by Ann Bannon
Beth stood just inside the door, her coat and gloves still on, content to be in Vega’s presence, content to smell her perfume and feel the air she stirred when she moved. Vega was swathed in a full peignoir of several varicolored layers that floated and swirled around her. It gave the illusion that she was rounder and softer than she was.
Vega busied herself with the bottle, opening it with a fingernail file and pouring herself a drink in the bathroom glass. Beth realized slowly that they were completely alone. The girls had banded together in the other rooms, and the fact that she and Vega were there by themselves, locked in a hotel room at nearly three in the morning, exulted her. She felt wonderfully strong and strange, gazing at Vega, who had softened and relaxed with the warmth of the whiskey and was settling herself on the bed.
Vega smiled up at Beth and said, “Come and sit with me and tell me how evil I am.” Her smile was both sad and inviting, and suddenly the curious strength Beth had felt washed out of her and her knees began to tremble. She was afraid to move, afraid any move she made would be the wrong one.
Vega frowned slightly at her, perplexed. “Beth, darling, you can’t just stand there in your coat for the rest of the night. Take it off and come here.”
It was such a frank proposition that Beth wondered suddenly how Vega could be gay, as Cleve said, and not know it. It just couldn’t be. She wanted to rush to her, grasp her hands and sink to her knees and say, “Vega, Cleve has been lying to me. He says you don’t know yourself, he says—”
“What do you mean?” said Vega, and Beth realized, with a little gasp of horror and surprise, that the words had virtually spoken themselves, so intensely was she involved in her thoughts. Her face went a hot deep pink and she moved at last, slipping out of her coat, wordlessly embarrassed.
“What did Cleve say to you, Beth?” Vega was strung up tight again, leaning forward to catch each word.
“I shouldn’t have said anything,” Beth murmured. “I—I just had a drink with him this afternoon. He told me a lot of guff. I think he was just tight.” She went anxiously toward the bed and suddenly Vega burst into a beautiful smile and laughed in her cautious, lovely way.
“He told you how charming you are and how wicked and depraved I am, no doubt. He thinks it’s his mission in life to warn decent people away from his nefarious sister.” Her laughter brought a breath of relief to Beth, who smiled gratefully at her. It gave her the courage to come and sit beside her, and when Vega offered her the glass and poured her a drink, she took it as a sign that there were no hard feelings. She didn’t want the liquor, just Vega’s esteem, Vega’s warmth and favor. But liquor was one way Vega had of showing her approval and it had to be accepted.
“He’s been telling people for years how rare I am,” Vega went on. “How immoral. How faithless and frigid. I…was married, you know,” she added abruptly, her eyes bright on Beth.
“I know.”
“Oh, so he told you that too.” And she laughed again, putting her head back a little. Her hair was loose, not wound into the graceful roll she usually wore, and it fell, two feet of it, in silky luxury down her back. Beth had an almost uncontrollable urge to touch it, and she was relieved when Vega straightened up and resumed her story. “I was married twice, Beth. They were nice enough guys. That wasn’t the trouble!”
“What was the trouble?” Beth said and felt her throat constrict with excitement. It was such a perfect opening for a confession.
Vega turned her bottomless brown eyes on Beth and touched her knee gently, letting her hand rest there. “You blurted out a minute ago—to your own embarrassment, obviously—that Cleve thinks I don’t know myself.”
“Vega, I’m so sorry, it was thoughtless, I just—”
“No darling, I don’t want you to explain.” Her hand tightened on Beth’s warm knee. “I just want you to tell me what Cleve thinks it is I don’t know about myself. Tell me, Beth.”
Beth opened her mouth to speak and found no voice. How could she possibly say such a thing? He thinks you’re a Lesbian, and you don’t know it. It could be torment for a sensitive person to have something that shocking, that personal, thrown at her from the blue.
“I can’t say it, Vega,” she admitted, and Vega read her pale face accurately.
“Well, then, I know what it is,” she said. “And he’s telling you what he honestly believes.” Her face became pensive suddenly and she gazed downward at the whiskey in the glass tumbler. “I have never let him understand me very well. I have good reasons for it. He thinks he does, of course. It’s rather painful sometimes, he thinks I’m so dense.”
Beth felt herself in a state of tremulous anticipation. She didn’t want to talk, only to touch, only to feel. And yet talking like this might bring her closer to Vega, help her understand her.
“If I tell you, Beth,” Vega said slowly, “that I have never been attracted to men…I hope it won’t give you wrong ideas.” She glanced up to see how her remark was taken, but Beth said only, “Wrong ideas?” She sat holding her hands together tightly to keep from reaching out for Vega.
Vega smiled at her suddenly and said, “Relax.” The squeeze she gave Beth’s knee tickled her and they both laughed. “You didn’t come here to get a lecture on me, anyway,” Vega added. “You deserve some reward for your effort. Here, have another.” She offered Beth the glass and Beth tried to turn it down. But she saw a quick shy retreat in Vega’s eyes, as if Vega feared Beth were disapproving, and she took the glass anyway and drank.
“Was Charlie mad at you for coming?” Vega asked.
“Yes,” Beth said simply. Her head was getting light.
“I’m sorry,” Vega said. Her voice was tender and grateful.
“You know, I had an odd thought on the way over here tonight,” Beth said, to change the subject.
“Tell me.” Vega leaned back into the pillows and gazed up at her, the whiskey glass resting on her stomach. She held it lightly, almost casually, as if she could easily give it up, as if she could go to bed without a drink, without a bottle on the table beside her.
“I’d like to get lost with you in Hollywood. I mean—” Beth laughed, flustered. “See the sights, like the tourists.”
“You don’t go wandering in Hollywood at night without a man unless you want to get picked up, darling. Is that what you mean?”
“No, I just want to share it with you. You’re fun to be with. I guess—to be frank—that’s why I came tonight.” She took the proffered glass again, avoiding Vega’s penetrating smile bashfully, and when she returned it she felt quite dizzy. She leaned toward Vega slightly, steadying herself with both hands pressed into the bed in front of her. She found herself tilted close to Vega.
“Feel okay?” Vega asked. “You look way out. No need to keep up with me, you know. I’m more or less immune to the stuff. Ask Cleve.”
“I feel fine. Wonderful,” Beth said, raising her eyes to Vega’s. She felt reckless, even. Their closeness was like a challenge, a dare that brought her pulse up high and visible in her throat and made her work for her breath. “Vega, you—you are the loveliest woman,” she whispered.
Slowly Vega placed her glass on the floor and then her hands went up to Beth’s shoulders, more to subdue her than encourage her.
“Beth?” she said, and the name itself was a question. “I never thought you of all people…”
In one quick painful second, Beth saw that she was caught; her fascination, her desire were clear and hot in her eyes and mouth. Vega could see them. There was nothing for it but to declare herself or retreat and run, spouting half-baked excuses that would fool neither of them. Back to Charlie she would go, back to the kids, back to Sierra Bella, humiliated and disappointed beyond her capacity to bear it. She could not give up so easily; she had come too far, risked too much.
“Vega, let me, you must let me,” she said, trying to lean closer to her, but Vega’s thin arms restrained her. Beth was afraid of hurting her and she paused.
“You know
how I feel about this,” Vega said, and there was something sharp, almost fearful, in her voice. Her eyes were quite wide. Beth felt her own strength and Vega’s weakness and she forced Vega’s arms down suddenly.
“You…of all people, you,” Vega moaned. “No, Beth. Please!”
“Vega, forgive me,” Beth said wildly. “I love you, I can’t help it!” And she bent her head in one swift hungry movement and kissed Vega’s exquisite mouth.
For the space of a heartbeat there was no response, only a chill, a palpable terror. And then suddenly Vega returned her kiss, and Beth, murmuring insanities, kissed her face and her mouth all over, holding her tightly and panting with the sheer forgotten glory of it: the marvelous sweetness and suppleness of a woman’s body, the instinctive understanding that surpasses words, the indescribable tenderness two women in love with each other can create.
She became aware only slowly that Vega was desperate for breath. The weight of Beth’s body was too much for her, and Beth rolled off suddenly, exclaiming, “Vega, darling, did I hurt you? Are you all right?”
Vega swept to her feet and nearly fell back again. Beth leaped up after her and caught her from behind, putting her arms around Vega and rocking her gently, her lips against Vega’s throat.
“Come sit down,” she said, and when she had Vega safely into a chair, she knelt and put her head down in Vega’s lap, her arms around that tiny waist and her lips moving still against Vega’s warm body, exploring, caressing, reverencing.
Until Vega pushed her head back and said, as if her breath had only then come back to her, “Stop it! Will you stop it?” with such anguish that Beth pulled away in alarm.
“Oh, I hurt you,” she said, dismayed.
Vega got to her feet. “No, don’t help me,” she ordered. “Don’t touch me.”
“But Vega—”
“Shut up!” Vega turned a tormented face to her. She walked to a window and pulled it up, gasping up the air. “I told you not to get any wrong ideas,” she said finally, when some measure of calm had returned to her. She gazed stonily at the street eight stories below, her face almost a mask now.
“I didn’t know that was so awfully wrong,” Beth said, rising and coming toward her.
Vega looked up at her and her expression changed again, the fear showing quite plainly in the quiver of her muscles. “Beth, stop, hear me,” she said. “It’s not that I don’t know what I am. It’s just that I can’t stand being what I am. If you do this, if you insist, you’ll destroy me.”
“All I want to do is love you, Vega,” Beth said, and felt tears of frustration and passion struggling for supremacy in her. “Can love destroy a person?”
“The wrong kind can!” Vega said.
“But this isn’t wrong.”
“You only say that because you want it, because you’re too weak to deny yourself,” Vega cried.
“I’ve done without it for more than nine years.”
“I’ve done without it for more than twenty years!” Vega said. But something in the parting of her lips, in the warmth of the kiss she had returned, gave Beth courage. Perhaps Vega feared her mother, perhaps she couldn’t help knuckling under to her mother’s ideas. But her body, her secret heart, seemed to beg for that proscribed love.
“I don’t believe you,” Beth said. “Your own beauty would trap you in a score of affairs.”
“I’m not that beautiful,” Vega said candidly. “I might have been once but I’m not anymore.”
“I never saw anyone lovelier,” Beth said. “I never saw anyone I wanted so much.” The thought of Laura flashed before her eyes and reminded her that she was lying. But that had been so long ago, this was so here and now. “Vega,” she said in a voice husky with pleading, with need. “Please come to me. Please, don’t let me stand here alone in this strange room speaking love to a stranger. Let me know you, darling. Let me be close to you. Don’t shut me out. Vega, do you know how long I’ve waited, turned this out of my mind and lived like a robot? No, worse—a robot can’t suffer. I did it because there was no one I could love.”
“You did it because Lesbian love is wrong and you know that,” Vega said, and Beth could hear the echo of her mother’s voice speaking, the way she had heard it in Cleve’s speech. “And it’s still wrong, Beth. More for you than for me. You have a husband. And children.”
“That’s why I need it so!” Beth cried in a storm of misery. She was ready to explode with the feeling inside her, a whirlwind of contradictions and desires.
“Yes. You need it, not me,” Vega said bitterly.
Beth couldn’t stand it any longer. She rushed toward Vega, but Vega very swiftly and unexpectedly opened her diaphanous dressing gown, holding it wide away from herself so that Beth should see every detail of her white body.
Beth stopped abruptly, within a foot of her goal, and stared. She made a small inarticulate sound, and Vega searched her face with horrible anxiety. “If you can make love to that,” she whispered, “then I’ll believe you love me. I’ll accept it.”
She was a complex of scars that twisted every which way over her chest, like yards of pink ribbon in snarls. She had no breasts, and the operation to remove her lung had left a bad welt that Beth returned to once or twice with a prickle of revulsion. Even Vega’s dainty little abdomen had its share. And the bones, the poor sharp bones without the ordinary smooth envelope of tender flesh that most girls take for granted and even rail against when there’s too much. Vega’s bones were all pitifully plain and frankly outlined.
Beth put her trembling hands over her mouth, to stifle her horror, and let the tears flood from her eyes. She shut them tight for a moment, but when she opened them Vega was halfway out of the open window.
With a little scream Beth lunged at her and caught her, pulling her to safety over the most violent protests of which Vega was capable. Beth held her, struggling and swearing hysterically, in her arms for some time, thinking all the while of Cleve and his unhappy eyes and his talk of Vega and their mother. She stroked Vega’s hair and let her own unhappy tears fall.
After a while sheer exhaustion forced Vega into silence. Beth felt her drooping and she bent down and put an arm under Vega’s legs and another around her shoulders and lifted her up. She was surprised at how slight the burden was. Beth was a big girl and she was strong, and she had always been proud of these unfeminine qualities in herself.
There was plenty of whiskey left, and Beth, after laying Vega down tenderly on the bed, poured her a drink. Neither of them had spoken a word.
Vega gulped the drink and then handed it back; she turned her face away and put one hand over it. Beth let her weep undisturbed for a while. At length Vega murmured in a broken voice, “You don’t need to tell me how you feel now. I saw it in your face.”
“Vega, you damn fool,” Beth said gently. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you spring it on me that way? I could have taken it, if you’d only let me know. If you’d only prepared me a little for it.”
“No,” Vega said, reaching for a tissue from her pocket and wiping her eyes. “No, what you mean is, you could have controlled the look on your face. You could have made up a kind little speech and said it right away, before your silence spoke for you.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Beth protested.
“Don’t you see, Beth,” she said, turning to look at her and forcing herself to face those eyes that had seen her saddest and ugliest secret, “if I had told you beforehand you would never have confessed your love to me at all. You would never have tried to know me or touch me. That counts for something, believe me. That’s one thing to be grateful for, even if it can’t last. But aside from that it wouldn’t have made much difference. You might have hidden your disgust a little better, that’s all. No matter which way I did it, the ending would have been the same.”
Beth lighted a cigarette. “This has happened before, hasn’t it?” she said quietly.
“Yes,” Vega sighed. “Now you know why I’ve been waitin
g twenty years. It wasn’t pure virtue.” She gave an acrid little laugh. “You thought my mother was ugly, didn’t you?” she said. “I’ll bet you didn’t know how ugly a woman could be until now.”
“Vega, please,” Beth said, exasperated with her and with herself. She was in a state of tremulous nervousness, keyed up to a fever one moment with aching desire, and almost nauseated with shock the next. Somehow, in the space of a few short weeks, this lovely woman she had known well enough for a period of years had appeared to her as a lover. Suddenly Vega, who had been only Cleve Purvis’s sister since Beth came to California, was all the promise of love, of womanhood to her. Vega became Beth’s own passion resurrected in the flesh.
And now, with brutal suddenness, she had seen her mutilated body, repellent and pitiable, and she could not find her desire anymore. It had dissipated.
But surely I loved her, Beth told herself miserably. When you love, you love more than a body. You love a mind and heart, too, or your emotion is a cheap fake. She knew this was true. She knew that if her “love” had been real it would somehow have survived, even in platonic form. But all she wanted now was to get out, to leave, to breathe the open air, to be free of her cruelly misshapen dream.
The very sight of Vega, the small sounds she made, drove Beth’s disappointment through her like a knife. She was ashamed of her selfishness but quite impotent with it. She had wanted a whole woman, warm and yielding. She had dreamed that her hands would touch the smooth perfumed flesh of a body that knew how to love. It had been a vital part of her desire and now she had little more than a face to hang her dreams on. Vega’s face, covered with tears.
“You’d better go,” Vega told her suddenly, and Beth wanted nothing mote than to obey. But shame and pity held her to the spot beside Vega on the bed.
After a moment Vega turned and gazed at her. “Surely you can’t stay, after what you’ve seen?” she said in a leaden voice.