Strange Are the Ways of Love

by Lawrence Block

  Got off that train in Danville,

  Got stuck on a Danville girl;

  You never saw such hair in your life,

  She had those Danville curls.

  Her eyes were blue and her skin was soft,

  Her body was shaped just right;

  And never did we say a word all day

  But we loved each other all night. . . .

  He was looking down at the guitar, completely absorbed in the chords he was playing and the song he was singing. He sang it very well. She could feel the strength of his voice and the rhythm of his guitar matching the pulse beat of the city, rising and falling as his foot tapped the bench in time to the music.

  The girl’s eyes were on him all the while.

  I’m a rail-riding grifter,

  I never shall have a home.

  When the sun comes out of the hill in the morn

  It’s time for me to roam.

  The whistle blew by the railroad yard,

  I kissed her breast, and then

  I pulled my cap down over my eyes

  And never looked back again. . . .

  He raised his head slightly and his eyes caught hers. She glanced away nervously but she could see him out of the corner of her eye, still looking at her, probing her with his eyes. He seemed to be singing to her and for her, as if she were the only other person in the room.

  Oh, love is where you find it

  Wherever you chance to go;

  I’ve taken my pleasure in Calumet City

  And east to Baltimore.

  I’ve taken my love where I found it,

  That’s why I’m the way I am;

  A two-dollar bum on the C&O road

  And I do not give a damn. . . .

  Stop it, she thought, angrily. Stop staring at me like that, damn you.

  He was good-looking. He shouldn’t have been, for his features by themselves were not good at all. His nose was too long, and when his lips turned in a smile the smile was crooked. And there was a haggard look in his eyes, as though he had stayed up too late for too many nights and eaten too little and smoked too much. But the whole was greater than the sum of its parts—he was definitely attractive.

  She was afraid. For a moment she started to think what it might be like with him, almost hoping, almost planning, and then she shook her head resolutely and banished the thought from her mind.

  If you ride the rails, my brother,

  You never shall have a home;

  You’ll go to sleep in any empty car

  And wake up all alone.

  You’ll find a girl and you’ll love that girl

  And you’ll kiss her good-by, and then

  You’ll pull your cap down over your eyes

  And never look back again. . . .

  The song was over. For several seconds no one said anything, and then the other boy said, “That was good.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Damned good,” the other boy said. “When you cut a side, include that one.”

  Mike’s eyebrows went up. “When I cut a side,” he said, “we’ll all be over ninety.”

  “But you’re good enough to record.”

  “Sure,” he said. “You’re my best fan. Almost my only fan, and unfortunately you don’t own a record company. Sad, but true.”

  “I’m not kidding, Mike. You ought to be able to set up an audition.”

  Mike shrugged and finished his coffee, making a face because it was cold, but drinking it anyway. He put the cup down on the table, struck a tentative chord on the guitar and looked up abruptly at Jan as if he were seeing her for the first time.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Janet Marlowe.” She answered automatically.

  “I’m Mike Hawkins. And this—” indicating the girl— “is Saundra Kane. And these people are Sue and Bob Dallman.”

  She nodded.

  “You live around here?”

  “Yes. I just moved in this morning.”

  As soon as she had spoken she regretted volunteering the information. She didn’t want to get involved in any conversation, not with him. It was too dangerous. She should have just mumbled something and left.

  But it was too late now.

  “Like it here?”

  She nodded.

  He tossed his head back sharply so that his hair fell back into place. “Anything special you want to hear?”

  “No,” she said, nervously, awkwardly. “I have to go now.”

  She stood up, stepped back from the table, and smiled at the four of them.

  “Wait a minute—”

  She didn’t answer, turning instead and walking from the back room through the kitchen and the front room and out the door. All the way out she felt his eyes on her, following her, burning into the back of her skirt and blouse.

  She was afraid of him.

  And she knew she would see him again.

  She wanted a drink, wanted one badly, wanted to hold a drink in her hand and sip it and think and try to figure things out. She wanted to drink in a bar, but first she had to select a bar.

  She walked up and down Macdougal Street again, but this time she didn’t notice the stores or the coffee shops. She looked at the bars, trying to place each one mentally and pick the right one, the bar where the drink would taste good and where no one would bother her. She stopped to examine each bar and rejected each in turn for one reason or another.

  She paused in front of a bar called The Shadows, a bar with a porch in front of it and a loud jukebox blaring in the rear. Something seemed particularly appropriate about this bar, and she wanted to analyze her reaction before going inside. What made it different? She sensed something, but she couldn’t pin-point it.

  A couple emerged from The Shadows. The girl was a fragile blonde in a print dress; the man wore tight black slacks and walked with his shoulders thrown back almost pugnaciously. Jan watched them walk out of the door and down the steps and saw them pass her and continue on down the street.

  And suddenly she knew why this place was different.

  Because the man was not a man, but a woman, and the two girls were obviously lovers. The Shadows was a Lesbian hangout, a gay bar.

  Now you know, she thought. That’s why it appeals to you. You should go home, but you won’t. You should pack up and get the hell back to Indiana and enter a convent, but you won’t do that either.

  Quickly, almost desperately, she walked up the steps and into the bar. She realized at the doorway that she didn’t want to go in, that she had no desire whatsoever to enter, but she couldn’t retrace her steps.

  Two sailors at the bar were the only men in the place. Girls, feminine and masculine in appearance, sat on stools at the long dark bar or drank at tables in small groups. She walked in and sat down at an empty table near the front, ordering Scotch-and-water and sipping it slowly when the waitress brought it to her.

  She didn’t want to look around, but she did. She was afraid she would catch someone’s eye without wanting to, or that she would gape at the girls like a tourist. But the fascination of the room was too much for her; she couldn’t keep from scanning the bar and tables, running her eyes over the girls.

  She didn’t like the butches. She heard them talk in their deep voices and watched them dance and snap their fingers to the jukebox, and she knew that they would never attract her. They looked hard and tough and coarse, and totally unappealing.

  But the other girls did excite her. It was not a physical attraction so much as the knowledge of what they were and the vague feeling of kinship coupled with the awful fascination of fear that made them attractive.

  On the jukebox Dinah Washington was singing So Long. The music was slow and sad, and Jan unconsciously compared it with Mike’s Danville Girl.

  She looked at them all, the girls who could pass for men and the girls who could pass for girls, and she began to think, But I don’t want any of them. I really don’t. Maybe’

  Then she saw the girl and a shiver w
ent through her.

  She was beautiful. She was tall with silky red-brown hair that fell to her shoulders and framed her face. There was a deep, haunting sadness in her eyes and a constrained beauty in her face that Jan knew could only accompany unhappiness. She sat at a table near the dance floor and the table obscured most of her body, but Jan was able to see that it was a good one, slender but with full curves.

  She was attractive.

  Attractive to Jan.

  No, she thought. No, it can’t happen. It’s no good and I don’t want it to happen and I won’t let it happen. I don’t want to think about her.

  She took another sip of her Scotch-and-water and turned away from the girl, but she could not think of anything else. When she closed her eyes the image of the girl’s face remained fixed in her mind.

  She began to imagine the two of them together, imagined the girl kissing her and holding her, loving her, and she pictured herself holding that slender, graceful body in her own arms and doing those things, things that she was afraid of and didn’t want to do or even to know about.

  I want her, she thought. Damn it, I want her and I can’t help it.

  The girl looked up and her eyes caught Jan’s. Jan turned away quickly, guiltily, finishing her drink and setting the empty glass down on the table.

  One of the two other girls at the table stood up suddenly, and walked to Jan’s table. Jan sensed her approach but didn’t look up until there could be no mistake, until the girl was standing just a few feet from her, looking down at her. Then she raised her eyes slowly to look at the tall, rangy girl with blonde hair that was almost sunflower-yellow.

  “Hi,” the girl said. Her voice was a little too deep, Jan thought. A little affected.

  Jan smiled, thinking, Go away. Please go away.

  “My name’s Kate Simons. What’s yours?”

  “Jan Marlowe.”

  “You look a little lonely, Jan.”

  “No. I mean, I’m fine.”

  “Would you like to come and join us? We can use the company.”

  “No, I don’t—”

  “Come on. There’s just Peggy and Laura and me, and we’d be glad to have a fourth.”

  Jan couldn’t speak. She stood up, shaking her head, and dropped a bill for the drink.

  “I have to go now,” she said finally. She smiled quickly and started for the door.

  “Drop in again soon.”

  She reached the door and started down the steps, trying to decide whether Kate’s last words were inviting or mocking or both. She couldn’t tell.

  Peggy and Laura and Kate.

  And she was either Peggy or Laura.

  I’m in love, she thought. I’m in love with a beautiful girl and I don’t even know her name.

  Peggy.

  Or Laura.

  4

  HER NAME WAS Laura Dean. She was twenty-three years old, and she had spent four of those years at a girls’ prep school and four more at a girls’ college in Massachusetts.

  Her father was the only man she ever really knew. She had lived with him in a big stone house in upper Westchester County ever since he divorced her mother for infidelity when Laura was ten, and until he dropped dead of a heart attack shortly after she began her first year in high school.

  She cried a great deal when he died. Later that year she fell in love with her French teacher and spent many hours talking with her and more hours thinking of her in secret.

  The following year she danced with her room-mate at the school dances and kissed her several times in their room with the door shut.

  The year after that she began sleeping with another girl, a senior.

  Since then she had gone with many girls, too many to remember. Each time the relationship was a shaky, tenuous thing that rarely lasted more than a month or so and frequently ended after a single night. After she graduated from college she moved immediately to the Village. She landed a bit part in an off-Broadway theater but gave up the role to sleep with an actress for four months. It was her only extended affair, and she was sick inside when the actress left her for another girl.

  And the time passed.

  She was with the little blonde now, Peggy. She felt Peggy’s hand on her thigh beneath the table, pressing gently but persistently, and she knew that Peggy wanted to leave. Peggy wanted to go out of The Shadows and around the corner to the apartment on Minetta Street. She wanted to get undressed quickly and throw her clothing on the floor and jump into bed and make love. Peggy wanted to be loved, wanted desperately to be held tight in Laura’s arms.

  “Hold me close,” she would say, as she had said so often in the three weeks they had been lovers. “Hold me close. I’m afraid.”

  What was Peggy afraid of? She didn’t know, and she was beginning to stop caring, just as she was ceasing to care for Peggy and ceasing to desire the slim, boyish body she knew so well.

  Soon it would end. The affair would be over, Laura knew, and she or Peggy would be hurt for a while just as Kate was hurt now, and then each would find another and the parade would go on. They would play Musical Beds until they dried up inside and died, and there would be a funeral with Lesbians crying, and the ground would cover them and no one would care. No one would even remember after a year or two.

  Kate was saying something and Laura nodded absently, not hearing her. Her mind was not on Kate’s conversation any more than it was on Peggy’s hot urgent hand. It was on another girl, a girl she had not yet met.

  Jan Marlowe, Kate had said. Short for Janice or Janet.

  Had she ever slept with a girl named Jan? She had to think back for a moment to be sure that she hadn’t, and she realized just how mad a game of Musical Beds she had been playing.

  Kate was rambling on about the girl, speculating, guessing. Was the girl gay? Was she a tourist? Why did she run so? What scared her?

  Laura knew. She knew why the girl was frightened and that she would be back, and she knew that they would make love. She had seen Jan’s eyes on her, gazing at her with a mixture of hunger and fear. She had sensed the eyes even before she had seen them, had been aware of the girl’s presence with that extra sense a person needed if he was radically different, the extra sense that could bring homosexuals an awareness of each other in the middle of a busy street or from two sides of a crowded room.

  Jan Marlowe would be back.

  They would meet and they would make love. Jan would come to her, still afraid but not so afraid as before. They would sit together and talk and drink and leave The Shadows and walk together to the apartment on Minetta Street.

  They would lock the door.

  With the door locked Peggy would become a memory and Jan would become a reality. They would be together—for a night or a week or a month—and Laura would hold Jan’s sweet body close and kiss her and love her. Until the music stopped and they switched partners once again.

  Musical Beds.

  “I hate this place,” Peggy was saying, making conversation and hinting at the same time.

  “Why?” Kate asked.

  “Touristy. People walk in and look at us and sailors make passes and people stare in the window. It’s a pain in the ass.”

  I don’t like that, Laura thought. Why does she always have to talk like a truckdriver?

  “But it’s the only place. God, you know what the rest of the spots are like. How about that hole over on Bleecker Street with the floor show? That’s better?”

  “No, it’s worse.”

  “Well, where do you want to go?”

  Peggy squeezed Laura’s thigh again, making it quite plain where she wanted to go. “We should have a place of our own,” she said. “Without the tourists.”

  “Good idea.” Kate finished her drink, getting into the spirit of the game. “What’ll we call it?”

  “Sappho’s.”

  “Too obvious. How about The Dikery?”

  They laughed and Laura smiled.

  “The Butchery’s better,” Peggy suggested.

&nbs
p; “Too coarse.”

  “The Nunnery?”

  “Sacrilege.”

  “The Convent?”

  “Same thing.”

  “I know—Halfway House.”

  And they all laughed.

  Laura drained her drink and put the glass down on the table, hard. She stood up, reaching for Peggy’s hand, and whispered, “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  As they walked to the door Peggy slipped her arm around Laura’s waist, leaning her little body expertly against her. The jukebox was playing So Long again and Laura knew without looking that Kate was crying or would start to cry in a minute or two. Then, within a week, she would fall in love again with someone new.

  “I’ve been wanting to leave for one hell of a long time,” Peggy said, her voice brittle. “What were you waiting for? It’s not that bitch Kate, for Christ’s sake. Or is it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I never know. Dammit, you know how much I need you right now. I was sitting there itching while those goddamned sailors were running their eyes up my skirt and Kate’s yammering away and you knew I wanted to get out of there.”

  Laura nodded, wishing she would shut up, half wanting her and half wanting only to sleep, to sleep alone in an empty bed with clean sheets and a hard pillow.

  “Then why in hell—”

  “Can’t you say anything without swearing like a trouper?”

  Peggy stiffened; then she relaxed and released her breath. “I’m sorry. I got in the habit but I know you don’t like it. I’ll try to stop.”

  And Laura knew that she had hurt her, so she slipped her arm tighter around Peggy as they turned the corner of Minetta.

  She’s really very pretty, she thought. With that blonde hair and those bright eyes. And I want her tonight. God, tonight I have to want her.

  “I’m sorry, too,” she said softly.

  “Do you really want me?” Peggy demanded suddenly. “We’ve been so close, but lately I keep feeling as though you’re a million miles away. What’s the matter, darling?”

  “Nothing—don’t be silly.”

  “You still love me?”

  “Of course I love you. Idiot, how many times do I have to prove it to you?”

  And even as she spoke the words sounded forced and artificial, as if she were an actress playing a role. How much longer would it be before Peggy saw the performer instead of the performance?