The Beebo Brinker Omnibus

by Ann Bannon

  It made her smile. “Can you forgive me?” she said.

  “Nothing to forgive. And I’ll let you back into my good graces on one condition. Do you think your friend Pat will be in bloom tonight?”

  “Probably,” she said, seeing him through her new understanding as through a rainbow curtain. He was a new shape, a new color, a new man. She was vastly relieved, and just a little awed. And ashamed of her bean-soup intuition.

  “Let’s go look at him,” Jack said.

  The night was hot and damp, with a low black sky that had looked menacing in the daylight, but was soft and close as dark came down, floating over the neon merriment below.

  Beebo was quiet as they walked, preoccupied with a new attitude toward Jack and an almost unbearable sense of anticipation. Pat was usually at Julian’s. When they arrived, the bar was crowded but there was standing room at one end. They squeezed in and ordered drinks, and Beebo began to pick out the faces that searched for her.

  “Is he here?” Jack asked, glancing around.

  She discovered him right away. “Over there in the blue shirt,” she said, nodding.

  “They all have blue shirts,” Jack said, squinting through the smoke.

  “The blond one.”

  There was a pause and Jack’s face puckered thoughtfully. “He looks pretty young,” he said in a bemused voice.

  “You mean, you like his face?” Beebo smiled at him.

  “It’s a face,” he said noncommittally, and when she laughed he shrugged and added, “Okay. A nice face. Beebo, I think you’re playing cupid.”

  “I wouldn’t know how,” she said. “Besides, you told me you only fell in love in the fall or the spring. This is midsummer.” But she wondered suddenly what would happen if he broke his rule. It made her heart drop. Jack’s apartment was small, with just one bed. Even if he didn’t ask her to leave, how welcome would she be if he invited a third party to share it with them? She’d have to bow out, out of simple consideration. But where could she go? She had avoided making any friends, and the Pasquinis with their five kids were out of the question. She would have preferred a park bench anyway to a room with Pete Pasquini in it.

  Beebo and Jack were both caught unaware by the sudden quiet interruption. There he was, Beebo’s boy, standing behind and between them. He had come over in the moment it took them to discuss him and now they looked at him in surprise.

  He paled a little and started to back away, but Jack put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t panic. We’re harmless when we’re drinking,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “Pat Kynaston,” said the boy, staring into his beer. He supposed Beebo had Jack with her this time to show him she was taken, and he was crushed.

  “Pat? That’s a girl’s name,” Beebo kidded.

  Pat swallowed some beer and moved the sawdust under his shoes.

  “Have a drink, honey,” Jack said, and Beebo felt a stir of strange interest in the endearment. And yet Pat seemed more like a child than a man, and it was easy to call him fond names. In spite of his light beard he had a child’s face, full of a child’s hardy trust. He smiled at Jack, reassured.

  “He looks as green as you did last May,” Jack told Beebo. “How long have you been here, Pat?”

  “Oh, since seven-thirty, I guess.”

  “No, I mean in New York?” Jack grinned.

  “Oh. January.” Pat’s eyes remained on Beebo while he answered Jack. But when she returned the look, he glanced down to her belt. “I left school then,” he said.

  “Sounds like the story of my life,” said Beebo. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  Jack cleared his throat and Beebo’s mouth dropped open. “With that face?” Jack protested. “You mean your father is twenty-seven.”

  Pat laughed a little and shook his head.

  “Besides, what is a twenty-seven-year-old child doing in school? You should be through.”

  “I was working on a doctorate in entomology.”

  “Bugs? You don’t look like a bug collector,” Jack said with a grimace, and they laughed while the drinks came up. Jack pulled Pat between himself and Beebo and teased him for a while, making him blush and answer questions. But when it came out that Pat was working as a garbage-collector for the New York City Department of Sanitation, Jack stopped laughing.

  “God! A frail kid like you? You shouldn’t do work like that,” he declared.

  “It was all I could get. Nobody wants an entomologist manqué,” Pat said. “I guess that’s why I’m skinny. I look at those rotting scraps all day and when I get home the stuff in my icebox looks just as bad.”

  Jack tapped Beebo on the shoulder. “Do we have any of Marie’s chicken tetrazini in the refrigerator?”

  “Plenty.”

  “Let’s go.” Jack threw a couple of bills on the counter and took Pat by the elbow. Beebo took the other and they walked him out of Julian’s and down the street.

  Beebo had been elated to learn that Jack, too, was gay. But now she felt the first twinge of misgiving. Jack was the older brother she never really had; one she could learn from, look up to, even love. It was a valuable feeling, new to her. For as fiercely as she resented Jim, she had always harbored a secret regret that they could not have been friends.

  They walked toward Jack’s place with Pat clinging in bewildered pleasure to Beebo, the object of what had seemed so long a futile attraction. But Beebo was lost in herself, wondering if she could make it yet in the city on her own. She was strong and handsome, and she walked, gestured, even swore with a boyish gusto that made her seem more experienced than she was. But she was still untutored in the ways of metropolitan gay life and that fact undermined her self-confidence.

  They put Pat, who was high enough to be sleepy, on Jack’s sofa and looked at him. He dozed a little, his fair face averted, and the two roommates were struck with the beauty of his features. Beebo was unnerved to find herself suddenly wanting a girl with blast-furnace intensity.

  “I’ll heat the bird,” she offered to Jack, “if you’ll mind the patient.”

  “You’re on,” he said.

  But she was sorry to have to leave them alone together. Jack was entirely too taken with the boy. Beebo moved pensively around the kitchen, preparing the food with unaccustomed hands.

  Jack brought Pat to the table when she called them. Pat looked so slender and peaked that she felt a good doctor’s desire to stuff him full of nourishment.

  He leaned against the door frame, gazing at Beebo. “Who are you, anyway?” he asked, drunk enough to be brave.

  “Sit down, Hungry,” Beebo said, smiling at him.

  Abashed, but unappeased, he obeyed.

  “You know what’s wrong with you, Pat? Malnutrition,” she said. “If you had any food under your belt, you wouldn’t give two bits for me.” He turned a baffled face to her. “Why hell, the damn bugs eat better than you do,” she told him. “They get all the garbage that ruins your appetite.”

  She tried to feed him but he turned away. “I can’t,” he said. The excitement of coming home with this girl he had admired so fervently for a couple of months was too much; that, and all the beer he had drunk…and a new gentle feeling stirring in him for Jack Mann.

  “Sure you can,” Beebo said, and began to feed him as if he were a sick lamb, while Jack cut the chicken bits for her. When Pat tried to protest she popped a mess of spicy meat between his teeth and shushed him, wishing all the while that she were ministering to a lovely girl instead of a lost boy.

  Beebo stole a look at Jack, afraid of what she might see. But he was regarding Pat with compassion, the same he had shown to her when he found her…and just a trace of desire, tightly controlled. Jack had kindly instincts. It was one of the things Beebo admired most in him. He took care of people because it made him happy. No one was to blame if, when the person was a beautiful young boy, it made him very happy indeed.

  Beebo got the chicken down Pat and made him drink his milk, wh
ich he did out of pure infatuation for her. And then Jack filled the silence with one word: “Bedtime.”

  But Pat seemed to be in a sort of trance, brought on by fatigue, fascination, and a full stomach. “Are you conscious?” Jack asked him with a smile.

  “I was just thinking,” Pat murmured, blinking at Beebo. “Maybe I’m straight.”

  They laughed at him, till he got indignant and tried to explain that even Beebo’s marginal femininity didn’t discourage him.

  “You need some sleep, buddy,” Jack told him, and took him off to the sofa. “And no damn trash cans for you in the morning.”

  “What if I lose my job?” Pat said.

  “That would be the best thing that could happen to you.”

  “I’ll starve,” Pat whispered.

  “Not while I’m around,” Jack said. Pat smiled at him sleepily, and then shut his eyes and turned on his side.

  Beebo climbed into Jack’s bed feeling like an impostor. But she was embarrassed to make an issue of it; more than that, afraid. If she offered to take the sofa herself, Jack might grab the chance to have Pat beside him all night.

  Beebo felt no physical attraction to Pat; only sympathetic interest. But his puppy love had scorched her a little; just enough to keep her moving and twisting on the warm sheets for an hour, obsessed with the growing need for a girl. A girl to curl in her lap and kiss her and talk away her fears.

  Pat’s loneliness shocked her. She saw herself mirrored in his predicament. Who was more alone than a lost and defenseless soul, hungry for something it couldn’t find? Couldn’t even define? It was enough to warp the heart, deform the soul.

  It was enough to get her out of bed at midnight that night, make her dress in silence and leave the apartment, undetected by Jack or Pat.

  She was almost as surprised to find herself on the street as Jack would have been to see her there. And yet the cool night air washed gratefully over her face and cleared her thoughts. She wandered aimlessly a while, as if trying to ignore the one place she wanted to visit: the Colophon.

  But her feet took her there anyway, and she found herself ringing the bell. The owner opened the peek-through in the door and nodded to her. She felt a momentary country-girl shame at being recognized in such a place. But she was glad enough to gain entrance. The glow inside was the color of fluorescent Merthiolate. It seemed almost antiseptic to Beebo, who had painted the undersides of countless cows and sows with disinfectants the same shade prior to a delivery.

  She took a seat at the bar. “Scotch and water,” she said.

  While the barman got it, she gazed idly into the mirror behind him, picking out the interesting girls surrounding her. She felt uncomfortable here in the pants she usually wore to work; in her hair that had just been cut and was too short again.

  Do they think I’m funny? she wondered. Or—exciting? She drank in silence, and ordered another, thinking that the solitude and uncertainty she felt now were worse than those she felt with Jack. For a minute, almost anything seemed better than having to leave Jack, with only fifty bucks a week to spend, no friends, and no place to live.

  The bartender brought her another drink while she searched for the last cigarette in her pack. It was empty. The girl sitting next to her immediately offered her one, but Beebo declined. It was partly her shyness, partly the knowledge that it was better to be hard-to-get in the Colophon.

  “Do you have cigarettes?” she asked the bartender.

  “Machine by the wall,” he said.

  She got up and sauntered over, ignoring the outrage on the face of the girl at the bar. The machine swallowed her coins and spit out a pack of filter-tips. Beebo noticed the jukebox, looked at her change, and fed it a quarter, good for three dances. She liked to watch the girls move around the floor together, now that the initial revolt had worn off.

  But when she regained her seat, she found most of the patrons paying attention to her, not the tunes. She looked back at them, surprised and wary. The cigarettes in her hand were an excuse to look away for a minute and she did, lighting one while the general conversation died away like a weak breeze. She lowered her match slowly and glanced up again, her skin prickling. What in hell were they trying to do? Scare her out? Show her they didn’t like her? Had she been too aloof with them, too remote and hard to know?

  She had started the music, and it was an invitation to dance. They were waiting for her to show them. It wasn’t hostility she saw on their faces so much as, “Show us, if you’re so damn big and smart. We’ve been waiting for a chance to trap you. This is it.”

  She had to do something to humanize herself. There was an air of self-confidence and sensual promise about Beebo that she couldn’t help. And when she felt neither confident nor sensual, she looked all the more as if she did: tall and strong and coolly sure of herself. She had turned the drawback of being young and ignorant into a deliberate defense.

  It didn’t matter to the sophisticated girls judging her now that she was a country girl fresh from the hayfields of Wisconsin, or that she had never made love to a woman before in her life. They didn’t know that and wouldn’t have believed it anyway.

  Beebo recognized quickly that she had to start acting the way she looked. She had established a mood of expectation about herself, and now it was time to come across. The music played on. It was Beebo’s turn.

  The match she held was burning near her finger, and because she had to do something about it and all the eyes on her, she turned to the girl beside her and held out the match.

  “Blow,” she said simply, and the girl, with a smile, blew.

  Beebo returned the smile. “Well,” she said in her low voice, which somehow carried even into the back room and the dance floor, “I’m damned if I’m going to waste a good quarter.” She got up and walked across the room toward the prettiest girl she could see, sitting at a table with her lover and two other couples. It was exactly the way she would have reacted to student-baiting at Juniper Hill High. The worse it got, the taller she walked. Her heart was beating so hard she wanted to squeeze it still. But she knew no one could hear it through her chest.

  She stopped in front of the pretty girl and looked at her for a second in incredulous silence. Then she said quietly, “Will you dance with me, Mona?”

  Mona Petry smiled at her. Nobody else in Greenwich Village would have flouted the social code that way: walked between two lovers and taken one away for a dance. Mona took a leisurely drag on her cigarette, letting her pleasure show in a faint smile. Then she stood up and said, “Yes. I will, Beebo.” Her lover threw Beebo a keen, hard look and then relapsed into a sullen stare.

  Beebo and Mona walked to the floor single file, and Mona turned when she got clear of the tables, lifting her arms to be held. The movement was so easy and natural that it excited Beebo and made her bold—she who knew nothing about dancing. But she was not lacking in grace or rhythm. She took Mona in a rather prim embrace at first, and began to move her over the floor as the music directed.

  Mona disturbed her by putting her head back and smiling up at her. At last she said, “How did you know my name?”

  “Pete Pasquini told me,” Beebo said. “How did you know mine?”

  “Same answer,” Mona laughed. “He gets around, doesn’t he?”

  “So they say,” Beebo said.

  “You mean you don’t know from personal experience?”

  “Me?” Beebo stared at her. “Should I?”

  Mona chuckled. “No, you shouldn’t,” she said.

  “Did I—take you away from something over there?” Beebo said.

  “From somebody,” Mona corrected her. “But it’s all right. She’s deadly dull. I’ve been waiting for you to come over.”

  Beebo felt her face get warm. “I didn’t even see you until I stood up,” she said.

  “I saw you,” Mona murmured. They danced a moment more, and Beebo pulled her closer, wondering if Mona could feel her heart, now bongoing under her ribs, or guess at the racing triumph
in her veins.

  “Did you ask Pete about me?” Mona prodded.

  “A little,” Beebo admitted. And was surprised to find that the admission felt good. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said you were a wonderful girl.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  Beebo hesitated and finally said, huskily, “Yes.”

  “You’re a good dancer, Beebo,” Mona said, knowing, like an expert, just how far to go before she switched gears.

  “I dance like a donkey,” Beebo grinned, strong enough in her victory to laugh at herself.

  “No, you’re a natural,” Mona insisted. “A natural dancer, I mean.”

  “I don’t care what you mean, just keep dancing,” Beebo said.

  Mona put her head down against Beebo’s shoulder and laughed, and Beebo felt the same elation as a man when he has impressed a desirable girl and she lets him know it with her flattery. Mona—so elusive, so pretty, so dominant in Beebo’s dreams lately. Beebo was holding her tighter than she meant to, but when she tried to loosen her embrace, Mona put both arms about her neck and pulled her back again.

  For the first time, Beebo had the nerve to look straight at her. It was a long hungry look that took in everything: the long dark square-cut hair and bangs; the big hazel eyes; the fine figure, slim and exaggeratedly tall in high heels. But it was still necessary for her to look up at Beebo.

  “It’s nice you’re so tall,” Mona told her.

  “Who’s the girl you’re with?” Beebo said. “I think she wants to drown me.”

  “No doubt. Her name’s Todd.”

  “Is she a friend?”

  “She was, till you asked for this dance,” Mona smiled.

  Beebo didn’t want to make trouble. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Are you?” Mona was forward as only a world-weary girl with nothing to learn—or lose—could be. And yet she seemed too young for such ennui—still in her twenties. “Are you sorry about Todd?” she pressed Beebo.