Unlike Others

by Valerie Taylor

  "That's what I was thinking."

  The opened door released a hum of voices and a whirl of jukebox music. They looked intently through the semi-darkness, partly to find seats, partly to see if they knew anyone. Richard said, "All the booths seem to be taken. You mind sitting at the bar?"

  "Not at all, it's closer to supplies."

  A youngster came to take their order. Girl or boy, it was hard to tell which in this light. Girl being boy, Jo decided. "Gin and tonic, please."

  "Two gin and tonic."

  This was the office crowd, stopping on its way home. Most of the girls were in skirts and blouses or between seasons cottons, their faces neatly made up, their young legs in nylon. Later in the evening the car-coat crowd would take over. The boys were mostly young. On a long bench along the wall, close to the jukebox, three young men who might have worked on a newspaper or in an ad agency sat talking in low voices. At the other end of the bar a woman in a flowered hat—the only hat in the room—sat next to a short man in glasses. "Tourists," Richard said scornfully.

  "Or a protectorate."

  "Not with that hat, I don't think so."

  "I don't either," Jo admitted. "I'm not sure about him, but she's straight."

  "How can you tell?"

  1 don't know. Sometimes I make mistakes, but not very often."

  They smiled at each other. Richard paid for the drinks. Jo said, "Thanks. I'll see you payday."

  "No you won't. It's my pleasure."

  "You have Michael, you don't need any more pleasure.

  It took him a minute or so to frame the question that had been in his mind all day. He was concerned. At the same time, he didn't want to hurt her. She waited, knowing this. He said, looking not at her but at the boy on the other side of her, "Have you heard from Karen?"

  "Not since I saw you. I told you she called me up, didn't I? They're back from the honeymoon and she's gone into analysis. Her analyst thinks she's making headway. Maybe shell be normal eventually." Jo's smile was a grimace. "We're all cases of retarded development."

  "Sure, we're neurotic. Who in hell isn't?" Richard wanted to know. "Society breeds neurosis. I suppose the heteros who run around laying every female they can get their hands on are normal. I suppose the morons who rape and dismember little girls are mature mentally. Also the frigid housewives who are always so tired when their husbands come to bed."

  "Well, anyhow you're the nicest neurotic I know.”

  "Thanks, darling. I love you too."

  The beautiful thing was, he really did. Looking at his profile as he scanned the men around the long oval bar, Jo felt the familiar warm affection. There was no one in the world she trusted more than Rich, or liked better, or relied on more often for understanding. Not that she often asked for advice, or took it when it was offered, but it was a comfort to know he was there to be counted.

  She said absently, "It's too bad I hate men.”

  He laughed. "All Lesbians hate men. If they didn't they'd get married."

  "Good old stereotypes. The boys are all artistic and the girls are all athletic."

  "Some are." With the smallest possible gesture he indicated a girl of twenty or so sitting next to the three young advertising men on the bench. Hair cut like a boy's and slicked back, knees brawny under olive drab bermudas, moccasins planted flat, she wore the challenging expression of a tough little boy looking for trouble. Jo said, "It's too bad I don't go for butches, they're so easy to identify."

  Rich finished his drink. The barboy picked up the glass. "You ready for another?" he asked Jo directly.

  "Not for me. Go ahead, Rich, unless you'd like to leave."

  Now that the first drink was down, he went back to the subject at hand. He said, "I thought maybe you saw her, or something."

  Jo said, "I've been thinking about her all day, off and on." She put her elbows on the bar and hunched forward, as though she could collect her thoughts by pulling her body together. "We hired a girl for Nancy's job this morning. She looks a little bit like Karen."

  "Is she gay?"

  "I don't think so. She's divorced."

  "Don't mean a thing. I've been married and divorced myself."

  "I know. The thing is," Jo said anxiously, "I don't want to start thinking she might be gay because she looks like Karen. She's quite a common type."

  "Karen wasn't a member of the club anyway, she was just experimenting. A lot of girls do that. They hear about it and they're curious. All you can do is let them go when the novelty wears off."

  "I know."

  "Sweetheart, the trouble with you is you're too monogamous. Why can't you pick somebody up and have a good time? It would do you good."

  "I was ready to last night." She looked into her empty glass, decided to have another gin after all, and beckoned the barboy. Her smile was answered by a hopeful look. Girls, she decided. "I was absolutely crazy last night," she said in a small abashed voice. "Not just in my body, the way you get when you haven't loved anybody for a long time, but my mind too. I was so lonesome I thought I'd die. You know?"

  "Baby, I do know."

  "I couldn't see anything ahead for me."

  "There's this new girl."

  "I'm trying not to think about her. I'd rather not be disappointed."

  "You've been thinking about her all day."

  "Have I? I don't think so. Anyway, I guess Stan's looking her over. Every time I went past her office today he was in there, explaining the job to her and looking down her cleavage."

  "Let him find his own girls. What's the matter with him anyhow?"

  "He has to be home by five-thirty," Jo said, "or his mother sends the sheriff out with a posse. He does a lot of talking, but I bet he hasn't laid a girl in the last five years." She sipped delicately at her new drink. "If this keeps up, I’ll be able to say the same for myself."

  "You know what I'd do in your place?"

  "Oh sure. You'd look around till you found something you liked, and move in on it. It's not that I have anything against the system," Jo explained, "I wash I could do it, but I can't."

  "You want a whole-personality relationship."

  She smiled. The drink was beginning to make her feel a little more cheerful, but sleepy too. "Thank you, Dr. Freud. I'm a bitch to keep you here when you could be with Michael."

  "It's only six-thirty." He checked his watch against the wall clock. "Let's have a sandwich or something, there's plenty of time. Excuse me just a minute."

  What a great guy, Jo thought, watching him walk in the direction of the telephone booths. If I were straight, that's the kind of man I'd go for. He deserves something better than those selfish young bastards he's always getting hung up on.

  The girl in the tan bermudas stood beside her. "You mind if I sit here?"

  "My friend's coming back."

  "That's all right," she grinned. Jo said, "Maybe another time."

  Because she herself looked so ambiguous, in spite of her short haircut and tailored clothes which were the style now, anyway, she was careful not to behave like a tourist in places like this. Just as careful as she was to hide her real nature from her fellow-workers. One was a necessary self-protective measure; the other, a way of identifying with her own kind.

  For these were her people. Not only the two career girls in the corner booth, touching each other with their looks even as their hands lay on the bare tabletop, but the others. The shabby little girls holding hands, the butches in jeans and heavy oxfords, the nervous-looking woman in high heels who was visibly and unsuccessfully cruising. They were hers. Just the middle-class, solvent and well-washed poet has to acknowledge his obscure colleague, reading for drinks in a cellar pad, so she had come to admit her relationship to the entire homosexual world—that society within a society whose existence most people never even suspect. It was easy. Too easy, she thought, following her idea carefully because the gin was clouding her mind a little. Once you learn to accept yourself, it's easy to accept other people.

  That wa
s where she'd made her mistake with Karen. She had supposed that Karen was simply reluctant to admit her own deviant nature. It's not easy to make a commitment to an idea that's going to take you out of the main stream of society. She hadn't realized, until the day of their separation, that their relationship was based on a false premise. For Karen seemed to feel, with her analyst, that the only possible commitment was to the normal. Anything else was a falling short, a detour rather than a destination. Jo's kind of love was not an alternative but only a phase she might go through.

  That takes care of that, Jo thought. If Karen had been attracted to another woman she might eventually have come back. Or if she had fallen irresistibly in love with a man. But no, she snatched at David Breen as a drowning person snatches at a life preserver, not caring who tosses it.

  Karen couldn't realize that it was normal for some people to be gay, just as it was normal for others to be attracted to the opposite sex. And failing to learn that, she would be miserable until she learned to live with a man—or with her own ambivalent feelings, a cold and cheerless outlook. I guess it had to be, Jo thought, taking a good long drink to drown her thoughts.

  "I feel happier," she told Rich when he came back from the telephone, looking flushed and a little smug.

  "Sure, it's the gin."

  "No, it's from talking to you. You always make me feel better."

  "You never take my advice. Maybe it's a good thing."

  "You always listen while I gripe."

  "No, but I've decided I have to forget about Karen. I decided that two or three times before," Jo admitted, “but I think I can make it stick this time. Then I'm ready for whatever happens next."

  "I thought nothing was ever going to happen again?"

  "Well, I don't know what it can be, but I'm willing to admit there might be something."

  Richard looked uneasy. Jo said kindly, "We really ought to go pretty soon. Is Michael downtown already?"

  "He's coming down a little early, but it doesn't make any difference. Let me get you something to eat."

  Jo tipped her glass to get the last of her drink. "I ought to get home early myself. And Richard, thanks again."

  "Think nothing of it. I'd do anything I could for you."

  "Me too," Jo said. They got up and walked around a little cluster of people just coming in. "You're a good guy," she said gratefully.

  "You're pretty okay yourself. I think everything's going to come out all right for you."

  "Sure." She blinked at the late-afternoon daylight, just beginning to pale. "Only tell me one thing, will you?"

  "What's that?"

  "Considering everything," Jo said, "why in hell do they call us gay?"

  CHAPTER 3

  But what else could you call it? she wondered, getting out of her clothes slowly. The gin had cleared her mind but was making her fingers a little stiff and slow. All the words people use for us seem so—ishy, somehow. Dirty, like something out of a medical book, Greek and Latin names for diseases. Which is what Karen's doctor thinks it is, she admitted, placing her gray skirt on a hanger and then putting the hanger away carefully in the closet.

  Homosexual. Like klepto or dipso. Don't call me a homosexual unless you want your face pushed in. Not that I mind being one. It's a long, long time since I was sixteen and that girl in my gym class asked me home to spend the night, and I found out there was something better than smooching with boys in parked cars. Allene, or Eileen or something like that.

  I'm like anybody else, medium intelligent, a good editor, I like to cook, I look like a lot of other people—hell, I'm exactly like a thousand other girls, except I like making love to women instead of men. So what? It's my own private business.

  She unbuttoned her blouse and tossed it into the hamper. I don't seduce teen-agers, she continued her mental inventory, I don't pick people up, I'm not promiscuous. I tell the truth and pay my bills promptly. I do an honest day's work in return for my pay. They ought to have a better name for people like me.

  Nylons and panty girdle followed the blouse into the hamper. She stood in front of the long bathroom mirror, naked, and gave her reflection one of those searching inspections. It was a good enough body, slender and solid, slim of hip, with small but adequate breasts and a nice line from waist to knee. The body of an adolescent girl, at twenty-eight, yet soundly female.

  The girl in the tan bermudas had been built like a boy, with wide shoulders and muscular legs. Not Jo. She and Karen, on one of their few evenings out, could have been meeting to nice young men for a double date.

  She could see why the boys she knew, especially, had settled on "gay" as the least offensive word. It had a good go-to-hell sound. But there were all these times between lovers—they were about as un-gay as anything could possibly be. And even when you were most in love there was the knowledge that the rending lay ahead, hope as you might.

  Monogamy? She knew one couple who had been together six years, stable hard-working girls with half a dozen interests in common. Dina and Olive were buying a house in the suburbs. They were the only ones.

  Straight husbands and wives changed, grew apart, saw the dulling of the rainbow. But at least they started out with the intention of permanence.

  It was too complicated. She gave up trying. Abruptly she was no longer interested in evaluating herself or in finding a word for her own dilemma. She was achingly tired. She switched off the bathroom light, picked her way across the bedroom like a sleep-walker wading in dreams, and fell into bed. In less than five minutes she was asleep. Thinking as she went under, darling Rich; and then, that wonderful gin.

  She woke before full daylight, and lay comfortably with her hands under her head. It was as though, having pushed the affair into the past, she could see Karen in her true perspective. Or as though Karen had died and could be remembered without grief, with a gentle accept-ant sorrow.

  She had met Karen in a bar. It seemed odd now, partly because neither of them was much of a drinker, partly because it was an ordinary downtown bar catering mostly to squares—the sort of place where a secretary might go hoping to meet a man, or simply for a half-hour's relaxation on the way home from work. No such place as Richard had taken her to last night, where you might hope to meet somebody. That she had been in this bar was strange enough; that Karen would perch on the stool next to hers and there dissolve into gentle weeping was even more to be wondered at.

  What impulse had swerved her, Jo, aside from her bus trip homeward into this chrome and neon paradise for five-o'clock drinkers? She couldn't remember. Nor why she had taken a handful of crumpled tissues from her jacket pocket and offered them to the blonde girl who sat beside her, ignoring her drink and the tears that rained down her cheek. Jo's first year in the city had taught her to mind her own business. If someone dropped dead in the street, you called a cop. If a scream rang out in the middle of the night, you closed your window and went back to sleep. People in the city not only wanted but demanded anonymity—that was one reason she'd left Cottonwood Falls, the job in the drugstore and the Sunday dinners with the family. Whatever she was, she had to come to terms with herself; and that was a thing that could be done only among people who didn't care.

  Not that I'm doing such a wonderful job, she reminded herself. I found out what I was, all right, but what good's it doing me?

  She looked at the crying girl. A slender blonde about her own age, maybe a little younger. Little heart-shaped face all pink with whatever emotion was shaking her. Even if it was nothing but fatigue at the end of a wearing day, her sorrow gave her a vulnerable, childish look. She smoothed back the fight hair from her rounded forehead, a woman's gesture of distraction. Jo's hand reached into her pocket without any instructions from her and brought up the wad of Kleenex. With no intention of doing so, she shoved it into the girl's hand.

  "Thanks."

  "That's all right."

  "I feel so stupid," Karen said, blowing her nose heartily. She blinked at Jo. Tears hung on her lashes. "I just had a
fight with my analyst and I'm so tired, and everything's a mess."

  Well, naturally. All these neurotics transferring the guilts and conflicts and their love, too, to some stranger who didn't really give a damn. Some guy who sat behind a desk and listened, for twenty bucks an hour. Trying to find in professional impersonality something of the deep and meaningful closeness people have lost in the modern world. If you have enough love, you don't need psychiatry. That was Rich's theory. Jo went along with it.

  That was the place to end the whole thing, before it started. Just get up and walk out.

  Back in Cottonwood Falls, baby-sitting for spending money, she had loved the sick children best of all. Tiny babies, too, because they were so helpless. Their bodies sagged against you, their heads wobbled, they were dependent. Later, working in the drugstore, she always made the best and biggest shakes for Jimmy Pearsall because he'd had polio and old Mr. Acosta because he was an alcoholic.

  As long as she lived, she supposed, it would be easier to love people who were hurt or helpless. According to religion and her mother's moral axioms—the ones she talked about, not the ones she lived by—that was commendable. Actually she thought it was a stupid way to be, it created a lot of messy situations, but people are what they are. By the time you discover that your supposed virtues are really faults, it's too late.