The Beebo Brinker Omnibus

by Ann Bannon

  The pleading in his voice irritated her. If she had been another kind of woman she might have responded with a wealth of sweet reassurance; she might have been able to respond that way. But instead she felt disdain for him, the sort of scorn most women reserve for a man who shows himself a weakling. Charlie was not a weakling and Beth knew it. And yet it seemed that over the years, as the ominous cracks developed in their marriage, he had made most of the concessions to keep them together, and that too aroused her scorn. It was true that she would have suffered fits of guilt and loneliness if he hadn’t, and she was grateful to him for his “tact.” But the very role she forced him to play and thanked him for in her secret conscience, lessened him in her eyes.

  Dimly, Charlie realized this too. But he was caught in the squirrel cage and there was no way out.

  Carefully Beth said, “I just want you to say it’s okay.”

  With a weary sigh he loosened his embrace in order to look at her. “Say what’s okay?”

  “If I model with Vega a couple of days a week.”

  His eyes widened then as he heard and understood, and he turned away from her, picking up his pajamas and carrying them in front of him. His unwanted love was too obvious and it embarrassed him. “Vega Purvis is a Class-A bitch,” he said.

  Beth’s cheeks went hot with indignation. She whipped her nightie out of the closet and slipped it over her simmering head. If she threw her anger in his face now he would never agree to it. But to call Vega a bitch, when he hardly even knew her!

  “I think she’s delightful,” she said haughtily, when the covering of the nightie gave her some pretense to dignity.

  “Sure. Delightful. What in hell do you want to learn modeling for? From that winesop?” He climbed under the covers and lighted a cigarette, and there was a flood of misery in him at the sight of her drawn up stiff and chilly in her resentment.

  “You say modeling like you meant whoring!” she flashed.

  “Well, what does it mean?” he asked with elaborate courtesy. “You tell me.”

  “I’d probably go down there once or twice a week,” she said, suddenly softening in an effort to bring him around. “It would be just for fun, not for money. I’d never model professionally. But it would be something to get me out of the house, something really interesting for a change. Not that goddamn interminable bowling Jean dotes on.”

  “I can’t see that walking around with a book on your head is so damn much more interesting than shoving a ball down an alley.”

  Her fleeting softness vanished. “I knew you’d be this way!” she cried. “Just because I want something, you don’t want it! When in doubt, say no. That’s your motto.” She continued to berate him for a moment until it became clear that he wasn’t listening. He was staring past her, beyond her, at nothing, thinking. And his eyes were dark and heavy. He held his cigarette in one hand, so close to his chest that she had a momentary fear the hair would catch fire and scorch him.

  “Charlie?” she said, after a moment’s silence.

  “Beth, tell me something,” he said seriously, and his eyes, still aimed at her, focused on her once again. “I want you explain to me what is the matter with our marriage.”

  For a long minute neither of them spoke. And then Beth sat down on the bed, at his feet, biting her lower lip. “You explain it to me,” she said.

  “I’ll gladly tell you all I know,” he said. “I know we have two lovely children. I know we have a pleasant house to live in, even if it is small. I know I love you.” There was a significant pause, in which she should have said, Of course I love you too. But she didn’t. He sighed. “I know we should be happy. There isn’t anything specific you can put your finger on that’s out-and-out wrong with us. So why do we argue all the time? Why, when we’re still together, we still have each other, and things are going along the right way—why aren’t we happy, Beth? Because we’re not. We sure as hell are not.”

  Beth couldn’t look at him, at his frowning face. “If you’d pick up after yourself once in a while,” she said. “if you’d agree, just once, to let me do something I really want to do.” The spite in her voice piqued him.

  “Oh! Now I understand. This would be a gloriously happy household if it weren’t for me, is that it? If the husband and father would just get the hell out, the family would be perfect. Right?”

  “Cut the sarcasm, Charlie,” she said. She tried to sound firm but her chin trembled.

  “I get it from you, dear. It’s catching,” he said. “Besides, I’m not convinced that you’ll swoon happily in my arms if I pick up my socks in the morning.”

  She made a helpless gesture with her hands. “All right, Charlie, I’m at fault too. Is that what you want me to say? I fly off the handle, I’m cross with the kids. I—I—”

  “You kick me out of bed three or four times a week.”

  She turned a blazing face to him. “Charlie, goddamn it, I’m your wife. But that doesn’t mean that any time you feel like having me, I feel like being had. Three or four times a week is too much!”

  “It didn’t used to be,” he said, his voice as soft as hers was loud. “What happened?”

  Tears started to her eyes for the second time that evening and she turned away. “Nothing,” she exclaimed.

  “Something must have happened, Beth. You just don’t want it anymore. Ever. You give in now and then to shut me up—not because you really want me.”

  She covered her face with both hands and wept quickly with fear and confusion. “I don’t know what happened,” she admitted finally.

  He leaned toward her, hating to hurt her. “Beth, I’d do anything for you,” he said earnestly. “I’d let you go model in Timbuktu if that would make you happy. But it won’t. All these things you think you want so badly—did you ever stop to examine them? What are they? So many escapes. You’re running away. The one thing you can’t stand, you can’t bear to face or live with or understand, is your relationship with me. Your home. Your kids. But mostly me. Are you sorry we got married, Beth? Tell the truth?”

  There was a terrible, painful pause. It took all of her courage to admit, “I don’t know. That’s the truth. I don’t know.”

  He shut his eyes for a moment, as if to recover a little.

  “Do you love me, then?”

  She swallowed. “Yes,” she said. Her courage would not stretch so far as to let her hedge on that one.

  “Do you love the kids?”

  She caught her breath and bit her lip. I will be truthful, I’ll be as truthful as I can, she told herself sharply.

  “Do you love the kids, honey?” he prompted her.

  “When they’re not around,” she blurted, and gave an awful sob, covering her wicked mouth with one hand. When she could talk a little she said, “I love them, I love them terribly, but I just can’t stand them. Does that make any sense?”

  He lay back on the bed and gazed at the ceiling. The sight of Beth tore his heart. “Not to me, it doesn’t,” he said. And seeing her despair, he added, “But at least it’s the truth, Beth, Thank you for that much, anyway.” There was no sarcasm in his voice now.

  Beth got up and walked back and forth at the foot of the bed. “I know I’m not the world’s greatest mother, Charlie. Far from it.” She wiped her eyes impatiently. “Or the best wife. I guess I hound you all the time because I’m ashamed of my own behavior. At least that’s part of it. You’re no dreamboat yourself sometimes.” She turned to look at him and he nodded without answering.

  “The trouble is, I just don’t know what I would be good at,” she said helplessly. “I don’t know what I want to do. I wish I could want something, good and hard, and it would be the right thing. Sometimes I wish somebody would tell me what I want. Maybe my ideas about traveling and the rest of it are just daydreams. Escape, or whatever you said. But Charlie, that’s not criminal. I need an escape. I really do.” She felt a note of semi-hysteria pulling her voice higher and higher and she stopped talking for a minute to catch her bre
ath.

  “I wanted to go to Mexico last year. You said no. I want to get that MG we saw in Monrovia. You said no. I have a couple of cocktails by myself in the afternoon and you blow your top. You think I’m headed for Skid Row. I ask to go home and visit Uncle John. No again.”

  “The last time you visited Uncle John,” Charlie pointed out with heat, “I didn’t see you for four whole months.”

  “And those four months saved my sanity!” she cried, thrusting her angry chin toward him.

  He lighted another cigarette in offended silence.

  After a moment she resumed, trying to keep her voice level, “Now I want to model a couple of days a week. Is that so very awful? Am I really a case for the bughouse because I want to escape once in a while?” She tried, with her voice, to make it seem ridiculous.

  “If it were only once in a while,” he said sadly. They were silent again. Beth had stopped her pacing and he look at her lovely figure, shadowy beneath the nylon film of nightie. He wanted her so much…so much. At last he said, quietly, “Well, I guess it’s better than losing you to Uncle John for half a year.”

  She turned around slowly and her face was grateful. “Thanks, Charlie,” she said. “I would have done it anyway, but—” She was sorry she had said it. He looked so despondent, utterly stripped of his husbandly influence, almost a stranger to her. “But I wanted you to approve,” she went on hastily. “I wanted to be able to tell you about it and everything.” He refused to look at her. “She—she’s doing it for nothing.” Beth added, hoping to make it more acceptable to him.

  He laughed unpleasantly. “She’s doing it for something, Beth. Not money, maybe, but something. Vega’s not the kind of girl who does things for nothing.”

  She went around the bed and sat down beside him. “Look at me, honey,” she said. “I want to thank you.”

  “I know,” he answered, but the thought of her kiss suddenly made him weak and a little sick. He sat up, turning to give her his back and was suddenly mortified to feel her lips on it in a brief shy salute. He froze.

  “Beth,” he said sternly. “Vega is a strange girl. You should know…”

  “Know what?” she said eagerly.

  “Cleve has told me,” he said reluctantly. “She’s been married a couple of times.”

  “To whom? Beth interrupted, astonished. Vega? Married?

  “Well, I didn’t know them. The first marriage was ideal, by your lights: she lived in Chicago and he lived in Boston. For eight years. Cleve said she never let him in her bed. His name was Ray something. She calls him ex-Ray.”

  Beth had to grin at his back. It began to sound more like the elegant enigma she knew. “Who was the other one?” she asked.

  “Some good-timer, backslapping sort of guy. A roommate of Cleve’s once, before I knew him. Younger than Vega. It’s only been two years since she divorced that one. I guess he didn’t get past the bedroom door either, but he did get into her bank account. Spent all her money and then disappeared. Nobody knows where he is. She never talks about him.”

  “Well,” Beth said cautiously, “that’s not so strange. I mean, she obviously wasn’t a good marriage risk, but lots of women have behaved that way. Maybe the men she picked weren’t such prizes either.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe.” He turned to look at her. “She lives alone with her mother and her grandfather. Cleve says they’re a trio of cuckoo birds. You can’t get him over there. Except Christmas and birthdays, and he only goes because he feels he has to.”

  “Do they really hate each other—Cleve and Vega?” Beth asked.

  “Only on the bad days,” he said. “Now and then they quit speaking to each other. But then their mother breaks a leg or Gramp poisons the stew and they get back together. Takes a family calamity, though. Right now they’re as friendly as they ever are, according to Cleve. I don’t know why it should be that way. Doesn’t seem natural.”

  “They’re both such nice people. It’s a shame,” she said.

  Charlie couldn’t stand to look at her any longer and not touch her. He put his arms around her and felt her nestle against him with a shattering relief. After a few minutes he heaved himself over her to turn out the dresser lamp, returning fearfully to her arms, only to find them open.

  “Is this my thanks for giving in?” he said. It was flat and ironical. He couldn’t help the dig. But she took it in stride by simply refusing to answer him. He made up for several weeks of involuntary virtue that night.

  Before they slept, Charlie had to say one last thing. He saved it until he knew they were both too tired to stay awake and argue. He didn’t want to ruin things. She lay very close to him, in his arms, too worn out for her usual tears of frustration, and he whispered to her, “Beth?”

  “Hm?”

  “Darling, I have to know this. Don’t be angry with me, just tell the truth like you did earlier. Beth, I—” It was hard to say, so awkward. He was afraid of humiliating her, rousing her temper again. “I keep thinking of Laura,” he said at last.

  “Laura?” Beth woke up a little, opening her eyes.

  “Yes. I mean, I can’t help but wonder if you—you know how you felt about her—if it’s the modeling that interests you or if it’s—Vega.”

  In the blank dark he couldn’t see her face and he waited, fearful, for her answer. God, don’t let her explode, he prayed.

  Beth turned away from him, her face dissolved in tears. “It’s the modeling!” she said in a fierce whisper. And they said no more to each other that night.

  Chapter Five

  VEGA’S STUDIO WAS LOCATED ON THE SECOND FLOOR OF A building that housed an exclusive dress shop and a luggage and notions shop. It was an expensive place to rent and Beth was rather surprised to see how bare it was. There was a small reception room which was tastefully decorated, though there was space for more chairs in it. There was a door marked “office,” which was closed, and there was a large, nearly empty studio room with eight or ten folding chairs, the kind you sit on at PTA meetings.

  Beth peered into the studio hesitantly, and instantly Vega materialized from a small group of high school girls who had surrounded her while she spoke to them. There was silence while she walked, regally lovely in flowing velvet, both hands extended to Beth. The teens examined the newcomer with adolescent acuteness, and Beth took their silent appraisal uneasily.

  Vega reached her. “Darling, how are you?” she said in her smooth controlled voice, and kissed Beth on the mouth. Beth was shocked speechless. She stared at Vega with big startled eyes.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Vega laughed, seeing her expression. “The doctor says I’m socially acceptable. The TB has been inactive for almost two years—really a record.”

  But it wasn’t the infected lung, the possibility of catching TB, that upset Beth. That, in fact, never occurred to her. It was the sudden electric meeting of mouths, the impudence of it, the feel of it, the teen-aged audience taking it all in. Beth was piqued. Vega had no business treating her so familiarly. Still, it was impossible to make a fuss over it, as though she were guilty of some indecent complicity with Vega.

  “How are you?” she said uncertainly.

  The knot of girls began to talk and giggle again, and Vega turned to them. “Okay, darlings, you can go now,” she said. “That’s all for this afternoon.”

  She took Beth’s arm and led her into the studio while the girls filed past them and out, still staring. Beth began to be seriously disturbed. Vega behaved as if they were sisters, at the very least, and at the worst…Beth turned to her abruptly.

  “Vega, I hate to say anything, but really, I—I—” She paused, embarrassed. Vega would surely take it the wrong way. Who but a girl with a problem would take the kiss, the familiarity, so hard? What, after all, was so dreadful about a kiss between two women? Even if it was so unexpected, even if it was so direct that a trace of moisture from Vega’s lips remained on Beth’s own.

  I’d only look like a fool to complain, Beth thought. She’
d think I was—queer—or something. How she hated that word!

  “Something wrong?” Vega said helpfully.

  “I—well, I’m just not so sure I should do this, that’s all,” she said lamely. “Charlie said—”

  “Charlie be damned. Charlie’s as stuffy as Cleve. They make a beautiful couple,” she shot at Beth, who was startled by the sharp emphasis. “However…” Vega turned away, walking to one of the folding chairs to pick up her purse and fish out a cigarette. “Maybe he’s right. Maybe you shouldn’t try to do this.”

  “What?” Beth exclaimed. “After all you said—”

  “Oh, just for today, I mean,” Vega laughed. “I don’t feel much like giving another lesson. I get so sick of this damn place,” she added plaintively, and her change of expression impressed Beth. Vega looked tired for a moment, and perhaps not as young as usual. But her face smoothed out quickly. “You don’t really mind, do you?” she said.

  “Well, I—I do a little,” Beth admitted. After what she had gone through to get Charlie’s approval she minded a lot. But Vega intimidated her somehow, and she hadn’t the nerve to show her irritation. “But if you’re tired…” She paused.

  “I am,” Vega said. “But I have no intention of abandoning you, my little housewife.” She swung a plush coat over her shoulders. “I’m tired and fed up and sick to death—not really,” she added with a brilliant smile that did not reassure Beth at all. The edge in Vega’s usually soft and low voice made her words sound literally true. Tired, fed up, sick. And those eyes, so deep and dark and full, had turned lusterless again, as if Vega were defying her to look into them and see her secrets.

  “Let’s go slumming,” she said, and the way she said it, the quick return of life to her face, the odd excitement so tightly controlled, was infectious.

  “Where?” Beth said, intrigued.

  “Well, you look so nifty we can’t go too far astray,” Vega said, looking at her professionally. And yet not quite professionally enough. “Do you have your car?”