Beebo Brinker Chronicles 4 - Journey To A Woman Page 20

  "How do you know you're right about me? What makes you so sure?” Beth said brokenly.

  "I don't know for sure. You brought me your troubles and said, ‘Here, help me. Straighten me out.’ Well, I'm trying.” There was impatience in her voice, but also sincerity.

  "Laura, darling Laura, don't you love me any more? Did you ever really love me?"

  "You know better than to ask. All the years that you and Charlie were getting along and still happy, I was dreaming of you. It's just that—” She glanced down at the tortoise shell comb in her hand.

  "Just that what?” Beth demanded.

  "Just that my love for you is different now."

  Beth stood up, anger and triumph all over her face. “Then why did you make love to me the way you did? An hour ago we were making love, Laura! Or have you forgotten? Why?"

  Laura gazed at her again, matching her own composure against Beth's hot, breathless emotion.

  "I had no warning—” she began.

  "Exactly! So you reacted naturally!” Beth exclaimed, her face flushed and excited. ‘That's what I wanted, that's exactly what I wanted!” She walked toward Laura, talking and gesticulating. “If you had known I was there you would have put me off, you would have behaved like a friend, nothing more. But you didn't know. It all took you by surprise and you gave yourself to me without a fight, without resisting me at all. The most natural thing in the world."

  Laura looked into her feverish face, standing her ground royally as Beth approached. “Beth, if you're going to think of it that way, I can't do a damn thing to help you. You love your own delusions too much."

  "Well, how in hell am I supposed to think of it?” Beth flashed. And in a sudden hopeless surrender to her misery, in the need to be right with Laura just once, Beth threw herself on Laura like a cat gone mad. She snapped the straps of Laura's slip with one hard desperate pull and caught the tender breasts beneath with angry rough hands. With a small startled scream, Laura lost her self-control. She struggled wildly against Beth but Beth had worked up a reserve of hysterical strength and tore the slip from her.

  "Let me look at you!” Beth cried, throwing Laura to the floor and falling on her. Laura tried to scream again but Beth kissed her savagely and bit her neck and shook her shoulders till her head hit the floor painfully.

  "Stop! God!” Laura moaned. “Beth, stop!"

  "An hour ago you weren't too good for me,” Beth sobbed. “Now all of a sudden you don't want to be touched."

  "I don't want to be hurt. I can't stand to be hurt,” Laura said, tears on her face.

  "I'm not welcome, I'm not loved, I'm not understood,” Beth went on in a strangling voice. “And you—you don't give a damn, do you? You stand there and comb your hair and turn your back on me and throw cold water in my face and tell me to go to hell—” Her face was scarlet and Laura, terrified, threw her hands up to protect herself.

  But Beth didn't know how to hurt her. She was lost. All she had was her thoughtless fury, her shapeless unhappiness. It all came together inside her and exploded in bitter kisses, sharp bites, and sudden agonized passion. She vented it all on Laura and it gave her only a sour sort of satisfaction to know that Laura couldn't resist it, that Laura had succumbed to the animal fury of it and let herself go.

  Beth lay beside her on the scratchy wool rug and sobbed when it was over. And then, slowly, she was overcome with a deep lassitude, a suspension of mind and emotions that would finally let her come back to normal.

  Laura sat up beside her and stroked her back and after a while she said in a low voice, a voice that let Beth know she was forgiven, “Have you any idea what a shock it was? Do you suppose I didn't dream of making love to you every day and every night for over a year after I left you? Do you think I hadn't imagined every detail of it? I'd have given my soul for that experience once. Only, Beth, it came too late. It was beautiful, it was so beautiful this morning. I can't pretend I'm sorry, I can't pretend I would have done it a different way. But that's just it, you see. It's as if my reaction were planned years ago. As if the whole thing went according to plan in spite of me. I saw you, suddenly, with no warning, the way I always dreamed I'd see you. And we were alone, the way I always dreamed we'd be. And we made love."

  Beth rolled over to look at her; at her lovely body with the fresh marks of teeth and nails in vulnerable spots. Beth touched the bruises and wept. “I'm sorry. I had to—"

  "I know, I know. Just like I had to be nasty. It's over now. We can be friends now. Can you understand that, Beth?"

  Beth heard, clear and genuine, the pity in her voice and she said, “I understand that you made love to me, that you wanted me, that it wasn't any different than it ever was, this morning.” Then she paused, hovering between defiance and adoration. “That's all I understand."

  "That's not enough,” Laura said gently. “Grow up, Beth. Your problems aren't hopeless, you can solve them. You don't need me, you need yourself."

  "If I hadn't started talking, if I'd just kept my damned mouth shut and stayed in bed with you, it would have been all right."

  "Do you know how many times you've said ‘if this morning?” Laura said. “If only this, if only that—everything would have been all right. That's a child talking."

  They remained a moment in silence and then, as if with one accord, got painfully to their feet. Beth couldn't look Laura in the face.

  "I hope I didn't hurt you!” she said. “I'd rather die than hurt you."

  "No. I'm all right."

  "Do you want me, to leave?"

  "No, of course not,” Laura said. Beth's eyes climbed only as high as Laura's breasts, faltered, and fell again.

  "Are you in love with that girl? Betsy's piano teacher?” she said.

  "I was."

  "No more?"

  "Not so much. But I wouldn't do anything to hurt her."

  "Not till Betsy can play the ‘Minute Waltz,’ at least."

  "You didn't hurt me till you learned how to play at love from me,” Laura reminded her. “You were no fool. You didn't get rid of me till you were sure you didn't need me any more."

  Beth deserved the dig. She finished dressing silently, with ferocious concentration, still ashamed of the hungry love and revenge she'd forced on Laura.

  Laura slipped a negligee over her torn slip and watched Beth without speaking.

  "Stay and have lunch with me,” she said when Beth had finished, but Beth wanted to get away from her.

  "I thought once I'd found you I'd hang on for dear life,” Beth said. “But I'm so full of feeling, so damned mixed up, I don't think I could bear to sit here and let you watch me puzzle it out. I just want to be alone."

  "Whatever you say,” Laura said, “How about dinner?"

  "I don't know.” Beth looked at her and the corners of her mouth trembled. “You never find what you set out looking for, do you?” she whispered. “Damn. It's queer. Life is so queer."

  Laura could see the bitter disappointment on her face and she put her hands tentatively on Beth's waist.

  "I want you to come back, Beth,” she said softly. “I've been hard on you, but I had a right to be. You got even. So we're square."

  Beth still couldn't face her. “Do you love me still?” she asked again. “I've already said it."

  "Say it just once more. I'll think of it before I think of the other things. The things that hurt.” “I love you,” Laura told her simply. And Beth turned around and walked out of her bedroom and across the living room. She stopped a moment, remembering Jack's messages. “Call McCracken and cancel the order,” she called back to Laura in an unsteady voice. “And send a check to Dr. Byrd.” Then she went out the front door.

  Chapter Eighteen

  SHE WALKED. She spent most of the day walking, and when she got tired she went to the library and sat at a table in a corner of the Social Sciences room and stared ahead of her. She didn't consciously try to understand everything. She just let her mind wander from one peak of recollection to another, t
oo worn out to steer her thoughts or make sense of them.

  When it began to darken outside she got up and left, stopping by the post office on her way back to the Beaton Hotel. There was nothing for her, nor did anything come for the next several days. She didn't know what to do with herself. She felt desperately scared most of the time, lost between those two worlds, one renounced, the other closed to her. One was normal, ordinary, reassuring, with a home and a husband and children. And it had failed her. The other was gay and strange, exotic and dangerous, painful and, possibly, wonderful. But it was still untried, inaccessible somehow. And Beth, caught dead center between the two, was afraid she had lost both forever and would wander in limbo the rest of her life.

  She couldn't go back to Charlie, even if he would have her. Her pride, her shame, her very nature, forbade that. And, having taken Laura's words as a rebuff, she felt almost as unwelcome in the gay world as the straight.

  So she spent nearly a week in a fog of confusion and fear. She refused to take any phone calls, though there were several. All from Laura, she thought, and it gave her a bitter satisfaction not to answer, to keep Laura worrying and anxious.

  Whenever she thought of her children her heart contracted. Something in her character prevented her from loving them openly, easily, naturally, like other women. Did a woman like her have a right to any children? She could hardly bear to think of it At the worst moments she tried instead to think of what it would be like living with a desirable woman, with someone affectionate and understanding, someone who was all she had hoped to rediscover in Laura. Then it seemed like the only life for her. She was sure she wanted it, whatever it cost in pain and regret.

  She remained shut up in a cocoon of private suffering and wondering for nearly seven days, meandering around New York in the afternoons and lying on her bed at night, sleepless. She drank quite a bit of whiskey. It seemed to ease her.

  Every day she stopped at the post office, until at last there was a letter waiting. It was from Cleve, but she hadn't the heart or the interest to open it right away. She was curiously without feeling, as if she had lost her capacity to care.

  Her feet were stiff and aching in then: heeled shoes when she finally reached the hotel. She started to walk past the desk but the clerk called to her and held up a letter to-catch her eye. For some reason it alarmed her and brought her back to life. A letter from Cleve was all right, but not two.

  It was from Merrill Landon, of course. He had her hotel address; there had seemed no reason to hide it from him. The odd feeling of foreboding, of distress at the sight of the letters, stayed with her and settled in her stomach. She threw them on the dresser in her small stuffy room, placed a newly purchased bottle of whiskey beside them, threw off her clothes and showered, before she tried to read.

  She opened the letter from Landon first. He was a reserved man, a cautious man, and he expressed himself carefully, but his pleasure was evident even in the controlled phrases that thanked her for having found his daughter.

  "I owe you any joy there may be left in my life,” he said, and the admission touched her. His note was brief. But at the end he added a shocker, in his terse sensible prose. “By the way, your husband is in Chicago. I found out through my ‘spies’ on the paper. Sorry I can't tell you more."

  Beth sat on the bed with a stiff drink in one hand and the note in the other. Charlie in Chicago! Why? What in God's name for? He knew then, from her aunt and uncle, that she had run away. What else did he know?

  She jumped up and grabbed Cleve's letter with quivering hands. Maybe it would explain, maybe it was a letter of warning about Charlie.

  It was.

  "Dear Beth,” he wrote. “I just found out about this—hope it's not too late to tell you. There's been a detective following you ever since you left Chicago. Your uncle John and Charlie have gotten together. John told Charlie everything he got from the detective so all our little precautions have been for nothing. Charlie has known all along where you are and what you are doing—more than I know by a long shot. He left yesterday for Chicago. I don't know what will happen now. He has the kids with him—they're both fine."

  The little domestic interjection almost threw her for some reason she couldn't fathom and she had to stop reading to clear her mind of guilty thoughts of her children.

  "One last thing,” Cleve wrote. “Just to make everything perfect. Vega has disappeared. She had been spending the weekends with us and seemed so much better. Sunday night I was going to drive her back to the hospital, but Mother called in a panic and said she was gone. Went out in back to help Gramp feed the cats and when his back was turned she got out somehow. Strangely enough, P.K.—that lessie Vega was always hollering about—has disappeared too. Romance? God, I hope not. Anyway, don't worry. I'm sure well find her. Will keep you posted. Cleve."

  But he had only told her to make her worry, she knew that. She knew it was the one small revenge he had for the sick sister Beth had foisted on him, and she didn't blame him. She looked at the letter, with the written lines uneven and shaky, and she wondered if he had written it with a glass of booze in one hand, which was just the way she had read it.

  God, we're all so weak, she thought dismally. I'm no better than the Purvises. We can't even face the crises in our lives without this. She made a face at the drink, and then she shut her eyes and finished it.

  And suddenly she remembered something, hazily at first. Just a figure, small and dumpy, male and tired-looking. Then a face, round, heavy-eyed, high-crowned and balding. A short, heavy man. Who was he? She had seen him around the Village. She had seen him going far uptown on a bus, the same bus she was on.

  "He was no damn ‘John,'” she said aloud. “He was the detective. He's been following me all this time.” For a moment she swayed a little and her stomach turned. And then she straightened up and stared at her empty glass. The bitterness she expected to feel, the resentment, the injury, were dissipated.

  Everything seemed suddenly ridiculous. Love was senseless, life was hopeless. She didn't know what she was doing there in that stuffy room in a hotel in a city that was foreign to her. She didn't know what she had come to find or whether she had found it. Nothing was simple, nothing was clear, and she felt dangerously as if she didn't give a damn.

  She had another drink. And another. And then she put her clothes back on and went out.

  "You had another call, Mrs. Ayers,” the hotel clerk told her, but she didn't even look at him and when she was out of earshot he told the elevator boy, “Snippy bitch."

  * * * *

  She went to the Village. She went to all the bars she could remember having been in and drank in all of them. She went to some she had never seen before with girls she didn't know, and by early morning it seemed as if she knew all of them, as if they had all grown up together.

  In the afternoon (who knew what afternoon?—the clock merely said two-thirty and the sun shone) she woke up in an apartment that” stank of cats and orange juice. The girl in the bed beside her was still sleeping, her back to Beth. She was naked. Beth knew with a shudder, as she saw her, that they had made love. But she couldn't remember her name. She couldn't remember her face. She didn't know where they had met or what they saw in each other.

  At first her physical pains were sharp enough to engross her mind, and she didn't worry about the girl. She got out of bed, holding her head, found the bathroom and tried to wash and dress herself. In the mirror her face looked tired and she felt a little dizzy. When she leaned over to brush her teeth a wave of nausea clutched her and she threw up precipitately into the washbasin. When she straightened up she discovered a number of curious bruises scattered over her limbs and body, as if she had fallen down. But she had no recollection of falling.

  She opened the bathroom door to find the girl she slept with standing there, evidently waiting for her. She seemed fairly cheerful and she tweaked one of Beth's breasts familiarly, as though she had the right.

  "Hung over?” she said, and went
past her into the bathroom.

  Beth had raised a quick angry hand to stop the tweaking but it was too late. The girl laughed at her and said, “Bad-tempered Beth,” in a singsong voice.

  And suddenly Beth was frightened. What in hell was her name? Why had she picked this girl? She found her purse and opened it, almost surprised to find her money still there. She ran a comb through her tangled hair and then she bolted for the front door like a prisoner on the run, buttoning her dress as she went.

  "What's the matter, honey? Don't you want breakfast?"

  Beth looked up to find her leaning in the open bathroom door, smiling suggestively. She was still undressed and laughing at Beth's confusion.

  Beth gave her one last look, wild and accusing, and then went out.

  "Come and see me again sometime,” the girl called after her and her voice rang down the narrow hall. “When you can stay a little while."

  Beth found her way out of the labyrinthine apartment house and down a couple of very crooked streets full of homogeneous brown houses. She burst upon Seventh Avenue abruptly, without recognizing it, and found a restaurant.

  It was small and not overly clean, in keeping with the nightmare atmosphere she was in, but it had food for sale, cooked. She ordered breakfast, but after letting her enumerate the items and tell him how she wanted her eggs, the waiter said, “What's the matter, sister, can't you tell time? It's three in the afternoon. We got no eggs after ten, in the morning."

  She gave him a baleful look and settled for pastrami on rye. As an afterthought she ordered a beer. Unexpectedly it went down well and she ordered another.

  When she left there seemed to be nothing to do but wander again, lost and looking, through the Village streets. The hotel depressed her unutterably; she couldn't go to Laura, she wouldn't go to Nina. And somehow, without exactly understanding where it started or how, she wound up in a bar again, drinking too much, talking too much, forgetting names and faces.

  Late in the evening she found Franny's telephone number in her pocket—Franny, the girl Nina had in bed with her one morning, and who had been taken with Beth. On an impulse Beth called her.