Lesley Evans

Strange Are the Ways of Love

1

Summer.

July, she thought. Summer in New York, with no shade trees or swimming holes, and the sun would be unbearably hot. The taxi turned a corner with its wheels screeching and headed south on Seventh Avenue. She glanced momentarily at the back of the driver’s head, then turned to gaze out the window, running her fingers nervously through her hair.

A rubber band held her black hair in a long pony tail, and she decided that both the rubber band and the pony tail would have to go. Maybe she would just let her hair fall free, straight down her back with the wind blowing through it.

Was there ever a breeze in New York in the summer? There had to be. New York was the same, every place was the same, in July or September or January. And outside on Seventh Avenue the people were the same, and downtown in the Village they would be the same.

And she was just another silly little girl from the Midwest, another corn-fed bit of fluff from Indiana making the famous pilgrimage to the big city.

The cab stopped for a red light. She sat up suddenly to stare out the window at the crowds on the sidewalk and sat back just as suddenly, forcing herself to relax.

Everything would be all right. But she felt wrong, somehow. Even the brown leather suitcase on the seat beside her seemed too small and too large all at once, too small to hold all the clothes she would need and too heavy for her to carry up the steps and into the apartment.

What’s wrong with me? she wondered.

I’ll find out, she answered herself. I’ll find out here, if I do nothing else, and if nothing’s wrong I can go back to Indiana, and if something is wrong, then—

Then I’ll stay here.

The cab turned right at another corner and the driver said, “You say it’s 54 Barrow? Right down the block here?”

She nodded; then, realizing that the driver couldn’t see her, she said, “Yes, that’s right.” It seemed to her that she ought to be able to say something else, something sharp or clever. But she couldn’t think of anything, so she just ran her fingers through her hair again and in a few seconds the cab pulled to a stop at the curb.

She opened the door immediately and stepped out of the cab, pulling her suitcase after her and setting it down on the sidewalk. The meter read $1.45; she gave the driver two singles and waved him away, watching the taxi move slowly down Barrow Street. Then, with a strange feeling of reluctance, she turned to look at her home.

It was disappointing. Paradoxically, it was exactly as she had anticipated and a disappointment at the same time. Her building was one of three red-brick buildings four stories tall, with an iron railing running alongside the front stoop. The red-brick front looked cold, almost shabby.

Janet Marlowe lives here, she thought. In two minutes they would be able to put up a sign in front of the building, not on the lawn because there was no lawn, and the sign could say: Janet Marlowe Lives Here. And everyone who passed by could wonder just who Janet Marlowe was, and why in hell she rated a sign.

She lifted her suitcase and walked to the door, opening it and stepping up into the vestibule. There was a row of buzzers and mailboxes, each with a card, each card with a strange name. 1-D had no card, and she made a mental note to put one in as soon as she got a chance.

Setting down the suitcase, she reached into her purse and fumbled for the key to the inner door. After a moment of panic she found it beneath a handkerchief. She turned it in the lock; magically, the door opened. Once again she picked up the suitcase and carried it into the hallway, closing the door gently behind her.

She paused in the hallway. It was very long and very narrow and incredibly drab, not as she had expected it at all. She had pictured something altogether different, wide and colorful with abstract prints hanging on the walls and some sort of oriental rug on the floor. Instead the walls were painted a nondescript gray and the brown carpet was monotonous and threadbare.

At the same time there was something satisfying about the hallway. It seemed to possess a comfortable anonymity, so that she could pass people there without saying hello if she wished. She could remain as much alone as she wanted to.

I must be crazy, she thought. It’s just a hallway, for God’s sake. I don’t have to pitch a tent here and live in it.

She carried the heavy suitcase to a door with a large gold D on it, fished around in the purse for the other key, found it quickly this time and opened the door.

As she moved through the apartment she realized how perfect it was and how much she liked it and how easy it would be to live there. There was a small bedroom in the rear with a single window facing out upon another wall, so that with the light out it was almost as dark in the daytime as it was at night. “It’s ideal,” Ruthie had written. “You can sleep whenever you like and it doesn’t make any difference.”

There was a tiny kitchen in the middle of the apartment with a two-burner gas range and a small refrigerator, and there was a large room in front facing out on Barrow Street, with a giant window Ruthie had said was quite excellent for looking out of.

The apartment was a bit extreme, which was in keeping with Ruthie’s taste. There was no rug on the bare and polished hardwood floor. Furniture was kept to a minimum. There was a bright red sofa along one wall with two equally bright blue pillows nestling on it. By the side of the window there was an unpainted wooden bookshelf loaded with paperbacks. Jan glanced through the books for a moment, wondering if Ruthie had actually read any of them, or if she bought them for show, or if they came with the place.

There were several Klee and Miró prints taped at random spots along the walls, and there was a little table loaded with more books and magazines, and a chair that looked comfortable. Ruthie’s last-minute instructions were typed on a sheet of yellow copy paper on top of the little table; Jan picked up the paper and sat down in the comfortable-looking chair. She lit a cigarette and began to read.

Jan Honey:

By this time you must be in the apartment, and I hope you like it, but not so much that I can’t have it back by the end of September. The super is in 1-B; he’s a pain in the neck but you can twist him around your finger if you smile and look sexy.

The rent’s all paid, natch. I meant to leave you some food but I used it all just this morning, but there’s a couple good super markets and a delicatessen on the next block. The electricity’s included in the rent, but I have to pay for the gas, so if you decide to kill yourself or anything just stick your finger in the light socket instead of taking gas.

No neighbors worth knowing, so I can’t give you any help there...

There was more — two paragraphs of uneven typing and disjointed prose telling her where to eat and what shows not to see and how to get places on the subway and where to buy clothes and a welter of miscellany. Jan drew deeply on her cigarette and laughed as she finished the letter. Ruthie was nuts, she thought, but very practical in her own way and very sweet and helpful, and now Ruthie was off to Mexico with some Village idiot who painted.

“I’m going to find out what it’s all about,” Ruthie had written once. And now she was in Ruthie’s apartment in New York to do the same thing.

The cigarette burned down and she stubbed it out in a large copper ashtray on the little table. She yawned, suddenly feeling very tired from the long train ride and the cab from Grand Central and all the rush and excitement. Resolutely she stood up and returned to the kitchen, lifting the suitcase and carrying it back to the bedroom and setting it down on the bed. She opened it and began unpacking things, putting some clothes in the small closet and others in the dresser. She put everything away methodically, devoting only half her mind to the task and letting the other half wander.

I am excited, she thought. I’m excited and I don’t know for certain what excites me. I’m excited over what is going to happen, but I don’t have the slightest idea what it will be.

Anything could happen.

I could die tomorrow, she thought. Or I could meet a man and marry him, or I could write a book or get a part in a play or became a heroin addict or start sleeping with an artist or get a job in a sweatshop or almost anything.

Anything could happen.

She picked up two small bottles of cologne from the suitcase and carried them into the bathroom. It was a very small room: she saw at once that she would have to take showers. She was not tall, but the tub was still too small for her.

The sink was a shiny white, stained a deep rust-brown where the water ran from the tap to the drain. She started to open the medicine cabinet over the sink to put away the cologne, pausing to look at herself in the mirror on the front of the cabinet.

Her eyes were very brown and her hair was black and her skin very smooth and clear. She ran her fingers lightly over her face, touching the lips that were red without lipstick and the cheeks that were rosy without rouge, the pointed chin, the high forehead, the hollow of her throat.

“You know,” she told the mirror image, “you’re rather pretty. Not bad at all. Nice to look at, sort of.”

She didn’t smile. She studied the image very seriously, her eyes fixed upon the eyes reflected in the mirror.

“Pretty,” she repeated.

“And you’re free and white and precisely 21, and you’re all alone in New York in Greenwich Village and you don’t know a soul, and you’re going to have an exciting summer. Because anything can happen.”

“What can happen?” asked the reflection.

“Anything. You can write a book or act in a play or get a job or take dope or live with an artist or—”

“Or what?”

Her hand tightened on the bottle of cologne.

“Or what? Tell me.”

She stared into the mirror, her eyes burning into the eyes reflected there. She couldn’t breathe.

“Say it,” the mirror image demanded. “Damn you, say it!”

“Or you can sleep with a girl,” she said.

The bottle of cologne dropped from her hand. It bounced once on the floor; miraculously, it didn’t break. For several minutes she studied the mirror image without moving. Then, finally, she stooped over and picked up the bottle and placed it in the medicine cabinet. She left the bathroom quickly, closing the door.

When everything was unpacked and put away she stretched out on the bed and lit a second cigarette. The smoke tasted good. She held it in her lungs until it made her feel a little dizzy and then blew it in a cloud toward the ceiling. There was a network of thin cracks in the ceiling and she lay on the bed hardly thinking, studying the cracks in the plaster as if they were a map.

I’m a little girl from Indiana, she thought. A little girl from a little town called Rushville, a little girl who went to Indiana University to study literature and learn French and supposedly grow up.

Indiana University.

When you told people you went to Indiana University, they thought immediately of one of two things. The football team or the Kinsey Institute. Those were the two most important things the damn place had.

Kinsey. A snoopy bastard, she thought. Snoopy, prying son-of-a-bitch. Collected sex lives on little white IBM cards like high school kids collected dirty pictures.

She had never been interviewed. She wondered idly what it would be like to tell her life story to some bland, moon-faced little interviewer. Did many of the girls lie? It might be fun to feed them a line, to make up some good stories and throw their silly survey for a fall.

Suppose they interviewed her. Suppose she told them the truth and they wrote it all down and filed it away on a white IBM card.

What would the card say?

Janet Marlowe, she thought. Nickname: Jan. Age: 21. Socio-economic background: Upper-middle class. Father: Attorney. Mother: Deceased. Siblings: None.

Marital status: Single, she went on. Premarital experience: necked twice in a parked car during high school, kissed dates properly and went all the way once. Once, she thought. The lady tried it once and she didn’t like it.

Oh, there would be plenty of fascinating information on that white card. It probably wouldn’t even get a raised eyebrow from the interviewer, but then they were supposed to be utterly shock-proof.

The typical crush on a teacher in high school. The typical unnaturally strong attachment for her dead mother. The typical overwhelming awareness of the beauty of another girl. Everything was very typical, just the way the book said it was supposed to be when people didn’t turn out the way they were supposed to at all.

All the symptoms, strong enough and pronounced enough to send her reading through books on the subject before anything even happened.

And then, of course, something had happened.

What happened was also typical. It happened during her freshman year in college when she was rooming with a tall lovely blonde girl named Anne Daugherty. Anne was also majoring in literature and interested in the same things, they became friends, they went places together, they talked. It was the first time Jan had felt truly comfortable and close with another person.

And then... then, one day—

One day Anne kissed her.

It was almost ridiculous. They were sitting on the edge of Anne’s bed, sitting and talking, and all at once Anne leaned toward her and her mouth fastened on Jan’s.

It was over almost as quickly as it had happened, with Jan wide-eyed and shocked and Anne embarrassed and furious with herself for losing control. It was over in an instant, and instantly the closeness that existed between them was also over. They hardly talked after that; Anne’s mumbled apology went unheard.

And it might not have meant anything at all. Nothing like that happened again. The two girls avoided each other, and at the end of the semester Anne went to share a room with another girl in a dormitory on the other side of the campus.

It might have meant nothing at all — except that Jan realized that she had enjoyed the kiss, that she wanted the same thing Anne did.

And that meant a good deal.

That would have to go on the IBM card too, of course. It was typical, and it surely belonged on the card with the rest.

Janet Marlowe, the card would say.

Janet Marlowe: Lesbian.

She felt funny. For the first time she had coupled them up — the word and the name — and the sensation was both good and bad. Bad because it was a label she didn’t want for herself; good because any label was belter than a question mark, ignorance was not bliss. It was hell.

Lesbian. It wasn’t such a terrible word, not so ugly as “dike” or “butch,” not so weird-sounding and sterile as “hermaphrodite” or the other pseudomedical terms. It sounded almost gentle, gentle and peaceful.

She stood up after a moment, looking at herself in the mirror on the bedroom door, a full-length mirror slightly discolored at the edges. Christ, she thought, the whole place is full of mirrors.

Quickly, mechanically, she began to remove her clothes. She unbuttoned her dress and pulled it smoothly over her head. Then she unclasped her brassiere, stepped out of her panties, and unrolled her stockings. She placed them all neatly on the chair next to the bed and stood quite naked before the mirror.

She had a good body. She didn’t need the mirror to tell her that men and boys told her with their eyes, stripping her as naked as she was now. Her body, she thought, certainly didn’t look as though it ought to belong to a Lesbian.

Her legs were long and shapely; her breasts were firm and well-formed. She dipped them gently with her hands, looking at herself in the mirror.

She liked her breasts.

I want to be touched, she thought. But I’m not sure whom I want to touch me.

And she began laughing softly.

When she flicked the switch on the wall and turned out the light the room was almost as dark as Ruthie had said, almost as if it were night. She pulled back the covers and slipped into bed. The sheets were wonderfully cool and smooth against her bare skin, the pillow soft under her head.

She closed her eyes.

Jan Marlowe, she thought. You’re a virgin once removed. You tried it once and you didn’t like it.

She opened her eyes, trying to make out the pattern of cracks in the ceiling, but it was too dark to see it. She yawned sleepily and let her eyes close again.

But at least you tried, she thought.

2

His name was Philip Dresser. He was tall and broad-shouldered with his blond hair clipped, close to his scalp in a crew cut, and he was sitting in the balcony of the theater, just barely aware of the picture on the screen.

He was concentrating on the girl sitting beside him. He sat with his arm around her, but it rested on the back of her chair, not touching her. Periodically she would sit back or move in her seat, touching his arm or brushing up against it, and each time the contact brought an increased awareness of her presence.

He wondered what she was like.

He knew very little about her. He knew that her name was Janet Marlowe, and that she was a junior, just one year younger than he was. He knew that she was quiet and hard to approach, but that she had accepted a date with him with no hesitation, that she took his arm crossing the street as if it were the most natural thing to do, and that she seemed wholly relaxed, her mind wrapped up in the movie.

This was what he knew about her, but it was not what he was interested in knowing. He wanted to know whether or not he would be able to sleep with her.

In twenty-one years Philip Dresser had slept with three tramps, seven prostitutes and one girl who had been in love with him. He was very rarely sexually successful with the girls he dated, and this lack of success made him care too much, try too hard, and expect failure before it came.

He looked at Jan, small and pretty in her sweater and skirt. He remembered how the skirt clung to her rounded hips as she walked, how the sweater hugged the upper half of her body. He wanted very much to sleep with her; he intended to try very hard.

And he fully expected to fail.

He wanted to touch her. He wanted to let his arm slip around her and to cup her shoulder with his hand, he wanted to take her hand in his, to move her head to his shoulder, he wanted to do these things, but at the same time he wanted to do them without being overly obvious about it, without setting her on edge in any way. He didn’t know how to do this, so he waited trying to turn his attention to the picture but unable to think of anything but Jan.

But he didn’t have to take her hand, for she took his, and she put her head on his shoulder without any provocation on his part, squeezing his hand as she did so. Her hand was soft, soft and small in his, and her head felt as though it belonged right where it was on his shoulder. And when his arm went around her all of its own accord, his fingers closing lightly around her shoulder, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

The balcony of the theater did not seem quite so public any more. It was as though they were somewhere else by themselves, and they remained like that for several minutes. It was good, very good, and he decided that he liked Jan Marlowe very much, that he liked having her close to him like this, and that he ought to kiss her.

But the moment passed.

He had turned his head slightly to look at her when she turned her head also and raised it from his shoulder and looked up into his eyes, her own eyes clear and unblinking.

“Let’s go,” she said.

He didn’t answer. He stood up and helped her to her feet and they walked up the aisle to the exit. She leaned against him as they walked, not sensually but comfortably, almost tenderly, and he put: his arm around her waist, his hand sensing the smoothness and firmness of the flesh beneath her skirt.

The air outside was warm and the sky clear. There was no moon, but the stars were bright, and they walked a block to his car without speaking at all. He wondered just what was coming next. Maybe he could drive for awhile and park without being too obvious about it, and could kiss her and hold her close for a few minutes. And then he could go out with her again in the middle of the week, and again the next weekend, and eventually they could go to a motel and he could sleep with her in a double bed, holding her all night long in his arms.

He realized with a start that he did not really know her at all, that he was crazy to plan or even think so far in advance. But he remembered the way her hand had slipped into his and his mind kept thinking, kept planning.

In his Dodge she sat close to him automatically, placing her head once again on his shoulder and letting one hand rest on his thigh, he drove with one arm around her, driving slowly out of town and along the road by the river.

“Did you like the movie?” he asked, trying to make conversation.

She didn’t answer, and he didn’t repeat the question or ask another. He kept driving, and soon she snuggled her head tighter against his shoulder, making little kisses against his shirt.

He knew that he ought to park the car. He knew this, just as he had known that he should kiss her in the movie, but he seemed unable to ease the car off the road, unwilling to spoil things by hurrying them.

“Find a place to park,” she said, suddenly.

He was surprised. Then, gratefully, he pulled the Dodge off the road and turned off the ignition. Almost as an afterthought, he switched off the headlights.

They turned at once and looked at each other. He saw something in her eyes which he couldn’t quite make out, some message that was going over his head. He was forced to play everything by ear, and while he didn’t like doing things that way, he couldn’t think of any other. There was a disturbingly unreal aspect about the whole scene — all he knew for certain was that she was waiting to he kissed, so he took her in his arms and kissed her.

She trembled. She pressed her lips against his and he kissed her again, amazed at the warmth and softness of her lips. She smelled very clean and very fresh.

When he kissed her again her lips opened beneath his. He felt her arms tighten around him and noticed that she was breathing faster and clinging closer to him, all warm and soft and sweet-smelling.

His hands moved with a will of their own and he didn’t have to think any longer about what he was doing. He lifted her sweater and slipped a hand beneath it, touching her skin, stroking her back, marvelling at the softness of her under his hand.

He touched her breast once, and then he cupped it with his hand when she did not draw away. He felt her breast, felt how firm it was, and he squeezed it gently, very gently, loving her, wanting her, wanting her with an intensity that was new to him and unable to fully understand his own feelings.

I love you, he thought, but he didn’t say anything.

He kissed her again, his lips pressing lightly against hers, and he held her breast while he kissed her. He breathed heavily, saying “Jan,” half moaning the name. She drew away from him, and there was a pause.

And then she said, “Let’s go in the back seat.”

It was extremely awkward for him, releasing her and opening the door, helping her from the car and closing the door, opening the back door and helping her inside, sitting down on the seat beside her and closing the door again. And then when they were inside with their arms around each other, the kiss was something false and contrived, something more necessary than natural. The second time he kissed her was a little better.

Then he began to breathe faster and harder, hungry for her, and her sweater came off and her brassiere followed it. Her breasts were soft and smooth and very beautiful, and the nipples hardened under his touch. He kissed them, and when he did this she let out a little moan, and when he heard her he did not want to stop, ever, and he could not have stopped if he had wanted to.

He was clumsy. He was clumsy, and he knew he was being clumsy, and still there was nothing he could do about it. He was awkward as he removed the last of her clothing, awkward as he pushed her back on the seat. His caresses were hurried and inept and ineffectual. And then he took her.

She was a virgin.

She let out a sharp little cry that went through him like a knife. Suddenly, too soon, it was over.

He moved away from her and looked down at her. Again there was something in her eyes that he could not read, something different this time. She seemed to be waiting, waiting for something that she would never receive. There was a sadness which seemed to say that she had just become aware of a frightening truth.

He lit two cigarettes and handed one to her. They smoked them there before returning to the front seat. After she finished her cigarette and tossed it out the window she began to dress. She didn’t seem at all embarrassed; on the contrary, she appeared totally unaware of his presence, as if he did not exist at all, or as if it didn’t matter if he did. He turned uncomfortably in his seat and gazed out the window, lighting another cigarette from the butt of the first.

In the front seat she did not sit next to him but sat as far away as possible, almost cowering against the door.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She didn’t answer.

It was a long ride. He drove too fast but it was still a long ride and the silence was unbearable.

He couldn’t understand it. For the first time in a long while he had been successful, and he felt as though he had failed. For the first time in his life he had made love to a girl whom he really desired, and all that he felt was an emptiness and a vague sense of loss, a loss of something which he had never managed to possess.

At last they reached her dormitory. He stopped the car, turned off the ignition and walked her to her door. They did not hold hands as they walked.

Everything was going wrong. It was not working out properly, and he wanted it to. It could be good, very good.

She turned to face him at the door, her face very solemn, and he started to kiss her but she dodged ever so slightly so that he missed her lips and just brushed her forehead. He looked at her, wanting to reach out for her and wanting to get back to his own room at the same time.

“Good night.”

“Good night.” She started to open the door.

“When can I see you again?”

She paused, considering, holding the door half open. Her mouth opened and closed, hesitantly, before any words came.

Then she said, “I don’t think we ought to see each other again.”

“Jan—”

He started to reach for her but she shook her head soundlessly and slipped through the door. She looked at him one last time, sadly, and then she was gone and the door was closing behind her.

He stood motionless for more than five minutes, staring at the closed door. Then he walked very slowly to his car and drove back to his dormitory.

He didn’t know how to feel. There was a momentary flush of pride at having seduced his first virgin, but this didn’t last long. It was replaced by a vague sense of wonder, a feeling that perhaps she had in fact seduced him. He forced the idea from his mind.

He wanted her. He wanted her for a whole night, warm and soft beside him in a double bed at a motel. He wanted to know her — it would be better then, better if there were something deeper and fuller between them, something that could give them a place to start.

He almost wanted to marry her.

When he called her on the phone the next day she would not talk to him or see him. She was almost apologetic, as though something were her fault.

He called again the next day, and the following day and the day after. A few days passed in which he forced himself to stay away from the phone, but finally he called again and got the same response as before.

Then he spent a night with a young prostitute in town and this helped to get her out of his mind.

He saw her several times on campus before graduation, walking alone with books under her arm or talking to a group of girls. He never stopped her, never tried to speak to her, and she never spoke to him.

In June he graduated. He never saw her again.

3

She woke up suddenly, coming out of a dream, but by the time she had pushed back the covers and sat up in bed, she could not remember what the dream had been about.

It was dark, darker than when she had gone to sleep. She stood up, savoring the feel of the cool air on her bare skin, and before switching on the light she took several deep breaths at the open window and rubbed the sleep from her eyes.

She put on her watch before anything else. It was ten-thirty. Then she dressed rapidly in a cool green blouse and black skirt.

She was hungry, and a little sleepy because of the lack of a transitional period between sleeping and waking. Outside, the moon was full and there was a light breeze scattering the pages of a discarded copy of the New York Post along the Barrow Street gutter. A few people were walking by, some in a great hurry and others very slowly, almost aimlessly.

She found the diner Ruthie had mentioned around the corner on Seventh Avenue. When she had finished her cheeseburger and swallowed half her coffee, she took a cigarette from her purse and lit it. I like this, she thought, blowing the smoke at the ceiling. I like this place. And I like getting up at 10:30 at night and getting dressed and going out.

She looked around at the people. They were a strange crowd — high school kids and truck drivers and old women and serious-looking girls with too much eye make-up and tired-looking Negroes with a vacant stare in their eyes. So many people, and no one that she knew.

She wasn’t used to this. She was used to knowing people, even if she didn’t speak to them, even if she knew no more about them than their names. She was used to familiar faces, and all of the faces in the diner were strange ones.

Part of her liked it. She could be alone, she could have as much privacy as she wanted, she could live by herself and for herself.

But I may be lonely, she thought. I may be very lonely.

She stubbed out her cigarette and finished her coffee. It was cold by this time, but she drained the cup anyway and paid her check, leaving a dime for the counterman. People tipped for counter service in New York, she knew, and that was another small thing that was different. Everything seemed to be different.

Back on the street she looked at everything. She walked north on Seventh Avenue to Sheridan Square, passing a theater and bookstores and restaurants and bars and a small nightclub. The whole city had a beat, a pulsing rhythm to it, and she was in time with the rhythm. She could hear it in all the noises and she could feel it in the air.

At Sheridan Square she turned east and continued along Fourth Street. The Village looked more and more the way she had guessed it would look from the books and articles she had read about it. There was a cellar bar cluttered with beer-drinkers, a coffee house with operatic arias on the jukebox.

And all over were the people. There were people and more people, people being moved along by a policeman, people entering and leaving the coffee house and the bar and all the little shops.

“Don’t buy clothes in the Village shops,” Ruthie had warned. “The prices are half for the clothes and half for the labels.”

Dear Ruthie, she thought. Dear Ruthie, who doesn’t really know me from third base, but who has a mad, wonderful apartment that will be mine for the whole damn summer.

She smiled and kept on walking.

The streets had names instead of numbers, and she decided that this was better and much more interesting. She passed Jones Street and Cornelia Street, crossed Sixth Avenue and walked for one more block, until she came to a sign that said Macdougal Street.

I am here, she thought.

She was at the center of the Village, if the Village really had a center. She looked at Washington Square Park, a block of grass and trees that didn’t seem to belong in New York at all, with benches by the hundred and stone tables where old men played chess. There were pigeons strutting and bums sitting on the benches and people walking all around, back and forth.

Washington Square. She saw the NYU dorms across the way, and the Circle at the foot of Fifth Avenue where the folksingers gathered on Sundays, and she was seeing it for the first time but she felt almost as though she were returning to it. It was all new; at the same time it was all very familiar.

She started to walk through the park, then changed her mind. Instead she turned south on Macdougal, the street Ruthie called “the Village’s most Village-y street.”

She saw at once what Ruthie meant. Macdougal Street was a commercial enterprise and it didn’t attempt to conceal the fact. It was evident in the little shops that tried to attract by their novelty, in the way that every store front was groomed to draw in the passer-by and the tourist. It was artificial and unreal; it was also quite likable.

Macdougal Street looked alive. It was joyously, vibrantly phony, as though claiming that everything could and did happen there, and she liked it. She walked up and down the street, hardly conscious of the fact that she was walking, looking at everything, staring into the windows of the little shops with the jewelry that was too “modern” and the dresses that were too extreme and the decor which would look ridiculous anywhere else, but which somehow seemed to belong here.

She passed all the stores and bars and coffee houses, and the stores selling musical instruments and the stores selling books and records, and the men with beards and bare feet and the men who minced and glided by, and everywhere the tourists, men and women from somewhere else who walked arm in arm and stared at everything.

Finally she entered one of the coffee shops, wondering vaguely how she had managed to select it from all the others. It was called Renascence, for some reason which escaped her completely, and it seemed a good deal more relaxed and natural than the other coffee houses on the block. The men and women at the tables looked and acted as though they all came to the place several times a week; while they were not dressed strangely in any way, they were obviously Villagers and they were obviously at ease in the cavernous candle-lit room.

There was a piece of doggerel in the window by a man who had been hailed as a great poet in the 20’s and had drunk in the 30’s and 40’s and was finally murdered in the 50’s by his wife’s lover. There were four muddy oil paintings on the wall. Heavy oak tables and benches and chairs made dark islands on the cold cement floor.

When she walked inside everyone looked up for a moment. Then, not recognizing her, they ignored her and returned to their chess games or cards. There was a bridge game in progress at the front table and several pairs of men were playing gin rummy.

Jan heard music coming from the back room behind the small kitchen. She walked in the direction of the music, finding a very small room containing one huge table surrounded by benches. Feeling a little like an intruder, she took a seat on one of the benches and sat without moving, listening to the music.

A tall, rangy boy with light brown hair that fell into his eyes was sitting with his back against the wall and one foot up on the bench. He was strumming a guitar, playing sad and driving blues chords and humming along with the music. There was a girl sitting next to him, and Jan thought that she might be pretty if she wore a little lipstick and less eye make-up. There were two others, another boy and girl, but Jan hardly noticed them.

The boy stopped playing the guitar and took a sip of his coffee. “Mike,” the other boy suggested, “play Danville Girl.”

The boy called Mike nodded shortly, took another sip of coffee and set the cup down on the table. He played softly and slowly, and when he sang his voice was husky and sad, almost mournful. Jan had never heard the song before.

Got off that train in Danville,

Got stuck on a Danville girl;

You never saw such hair in your life,

She had those Danville curls.

Her eyes were blue and her skin was soft,

Her body was shaped just right;

And never did we say a word all day

But we loved each other all night...

He was looking down at the guitar, completely absorbed in the chords he was playing and the song he was singing. He sang it very well. She could feel the strength of his voice and the rhythm of his guitar matching the pulse beat of the city, rising and falling as his foot tapped the bench in time to the music.

The girl’s eyes were on him all the while.

I’m a rail-riding grifter,

I never shall have a home.

When the sun comes out of the hill in the morn

It’s time for me to roam.

The whistle blew by the railroad yard,

I kissed her breast, and then

I pulled my cap down over my eyes

And never looked back again...

He raised his head slightly and his eyes caught hers. She glanced away nervously but she could see him out of the corner of her eye, still looking at her, probing her with his eyes. He seemed to be singing to her and for her, as if she were the only other person in the room.

Oh, love is where you find it

Wherever you chance to go;

I’ve taken my pleasure in Calumet City

And east to Baltimore.

I’ve taken my love where I found it,

That’s why I’m the way I am;

A two-dollar bum on the C&O road

And I do not give a damn...

Stop it, she thought, angrily. Stop staring at me like that, damn you.

He was good-looking. He shouldn’t have been, for his features by themselves were not good at all. His nose was too long, and when his lips turned in a smile the smile was crooked. And there was a haggard look in his eyes, as though he had stayed up too late for too many nights and eaten too little and smoked too much. But the whole was greater than the sum of its parts — he was definitely attractive.

She was afraid. For a moment she started to think what it might be like with him, almost hoping, almost planning, and then she shook her head resolutely and banished the thought from her mind.

If you ride the rails, my brother,

You never shall have a home;

You’ll go to sleep in any empty car

And wake up all alone.

You’ll find a girl and you’ll love that girl

And you’ll kiss her good-by, and then

You’ll pull your cap down over your eyes

And never look back again...

The song was over. For several seconds no one said anything, and then the other boy said, “That was good.”

“Thanks.”

“Damned good,” the other boy said. “When you cut a side, include that one.”

Mike’s eyebrows went up. “When I cut a side,” he said, “we’ll all be over ninety.”

“But you’re good enough to record.”

“Sure,” he said. “You’re my best fan. Almost my only fan, and unfortunately you don’t own a record company. Sad, but true.”

“I’m not kidding, Mike. You ought to be able to set up an audition.”

Mike shrugged and finished his coffee, making a face because it was cold, but drinking it anyway. He put the cup down on the table, struck a tentative chord on the guitar and looked up abruptly at Jan as if he were seeing her for the first time.

“What’s your name?”

“Janet Marlowe.” She answered automatically.

“I’m Mike Hawkins. And this—” indicating the girl — “is Saundra Kane. And these people are Sue and Bob Dallman.”

She nodded.

“You live around here?”

“Yes. I just moved in this morning.”

As soon as she had spoken she regretted volunteering the information. She didn’t want to get involved in any conversation, not with him. It was too dangerous. She should have just mumbled something and left.

But it was too late now.

“Like it here?”

She nodded.

He tossed his head back sharply so that his hair fell back into place. “Anything special you want to hear?”

“No,” she said, nervously, awkwardly. “I have to go now.”

She stood up, stepped back from the table, and smiled at the four of them.

“Wait a minute—”

She didn’t answer, turning instead and walking from the back room through the kitchen and the front room and out the door. All the way out she felt his eyes on her, following her, burning into the back of her skirt and blouse.

She was afraid of him.

And she knew she would see him again.

She wanted a drink, wanted one badly, wanted to hold a drink in her hand and sip it and think and try to figure things out. She wanted to drink in a bar, but first she had to select a bar.

She walked up and down Macdougal Street again, but this time she didn’t notice the stores or the coffee shops. She looked at the bars, trying to place each one mentally and pick the right one, the bar where the drink would taste good and where no one would bother her. She stopped to examine each bar and rejected each in turn for one reason or another.

She paused in front of a bar called The Shadows, a bar with a porch in front of it and a loud jukebox blaring in the rear. Something seemed particularly appropriate about this bar, and she wanted to analyze her reaction before going inside. What made it different? She sensed something, but she couldn’t pin-point it.

A couple emerged from The Shadows. The girl was a fragile blonde in a print dress; the man wore tight black slacks and walked with his shoulders thrown back almost pugnaciously. Jan watched them walk out of the door and down the steps and saw them pass her and continue on down the street.

And suddenly she knew why this place was different.

Because the man was not a man, but a woman, and the two girls were obviously lovers. The Shadows was a Lesbian hangout, a gay bar.

Now you know, she thought. That’s why it appeals to you. You should go home, but you won’t. You should pack up and get the hell back to Indiana and enter a convent, but you won’t do that either.

Quickly, almost desperately, she walked up the steps and into the bar. She realized at the doorway that she didn’t want to go in, that she had no desire whatsoever to enter, but she couldn’t retrace her steps.

Two sailors at the bar were the only men in the place. Girls, feminine and masculine in appearance, sat on stools at the long dark bar or drank at tables in small groups. She walked in and sat down at an empty table near the front, ordering Scotch-and-water and sipping it slowly when the waitress brought it to her.

She didn’t want to look around, but she did. She was afraid she would catch someone’s eye without wanting to, or that she would gape at the girls like a tourist. But the fascination of the room was too much for her; she couldn’t keep from scanning the bar and tables, running her eyes over the girls.

She didn’t like the butches. She heard them talk in their deep voices and watched them dance and snap their fingers to the jukebox, and she knew that they would never attract her. They looked hard and tough and coarse, and totally unappealing.

But the other girls did excite her. It was not a physical attraction so much as the knowledge of what they were and the vague feeling of kinship coupled with the awful fascination of fear that made them attractive.

On the jukebox Dinah Washington was singing So Long. The music was slow and sad, and Jan unconsciously compared it with Mike’s Danville Girl.

She looked at them all, the girls who could pass for men and the girls who could pass for girls, and she began to think, But I don’t want any of them. I really don’t. Maybe’

Then she saw the girl and a shiver went through her.

She was beautiful. She was tall with silky red-brown hair that fell to her shoulders and framed her face. There was a deep, haunting sadness in her eyes and a constrained beauty in her face that Jan knew could only accompany unhappiness. She sat at a table near the dance floor and the table obscured most of her body, but Jan was able to see that it was a good one, slender but with full curves.

She was attractive.

Attractive to Jan.

No, she thought. No, it can’t happen. It’s no good and I don’t want it to happen and I won’t let it happen. I don’t want to think about her.

She took another sip of her Scotch-and-water and turned away from the girl, but she could not think of anything else. When she closed her eyes the image of the girl’s face remained fixed in her mind.

She began to imagine the two of them together, imagined the girl kissing her and holding her, loving her, and she pictured herself holding that slender, graceful body in her own arms and doing those things, things that she was afraid of and didn’t want to do or even to know about.

I want her, she thought. Damn it, I want her and I can’t help it.

The girl looked up and her eyes caught Jan’s. Jan turned away quickly, guiltily, finishing her drink and setting the empty glass down on the table.

One of the two other girls at the table stood up suddenly, and walked to Jan’s table. Jan sensed her approach but didn’t look up until there could be no mistake, until the girl was standing just a few feet from her, looking down at her. Then she raised her eyes slowly to look at the tall, rangy girl with blonde hair that was almost sunflower-yellow.

“Hi,” the girl said. Her voice was a little too deep, Jan thought. A little affected.

Jan smiled, thinking, Go away. Please go away.

“My name’s Kate Simons. What’s yours?”

“Jan Marlowe.”

“You look a little lonely, Jan.”

“No. I mean, I’m fine.”

“Would you like to come and join us? We can use the company.”

“No, I don’t—”

“Come on. There’s just Peggy and Laura and me, and we’d be glad to have a fourth.”

Jan couldn’t speak. She stood up, shaking her head, and dropped a bill for the drink.

“I have to go now,” she said finally. She smiled quickly and started for the door.

“Drop in again soon.”

She reached the door and started down the steps, trying to decide whether Kate’s last words were inviting or mocking or both. She couldn’t tell.

Peggy and Laura and Kate.

And she was either Peggy or Laura.

I’m in love, she thought. I’m in love with a beautiful girl and I don’t even know her name.

Peggy.

Or Laura.

4

Her name was Laura Dean. She was twenty-three years old, and she had spent four of those years at a girls’ prep school and four more at a girls’ college in Massachusetts.

Her father was the only man she ever really knew. She had lived with him in a big stone house in upper Westchester County ever since he divorced her mother for infidelity when Laura was ten, and until he dropped dead of a heart attack shortly after she began her first year in high school.

She cried a great deal when he died. Later that year she fell in love with her French teacher and spent many hours talking with her and more hours thinking of her in secret.

The following year she danced with her room-mate at the school dances and kissed her several times in their room with the door shut.

The year after that she began sleeping with another girl, a senior.

Since then she had gone with many girls, too many to remember. Each time the relationship was a shaky, tenuous thing that rarely lasted more than a month or so and frequently ended after a single night. After she graduated from college she moved immediately to the Village. She landed a bit part in an off-Broadway theater but gave up the role to sleep with an actress for four months. It was her only extended affair, and she was sick inside when the actress left her for another girl.

And the time passed.

She was with the little blonde now, Peggy. She felt Peggy’s hand on her thigh beneath the table, pressing gently but persistently, and she knew that Peggy wanted to leave. Peggy wanted to go out of The Shadows and around the corner to the apartment on Minetta Street. She wanted to get undressed quickly and throw her clothing on the floor and jump into bed and make love. Peggy wanted to be loved, wanted desperately to be held tight in Laura’s arms.

“Hold me close,” she would say, as she had said so often in the three weeks they had been lovers. “Hold me close. I’m afraid.”

What was Peggy afraid of? She didn’t know, and she was beginning to stop caring, just as she was ceasing to care for Peggy and ceasing to desire the slim, boyish body she knew so well.

Soon it would end. The affair would be over, Laura knew, and she or Peggy would be hurt for a while just as Kate was hurt now, and then each would find another and the parade would go on. They would play Musical Beds until they dried up inside and died, and there would be a funeral with Lesbians crying, and the ground would cover them and no one would care. No one would even remember after a year or two.

Kate was saying something and Laura nodded absently, not hearing her. Her mind was not on Kate’s conversation any more than it was on Peggy’s hot urgent hand. It was on another girl, a girl she had not yet met.

Jan Marlowe, Kate had said. Short for Janice or Janet.

Had she ever slept with a girl named Jan? She had to think back for a moment to be sure that she hadn’t, and she realized just how mad a game of Musical Beds she had been playing.

Kate was rambling on about the girl, speculating, guessing. Was the girl gay? Was she a tourist? Why did she run so? What scared her?

Laura knew. She knew why the girl was frightened and that she would be back, and she knew that they would make love. She had seen Jan’s eyes on her, gazing at her with a mixture of hunger and fear. She had sensed the eyes even before she had seen them, had been aware of the girl’s presence with that extra sense a person needed if he was radically different, the extra sense that could bring homosexuals an awareness of each other in the middle of a busy street or from two sides of a crowded room.

Jan Marlowe would be back.

They would meet and they would make love. Jan would come to her, still afraid but not so afraid as before. They would sit together and talk and drink and leave The Shadows and walk together to the apartment on Minetta Street.

They would lock the door.

With the door locked Peggy would become a memory and Jan would become a reality. They would be together — for a night or a week or a month — and Laura would hold Jan’s sweet body close and kiss her and love her. Until the music stopped and they switched partners once again.

Musical Beds.

“I hate this place,” Peggy was saying, making conversation and hinting at the same time.

“Why?” Kate asked.

“Touristy. People walk in and look at us and sailors make passes and people stare in the window. It’s a pain in the ass.”

I don’t like that, Laura thought. Why does she always have to talk like a truckdriver?

“But it’s the only place. God, you know what the rest of the spots are like. How about that hole over on Bleecker Street with the floor show? That’s better?”

“No, it’s worse.”

“Well, where do you want to go?”

Peggy squeezed Laura’s thigh again, making it quite plain where she wanted to go. “We should have a place of our own,” she said. “Without the tourists.”

“Good idea.” Kate finished her drink, getting into the spirit of the game. “What’ll we call it?”

“Sappho’s.”

“Too obvious. How about The Dikery?”

They laughed and Laura smiled.

“The Butchery’s better,” Peggy suggested.

“Too coarse.”

“The Nunnery?”

“Sacrilege.”

“The Convent?”

“Same thing.”

“I know — Halfway House.”

And they all laughed.

Laura drained her drink and put the glass down on the table, hard. She stood up, reaching for Peggy’s hand, and whispered, “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

As they walked to the door Peggy slipped her arm around Laura’s waist, leaning her little body expertly against her. The jukebox was playing So Long again and Laura knew without looking that Kate was crying or would start to cry in a minute or two. Then, within a week, she would fall in love again with someone new.

“I’ve been wanting to leave for one hell of a long time,” Peggy said, her voice brittle. “What were you waiting for? It’s not that bitch Kate, for Christ’s sake. Or is it?”

“No.”

“Well, I never know. Dammit, you know how much I need you right now. I was sitting there itching while those goddamned sailors were running their eyes up my skirt and Kate’s yammering away and you knew I wanted to get out of there.”

Laura nodded, wishing she would shut up, half wanting her and half wanting only to sleep, to sleep alone in an empty bed with clean sheets and a hard pillow.

“Then why in hell—”

“Can’t you say anything without swearing like a trouper?”

Peggy stiffened; then she relaxed and released her breath. “I’m sorry. I got in the habit but I know you don’t like it. I’ll try to stop.”

And Laura knew that she had hurt her, so she slipped her arm tighter around Peggy as they turned the corner of Minetta.

She’s really very pretty, she thought. With that blonde hair and those bright eyes. And I want her tonight. God, tonight I have to want her.

“I’m sorry, too,” she said softly.

“Do you really want me?” Peggy demanded suddenly. “We’ve been so close, but lately I keep feeling as though you’re a million miles away. What’s the matter, darling?”

“Nothing — don’t be silly.”

“You still love me?”

“Of course I love you. Idiot, how many times do I have to prove it to you?”

And even as she spoke the words sounded forced and artificial, as if she were an actress playing a role. How much longer would it be before Peggy saw the performer instead of the performance?

“You have to love me, Laura.” Her voice was flat and deadly serious. “You have to keep proving it to me, over and over. It sounds trite, but you’re all I have. I need you so goddamned much.”

She swore again, Laura thought. But it’s all right. I shouldn’t let it bother me.

They reached Laura’s building and walked slowly up the winding staircase, not speaking and hardly thinking. When they reached the room Laura turned on the light and bolted the door, taking the little blonde in her arms and holding her close.

Then their clothes were off, tossed on the floor as she had predicted. Then the light was off and they were in the bed with the covers over them, and Laura forgot everything but the soft and beautiful and exciting body she held in her arms.

Later she lay on the bed with her head on the pillow and Peggy in her arms, with Peggy’s face warm against her breast. She felt relaxed against the cool sheets.

She closed her eyes in the darkness and thought of Peggy and tried to picture Peggy’s small girlish face in her mind.

But the face she saw was Jan Marlowe’s.

5

It was Saturday morning. Jan woke up slowly, stretching and yawning like a cat, slowly pushing the bedclothes back and pulling herself out from under them.

It was late, almost noon. She sat up in bed, unconscious of her nakedness, her mind slipping back to the previous evening.

She remembered leaving The Shadows, half walking and half running along Macdougal Street and Third Street and finally reaching her apartment, exhausted. She threw herself headlong upon the bed without bothering to remove her clothes, trying desperately to sleep, shutting her eyes and saying sleep, sleep, sleep, over and over to herself. But she couldn’t.

So she read, lying on her bed and racing through a book and starting another book when the first one was finished. The books came from Ruthie’s bookshelf, but that was all she could remember about them now. Titles, plots and characters escaped her completely. She only remembered that she had read swiftly, with a vengeance, attempting to bury herself in the books, to think about nothing else, to lose her mind completely in the rhythm of the prose and the flow of the narrative.

It had worked in the past. She discovered reading the year her mother died and had read everything, racing through libraries, reading not books but complete works of her favorite authors, reading totally incomprehensible poetry for the sound and meter alone. Reading constantly, forgetting everything but the book in her hand, even shutting out the world and the light and the presence of other persons in her room.

But last night it did not work. She plowed on and on through the books, turning pages automatically. Her mind kept wandering back to the coffee shop and to the bar, and suddenly she would catch herself, realizing that she had read three or four pages without noticing a word or remembering what they were about.

Mike Hawkins, who frightened her with the invitation in his deep eyes. Who scared her with the promise he made, the empty promise of fulfillment she could never find with him.

Peggy or Laura. The beautiful Lesbian who could bring her the pleasure she wanted but was afraid to accept.

In one night she had met two fires, two persons who attracted her and repelled her and frightened her at once. In one night in Greenwich Village she had been awakened severely.

She almost longed for Indiana. She almost ached for its emptiness and loneliness, for the fresh air and two-story buildings and quiet people who never did anything, who never made her think about anything more upsetting than whether or not it might rain that night.

She almost craved this emptiness, and then, just before sunrise, she fell asleep.

Now she was awake and hungry. She was also naked, and she realized this fact with a start, flushing with embarrassment and thinking that someone was watching her, that somewhere a pair of eyes watched her, burning over her skin. It was ridiculous, of course. There was no one near and no way for anyone to see her. Her window faced a blank wall and the door to her bedroom was shut.

What was she afraid of?

She wasn’t sure. She stood up abruptly, taking a deep breath and holding it in her lungs, throwing her shoulders back, expanding her chest. She released the air in a rush.

Naked, she walked to the bathroom and turned on the shower. When the water reached the right temperature she stepped into the tub and soaped herself thoroughly, working the lather into her skin. Then she stepped under the shower, enjoying the way the water beat down on her, hard, pelting her skin and waking it up.

She soaped and rinsed again. Then she rubbed the soap into her long black hair and rinsed it and soaped and rinsed, repeating the process until her hair squeaked between her fingers.

When she had rubbed herself dry with the heavy white towel, she returned to the bedroom and began to dress. The shower had intensified her hunger, and she wished that Ruthie had left food in the refrigerator, or that she had had sense enough to buy breakfast food the day before. At least Ruthie left a houseful of staples — sugar and salt and flour and all the rest, and a full stock of pots and pans and dishes. That was something.

She ate at the diner again — ham and eggs and orange juice and black coffee. It was good, but when she paid the bill and tipped the counterman she realized that eating out was costing much too much money, that she would have to do her own cooking from now on. She could always get a job, but that would be a great waste of time.

She had little enough time as it was. Three months, and that wasn’t nearly enough time for a city like New York, not at all enough time to explore it and get to know it, to go every place and do everything there was to do. It would be foolish to waste eight hours a day working.

Let her father pay for it. Let the old bastard pay and pay and pay—

Sure, she thought. Another indication, another typical reaction.

My father.

I hate him.

He’s good to me and he loves me, but I hate him. He was good to mother, but I can’t help feeling he killed her.

Another sign. Another complex the doctors could label. Another clue.

Why didn’t she give up? Why didn’t she quit fighting and join the three of them in The Shadows and go home with one of them and find out, finally? Why?

She hurried out of the diner and walked to the supermarket down the block. She pushed a cart up and down the long aisles, filling the basket and deciding while she shopped that she wouldn’t cook dinners at the apartment. There were so many restaurants to try. Economizing on breakfasts and lunches was enough.

She’d be spending enough time in the apartment anyway.

She shopped slowly, buying a large quantity of food. She stocked up on eggs and coffee and bacon, and bread and sandwich meat for lunches, and fruit juices and milk and everything else that caught her eye. Shopping could be an end in itself. She had learned long ago that it could provide as perfect an escape as reading, that a person could lose sight of herself completely when she tried on pair after pair of shoes or pushed a market basket or simply stared into store windows.

The hell with it, she thought angrily. The hell with it, whatever it was. I don’t care what I am or who I am, but I can’t go on escaping forever. I can stand it, whatever I am. But I can’t stand running, always running.

The hell with it.

Back at the apartment she unpacked the groceries and put them away. The refrigerator looked better now, filled with food and ready for use. The shelves were not so empty any more. She put a pot of water on the stove for coffee and made the bed while she waited for it to boil.

The apartment was beginning to feel more and more like home. Somehow the mere act of working in an apartment, of straightening it up and buying food for it, made it seem to belong to her. It had been Ruthie’s and it would be Ruthie’s once again when Ruthie returned to the city, but now it belonged to her, and she lived in it.

She’d buy more books, she decided. Books that she wanted. And some decent curtains for the front window. And a good-looking table cloth for the kitchen table instead of the red and white checkered rag that was on it now.

She put a spoonful of instant coffee in a cup, poured water in, and sat down in the living room to drink it.

I’m here, she thought. I’m here, but where do I go from here?

The time passed. She started another of Ruthie’s books, an obscure novel that didn’t sell well but had been reviewed favorably in several of the literary quarterlies. The characters remained quite shapeless after the first fifty pages, and she put the book down unfinished, knowing she would never return to it.

She sat motionless in her chair for several minutes. Then she rose and walked to the kitchen to re-light the burner under the pot of water. While it boiled she brushed her hair before the bathroom mirror, letting its glossy blackness flow over her shoulders and down her back. She put on fresh lipstick and smiled at herself in the mirror — a fast smile that left her face before she was out of the bathroom.

She made more coffee and returned to the chair in the living room and pulled another book from the shelf.

It was four-thirty.

It was five-thirty when the bell rang.

The bell startled her, for she had never stopped to realize that there actually was one for her apartment, that a person might visit her and might press the button in the vestibule. She got to her feet, setting the book down on the arm of the chair and walking to the kitchen. There was an answering buzzer for her to press, she knew, but she didn’t have the faintest idea where it was. She hunted around for several minutes before she located it under the light switch. For a moment she hesitated; then she pushed the buzzer and heard the door open in the hallway.

“Who is it?” she called, but there was no answer. Then there was a knock on her door and she opened it.

It was the folksinger, the boy called Mike. “Hi,” he said. “Mind if I come in?”

She took a step back and he walked through the kitchen to the living room, sat down on the couch. She sat across from him in her chair, wondering how he had found her and what he wanted.

“Saw you walk home last night,” he explained, answering her question before she had a chance to ask it. “Just wanted to drop over.”

“Why?”

He looked very relaxed in a flannel shirt and faded blue dungarees, as if he was already at home in her apartment.

“Why? Oh, I wanted to get to know you.”

“What do you mean?”

He leaned forward, resting his chin in one hand and looking at her intently. “New York’s a funny town,” he said, slowly. “It’s the only town worth living in, but there are some problems. For instance, it’s impossible to start a conversation with someone like you. Know what I mean?”

She shook her head.

“I’m from a little hick town upstate that nobody ever heard of. There was never anything much to do, but if I ran into anyone new on the street I could say hello.

“Here it’s different. Suppose a gal and a guy bump into each other on the subway. She looks interesting. She’s pretty, she looks bright — so the guy’s interested. What can he do?”

“I don’t know.”

“He can’t do a thing. Whatever he does, he comes across as a guy on the make. If she’s a tramp he’s set, but suppose she’s a nice gal. Then she rides to her stop and he rides to his stop and they never see each other again.”

“Unless—”

“There is no unless.” He leaned back, crossing his legs and smiling. “There’s nothing he can do.”

“He can follow her home and drop over the next day,” she said. “And then he can tell her what’s the trouble with New York.”

He grinned. “All right,” he said. “I’m interested in you. Now you know.”

I knew that, she thought. You didn’t have to tell me. I knew that from the way you looked at me.

“I tried last night,” he went on. “I started a conversation, tried to get you talking. And you assumed I was on the make and cut out.”

“I didn’t think—”

“Of course you did. I’m not blaming you; it’s the way things go around here. But I would like to talk to you and I’m not on the make. If you want I’ll get out now, but—”

“No,” she said, slowly. “No, stay.”

“Thanks.” She couldn’t tell whether or not he was being sarcastic.

“I mean... you’re right. I don’t know anyone in New York and I should. I should get to know people.” Her words sounded mildly ridiculous, but she was talking as much to herself as to him, getting things straightened out in her mind. At first she had resented his visit but now she was glad he had come, glad there was somebody for her to talk to.

“Good. Let’s get to know each other.”

On the surface his words seemed to flow easily, but she sensed that the conversation was hard for him, as hard as it was for her. It seemed as though he hadn’t played this particular scene before and was unsure of his lines. Maybe the unsureness was part of his line, a line he had used dozens of times before. But she doubted it.

“How do we start?”

“Anywhere. Tell me who you are and what you’re doing here and anything else that seems to fit in. Okay?”

“Okay.” She smiled suddenly, warming to the game. Then she lit a cigarette and drew deeply on it.

“I still don’t know where to begin.”

“At the beginning. Don’t worry — I’ll stop you if it gets boring.”

She began to talk — guardedly at first but more openly as he drew her out and she began to relax. She told him about her home and her parents and the school she went to and the classes she took and the books she read and the people she knew. She left out a lot, but what she omitted didn’t matter.

And he helped her along. He seemed to know everything, to have read all the books and have been to all the places. He wasn’t much older than she was, but he talked as if something had made him grow a great deal in a short time. As he talked his body relaxed more on the couch.

She learned about him. She learned how he’d left home before finishing high school and how he had travelled all up and down the Eastern seaboard, winding up in New York three years ago. He’d been there ever since.

Once in a while he worked. He had pushed a garment truck on Seventh Avenue for a few weeks, clerked in book stores and drugstores, bussed tables in cafeterias and slung hash in a beanery once. He had seaman’s papers and twice he had shipped out for short cruises along the coast as a deckhand.

He’d learned the guitar six years before in Virginia. It accompanied him wherever he went. He learned new songs constantly and he sang them all — at parties, in Washington Square on Sunday afternoons, at folksings and, when he was lucky, at folk music concerts.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Keep singing.” He smiled.

“Will you keep on like this? I mean—”

“You mean will I always be a bum with a guitar? I hope not. I’m sick of starving for my art, Jan. You hear people talk about starving in a garret as though it was a treat, but those people never missed a meal or lived in a cold water flat with roaches for company.

“It’s only romantic for the first week. Then you’re too tired all the time to think how noble it all is, and you feel as though you have lead in your shoes, and you stay out all night and sleep all day because at night your room’s too cold to sleep in.

“Did you ever live like that?”

She shook her head.

“Of course not. But I have. For awhile I was the only person in the Western world who was starving to death and eating caviar every day. Know why?”

“Why?”

“Because it was very nourishing and the cans were small enough to fit in my pocket without bulging. Besides, there was something poetic about it.”

“Were you ever caught?”

“No, but I was hoping they’d catch me, just like in all the jokes. Then they’d put me in a nice warm cell and give me food. It was a hell of a way to live.”

He paused. “I’m through with that,” he said. “I want to make enough money to live on. Not a fortune, but enough.”

“How?”

“Singing.”

“Is there money in folksinging?”

He laughed. “Not much, but it’s there. It’s tough — you keep on singing and you keep on trying and you let people listen to you, and you get a few plugs in mags like Caravan and get heard by the right people. If you’re lucky you cut a record.”

“For a special record company?”

He nodded. “Elektra, Folkways, Tradition, Comet — some label like that. The record date pays a little with more coming in if the record sells. And when people buy the record you can get lucky and play a few concerts and club dates, and if you make it big you cut a pop record or do a bit in Hollywood. People like Bikel and Seeger made it that way.”

“Would you want to record popular songs? I thought—”

“You thought that would be the so-called act of prostituting my art? Hell, I’d be happy to prostitute my art. That’s another expression the people who never starved come up with. They think Art is playing the guitar in your room with the door closed. That’s not the way I want to sing.”

“I like the way you sing,” she said. “I only heard one song last night, but I’d like to hear more sometime.”

“Would you? Well, that could be arranged.” He grinned.

She didn’t say anything.

“Jan,” he said after a moment, “I’m not on the make. Really, I’m not — but would you come to a party over at my pad tonight? It’s not a big thing, just a few people dropping in. There probably will be a mob by the time it gets rolling, but nothing much doing but singing. Would you like to come?”

“I don’t know, Mike.”

“Why not? Look, you don’t have to come as my date or anything. Just drop over whenever you feel like it. I’ll have the guitar there and a few other singers’ll be around. We’ll have an easy-going evening and you can get to know some people. Why not come?”

“I’m busy tonight.” The minute the words were out of her mouth she realized how phony they sounded. “I—”

“See? It’s impossible to get to know anybody in this damned town. They always think—”

“It’s not that.”

“Then why don’t you come?”

Why not? And she said, “All right. I’d like to come, then.”

He smiled.

“You see,” she went on, “it’s not easy for a girl either. A guy could think she’s... on the make.”

“I don’t think that.”

“I know.”

For a moment neither of them said anything. Then he said, “I’ve got to cut out now.” He stood up and started to the door, and she noticed that his eyes did not look as tired as they had before.

“Eight-thirty or nine will be about right,” he said. “Want me to pick you up?”

“Don’t bother,” she said. “I’ll be going out for dinner anyway.”

“Okay. My pad’s on Cornelia Street north of Bleecker. Know where that is?”

She nodded. She had passed that street last night on the way to Macdougal Street.

“Twenty-four Cornelia Street. It’s on the third floor.”

“I’ll remember it.”

He stood with his hand on the door knob looking down at her and she realized how tall he was, how he towered over her. He seemed to be searching for something more to say.

“Well,” he said at length, “I’ll see you then.”

He opened the door and walked down the hall and she stepped to the doorway to watch him leave, following him with her eyes until he was out of the building and gone. Then she closed the door, slowly and almost absently, and went to the bedroom. She sat on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette, watching the smoke rise to the network of cracks in the ceiling.

She liked him; he was handsome and honest and interesting and perceptive. Not entirely honest, of course — he was on the make, but on the make in a nice way.

He could be a friend.

He could introduce her to New York and to some of the people in it, and he could teach her things and take her places.

And, if she let him, he could make love to her. And, afterwards, she could lie back on the bed, alone and empty and sick. Then she would be a virgin twice removed, a little girl from Indiana who tried it once and didn’t like it and didn’t have the brains to quit.

She was afraid of him.

6

His name was Michael Hawkins. He was the oldest of five children of an English father and an Irish mother in Marionsburg, a town of 2,500 people in the foothills of the Adirondacks.

In Marionsburg his father ran a drugstore and his mother worked behind the counter. Jed Hawkins was a good businessman — not too clever, hardly imaginative, but willing to put in the long hours necessary to earn enough money to support a wife and five children. His mother was a good woman, but he never knew her at all. It took all her time to work in the store and to bring up the children. He was the oldest; he learned to get along by himself. Afternoons he ran errands for his father at the drugstore and swept the floor and dusted the bottles on the shelves. The rest of the time he was alone.

He was a good student and a natural athlete, but he spent little time with school books and less with the boys in his classes. They always seemed so young to him, and they walked around with their eyes closed, hardly realizing that there was a world outside of Marionsburg.

Instead he preferred the company of the lonely old men who sat on the wooden benches in the square and talked with him by the hour. He got along well with them — they had things to tell him that he was hungry to hear, and they in turn were glad to find such a willing listener. Nobody else seemed to listen to them any more.

When he began reading he by-passed the juvenile fiction that others his age were reading. He discovered Steinbeck at fourteen, Wolfe and Dos Passos a year later. The books only drew him farther away from his friends and farther in spirit from Marionsburg. He walked by himself, walked far into the woods at the edge of town singing lonely songs to himself and growing hungry for the world. He listened to the trains rushing by, heard their whistles and watched the smoke trail off in the distance as they left him behind, and he wondered how long it would be before he was riding one of them.

He learned songs constantly. When he heard a song once, it was his and he never forgot it. His family was too tired to sing and his friends were wrapped up in the monotony of popular music, but the old men in the square taught him the old songs, songs of the road and the songs the wobblies used to sing. The Negroes on the south side of town taught him blues, and he would sit on a stump in the woods by the hour, singing blues in his husky, throaty voice, making up new verses and twisting the old ones around.

He was sixteen when he made love to the Negro woman who had taught him John Hardy. He was unsure of himself at first, but she held him gently in her warm arms and helped him, moving expertly beneath him. Afterwards, when she had kissed him and told him to go, he had walked for hours in the woods. It was autumn, and the leaves crunched beneath his feet as he walked, but he was not conscious of the leaves, or of the chill in the air.

He knew that he could not remain in Marionsburg any longer. He had crossed some sort of bridge; remaining at home would be a waste of time, a waste of himself. He wanted to tell his parents, but he knew that he could not make them understand why he had to go.

“I’m leaving town,” he told his father after supper. “Going tonight.”

“Why?”

“Knocked up a girl,” he said. And his father nodded his head slowly; this was the kind of reason he could understand.

“Where are you headed?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “South, I figure.”

His father told his mother. Then Mike kissed them both good-by and took the twenty dollars that his father slipped him. He walked to the railroad siding and waited in the brush, and when the freight pulled out of town he was on it, snug in an empty boxcar. He lay down in one corner of the car and slept all the way to Pennsylvania.

He never went back to Marionsburg.

He was young and the world was huge. There were places to see and he saw them — Virginia and Delaware and the Kentucky hills. There were songs to learn, and he learned them wherever he went.

And there were women, too. There were the wives and daughters of men who never travelled, and their lips were soft against his and their bodies warm and alive. There was a spinster librarian in Broken Ridge, a waitress in Oak Valley.

He worked when he could, begged or stole when there was no work. Less than a year after he left home someone showed him how to play the guitar. He learned quickly, almost instinctively, and now that he could sing for his supper he didn’t steal as frequently.

From time to time he mailed postcards to his parents. There was never room on the cards for him to say those things that he had trouble expressing and there was never any mail for him. He never stayed in one place long enough to have an address of his own until he reached New York.

There the wanderlust left him. By that time every small town was the same to him, but New York excited him and gave him something altogether new to absorb. He took a room on Henry Street on the lower East Side and wrote a note to his parents with his address. His sister Claire wrote a short note back, telling him that his mother and father were dead, killed four months before in an auto accident.

He never wrote again.

He was walking aimlessly now, half heading for the apartment on Cornelia Street and half killing time. New York had been good to him, he reflected. New York had given him a home and helped him to learn things he needed to know. He met other folksingers — banjo pickers and guitarists and others who strummed mandolins and dulcimers. He met blues singers and ballad singers and greensleevers and bluegrassers. He listened to them and he sang with them.

Michael Hawkins, he thought. Boy Folksinger.

It wasn’t enough. The parties weren’t enough, nor were the folksingers or the back rooms of the coffee houses. Greenwich Village was certainly not enough.

And the women were not enough either.

Women like Sandy. Saundra Kane, nee Sandra Cohen. The liberated ones. The exchange students from Kew Gardens, the little girls from the provinces who came to the Village in droves.

How did the song go again?

I’ve turned my blue jeans

On Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens

And the Village is my home...

Sandy, who played at being a Bohemian on an allowance from her father, an allowance that paid for food and rent for both of them. Sandy, who was on stage twenty-four hours a day, even in bed. Who thought there was poetry in filth. Who kept him.

Michael Hawkins, he thought. Boy Gigolo.

As long as he stayed with her he would stay right where he was.

Which was nowhere.

He would go on singing in coffee houses and at parties and once a week in Washington Square. He might even cut a record some day. But he would never really make it, never get to the top, never even start for the top. He wouldn’t care enough to try hard enough.

He had the talent. He knew himself, and he knew that he was good enough to make it. While his voice wasn’t perfect, his style was distinctive, and it suited his voice and the way he played the guitar. He played with simple chords and a compelling beat, and he sang with the beat, strong and cleanly.

But lots of people had talent. Some of them made it and others didn’t. Some of them lost and others won. The whole world was divided into winners and losers, and it was hard to tell what was the dividing line.

Maybe someone like Jan could make the difference...

Turning the corner of Cornelia Street he laughed to himself. In the first place he wouldn’t get Jan; in the second place if he did she would turn into another Saundra, a phony from Indiana instead of a phony from the Bronx. And that was something he needed like he needed cholera.

Twenty-four Cornelia Street, third floor. My pad, he had told Jan, but it wasn’t his pad. He didn’t have a pad. It was Saundra’s.

It even looked like Saundra. There was the same contrived sloppiness about the place, the bed that looked as though it had been left unmade for effect, the prints purposely hung at a tilt on the walls. The floor was dirty, and he grinned as he remembered watching her going through a small hell one afternoon. She had wanted to sweep the floor, wanted it to be clean. But she thought it looked better dirty.

Two years, he thought. Two years at the most and she’ll do a Marjorie Morningstar and marry some doctor and move to Connecticut. She’ll laugh when she thinks of this hole and the guy she used to live with.

She came out of the bathroom, her hair messy and her eyes made up too heavily, smiling.

“Party tonight,” she said.

He nodded.

She walked across the room, leaning back on the messy bed uncomfortably, then stretching out on the bed with a pillow under her head and her shoes off.

“Where were you?”

He shrugged. “Out for a walk. I called Henry.”

“What did he say?”

“He’ll call me. He may be able to set up an audition for next week.”

“That’s good.”

She sounded as concerned as if he had said that the sun was shining. It could be big, an audition with Comet.

He hadn’t told Jan about it and hardly wanted to think about it himself, but he could tell Saundra easily enough. It didn’t count with her. She wouldn’t remember. She wouldn’t mention it again, and if he got the audition and left the pad that day she would ask him where he was going. And when he told her, she would say, “That’s good,” in the same tone of voice.

“I’m glad you’re home,” she said suddenly, holding out her arms for him.

This isn’t home, he thought.

But he went to her.

7

The party was in full swing when she arrived at nine-fifteen. She walked in timidly, unsure of herself in a roomful of strangers, her eyes scanning the room, looking for Mike. All she could see was a group of people her own age sitting on the floor and on the bed on the other side of the room. For a moment she wanted to turn around and leave without speaking to anyone.

Then she heard the guitar and saw Mike in the middle of the crowd, sitting on the floor with a girl beside him. She walked in slowly, wondering whether she ought to say hello to him first or if she should just make herself at home.

He was playing the guitar — not singing, but banging out a hard blues chorus and drinking periodically from a bottle of chianti. Once while she was standing by the door he looked up at her, but he didn’t seem to see her. There was a glaze in his eyes, and she guessed that he had been drinking fairly steadily since the party began.

She decided to wait. If anyone bothered her, she could say that Mike had invited her, but in the meanwhile she just wanted to sit and listen and watch. She looked around briefly for a chair; finding none, she sat down on the floor. She was wearing blue jeans and a light blue blouse, and she saw that she had selected the right outfit.

The other girls were dressed more or less the same. Some of them — the girl with Mike, for example — seemed to her to be deliberately trying to look sloppy. Jan remembered the story of the Communist girls during the 30’s who used to look in the mirror to make sure their stocking-seams were crooked. That was the impression these girls gave her. If they wore lipstick it was too thick and applied lopsidedly. More often they left off the lipstick entirely and plastered on purple eye-shadow with a trowel.

The boys, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be putting on as much of an act. Their dress was less stylized and they seemed more at home in the general messiness of the apartment. The girls were obviously pretending that they didn’t notice any disorder; the boys acted as though they were genuinely accustomed to it.

Impressions.

LIFE Goes to a Village Party, she thought. I should have brought my camera. A camera and a notebook.

“Have a beer,” someone said. Janet started. She turned around and took a can of beer from a short boy with red hair and a slight growth of red beard, who disappeared again as soon as she had the can in her hand. The beer was good and cold and she took a deep drink of it, spilling a little down her chin.

The night was still warm although the sun had set a while ago. Thirty-odd people in one room made the night even warmer and beer taste even better. She sat back and drank again, no longer caring that she didn’t know anyone. It was a nice party.

What’s that smells like fish, Mama?

Tell you if you really want to know.

Yeah, what’s that smells like fish, Mama?

I’ll tell you if you really want to know...

She didn’t have to look up to know that it was Mike singing. There was something very distinctive about his voice, about the way he picked the strings of the guitar and sang with it. And there was an intangible quality, too — someone else could play the same chords and sing the same notes and it would come out weak and pale by comparison.

She liked the way he sang.

She liked his name, too. Mike was blunt and strong and honest and rugged, and Michael was music and poetry and something tranquil. It suited him, matched the odd and intense combination of tough and tender which she could feel in him.

Well, it smells like fish and it tastes like fish

But you better not serve it in a chafing dish

Keep on trucking, Mama, trucking my blues away...

The beer was gone suddenly and she was drinking wine from a bottle and passing the bottle to a thin young man with a shock of black hair that hung limp over his forehead. The young man looked a little like Hitler, and he was trying to talk to her but she liked being all alone in the group, all alone with herself, and she didn’t answer him.

There were more people in the room. There were at least fifty by now, and others kept arriving. Everybody who came seemed to have a bottle, and the bottles kept passing back and forth around the room. And she kept sampling them.

Smoking a cigarette, she realized abruptly that she was drunk. It was nice. It was very nice being drunk, especially when it didn’t cost anything. She felt the side of her face and it was numb to her touch, her skin feeling even cooler and smoother than usual. She was a little bit dizzy, and she drew more deeply on the cigarette as if that would stop the dizziness. She smiled quickly at no one in particular and her face felt funny. She let the muscles in her face relax slowly.

There were more guitars going now and she didn’t hear Mike singing any more, but heard instead a deep-voiced boy singing about a bad man named Stackolee. Another boy passed her another bottle and she put it to her mouth and drank. It was wine, but she couldn’t tell what kind of wine it was or even whether it was good or bad. It was wet and her mouth was dry so she kept on drinking until the young man shook his head strangely and took the bottle away from her.

You’re drunk, she whispered to herself. LIFE Goes to a Village Party and Gets Smashed. Poor little Life gets tight as a kite. Or was it high as a kite? Tight as something, but she couldn’t remember.

A hand touched her shoulder and she turned, ready to take another drink from another nice young man’s bottle. Mike was standing beside her.

She saw that he was sober, and that was funny because she was drunk now, and when she had come in he had been drunk and she had been sober. It was funny.

She started to giggle.

“How long have you been here?”

It was a silly question, because she had been there so long. It was so silly that she started to giggle again.

“I guess you’ve been here awhile, huh?”

“Uh-huh.”

He smiled. “Why didn’t you say hello? I didn’t even see you come in. I just got up to take a break and saw you sitting here, so I came over. Having fun?”

“Uh-huh.”

She thought that he was nice, very nice, and very funny because she was drunk and he wasn’t.

“You’re drunk.” It wasn’t an accusation but a simple statement of fact.

“I was for awhile but I sang myself sober. Do you like the party?”

“Uh-huh. It’s a beautiful party.”

“It’s a terrible party. I suppose you like the apartment?”

She made a face.

“Good. It’s a terrible apartment, too, and I’m glad you don’t like it. I’d introduce you to some people, but they’re pretty awful, too.”

“They are?”

“Yeah. Miserable people.”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“They’re not like us. We’re alike — did you know that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Mike and Ike — we think alike. Except it’s Mike and Jan, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I like the way you say that. You say it with a giggle even when you keep your face straight. You’re pretty drunk.”

“Uh-huh.” She giggled aloud, thinking that he wasn’t quite as sober as she had thought. “You’re silly.”

“I am?”

“Uh-huh.”

More people came in. The boy playing Mike’s guitar was singing a song that everybody seemed to know and the party was getting progressively noisier. The girl with the eye make-up and the long black hair who had been sitting with Mike was alone in a corner drinking from a dark brown bottle. Another boy had passed out silently with his head in a girl’s lap. The girl didn’t seem aware of him and went on talking earnestly to another couple, absently running her fingers through the boy’s hair while she talked.

“Let’s get out of here.”

“No.”

“Come on. It’s too damn noisy here.”

“Where can we go?”

“Some place quiet.”

She shook her head. “You can’t leave now. It’s your party.”

“So what?”

“Well, you can’t leave your own party, can you?”

“Sure I can.”

“No.” She shook her head solemnly. “Besides, you have a girl here.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. The girl in the corner with the blue stuff on her eyes. I think she’s drunk.”

“I think you’re drunk, too.”

“I think she’s drunker. I think she wants you to go over and talk to her.”

“Is that what you want?”

“I’m not sure. She’s your girl, isn’t she?”

“Not really. I... oh, the hell with it. Let’s get out of this hole.”

She put a cigarette between her lips and let him light it for her. It was tasteless, and she wondered whether it was the wine she had drunk that made the cigarette tasteless or whether it was because she had been smoking too many cigarettes.

“Let’s stay right here. It’s a nice party.”

“The hell it is.”

“It’s a beautiful party. And you can’t leave your own party in your own apartment, and you can’t leave Saundra.”

His eyes widened. “How did you know her name?”

“You introduced me, sort of. At the coffee shop.”

He nodded, remembering.

“Besides, she’s pretty.”

“Do you think so?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Honestly?”

She lowered her head and regarded the cigarette thoughtfully. “I think,” she said, “that she looks as though she’s made out of cardboard.”

He laughed. She like the way he laughed, the way he let his whole body relax in laughter.

“She is,” he said. “Cardboard and library paste.”

“With stuff on her eyes.”

“Definitely. Look, let’s get the hell out of here.”

He stood up and reached down for her hand, and it was very natural to stand up and slip her hand into his. Her hand seemed very small when he held it, small and soft in his, and she felt the tips of his fingers close around the back of her hand. They were rough and calloused from the guitar.

They were at the doorway when she asked, “Where are we going?”

“Anywhere. It doesn’t really matter, does it?”

“I suppose not.”

“As long as it’s quiet.”

They were on the stairway and she had to lean against him just a little. Too much wine, she thought. She was just a little dizzy, with just a little too much wine in her, and it was just a little bit difficult for her to keep up with everything that was happening.

“Too much of that lousy vino,” he said.

“Uh-huh. Beer, too.”

“The beer wasn’t too bad. Hang on until you get outside. The air’ll help.”

“I guess so. Where’re we going?”

“I don’t know. Where it’s quiet, that’s all. What’s the difference?”

Slowly, she said, “I think I’m a little afraid of you.”

“Afraid?”

She squeezed his hand. “Uh-huh. I like being with you and it scares me too.”

“You don’t have to be afraid.”

“Maybe not.”

“You don’t. I’m harmless.”

“Sure.”

“Honest. We’ll just walk around for awhile. The air will do you good and it won’t hurt me either. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“No passes. I promise.”

“Okay.”

“And there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“I guess not.”

“There really isn’t. I like you too much to chance spoiling things.”

She looked up at him, searching his eyes, hoping that he was telling the truth and that he really did like her, that he liked her very much. It seemed important to her. She wasn’t sure why.

“Do you? Don’t say that unless you mean it.”

“I mean it.”

“That’s good,” she said. “It really is.”

Outside the cold air hit her in the head like a sledgehammer. She was sober all at once, still a bit light in the head but no longer dizzy. She breathed deeply. The air in New York was so different at night. The heat was gone from it and the smoke and grime of the city were not so noticeable.

It was quiet as only New York can be late at night. She heard the late sounds: staccato footsteps that can be heard when only a few people are on the sidewalks, sharp car noises that in the daytime are only part of the blended rumble of the city. When a car passed them on Cornelia Street it seemed out of place, as if all the cars should have been locked up for the night hours ago.

They didn’t speak. It wasn’t necessary, for there was a certain rapport already established between them. The closeness induced by the wine had vanished with the shock of the cold air, but it had been replaced by a clearer emotion.

She felt as though she were standing on the top of a narrow ridge. On one side was the sunlit world, a world of husband and children and the home she wanted. On the other side was the shadow world, the gay world, the Lesbian world.

One little push. That was all it would take — one little push and she would topple from her perch. It wasn’t an easy perch to hold; the ridge grew narrower every day, and every day she thought she was about to fall. She wanted so much to reach out her fingers and grab at the sunshine.

If she tried to jump it would be too easy to slip and fall back into the shadows. Once she had tried to jump. She had been lucky then; she was still on the ridge.

And every day the ridge narrowed.

They were on Bleecker Street walking toward Sixth Avenue. Her hand still felt soft and small and comfortable in his, and she still leaned a little against him although she wasn’t drunk any longer.

“What time is it?”

Her voice shattered the silence just as the cold air had shattered the drunkenness. As soon as she had spoken the question she found herself leaning less upon him. She almost wanted to remove her hand from his, but she left it where it was.

“Around three.”

“Three? How did it get to be three?”

“Closer to two, maybe.”

“That’s still a good five hours. What did I do for five hours?”

“Most of the time you were drinking, I guess. I didn’t even see you come in, so it’s hard to say what you were doing before I saw you.”

“I didn’t do anything silly, did I?”

He laughed. “I don’t think you talked to anyone all night long.” She shook her head, unable to believe that the time had passed that quickly and that she had done nothing for so many hours.

“What were you doing? Did you sing all that time?”

“Most of the time. A few of us swapped songs, so I wasn’t singing straight through.”

“That’s a long time to sing.”

“Not so long. I went for seven hours once without stopping, and that was all by myself.”

“When was that?”

“A few years back. But I was younger then.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re still saying ‘uh-huh’. Do you say that all the time?”

“Sometimes I say ‘no’.”

“You do?”

“Uh-huh.”

It was easy. Talking to him was very easy, and he was very tall and very strong and kissing him might be easy, too, and it might be easy to let him touch her with his big rough hands.

He wouldn’t hurt her. His hands frightened her a little because they could hurt her so easily, could bruise the soft skin of her body. But they could be gentle, too. She knew that.

“Where are we?”

“Bleecker and Sixth.”

“Oh. Where are we going?”

“Nowhere special. There’s a street here you ought to see. Have you seen Minetta yet?”

“No. What is it?”

“It’s right around the corner. It looks the way the Village is supposed to look — too narrow for two cars at the same time and it bends in the middle and the buildings are painted different colors. Want to see it?”

She nodded. They crossed Sixth Avenue and turned left into the crooked little street. Minetta was exactly as he had described it. It was narrow, with just enough room for one lane of traffic down the middle of the street. The lamps were old-fashioned and at first glance she thought they were gaslights until he explained that the only gaslights were on Macdougal Alley.

And the buildings looked ridiculous at first, robin’s-egg blue and pink and muted scarlet and dove grey under the dim lights. She looked at them a second time and they looked pretty, and the third glance had them looking quite lovely and almost beautiful.

It was a make-believe street. She knew now that it didn’t really exist and that people didn’t actually live in the funny little buildings. He pointed out the little shops in some of the buildings — carpenters, leatherworkers, silversmiths and even a Chinese laundry. But it was all make-believe, and she thought what fun it would be to have a pretend apartment on the make-believe street and not worry about anything except what color to paint the building next spring.

“Woo-woo,” she said.

“What?”

“Woo-woo. Like in that book by John O’Hara, where the girl is a little bit drunk and everything is pretty and she says woo-woo. Don’t you remember?”

“Now I do, I guess. Was it Hope of Heaven?”

“I think so. I don’t remember much about it except that it was in California and the girl was a little drunk. I feel very woo-woo now.”

“How does it feel?”

“It feels good.” She rested her head against his shoulder and gave his hand a squeeze. “It feels wonderful.”

“Woo-woo.”

“That’s it exactly. That’s just how I feel.”

“You’re nuts,” he said. “Do you know that?”

“Not nuts. Just a little woo-woo.”

“Nuts. Nuts in a nice way, and pretty and drunk and even woo-woo, but still nuts.”

“Maybe.”

“You are. C’mon, I want to show you the courtyard. It’s the best part of Minetta.”

She followed him through the gateway of the building on the corner and into the courtyard. It looked even more unreal than the rest of the street, more make-believe than anything she had ever seen, and she decided that she must have walked through a looking-glass instead of through a gateway, because this couldn’t possibly be in New York.

There was a garden, first of all. In the middle of New York there was a street with a building with a courtyard with a garden. It was a real garden, with rose bushes and zinnias and delphiniums and something that looked like a grape vine. In the center of the largest flower bed there was a terra-cotta cat with water flowing and bubbling from its mouth.

The balconies overlooking the garden seemed to come straight from Mexico. All the windows had heavy iron grillwork. She felt as though she were standing in a patio in Guadalajara.

She said, “You should have brought your guitar.”

“Why?”

“So you could sing Spanish songs to me. I wish I could live here. Barrow Street is nice, but this is magical. Can you feel the magic?”

“I think so. I’ve been here a million times, but you haven’t and that makes it new for me. Does that sound corny?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s true, though.”

“Then it’s not corny, but I still wish I had an apartment here. I wonder what kind of people live here, Mike?”

“I don’t know. The rent must be pretty steep.”

“It would be worth it. And at night I could sit by my window and you could serenade me through the iron grille. Do you know Spanish?”

“Just a few Spanish songs. That’s all.”

“That’s enough, because we couldn’t talk, you know. You could only sing to me, and if you were very good I might throw you a rose.”

She turned to face him and he took her arms in his hands, looking down into her eyes. She returned his look. For several seconds nothing happened. There was total silence in the small courtyard, total lack of sound or motion. She was conscious only of herself and him.

In a moment he will kiss me, she thought. Do I want to be kissed?

A moment passed. He was about to kiss her. His head was ready to come down to hers, his arms ready to close around her body and press her against him.

And then, all at once, they were not alone.

She sensed them before she heard them and heard them before she saw them. They walked into the courtyard, not wandering or strolling but walking with a purpose, crossing the courtyard toward a doorway on the opposite side. She knew at once that she had seen them before, but there was a half-second between that moment and the moment of recognition while she waited for Mike to kiss her.

And then she remembered.

She turned slightly away from Mike and stared full into the face of the girl with the red-brown hair. She looked at the girl and the girl returned her glance and instantly they were alone in the courtyard as Mike and the small blonde girl seemed to fade away into the shadows. Mike still held her and the blonde’s arm still encircled the girl’s waist, but neither Mike nor the blonde mattered at all.

“Laura,” said the blonde. She said something else but that was all Jan heard.

Laura.

There was no mistaking Laura’s glance. Jan watched the two of them pass her and walk on toward the door, and she knew that there had been invitation in Laura’s eyes. Laura wanted her, and she wanted Laura just as much if not more.

“Jan.”

She turned back to Mike and leaned against him. She did not want him and she knew that she could not and would not want him, not ever, but she needed someone to lean on. She was weak and she was sick and she had slipped off the narrow ridge into the shadows without even jumping, without even straining for the sunshine.

Mike’s arms closed about her, gently, possessively, but she was not conscious of them as arms or as belonging to Mike. They were merely something to hold her, something to keep her upright and tight-lipped when she wanted to fall down and cry.

Hold me, she thought. Hold me but don’t want me, don’t ever want me because I’m no good for you and you’re no good for me and I love a girl and her name is Laura.

The door slammed shut at the far end of the courtyard. Soon the little blonde girl would be kissing Laura’s lips and touching her breasts. Jan was jealous. It was an irrational jealousy, but she couldn’t help it.

Mike, who was holding her now and stroking her hair, was undoubtedly sleeping with Saundra, but she didn’t care in the least.

Laura.

Let’s face it, she thought. Let’s face it once and for all. You’re not on the goddamned ridge any more. You’re in the shadows, Miss Marlowe. You’re gay as a jay.

Give in.

To give in. To find Laura and go with her, to replace the little blonde in the apartment on Minetta and to sleep every night with Laura.

To love.

The thought started her trembling, and Mike did the one impossible and inevitable and unforgivable thing at that moment.

He kissed her.

Actually, she realized, it was the most natural thing he could have done. He tilted her head back and lowered his mouth to hers and held her close and kissed her. It was completely natural.

But she was not natural.

She drew back almost instantly, pushing him away from her.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Don’t.”

He was breathing heavily. He started to reach for her again but she shook her head and backed away.

“Why not?”

She didn’t answer. She continued to tremble slightly as she backed away, shaking her head as she moved.

Then he shrugged and she knew that he was all right now.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

Please, she thought, just don’t say anything. You’re nice and I like you but I want you to go away without saying anything.

“I said no passes,” he went on. “I mean it, too.”

Please. Stop.

“It just seemed right to kiss you. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

Slowly, they started to walk out of the courtyard. Minetta looked as it had looked before, but now Janet wanted to get back to her own bed in her own apartment.

She was totally sober and very tired.

“I’d better take you home.”

“No.”

“It’s pretty late. I figured—”

“No, that’s not what I meant. I can go home by myself.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Jan. I’m not a sex criminal. I just—”

“I’m not afraid, Mike.” She was conscious of an edge to her voice but he didn’t seem to notice it.

“Well—”

“It’s just that I’d rather walk home alone. I can’t explain it, but I’d rather be alone. Do you understand?”

“Not really. I’d like to walk with you.”

“It’s not far. I have things to think about.”

“Are you sure?”

“Uh-huh.” She smiled. She didn’t feel like smiling but she knew that it would make things easier.

“All right. But at least let me walk with you as far as my place.”

When she hesitated he said, “Not even that, huh? I’ll see you.” He started to turn from her.

“Mike?”

“What?”

“You’re not mad, are you?”

“Not mad. A little disappointed.”

“Don’t be.”

“Why not?”

“You shouldn’t be. I... I mean, you didn’t do anything wrong. Do you understand?”

He nodded. “Sort of.”

“Good,” she said, forcing another smile. “Good night.”

“I’ll see you.”

He turned and walked along Minetta Street toward Sixth and his apartment, and she watched him for a minute, watched him walk with a firm stride. Then she turned and walked off in the opposite direction. She heard him whistle, and she recognized the tune as Danville Girl.

It was better being alone. The night seemed much darker and vaguely empty. Now that he was gone she no longer wanted to hurry back to her apartment, but there was no place else to go, nothing else to do. She followed Minetta Lane up to Macdougal, surprised to see The Shadows just a few doors from the intersection.

Quickly she headed home. She followed the same route she had followed the night before, but it seemed as though last night had been ages ago and that she had walked the same route over and over. Her feet automatically carried her toward Barrow Street.

Mike wanted her. It was more than desire on his part — he loved her, or could fall in love if she gave him half a chance. But she had no intention of giving him that half-chance.

Laura wanted her, too. And Laura would love her, because she would see to that. Laura was the person she wanted and needed.

By the time she reached her apartment she was exhausted and her bed felt good to her. It was late, very late, and the room was properly dark and the bed properly soft and cool. She slept naked, with nothing between her body and the smooth bedsheets.

I’ll see you, he had said. She hoped that he wouldn’t. He deserved a lot more than she could possibly give him. He deserved love, and she knew that she could never love him.

She had so much love stored up, so much love that she had been saving and hiding for so long.

But it was not for him.

Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow she would fall into the darkness. That was where she belonged, and her ridge was now too thin to hold her any longer. Her pilgrimage to New York was a success already. She had found the answer to her question, and although the answer wasn’t the one she would have preferred, it was as she had expected.

Now she knew what she was. It was time to accept it.

Tomorrow.

8

As he climbed the stairs he was struck by the utter silence of the building. The party was over now. Only the smoking ruins would be left. And Saundra would go right on living among them. Maybe she would throw away some bottles or empty an ashtray here and there, but she would make an all-out effort to maintain the general disorder.

The silence was deafening. It was after four, and even Saundra’s charm hadn’t been able to sustain the party any longer than that. He laughed silently, thinking that the guests hadn’t had the opportunity to say good-by to their unwilling host. Not that they would have even if he had been there. It was all part of the ritual. You avoided good manners because society imposed them on you and the Village imposed the reverse. You fought manners, just as you fought cleanliness and belief and emotion. You had to prove forever that nothing really mattered to you, that you were living your own life and would continue to do so even if it killed you.

It hadn’t bothered him before. In the past he lived in filth and missed meals and begged and stole, but before not even the hunger bothered him. Now, for some reason, he wanted more than what he had. More precisely, he wanted something different, but the intensity of his desire made it appear to be something more important and more valuable than what he had at the moment.

What exactly did he want? He paused on the stairway, hunting for a word that would sum up the change in his desires.

Respectability? No, he had lived too long alone and within himself to begin worrying about the opinion of the world. Security? Partly, but it was more than that.

Direction? That was closer. Inevitably, he was getting older, and the period for a person to find himself had to end when he grew older. It might be considered colorful for a guy to knock around the country at sixteen, but by the time he got to be twenty-three he wasn’t colorful any more. He was just a bum.

Sometimes he felt that he was making progress. The audition with Comet, for instance — if that went through he had a chance, and if the chance worked he would have a start in the right direction.

Purpose? Yes, that was probably close enough. If one word could embrace everything, purpose was the word. Maybe nothing mattered, as the code of the Village declared. Maybe they were all right and nothing at all was important. But even if they were right, where were they? What did it get them?

He himself needed purpose, a reason for existing. It would sound corny to the skeptics. But there it was. If there was no purpose it was necessary to invent one for himself. What was it Voltaire had said? If there were no God man would have invented Him. Maybe the same thing could be said for purpose. His goal was his music, and if that was meaningless he had to make it mean something for him. He had to make each step along the way seem significant and important.

Otherwise there was no real point to anything. He might as well be dead, or never have been born to begin with.

The audition, for example. It would be important. God, he would be good! He’d play them like fish on a line. He’d figure out what songs those bastards wanted to hear and he’d sing them the way they would want to hear them.

Compromise? Yes, it was a compromise. He was selling out, but somehow the idea of selling out didn’t hold the terror it once held for him, the terror that seemed so awful to the little world of coffee shops and Village parties.

He hadn’t mentioned the audition to Jan. Paradoxically, Saundra was the only person he had been able to tell simply because he knew it had made the least possible impression upon her. She undoubtedly had forgotten by now.

But he would tell Jan. It had been a mistake to kiss her but it had been something he couldn’t help. God, she was a moody kid, getting all panicky from a kiss. At any rate she had forgiven him, and she certainly seemed to like him. Would she fall in love with him?

He didn’t know. Nor did he know whether what he felt for her could be described as love. He wasn’t sure just what love meant, or whether such a state actually existed outside of novels and poems and songs.

He knew at least that he had never been in love. There had been women, and there had been a few women that it had hurt him to break with, but there had been nothing he could think of as love. He knew that he enjoyed being with Jan and that he was comfortable with her, more so than with any woman before. But was it anything deeper than that?

He didn’t know. He felt vaguely that it might be good to be in love with a girl like Jan. A man might be able to go farther if he had someone to go along with him. A man might care more about things if someone else cared, too.

He wondered idly whether she was a virgin. She probably was, and he was surprised to realize that he somehow hoped she was. It didn’t make sense; he had always wanted his women to be as experienced as possible.

Maybe it did make sense, in a strange kind of way. If he was in love.

Maybe he was in love. Whatever in hell love was...

“Is that you, Mike?”

Saundra’s voice broke into his thoughts, intruding just as sharply as the two girls had intruded upon him and Jan in the courtyard. The silence was gone. Twenty-four Cornelia Street was noisy again.

“Mike?”

He took a deep breath and began to climb the stairs.

“Laura?”

She turned off the shower and stepped out of the tub, reaching for the towel. God, a shower was good! It was good in the morning to wake you up, but it was even better at night when you were hot and sticky from the heat and stickiness that was New York in July. First the hot water pelting down on you while you soaped yourself and worked the shampoo into your hair, soaping and rinsing until you were clean all over and your hair squeaked like a violin when you pulled a strand of it between your fingers.

And then the cold water that stung like needles, like the torture of a thousand cuts, and you wanted to get out from under it but you liked the way it snapped and bit at you and the way it cleared your head and closed up your pores and made you feel even cleaner and much more alive.

“Laura? Christ, aren’t you done yet?”

The shower hadn’t quite worked. Sometimes you needed more than a shower. Sometimes you were too dirty for soap or shampoo to cleanse you, dirty inside in a way that made you want to open your mouth under the shower and wash yourself out. And then you could soap and rinse until you were limp and you felt better but it still hadn’t quite worked. Somehow you were still dirty.

“I’m coming,” she said.

She was dry and she should go in now to Peggy, but she didn’t want to go, not yet, not for a moment.

What did she want? That was a good enough question. Whatever it was she kept on looking for it, looking for it in bed after bed, even breaking down for awhile and paying $25 an hour to look for it on a couch until she decided that analysis wasn’t the answer, that perhaps there was no answer, or that the only conceivable answer was to keep on looking for something that wasn’t there and never would be there. To search a thousand beds, and to bring a thousand girls to help you look for it in your own bed in your own room, and never to find it because it wasn’t there at all.

Yes, she knew what she was going to do. She knew precisely what she was going to do and why she was going to do it.

Musical Beds.

It wouldn’t work. It had never worked and it never would work, and Jan Marlowe would be the memory that Peggy was going to be, that Peggy was destined to be even now while she waited impatiently in the bedroom. Jan Marlowe had not yet reached the bedroom but already she was waiting to become a memory. She was a potential memory, as surely as a fetus was an unborn corpse.

Perhaps if she could ever have a child, if she could feel her belly growing larger and know that a lover had made it grow, perhaps then the game could end.

Of if she could father a child. The thought was first ridiculous and then as perfect as it was unattainable. If she could give a girl a baby, even a girl like Peggy who was becoming a bore already and who wouldn’t last more than another night, no matter how good she was in bed with the lights out.

There was something inevitably ephemeral about a relationship that could never bear tangible fruit. In bed with a girl — almost any girl — she could feel that they were building something, that their bodies together were moving toward a goal.

And when the climax had been reached and passed the vision passed with it. Nothing was built, nothing would endure.

Each time she was fooled. Each time the quick and beautiful spasm seemed to bring fulfillment and left only emptiness. And she knew she would continue to be fooled forever.

Jan Marlowe. She wouldn’t have to wait long now, just a day or two at the most. There was no mistake possible in interpreting the look in the girl’s eyes or the expression on her face. The boy who had been holding her in his arms was quite meaningless, a red herring that didn’t fool her at all, a very insignificant bit of camouflage.

A day or two more. That was all.

“Damn it, Laura!”

She sighed softly, turned out the light, and reached for the door.

The apartment was worse than ever.

That was the first thing he noticed. Even before he was aware of her his eyes took in the mess that was the apartment. Beer cans covered the floor, some standing upright while others lay on their sides with beer leaking out of them onto the rug. There were empty wine bottles as well, and he wondered momentarily whether she would throw them out or attempt to drip candles on them. Once she had gone on an elaborate candle-dripping spree, carving deep grooves in the side of each candle so that they would drip faster and cover the bottles rapidly so that people wouldn’t know that she had just started with her candle-dripping.

That night they had made love by candle-light.

No, she wouldn’t start that again. The bottles would go and the beer cans would go, but the stains would remain in the rug forever. He closed his eyes for a second and pictured her kneeling on the floor and methodically rubbing dirt into the rug for atmosphere.

“It’s about time.”

Then he saw her. She was lying on the bed as usual but in a slightly different pose this time. Her shoes and socks were off, tossed somewhere among the debris of the party. She was still wearing her sloppy paint-spattered dungarees that would rot before they wore out, but her sweater and bra were off.

Her breasts were bare. She was lying flat on her back, not even using a pillow, and her breasts jutted upward proudly. Her skin was milky white and the contrast with the dungarees and with the dark wine-colored blanket was striking. Her breasts would have been magnificent except that they were hers and that most things that were hers seemed phony and empty.

It was funny. When those breasts were encased in a sweater, a person would guess that they were the most necessarily phony thing about her. They looked too good to be quite true. But they were all real, all hers, all firm and solid flesh. They were the only real thing about her.

“Where did you go?”

“Out for a walk. I couldn’t take the party any more.”

“Oh? I thought it was a good party. Everyone else seemed to like it.”

He didn’t answer.

“Everybody said you were good tonight, too.” She remained motionless on the bed, only her lips moving and her breasts rising and falling as she breathed.

“I got kind of stoned.”

“You didn’t go out alone, did you?”

“No.”

“Who were you with? That little square from the coffee house?”

“She’s not a square, if you mean Jan.”

“So she’s not a square. That who it was?”

“Yeah.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

He felt himself getting angry, irritated at the way she talked and the way she was completely oblivious to the disorder of the room.

“Did you go to bed with her?”

He hadn’t expected that. But he should have known that she would ask, known it despite the fact that he had never made a half-serious pass at another girl since they’d started living together.

“No,” he said, finally.

“Too bad.”

She sat up on the bed and stared at him, opening her eyes very wide. Her eyes were large to begin with and larger with the eye-shadow, and now with her eyes wide open and her eyebrows raised she looked almost like a caricature of herself.

“But you wanted to, didn’t you?”

He didn’t answer.

“Of course you did. I knew that much from the bit you pulled at the Renascence. You’re not too subtle, Mike.”

“I’m not?”

“No. No, subtlety isn’t one of your strong points, Michael Hawkins. Come over here, will you?”

He was sitting in a chair across from her and he didn’t want to move at all, and he especially didn’t want to go to her.

“What for?”

She shook her head in exasperation. “God, you know what for. What’s the matter with me, Mike? Aren’t I any good? I try to be, you know. Aren’t I good in bed any more?”

“Yes,” he said, thinking. You’re good, all right. Like an actress, with every movement and every moan polished and rehearsed and absolutely meaningless. You’re marvelous. You’d make one hell of a whore.

“I know I am. Half the guys here tonight wanted to make me, you know. So why do I have to beg you?”

He stood up, forcing a smile. “Let’s fix up the pad a little,” he suggested. “It’s pretty messy.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“It’s terrible, Sandy. Let’s at least get rid of the beer cans.” He stooped over and started to pick up cans from the floor.

“That can wait. There’s something else I’d rather do just now.”

Her voice was husky, and he wondered whether she actually wanted him or whether the huskiness was just another part of the act, another gesture.

“Let’s clean up first.”

“To hell with it.”

“Come on.”

“Not now,” she said. “That can wait.”

“Dammit, it can’t wait! I’m sick of it, Sandy. I’m sick of the sloppiness all the time and I’m sick of the damned parties and the goddamned beer cans all over the floor!”

She jumped to her feet and grabbed him by the shoulder, knocking the beer cans from his hands. “Damn you,” she shouted, “I like it this way! And it’s my apartment and I pay the rent and you can just leave the goddamned cans on the floor and—”

She broke off suddenly. He wasn’t angry because for once the mask had slipped and she had said what she meant without stopping to think how it would sound. He turned from her and kicked a can, watching it skitter across the floor, bouncing off a wine bottle and rolling along the rug.

His eyes followed the can until it stopped rolling. Then he turned to her, seeing how ridiculous she looked in her dirty dungarees with her breasts and feet bare. He looked at her breasts without feeling anything, seeing her body only as a body to be serviced.

“All right,” he said levelly. “What do you want? What are you paying for?”

“Damn you. Oh, God damn you!”

“Tell me.” He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to because he didn’t feel anything, not even anger.

“You son-of-a-bitch.”

“It’s your money. What do you want?”

“What do you want?”

Silence.

“What do you want, Laura? Tell me.”

It was coming. They were naked together on the bed and the room was in darkness except for a single dim lamp that cast their shadows against the wall. Their bodies were almost touching, but she knew that the inch or so that separated them was an illusion. They were actually much farther apart.

And the break-up was coming. It would be more upsetting than usual because Peggy was small and weak and strangely vulnerable, and while she no longer loved her she did not want to hurt her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what I want.”

“But you don’t want me.”

Silence.

“You don’t, do you? You don’t have to say it. I know you don’t and it’s a hell of a thing to know. I still want you, Laura. I want you and you don’t want me and I know you don’t. And it’s a hell of a thing.”

“I—”

“Don’t. I saw it coming, Laura. From the minute she walked into that goddamned bar. And when you shouted at me for swearing.”

“I didn’t mean to shout.”

“You didn’t exactly shout. But it doesn’t matter a hell of a lot. It’s over now, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

She was both glad and sorry when the word left her lips. There was a necessary finality about it, but that finality was so harsh, so cruel.

Peggy’s eyes closed. She was tense and knotted inside but her facial muscles were relaxed and she looked childlike in her nakedness.

“It’s funny,” she said. “She wants you, you know, and she’ll be here tomorrow. She’ll be here on this bed right where I am, and you’ll be with her, holding her and touching her. And I’ll be somewhere else.”

She opened her eyes suddenly and for a moment Laura thought she was going to cry. But she swallowed and went on talking.

“I’ll leave in the morning. That’s what you want, isn’t it? No, don’t answer. I know it is but I don’t want to hear you say it. She’s lovely, you know. I don’t think she’s been with a girl yet, do you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Probably not. How long do you think you’ll last?”

“God. I don’t know.”

“It’s funny.” She closed her eyes again and smiled. “You know, we lasted a little less than a month. And when we started I thought we would go on forever. It’s crazy. Nobody ever lasts, and I knew that, but I couldn’t help—”

“I felt the same way.”

“Did you? But you must have known. I knew too but I faked myself out. It was perfect for awhile, wasn’t it?” There was something desperate in her question, as though she had to have the right answer or nothing would be left her.

“It was good,” Laura said. “It was very good.”

“Was.” She opened her eyes and there were little tears forming at the corners, but she was fighting not to cry, struggling with herself. “That sums it up, doesn’t it? Was. It’s all over.”

Silence. She wanted Peggy to cry, knowing how desperately the girl needed to cry. At the same time she hoped selfishly that Peggy would get control of herself because she too would cry and she hated to cry, hated herself for the weakness of it.

I’m weaker than she is, she thought, and the thought was disturbing.

“Laura?”

“Yes?”

“I’m going to ask you something.”

“Go ahead.”

“It’s selfish.”

“That’s all right:”

“I... I still love you, Laura.”

No, she thought. And she said, “It will be over soon, darling. It hurts like hell but it ends, and that’s the compensation for the shortness of the love. The pain doesn’t last so long.”

“I know.”

“I mean it. It can be over in a day, Peggy. You have to learn that. You have to grab on to that and never let go because you’ll hurt and be hurt over and over and it never stops.”

“I know. But I’m still going to be selfish.”

“Go ahead.”

“There’s only one thing I want from you and it’s the one thing I have no right to ask. But if I have it I’ll be able to leave tomorrow morning without crying, and it’s very important to me not to cry. I’ll cry later, but I don’t want you to see me crying. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

She paused, choking back tears and breathing hard, and finally she said, “I want to make love to you.”

“Oh!”

“If you don’t want to—”

“Oh, Peggy!”

She felt like crying but she didn’t want to cry or to let Peggy cry. She knew how Peggy loved her and she remembered how she had loved her and now she wanted so little, so very little.

Twice she opened her mouth to speak and twice she closed it because she was afraid to speak, afraid she would cry instead. She didn’t have to say anything.

She moved toward Peggy until their bodies were touching, put her arms around her and held her close. She I pressed her lips against Peggy’s and kissed her.

And Peggy’s mouth opened under hers, and Peggy’s hands began to move over her body, gently and then more insistently.

And Peggy moaned.

For the first time in his life he felt like a male whore. He stood up from the bed and turned away from her, not wanting to look at her, not wanting to see her or think of her. As he pulled on his clothes his skin felt sweaty and grimy.

“Mike?”

He began tying his shoes, fumbling with the laces. It was over now. He had given her just what she paid for and no more, and now he could leave and never come back and not see her again, not ever.

“I’m a bitch.”

For some reason he found it impossible to walk out without looking at her. He turned and saw her lying face down on the bed, stretched out full length, and foolishly naked.

“I’m a bitch and I’m sorry. But it doesn’t make any difference, does it?”

“No.”

“Of course not. I guess we’ve had it. I suppose you’re leaving?”

“Yes.”

“Of course,” she said. “I guess I didn’t have to ask.”

Her voice sounded very tired, flat and exhausted. “I’ll miss you,” she went on. “It sounds silly but I think I really will. Can you believe me?”

“Yes,” he said, not really meaning it, not really caring one way or the other.

“And I’m going back home,” she said. “I think I should.”

“Home?”

“To the Bronx. I guess that’s my home. It’s not that horrible a place, Mike. It’s like any other place. I suppose people always hate the place they come from.

“But it will be good to get back to Parkchester. I don’t really belong here, and my folks are good people. Oh, they’re middle-class and all that, but I’m middle-class too. This is just a game, this Village scene. I guess it’s time to give it up.”

She broke off suddenly and turned on the bed, raising herself on one elbow to stare at him. “I sound like Marjorie Morningstar,” she said. “And I don’t want to. But I can’t help it.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I won’t miss this place,” she said. “I never really lived here. The girl who lives here isn’t really me, Mike. I wish you had had a chance to get to know the real Sandra Cohen. You might have liked her. She’s dull but she’s fairly nice.”

She sat up suddenly. “Don’t go yet,” she said. “Sleep awhile first. Wait until morning.”

“It’s morning already.”

“Sleep anyway. You’re tired, aren’t you? You might as well sleep here.”

He didn’t want to. He wanted to leave, and he took a breath and started for the door.

“Mike—”

He stopped and she said, “Please stay with me. You don’t have to touch me and I’ll sleep on the floor if you want but I don’t want you to leave yet. This is the last night I’ll be staying here, Mike. I don’t want to stay all by myself.”

It wasn’t that much. It was very little to give her, very little indeed, and besides he was tired and there was no place else to go.

“All right, Sandy.”

She smiled, and he saw that her eye-shadow was smeared from crying. He hadn’t heard her cry.

“Good,” she said. “But first let’s clean up the apartment a little. Okay?”

“Sure.”

He was fully dressed and she was stark naked as the sun began to stream through the windows and they bent over to pick up bottles and beer cans and discarded clothing, working to clean up an apartment that would never be clean.

It was over.

She didn’t feel anything but emptiness. They had made love and nothing had happened for her, and now it was surely over and nothing remained of it. For a week the bed had been their only real meeting-place; now it too was gone and nothing remained.

Musical Beds.

And some joker had stopped the music.

She lay on the bed, not wanting to touch Peggy any more and yet not wanting to withdraw from her, not yet, not until they both got up and Peggy packed up her things and disappeared. Then for a few hours she could be alone until she heard the music start and took another partner.

She couldn’t sleep. Even with the shade drawn the daylight filtered into the room; besides, she was too tense and mixed-up inside to relax.

Her eyes closed. She thought of Jan and tried to erase the thought, feeling guilty for it, feeling that it was wrong now and unfair to Peggy to think of another girl. There would be time enough later.

In a minute there is time.

There would always be time. Time was cheap. Everything happened in very little time, quickly, abruptly, and the edges were always jagged when the break came.

Decisions and revisions that a minute can reverse. Back and forth, up and down, in and out, over and over. There was always time and there was never time enough, and the decisions were always both right and wrong and never in-between. And never permanent.

Do I dare to eat a peach?

Oh, yes. Oh, definitely, to eat a peach, to gobble down a million peaches and each time to spit out the pit. A million peach-pits.

Tomorrow.

And Peggy began to cry softly into her pillow.

9

Sunday. That was the first thing that she was aware of, even before she knew quite where she was or even who she was. When she awoke in the morning she often lost herself completely, lost all awareness of time and place. One morning in Indiana she had managed to dress herself completely without quite remembering her own name.

Now when she realized it was Sunday, the second thing that occurred to her was the significance of the day. The Sabbath was not going to be a day of rest, not this week.

Sunday.

It wasn’t morning, she realized. It was past noon, one o’clock at least, and she crawled out of bed and hunted for her watch on the dresser. It was one-thirty.

She dressed in dungarees and a blouse and headed for the bathroom, yawning on the way. The reflection in the mirror didn’t even look like Jan Marlowe at first glance — her eyes were slightly bloodshot and her face drawn and tired and pale.

She was incredibly thirsty. She rarely had a hangover, but fairly heavy drinking left her thirsty enough to empty a bathtub. She filled and drained the plastic bathroom glass four times without ever really quenching her thirst.

In the kitchen she broke an egg into the stainless aluminum frying pan and spent several minutes fishing for pieces of the shell. She hardly ever managed to break an egg properly. Once years ago she had tapped one too hard on the stove and smashed it. The egg had dripped into obscurity within one of the burners, but had immortalized itself for weeks by giving off a burnt smell each time the stove was used.

That was in Indiana, the summer she had spent with her mother on the lake shore. She remembered it now, how they had gone swimming and slept on the beach in the sun, and how they laughed at the egg smell in the cottage.

While the egg was bubbling in the pan, she boiled water and made coffee and poured orange juice. She ate her breakfast at the kitchen table, thinking once again that she really had to get another table cloth soon.

Sunday.

She would meet Laura that night. Meanwhile there was time, time to do almost anything, and there was certainly plenty to do, plenty of things to see. But for some reason she didn’t want to do anything, and most of all she didn’t want to leave the apartment. The thought of meeting anyone, even a total stranger, was repelling.

But I have time to kill, she thought. How do I kill it?

As she washed the breakfast dishes in the sink she went over the previous night in her mind. It had been a good night, until all at once it went wrong and became a very bad night. Then, suddenly, it was good again, better than ever. It had been free and easy with every problem solving itself.

Now she knew what she was, and now that she knew it for a fact it seemed a good deal less frightening.

Be the best of whatever you are. That was the punch line of one of those insipid poems they taught you back in grammar school, something about being a shrub if you couldn’t make it as a pine on the top of the hill. But the line was beginning to make a little sense.

Okay, she thought. I’ll be the greatest dike in the Western world.

She dried the dishes and put them away, thinking that now the problem was solved and the course was clear enough. She wanted Laura and Laura wanted her and there was nothing in the way. The little blonde didn’t matter, Mike didn’t matter, nothing mattered. Mike wanted her, but that was immaterial now. He might even love her, but he would be able to get over it.

She poured another cup of coffee and carried it into the living room. The sun was streaming into the open window and she felt slightly exposed there, her apartment open to the eyes of any tourist who happened to be passing by. Curtains would end that, but at the same time she liked the view open as it was. She could sit alone in her own living room and still be a part of the city outside.

The apartment was stuffy now and she walked to the window and opened it. The weather was nearly perfect — sunny and cloudless but not too hot. Outside it was peaceful, with less of the continual traffic and noise that had been present during the past two days.

She pulled a chair over to the window and sat down in it. The sun came just a little way into the room, warming her legs pleasantly so that she wiggled her toes.

The coffee tasted good. Actually, she thought, it’s lousy coffee. It doesn’t really taste like coffee, and if I want good coffee I ought to learn how to make it. This is instant coffee and it tastes like instant coffee, and if it weren’t such a wonderful day it would taste like iodine.

But it didn’t. It tasted good, even if it didn’t taste particularly like coffee, and she knew that this was a sign that the day was going to be a good one.

She lit a cigarette, dropping the match out of the window to the pavement below. The cigarette and coffee went together perfectly. Like beer and pizza. Like coke and aspirin. Like love and marriage.

Like love and marriage. But love and marriage didn’t go together, not at all. Not for her, at least. Marriage? Marriage was something that would never happen, an experience she would have to pass up, a set of emotions she would not feel, not ever.

Love and marriage and children.

And that of course was another item to be passed up.

She was going to miss a good deal. No husband, no kids—

She dragged on the cigarette and inhaled deeply, trying to punish herself by drawing too much smoke into her lungs. Bad girl, she thought, coughing. It’s a beautiful day and you’ll think yourself into a headache if you don’t come off it. Give it up, kiddo.

Besides, wasn’t it better? She could have marriage and children, sure. But she wanted love and she was lucky enough to see a way to get it. And if she settled for marriage and kids she would lose the love, and didn’t love come first? Without it, weren’t the others a lie?

Yes.

Yes, and she was right and the day was beautiful. The day was beautiful and Laura was beautiful and the apartment was beautiful and she was in love. Jan Marlowe was in love. Miss Janet Marlowe of Barrow Street, formerly of Indiana.

Across the street a pair of small boys were playing handball against the brick front of a building. Two doors down the block an old woman with grey hair sat alone on the front steps. The woman wore a faded print dress and brown loafers, and Jan could see her stockings — thick, dark brown stockings that covered her heavy legs. The woman wasn’t doing any of the things old women usually did. Her hands were empty. And she didn’t seem to be looking at anything, either: her eyes stared blankly ahead.

A couple passed arm in arm, talking in whispers and pointing at things. Jan guessed that they were tourists. Strangely, she didn’t consider herself a tourist although she had been in New York only since Friday. She felt so completely at home that she thought of herself as a New Yorker, a Villager, and was aware of a vague resentment toward the tourists who were walking on her street and pointing at things.

Was Laura a New Yorker? She decided that she must be, and then she realized that all the people she had met seemed to be native to the city. She couldn’t imagine them in any other surroundings. Even the artificial ones so completely fitted into the pattern of the city that she hadn’t thought of the possibility that some of them might come from Chicago or California or New England.

Or even the Midwest, even Indiana for that matter.

Laura could be from Indiana. Jan started to laugh, amused at the notion of two little hicks rushing to New York to crawl into bed together.

The handball bounced out into the street and one of the boys chased it past the wheels of a car. There was a squeal of brakes; then the car started up and drove away and the boys went back to their game. Jan glanced at the old woman and saw that she hadn’t moved, hadn’t even looked up at the sudden noise.

She thought how terrible it must be to be old. Sitting around with nothing to do and no place to go. She shivered at the thought, but at the same time she felt comfort in knowing that she herself was not old, that she had places to go and things to do and would have them for a good long time.

Then it occurred to her that it was not just the woman’s age, that it was not age at all. It was the loneliness. She knew just by looking at the woman that she had nobody, and without knowing anything about her other than that her hair was grey and her legs ugly, she could tell that there was no one inside the building waiting for the woman and no one in the city who would come home to her.

No one would know when the woman died.

This was frightening. It was far more frightening than age or ugliness or the grave.

Was Jan alone? She was now. Only Mike and Ruthie so much as knew where she was, and Ruthie was in Mexico and she never wanted to see Mike again.

In that sense she was alone. She had never even met the girl she was to see that night, but she knew that from the moment they met she would not be alone again. She was alone now as surely as the old woman was alone, but she would not be alone after tonight. That was the difference between them: she was waiting to love and be loved, and the woman was waiting only to die.

She felt that she ought to read something. She picked up three books, one after another, reading the first few pages of each and replacing each in turn on the bookshelf. After the third book she decided that she didn’t want to read, that in fact she didn’t want to do anything at all.

If only it could suddenly turn into night, if four or five hours could drop from time forever. In a sense the anticipation was pleasant, but it was also agonizingly long.

And she was worried.

Would Laura like her? Would she, Jan, say the right things and smile the right sort of smile and keep her mouth shut at the proper time?

For that matter, would she do the right things in bed?

She was terribly ignorant. From the first moment years ago when she had suspected herself of being gay she had devoured every available book on the subject of female homosexuality. Every type of book but an instruction manual, she thought, laughing to herself. There didn’t seem to be anything in print along those lines. She knew what to feel and what to think, but the basic mechanics were outside of her circle of knowledge.

What would she do? What would Laura expect her to do; what kind of caresses would she want? Laura was experienced, of course. Laura had loved before and had been loved before, and Jan hoped desperately that she would be good enough. She had to be good — that was all there was to it.

Through the window she watched a boy saunter by with his hands plunged deep in his pockets, whistling something and shuffling his feet along the pavement. There were so many people in New York, so many people whom you could see a million times and never meet. She still hadn’t met anybody living in her building. All she knew was that somebody had a dog that barked in the middle of the night Otherwise the building might as well be empty.

Lighting another cigarette, she realized that she didn’t actually have a date with Laura. Once she made her decision it seemed obvious that they would meet that night, but it hit her that no arrangements had been made, no time set, no place designated for them.

She almost dropped her cigarette.

She would go to The Shadows. Laura would be there. Laura had to be there; that was all there was to it.

The boys weren’t playing ball any more. They had vanished and only the motionless old woman remained. Otherwise Barrow Street was empty.

The buzzer jarred her at a quarter to five. She had managed somehow to drift into a semiconscious state, half submerged in a book and half asleep in the comfortable chair. It took her several seconds to identify the buzzing sound and several more seconds to decide who it could be. For one wild moment she suspected that it was Laura coming to see her, coming to meet her and make love to her, until she remembered that Laura didn’t know who she was or where she lived.

Only two people knew where she lived. One was in Mexico.

It could only be Mike, then, and she didn’t want to see him, especially this afternoon when she was waiting to meet Laura. She half-decided to let the buzzer remain unanswered, but when it sounded a second time she remembered that he had undoubtedly seen her through the window on his way into the vestibule. She walked slowly to the answering buzzer and pressed it once, hearing the outer door swing open.

She heard his footsteps coming up the hallway. Then he knocked and she walked to the door, not wanting to open it.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me — Mike.”

“What do you want?”

“Just to see you. Can I come in?”

She opened the door part of the way. He was dressed in the same clothes he had worn yesterday and he looked tired, as though he hadn’t slept much that night. His guitar was slung over one shoulder.

“Can I come in, Jan?”

She opened the door the rest of the way and motioned him inside and soon they were seated in the living room just as they had been the afternoon before. She thought that there should have been some way to get rid of him, some quick gambit to keep him from entering the apartment, some conversational trick to hurry him out the door and down the street. But it was infinitely easier to open the door for him and follow him to the living room.

“I got the audition,” he was saying. “I called Henry just a minute ago and it’s all set.”

“What audition?”

He looked at her for a minute, puzzled, and then laughed.

“That’s right, I didn’t tell you. A friend of mine has been trying to set up an audition for me with Comet Records and it’s set now. It’s next Thursday night.”

“Mike, that’s wonderful!”

“It may be. It could be a break and it could turn out to be nothing, but it’s a chance. If I’m good it means a chance to cut a record.”

“You’ll be good.”

“I’d better.” He crossed his legs and leaned back on the couch.

“Let’s celebrate in advance, huh? Just to be on the safe side. What are you doing tonight?”

“I’m busy.” The reply came spontaneously and it didn’t seem like a lie to her. In her mind she already had a date with Laura.

“I see. I’d have asked you earlier but—”

“But you just called Henry.”

“Yeah. How’s tomorrow night?”

Stop it, she thought. And she said, “I’m busy then, too.”

He nodded. “The night after?”

She opened her mouth to say that she was busy that night and every night but the words didn’t come out. She wanted to tell him that as far as he was concerned she was busy for the rest of her life, but she didn’t want to hurt him. And yet he kept on, kept asking to be hurt.

“Jan,” he said slowly, “what’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter.”

“Cut it. You’re off-again on-again like an old crystal set. What’s the bit?”

She didn’t answer.

“You don’t want to go out with me. Why?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Is it because I kissed you last night?”

She shook her head.

“Well?”

He leaned forward staring at her and she thought, He’s trying so hard. God, he’s trying so hard.

“Jan, are things happening too fast for you?”

Yes, she thought fiercely. Yes, but not the way you mean. It’s a different way entirely.

“I think that’s it,” he went on. “I’m used to things happening fast and you’re not. For years now I’ve been on the go, moving from one room to another every week or so and changing my friends the way other people change clothes. Everything happens like a 45 record played at 78. You know what I mean?” She nodded.

“You probably think I’m working too fast. I can’t help it, Jan. I like you and I... but I have to give you more time, don’t I?”

She nodded, mainly because she didn’t know what else to do. He was all wrong. He had cause and effect mangled, his logic was way out in left field, but this was irrelevant. He was leaving. He would go away and leave her alone if she let him talk for a few more minutes, and the fact that he would be back in a day or so didn’t seem to make any difference. Only the present mattered, and anything that could get him out of the apartment was the right thing for the time being.

As if he had read her mind he stood up, the guitar still slung over his shoulder. “I’m going,” he announced. “I have to give you some time to think, Jan. I’ll be back, but not for a few days. Take your time.”

“I—”

“Don’t say anything now. It’s my fault. I’m not used to girls like you.”

“I’m not the right kind of girl for you.” She had to get through to him somehow but she couldn’t spell it out for him. She probably should say Look, I’m a Lesbian, but down deep it didn’t seem right that she tell him.

“Maybe you aren’t. I want to find out.”

He walked to the door by himself, quickly, and when the door closed behind him she picked up her book from the arm of the chair and hurried into the bedroom. She didn’t want to watch him walk off down the street.

At six she showered and dressed simply in a plain cotton knit dress that matched her black hair. She brushed her hair methodically, letting it fall down her back but loosely securing it away from her face with a few pins. She hesitated before using perfume, wondering whether Laura would like it or not and finally deciding in favor of it.

She had dinner alone in a tiny restaurant around the corner on Bedford Street. The food was good but she scarcely tasted it. The waiter was courteous, buzzing around her table constantly, recommending a good wine to complement the fish and even telling her how pretty she looked. But she hardly heard him, hardly noticed him at all, and once outside the restaurant she couldn’t remember what he looked like, whether he was short or tall, dark or light.

She had spent a long time at dinner and a longer time walking to Macdougal Street. She didn’t want to arrive too early. She was nervous almost to the point of trembling, lighting one cigarette from the butt of the last.

At precisely nine o’clock she was on Macdougal Street, mounting the steps of The Shadows.

10

The same song was playing on the jukebox. Dinah Washington was singing So Long again, her voice deep and sad, and Jan wondered if there were any happy songs on the jukebox in The Shadows, or if a Lesbian bar had to be sad by definition.

Someone must have played the song. Someone was sad, someone had just broken up with someone else. She scanned the room quickly, looking for Laura and simultaneously trying to pick out the girl who had played the record. All the girls she saw at first were seated in couples and she rejected them automatically. The girl who played So Long would be sitting alone.

Then she saw her. In the back in a corner booth the blonde called Peggy was sitting alone and drinking. Her head was lowered, her mouth inches from the rim of the glass that rested on the table. She looked even sadder than the song.

Jan was glad. She felt guilty being pleased about Peggy’s unhappiness, but it meant that the pair had broken up, that Laura was free now. She took a seat at an empty table, sitting at the far side so that she could watch the door without having to look at Peggy.

She ordered Scotch-and-water and toyed with it when it arrived, not wanting the drink and not needing it. She didn’t have to be drunk, not tonight.

The song on the jukebox didn’t match Jan’s mood at all. This was going to be a good night, and the background music should be good and light and happy, joyously and crazily happy. It was an evening for Hello rather than So Long.

The words of the song pounded against her ears. Two people promising to love each other forever. Was that the way it had been for Peggy? Had she expected it to last or had she been waiting all along, waiting for the break-up from the beginning? Did anything last? Would she and Laura last?

Or didn’t it matter? The moment mattered, the moment above everything, and she didn’t dare to start worrying about time or permanence or anything of the sort. The moment was all-important and it made her questions seem terribly trivial.

Just as the song ended the door swung open and Laura walked into the room.

She didn’t even stop to look around. She didn’t have to; it seemed as though she knew instinctively just where Jan would be sitting.

“Hello,” she said. Jan liked her voice. It was gentle without being weak, smooth without any slickness.

“Hello.”

“You’re Jan Marlowe. Is it short for Janice or Janet?”

“Janet.”

“I thought it would be. I’m Laura Dean.”

“I know.” She hadn’t known, not the last name, and she repeated it mentally. Laura Dean. It was a good name. She liked it.

Laura took a cigarette and tapped it twice on the table before lighting it. She ordered bourbon-and-soda when the waitress came and then lit her cigarette, extinguishing the match with a quick flick of her wrist.

“Jan,” she began, choosing her words carefully, “what are you doing here?”

“Don’t you know?”

“I think so. Tell me.”

Jan took a sip of her drink, searching for the right way to phrase what was in her mind. The same record began to play once again on the jukebox.

“I think I’m here for the same reason you are.”

“What’s the reason?”

The waitress brought the drink and left, but Laura left the glass untouched. She seemed tense, as if Jan’s answer was going to be extremely important to her.

“I came here to meet you.”

“Oh?”

“Yes,” she said, still unsure of herself. “Yes, you see I... I—” She broke off suddenly and took a deep breath, dragging the air into her lungs. She knew that she had to say exactly what she felt, that she could not wait any longer and that the words had to come now in a rush, no matter what was to happen afterwards.

“I want you,” she said. “I want you more than I ever wanted anything in my life. I wanted you the minute I saw you Friday night and even more last night and I thought about you all day. I think I’m in love with you.”

Silence.

And then, “God.”

And then, “Well, that was quick. Your next answer is important, Jan. Because I’m only going to ask you once and this is your last chance to back down. Are you sure?”

It was so perfect. She said, “I’m sure,” in a thin small girl voice and all the barriers dissolved. As her whole body relaxed she could sense the same relaxation passing through Laura.

For the first time she noticed what Laura was wearing. Laura had a dress on, and Jan was glad she had selected the knit for herself. Laura’s dress was a rich blue that contrasted radiantly with the red-brown of her hair. Laura was beautiful. Laura loved her.

Laura took two bills from her purse and put them on the table. “Let’s go,” she said. “This place is vile and we don’t have to stay here now, do we? You’ll come up to my apartment now, won’t you?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course.”

“And leave your drink. They serve shellac here. I have better stuff at the apartment.”

“I won’t need anything.”

“No. No, neither will I.”

“I only drink when I’m lost or afraid or when I don’t have anything to do. I’m not lost now and I don’t feel afraid at all.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of, Jan.” Her voice was a caress.

“I know.”

They stood up and walked to the door and out to the street. The last streaks of the sunset were fading into full darkness. There were stars.

At the foot of the steps Laura said, “I live on Minetta Street. Right around the corner.”

“I know.”

Then Laura took her hand — easily, naturally — and she wasn’t embarrassed in the least, not even with all the people milling around. She thought, You can stare at me. You can see who I’m with. I’m proud of it. And as they walked toward Laura’s apartment it was all quite perfect, all exactly as she wanted it to be.

The apartment matched Laura. That was Jan’s first impression, and the over-all effect of the place.

At once one major difference between Laura’s apartment and hers on Barrow Street was that hers — Ruthie’s, really — was not attempting to be a permanent affair. The furniture by and large had been there when Ruthie leased the apartment and would remain there after she left it. The additions she had made and whatever additions Jan would make would do little to change the fundamental nature of the place.

Laura’s apartment was different. It was easy to tell that it had been rented unfurnished and that each piece of furniture was purchased with an eye to developing permanent living quarters.

Nothing was out of place. No chair or table was in any way incongruous. Both apartments were about the same size, with kitchen, bedroom, living room and bath, but Laura’s appeared bigger and more intimate at once. The furniture was modern without being faddish or affected. There were several good prints on the walls in simple black wooden frames. A sofa near the window overlooking the courtyard was smartly black and white and at the same time it was comfortable.

Jan sat down on the sofa. Laura seated herself next to her, their bodies close but not touching. Awkwardly, Jan folded her hands in her lap, wanting Laura to hold them but not knowing how to bring that about without being awkward.

“Nothing to drink, Jan?”

“No thanks.” Should she have a drink? Was that part of the pattern?

“I don’t know just where to start, Laura said. “I suppose I should ask you about yourself and tell you about myself, but that wouldn’t make much sense. We don’t have to go through all that rigmarole, do we?”

“No.”

“That’s how I feel. I hate beginnings, so we’ll pretend this isn’t a beginning.”

“It isn’t, is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s a—” she hunted for the word — “a continuation, rather than a beginning. It all started days ago even if we haven’t been together before tonight. It started, before—”

Laura nodded. “Okay. Then let’s skip the beginning and get going in the middle.” She smiled and took one of Jan’s hands in hers, looking into her eyes.

“You’re very lovely, Jan.”

“Thank you.”

“You are. Your hair and your face—”

She started to say, “So are you,” but it seemed silly and clumsy and not the thing to say at all.

“Jan—”

“What?”

“Jan, this is a crude question but I’m a pretty crude gal sometimes. Have you been here before?”

“Here?” She looked around the apartment vaguely.

“Not here, idiot. I mean have you been with a girl before.”

“Oh—”

“Not well put, I admit. I’m not much of a poet, and if you want me to mind my own business—”

Jan smiled quickly. “I just didn’t understand. I don’t mind, Laura. I’ve never... been with a girl before, no.”

“I didn’t think you had.”

“And I thought you would know. Do you see what I mean? It’s not a beginning. We already know a lot about each other.”

“I know. Were you ever—”

“With a man? Once. It wasn’t good at all, Laura.”

“Just once?”

She nodded.

“When was that?”

“Over a year ago.”

“I see.”

She paused and looked away, and Jan wondered what was the matter. Didn’t Laura want her now?

Without looking at her Laura said, “Jan, it doesn’t have to be tonight.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I mean it could be tomorrow. Or the night after. Whenever you’re ready.”

“I’m ready tonight. You might not want me tomorrow.”

“Silly,” she said, grinning. “I’ll always want you, you little idiot. But maybe you want to sleep on it.”

She shook her head from side to side, her eyes wide open. “No,” she said, slowly. “I wouldn’t be able to sleep. If I went home now I’d lie awake all night. I love you, Laura.”

“God.”

And then, “I want to kiss you.”

She wants me, Jan thought. And she closed her eyes and raised her face to be kissed.

Laura’s lips pressed against hers and she was amazed that lips could be so soft, so wonderfully gentle. Instinctively she let her arms slip around Laura and drew the girl down to her. Laura kissed her again, more insistently this time, and Jan returned the kiss, loving the taste of Laura’s mouth on her mouth and the tenderly beautiful pressure of Laura’s breasts against her own.

“You’re so beautiful,” Laura was saying. “So beautiful. I love you, Jan.”

And they were kissing again. Jan moved her mouth against Laura’s with real passion now, a passion totally new to her. Her body was trembling with the sensations flowing through it and with the realization that the same sensations were happening to Laura, that each was loving and being loved.

“Jan.”

Laura spoke her name half in a whisper, half in a moan. Jan was unable to answer and only nodded.

“This way.”

Laura stood up, helping her from the couch and down the little hallway to the bedroom. Jan walked with her eyes open but saw nothing, her hand warm in Laura’s as she walked. She didn’t see the bedroom, didn’t see Laura close the door or turn off the light.

“Jan, I want to do everything for you tonight. This will be your night, darling. Stand very still now. I want to undress you.”

Laura released her hand and she stood alone in the darkness, feeling as though she were suspended in mid-air. Then she felt Laura’s hands on her body, just barely touching her, removing her clothing deftly and gently and urgently. The touch excited her and anticipation coursed through her body. Moments later she was naked and then Laura’s hands left her body and the sensation of suspension in air returned more strongly than before.

Catch me, she thought. I’m falling, but I’m falling so slowly that there’s plenty of time.

There were rustling sounds while Laura undressed. Then Laura was guiding her gently to the bed, pulling back the covers and settling her upon the cool bedsheet. Laura lay down beside her and their bodies touched and she gasped involuntarily.

Laura kissed her.

“Laura, I don’t know what to do! You have to tell me what to do!”

There, was a moment of near-silence while Laura caught her breath. “Shhhh,” she whispered. “Don’t do anything, darling. Just love me.”

Laura was kissing her again and Jan was floating in air. She was floating upward now, not falling but floating with her whole body alive and awake and her breathing short and hard and her heart pounding desperately.

Nothing mattered now — nothing but the moment and Laura, and Laura loved her and the moment was perfect.

She remained for a long while in Laura’s arms. She felt as though she had come to the end of a long journey, a trip she had been taking for the whole of her life.

In a thousand books a thousand girls had said, I didn’t know it could be like this. Still the phrase kept running through her mind, over and over. Because it couldn’t be like this, nothing could be like this, and she was so lucky and so happy.

“I love you,” she whispered.

Later, they fell asleep with their arms around each other.

11

She didn’t move in with Laura at the Minetta Street apartment. Laura had asked her to and she had almost accepted, thinking how good it would be to be with Laura all the time, to live with her and share everything between the two of them. But in the end she had decided against it.

The main reason, of course, was that her rent was paid and there was no way to get it back. Ruthie had paid three months’ rent to the landlord and she had paid the same to Ruthie, and the money was gone whether she lived there or not. True, it would cost the same amount either way, but she also wanted the opportunity to have some time to herself and a certain amount of privacy. Laura’s apartment was nicer than hers, but it was also good to have a place of her own, an apartment that was simply hers where she could keep her things and receive her mail.

It was the first time she had ever lived alone. She wanted to give herself time to see what it was like.

Now it was a few minutes after seven. She and Laura had eaten dinner in a small Italian restaurant on Christopher Street with candles on the table and soft recorded music. Laura knew just what to order and what wine went with what food, and Jan admired her for this. Part of it was inevitable, of course; there are certain things one is more likely to learn in Westchester and in expensive schools than in Rushville and Indiana University.

But there was more to it than that. Laura always knew the right thing to do and the right words to say. They were not far apart in age, but Laura made Jan feel years younger in comparison.

Laura didn’t work. For awhile she had, but now her mother supported her. Once a month a check arrived in a plain envelope, with no letter to accompany it. Every month Laura deposited the check to her account and drew on it. She always spent less than she received and the account grew steadily.

“Won’t you ever work again?” Jan had asked.

“Why? She feels it’s her duty to support me and I’m perfectly willing to let her do her duty.”

When Laura said it the logic was clear. But now Jan wondered. It was easy — living on an allowance, never working and never worrying about money. But where was Laura headed? She would go on living the same life forever, never moving toward a concrete goal, never a part of anything larger than herself.

But that wasn’t quite it either. For, by the same token, that was the life she herself had selected. Her father was supporting her and she didn’t have the slightest intention of getting a job. She and Laura were limited — they weren’t cut out to be career women and they were obviously not about to get married. All they were equipped for was love, and unfortunately there wasn’t much money in love.

But was love enough?

It was. God, it was more than enough, more than the world. She could never doubt the importance or magnificence of it, not after the first night or Monday morning or Monday night or that morning. Not after the experience of waking up without feeling lost or alone, not after opening her eyes for the first time and knowing instantly who she was and where she was and what she was doing there. Not after turning in the bed and seeing Laura lying beside her, looking at her with love.

Not after those things.

Now it was Tuesday. They had been together for almost two glorious days.

She was sitting in the living room smoking a cigarette, wondering whether she should wait any longer before going to Laura’s apartment. She still wanted very much to be with Laura; at the same time she could use a few minutes more to relax by herself and get organized.

And she wanted to change her clothes. She had to dress differently as often as possible so that Laura could never tire of her and would go on wanting her and wanting to be with her forever. She stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray and hurried to the bathroom, wondering what to wear.

Nothing too fancy, she decided. But nothing too casual either. Something just right, something that would suit her mood and the decor of the apartment.

Above all, something Laura would like.

She picked out a gold-colored paisley print outfit, the skirt flaring out in great splashes of color, while the low-cut blouse showed off her figure.

A few minutes later she was back again in the comfortable chair in the living room, smoking another cigarette and waiting for time to pass. She was going to be waiting for a lot of time to pass, she reflected. She wouldn’t go back to Indiana when the summer ended. She might stay in the Barrow Street apartment. If Ruthie wanted the place back she would move in with Laura. At any rate she would stay in New York, but she certainly had to find something to do or she would go stir-crazy.

Work was out for the time being. She could always take courses toward a master’s degree at NYU, but she didn’t want a master’s in the least and the thought of a classroom was not appealing. She ought to try writing again — the poetry she’d written at school hadn’t been too bad. Or drawing or painting, maybe. She wasn’t too great at either, but she wasn’t terrible and she could improve. At least she could be doing something and that was important.

Laura spent her time reading. Laura devoured books by the ton, buying them in carload lots from the bookstores on Fourth Avenue and churning through everything from sociology to ancient history, from economics to Chinese calligraphy. Laura talked about writing sometimes, but she said it as though it didn’t really matter very much one way or the other and Jan doubted that she would ever get around to it. But she was always busy, always doing something and always very intent upon what she was doing.

It was almost time. As soon as she finished the cigarette she would walk to Minetta Street and Laura’s apartment. They would talk first. Laura knew so much and understood so many things that there would always be new topics for them.

They would never have to spend their time the way so many girls like them did. Drinking at The Shadows. Sitting up nights at gay parties chattering and drinking and waiting to crawl into bed. As long as they had enough within themselves and within their relationship, everything would be perfect. The sad gay girls were the ones who were empty inside.

When the buzzer rang she pressed the answering buzzer automatically without pausing to wonder who it might be, her mind wrapped up in her thoughts. When there was a knock at the door she answered it without quite realizing that someone was coming to see her.

It was Mike.

For a moment she didn’t recognize him. She couldn’t understand what he was doing there. She had hardly thought of him since his last visit on Sunday and it seemed to her as though he should know by now that she wasn’t at all for him, that she had gone over the ridge into the darkness and that she did not need him at all.

“Did I give you enough time?”

“What?” She didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Enough time to think about it? I told you to take your time and I wondered whether you made up your mind yet or not.”

“I—”

“To go out with me. That’s all.”

Of course she didn’t want to go out with him. She didn’t want to see him at all, didn’t want to think about him or to have him think about her. This sort of mess had happened once before in Indiana with Philip Dresser and that time it took her weeks to get rid of him. But she had to get through to Mike.

“Come in,” she said.

She closed the door after him and followed him to the living room. When he sat down on the couch she remained standing, nervous and jittery and not knowing exactly where to start.

“Mike,” she began.

“No decision yet?”

“No. I’ve decided.”

“And?”

It wasn’t going well at all. She had to tell him bluntly and swiftly or it would just drag on until he was back again in a few days. And that wasn’t what she wanted.

“Mike,” she said.

She paused and he stared at her.

“I don’t want to see you again.”

He didn’t seem to understand or to accept what he had heard. She wanted to leave it at that but she couldn’t. She had to get through to him.

“It’s better that way,” she went on. “I can’t tell you why exactly but it is. I just can’t see you again. If I could explain it you wouldn’t want to see me at all. Do you understand what I mean?”

“No. Not at all.”

“But you’ve got to understand. Look, I know that you want me very much. Is that right?”

He said, “That’s right.” He started to say something else but stopped himself.

“And right now you just want to see me, but if you see me you’ll want more. Won’t you?”

He tossed his head impatiently. “Jan,” he said, “I don’t know what kind of guy you went with last, but I don’t have sex on the brain. Can’t you see that? I—”

“I don’t think either of us is talking about sex.”

He was silent.

“I mean love.”

There was a long pause.

“All right,” he said at last. “I think I’m in love with you.”

“You think so. But you’re not. You don’t really know me.

“You won’t give me a chance.”

“Mike,” she said, “if you knew me you wouldn’t be in love with me.”

“Jan, you’re talking in riddles.” His voice rose. “I have to see you. Why can’t you give me a chance? Why?”

God, she thought. This is unbearable. God, I’m going to hurt him and there’s absolutely nothing else I can do.

And she said, “Because I could never possibly love you, Mike. I couldn’t possibly want to see you or be with you. Not ever.”

He leaned forward and rested his head in both hands. Neither of them said anything for several minutes! When he spoke his voice was husky.

“Jan, are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Jan, I—”

“I’m positive, Mike.”

Silence.

“I guess that’s all then.” He stood up and started for the door.

“Mike—”

He turned.

“I...I like you very much.”

“Cut it, will you?”

“I mean it. And Mike, someday you’ll find someone.”

When she said the last sentence he stopped still in his tracks with his hand outstretched for the doorknob. “You know,” he said hollowly, “there’s absolutely no answer to that one. The only thing I could say is I already have, and that’s pretty corny.”

Then he was through the door, slamming it hard behind him. The outer door banged shut seconds later and he was walking down the street swiftly with his hands plunged deep in the pockets of his dungarees. She watched from the window until he turned up Seventh Avenue and disappeared from view.

When she entered the apartment Laura was sitting on the sofa reading. She looked up and smiled, putting down the book and walking toward Jan with her arms outstretched. Jan went to her and they kissed, and Jan relaxed for the first time since Mike stormed out of her apartment.

Laura stepped back. “What’s the matter, dear?”

“Nothing. Why?”

“Because you’re shaking, idiot. Tell me about it.”

Sitting next to Laura on the sofa she said, “Mike was over to the apartment.”

“What happened?”

“I got rid of him.”

“That’s good. How?”

“I told him I didn’t want to see him again. I said I didn’t love him and I never could.”

“Did you tell him why?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, did you tell him you were gay?”

She was stunned. It had never even occurred to her, and although it was the obvious way, the way that could end things immediately between them, it seemed somehow out of the question.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t tell him that.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t even think of it.”

“That would have been the best way, Jan. Is he in love with you?”

“I think so.”

“Then he’ll be back. You’ll have to tell him next time.”

She hesitated. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think I could tell him.”

Laura looked away. “Honey,” she said, “are you ashamed of what you are?”

“Don’t be silly. I just—”

“Of course you’re ashamed. It’s only natural at this point. But you’ve got to get over it, Jan. It’ll only keep you miserable.”

“I’m not miserable.”

“You will be if you don’t learn to live with yourself. Do you know what it’s like to live a lie? You worry every minute over somebody finding out that you’re gay. You’re sensitive to everything.

“Jan, you can go out of your mind that way. One day you’ll pick up a newspaper and see a headline that says Flood Waters Rise; Dikes Threatened and you’ll get defensive. You’ll—”

Jan laughed.

“I mean it,” Laura went on. “It isn’t enough to accept yourself. You’ve got to accept the fact that the world is going to know what you are.”

“Can you accept it?”

“Most of the time.”

“Does your mother know?”

“Do you think she’d be so anxious to support me if she didn’t? This way she knows I’ll stay away from her and her precious husband.”

Jan tried to picture herself telling her father, with him unable to understand it at all. She thought of what it would be like to tell the people she knew — Ruthie, Mike, her few friends from Indiana. The picture was unreal and impossible.

“I couldn’t,” she said, half to Laura and half to herself.

“You will, honey. You’ll have to.”

“But I couldn’t!”

Laura smiled and gave her shoulder a squeeze. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Relax. You’ll tell them in time, or else they’ll find out and confront you with it. But forget it for now. It’s only been two days, Jan. Not even that. I think you’re still a little bit afraid of it all.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“No?”

“Nope,” she said.

“You’re tough, I suppose.”

“Tough as nails.”

“You chew nails.”

“And spit bullets.”

“Come here, toughie. Kiss me.”

“That okay?”

“Mmmmm. Do it again.”

“God, how I love you!”

“Tell me again.”

“I love you, Jan.”

Teasingly, “Again.”

“I... oh, Jan!”

“I like the way you’re dressed, Jan.”

“I’m not dressed, really. I’m all mussed up.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So don’t play semantic games. But I do like your clothes. You should always wear gold, honey.”

“You like it?”

“I like it on you very much. And the top is perfect. You should always wear that sort of neckline.”

“Why?”

Laura laughed. “Nope. I won’t be forced into a compliment.”

“Laura?”

“Hmmm?”

“Do you like me?”

“Idiot.”

“Then just sort of hold me, because it’s so quiet and peaceful when you do.”

“Poor baby. You’re sleepy.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why don’t you take a little nap?”

“You mean like this?”

“Sure. Just close your eyes and sleep for awhile.”

She obeyed. It was unbelievably restful in Laura’s arms. Laura leaned back a little and her head dropped to Laura’s bosom. It was soft and warm beneath her cheek.

Sleepily, “Laura?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t let go of me.”

“I won’t, silly.”

“Mmmmm. Don’t let go, Laura. Because if you do I’ll fall. I’m all right when you hold me.”

12

Her name was Peggy Cordovan and she was drunk.

Very drunk, she decided. Almost too drunk to know where she was and definitely too drunk to know where she was going.

She was on Thompson Street. She knew that, because she had left The Shadows when it had closed, and since it was Wednesday night it must be around four A.M. Which meant that it was Thursday morning, when you came right down to it.

But what was the point of coming right down to it? That was the most excellent thing about getting drunk — you didn’t have to come down to it until you woke up the next morning or afternoon with a head that was two sizes too big. Then you came down, hard, but until then you could fly around like a sparrow on marijuana, flying around and even chirping.

She came to a corner and peered intently at the street sign, trying to put the letters together to form words. Thompson and Houston, the sign said. She had managed to wander south and east, and this wasn’t particularly good because the neighborhood wasn’t particularly nice, not nice at all, and if she weren’t drunk she would be a little scared by it all, but why be afraid now, why be scared because she was drunk and God protected drunks and fools and she qualified on both counts.

There was no place to go.

That was the hell of it. There ought to be a place to sleep somewhere, even alone, because she didn’t want to sleep with anyone else yet except Laura, who didn’t want to sleep with her. But there ought to be an empty bed for her to crawl into. She had found one Sunday night and Monday night and Tuesday night, although she couldn’t remember whether she had taken a hotel room or slept at a friend’s place or exactly what she had done.

This was nice. Just letting her mind ramble on and not giving a good goddamn about anything, just walking south on Thompson Street into a perfectly wretched neighborhood and not caring, this was what she needed. She had to practice not caring about things and pretty soon she wouldn’t care about anything at all and she would never be hurt again. She would be strong and bitter and tough and never care any more and that would be better and infinitely safer.

There were footsteps behind her.

She was aware of this suddenly, and with the awareness came the realization that there had been footsteps behind her all the way from The Shadows, footsteps that she hadn’t quite noticed until just now. She listened closely and discovered that more than one person was following her. Two at least. Maybe more.

She decided that she ought to be frightened. Here she was in a lousy neighborhood with someone right behind her and she ought to run like hell. But, strangely, she wasn’t frightened at all.

She didn’t run. She was drunk and nothing was worth worrying about, so instead of running she simply turned around and walked back again to find out what sort of sons-of-bitches were following her and just what they wanted from her young life.

She kept walking until she was within ten yards of them. Then she stopped and they stopped and she looked at them carefully.

There were four of them. They were young, around eighteen, and they were big and they looked strong. They were dressed alike in tight dungarees and black leather jackets with zippers on the pockets.

Christ, she thought, it’s just like the movies. Sideburned teenage toughs in black leather jackets. I ought to be scared out of my wits.

But she wasn’t.

What could they want? If they were after money they had the wrong pigeon. Her purse was someplace, but she hadn’t the slightest idea where.

What did they want?

I’ll ask them, she decided. That ought to be the best way to find out. “What do you want, fellows?”

One of them snickered and they all put their hands on their hips, all at the same time, and it was funny the way they all did the same thing at the same time like a bunch of robots. She started to smile.

“What do you think we want?” one of them demanded.

“That’s a silly question. Would I ask if I knew?”

The one who had asked the question seemed to be the leader. He was a little taller than the rest and a little more ferocious in appearance. “We want you,” he announced. “What else?”

She was puzzled.

“We been following you a long ways. Nobody awake at this hour. No cops around. See?”

She didn’t see.

“All the way from that dike joint we followed you. Hell, what’s a good looker like you doing being a lady-lover? It don’t make sense.”

Doesn’t, she thought.

The tall one snickered again, and she thought that it was a most unpleasant sound, not a nice snicker at all. Come to think of it, how did people snicker pleasantly? That was something to think about.

“It’s such a waste,” he went on. “We figure it’s because you never had a chance to learn better, and maybe if you had a chance it’d do you some good. Get the picture?”

She was beginning to get the picture. She was beginning to see it, although the lines were still slightly fuzzy. She realized what was going to happen to her and that it was the most terrible thing that could happen to anyone and especially the most terrible thing that could every happen to her, and she was beginning to get frightened and a little sober.

“Hey,” she said. “Wait a minute.”

“Why wait? Pretty soon it’ll be getting light out. We been waiting all night.”

Then he took a step toward her and she wanted to scream but she couldn’t scream, not quite, not yet, and by the time she was ready to scream it was too late. His hand was pressed tightly over her mouth and the fingers of his other hand were digging into her shoulder, hurting her.

He took his hand away and another of the boys slipped a piece of tape over her mouth so that she still couldn’t scream. They had her surrounded now. Behind her was a store entrance and there were boys all around her.

They knew that she was helpless. Now that they had caught her, now that it had all been so easy for them, they didn’t seem to be paying any special attention to her.

She was merely a girl to be raped. She might just as well be a car to be stolen or a boy to be beaten up, it didn’t matter. The smallest of the boys was looking at her with something approaching hunger in his eyes, but the others gave no real indication that they were about to rape her. She knew what was going to happen. But she couldn’t believe it was actually going to happen to her.

“I’ll go first,” the tall one said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. It was my idea, wasn’t it?”

The other shrugged, as though it didn’t really matter very much, and the tall boy took a step forward and drove his fist into her stomach. The pain shot through her and she doubled up, trying to shout through the piece of tape and suddenly very much afraid, knowing that it was definitely going to happen, and not wanting it to happen, not wanting it at all.

He hit her again, slapping her sharply across the face and shoving her down onto the pavement. Then he was tearing at her clothing, hungry for her, impatient. She heard him breathing heavily and she started to struggle, pushing and clawing at him with her little hands. Then his knee shot into her stomach and it hurt, hurt so badly that she closed her eyes and stopped struggling, unable to move or feel or even think about anything but the pain that was shooting through her body.

He tore at her blouse and ripped off her bra, his hands digging into her flesh so that she ached to scream her lungs out. She had to make him stop but there was nothing she could do.

“She’s nice,” one of them said.

And then it happened. When she couldn’t struggle any more he took her, forcing her, hurting her, and a stab of pain screamed through her. Nothing existed for her but the pain. She wished that it would stop, hoped that she would die so that the pain would be over, but she didn’t die and it didn’t stop and her whole body was twisting and crying and dying inside until finally, finally it was over.

There was hardly a break. Before she could think, before she could fully realize that he was through with her, the second one was taking her and hurting her all over again. This time she couldn’t struggle at all.

She lay on the cold sidewalk inert while the two remaining boys took their turns with her. She thought that it was going to go on this way forever, that the rest of her life would be one continuous rape, a never-ending succession of pain with hard bodies pressing down upon her.

After the fourth boy had finished she lay alone on the pavement waiting for a fifth, until the realization came that it was over, that she had indeed lived through it.

“Let’s go,” one of them said.

“Jesus, that was nice.”

“C’mon.”

She listened to the footsteps as they left, still hearing the voices and not bothering to figure out which way they were headed. Finally as the footsteps faded away she opened her eyes.

The drunkenness was long gone. Everything was gone, everything but the pain. Laura was gone and the boys were gone and now even her virginity was gone. The thin membrane that was the last sign of innocence had been torn from her.

She had nothing left.

Slowly, painfully, she hauled herself to her feet. She pulled the shreds of her clothing around her to cover herself as well as she could. She seemed to be bruised all over, and she wanted to go somewhere, anywhere, some place where she could be all alone with no one to see her and no one to talk to her and no one to hurt her any more. She walked south on Thompson Street, not going any place in particular because there was no place for her to go, because it no longer mattered in the least where she went.

She had lost more than her virginity. She had lost her innocence, and perhaps that was a good thing. Perhaps the pain and the horror of it all was something good, something to be thankful for, something important to her.

Because she knew that she could never be hurt again. She had endured everything there was to endure and she was still alive, still able to breathe and walk and think. She had passed through Hell. It burned and it would leave scars, but she would never be burned again.

She would never love either. She’d get tough as shoe leather and kick the hell out of anyone who got in her way. Nobody would hurt her. Nobody would make her cry again.

Never.

She wouldn’t be sweet little Peggy, not any more. She’d be one hell of a tough little bitch, a real bitch on wheels. She wasn’t too sure where she was going, but no one would keep her from getting there.

The city started to wake up around her. Windows opened and alarm clocks rang in rooms. Cars passed her on Thompson Street. The city woke up but she didn’t notice it. She didn’t let herself respond to anything.

When the sun came up over the East River and cast her shadow on the pavement she didn’t pay any attention to it.

13

Shadows

Scattered by the sun

Melt.

Black against grey,

Dodging the wind,

Fearing the heat.

We

Looking for love—

We too are shadows...

It was terrible, she decided. She had something to say, something which was fairly important no matter how many times it may have been said in the past. But she didn’t know how to get it across. By the time the message was on paper it had turned into a pretty bad poem.

But there was a poem in it. There was a poem and a painting and a symphony, but she couldn’t turn the idea into words or music or anything. She could think and feel but something was continually lost in translation. She couldn’t communicate the thought or the feeling, and without communication there was no point in writing or painting or composing, no point in anything more involved than the thinking and feeling itself.

Alone in her own apartment with her poem, she couldn’t even translate it herself.

To hell with it. She folded the slip of paper and placed it between the pages of a book, banishing the poem from her mind. It could wait. Later she could return to it and either straighten it out or tear it up. But there were other things to think of now.

Like Laura, for instance.

It was Thursday night and she hadn’t seen Laura for hours, not since early in the morning. She had slipped out of bed while Laura was still asleep, planting a kiss on her shoulder and leaving a note saying that she would be back by nine in the evening.

Now it was a quarter to nine. In a few minutes she would walk to Laura’s apartment and there would be so many things for them to talk about, so many things to tell Laura.

After breakfast she had walked all over the city, through Little Italy and Chinatown and across to the Lower East Side. She had wandered aimlessly without looking for anything in particular, not going anywhere special, her eyes taking in everything she saw. She walked and bought things and stared at store windows and glanced down dark alleyways and talked occasionally to people that she met. She ate a bite here and a bite there, trying to taste everything, trying to gulp down New York and get it digested and absorbed into her bloodstream in as little time as possible.

And then back to her apartment to put herself into a poem. It was her poem, and she wondered how Laura would react to it.

Should she get going? No, she decided, not yet. A few more minutes, a few minutes by herself before it was time to go. It wouldn’t even hurt to be a minute late, and it was pleasant to sit by the window and look at Barrow Street.

When she saw Mike approaching the door she wasn’t overly surprised. By this time Laura had convinced her that he would come again and that he would continue to come to her until she managed to kill whatever hope remained in him. So she was not surprised, and she was ready at the answering buzzer before her buzzer sounded and at the door before he knocked, not dreading this visit as she had dreaded the others in the past.

She opened the door, noticing as she did that he looked much different than he had the last time she saw him. His clothes were still the same and the guitar was slung over his shoulder as usual, but there was a look in his eyes that was strange.

Before she could say hello he said, “Know what tonight is?”

“Thursday,” she said, puzzled. He hadn’t shaved, and the stubble of beard on his face made him look older and thinner than he was.

“Yeah. I have an audition tonight.”

“What time?”

He reached out for her wrist and studied her watch. He seemed to be in a daze, as if he was ready to pass out any minute.

“It’s in fifteen minutes,” he announced. “At nine-fifteen they’ll be expecting me.”

She felt lost. “Aren’t you going?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “Why bother?”

“I don’t understand,” she said, searching his face. “You were so excited about it.”

“I was excited about lots of things.”

“Mike—”

He straightened up. “Look,” he said, “I’m not going because I simply don’t give a damn about it, as a matter of fact. The reason I came here is I’m a son-of-a-bitch. I wanted to crawl in looking like a wreck to tell you I was missing the audition on account of you. I guess I wanted to even things up or something. Doesn’t make much sense. I’ll go now.”

As he turned she said, “Mike? Are you going to the audition?”

“No.”

“But you have to! What’s the matter?”

“Hell, I couldn’t get there in time now if I wanted to.”

“Where is it?”

“Sixth Avenue in the Forties.”

“If you took a cab—”

“Forget it,” he said. “I don’t feel like singing anyway. My voice is in lousy shape.”

She glanced quickly at her watch. It was past nine already; Laura would be waiting for her and she had to hurry.

But—

“Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“Would you go if I went along with you?”

A pause. Then, “Why?”

“I’ve never been to an audition.”

“What’s your angle on this, Jan?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the other day you couldn’t wait to get rid of me. I don’t get it.”

“I just want you to go to the audition,” she said honestly. “If you’ll go I’ll go with you. That’s all.”

“You would?”

She walked up to him quickly and took him by the arm. “Come on,” she said. “There’s not much time left.”

They were out of the building and hurrying down Barrow Street before she remembered that she hadn’t locked the door. She had her purse, though, and there wasn’t anything very valuable in the apartment. To hell with it, she thought.

She didn’t say a word until they were sitting together in the back seat of the cab and the cab was moving north on Sixth Avenue.

“We’re in a hurry,” she told the driver.

“Everybody is,” he said. “Everybody’s always in a rush. You think a fare ever tells me to take it nice and slow?”

“I mean it,” she said. “We have an appointment and—”

“Lady,” he said. “Lady, sit back and relax.”

She started to tell him again but decided against it and sat back trying to catch her breath. Why was she doing this? She didn’t really care about Mike and when it was over she would only have to get rid of him all over again. It didn’t make sense.

She pushed the questions out of her mind, forcing herself to think about something else. Turning to Mike she said, “Do you have everything you’ll need?”

“I’ve got the guitar.”

“Is that all? Do you use picks or anything?”

“Just the guitar.”

“Don’t you have to tune it or something? You better check.”

He nodded and began tuning the guitar, plucking each string in turn and twisting the little knobs to tighten or loosen the strings until he was satisfied that the pitch was right.

“It’s okay,” he said.

She studied him carefully. “You’re a mess, you know.”

He grinned. “I’ve been wearing these clothes for awhile now.”

“And you look tired.”

“I am tired.”

“You need a shave, too. Will that make any difference?”

He shook his head. “If they say anything I can always tell them I’m growing a beard, but they won’t care. All they care about is whether I sing well or not.”

“Will you?”

He looked at her a moment before replying. “I suppose so,” he said.

“You said something about your voice—”

“Just an excuse. It’s as good now as it ever was.”

“That’s good,” she said.

The cab seemed to be crawling. The traffic was thick on Sixth Avenue and they stopped for a light every few blocks. She glanced at her watch; it was almost time.

“Jan?”

“What?”

“What’s the bit?”

She hesitated.

“You don’t—”

“Love you? No, I told you I didn’t.”

“Then why are you doing this?”

“I honestly don’t know,” she said levelly. “I’m not entirely sure myself. It’s just important to me that you go to the audition and do whatever you’re supposed to do.”

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll see what happens.”

Her eyes darted again to her watch and she wanted to shout at the driver, wanted to scream at him to hurry. He simply had to get them there on time.

She forced herself to relax. A few minutes didn’t matter that much. They would wait for him. They would do that much.

“Jan?”

“Yes?”

“Take it easy. We’ll get there.”

She nodded.

“Another minute won’t make any difference. We’ll be there soon enough.”

“Good.”

“And Jan?”

“What?”

“You’ll come in and listen, won’t you?”

“If they’ll let me.”

“They will.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’d like to come.”

“I’d like to have you there.”

Finally the cab pulled to a stop in front of the address Mike had given the driver. She took a bill from her purse and handed it to the driver and followed Mike into a dark brick building.

“Relax,” he told her. “We’ve got it made.”

In the audition room, or whatever it was called, short men with dark hair smiled quickly at her and then calmly ignored her. She walked to the back of the room and took a seat in a hard-backed folding chair, watching Mike mount the steps to a raised platform at the front of the room.

He took his guitar from his shoulder and picked the strings, going through the motions of tuning it. Then he smiled once at her and glanced momentarily at the little men who had come to listen to him.

Then he began to sing Danville Girl.

14

He was unbelievably good.

That was all she could think of after the little men with dark hair had said good-by and after she and Mike had hurried out the door and onto the street. His singing had been perfect, better than perfect. The reactions of the little men proved that she wasn’t crazy, that they also recognized how good he was. Of course they hadn’t said anything and wouldn’t until they had a chance to go over the audition tapes, but she knew their decision was already made. He would have a chance to make a record.

He sang about two dozen songs in all. Some she had heard at the party, others were new to her. They all had the drive and flavor that was always present in his singing.

Danville Girl. Then a blues she hadn’t heard before, slow and agonizingly sad. Then Shady Grove and House of the Rising Sun and two songs of the Irish Republican Army. And more songs — more than she could remember.

“I was good,” he said. He wasn’t bragging. It was a simple statement of fact, and he could hardly help realizing how well he put himself over.

“You were very good.”

“They’ll let me do a record.”

“I’m happy, Mike.”

“Are you?”

She nodded, thinking that it was a strange sort of happiness. Even though Mike Hawkins was nothing to her she felt a deep sympathy for him. No, it was more than sympathy. There was a sense of easy communication between them. She felt almost as though she had a stake in his success.

“Where do you want to go now, Jan?”

She looked at her watch and noted with surprise that it was almost ten-thirty already. Had the audition taken up that much time?

“Oh, God!” she said, thinking of Laura waiting alone in the apartment on Minetta Street. “I have to go now, Mike. I’m late for a date as it is.”

“Oh.”

She heard the disappointment in his voice and she didn’t want him to be disappointed, not now. This was selfish; she could disappoint him later, but surely not now. She couldn’t help saying, “It’s with another girl,” thinking how easily the truth could be a lie.

“I see. In the Village?”

She nodded. “We’ll take a cab — I’m in an awful rush. Where do you want me to drop you?”

He hesitated while she hailed a cab and hopped into the back seat. “C’mon,” she said. “I can let you off wherever you want.”

He got in. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Where are you staying?”

“Nowhere.”

She took a cigarette and handed one to him and he lit them both. “I don’t get it,” she said, blowing out smoke. “Where did you sleep last night?”

“I don’t have a place to stay,” he said. “The pad on Cornelia Street wasn’t mine. I was living with Sandy but we broke up after the party.”

“Where... where have you been since then?”

He shrugged.

“I mean—”

“Let’s see... I slept on a park bench in Washington

Square one night — that must have been Tuesday. I was up the rest of the time.”

“Are you crazy? For God’s sake, no wonder you look so tired. What’s the matter with you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well—”

“I just didn’t feel like sleeping, Jan. If I’d had the money I would have been drinking. Instead I just kept going, walking around. It’s a fairly good habit if you can’t afford alcohol.”

“But where will you go tonight? Mike, you have to get some sleep! You’ll fall over dead if you keep on like this.”

“I’m all right.”

“You’ll kill yourself. You can’t keep on—”

“I’ve done it before.”

“That doesn’t make it sensible. What could you do all that time?”

“Just walk.”

“Is that all?”

“Think a little. Not too much though. Mostly I just kept going. When I get that way it’s easier to keep going than to stop. I got all wound up and I have to unwind bit by bit, and the only way is to keep moving.”

“But what did you do?”

“Just walked. One night I must have gone ten or fifteen miles without a break. Did you ever see Times Square at six in the morning? That’s the only time it closes up. Between six and seven the stores are all locked and the shooting gallery is closed and the movies are done for the night. There’s Bickford’s and Hector’s serving food and coffee twenty-four hours a day, but that’s all.

“Another morning I caught sunrise on the East River. It’s times like that when you forget New York is a city. The sun comes up at you off the water and it’s the only time in the day when the air is almost fresh. And it’s quiet. This town can be the quietest place in the world at the right time.”

He smiled. “That was part of it. Some day I’ll have to show you this town, Jan. There’s so much of it you couldn’t possibly have seen yet. I’d like to—”

He stopped. She knew what he must be thinking — that things hadn’t changed, that he would not be able to show her New York or anything else, that she was still not going to love him. The cab crossed 14th Street and continued on downtown. Quickly she leaned forward and said, “Fifty-four Barrow Street” to the driver, deciding that right now the most important thing was to find him a place to sleep.

“Your pad?”

“Yes. You’ve got to sleep somewhere, Mike.”

He looked at her, puzzled, and she decided that he had to get a good twelve hours of solid sleep, that he ought to get a shave and a haircut. His hair was flopping over into his eyes and it made him look like a little boy. The puzzled expression made him look even more so. A lost little boy. She almost started to laugh.

“My place,” she said. “I can stay with my girl-friend—” it seemed ridiculous to refer Laura that way — “and you can get some sleep. Is that okay?”

“If it’s okay with you.”

They rode the remaining few blocks in silence. She wondered whether or not she was doing the right thing. She wasn’t sure. It would probably only make things messier later because he still wanted her and would go on wanting her until she explained everything there was to explain.

Why didn’t she explain now? Why didn’t she tell him that the girl she was meeting was her lover and that she was a Lesbian and that this was why she could never be more than a friend to him? Now was the obvious time to tell him. Now they were close enough for her to talk easily, and now she still had time before he got too many wrong ideas about himself and about her and about the two of them.

But other things came first. Getting him to sleep came first, and getting back to Laura came first, and die rest could wait for a while. Besides, if she told him now he might not be able to sleep, might refuse to stay at her apartment. She pictured him walking around for another night, tramping all over the city until he collapsed on a street corner somewhere. She looked outside and saw that it was starting to drizzle. She couldn’t let him walk in the rain all night.

No. There would be time to tell him.

He wasn’t the only one who was tired. She was exhausted herself, and for the first time she wasn’t especially looking forward to seeing Laura. She imagined herself walking in two hours late and trying to explain. She was too tired for explanations. She just wished that everything could be suddenly over and done with, with Mike asleep in her bed and herself asleep in Laura’s bed. And that would be the end of Thursday.

I really am tired, she thought. I don’t even feel like making love.

It was the first time she hadn’t become excited at the thought of making love with Laura. She had to be tired — that was the only answer. It was logical enough. She’d been on the go from the minute she got out of bed, running all over town all morning long, knocking herself out with the poem all afternoon, and now this—

Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

Now that was why psychology could be such a monumental pain in the neck. If an action meant something, the opposite action could mean the same thing. Everything could prove anything and you could drive yourself out of your sick little mind if you kept it up. Sometimes it was better to leave it alone and relax.

First things first. First Mike to bed, then Jan to bed, then the rest of it.

The cab pulled up in front of her building and she got out after Mike. She paid the driver and followed Mike through the rain to the door, and into the building to her apartment. The door was ajar but the apartment seemed to be undisturbed. They walked inside and she closed the door.

“Are you sure you want me here?”

Everyone was always asking her if she was sure of every little thing she started to do. Did she seem that unsure of herself?

“Of course I’m sure.”

“I could get a hotel room, you know.”

“Don’t be silly. Just get to sleep, and the sooner the better.”

She led him into her bedroom. “Sleep here,” she said. “You don’t have to get up any special tune, do you?”

“What for?”

“I didn’t think so, but there’s a clock on the dresser if you want it.” She turned and started out of the room.

“Jan—”

“I have to go now, Mike.”

“Hang on a second. Did you like the way I sang tonight?”

“Silly. You know I did.”

“I was singing for you, you know.”

She didn’t like this. The conversation was getting dangerous, dangerous for both of them. “I have to go now,” she repeated.

“I was singing for them, too,” he went on. “I knew what they wanted and that’s what they go. But if you hadn’t been there I couldn’t have pulled it off.”

“Mike—”

He took a step toward her and she wanted to back away from him. She had to step back. But she couldn’t move at all.

“I need you,” he said. “I’ll never be able to do anything without you.”

Then he was standing much too close to her and she wanted to get away but she couldn’t seem to move her feet or put her hands in front of her face or even turn away. He was in front of her with his arms reaching out for her and there was nothing she could do about it. He was strong and she was weak. He was there and she was there and he was going to kiss her, and the fact that she didn’t want to be kissed didn’t seem to matter. She couldn’t prevent what was happening.

His hands took hold of her shoulders. His body came even closer to her, almost touching her, and his hands were strong on her shoulders without hurting her at all. He was pressing her close to him and still she didn’t turn away, still she didn’t even lower her head or push or struggle.

And then he was kissing her.

His lips were like his hands, big and strong and strangely gentle. He kissed her again and his hands released her shoulders and encircled her body, holding her gently but firmly against him.

She closed her eyes.

Something was wrong. She enjoyed the kiss, enjoyed being kissed by him, and that was not right at all. His arms shouldn’t feel comfortable around her. He was a man and she didn’t want men, and that made it thoroughly and completely wrong.

Wrong.

But she didn’t protest when he led her to the bed, didn’t struggle when he made her lie down or when he lay down beside her, didn’t try to escape when his arms went around her again and his lips found hers. He was kissing her again and, suddenly and incredibly, she was returning the kiss. Her hands met behind his back and his body felt so solid against her, so strong and hard, and it was all so bad and good at once.

“Mike—”

He kissed her again, harder than before, and his hands touched her and excited her. She didn’t understand what was happening to her, knowing only that it was radically wrong, that she must be very tired and very upset for this to be happening.

She felt herself trembling under his big hands. Her body stirred in response to his. She was afraid of him and afraid of herself and afraid of what they were doing.

“Stop—”

He didn’t stop. He didn’t seem any more able to stop than she was to stop him, and she felt herself enjoying it, yet she had to stop, had to stop him before anything happened.

“No!”

His hands were all over her body, fumbling with her clothing, preparing her for what was going to happen. Still excited, she began to struggle, fighting to get loose. But she couldn’t get away.

She had to stop him. There was only one way to do this, only one course open to her, and she took it.

Hardly thinking, she drove her knee up into him, hard, hurting him. He let out a small cry and fell away from her, doubled up in pain. His teeth were clenched tight and she could see him struggling to get his breath, fighting to keep from screaming. He moaned again and slipped from the bed to the floor.

“Mike! Oh, God—”

“Jan, I’m sorry. I’m so damned sorry.”

“No, it was my fault. I—”

“It was mine.” His teeth were still clenched and he was trying to talk over the pain. “I should have stopped when you told me to but I couldn’t, I just—”

“You couldn’t help it.”

“I should have,” he insisted. “Jan, I love you so much!”

“No,” she said. “No, you can’t. You can’t.”

When he looked up at her she could see the tears starting to form in the corners of his eyes. His eyes were begging with her and arguing with her and holding back tears all at once. She stood up from the bed and began straightening her clothing like a person in a dream while he was saying, “Jan, I love you. I love you!”

“No!” The words came out in a rush and she didn’t attempt to hold them back. “You don’t love me. You think you love me but you can’t because you don’t know me. Mike, you don’t know what I am!”

She turned and ran from the apartment, slamming the door behind her and rushing through the hallway and out of the building onto the street.

15

Laura was watching her intently from the couch when she walked into the apartment. There was some new and unfamiliar quality present in her eyes, some emotion Jan could see but could not identify.

“Where were you so long?”

It was a question, not an accusation. But Jan felt guilty immediately. Her hands began to tremble and she couldn’t manage to control them even though she clenched them. What was the matter with her?

“I got tied up,” she said, lamely.

“What kind of rope did they use?”

“Huh?”

“It’s after eleven, honey. Where were you all this time?”

“I—”

She saw that Laura was staring hard at her, noticing the way her hands were shaking. “Jan,” she said, softly, “what’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? Honey, you’re shaking like a leaf. Come over here and tell me about it.”

She walked to the sofa and sat down, knowing that she had to tell Laura what had happened but not knowing where to start. She knew that it was nothing, that it had happened because she was tired and that it didn’t mean anything. But how could she tell Laura?

“Jan.”

“Yes?”

“Jan, something’s got you all in knots tonight. What is it?”

“It’s nothing, really.”

“That’s possible. But don’t you think you ought to tell me about it?”

Silence.

“Jan? Sweets, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Are you afraid you’re going to hurt me?”

Silence. Her hands were shaking more violently.

“Jan, it hurts me more when you’re afraid.”

She closed her eyes. Laura was right — she had to talk, had to get it out of her system.

Slowly, haltingly, she began. She started from the time she left the apartment while Laura was still sleeping and went over the early part of the day, leaving nothing out. As she spoke her words flowed more smoothly, until by the time she got to Mike’s appearance the words followed each other easily, fluently. It was no effort to speak, no effort to recount everything that had taken place.

She did not look at Laura while she spoke. At first she kept her eyes shut, trying to lose contact with everything but the story she was telling. Later she focused her eyes on a lamp across the room.

Laura held her hand while she talked but this did not distract her. By the time she finished her hands had stopped trembling.

Laura remained silent, not moving at all, not saying a word. There was silence all over the apartment, hanging from the ceiling, pushing against the walls, weighing on the floor. A clock ticked mechanically in the bedroom and the rain lashed at the window.

Jan had hardly noticed the rain on the way over. Now she realized that her clothes were damp.

“Jan—” Laura’s voice seemed to be coming from far away as though she was speaking through a filter. “I’m glad you were able to tell me.”

“It was nothing. It didn’t mean anything.”

“But it did.” She smiled, a brief smile that left her face at once. “It meant more than you realize, honey, I guess I’ll have to draw you a picture.

“Jan—” She broke off, looking up abruptly. “Jan, this is very hard for me. I don’t want you to interrupt me until I’m finished. Okay?”

“But—”

“Please?”

“All right.”

Silence.

“First of all, I don’t want this to hurt you. It may hurt a little at first, but you have to realize that I’m not trying to hurt you. It’s just that I understand some things that you don’t understand yet. I’ve been here longer than you have. Sometimes I feel as though I’ve always been here, that my life started in this room and will end here. That’s why I know some things that you don’t... yet.”

Laura, I don’t understand.

“You... you don’t love me, Jan. Wait, don’t interrupt me until I’m through. You don’t love me and you never did love me, and I’m not saying this bitterly or angrily. I’m not blaming you in the least.”

But I do love you, Laura.

“Sometimes a person can think she’s in love, Jan. Sometimes a person needs something, and when another person supplies that something — it appears to be love. You... oh, I’m not getting through to you at all, am I?”

No. No, I don’t understand—

“You were using me, Jan. Not consciously — I don’t think you could consciously use anybody. But that’s what you were doing. It’s as though your back itched and you couldn’t reach to scratch it. I wasn’t a lover, honey. I was a kind of back-scratcher and your back doesn’t itch any more.”

You’re wrong. I need you. I still don’t understand what you mean and—

Laura lit a cigarette and shook out the match elaborately, her eyes focusing on the end of the cigarette for several seconds. “Jan,” she said, forcing a little smile, “let me tell you why your back itched. It itched because you wanted a man.”

That’s not true. That’s—

“You wanted a man,” she repeated. “You wanted a man but you were afraid of men, so you had to settle for the next best thing. Men were too strong. Men were strong and you were weak and they might hurt you. So you were afraid of them.

“I wasn’t a man; therefore I couldn’t hurt you. But at the same time you felt I couldn’t love you as well. You’re right — I can’t. Why do you think you were afraid to love Mike?

Love... Mike? “You weren’t ready for him. That’s all it was. And now you’re ready.”

Ready? Ready for what? Laura, don’t you know what I am? Doesn’t anybody know?

“You are in love,” Laura said. There was a certainty in her voice that kept Jan from questioning the words. She had to take them in whole.

“Jan, you’re not a Lesbian. Honey, you talked yourself into the whole thing and now I have to talk you back out of it. You got here because you weren’t ready to go all the way. Lesbianism was one of the rungs on the ladder. Now you’re ready to climb up to the top.

“Don’t try to argue with me, idiot. There are some things you still don’t know a hell of a lot about and this happens to be one of them. You’re not gay; you never were gay. You’re going to be happy and you’re going to have kids and a home, things that I couldn’t ever give you. You’re going to have a love with a future, honey, and I almost envy you.”

Silence again. Jan wanted to say something because something had to be said but she didn’t know what to say or even what to think or feel. Laura’s words began to soak in and the thought came to her that Laura was right, that Laura had to be right.

But she had loved Laura. And even as she thought this she felt the love fading away.

“Okay, honey. It’s your turn now.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Say that you love Mike.”

“Do I?”

“Of course you do. You know that now, don’t you?”

“I think so.”

“Then say it.”

The words didn’t want to come out. First she had to take a breath, and then she had to force the words from her lips: “I love Mike.”

“That’s right, honey. Now tell me that you don’t love me and never did.”

“Laura, I can’t say that!”

“You have to.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s true. Because you have to know it and make sure you know it deep down inside you so you’ll never forget it. And you’ve got to make me believe it, honey. Because I have to let go of you and that’s not an easy thing for me to do, not unless I know that we never had anything and that whatever we might have had is over.”

“Laura—”

“Say it, Jan.”

“I can’t.”

“Of course you can. Come on, now.”

She closed her eyes tight and turned her head to one side, mumbling “I don’t love you and I never did.”

It sounded cruel. Harsh and cruel.

“Again.”

“Why?”

“Say it!”

“I don’t love you and I never did!”

She shouted the words, no longer able to control the emotions within her. Sobbing, she threw herself into Laura’s arms and pressed her face against Laura’s shoulder. Automatically Laura’s arms went around her.

But for the first time these arms weren’t strong enough to hold her.

When she sat up she could feel herself withdrawing from Laura. “I guess you’re right,” she said. “I guess it’s all over.”

“It never existed.”

“Something did. I can still feel parts of it.”

“Maybe, but it was never love. We needed each other and we took what we needed. We were two straws clutching at each other, that’s all. Now we don’t need each other any more.”

“You don’t need me now, do you?”

Laura only hesitated for a moment. “No,” she said. “I needed you because there was something you needed from me. Now I’ve given it to you and I don’t need you any more.”

She nodded, understanding Laura and beginning to understand herself.

“Laura?”

“What?”

“What should I tell Mike? Should I tell him about us?”

“No.”

“But is it right not to tell him?”

Laura thought for a moment. “There’s an out for you, Jan. There’s a way to avoid telling him.”

“How?”

She looked away. “There was a novel I read a year or two ago,” she said. “By a man named Leonard Bishop. In it a boy named Ab made love to a girl named Rachel.

“Afterwards she asked him how many women he had slept with. And he said ‘One — the rest were shadows.’ ”

A pause.

“Is that what you are?”

“That’s all I ever was. So was that boy in Indiana, in his own way. Jan, nobody has ever made love to you yet, not really. You’re still a virgin inside. I’m a shadow — when the sun comes up I’ll go away.”

“And am I a shadow for you?”

For a moment she didn’t answer. Then, “I suppose you are. But all I’ve ever known are shadows.”

Silence. The clock still ticking and the rain still coming down hard against the windows.

“Laura—”

“What is it, honey?”

“Laura, I feel like crying.”

“Idiot. You ought to be happy. You’re in love for the first time.”

“I know it. But I still feel like crying. I can’t help it.”

“Don’t cry, Jan.”

“I—”

“Because I don’t want to cry and I will if you do. Please.”

She swallowed and said, “I’m all right now.”

“That’s the girl. You’re going to be happy, Jan.”

“I hope so.”

“You will, honey. Now... now I’m going to leave and I want to go before you do. I don’t want to be by myself right now.”

She stood up and walked to the closet, taking a raincoat from a hanger and slipping into it.

“Will I see you again, Laura?”

“If you do I don’t want you to talk to me. Do you understand?”

She nodded.

“Good. It’s better that way, Jan.”

“I understand.”

Smiling quickly, “Now will you give me a kiss?”

The kiss was very brief, very chaste and sisterly. Laura stepped back, her hand on the knob of the door, and Jan could see the tears flooding her eyes and at the point of overflowing.

She said, “So long.”

And then she was gone.

16

Solong. That was the song, of course. That was the song she had to hear, the song that was played in The Shadows at least a dozen times a day, day after day. How many times had she heard it? How many times had she been the one to play it, for that matter, or the one to cause some other girl to play it?

Too many times, she thought, dropping her dime in the slot and pressing the proper buttons. She turned and walked to an empty booth, glad at least that there was a booth to be alone in, glad that at The Shadows she could be all alone by herself and yet have people in the room with her.

The record. Such a sad song. Music and lyrics blending to create a mood which matched her own as no other song could. Some girls even cried to it, but it never had that effect on her. It summed things up so expertly that crying became unnecessary, as though the song did it for you.

As those melancholy lyrics said, she would not forget. Not Jan, not even if all the others were someday forgotten, all the girls she had left and all the ones who had left her. She had said this about each of them in turn but this time she knew it to be true. Jan would remain. Jan would stay in her mind until there was no mind left.

Such a short time. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. And a part of Thursday. Four days, really — four days in a lifetime, and wasn’t that the title of a book? But all she could remember about it was that it drew four separate days from a man’s life and made them into a novel.

Four days.

They were such good days, such perfect days, and the tragedy was that they had to come all at once, one after the other. Days like that were so good that they ought to be spaced throughout a person’s life.

Or was it better this way? Perhaps the intensity of it all compensated for the brevity. She had told Peggy something to that effect, that the acceleration was matched by the loss of love and the lessening of the pain. Did that make it any easier for Peggy?

Probably not. The fact was important, but knowing it didn’t help in the least.

Something was different. This was an altogether new sort of break-up, a new chapter in the saga of the Musical Beds. The sadness and emptiness was present as always, the deep feeling of the loss of something precious.

But there was more.

She had left many girls and many girls had left her. And on rare occasions nobody left anybody — the relationship simply withered away with no broken edges.

But this was different.

So many good-byes. So many times and so many times to look forward to, so many girls still to be known, to be loved passionately and lost with equal passion. And yet this one affair was different from all that had been and all that was yet to be.

She looked around the room. The faces kept changing but the girls remained the same. And The Shadows never changed. It was supposed to have been a speakeasy during Prohibition, complete with peephole in door. And — in a sense it still was. It never changed and it never would change. The same records would spin forever on the jukebox while the same faceless waitresses served the same tasteless drinks. And the same tourists would stumble in to stare nervously at the dimly lit forms, leaving with the sensation that they had stepped into another world.

Even the same people would drink at The Shadows. Their names and faces might change but this did not matter. Kate wasn’t around; neither was a whole host of the girls who had been present Saturday night. Peggy was sitting across on the other side of the room, she noticed, and she thought of Peggy for a moment with something approaching tenderness.

But there was no time to think of Peggy. Later there might be time for her, later but not now.

Tonight was Jan’s night.

Tonight was a brand-new night. She had never felt quite this way before. She herself had never broken up an affair while still in love and she had definitely never felt the particular emotion that filled her. What was it, exactly?

Relief? Hardly. Fulfillment? Not that. Nothing like that.

What was it?

Never mind. Whatever it was, she felt strangely good about it.

She could have kept Jan with her, for a time. She could have fought with Mike and she might have beaten him. With a certain amount of effort she might have kept Jan in the shadows forever.

But she hadn’t. She hadn’t even demanded that last fitful and desperate love that Peggy had requested and received. She could have, but she did not really need it.

I must have loved her, she thought. I must have loved her one hell of a lot.

She had lost so much. This time she had loved more intensely than ever before.

Tonight would be empty and alone. Tomorrow morning there would be no one in bed beside her. But she would go on living, and then there would be another girl with brown hair or black hair or red hair — or blonde hair, she thought, looking briefly at Peggy.

Tomorrow or the day after. Always another girl, always someone else to fill part of the emptiness.

Musical Beds.

The game had to go on because you could never get away from it. If you lived in the shadows you had to be a shadow and play shadowy games. You had to run from the sunshine or be dissolved by it. When you were a shadow, the shadows were all you ever knew.

So long.

The magic word in the shadow world. You said it over and over until you died, but you could never say “so long” to the shadows.

And yet, for the first time, she felt as though she had caught one brief glimpse of the sun.

17

She was just barely aware of the rain. The water poured down on her as she walked, plastering her clothes to her skin and soaking her hair, but she remained only vaguely conscious of it. She noted the rain, accepted it and forgot it. There were too many other things to be aware of, too much to think about and try to understand. The rain was the least of her worries.

Everything was happening so quickly. It seemed as though that was the story of her life: things always happened before she was ready for them and ended before she had quite begun. Everything happened so quickly, so suddenly, and she was always just a little bit behind; just a little too slow to catch on, just a little too young and a little too frightened for each successive event.

But she was beginning to catch up. Finally she could feel herself growing older and moving faster, and everything was slowing down to wait for her. That was the way it had to be and the way it would be from now on.

She was going home. She had been trying for so many years to go home but there had never been a home for her, not since her mother died.

Home with Mike.

She started walking faster, thinking that Mike might not be at the apartment, that he might have left after what happened, that he hadn’t slept in days and that it was cold and raining outside and that he had to be there, had to be asleep in her bed and waiting for her.

She had to get home to him.

And he had to be there. He couldn’t be out walking tonight, not on a night like this, not when he was so tired and so worn out and when she needed him so much because she loved him. Now, finally, unalterably, she knew that she loved him.

And suddenly she thought of Laura.

Laura had told her to forget her. Now, yes — but later she would be able to remember her, to remember all that was good about her, to remember her as someone who had taught her who she was and where she was going.

All at once she was standing on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Barrow Street with home only a few doors away, only a few seconds from where she stood. She began walking faster and faster, then breaking into a run, running all the way to her building with the pavement wet and slippery under her feet and the rain pouring down on her.

She opened first the outer door and then the door to her apartment. Mike had to be there. She tiptoed inside, water dripping from her clothes to the kitchen floor, thinking that Mike had to be sleeping in her bed. She walked softly to the bedroom door, too frightened to open it for a moment. Then slowly she turned the knob and opened the door.

He was asleep in her bed with his face pressed into the pillow. His clothes were folded on the chair in the corner and he looked so peaceful in bed that it seemed almost a shame to wake him.

Soundlessly she left the room and closed the door. In the bathroom she removed her clothes and dried herself with a towel, went back into the bedroom.

He was still asleep. She slipped under the covers very slowly, very careful not to wake him, not yet. She drew the covers up over her and moved close to him so that she could feel his warmth without actually touching him. And then she moved her head near his and put her mouth very close to his ear.

“Mike?”

Then, a little louder, “Mike?”

He turned and opened his eyes. At first he didn’t seem to believe she was really there, and then his eyes opened wider and he started to say something.

With a little cry she went to him.

Content

Lesley Evans
Strange Are the Ways of Love

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