Rubyfruit Jungle

by Rita Mae Brown

  “I wouldn’t miss one of your parties for the world, Chrys. I’d like you to meet Molly Bolt, a friend of Holly’s and a new friend of mine.”

  Chrys looked at me with as much subtlety as a vulture. She took my hand in both of hers and intoned, “I’m delighted to have you. Come right over here and tell me what you want to drink and then we can chat like civilized human beings.” There were over fifty women in the room and as Chrys paraded me across the floor, a slight smirk visited their faces. “What will you have?”

  “A Harvey Wallbanger.”

  “Marvelous. Louis, fix this divine creature a Harvey Wallbanger, with the emphasis on the bang. Now tell me what you do and all those things that one opens a conversation with. Then I’ll tell you what I do and we can move from there.” Slight laugh.

  “At this moment I happen to be a waitress.”

  “How colorful. But that’s not what you really want to do, of course.”

  “No, I want to go to film school.”

  “How interesting. Do you want to act or something like that?”

  “No, I want to direct but I may have to change my sex in order to get a job.”

  “Don’t do that.” She put her arm around my shoulder and whispered in my ear, “We’ll see what we can do about breaking the sex barrier in film.”

  Pause. Then I asked, “You’re an archeologist?”

  “Yes, but I’ll bet you don’t want to hear about me digging and dashing about in those dirty trenches, do you?”

  “Not at all. In fact, I was reading the other day about N.Y.U.’s dig at Aphrodisios.”

  Her eyebrows went up, a note of sarcasm crept into her voice. “Yes, but they’re botching the job. Now, on my dig, we are uncovering fabulous things, simply fabulous. Last summer I discovered the breast of Artemis done by one of the pupils of Phidias. I’m sure of it.”

  “I read about it in the Post.”

  She totally brightened, “Oh, they tried to stir up controversy about it, of course. Those parasites will do anything for copy.”

  A square woman in a tweedy suit lumbered over and bellowed, “Chrys, are you boring this young thing with tales of broken pots and torn fingernails? Really, dear, I’ll never understand how you can get excited about all that dirt and shattered housewares.”

  “You’re a cultural infidel, Fritza. This is Molly Bolt, aspiring film director, an American Mai Zetterling.”

  Fritza smiled, “We need one. I’m sick to death of John Ford.”

  Chrys flashed a rapier grin at the woman. “Fritza is a true philistine. She’s a stockbroker—the ultimate in tedium but it has made her disgustingly rich.”

  “Yes, and Chrys relieves me of a sizable portion to help finance her dig.”

  “It’s your cultural dues, darling.”

  “I tend to think of it as alimony, myself.”

  “Fritza, you’re a cad.” Chrys linked her arm in mine. “Now, I’m freeing this delicious woman from the clutches of your heavyhanded humor.” We started through the crowd leaving Fritza to her drink. “Pay no attention to Fritza. She was my first lover at Bryn Mawr and we’ve grown comfortable in our hostility.”

  “Chryssa, Iris is here,” a voice called from the crowd.

  “Excuse me, Molly, I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Holly and Kim came over to me and Holly snickered, “See, I told you she’d flip out over you. She likes dark-haired women with strong faces. I bet her ovaries hit the floor when you walked through the door.”

  “My irresistible charm, ladies.” I lifted my glass for a toast: “to ovaries.”

  “To ovaries,” they echoed. Then Holly scampered off in the direction of a waving arm with too many gold bracelets on it.

  “What do you think of the party?” Kim asked.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t had time to talk to anyone except Chrys and her friend, Fritza.”

  “The gruesome twosome. That’s been going on since 1948 when they graduated from Bryn Mawr.”

  “She mentioned Bryn Mawr but not the year.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Want to go over there on that bench and sit down for a bit?”

  “Sure.”

  “I promise not to ask you any questions about your career.”

  “Good. I’m running away from it. I can’t act anyway. Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

  “No, I don’t think I believe in those kind of separations anyway.”

  “That I’ll keep in mind. Are you sleeping with Holly?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so. You know she took that job at The Flick so she could get to know you. She told me about it. She’s very honest.”

  “Does it bother you?”

  “No, not really. Once I got beyond thirty-five I stopped being torn up about those things and I definitely gave up on monogamy. Maybe I can do it but no one else seems to be able to.”

  “Well, don’t test yourself. Non-monogamy makes life much more interesting.”

  Kim laughed and looked at me. Her eyes were very light blue-gray. There was something good about her that radiated through her eyes. “That’s another thing you’ve said that I’ll keep in mind. Here comes another question—got your fielder’s glove on?”

  “Check.”

  “Do you love Holly?”

  “No. I like her a lot. In time I think I could love her too, but I don’t think I’ll ever be in love with her. We’re too different.”

  “How?”

  “Oh, Holly’s impressed with names and money. She doesn’t have much ambition, I think. I do. I don’t care about who’s got what. I care about getting to school and getting on with my work. She doesn’t understand that but as long as we go out for fun there isn’t any friction.”

  “Well look here in the corner: beauty and the beast. Aha!” Chryssa popped her head over a lethargic palm. “Really, Kim, you keep all the young ones to yourself. If you were a man, they’d call you a chicken queen.”

  From the greatly increased crowd a voice called out, “Chryssa!”

  “It’s simply impossible to talk at my own party. Molly, have lunch with me next Thursday at one—Four Seasons.”

  “One, next Thursday,” I replied. She gave my hand a squeeze and disappeared back into the mass.

  “Better wear your chastity belt.”

  “Haven’t got one. Do you think B.O. will do the trick?”

  Lunch with Chryssa was an exercise in evasion. Since I had borrowed all the clothes on my back I was afraid to lift a fork to my mouth. Suppose something would slip off into my right tit and I’d wreck the damn blouse? And the questions from Chryssa—sly and charming but all leading to the same conclusion. I strained to be pleasant and kill the last gasp of a Southern accent. But I nearly lost my restraint when she hinted she’d pay my way through film school, if only. Somehow I got through it without slopping whipped cream on myself and without committing myself.

  Riding the subway home I watched the people watching me. I had on nice clothes so I was getting stares of idle curiosity, and even approval, rather than the usual bitter searching eye. Didn’t Florence always say that clothes make the man? Oh, for sure, Florence. What the hell were they doing now that I was riding the BMT? Right this minute? If they could see me they’d think I was rich. The hell with them. Why am I thinking about them anyway? Why did that woman in her well-modulated voice try to buy me off? I know why, I know good and why. Shit, what do I do now? I can’t run a kept number. I know it’s fucked not to be able to do it. Hell, I should take her money and go to school. Her old man got rich off the backs of the poor anyway. Part of the money is my inheritance. Retribution. I should take the Goddamned stuff. How can I pay for school myself? A semester is $1,000. Goddamn being poor. I got to use my ass to save my head. Well, fuck you, Chryssa Hart, I’m not taking your enticing money, and fuck me because I’m going to sit in that rathole and stay proud but poor. Purity. There has to be some way out of this. Maybe I am hung up on false pride. Ca
rrie don’t even make $1,500 a year, and she won’t take welfare or anything, not even from the church. Maybe it runs in the family. Family, now that’s a fat laugh. What family? All I had was room and board. Well, some of it rubbed off, I guess. But it’s more than poor pride. If that woman loved me it’d be different or if I loved her. I’d take anything she gave me then, but she don’t give a flying fuck about me. She buys me the way she goes and buys a winter coat or a Gucci handbag. I’m a piece of meat. Damn, I go walking down the street and the men look at me like a walking sperm receptacle. I walk into a party and this buzzard sees flesh. She’s no different from a construction worker, she’s just got class and bread, that’s all.

  Well, piss, I’m not sittin’ here on this Goddamn subway train feeling sorry for myself. Fuck that shit. So an old dyke tries to buy my ass. Big deal. So I’m eating the wallpaper off the walls and ripping off day-old bread. Tough shit. I am getting my ass over to N.Y.U. tomorrow and telling those academic robots that they’re giving me a scholarship. I’m the hottest thing since Eisenstein; they’re lucky to be able to help me in my formative stage. Hell, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Carrie all the time said that. Shit, I wish I’d stop thinking about Carrie.

  After months of bureaucratic shuffle and a battery of entrance exams I won a tuition scholarship. I took classes during the day and worked at The Flick at night. Holly only saw me on weekends and didn’t take to my schedule kindly nor did she take film school seriously.

  One weekend night we were mobbed at work. The place was jammed with middle-aged, white, suburban theater goers and preppies who couldn’t get into the Playboy Club and had to settle for imitation bunnies. We worked four tables each. It was near the end of our shift and we were all tired.

  One of Holly’s tables emptied and a sallow man, maybe forty-five sat down with a plump wife in her green satin dress that was near to busting at her hips. My tables were eating and contented, so I had a little breathing space. Holly whizzed by, tray in the air, running down to the kitchen to get the couple’s order. She returned with one orange freeze and an enormous banana split—six scoops of ice cream, mountains of whipped cream, three different syrups, and an obese cherry that bordered on the obscene.

  The little man watched Holly, actually he never took his eyes off her perfect breasts. She served the wife first and as the lady imprisoned in green satin with her metallic hair peered at her sweetheart straw wrapper, the husband reached right up and fondled Holly’s left breast. He’s loaded I thought, this guy has got to be loaded. Holly took a step back to view him more clearly, then she carefully put the banana split in her right hand and smashed it on his head. The entire top floor of The Flick broke out in a chorus of laughter and noise. He bellowed and jumped out of his metal chair, knocked it over and fell on his ass. His wife, seeing him on the floor with an enormous cherry oozing down his hairy ear, released a splitting wail, “Harold, there’s a cherry on your ear!”

  Harold would have had a banana in his ear if Holly could have gotten a good hold on him. She kicked him in the balls, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and, dragged him to the top of the stairway. There she put her foot firmly on his rear and launched him without countdown. He collided into the manager, who was huffing his two hundred and fifty pounds up the stairs looking like an ad for the heart association fund.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” Larry the Leech squawked, his affected masculine voice lost in the hysteria of the moment.

  “That putrid prick laid his hand on my breast, that’s what’s the meaning of this.”

  By now people were out of their seats crowding around the stairway for a better view. I was standing directly behind Holly. Larry’s face was mottled red and he reached down to help the tit tweaker to his feet. Whipped cream and remnants of syrupy banana covered the carpet.

  “You’re fired, now get outa here. I’m sorry, Sir, this is most unfortunate.” Larry then looked at me and, remembering that Holly and I were friends, added as a postscript, “You can stay, I’m not mad at you.”

  Holly whirled around and jacked her foot squarely in Larry’s huge gut. He sailed down the stairs, airborne without a sound until he bombed on the bottom step. She locked my wrist in an iron clasp and announced at the top of her lungs, “If I’m fired, I’m taking my wife with me!”

  The uproar was louder than a home run at the World Series. Holly yanked me down the steps and out into the street. She didn’t let go until we had walked to the Lexington Avenue subway. I was a mixture of amazement and laughter.

  “You shook the shit out of all of them, but Holly, you told a lie, we’re not married. Now all those nice people will think I’m taken. This is the ruin of my single life.”

  She was still too wrought up to be amused. “Shut up and come home with me.”

  “I can’t. I have to get up early tomorrow and go to the library to do some research on D. W. Griffith. Come down to my place.”

  “Go to that dump?”

  “Well, I’m in it so close your eyes to the rest.”

  “All right, but don’t wake me up when you go to the library.”

  We rode down to the apartment in silence. The crosstown at Union Square took forever so we walked down Fourteenth Street all the way to the river and up to the apartment. Holly wasn’t cooled by the walk, it only irritated her more. As I opened the door and heard the police lock click into place, I turned on the light accompanied by Holly’s “How can you live in this rathole? You’re a fool not to let Chryssa keep you.”

  “Let’s not get into that. I’ve got enough on my mind. Glad as I was to see both that little shriveled-up turd get it and Larry too, now I’ve got to look for another job.”

  “Look, you stubborn shit, if you’d just bend a little you wouldn’t have to kill yourself like this—and you’d have some clothes, a decent apartment, a few little lovelies that make life easier.”

  “Holly, lay off.”

  “Lay off what? You think you’re too good to be kept? I’m kept, so what am I, a whore or something? Or maybe it’s symptomatic of my race’s refusal to be responsible. That what you think?”

  “No. We’re different people and it has nothing to do with whoring or color or any of that shit. I can’t do it, that’s that.”

  “Don’t hand me that shit. You can’t do it because you’re a fucking prude and you think it’s immoral. Well, I think you’re a goddamn ass, that’s what I think. You spent your whole life in poverty and now you have a chance to have something. Take it.”

  “You don’t understand, Holly, I don’t want to live here. I don’t want raggedy clothes. I don’t want to be running on nerves for the next ten years, but I have to do it my way. My way, understand. It has nothing to do with morality, it has to do with me.”

  “Oh, come off it, Horatio Alger.”

  “I don’t want a fight. Can’t we forget it for tonight?”

  “No, I’m not going to forget it because I know you’re making a value judgment on me.”

  “I am not. Now stop trying to guilt trip me.”

  “You think I’m weak and lazy, don’t you? You think I’m a soft rich kid who’s taking money from her lover instead of from doctor daddy. Why don’t you say it? You don’t love me.”

  “I never said I did.”

  Holly blinked and then her eyes narrowed. “Why, you can’t fall in love with a decadent, middle-class, black brat?”

  “Just stop, will you? This is ridiculous.”

  “Ridiculous, I’ll tell you what’s ridiculous. You sitting here in this, working yourself to the bone and for what—to be a film director. Listen to me, baby: big dreams, big dreams. You can graduate at the top of your class. You probably will, but you’re not going to get any work. You’re another piece of ass who can sit in a secretary’s chair with your Phi Beta Kappa key wrapped around your neck. You’re doing all this for nothing. You know what, you’re a lot like my father. I never realized that until now. He worked his ass off too and he got rich but he
wanted to go all the way to the top and he’s not getting there for the obvious reason. You two would make a fine pair, bullheaded, can’t see what’s coming down in front of you. Gonna fight the whole world and get nothing but kicked in the ass. At least, my old man got money out of the deal. You aren’t even going to get that. You’d better grab on to Chryssa Hart because she’s the best you’ll get, honey.”

  “Goddammit! No matter what happens to me I’ll still have the knowledge inside my head and nobody can take that away from me. And someday, even if you can’t see it coming, I’m going to make use of that knowledge and make my movies. My movies, you hear me, Holly—not soppy romances about hapless heterosexuals, not family dramas about sparkling white America, not Westerns that run red from first reel to last or science fiction thrillers where renegade white corpuscles fill the screen—my movies, real movies about real people and about the way the shit comes down. Now if I don’t get the money to do that until I’m fifty, then that’s the way it is. I’m doing this so help me God and it’s not for nothing.”

  “You know, you’re incredible. I don’t know if you’re crazy or if you’re the stuff that towers over the masses of the mediocre, but I’m not going to stick around to find out. I’m not willing to have to watch you go through the ugliness you’re going through now and I don’t think I could face what’s going to happen after this—when all those doors shut in your face and they tell you whatever lie it is they’re telling to Blacks and Puerto Ricans and women that day. You’re strong enough to take it, but I’m not strong enough to watch it. After watching Daddy, I haven’t got the heart to see it all over again.” She stopped, took a breath and lowered her eyes to the linoleum floor, “I feel shitty. I just feel shitty. Maybe some of it is that I don’t have real work of my own. I go around being beautiful and having fun, yeah, but I don’t have anything for me, really mine, and you do, and it fucking kills me.”

  “So what the hell am I supposed to do? Give it up to make you happy? Be a failure, so you can feel good about yourself?”

  “No, no. Oh, Molly, deep inside I do want you to bust right out of here, to break the whole scene wide open. I know what it means to you, and maybe I’m even perceptive enough to know what it will mean to a lot of other people if you do. It’s the everyday wear and tear that brings out the green in me. I begin to hate you, hate you and I love you, that’s a fucked mess—but I start to resent you for all the things that make you strong, that enable you to stand up under that daily erosion. I begin to hate myself because I’m not like you. I don’t know, maybe it was because my parents gave me everything, spoiled me, maybe that’s why I’ve got no drive.”