Rhea had all the cues she needed about my relationships with women. She had witnessed the melodrama with Bea. But on the surface, Rhea did not know I was gay, and I did not tell her. Homosexuality was outside the party line at that time; therefore, Rhea defined it as “bad,” and her approval was important to me. Without words, we both more or less agreed never to allude to what was obviously the guiding passion of my life, my involvement with those female friends to whom Rhea always referred as “your cool-voiced young women.”
Rhea and I loved each other, yet she would have professed horror had she been forced to imagine an extension of our love into the physical.
Fortunately, or maybe because of her attitudes, I was never physically attracted to Rhea. She was a beautiful, strong, and vivacious woman, but I have never found straight women physically appealing. Self-protective as this mechanism is, it also has served me as a sixth sense. In those days, whenever two or more lesbians got together, the most frequent topic of conversation was “Do you think she’s gay?” It was a constant question about any woman we happened to be interested in. Nine times out of ten, if I felt a strong physical pull toward a woman, whatever her protective coloration might be, she would usually turn out to be either gay, or so strongly women-oriented that being gay became only a question of time or opportunity.
Always before, the few lesbians I had known were women whom I had met within other existing contexts of my life. We shared some part of a world common to us both—school or work or poetry or some other interest beyond our sexual identity. Our love for women was a fact that became known only after we were already acquainted and connected through some other reason.
In the bars, we met women with whom we would have had no other contact, had we not all been gay. There, Muriel and I were pretty well out of whatever was considered important. That was namely drinking, softball, dyke-chic fashion, dancing, and who was sleeping with whom at whose expense. All other questions of survival were considered a very private affair.
When Muriel came into the city on weekends that spring, she stayed at the YWCA over on Hudson Street in the West Village, which is now a nursing home. We spent the weekend in her tiny room making love, in between barring and trips back to Seventh Street for something to eat. Sometimes, we didn’t have the money to rent a room at the Y, because I was not working again and she only had a part-time job in Stamford. Then, we braved Rhea’s bewildered and questioning glances and stayed at the apartment. After Muriel left one Sunday, Rhea and I talked.
“Muriel’s around a lot, isn’t she?” I could see Rhea remembering the weeping Bea in the stairwell.
“I love Muriel very much, Rhea.”
“I can see that.” Rhea laughed. “But how do you love her?”
“In every way I know how!” And Rhea turned back to the dishes, shaking her head, trying to find some correlation between my loving Muriel and her own painful love affairs. She did not dare to see the similarities and so she could not see the differences. And the words were never spoken. I was too chicken to come right out and say, “Hey, look, Rhea, Muriel and I are lovers.”
Rhea could not bear the heartbreak of her affair with Art, and began to make plans to move to Chicago later in the spring. The idea that I would soon have the apartment all to myself delighted me. I made up my mind that I would never live with anyone else again, unless we were lovers.
Muriel and I were beginning to envision the world together. I didn’t know how I was going to bring my personal and political visions together, but I knew it had to be possible because I felt them both too strongly, and knew how much I needed them both to survive. I did not agree with Rhea and her progressive friends when they said that this was not what the revolution was about. Any world which did not have a place for me loving women was not a world in which I wanted to live, nor one which I could fight for.
One Friday night, Muriel and I spent the evening making love on my studio couch in the middle room of the apartment. Dusk crept away from the window on the air shaft and night came in. We were just resting briefly when we heard Rhea’s key in the front door in the kitchen. Muriel and I lay curled into each other’s arms on the now-familiar single couch. Without moving much, we simply pulled the covers up over us, closed our eyes, and pretended to be asleep.
We heard Rhea come into the kitchen and turn on the light. I could feel the glow of the sudden brightness from the room next door as it shined through the arched doorway and along the floor of my room, parallel to where the two of us lay. Rhea entered, proceeding across my room to hers at the front of the house. Her footsteps stopped beside the bed where Muriel and I were, our eyes squeezed shut like children. She stood there for a moment looking down at our supposedly sleeping figures under the covers entwined within the narrow space, lit by the dim reflected light from the kitchen.
And then, without warning, Rhea burst into tears. She stood over us sobbing wildly as if her heart was being broken by what she saw. She wept over us for at least two minutes while we both lay there, our arms around each other and our eyes closed tightly. There was nothing else we could do; I felt it would just be too embarrassing to Rhea for me to look up and say, “Hey, what’s going on here?” Besides, I thought I knew. Our obvious happiness in our “incorrect” love was so great besides her obvious unhappiness in her “correct” ones, that the only response to such cosmic unfairness was tears.
Finally, Rhea turned and ran into her own room, closing the door. We could hear her sobbing through the closed door until we both fell asleep.
I never discussed that night with Rhea, nor whether those furious tears had been for her own loneliness or for the joy that Muriel and I were finding in each other. Perhaps, if I had, both of our lives might have been different. Rhea left New York City one week later, and I did not see her again for many years.
Much later, I discovered the real reason why Rhea left New York that spring to take a job in Chicago, on what seemed at the time to be such short notice. A visiting higher-up in progressive circles had come to the house one evening while I was there. She later returned to headquarters in New Jersey with the shocking report that Rhea shared a house with a homosexual, and a Black one, at that. In other words, Rhea had been denounced for her association with me. A progressive in good standing could not afford such questionable company in 1955. I had become an embarrassment.
I was totally oblivious to all this, immersed as I was in the fact of Muriel and me. I only knew that Rhea was becoming more and more troubled, culminating in the scene over my couch. But the word had come down to her; get rid of me or give up her work. Rhea loved me, and valued our friendship, but her work was more important and she had to protect herself. Her last affair was a perfect excuse. Rather than ask me to leave or let me know what was going on, Rhea decided to give me the apartment and move to Chicago.
My Mother’s House,
July 5, 1954
Hickory-skinned demons with long white hair and handsome demonical eyes stretch out arms wide as all tomorrow, across the doorway exit from a room through which I run, screaming, shrieking for exit. But I cannot stop running. If I collide with those long arms barring my pathway out, I will die of electrocution. As I run I start to shout in despair, “Our father who art in heaven…” and the arms start to dissolve and drip down the walls and the air between the door and me.
I then pass into another room of my parents’ home—their bedroom, the room in which I am now asleep. It is dark and silent. There is a watermelon shaped like an egg on the bureau. I lift the fruit up and it drops down upon the linoleum floor. The melon splits open, and at the core is a brilliant hunk of turquoise, glowing. I see it as a promise of help coming for me.
Rhea is asleep, still, in my parents’ large bed. She is in great danger. I must save her from the great and nameless evil in this house, left here by the hickory-faced devils. I take her hand. It is white and milky in the half-dark.
And then suddenly I realize that in this house of my childhood I am no longer welcome. Everything is hostile to me. The doors refuse to open. The glass cracks when I touch it. Even the bureau drawers creak and stick when I try to close them. The light bulbs blow out when I switch on the light. The can-opener won’t turn; the eggbeater jams mysteriously.
This is no longer my home; it is only of a past time.
Once I realize this, I am suddenly free to go, and to take Rhea with me.