The Beebo Brinker Omnibus

by Ann Bannon

  Jack fought his way through the crush at the bar, absorbing a lot of pointed merriment directed at his masculinity.

  “Sour grapes,” he cried good-naturedly and inspired a chorus of laughter and catcalls. Beebo, pushing in behind him, became aware suddenly that she was the object of mass curiosity. She could look over the heads of most of the girls and her height made her visible from all directions.

  Abashed, she closed in on Jack, who was hollering an order to the bartender. “Maybe we ought to go. I—I mean—” She didn’t know how to explain herself to him. He was looking at her with a startled frown. “They don’t seem to like having a man in here,” she said lamely.

  Jack began to laugh. “You want me to go, honey? Okay. Just give me two bits to see a movie.”

  She gasped. “That’s not what I meant!” she objected. “I don’t want to be in here alone!”

  “Why not?” He reached between two girls at the bar to grab his beer. “You’ll make out. I might cramp your style.”

  “Jack, damn it, if you go, I go.”

  “Okay, pal, I won’t ditch you,” he said, glimpsing her anxious face. “Relax. We’ll have one more and then cut out.”

  She had had quite a bit of beer already, even with Jack finishing them for her. But she couldn’t stand there with all those eyes on her and do nothing. Better to drink a beer than gape back at the gapers. She poured some into her glass and drank it. And then drained the glass and poured some more.

  Jack took her elbow. “I see some friends over there,” he said, guiding her toward a table near the back. There were introductions all around, but to Beebo, things seemed different. The other bars had been all male or mixed. In this one, Jack Mann and the two bartenders, and a small scattering of “Johns,” were the only men in a big room solidly packed with women. It excited Beebo intensely—all that femininity. She was silent, studying the girls at the table while Jack talked with them. When she shook hands with them, a new feeling gripped her. For the first time in her life she was proud of her size, proud of her strength, even proud of her oddly boyish face. She could see interest, even admiration on the faces of many of the girls. She was not used to that kind of reaction in people, and it exhilarated her. But she didn’t talk much, only answering direct questions when she had to; smiling at them when they smiled at her; looking away in confusion when one or another tried to stare her down.

  They had been there half an hour when somebody came over from another table and asked her to dance. Beebo turned around, her stomach in a knot. “Are they dancing?” she asked.

  “Sure,” said the girl. “By the jukebox.”

  Beebo had heard music without looking to see where it came from. She got up from the table and went to the back room, realizing as she stood up how much beer she had drunk. At the back of the crowd surrounding the dance floor, there was room to stand and watch.

  The music was rhythmic and popular. The floor was jammed with a mass of couples…a mass of girls, dancing, arms locked around each other, bodies pressed close and warm. Their cheeks were touching. Quick light kisses were exchanged. And they were all girls, every one of them: young and lovely and infatuated with each other. They touched one another with gentle caresses, they kissed, they smiled and laughed and whispered while they turned and moved together.

  There was no shame, no shock, no self-consciousness about it at all. They were enjoying themselves. They were having fun in the most natural way imaginable. They were all in love, or so it seemed. They were—what did Jack call it?—gay.

  Beebo watched them for less than a minute, all told; but a minute that was transfixed like a living picture in her mind for the rest of her life. She was startled by it, afraid of it. And yet so passionately moved that she caught her breath and held it till her heart began to pound in protest. Her fists closed hard with the nails biting into her palms and she was obsessed momentarily by the desire to grab the girl nearest her and kiss her.

  At that point she murmured, “Oh, God!” and turned to flee. She felt the way she had in childhood dreams when she was being chased by some vague terrible menace, and she had to move slowly and tortuously, with great effort, as through a wall of water, while the monster gained on her from behind.

  She caught Jack’s shoulders in her big hands and squeezed them hard. “Let’s go, let’s go,” she said urgently.

  He looked at her as if she had lost her senses. “I just ordered another round,” he said.

  “Jack, please!” She pulled him to his feet.

  “Jesus, can’t you wait a little while, honey?” he said, and triggered an outburst of merriment at the table. But she meant it, and he was not too high to see her panic. He picked his jacket off the back of his chair, apologizing to his friends. “When she wants it, she wants it now,” he grinned, shrugging.

  “Who are you kidding?” they laughed.

  Beebo was already pushing her way to the exit and Jack had a battle to catch her. He found her waiting for him outside by the door.

  “Hey,” he said, and put a friendly hand on her shoulder as they started to walk toward his apartment. “What happened?”

  “I don’t want to go back there, Jack,” she blurted.

  “What’s the matter with it? Too much fun?”

  “It was awful,” she said, not even knowing why she said it.

  “You liked the other places.”

  She wouldn’t answer, only striding along so fast in her haste to leave the Colophon behind that Jack had to run to keep up.

  “Was it the dancing?” he said.

  She whirled to answer him, her face flushed with emotion. “I suppose you’ve seen it so many times you think nothing of it,” she cried. “Well, it’s—it’s wrong!”

  “Who the hell do you think you are to call it wrong?” Jack demanded. “Those are damn nice girls. If they want to dance with each other, let them dance. You don’t have to watch.”

  Beebo listened, her anger fading, to be replaced by a fearful desire.

  “Did it make you feel…that way, Beebo?” he said gently.

  “It made me feel…” She turned away, unable to face him. “Funny inside. As if it was wrong. Or too right. I don’t know.”

  “It’s not wrong, pal,” he said, speaking to her back. “You’ve been brought up to think so. Most of us have. But who are they hurting? Nobody. They’re just making each other happy. And you want their heads to roll because it makes you feel funny.”

  She covered her face with her hands and rubbed her eyes roughly. Through her fingers she said, “I don’t want to hurt them. I just don’t want to stand there and watch them.”

  “Well, why didn’t you dance?” he said. “Hell, I don’t like being a wallflower, either.”

  “Jack, I can’t dance like that,” she said in a hushed voice.

  “Why can’t you?” She refused to answer, so he answered for her. “You can. You just won’t. But you know something, my little friend? One of these days, you will.”

  “You’re no prophet, Jack. Don’t predict my future.” She started walking again.

  He followed her, throwing up his hands. “Okay, okay. It shook you. But not because it was vulgar and indecent. Because it was beautiful and exciting. Besides, you envied those kids on the dance floor. Didn’t you?”

  Her confession never came. They walked in silence the rest of the way to Jack’s apartment. He closed and locked the front door and turned on the living room light, tossing his jacket into a chair.

  “Beebo,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “You’ve been living with me almost a month now—”

  “If you want me to move, I’ll move.” She was surly and defensive.

  “I want you to stay. When you move, it’ll be because you want to,” he said. “Besides, that’s not what I want to talk about. In the past month, you have never once told me the most important thing about yourself, Beebo.”

  She felt a flash of fear, piercing as sudden light in darkness. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said
.

  Jack gave her the freshly lighted cigarette and she hid gratefully behind a smoke screen. “You know,” he said. “But I’m not going to insist on it. I think you want to talk to me, but you’re afraid. I’m trying every way I know to show you that it won’t offend me, Beebo. You think about that. You think about the people who are my friends—people I enjoy and respect—and then you ask yourself what you have to fear.”

  There was a long pause. At last she said, “It isn’t that easy, Jack. I should know what I am. But I don’t know myself at all. Especially here in this new place. Back in Juniper Hill, I could only see what other people saw, and I was afraid and ashamed. But here, I look all different. I even feel different.” She looked at her hands. “Don’t push me, Jackson.” And she rushed past him suddenly, to cry in the privacy of the bathroom; to wonder why the girls she had seen that night had moved her so dramatically.

  She did not fall asleep until very late. And when she did, she dreamed of sweet, supple, smiling-faced girls, dancing sensuously in each other’s arms; glancing at her with wide curious eyes; beckoning to her. She saw herself glide slowly, almost reluctantly, over the floor with a girl whose long black hair hung halfway down her back; a girl with an old-fashioned name: Mona. Beebo touched the hair, the long dipping curve of the back till her hands rested on Mona’s hips.

  The next thing she knew, Jack was shaking her awake. “Wake up! Jesus!” he said, grinning at her in the early light. “You’re beating hell out of the mattress.”

  Her eyes flew wide open and she stared at him, stuttering.

  “Funny thing about dreams,” he said softly. “They let you be yourself in the dark. When you can be yourself in the morning, too, you’ll be cured.”

  “Cured of what?” she said in a disgruntled whisper.

  Jack chuckled. “Dreams,” he said. “You won’t need ’em.”

  Beebo was relieved when he went back to sleep. There was no escaping now what she was. The dancing lovers in the Colophon had impressed it indelibly on her. And yet Jack wanted her to confirm it in so many words, and the idea terrified her. It would be like accepting a label for the rest of her life—a label she didn’t even understand yet.

  And there was no one to tell her that the time would come when the label wouldn’t frighten her; when she would be happy simply to be what she was.

  They went a while longer without discussing it. Jack was on the verge of confronting Beebo a dozen times with his own homosexuality. But she would catch the look in his eye and warn him with tacit signs to keep still. He began to wonder if she understood about him at all. He had tried to make it obvious the night they went barhopping. He wanted to say to her, “Okay, I’m gay. But that doesn’t make me less human, less moral, less normal than other men. You’ve got the same bug, Beebo; only with you, it’s girls. Look at me: I’m proof you can live with it. You don’t need to hate yourself or the people you’re attracted to.”

  But if she saw it she kept it to herself. She’s too wrapped up in discovering herself to discover me too, he thought. He tried to kid her. “You think it’s all right for the other girls but not for Beebo,” he said, but she wouldn’t give him a smile. He felt stumped in front of her stubborn silence; aching to help her, afraid of scaring her into an emotional crack-up.

  She was very tense. And then one evening, about a week after her night out with Jack, over dinner she said, “Mona was in the shop again. I talked to her.”

  Jack looked up in surprise. “What about?”

  “I asked if she was Mona Petry. She is.” She seemed afraid to elaborate.

  “Is that all?” he smiled.

  “You were right about her—she’s gay.” She looked up to catch the smile.

  “Did she say so?” he asked.

  “No, Pete said so after she left. He said he used to date her but he dropped her when he found out.”

  “Well, he’s got it backwards, but never mind. The point is, Mona’s a slippery little bitch. She’s good to look at but she isn’t any fun. She’s out to screw the whole damn world. If I were you—”

  “Jackson, I don’t give a damn what you think of Mona Petry,” Beebo said.

  “Then why bring her up?”

  She colored, and put down a few more bites of the dinner they were eating. Finally, slowly, with her face still pink, she said, “Do you think it would be all right if I went out tonight? I mean—alone?”

  “If you eat all your spinach.”

  “I am asking you,” she said hotly, “because I value your judgment. Not because I’m an addlepated child.”

  “All right,” he said, smiling into his napkin. “Where do you want to go?”

  She looked at her plate. “The Colophon,” she said, making him strain to hear it.

  “Why? Want to drop a bomb on the dance floor?”

  She sighed. “Pete says Mona hangs out there.”

  “In that case, I don’t think it’s safe,” he said flatly. “But it should be educational.”

  She said, “Jack, I’m scared. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared of anything in my life.”

  “It’s no disgrace to be scared, Beebo. Only to act like it.”

  “I feel as if that damn silly bar—the people in it—are a sort of challenge,” she said, fumbling to express it justly. “As if I have to go back or I’ll never know…” She shook her head with a self-conscious smile. “That’s a hell of a place to go looking for yourself.”

  “Hell of a place to go looking for Mona,” he said. “I don’t know though, pal. It has to come sooner or later. It’s time you learned a thing or two. You’re naïve, but you’re no fool. Go on—but go slow.”

  Mona was not at the Colophon that night, or for many nights afterward. In a way, Beebo was relieved. She wanted to meet her, but she wanted time to meet other people too, to see other places, and cruise around the Village without any pressure on her to prove things to herself. Or to a worldly girl like Mona Petry. Beebo was still a stranger in a strange town, unsure, and grateful for a chance to learn unobserved.

  She would sit and gaze for hours at the girls in the bars or passing in the streets. She wanted to talk to them, see what they were like. She was often drawn to one enough to daydream about her, but she never mentioned it to Jack. Still, she was eagerly curious about the Lesbian mores and social codes. The gay girls seemed so smooth and easy with each other, talking about shared experiences in a special slang, like members of an exclusive sorority.

  Beebo, watching them as the days and weeks passed, became slowly aware how much she envied them. She wanted to join the in-group. And she would watch them longingly and wonder if their talk was ever about her. It was.

  A few of Jack’s friends, who had met her in his company, would come up and talk with her, and knowing for certain that they were Lesbians gave Beebo a vibrant pleasure, whether or not the girls themselves were exciting. Looking at one she would think, She knows how it feels to want what I want. I could make her happy. I know it. Even the word “Lesbian,” which had offended her before, began to sound wonderful in her ears.

  She shocked herself with such candid thoughts, but that was only at first. Little by little, it began to seem beautiful to her that two women could come together with passion and intelligence and make a life with and for each other; make a marriage. She dreamed of lovely, sophisticated women at her feet, aware even as she dreamed that she hadn’t yet the savoir faire to win such a woman. But she was afire with ambition to acquire it.

  She would walk into a bar, order a beer, and sit alone and silent through an evening. In her solitude, she seemed mysterious to the laughing chattering people around her. They began to point her out when she came in.

  At first, ignorance and inexperience kept Beebo aloof. But she quickly understood that her refusal to be sociable made her the target of a lot of smiling speculation. When she got over being afraid of the situation, it amused her. The fact that she attracted girls, even ones she knew she would never pursue, was almost super
naturally strange and exciting to her. She submitted to their teasing questions with an enigmatic smile until she realized that one or two had worked themselves up to infatuation pitch over her.

  There followed a period of elation when she walked into Julian’s or the Cellar and saw the eyes she knew had waited all night to look into hers turn and flash in her direction. She always passed them by and went to a seat at the bar. But each time she came closer to stopping and answering a smile or asking someone to join her in a beer. And still, she couldn’t find Mona.

  The only wrong note in the tune was a boy, slight and fine-featured, who watched her and seemed to have persuaded himself that he loved her. He fell for her with an awkward crush that embarrassed them both. Often, at the end of an evening when he was pretty high, he would approach her and timidly offer to buy her a drink.

  Beebo kept turning him down, kindly but firmly. He always flinched when she said no, and she pitied him. He had a gentle appealing face, fair in the way of extreme youth. She guessed he must be a couple of years younger than she, and wondered how he could buy drinks in a bar.

  “I’m sorry, I’m just leaving,” she would tell him.

  And he would watch her go, wistfully. He looked tired and malnourished, and she wondered once if it would offend him to be offered a free sandwich. She never quite got up the nerve to find out.

  At home, Jack did not press her. But her silence regarding her activities at night worried him and put a strain between them. She knew that Jack was waiting for her to talk about it, and she wanted to be honest with him more than ever. He had been patient, humorously tolerant with her. And she knew that he was a man of the world. He had made it clear that he enjoyed the friendship of many delightful gay women, that he approved of them, and that he thought she might enjoy their company.