men and expected to be treated as such. They were the ones who excited Laura the most, when it came right down to it. Women, women…she loved them all, especially the big girls with the firm strides and the cigarettes in their mouths…She realized with chagrin that she was thinking of Beebo.
God, what if she’s here? she thought with a wonderful scare running up her spine. She looked around, but Beebo was nowhere in sight.
I wonder if she has a job, poor darling. I wonder if Lili’s still supporting her. I wonder if she’s still drinking so much…if she thinks of me at all…Oh what’s the matter with me? What do I care? She nearly drove me crazy!
She thought of Tris suddenly, of that marvelous fragrant tan skin. In fact she indulged in an orgy of suggestive thoughts that would have driven her crazy cooped up at home. But here, surrounded with people who felt and thought much as she did, it was all right. It was safe somehow. She could even spend the evening flirting with somebody, if anybody caught her eye, and it would come to no harm. Just a night’s outing. Nothing more.
Tris…Tris…she would never show up in a place like this. She’d shun it like the plague. All the same it would be nice. So nice.
But the harder Laura concentrated on Tris the more insistently Beebo obsessed her. Laura shrugged her off and ordered another drink. She laughed a little to herself and said, But I don’t love her at all anymore. And she turned to talk to the girl beside her.
The girl was very charming: small and curly-headed and pretty, and she laughed a lot. And soon Laura was laughing with her and learned that Inga was her name. But that face, that damned face of Beebo’s, strong and handsome and hard with too much living, kept looking at her through the haze of Inga’s cigarette.
“Did you ever have somebody plague your thoughts, Inga?” she asked her abruptly. “Somebody you’d nearly forgotten and weren’t in love with anymore, and never really were in love with?”
“What’s her name?” Inga asked sympathetically.
“Oh, nobody you’d know.” She was fairly sure Inga would know, if she frequented the Cellar. If she’d hung around the Village long enough she’d know most of the characters by sight, if not personally. Beebo was one of the characters. And she had been around here for fourteen years. “How long have you lived down here?” Laura asked the girl.
“Two years next month.”
Long enough, Laura thought.
“I’ll bet I know her. She ever come in here? Come on, tell me,” Inga said.
“I can’t,”
“You’re silly, then. I’ll clue you in on something, Laura. If you can’t get her off your mind it’s because you can’t get her out of your heart. That sounds corny but it’s true. I found out the hard way. Believe me.”
Laura shook her head. “I never loved her,” she said positively.
“You’re fooling yourself, sweetie.”
Laura looked at her, bemused. “I’m in love with somebody else,” she said, thinking of Tris.
“Me?” Inga grinned.
“No. No, an Indian girl.”
“Indian? What’s her name?”
“Tris.”
“Tris! Gee, I do know her. She comes in here a lot.”
Laura stared at her, too shocked to answer for a minute. Finally she said hoarsely, “Tris would never come in here. She hates gay bars. I know that for a fact.”
“Well…” Inga looked as if she knew she had put her foot in her mouth and regretted it. “Maybe it’s a different Tris.”
“What’s her last name?”
“Robischon, or something. Something Frenchy. I think she made it up myself. But she’s a gorgeous girl. I was really smitten when I saw her.”
Laura blanched a little and ordered another drink and drank it down fast, and Inga laid a hand on her arm. “Gee, I’m sorry, Laura,” she said. “Me and my big mouth. I should learn to shut up. But I’m in here all the time. I come in after work and I see just about everybody—”
“I know, I know. It’s okay, Inga.” She ordered another drink. “I’d rather know than not,” she said. “Besides, I haven’t seen the girl for eight months. It’d be pretty strange if nobody found out about her in eight months. She’s beautiful.”
“That she is. Somebody’s found out, all right. A lot of people, I hear.”
“Does she come in here alone?” The whole thing seemed incredible to Laura. Tris! So aloof, so chilly, so much better than the rest of the gay crowd. Tris, who wouldn’t go near Fire Island for a summer vacation because it was “crawling with queers.” It just couldn’t be. But Inga certainly wasn’t describing anybody else.
“She comes with somebody else,” Inga said reluctantly. “Look, sweetie, why don’t you come over to my place and have a nightcap. We can’t talk in here.”
“I’d like to know, Inga. Tell me. Who does she come in with?” Laura turned and looked at her, swiveling slowly on her stool, a little tipsy and feeling suddenly as if the situation were something of a joke.
“Oh…a big gal. Been around the Village for years. You might know her. Beebo Brinker’s her name.”
Laura sat there frozen for nearly a minute. It was a joke—colossal, cruel, hilarious. She laughed uncertainly and ordered another drink.
“I knew you were going to say that,” she told Inga. “Isn’t that the damnedest thing? Isn’t that the goddamnedest thing?” And she began to laugh again, repeating, when she could get her breath, “I knew you were going to say that.” Inga had to slap her face to stop the shrieking, irrepressible giggles that were strangling her. Then Laura’s laughter changed, in the space of a breath, to tears.
Inga talked to her quietly with that odd intimacy that springs up between homosexuals in trouble, and it helped. After five or six minutes Laura wiped her eyes and drank her drink and let Inga help her out of the Cellar. A few curious eyes followed them and Laura prayed again that nobody she knew had seen her.
The cold air braced her a little, and she stood on the corner weaving slightly and trying to get her bearings.
“Come on,” Inga said. “Let’s
get some hot coffee into you. I live just a couple of blocks from here. Come on.”
Laura let herself be led by the diminutive curly-head, but when she saw they were headed for Cordelia Street she began to get scared. “Beebo lives near here,” she said, hanging back.
“I mean—she used to.”
“She still does,” Inga said. “I see her now and then. I live right over there.” She pointed.
Laura brushed the girl’s hand from her sleeve and turned to her. “Thanks, Inga,” she said. “Thanks anyway, but I think I’ll…” And her eyes wandered back into Cordelia Street
Inga followed her gaze, catching the idea. “I wouldn’t if I were you,” she said. “You’ll be real sorry the minute you get there.” When Laura didn’t answer she asked, “Tell me, which one of them is it?”
“Which one?”
“That you just can’t get off your mind?”
Laura looked back up the street where she used to live and said softly, “Beebo. It’s crazy, isn’t it? Beebo. And it’s Tris I’m in love with.”
“Yeah,” said Inga with kindly skepticism. “Sure…Have some coffee with me?”
Laura leaned over on a whim and kissed her cheek. “That’s for being a woman,” she said. “You don’t know what a help it’s been.”
Inga stood on the corner and watched Laura walk away from her. “Any time you want that coffee, Laura,” she called. “I’m in the phone book.”
Laura stood in front of the door into her old apartment building for a long while on trembling legs before she turned the knob and walked in.
What if they’re together? she wondered. They’ll just grab me and wring my neck. God, all those questions Tris used to ask me about Beebo. And it never entered my love-sick head!
She crossed the little inner court to the second door, opened it, and went to the row of mailboxes to press the buzzer. She found Beebo’s name, with her own crossed out beneath it but no other added. And a weird, wonderful panic grabbed her throat at the thought of Beebo.
She left the buzzer without pressing it and walked up the flight of stairs to stand in front of the door that had once been her own, with Beebo still swimming before her eyes.
She could picture her more and more clearly: wearing pants and going barefoot, tired at the end of the day and maybe a little high; a cigarette in her mouth and a towel tied around her middle while she did dishes or cleaned up the apartment; the smooth skin on her face and the handsome features that used to fire Laura’s imagination and make her tingle; the tired eyes, blue and brilliant and somehow a little sick of it all…except when they focused on Laura.
Laura remembered how it had been and a sudden flash of physical longing caught her heart and squeezed until she felt her breath come short. She stared at the door, afraid to knock and still hypnotized with curiosity. Her hand was raised, quivering, only inches from the green painted wood.
Tris will open it, she thought, and together they’ll strangle me. Oddly, she didn’t care. She was too tight to care. She had a vision of herself falling into their arms and succumbing without a struggle. Just letting them have her life, her mixed-up, aimless, leftover life.
She knocked—a quick scared rap, sharp and dear. And then stood there on one foot and the other, half panicky like a grade-schooler nearly ready to wet her pants and flee.
Footsteps. High heels. From the kitchen, Beebo’s voice. “Who the hell could that be? After ten, isn’t it?” Oh, that voice! That husky voice that used to whisper such things to me that I can never forget.
The door swung open all at once, ushering a flood of light into the hall. Laura looked up slowly…at Lili! The two of them stared at each other in mutual amazement for a moment. And while they stared, mute, Beebo called again, “Who is it, Lili?”
Lili, her candy-box pretty face overlaid with too much makeup, as usual, broke into a big smile. “It’s Laura!” she exclaimed. “I’ll be goddamned. Laura!”
For a tense moment Laura could feel Beebo’s shock across the rooms and through the walls like a physical touch. Then her courage melted—fizzled into nothing like water on a hot skillet, and she turned and ran.
She heard Beebo at the door, before she got out into the court, saying, “Let her go, Lili. If she thinks I’m going to chase her twice—” And that was all Laura got of it. It shot through her heart like a bullet.
Laura reached the door to the street, tore it open, and rushed out. But once there, with the door shut behind her and no sound of pursuing footsteps, she collapsed against the wall and wept. Between sobs, when she could get her breath, she listened…listened…for the running feet that would mean Beebo had changed her mind. Laura had to believe, at least for a minute, that Beebo would come after her. Because it was all tied up in her mind with Beebo loving her. If Beebo loved her she’d chase her. It was that simple. And it didn’t matter a damn what Laura might have done to Beebo in the past, or how she might have hurt her.
Tris! she thought. I’ve got to see her! She said this to herself very urgently, but curiously, at the same time, she felt no desire to go and find the lovely tormented dancer. She told herself it would be all fight and misery. But in her heart of hearts she knew that real love would brave that misery now, being so close and so starved for passion.
She stood there for fully fifteen minutes before she was able to pull herself together and walk to Seventh Avenue. She went straight home in a cab.
Laura walked slowly up the stairs to her apartment. It was after eleven now, and Jack would be in bed. She had had too much to drink, but she was sober, a tired, bewildered sort of sobriety that made her want to lie down and weep and rest.
In the morning she would tell it all to Jack. Wonderful Jack. He would coax her back to living, coax her with his wit and his compassion and his incredible patience with her. And she would lie in a welter of dejection and let him work on her until she felt like lifting her head from the pillow and raising the shade from the window and going on with life. It was one of the things she loved him for and needed him for the most—this ability to revive her when she was so low that only death was lower.
Tonight was perhaps not quite that bad. But it was bad enough to have exhausted her. And Tris and Beebo! That had been the cruelest blow; the one she should have foreseen clear as a beacon in a black sea. She shoved a trembling key into the lock and walked into the apartment.
It was warm and well-lighted. It was pretty and it was comfortable. It was home. And Laura felt a sort of gratitude to Jack that needed words. She went to find him. But he wasn’t in the living room, nor in the bedroom.
She stood on the threshold of the bedroom and said, “Jack? Hey, Jack! Where are you?”
“Here,” he said from the kitchen.
“Oh. It’s me. I thought you’d be in bed.” She slipped her coat off while she walked through the living room to find him. “Hi,” she said. He was sitting on a kitchen chair and he answered, “Hi.”
Laura stood in the doorway and looked at him. And he stared back at her, and she knew something was wrong but she didn’t know what. Her long fine hair had come loose when she ran from Beebo and she reached up and pulled it down in a shimmering cascade, watching Jack all the while through narrowed eyes.
“Have fun?” he asked.
“Beebo and Tris…are…shacking up.” She threw it at him point-blank. She wanted his sympathy.
Jack put his head back and laughed, that awful bitter laugh she hadn’t heard for months, and she knew with a sudden start of fear and pity that he was drunk. “That makes everything perfect,” he said, still laughing, his eyes wicked and sharp behind the horn rims.
“Jack…,” she said shakily, coming in to sit beside him and seeing now the whiskey bottle on the table in front of him, two-thirds empty. “Jack, darling.” She took his hands and her eyes were big with alarm.
Jack took his hands back. Not roughly, but as if he simply didn’t want to be touched. Not by Laura, anyway.
“Mother, you are a living d
oll. If I had known you could keep secrets so well I’d have told you a few,” he said. He spoke, as always when he was drunk, with a slow precision, as if each word were a stepping stone.
“Secrets?” Laura said.
“You are the living picture of guilt, my dear,” he said. “It is written all over your beautiful face.”
Laura put her hands over that face suddenly with a gasp.
“Terry!” she sobbed through clenched teeth. “Terry! If I hadn’t gone out he wouldn’t have come.”
“He comes when the mood hits him,” Jack said. “Which is most of the time, most anywhere. It had nothing to do with you going out, my little wifey.”
Laura looked up, her delicate face mottled pink and white and wet from the eyes down. “He wrote—”
“Indeed he did. He told me the whole romantic story.”
“Jack, darling, I only kept it secret because I was afraid you’d—you’d start drinking, or something—I—”
“You hit the nail on the head. I’m indebted to you. Your solicitude is exemplary.” He waved the fast-emptying bottle at her.
“Oh, shut up! Shut up! I love you. I did it because I love you.”
“You opened my mail because you love me?” He continued to drink while he talked…slowly, but steadily.
“I knew it was from him, Jack. I just had a feeling. The handwriting and everything.”
He laughed ruefully. “Just think what you’ve spared me!” he said. “I can drink in peace now. My wife loves me. Thanks, wife.” He saluted her.
Laura slid off her chair to her knees and put her arms around him, still crying. “Jack, Jack, please forgive me. I’ll do anything, I couldn’t bear to hurt you, I’d die first. Oh, please—”
“You’re forgiven,” he interrupted her. “Why not?” And he kept on laughing. But his pardon was so light, so biting, that she cringed from it. She lifted her face to him, streaming with tears, and he said, smiling at her, “You make a lovely picture, Mother. Sort of Madonna-like. If I could paint you, I’d paint you. Black, I think. From head to toe.”