by Ann Bannon
She found the door promptly, but it was another matter to ring the bell. She felt suddenly faint and hated herself, trying to take up her courage and smooth her dress and compose her face with a multitude of ineffectual fluttering gestures. At last she stopped and stood rigidly still for as long as she could bear it, her eyes tight shut and the sweat loosed uncontrollably all over her. And then she reached for the bell.
Before she could push it the door opened and she gave a small but audible gasp. A short dark man, crew-cut and horn-rimmed, smiled at her.
“Took so long I thought you must have gotten lost,” he grinned. “Mrs. Ayers? Come on in. I’m Jack Mann.”
“Thanks,” she said from a husky throat, and followed him into the living room, grasping the box with the candlesticks in it so closely that the white tissue paper pulled apart under one of her thumbs. She looked about the room with quick scared eyes, her whole being prickling with the possibility of Laura’s presence.
“Sit down,” Jack said. He watched her with a mixture of amusement and curiosity that was friendly enough. Beth obeyed him, lowering herself halfway into her chair and suddenly remembering her gift.
“Oh, here,” she blurted, rising abruptly and thrusting it toward him “I—I brought you a little something. I remember Laura used to like crystal and cut glass, things like that.”
“Thanks,” he said, accepting it “Yes, she still does. Shall I keep it till she gets home? She ought to be the one to open it.”
“Isn’t she here?” Beth stared at him, still half out of her seat.
“If you froze that way,” he said with a grin, “you’d be a pretty unhappy girl.”
And she sat down suddenly, embarrassed.
“Yes, she’s out,” he went on. “I mean, no, she’s not at home.” He put the gift on the table in front of him and sat down opposite her in a leather chair, asking if she’d like a drink, how long she would be in New York, a dozen urbane civilities that they batted back and forth with a show of casualness. And all the while they studied each other surreptitiously, Jack with the bemused air of a man trying to place a face, and Beth with the intense interest of a rival.
“So you and Laura went to school together,” he said.
“Yes. Just for a year.” She thought she liked him, which was something she hadn’t planned on. He was ugly, in the nice sort of way that women like. There was a friendly intelligence in his face. And he was short. Beth guessed that he and Laura might be near the same height. Beth was taller than he, quite a bit taller in her high-heeled shoes. But he was quick and graceful and very much at ease, and it made her easier within herself, for which she was grateful. He went to a small built-in bar in a corner of the living room and fixed her a drink. It gave Beth a chance to look around. It was a spacious room, an unusually roomy apartment for midtown Manhattan.
He must be doing well to keep Laura like this, she thought.
“When do you think she’ll be in?” she asked in a voice loaded with careful disinterest.
“I don’t know. She’s out with a friend. They were going to a concert, so it could be rather late. If you’d told us you were coming…” He smiled and shrugged, handing her the scotch and water.
“Thanks. I guess it was silly not to. I wanted to surprise her.”
“Well, it sure as hell will surprise her if she hasn’t seen you in nine years. If you’d gotten here ten minutes earlier you would have caught her.”
“Probably just as well I didn’t. I might have ruined her evening.” She was thinking of the “friend” Laura went to the concert with, and Jack, though his eyes opened wider at this, pretended not to have heard.
“Where’s your daughter?” Beth asked suddenly. “I thought you had a daughter.”
“Really? What gave you that idea?” he asked with a little frown of curiosity visible between his eyes.
Beth cursed her own clumsiness silently. “I should have told you right away,” she stumbled. “I ran into a friend of Laura’s—oh, just by accident—or I never would have found you. She told me about—Betsy.”
“Oh. That explains it. I was about to ask how you found us.” He said it slowly and she knew he was amused but somehow she didn’t mind. She had the feeling he was being amiable because he liked her, not because it was his obligation to a guest. “Who was the friend?” he asked.
She didn’t want to throw it at him as if she had been down in the Village sleuthing and run into Beebo as a likely well of information—as if she and Beebo were in cahoots. But his smile broadened at her delay and she finally said, with a little sigh that meant she was surrendering all her subterfuges, “Beebo. Beebo Brinker. You know her pretty well, I guess.”
“Pretty well,” he said with the emphasis of understatement, and laughed outright. “Good old Beebo. How the hell did you find her? Well, I guess it’s not so hard at that,” he answered himself. “Anywhere south of Fourteenth Street you can’t miss her. Was she wearing her boots?”
“Her boots?”
“Yes. She wears them when she’s mad at the world. Makes her feel manly.” He said it without ill-will but full of old familiar affection.
“No boots,” Beth smiled. “But lots of advice. Lots of stories.”
“She must have been bowled over when she found out you knew Laura,” Jack said. “She’s still in love with her.”
A queer little flash of disappointment, almost alarm, went through Beth. “She recognized me,” she said. “I guess Laura told her quite a bit about me. Showed her some old snapshots, or something.”
“Then you must be Beth,” he said. “I thought so but I didn’t want to embarrass you…. Beth the Incorruptible.”
“What?” she exclaimed.
“That’s what I used to call you,” he said. “In the days when I couldn’t stand you. Purely sarcastic, you can be sure. But that was before I met you. Laura used to make you seem that way when she talked about you.”
Beth began to grin. Suddenly, strangely, she felt at ease. “You know, it’s the damnedest thing,” she told him. “I met her father in Chicago a couple of weeks ago, and he knew me right away. I met Beebo in a bar last night and she said, ‘My God, you’re Beth!’ And now you’ve got it figured out too. I feel like a celebrity.”
“Around here you were a celebrity, for quite a while,” he said. “We all had to learn to live with you—all of us who lived with Laura. Papa Landon got you thrown in his face one night at the McAlton Hotel—all about that year you and Laura roomed together. After Laura told him she cracked him over the head with a glass ashtray and beat it. Gave him a concussion, but he recovered. They’ve never seen each other since.”
“My God!” Beth breathed softly. “He spoke of her so lovingly. As if it had all been forgiven, if not forgotten.”
“I suppose it has,” Jack said. “I suppose he’d like to find her again and patch things up.” His eyes were bright on her. “But it wouldn’t be a very good idea.”
“No? Why not?” Her mind flashed to the note she had mailed that very afternoon with Laura’s address and married name in it.
Jack shrugged. “Well, Laura’s happy now. We’re happy, I should say. And Landon never did anything but upset her. At least when they were together.”
“It’s been a long time. Maybe he deserves another chance,” Beth suggested.
“I think that’s up to Laura, don’t you?”
“Why not to him?”
“He wasn’t the aggrieved party,” Jack said. “Whatever was unhappy between them was his doing. It’s up to Laura to forgive, not Landon.”
“Oh.” She lowered her head, a small alarm inside herself. But Merrill Landon had given Beth his promise not to visit Laura, not to interfere with her life. He said it was because he had no right to bother her. All he wanted was a link, an address, a reassurance. And remembering him with confidence, even a sort of affection, her trust returned and she calmed herself.
Before she could ask Jack more a little girl about six years old burst out
of a door behind him and said, “Daddy, will you fix the TV? The picture’s all crooked.”
“Sure. Come here, honey, we have company,” he said. “This is Mrs. Ayers.”
“Hello, Mrs. Ayers,” she murmured and came forward shyly, her hair long and blonde and floating like Laura’s, her features dainty and her face fair, though she wore glasses like her father. She was shy and unspeakably sweet and small, and Beth thought of Polly, her Polly…and of Laura and all Laura’s reflected beauty and reticence. And she held out her arms to Betsy with a full heart and full eyes and clasped the astonished child to her.
“Oh, you’re lovely!” she exclaimed. “You look just like your mommy.”
The little girl backed away, frightened at her strange behavior, but Beth caught her hands and said, “Don’t be afraid. You know, I have a little girl—” She stopped, suddenly wary. She meant to keep that part of her life separate and apart from this. “I was a good friend of your mommy’s years ago,” she said, brushing impatiently at a tear. “We went to school together. And I’m so happy to see she has a beautiful little daughter that looks so much like her.”
Betsy smiled. “You’re beautiful, too.”
Beth had to resist the impulse to hug her and probably scare her again. Jack had adjusted the television for Betsy in the meantime and he came to take her by the hand. “You go in and watch,” he said. “You can have another half hour,” he told her. “Then bedtime. School tomorrow.”
Beth watched her retreat across the living room and turn in her bedroom door to say again, with the same little dip of her head that Laura gave before people she didn’t know and was a bit shy with, “Good night, Mrs. Ayers.”
“Good night, Betsy,” Beth said solemnly.
Jack gave her a kiss and closed the door behind her. He looked up to see the tears in Beth’s eyes and, surprised, he said, “She’s just a kid like any other. Except to Laura and me. We’ve got her pegged for President of the United States, naturally.”
“I didn’t mean to be silly about it,” Beth said. “She—looks so much like Laura.”
“That’s nothing to cry about,” he smiled. “That’s something to be grateful for. Before she was born I had nightmares that she’d look just like me.”
“It wouldn’t have been that bad,” she said, forced to return his smile.
“Not for a boy, maybe,” he said. “A man can be ugly and nobody cares. But a woman can’t. Her whole life is twisted up if she is.”
Beth gazed at him with a new respect. His words recalled Vega’s shocking hidden ugliness to her and for a minute she was nearly overcome with the thought of her former lover. She concentrated on Jack for the sake of composure. He was a father, he had proved himself a man. He had a lovely child and a lovely home. He had Laura.
All Beth’s stereotyped ideas about homosexual men were getting a bad jumbling. He seemed as normal, as comfortable to be with as any man she knew. Only, he wasn’t normal, and it gave her an odd feeling inside. She asked herself how much he knew of her, and what he supposed she was doing there, trailing Laura after all these years.
They talked and the time passed quickly. He told her how he and Laura had met and how their love had grown and Beth thought, watching him, that Laura must love him very much to have let him marry her, to have taken his name and shared his home and borne his child. It amazed Beth that Laura could have done that, gone that far. Laura was not a selfish girl. She wouldn’t have objected to children on that ground. It was the mechanics of it, the necessary intimacy between a man and a woman that preceded children that Beth could hardly picture Laura accepting. But she had and with this man, Jack, who faced Beth now over a friendly nightcap and described his life with Laura.
“The one thing I never thought she could do,” she confessed to him, “was marry anybody.”
“I didn’t think she could, either,” he said. “Gave me some bad nights till she said yes.”
“I remember when we were in college together, how she used to talk about—about men.”
“She didn’t think much of us as a group,” he said and his eyes twinkled. “Chalk that up to Papa Landon. He set a sterling example as a slob. I had quite a prejudice to overcome before I could talk her into tying the knot.”
“You don’t mean you had to talk her out of women?” Beth exclaimed.
“Hell, no,” he said and laughed. Now that it was out in the open they both felt better. “Nobody could do that. I’d have been nuts to try. She can’t be talked out of women and I can’t be talked out of men—emotionally, that is. It would take more words than there are. But that doesn’t matter to our marriage. Nothing goes on in this house that might hurt our life together. We keep the other stuff apart; it always comes second.”
“Does Betsy know?”
“No,” he said simply. “It’s not that we hide things, it’s just that she’s too young to understand, even if we made a point of it to her. She knows we have our own friends, she knows we go out occasionally. Like Laura tonight. Now and then she meets some of our friends. That’s all. She’s a happy kid, thank God. And we’re happy.”
“I’m glad,” Beth said, and she truly was. “I’ve been expecting to hate you ever since I knew you existed. But I don’t. I don’t even want to anymore. I’m glad things have worked out for you. Only…”
“Only, you’d like to see Laura again. See if she’s changed and all that?”
“Something like that.” She looked away from him timidly. “Why did you come to New York, Beth?” he said quietly. “It wasn’t just to find Laura, was it?”
“Oh, it was a lot of things,” she said.
“Laura said you were married. Or nearly married when she last saw you. You said your name was Mrs. Ayers. Is Mr. Ayers here with you?”
“No, he’s in California,” she said. “As a matter of fact, we’re divorced. I haven’t seen him for quite some time.”
“Too bad,” he said, but he said it too quickly, too lightly, without comment, and she sensed his doubt, sensed that he only accepted her statement to put her at ease, not because he believed it. She had no idea why she felt compelled to lie about her marriage. Maybe because she thought Jack would not let her get close to Laura if he knew. Maybe because she was at heart so desperately ashamed of the mess she had left in California. At any rate the lie was spoken and she had to stick by it now.
“Any kids?” he said and she shook her head, unable to speak the monstrous fib aloud. How could Laura take her back, how could she learn to love Beth again, hold her and come close to her, if she knew what Beth had done to her own children? She must never know and Beth realized suddenly that she had to keep the whole past in the shadows, to pretend it was no more real than she said it was. Or it would poison the happiness she felt so near.
“You must be a little older than Laura,” she said brightly to Jack, switching the subject abruptly and making him blink at her.
“A little,” he conceded. “Twenty-two years.”
“My God!” she cried. “That much? I don’t believe you.”
He shrugged and smiled. “You don’t have to,” he said.
“But that makes you damn near fifty years old,” she said, incredulous.
“Damn near. Forty-seven.”
“But you look as if you were in your thirties.”
“Thanks,” he said with a grin. “You make me feel extremely generous. Have another drink.”
She handed him her glass. “You look so—Joe College,” she said and he gave a laugh that was more of a snort of self-mockery and said, “That’s going too far.” But he did look remarkably young and moved his spare body with a suppleness that belied his age.
She took her glass back filled and looked at it intently, as though in search of poise. “Is—is Laura in love with anybody, Jack?” she asked.
“Not seriously,” he said, studying her, wondering just how much she wanted from his wife.
“Either she is or she isn’t,” she said.
“Well, o
n that basis,” he said, “I’d have to say she is. But remember you forced me into it.”
“Then it is serious.” Her face was very pale and her eyes were on him now.
“Hell, she’s not going to marry the girl.”
“Has she known her a long time? Does she dream about her all the time?” The questions tumbled out of Beth and she was suddenly humiliated by her eagerness, her concern, and her gaze dropped from his again.
“She’s known her for a while now,” he said. “I think it’s beginning to fade. But they still see each other just about every day. They’re pretty compatible.”
“Who is the girl?”
He chuckled a little. “Betsy’s piano teacher,” he said. “Betsy’s getting free lessons all over the place. Very economical.”
After a long pause Beth said, “Are you in love with anybody?”
“You have designs on me, too?” he grinned and she blushed a quick red. “I’m always in love with somebody. How about you?”
She had left herself wide open for that and she knew he wanted to know why she was there and what she was seeking from Laura.
“I’m never in love with the right person,” she said softly.
“I’ll bet,” he said, but though he teased her it was not malicious. “You must have been once,” and when she glanced up at him, he added, “to hear Laura tell it.”
“You mean—my husband?” she faltered.
“I mean Laura,” he said bluntly. “She was terribly in love with you, for a very long time, Beth. Long after she left you.”
“Is she still?” she asked. She had to say it; her heart and tongue would not be still even though the asking of it shamed her.
He looked at her a moment and then he shook his head. “Her life has changed,” he explained. “There are other things, now. I don’t know exactly how she feels about you anymore, Beth. I can only say she’s safely out of love with you and has been for a long time. We don’t talk about it much. On the other hand, I think she’ll always feel a special tenderness for you. It’s just that you don’t seem very real to her anymore. You’re more like a beautiful dream that’s over and done with. Something to remember with gratitude and affection, but something more like a mirage than a fact.”
