by Ann Bannon
Beth looked away and said in a low voice, “Do you want a yokel like me to make love to you? I don’t know what I’m doing, Nina. I’ll disappoint you.”
“You couldn’t, honey. Try it.”
“You mean, in the mood you’re in, nobody could disappoint you.” Beth gave a sad little laugh. “It just happens I’m the one who’s with you.”
“In the mood I’m in, nobody could touch me but you.” Beth felt the smooth tingling drift of a hand over her back underneath the loosened pajamas. She bore it for a moment in silence and then, with a little groan, she struggled out of the tops, nearly tearing them in her hurry. She turned on Nina, leaning over her and bending nearer until her weight rested partly on her, and then she kissed her and a flash of pleasure, as sharp and dreadful as a sword, impaled her. She had wanted to tell Nina, “Don’t laugh at me. Don’t make me feel clumsier than I am. I think I could kill you for that.” But there had been no time and now there was no need.
Nina, for once, was not laughing. She was spread beneath Beth like a carpet of warm silk. She moved with her, she murmured to her, she was as absorbed as Beth was in the fantastic luxury of sexual pleasure. When she tried to pull away a little Beth caught her from behind and kissed her bare neck and shoulders, her fingers pressed around Nina’s lovely breasts and their legs entangled. Nina was surprised at the strength she felt in Beth’s arms, and let herself be pushed back down on the bed with a sigh of ecstasy.
Nina showed Beth things that night that Beth never dreamed existed. “I’m going to do things to you you never even heard of,” she whispered, and she did. With her mouth, her fingers, the warm tickle of her breath, she called up feelings in Beth that had never been there before. She made Beth aware of parts of her body, her own familiar comfortable body that she thought she knew so well, that Beth had never discovered for herself. A thousand sensual subtleties were revealed to Beth in Nina’s arms: all the tricks and caprices of a lovely body, all the scented shapes, the astonishing joy of uncontrollable physical reactions, the enormous force of a woman’s ecstasy flowing unfocused through her whole body, claiming her absolutely and reverberating in her for hours after the act of love.
Beth kissed Nina with a hungry mouth, amazed at her own appetite, at how much it took to satisfy her. She would settle against Nina, holding her in her arms and thinking now sleep would come. And she would half doze off for a while and then shift her weight a little and the mere feel of Nina’s hair brushing her face, or a length of perfumed leg, would jolt her desire to the surface.
“Nina,” she murmured wildly once in the night, “am I exhausting you?”
“No,” Nina whispered. “You surprise me but you don’t exhaust me.”
And once Beth tried to recall if it had been this way with Laura, if it had been this good, or if it could be. There wasn’t any reason for anything to be so beautiful. After what she had done, after what she had been through, Beth could hardly believe this was happening to her at all. It seemed as if all her days were fated to be gray and worried, all her nights empty and tragic. And now suddenly she was incredibly happy. There was no time to wonder whether the happiness was purely physical. She didn’t stop to think about her ambivalent feelings for Nina, about how Nina might look in the daylight, with irony in her air again and sarcasm on her lips. There was no daylight, no night, no time, nothing but that moment on the bed with Nina in her arms. Beth was unable to think ahead or to care what happened.
Nina’s voice came softly out of the dawn to her. “You’re gay, Beth,” she said positively.
“I know.” It came as a wild wonderful relief, just to know for sure after years of tormented wondering.
Nina stroked her cheek with one finger. “What was her name?” she asked.
After a long pause Beth answered her. “Laura.”
Nina smiled. “Good,” she said. “I don’t know any Lauras.”
Beth felt a small stab of dismay. And then she wondered if Nina could conceivably be jealous now, unwilling to share Beth, unwilling to reveal anything she might happen to know. Beth considered Nina’s curious incapacity for friendship. Nina might be able to come close to her as a lover but never as a friend. She might even learn to love Beth for a little while, but she could never like her and it would never last.
“You know what you’d be if you let yourself go?” Nina said playfully into her ear. “You’d be a butch. You’d cut your hair off real short and live in the Village. Oh, yes, you would. Don’t smile. And I’ll bet that’s exactly what you will do, too. You won’t be interested in me very long. Not after you find out how many beautiful women will be interested in you.”
Beth squirmed uncomfortably at the idea. “I don’t want a lot of beautiful women, Nina,” she mumbled.
“What do you want?” Nina asked, and when Beth hesitated, silent for over a minute, she teased, “Me?” And then, with spite in her voice, “No. Laura. Laura she wants, after all I did for her last night.”
“I don’t know,” Beth said. “I really don’t know…now.”
“Now? You mean now that I’ve corrupted you?” Nina laughed quietly. “I’m glad I mixed you up a little. I hope you don’t find your Laura. Not for a while anyway.”
Chapter Thirteen
WHEN BETH LEFT NINA’S APARTMENT TWO DAYS LATER, SHE found a letter waiting for her in the post office box she had rented. She half expected Nina to ask her to move in before she left. But it would have inconvenienced Nina too much, with the lack of space and the long hours she had to spend at her typewriter. She didn’t want to be bothered and Beth understood, even though she was sorry not to have been asked. Nina should have known Beth would refuse, out of consideration for her. But Beth never got the chance.
The letter was from Cleve, and Beth tore it open in the elevator on the way up to her room at the Beaton. She got as far as, “Dear Beth, How do you like New York? Charlie and the kids are as ever. Not very happy but getting along. The kids like Mrs. Donahue pretty well now that they’re used to her. Charlie works like a dog—too damn hard if you ask me. Puts all of us to shame and gives me a guilt complex.”
Beth asked herself if he might not be drinking still more and neglecting his job down at the office. Of course, he was still half boss; Charlie was the other half. But she knew Charlie would be hard on him if the alcohol became more important than Ayers-Purvis Toys.
She stepped out of the elevator and went to her room, fumbling with the key in her purse and pushing the door open with her shoulder. The morning sun was coming in her windows and she sat down on the bed to finish reading the letter.
“Charlie has some big idea for a new toy,” Cleve went on. “He wants to call it ‘The Scootch.’ It’s a sort of spring, a great big thing you can crawl inside or sit on top of and bounce. It travels when you bounce on it, or you can roll down hills in it. Sounds kind of goofy probably, but the neighborhood kids go for it in a big way. So do your kids. Skipper says it’s better than a kite any day. Charlie is hoping it’ll take up where the Hula Hoop left off. If it does we’d make a fortune. He’s been working on it night and day, try to get the right materials and colors, and working up a marketing scheme for it. I haven’t seen all the plans yet. Jean and I have been away on a vacation, and I haven’t been feeling so red hot lately. But don’t worry about me. You have enough on your mind.”
It was kind and restrained, with hardly a trace of reproach. Beth lowered the letter to her lap for a minute, not quite finished with it, and stared out the window at the shaded side of the building across the street. “Not feeling so red hot.” Drunk, maybe? She hoped not. She liked Cleve too well, she owed him too much, to wish him any ill. But the thought of his mother, ravaged by liquor, and his sister, who devoted her life to it, frightened her.
“You ask about my family,” he went on in reference to one of her notes. “Mother is about as ever. Gramp still feeds his cats and vents his temper on the delivery boys or the plumber or whoever gets in the way. Vega is at Camarillo. We all thou
ght it would be for the best—”
Camarillo! Camarillo! All the sense was suddenly shocked out of Beth. Camarillo—the state mental institution. “Oh, God!” she cried aloud, too stunned to read any further for a minute, unaware that she spoke aloud. “Oh, good God! Vega!”
“We all thought it would be for the best since the studio folded two weeks after you left. Do you remember P.K.? The girl she said she hated so much? Well, P. K. managed to spread some pretty ugly rumors about her, and that, on top of the shaky state of her finances, did the trick. The students she had left, and there was really a surprising number—they all liked her a lot—had to leave. Their parents heard about it and disapproved, and that was it.
“The doctors say she has an excellent mind and she is very reasonable most of the time, and they hope she can come home in another few months. The oddest part of it is, she copies Mother all the time. I mean, all Mother’s sicknesses. She acts as if she’s crippled, has to run to the bathroom every five minutes, even says she’s blind and can’t see a thing. The doctor says it’s almost as if she wanted old age to catch up with her and incapacitate her to punish herself for her feelings. Or maybe to stop her from having any feelings. Another angle occurred to me. If she is Mother, how can she be anything Mother disapproves of? Like gay? I don’t know—make any sense?
“Don’t worry too much about this, Beth. It’s been in the wind for many years now. I’m surprised myself it didn’t come sooner. She’ll be okay. The important thing for you is to get yourself straightened out and come home. Charlie needs you. He used to be a nice guy but now there’s no living with him.
“Best to you, Cleve.”
Vega at Camarillo! Of all the things in the letter none affected her any more than that. Vega had had to bear the loss of her lover and the loss of the girls she adored and her business, her only means of support, within two weeks of each other. Beth bowed her head and cried, without bothering to cover her face or wipe away the tears. Vega had had to face the scorn of a teenage torturer in the person of P.K. all alone. It must have been godawful, terrible even for Cleve, who had to hear it all from her hysterical lips, who had to try to comfort her and care for her.
P.K.…
“Oh, Vega,” Beth said. “Vega, I’m so sorry. Forgive me. I wish you could hear me, I wish I could undo what I did to you. Please Vega, get well.”
Just telling it to the walls was better than keeping it all inside and getting sick on it. Even at that there was a sick feeling in her stomach and it didn’t go away for a long while.
For three days she stayed in her hotel room. Not the lure of seeing Nina or even the search for Laura Landon that had propelled her this far could stir her. She simply lay on her bed and tried to disentangle her thoughts. Now and then she had some food sent up.
She told herself that nothing that had happened was her fault, exactly. It was fate, it was an accident, it was foul luck. But one single person couldn’t have caused it all. The Purvises were wrong to drink so much, Charlie was wrong to be so bad-tempered, Uncle John was wrong to be so inquisitive. Laura was wrong to have walked out of her life nine years ago. Everybody was wrong but Beth, who was only an innocent girl trying to find herself. She had to see it that way or get sick on herself.
She had been in New York for over a week but she hadn’t found Laura. There was Nina—an unexpected discovery—but Nina wasn’t what she came for. It was time, and overtime, to find Laura.
Beth thought about these things as she rode up Fifth Avenue in a bus. She was on her way to Nina’s apartment, just off Fifth, near the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sitting wedged between two ample women with their arms full of bundles, and silently cursing the humid warmth of the late July day.
It was early afternoon. Nina would still be sleeping but Beth wouldn’t disturb her. Being away from her for several days had generated a number of feelings in Beth, all of them at odds. She had to get back and try herself against Nina again. She had to know for sure what she already suspected: that her desire for Nina was mostly a desire for physical love, a desire that required only a pretty body and a certain skill in using it.
Still, and most important, she wanted to find Laura. She had only been down to the Village once, but she would make Nina take her again. Tonight. If Nina didn’t know any Lauras there must be plenty of people down there who did. It was a Saturday night this time and things would surely be busy. Maybe Laura herself… But it both frightened and excited her too much to think about it, to visualize that actual meeting that would come, had to come, some day, when she and Laura would be face to face again, when they would search for the right words, the right gestures, to show their love. It would all be so clumsy at first and then so beautiful, and Beth ached to have it happen. Soon.
Across from her on the bus sat a small heavy man suffering so visibly from the heat that Beth almost smiled to herself. He looked enough worse than the rest to make Beth almost feel cooler. He was balding, with shadows of weariness under his eyes and a hopelessly rumpled seersucker suit, and he reminded her sharply of one of the “Johns” she had seen with Nina the night they had met and gone bar hopping in the Village.
Forlorn and hot and friendless, she thought. He’s probably on his way home to a wife he can’t stand. He’s probably mired in a life that bores the hell out of him. But he hasn’t the guts to get out of it.
She pitied him, for it seemed to her then that escaping from a life you didn’t like was a matter of courage. She had that courage and she was trying to be proud of it. She didn’t dare to wonder if she had the right to leave her life and everyone in it or if the dumpy little man across the aisle had that right. She only saw his dissatisfaction and she scorned him for enduring it. Everything that touched her now she saw in terms of her own problem.
The rest of her thoughts were of Nina as she approached her apartment. They had had three days together, three strange long days and nights when Nina didn’t write anything on her new book or call anyone or even go anywhere. They had simply lain around, not bothering to make up the beds or dress themselves. They had made love and talked and when they got hungry Nina ordered sandwiches from a nearby delicatessen and that was what they lived on.
Nina had made her keep her voice down for fear her neighbors would hear them. “I don’t know what they’d think,” she said. “I can’t afford to have them thinking anything. I had enough trouble finding this apartment and I don’t want any nosey cops coming around answering complaints. It’s not the same as the Village. You can do things there you wouldn’t try uptown.”
Beth had stared at her. “I’m not making any noise,” she said.
“Well, don’t.”
Beth thought back on this, bemused. Nina had dodged any commitments to her. She was lavish with compliments, telling Beth how pretty she was, how delectable her body was, how Charlie probably didn’t appreciate her. But she never had a word to say about how much she really liked Beth, how often she wanted to see her, what her presence meant to her. Beth was in the dark. All she knew was that Nina thought she was pretty and had handled her life like a fool.
Beth wasn’t prepared for what she found when she walked into Nina’s apartment ten minutes after her bus ride and found Nina in bed with a girl of eighteen. The girl was still asleep but she woke up hard when Nina sat up in bed and said, “Who the hell told you to come over? At this hour?” Her eyes were narrow with anger and Beth recoiled, shocked.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll leave.”
But before she could turn around and get the door closed behind her Nina said, “No. You’re here now. So stay.”
Beth looked at her doubtfully and at the sleepy-eyed and rather scared girl beside her. “I don’t think that’s the best idea,” she said, but Nina’s anger had passed as quickly as it had come. Suddenly she saw the possibilities of the situation: Beth’s embarrassment, the charming consternation of Franny, the girl in bed with her, and herself, Nina, mistress of their feelings. What a scene! It was worth pla
ying out.
“Make yourself some coffee,” she told Beth. “We were just getting up.”
And Beth could tell by the sudden change in Nina’s voice, by the look on her face, that she was playing with her two guests.
“I didn’t expect this, Nina,” she said frostily. “I have no claim on you, I realize, but I didn’t expect this.”
“Oh, come off it, Madame Queen. What did you expect?” Nina asked, smiling at Beth’s white-faced annoyance. “I don’t wear a chastity belt, you know.”
Franny, the teenager, got up abruptly, sitting down again in humiliation as she remembered her nakedness, and then covering herself with a blanket and going into the bathroom. Beth collapsed in an armchair and preserved a chilly silence while Nina dressed herself, smiling all the while, wondering whose temper would blow first.
Franny came out of the bathroom a few minutes later with her clothes on. She walked over to Beth and spoke, facing her. “I didn’t know I was muscling in on anything,” she said. “This just happened, almost by accident. We weren’t even going to sleep together. I feel as bad about it as you do, believe me. And she gave Nina a dirty glance but it only made Nina laugh.
“Thanks,” Beth told her softly, surprised at the dignity the girl had mustered. “But never mind. I didn’t come for that anyway.”
“For what, then?” Nina said cheerfully, going into the kitchen.
“I want to go back to the Village tonight, Nina. I want to see the places we missed last time.”
“There are quite a few,” Nina said ironically. “Couple of dozen, at least.”
“That doesn’t matter. I want to see them all.”
“Laura, hm? Got Laura on the brain,” Nina said. She was fixing some frozen orange juice.
“Yes,” Beth said simply.
