"Where you going?"
"Back on the davenport. Get some sleep now, like a good kid."
The davenport had lumps in it. The blanket was one she'd used on the beach all summer; a few grains of sand fell out as she spread it. But it felt so good to lie down that nothing else mattered. She shut her eyes and lay still, listening to the rhythmic gurgle of the radiator.
She didn't know whether Betsy's courage or her curiosity would survive this emergency. She might wake feel-jug rested and self-assured, confident that she could manage Stan—or any other male who might conceivably he waiting for her. She might decide that her willingness had grown out of gratitude. She might conceivably be shocked, and thankful that her offer to do a thing she regarded as abnormal had been turned down. In that case, it would be all over.
I don't care, Jo thought. But she did care, achingly. She wanted Betsy, had wanted her since the day she walked into the office and found Betsy sitting there with her white-gloved hands folded so primly. But more than anything else, she wanted Betsy to make up her own mind. She wanted love, certainly. (She moved restlessly on the narrow space of the davenport, feeling desire stronger than fatigue.) But love is for adults. She wasn't going to hang on to a girl who was only half willing; Karen had taught her the futility of that.
This time she was out for a two-way relationship, Betsy would have to make her own decisions. Nothing real or lasting was possible unless it was on that basis. I won't settle for anything less, Jo thought.
She felt that this decision wasn't especially admirable. It was for her own sake as much as Betsy's that she wanted complete acceptance. She had done Karen an injustice, earning the living for both of them, babying her, making all the decisions, behaving in general as though Karen were a pretty doll, to be pampered and cuddled but not trusted. Granted that this was what Karen wanted, hadn't it been all wrong for both of them?
She fell asleep with the first words of a prayer in her mind, addressed to a God she had stopped believing in a few years back. Outside the wind blew, the sun shone, a few first leaves drifted down from the autumn trees, people went about their daytime business. It was two o'clock of a Monday afternoon in September.
CHAPTER 16
She hadn't stopped to think about the possibility of losing Betsy by this postponement, until after the words were spoken. It had been compulsive, a thing for which she could claim neither blame nor credit. Waking at her usual time, stiff and unrefreshed, depressed as she often was after a long sleep, she found Betsy gone. The blue pajamas lay neatly folded on the unmade bed.
That takes care of that, she thought. It was seven o'clock on Tuesday, a nothing sort of day, a gray hour. No telling when Betsy had left, but one thing was sure: she wouldn't have gone this way, without a word, if she'd been joyful over the prospect of being initiated into the mysteries of Lesbian love.
Jo made the bed, scoured the bathtub, crammed more clothes into the full hamper, and showered. As an afterthought, she cooked a good breakfast and ate it with appetite, even though she had supposed she wasn't hungry. It seemed unworthy to let the alimentary tract rule her emotions, but she decided that unhappy people skipped meals just because malnourishment helped them bang on to their misery. It was deplorable but understandable.
She put on her gray suit and the pleated white shirt, the silver cuff links, oval silver earrings, the new black pumps with teetering heels. She decided she wasn't a bad-looking wench considering what a crazy life she'd been leading. She had another cup of coffee, sitting on the step stool, waiting for it to be time to go to work.
She wondered if Betsy had squared things with her aunt, and whether she would really leave Topix, and whether Stan would be well enough to come back to work. She felt sure that his flu was remorse and not a virus.
Her head hurt, after almost sixteen hours of sleep. Apparently it didn't pay to lead a virtuous life.
The office was empty and quiet. She let herself in and tiptoed back to her own room, almost afraid to disturb the silence. Her desk stood as she had left it the day before, printed sheets spread out, pencils lying here and there. Gayle wasn't in yet and the telephone was silent. Jo went down to the fifth floor lunchroom and had a cup of coffee, sitting at the counter next to a thin gloomy man.
She thought about Linda, and realized that she didn't know Linda's last name or her home address. There was Vogue North, but they might be suspicious, and rightly, of strangers who called their employees to the phone but didn't know their names. She would have to wait.
She was tired of her job. She was tired to death of Topix and all the jolly little bits about who was engaged and married and having babies. Presumably it was important to the actors in these domestic dramas to be immortalized in type; she sympathized with the universal human desire to see one's name in print. She herself had high school annuals and family snapshots stored on a high closet shelf. But she was tired of other people's vital statistics.
She was tired of getting up at seven and drinking coffee in a rented kitchen, of catching the bus downtown and watching the days crawl toward payday. She was tired of loving girls in a world that expected women to love men, or at least go to bed with them. She was tired of the remnant of guilt she carried in the back of her mind all these years, that rose to nag her on rainy nights and dull Sundays. She was tired, period.
She could go to New York. It would be more of the same thing on a larger scale, but it would mean novelty: a different apartment, unfamiliar streets and the challenge of a new job. With part of her mind she clung to the known and familiar. The little waitress who served her lunch at least three days a week, the letterhead sheets in her second desk drawer were known. With another part, she longed for change.
For a long time she had supposed that only gay people felt like this. Not until a girl in an office where she worked slashed her wrists did she realize that depression was, as Jeannine said, a modern epidemic. It was part of being alive in a vast, mechanized, impersonal culture that made intimate association almost impossible, so that even two coming together in bed might be strangers to each other and therefore find no real pleasure or fulfillment in the closest of contacts. Everyone was lonely, bored and tired, and no one knew what to do about it.
This kind of thinking made her nervous. People in offices were supposed to work—at least, they were supposed to give the impression of working. She called Richard at his realty office and found him there early for once, feeling more cheerful. Mag had called to say that the charges against him were being withdrawn. The whole thing had been an embarrassing mistake; the police had dropped the matter. Jo wondered who had been paid and in what coin. Favors, probably. Operators like King Fosgett didn't stoop to vulgar bribery unless they had to.
"Of course it might come out some time in the future, but you learn to live with that," Rich said. He sounded muffled. Hearing the voices of his fellow workers in the background, she guessed that he had a hand cupped around the mouthpiece to keep the others from hearing. He said, "I'll see you in a day or two, darling," and hung up.
She called Mag's apartment and got no answer. Either Mag was out, in which case she felt better, or she had taken a sleeping pill (or a good slug of gin) and was too far gone to wake—in which case she didn't care how she felt. Jo considered and rejected the possibility that she might be in the hospital. When Mag went to the hospital she notified everyone she'd met in sixty-two years of gusty living, and the result was pandemonium.
Jo made a mental note to call later, and started to dial Betsy's number. After the second digit she hung up, shaking her head. It's no good, she thought. She has to call, or it doesn't mean anything.
If she doesn't call, it's over. End it nice and clean. Gayle came in, spent ten minutes arranging her hair, and sprayed herself and most of the office from a pink flask of perfume, very fine if you liked Night of Passion or Seductive Temptress or whatever she was using this week. Jo opened a window and gratefully breathed in exhaust fumes and soft-coal smoke. Stan came in, hung up
his hat and spring topcoat and stood around in the hall for a while, looking undecided. He said good morning to Gayle, got a drink of water from the cooler and opened and shut his desk drawers. After about five minutes, during which Jo sat seething with restrained impatience, he plodded back to her office and took up his stance against the doorjamb. She was almost irresistibly tempted to put a foot out and trip him.
She said "Hi," instead and went on looking through the morning mail as though she expected to find a million dollars in one of the letters. Stan tried to light a cigarette. His hands were shaky, but he finally made it. His eyes were pouchy, his cheeks vertically lined; he avoided looking at her. Feeling guilty, she thought coldly. Let him suffer, he deserves to.
He said stiffly, "Betsy's not coming back. She called to say she's found another job. Will you make out a check for what she has coming?" He hesitated. "Give her a week's severance pay. She didn't give us any notice, but what the hell, she probably has extra expenses. New place and all."
Some people paste prayer slips on a wheel, Jo ought. Others say a specified number of Hail Marys. Others leave their millions, gouged out of working people, to set up charitable foundations. Penance is penance. She nodded.
Stan said, "She wasn't very good on the job anyway."
"She was all right. Where's she going?"
"She didn't say. I wish women wouldn't call me at home," he said, aggrieved. "My mother answered the hone, and she raised holy hell. She can't understand why an employee would call on business, she thinks everybody's chasing me." His face got red, even redder than Betsy's when she was embarrassed. It's catching, Jo thought. He said, "It's so silly. I was a little bit late getting home the other night, and she had an asthma attack. I was up almost all night giving her medicine and heating the steam kettle."
Of course, Jo thought. You fight a rival by demanding extra attention. The poor jerk, all worn out from the session on auntie's davenport. But she kept a straight face. "She might be better off in a nursing home."
"Oh, I think she would. With people her own age, and all. My aunt's in an old ladies' home, my father's sister, and they have a fine time. A nurse on hand all the time, and everything. She won't do it, though, and the house belongs to her."
Her mausoleum, Jo thought. She had taken a walk in Stan's neighborhood one Sunday afternoon when she had nothing better to do, had walked down a street of two-story brick and frame houses until she came to the number that was on his personal correspondence and stood for a minute or two looking at it. Four-square and ugly, its bay window filled with thick-leaved plants, it looked like a house that would smell of cellar and dusty upholstery and old cooking.
She had never seen Stan's mother, but she knew, from Cottonwood Falls, the kind of old woman who lived in a house like this. She might be skinny and querulous, with her hair strained back from a shiny forehead. She might be shapeless and tallowy. She might even be a corseted travesty of style, with her hair curled though thinning. But she would be a familiar figure if you met her (as you were likely to meet her) at a meeting of church women or in a relative's home on Sunday afternoon.
Maybe she did have asthma. It was almost always emotional in origin, wasn't it? Maybe she really did have a bad heart, especially if she was a fat old lady who ate too much. (Stan, she knew, resembled his father; his mother had never forgiven him for it.) Doctors were cagy about things like that, especially the lovable old family physician type who hadn't opened a medical journal since 1920. You could have a functional heart disorder, you could have attacks brought on by rage or fear, and they hurt just as much as the real thing. Like arthritis, like allergy, it was a genuine illness.
It was easy to feel that she'd have left the old lady wheezing if she had been in Stan's place, but how did she know? What did she expect him to do, for God's sake, step over the old bitch's prostrate form and walk away? And even if that were the thing to do, what could you expect from a man who had been smothered and squeezed to death by that kind of maternal devotion, among the aspidistras or whatever the hell they were?
She always fetched up against this conclusion, and it always spoiled the fine contempt she'd have liked to feel for Stan. I'm a better man than he is, she reminded herself, looking at him with new curiosity. He wasn't just the friendly colleague or the weak-kneed yearner after women, he was the man who had possessed Betsy. More or less against her will, yes. Clumsily, yes. But he was her rival. She hated him for it.
She could see the whole thing, just as though she had been hiding in the shadowy corner of the living room. The girl pushed back against the scratchy couch, the man half undressed, at once forceful and ridiculous in eagerness. And later, the shame that overcame both of them, and the wordless parting.
No wonder Stan had the flu. No wonder Betsy, bewildered by the way things were developing, decided to leave her job in a year when jobs weren't too plentiful. Neither of them could bear to face the other.
She asked, "How's your flu?"
"Better."
"The corrected pages are on your desk."
He wasn't thinking about the magazine. He said abruptly, "Make that two weeks severance pay, will you? I guess it's my fault she didn't stay and work out her notice. I got a little fresh the other night."
"All right."
Stan's blush deepened to purple. "Tell her she should let me know if she ever needs anything."
The hell I will, Jo thought. If what you're thinking about happens, I’ll take care of it myself. You’ll never know. She looked at him blankly.
She wondered for the hundredth time why normal people were always getting into such sickening messes. They ought to be happy as all get-out, she thought. Everything was on their side, religion and morality and even the advertising industry, a bigger influence than either morality or religion. Yet almost everyone she knew was all miserable and confused, either because of sex or because of its lack. It made her own problem seem clean and honorable, a question to be answered or, if no solution were forthcoming, a sorrow to five with in dignity.
Stan hovered. She knew what he wanted. He wanted to tell the whole story and get rid of it, to lay his guilt in a mother's hands and be forgiven. She had been a mother surrogate about as long as she cared to be. She said sharply, "I better get to work, they're waiting for the okay on the last folio," and turned over a page.
Stan wandered away, looking rebuffed.
She did all the routine things. She made out a check for half a month's pay, improving on Stan's instructions by two days, and another check for the money Betsy had coming as of right then. She put both slips in an envelope and addressed it to Betsy. A wave of faintness swept over her; she sat staring at the envelope, waiting for things to come into focus again. This couldn't be the end.
She held the envelope for a while as though some of her feeling might penetrate and permeate it; then she carried it into the hall and dropped it down the chute, watching it until it disappeared. That's that, she thought. At least the kid won't go hungry for a while.
She had forgotten that she wanted Betsy to be self-reliant.
She corrected pages with great care, frowning over details that she would normally have caught at first glance.
She didn't want to go home. There was plenty to do there, the whole apartment needed to be cleaned, the laundry was overflowing the hamper again, she ought to stop at the supermarket and replenish her dwindling food supply. She didn't feel like doing any of these things. The long sleep of the day and night before had left her heavy-headed and, at the same time, restless. Calling it another wasted day, she was prepared for another un-relaxed night.
She plodded up the stairs to her own apartment, gripping the rail, although usually she ran up briskly. Unlocked the door and went in.
A girl was sitting primly in the overstuffed chair, gloved hands in her lap, handbag on the floor at her feet, wisps of hair escaping under a small brimmed hat. Jo stopped short in the doorway.
Karen.
CHAPTER 17
"How did you get in?"
Karen smiled. "I have a key, remember? Not that I meant to keep it, I was going to mail it back to you, but I keep forgetting. Aren't you even glad to see me?"
"Depends." Jo looked at her. "What do you want?"
"Do I have to want something? Can't I just come calling?"
"Not without an invitation," Jo said. "Most of my guests wait to be let in."
Karen shrugged. She was looking very soft and pretty—new dress, new topper, smart hat, fancy shoes with extremely high heels. On her wrist was a thin watch set about with diamonds. "Anyone would think I'd walked in on something," she said. "Are you expecting guests? Or a guest?"
"It doesn't matter." Jo shut the door behind her and came a little way into the room. "Do you want a drink? I'm sorry all I have is a little bourbon."
"No thanks. I had a couple before I came."
"Coffee?"
"All right. I'll come in the kitchen while you make it." Karen stripped off her gloves and laid them on the desk. "It's been a long time, Jo."
"Almost four months," Jo said flatly. "How's marriage? You look as though it agreed with you."
Karen stood beside the cupboard. "All right, I guess. Dave's nice. We're going to buy a house in Wilmette—his mother's lending us the money for the down payment"
"Sounds like fun."
"Oh sure. I'm going to furnish it all in contemporary. Hand-loomed fabrics and a couple of good original paintings. You know I've always wanted to furnish a home of my own."
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