Warm and Willing Page 14

  “That’s the whole thing.” Bobbie sighed. “If she wants to sleep around, that’s her business. And Peg’s probably used to it by now, so she can train herself to look the other way. But Lu has to rub her nose in it. It’s typical. I don’t know how Peg stands it.”

  She remembered the night-the phone call, the cab ride, the moment of stark horror when Peg came from the locked bathroom with blood gushing from her wrists. She shivered and drank her drink.

  They were outside, Bobbie started to flag a cab but Rhoda stopped her. “I’m a little rocky,” she said. “Let’s walk it.”

  They walked. She remembered another walk two weeks ago, when they had bumped into Ed Vance. New Year’s-and a hell of a way to start the New Year. She hadn’t seen him since then, and she wondered who he had told about her and what they had said. But what difference did it make? It was her life, and she no longer cared who knew about it.

  Home, in bed, she turned expectantly to Bobbie. She felt Bobbie’s lips on her lips, Bobbie’s breasts just touching her own breasts. Then Bobbie was smiling softly in the darkness, whispering, “Not tonight, sweets. We’re both too tired to do much. Get some sleep.”

  That night, for the first time in ages, the dream came back to her. The old dream, the one that had always ruined her sleep in the past. In it she ran once more, ran alone down that endless hallway with some dark unknown chasing her and gaining on her. Walls of ivory white, unbroken by windows or doors. An endless ribbon of black floor beneath her feet The hallway getting progressively narrower, and the pursuer getting closer and closer, and the feeling, at last, of something colder than death reaching out for her, almost but not quite touching her When the telephone rang, her mind incorporated the sound into the dream, weaving it into the fabric of her nightmare so that she thought there was shrill screaming behind her. Then the dream broke off and she was struggling to sit up in bed, and the phone was ringing and Bobbie, by her side, was groping for it. Bobbie took hold of the receiver and Rhoda shook off the dying echoes of the dream and lit the bedside lamp. She glanced at the clock on the bedside table. It was twenty minutes of five.

  Bobbie said, “Oh, God. Omigod.”

  “What-”

  “Are you sure? Listen, are you sure?”

  She went to Bobbie, took the girl’s arm. Bobbie shook her off. Bobbie was talking on the phone but Rhoda couldn’t hear her. She didn’t know what was happening. She looked for a cigarette but the pack on the bedside table was empty. She crushed it, hurried into the kitchen. There was one pack left in the carton. She tore it open, shook two cigarettes out of the pack, lit them. She went back to the bedroom and gave one of the cigarettes to Bobbie. The Siamese cat sat erect upon a chair at the side of the bed, his eyes glinting brightly. Bobbie took the cigarette and looked oddly at it, then took a deep drag.

  “What-”

  “That was Lucia,” Bobbie said.

  “Oh, no.”

  Bobbie swallowed. Then she took a deep breath and when she spoke her voice was firm, strong. “Peg did it this time,” she said. “Pills again, a whole bottle. After the party Lu and Roz went back to Roz’s apartment and Lucia just got home. If she had gone straight home from the party she might have found her in time, but she didn’t, and that’s all, she was too late. Peggy’s dead.”

  “Oh, Jesus-”

  “Yeah.” Bobbie closed her eyes. The room was very still. Claude held his pose on the chair like a statue. “I can’t believe it, I knew it would happen sooner or later. But I still can’t believe it. All the times she tried to kill herself and this time she managed it, finally.”

  Bobbie looked at her now. Her face was a mask of sorrow but her eyes were quite dry. “Everything’s so rotten,” she said. “So goddamned rotten, everything.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  She hadn’t realized it would be that easy. In the morning, when she left the apartment and went to work, she took off the plain gold wedding band Bobbie had given her and slipped it into her purse. In the early afternoon a man came into the store to buy a present for his sister, a birthday present. She smiled warmly at him, and when she showed him some possible gifts she let her fingers brush his hand. She felt his eyes on her face, her body. After the sale was concluded, he lingered in the shop, talking to her. She handled the conversation easily. It wasn’t long before he asked her name and told her his. Wasn’t long before he asked her to have dinner with him that evening.

  “I’d like that,” she said.

  “Where can I pick you up? At your apartment?”

  “Fine.” She gave him the address. He wrote it down in a small black book and returned the book to his breast pocket. He smiled at her and said he would see her then. She smiled back at him.

  So very simple, she thought. All you had to do was make it obvious that you were interested and available. The men did the rest. There was nothing to it, nothing at all.

  When he was gone, she opened her purse and replaced the plain gold wedding band upon her finger.

  Bobbie was out of town. Peg Brandt was a Chicago girl and her body had been shipped home to her family for burial. Bobbie and Lucia and a few of the other girls who had known Peg very well had gone to Chicago for the funeral. At first Rhoda had wanted to go. Bobbie talked her out of it.

  “You don’t have to go,” she said. “You didn’t know her that long or that well. And it would probably be best to keep the New York contingent to a minimum. Peg’s folks know about her, but they might feel that it would be in bad taste for a whole army of lesbians to show up for the funeral.”

  She felt badly about it at first. She had liked Peg, and she felt wrong missing the funeral. But what Bobbie said made sense.

  The funeral was that afternoon. Bobbie would be staying overnight, returning on a morning plane. Rhoda had the evening to herself.

  She would be spending it with a man.

  It was an odd decision, one she did not fully understand even now. When the idea first came to her that she ought to do this, there had been an element of compulsion in the notion, as though it was something which had to be undertaken for its own sake with no rhyme or reason involved. The impulse had sprung up as soon as she realized that the opportunity itself was there, as soon as she realized that Bobbie would be gone for an evening. She had thought, automatically and spontaneously, that she could use that time to be with a man.

  And, after the shock of her own thought had worn off, the reasons came to her. She had to try, had to see what would happen. Because she saw herself going on and on and on this way, living with Bobbie until, inevitably, she broke with Bobbie, living with another girl and another girl and a whole endless parade of other gay girls. And working for Mr. Yamatari forever, or quitting her job and taking another meaningless job after that, and another, always aching for important work but never finding it, and never really looking too very hard for it. And growing old, and killing herself like Peg Brandt, or being killed slowly by time itself. And burial somewhere, with six gays for pallbearers and a covey of lesbians to mourn her.

  No…

  Not all of this emptiness, all of this agony, merely because she liked to sleep with girls and did not like to sleep with men. She had been a frightened little girl when she was married to Tom Haskell. She was older now, ready to sustain more, ready to settle for less. Marriage with a man meant a home and children and a place, if not in the bright sun, at least out of the shadows. There might be no bells ringing when her husband made love to her, but you could live a life without hearing the ringing of bells. She could learn, if not to like it, at least to endure it and to give a halfway decent performance of passion.

  And so she had let herself be picked up by a customer. He would take her to dinner, and then she would let herself be led to his apartment, and there she would be slept with. This was just experimental. If it worked at all, if it were only merely bearable, then she would be able to make her choice. She could go somewhere-to another city, probably. And she could meet a man who would make her a go
od husband, and she could get him to marry her, and she could live-well, decently ever after. And even happily.

  But tonight-she shrugged, lit a cigarette. Tonight was just a test, of course, and that meant it would probably be a little crude and cheap. More than a little. She didn’t know this man, had never learned his last name, and had already forgotten his first name. He didn’t especially seem like her type, if she had a type, and she didn’t feel anything resembling a flush of rapport with him. But he didn’t have to sweep her off her feet, he only had to make love to her, that was all, and if she could live through it without wanting to throw up-which had never been the case with Tom, sad to say-then she might be able to make the move.

  If she still wanted to.

  There had to be a better way to live. The thrill of sexual pleasure was wonderful, certainly, but you couldn’t build a life around it. The warmth of Bobbie’s love was great and good, but you couldn’t make a life out of it, either. And the only life she had was one in which day followed day, endlessly and patternlessly and pointlessly, with nothing mattering very damned much.

  At five-thirty she hurried home. She showered, made up expertly, dressed in a black sheath that showed off her figure to maximum advantage. Femme up, she told herself. This was no time to look butchy.

  He was on time. “You’ll have to excuse the apartment,” she said. “It’s a mess.”

  “It looks comfortable. You live here alone?”

  “With a girl friend.” Which, she thought, was putting it mildly. “She’s out now.” She didn’t want to tell him that Bobbie was out of town or he might want to come back to her apartment afterward. She wanted to go to his place instead.

  “I’d offer you a drink,” she lied, “but there’s nothing around. Shall we go?”

  They walked over to Fourteenth Street to catch a cab. On the way, she wondered if anyone might see them together, any of the people who knew her and Bobbie, and she realized suddenly that she didn’t have to worry about Bobbie hearing anything. If her friends saw her with a girl, they might guess that she was cheating on Bobbie. But if they saw her now, with this man, they would automatically assume that he was a gay boy himself.

  Dinner was quietly pleasant. He took her to an expensive East Side restaurant, ordered wine with dinner, and talked easily to her about very little. He was in advertising, he said. He was married and separated from his wife, who lived with their two children somewhere in Connecticut. He lived in the East Eighties now, near the river. His wife would probably divorce him within the year, but all of that hadn’t been quite worked out yet.

  All at once she found herself talking about her own marriage. She had not counted on this, had meant to keep everything as impersonal as possible. But she let the words come, let him hear everything about her own pointless marriage.

  “You had it rough,” he said.

  “You live through these things.”

  “Uh-huh.” He leaned across the table to light her cigarette. “We’re not kids,” he said. “Are we?”

  “No.”

  “I’d like to take you to my apartment. I think you’d like to come. Would you?”

  “Yes.”

  And she thought that this was just as she had hoped it would be. No love and no pretense of love, no feeling of being pursued, no fear of violation. In the cab on the way to his apartment, he put an arm around her and she forced herself to relax in his embrace. She tried not to think about what it would be like, the actual physical fact of it. She tried to put that out of her mind.

  In his apartment-three rooms, hypermodern, the typical bachelor’s dream-he put on records and poured drinks. They sat together in front of an elaborate fake fireplace. He put his arm once more around her, and he said her name, softly, and she knew enough to turn to him and be kissed. She closed her eyes when he kissed her and surrendered herself to him. Little by little, she told herself. Little by little and bit by bit, and then the bedroom, and the act itself, and that’s all.

  No If she had not liked him, if she had not felt comfortable with him, she might have been able to go through with it. But it required too much acting and too much pretense, and it was all false and she couldn’t do it. He kissed her again and again and she tried to force herself to fake a response, but this couldn’t be, she could not pretend to feel something which she did not feel. It was phony and she couldn’t do it.

  She drew away from him, got to her feet. “Listen to me,” she said. “Listen to me, I have to say this.”

  “Go on.”

  “I didn’t tell you everything. I’m not normal, I’m a lesbian.” The words just came, awkward, fumbling. She couldn’t direct them. “I’m a lesbian, the girl I live with is my lover. She’s out of town now. I thought that-that I could use you, that I could try and-I thought-I don’t know what I thought, it’s crazy. But it isn’t working. I don’t work this way, I can’t feel anything, I-”

  He seemed stunned at first. But later she remembered going out on the terrace with him and standing with her back against the brick of the building, looking up at the thin sliver of moon.

  She said, “I want to be fair. If you want, I’ll go through with it.”

  “It’s not what I want, Rhoda.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No.” He smiled briefly. “If you, well, give it a try…”

  “Nothing will happen.”

  “It might.”

  She could not imagine a more dispassionate discussion of the sex act. They were deciding whether or not to go to bed together, and they both seemed to be utterly cold and unmoved.

  “I’d like to make love to you, Rhoda. Maybe-”

  He left the sentence unfinished. She hesitated, then closed her eyes and nodded. He took her hand and led her back inside and lay down with her on the couch, She felt his hands on her body, felt him remove clothing, felt him touch her breasts and kiss her face and run his hands gently, gently, over her hips and thighs.

  She kept waiting.

  And then he said, “Forget it, Rhoda. Maybe you’d better go home.”

  “I’m sorry-”

  “Don’t be.”

  “But I am,” she said. And, from the doorway, leaving him there, “I am really sorry. I mean that.”

  She did mean it, she was sorry. But she was what she was, she could not help it, and the date with this man had been a bad idea from the beginning. A stupid idea, senseless as whittling crazily at a square peg in order to jam it cruelly into a round hole. She was a lesbian. It did not matter how she had gotten that way, and it did not matter whether or not she was particularly pleased with herself. She was a lesbian. To try to be anything else was madness.

  The cab seemed to take forever. But at last it stopped in front of her building, and at last she was paying the driver, leaving the cab. She went to the apartment, unlocked the door, stepped inside.

  In the morning, Bobbie would return. They would love each other-for a day or a week or a month or a year. There would be fights, and there would be deep spells of unhappiness, and sooner or later there would be a break and they would go off in search of other loves.

  She made herself a drink, opened a can of oysters for the cat. It would not be heaven, she thought, but there was plenty of time for heaven after death. It would not be hell either. It would be her life, and all she could do was live it.

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