IT WAS ALMOST DAWN WHEN SHE HEARD THE FRONT DOOR opened carefully, and shut with a small click. She was lying on her stomach with her face obscured by crumpled bedclothes and the pillow. She heard Laura come in, heard her pause as she caught sight of the sofa-bed open and occupied, heard her rustle softly across the room and felt her presence, her scent, only scant inches from her. The room was full of a deep gray light and Beth was sure it wasn’t enough for Laura to distinguish her face by. She lay almost breathless on the bed until Laura turned and moved quietly away, going into her own bedroom.
Beth rolled over and gazed at the faintly visible ceiling with a tremendous happiness inside her that called for singing, shouting from the rooftops, hilarity. It made her smile at the ceiling and hug herself, and after a while it got her out of bed and sent her to the door of the bedroom where Jack and Laura were sleeping. She just stood there, one hand pressed against the door and a smile on her face, for half an hour. There was too much excitement and anticipation in her for the unhappy parts of her life to bother her. She never once thought of Charlie or of Vega.
She got up and dressed. There was no point in trying to sleep any more; she was too keyed up. She put her clothes on and washed her face and then she made up the sofa-bed, folding the sheets and blanket carefully and stacking them in a chair while she closed the hinged mattress and put the cushions back in place. All slowly…all quietly.
She picked up a magazine and looked at the pictures. And finally, after what seemed like an eternity, she heard stirrings in Jack and Laura’s room. She heard a sleepy male voice speaking softly and then someone answering him, and her whole soul thrilled to that light feminine voice. It had been so long, so abysmally long and lonesome a time since she had last heard it. She even wondered, half laughing at herself, if she would have recognized it as Laura’s voice without the sure knowledge that it was actually Laura who spoke. She heard her so indistinctly; the words were unintelligible, just a faint murmur of sound.
Fifteen minutes went by, during which Beth could hear sounds of running water in the bathroom, small sounds of drawers opening and shoes dropping and things being moved and things being gotten into. Suddenly the bedroom door opened and she looked up—almost leaped up—only to see Jack emerge.
Jack gave her a pleasant grin. “She’s still sleeping,” he said. He gave three sharp raps on Betsy’s door and said, “Get up, honey.” And then, turning to Beth, he said, “Come on, I’ll fix you some breakfast.”
She got up and followed him into the kitchen and helped him make scrambled eggs and bacon and coffee and orange juice and muffins.
“I believe in big breakfasts,” he told her.
“You’re some cook,” she said. “You really know your way around the kitchen. I’m a flop in that department.”
He smiled, unabashed. “Worked out very well,” he said. “Laura’s not a great cook, and she doesn’t like it much. I do most of it.”
“Under protest?”
“Hell, no. I enjoy it. I wouldn’t do it otherwise.”
Betsy came in as Beth was pouring the orange juice and she exclaimed brightly, “Hi, Mrs. Ayers! Did you stay all night?”
“Sh!” her father told her. “Come here and let me button you. Mrs. Ayers is going to surprise Mommy. We don’t want her to know she’s here.”
“Oh,” she said, turning big eyes, made bigger still by the lenses in front of them, on Beth, while Jack did up a row of pearl buttons on the back of her dress.
“There,” he said. “Eat.”
Beth had the uncanny feeling that everything she saw and heard, every bit of this little morning ritual she was sharing with them, would tie Laura closer to her and help her understand herself. Nothing was unimportant. She remembered it all.
“When does Laura get up?” she asked while they ate.
“Not till ten or so. It depends,” he said.
“She isn’t working, then?”
“No.” It was emphatic. She sensed that he didn’t want his wife to work.
“Who did you tell her I was?”
“She asked me this morning,” he said, grinning. “I told her you were my mother. Stood her on her ear.”
“Did it? Is your mother dead or something?”
He laughed. “No. Laura’s never laid eyes on my mother, and neither have I for thirty years. But I call Laura ‘Mother.’ It started out as a joke and ended up a family institution. I was calling her Mother long before I had any notion of marrying her. A Freudian slip, I suppose.”
Betsy giggled, more at the tone of his voice than at his words, for they didn’t make much sense to her.
“I’ll be home after five,” he told Beth when he finished. “We’ll go out for dinner or something.” He got up and Betsy followed him. At the kitchen door he turned to add, “Say, tell Laura to call George McCracken and cancel that order, will you? I’ve changed my mind. And tell her to mail a check to Dr. Byrd. It’ll save me writing it down.”
“Sure,” Beth said.
When they had gone she felt suddenly scared, suddenly on her own without anyone to help her through it, and she almost wished that Laura knew she was there. It was going to be such a hard shock for her. Or was it? Would she take it in stride the way she seemed to have taken the rest of her life?
Beth cleaned up the breakfast dishes, leaving the coffee and wrapping the muffins in waxed paper for Laura. She smoked incessantly out of sheer nervousness and she began to wonder if it would ever be ten o’clock.
But Laura was quicker than that. It was only a little past nine when Beth heard her getting up, heard the familiar morning sounds that Jack had been making an hour ago. And all at once Beth was overwhelmed with the significance of it. It seemed as if all she had suffered and begun to learn so painfully and searched for so clumsily was about to be revealed to her, as if her very soul would come walking out of that bedroom with Laura and show itself to her for the first time and answer all her questions.
She was almost more afraid of seeing her true self than of seeing Laura now and she sat on the edge of the chair with her whole spine shivering and her hands hot and sweaty.
The bedroom door opened and from her seat Beth heard Laura cross the living room, the dining area. For a shattering second she felt the gray faintness that possessed her in tense emotional storms and she clamped her eyes shut. But the feeling passed and she opened them again. They opened on Laura.
She was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, and at the moment Beth saw her she was still too stunned to speak. There was not even a trace of amazement yet on her face, just morning sleepiness and the heart-piercing beauty that Beth had loved so passionately long ago.
For some moments they simply stared at each other, both too full of feeling to speak or move. And then Laura raised trembling hands to her face and Beth heard her voice, clear and familiar now, break as she spoke her name. It took her another second to realize that Laura was crying.
Beth sprang to her feet and went to her, only to find herself helplessly shy and unable to touch her. Until Laura lowered her hands and turned diamond-bright eyes up to her and reached for her.
They kissed each other with such tenderness, such perfect accord, such lovely waiting warmth, that Beth felt dizzy with it. Laura simply moved into her arms, giving herself to her with that whole-souled generosity that thrilled Beth almost to tears. They clung to each other, and still there were no words between them, there seemed to be nothing to say. Beth held her tight, feeling a flood of strength and sureness come into her arms, as she put her head down against Laura’s and kissed her throat, her ears, the delicate expanse of shoulder that her negligee revealed. She could feel Laura trembling and it delighted her inexpressibly, this overpowering response they could feel for each other. It was as if Laura had known all along and was welcoming her home.
“I thought you might have changed,” Beth whispered finally. “I thought you might never have forgiven me. Oh, Laura, Laura, oh my darling Laura.”
But Laura, sensing better than Beth the futility of words at such a moment, pulled away, seeming to glide out of Beth’s arms. Her eyes, her whole face glowed with a beguiling reticence that Beth remembered with a wrench of the heart, and she followed as Laura moved away from her, across the kitchen to a window.
“Laura, say something,” Beth pleaded. “Say it’s all right that I’m here. Say you’re glad to see me.”
Without looking at her Laura repeated softly, “It’s all right, Beth. I’m glad to see you. Very glad,” and her voice vibrated with amazed desire. When she felt Beth’s kisses on the back of her neck she put her head back and let it rest against Beth’s shoulder.
For Beth it was almost too much. There was so much to say, so much to excuse, and yet all she wanted was to touch Laura, to make love.
“I’m afraid to stop touching you!” Beth said. “I’m afraid you’ll vanish, I’m afraid I’m dreaming. Oh, Laura, Laura…Just saying your name to you now, knowing you hear me…I can’t bear it.” She felt her own tears well up and she let them come. “I’ve said it so many times to myself, to the bare walls, to nobody and anybody. I feel as if I’ve spent my whole life trying to find you again, as if everything in my life that I’ve done without you doesn’t count. Nothing matters but you. Laura, I was so afraid I wouldn’t find you. I’ve tried so hard, I’ve been so damn scared that you wouldn’t want to see me, that you’d be different.”
Laura turned around and put a finger on Beth’s lips. “Don’t talk,” she said. “It’s so hard to talk. You’ll spoil everything.” She took Beth’s hand and led her into the bedroom. The scent of her pervaded the whole room and struck a whirling exhilaration into Beth. The beds were rumpled and welcoming and the clothes Laura must have worn the night before hung over a chair in the corner.
Laura pulled Beth down on the bed with tender graceful arms, slipping under her as she did so and letting her negligee fall away. For every feverish word Beth uttered Laura gave her a kiss until she had Beth helpless with desire, until all the words were stilled. Beth had not even the time to marvel at it, to be grateful; all that she saved for afterwards, succumbing to the sensual beauty of it now, while it was happening.
She had the feeling, whenever Laura touched her or moved with her, that no one, no living human being, had ever understood her so beautifully, so instinctively, and she felt too that Laura could not have been this way with anybody else. All Laura had to do was speak, and Beth would understand all. Their love was sacred to them. It made her feel that Laura had just been waiting for her all these years. Nothing of significance had happened to either of them since they parted. All their lives, all their actions, all their thoughts without each other lost meaning. It was as if nothing existed but the two of them, and they were more important than the rest of the world put together.
They lay in each other’s arms throughout the rest of the morning, hardly speaking at first, just reaffirming a powerful attraction that had lain dormant for too long, thrilled to feel the remembered sweet response.
“It makes me think of the campus,” Laura murmured. “Do you remember how it was in the spring? How it felt to walk under the huge old elms on the broadwalk and talk about classes and whisper about love? It’s almost like being there, having you so close. I never thought I’d feel it again.”
“Laura,” Beth said, her hands full of Laura’s hair. “I’ve been half dead all these years. I’ve needed you so terribly.” There was a little pause. Laura looked away and Beth knew what she was thinking. “I—I know I could have had you in the beginning,” she went on, hesitant but unable to stem the flood of feeling. “I know I should never have given you up. But you see, I didn’t understand it then.”
She paused, searching Laura’s face for a light of sympathy, but Laura listened to her with her face averted. It made Beth feel, more than words could have, how profoundly she had hurt this exquisite girl. “I thought I had to have a man, then,” she tried to explain. “But Laura, I was wrong. I’ve had to live with one and, believe me, I know. I’ve been sick—just sick with it.”
“You’d have been sick with me too, Beth,” Laura said with a wise smile, unexpectedly. “No matter which one of us you chose, it would have been the wrong choice. You would have spent the rest of your life wondering if you hadn’t done wrong. It wouldn’t have been so much different with me than with Charlie.”
Beth sat up in bed, grasping Laura’s face in her hands, her eyes hurt and shocked. “Laura, you’re the only one who ever understood me, who ever cared so beautifully and completely for me. No man—certainly not Charlie—could ever measure up to you. No man can understand me when I can’t understand myself. That’s why I needed you so desperately.”
“To be understood?” Laura interrupted. She smiled with a sad mouth. In the aftermath of shock and passion, her head was clearing.
“Not just that,” Beth said, feeling somehow as if the ground were slipping out from under her, yet not knowing why. “I love you, Laura. I’ve loved you since we parted.”
“When did you make that discovery?” Laura said. “On your wedding day?” And her smile was sharp now.
“Oh God, Laura, I don’t know when I first realized it—what a mistake the marriage was.”
“Probably the day you had your first quarrel,” Laura said, and her expression hinted that she would have liked to have seen it. She looked suddenly like a minx—sly and taunting. Beth could tell just from her face, her smile, how much she had learned, how much she had changed. She would not be easy and yielding for long.
“Laura, don’t laugh at me,” Beth pleaded. “You don’t know what I’ve been through, what I’ve given up, to find you.”
“What, Beth? Tell me. Your reputation? Your fortune? Your rose-covered bungalow? Or just a little peace of mind?” She got up from the bed while she spoke and began to dress. The action was almost insolent, a soundless slap in the face that reverberated across nine years. Beth saw in her mind with stinging clarity the scene at the train, when she had sent Laura away. It had never seemed cruel to her until now because she had fooled herself into thinking she had done it for Laura’s own good. But looking into Laura’s haunting face she saw very clearly that it had been cruel after all. Laura remembered every word and gesture of it. She was remembering it at that moment while she looked at Beth with a smiling mouth.
“Laura, I’m speaking to you from my heart,” Beth said, her voice straining. “I’m telling you the absolute truth the very best I can. Don’t turn your back to me.”
But Laura had kept her resentment in check too many years not to give herself the luxury of loosing it now. Just once. Just to let Beth know how it had been. That was all she wanted. “You turned your back on me often enough,” she said, facing away from the bed and looking through her dresser drawers.
Beth looked down at her bare thighs in confusion and covered them with part of the sheet. “Never on purpose,” she protested.
Laura laughed. She knew better. “Only for Charlie’s sake,” she said. “That it? He forced you. You never would have turned me out on your own. Where is Charlie now?” She pulled a gauzy slip from one of the drawers, and still her back was turned and her eyes ignored her lover.
And Beth knew from the toss of Laura’s head, from the sweep of her smooth arm, that Laura meant to punish her.
“He’s in California,” Beth said darkly.
“How long has he been out there?”
“A long time. Years.”
“Were you there with him?”
“No.”
“He must be worried sick about you. Or does he know where you are?” And now, as from a great height, Laura’s cornflower eyes swept over her curiously. Those eyes had lost their innocence through the years, but Beth loved them still.
“No, he doesn’t know. I doubt if he’s in any mood to give a damn, either. He thinks I’m in Chicago.”
“Are you still married?” Laura said.
“No. Divorced. Oh, it was a long time ago, Laura. Don’t ask me about it.” She sped through the lie as if afraid of stumbling over it. But Laura’s eyes, grown knowing and sharp, saw the shadow of uncertainty on Beth’s face.
“Have you been looking for me all this time?” Laura said, and suddenly she was coy, teasing, needling Beth. “Was I so hard to find?”
“Not after I got to New York. I met Beebo Brinker in the Village. Beebo told me where you were.”
“Oh.” Laura pulled the slip over her head and her act of dressing defied Beth. Laura was so breathtaking without her clothes. The fact that she was covering herself up was almost depressing, as if she were putting an end to the tenderness, the caresses of a little while ago. She was telling Beth, subtly and wittily, to go to hell, and Beth was stung. Laura’s whole graceful body told her impudently, You took advantage of my surprise, my helpless love. Well, I’m not helpless any longer.
“Did you have any children, Beth?” Laura asked. Her questions were slow, bold, rather hopeful of offending. And yet there was still restraint in her. She had once loved Beth utterly, and her first reaction to Beth’s presence had been a quick unreasoning surrender. Desire had made her weak. But desire was satisfied now; it remained to satisfy her wounded soul.
“No,” Beth snapped. “No children.” She was appalled at herself and at the same time angrily determined to deny that part of her life.
Laura gazed at her, aware from the tone and temper in Beth that she had touched an emotional sore. But then perhaps it was just Beth’s disappointment in seeing Laura get dressed.
Beth, suddenly surly, got up and began to put her own clothes on. She stepped into her panties self-consciously and then, to her own surprise, broke down and began to cry. The chill between them was too much for her. She went to Laura humbly and embraced her.
“Laura, I want you,” she whispered. “I love you. Nothing else matters. The rest of my life doesn’t matter, it didn’t even happen, if you’ll just take me back. Be good to me. Help me, please, help me.”
But Laura couldn’t be had that easily. “Help you what?” she said. “You mean, help you now the way you helped me nine years ago? Put you on a train and send you to hell? One-way trip?”
“Please—dear God—don’t be sarcastic!” Beth implored her.
“It’s a very educational trip, Beth,” Laura said softly.
For a moment it struck Beth as Nina’s barbs had struck her. But she needed Laura’s aid too much to risk antagonizing her. “I’m dead serious,” she said through her tears. “Help me find myself. Help me know myself,” she insisted, shaking Laura forcibly. “No one can help me but you.”
And Laura, caught in Beth’s strong urgent arms, began to understand, began to see through the clouds of passion and desperation that hung about Beth. She knew what Beth was there for. Not for love, not for Laura, not for nostalgia or passion or anything tender. She had come to find herself and was fanatically sure Laura could help. Laura was her tool, and, realizing it now, Laura smiled at her with pity.
“You’re so lucky,” Beth said. “So damn lucky!” And she couldn’t keep the little green flash of envy from showing. “You’ve got it both ways. A husband and a child and a home. And at the same time, women. You worked your life out right, Laura darling. I made a complete mess of mine. God, isn’t it ironical? When I said goodbye to you and watched you climb on that train and go out of my life, I felt sorry for you. I pitied you because I thought you were already starting out on the wrong foot. I thought nothing could set you right. You’d just bungle along and botch the whole thing. I thought you’d be hurt.” She clung to Laura as she spoke, unconsciously rocking her as if the movement were a comfort.
“I thought you’d get lost, I thought you’d get taken, I thought the big city would devour you,” Beth cried, almost wishing, out of spite, that it had. “I thought living like an outcast, a Lesbian, would destroy you. All this time I’ve worried and wondered about you. And now at last I find you and—and” she began to laugh a little hysterically—“and you’re happy as a clam. You’ve got the world on a string. You’re the one who did it right, who found the secret. Laura, let me in on it. I’m so damned miserable sometimes I feel like death. Like death.” And she shook Laura with the angry demand for sympathy.
It was not a generous speech. It was not the declaration of love reborn or of gratitude that she had meant to make. It was an accusation. It said, “You have no right to be happier than I!” Laura had it all, Beth had nothing, and Beth showed her grudge in a sudden uncontrollable outpouring of envy and unhappiness. It was not what she had come all this way to discover and it was too much to bear.
Laura understood this while Beth did not. Beth thought she was speaking of love, and she was chagrined when Laura moved out of her arms with a laugh.
Laura walked across the room in her slip, one nylon stocking on, one in her hand, and her laugh burned Beth like salt in a cut. Laura turned and looked at her then, still smiling.
“Beth,” she said, lingering over the name. “I still love you, Beth. God knows why. But now, for the first time in all these years, I can pity you too. It’s a strange feeling. A little like being set free.”
“No, Laura—”
“Don’t talk. Listen! You need a little pity. You need a lot. You’ve spent so damn many years pitying me, Beth, don’t begrudge me the same pleasure. It’s my turn now.”
Beth went over to the bed and collapsed on it. “How did you do it?” she begged. “Where did I go wrong? I never should have let you leave me.”
“No? What would we have done together, you and I? Settled down in a vine-covered walk-up in the Village? Adopted a couple of kids?”
“I don’t want kids, I never did!”
“You said you didn’t have any.”
“I don’t!” Beth shrieked.
“Then don’t get excited,” Laura said curiously. “You could have lived with me once, Beth. Don’t forget that.”
“Anything would have been better than Charlie!”
“Even me?” Laura couldn’t help laughing again.
“No! No! Good God, Laura, Laura, please don’t laugh like that. Don’t laugh at me!” She sounded quite frantic and Laura took pity on her. She was not malicious, only human, and she needed to hurt Beth a little. It was healthy for her. It would clear away the murky, pent-up bitterness and misunderstanding.
“If you don’t want me to laugh at you, don’t be such a fool,” she said.
“Charlie was insufferable,” Beth gasped, clutching at her self-control.
“Charlie loved you, Beth,” Laura retorted. “I don’t know what the situation is now, but you dismissed his love much too lightly a few minutes ago. It was a wonderful love, very deep and strong. If there were blind spots in it, they weren’t weaknesses. He had enough love to smooth them over. I hated him but I respected him always. I knew how much he loved you.”
“Are you saying that whatever happened between us must have been my fault? That I didn’t love him enough?” Beth cried. And the frustrations of the last months colored her voice.
“No. I’m saying you couldn’t have made a better choice than Charlie, if you wanted to get married. And Beth, you did want to. You were cocksure of yourself.”
“Then why didn’t it work? Why wasn’t I happy?” Beth had lost control, even the desire for control. She wept noisy furious sobs like a child, her hands covering her face.
Laura watched her from across the room for a moment and then she went into the bathroom. She came back in a moment with a glass of cold water, walked up to Beth, and threw it in her face. She accomplished this quietly, experimentally, but with a certain satisfaction. She had never thought, in all her daydreams of Beth, that she would have the courage to treat her like another mere human being.
“I don’t know why it didn’t work, Beth,” she said. “Maybe you’ll be happy now. I hope so.”
With an outraged splutter, Beth stopped crying. There was a moment of palpable tension between them. The water clung to Beth’s hair and dripped from her face and for a moment she thought she would explode with rage. But it came to her slowly that she could not get any angrier than she had just been. She hadn’t the strength and there was no way to express it without behaving like a madwoman. She was not that kind.
Beth turned her wet, violet eyes and open mouth up to Laura, struggling to find words, composure. But Laura, still smiling, spared her the necessity.
“Maybe the one thing you learned from living with a man is that you can’t live with a man,” she told her. “It’s a sad, common little lesson. But sometimes those are the hardest to learn.”
After a full minute of wet humiliation Beth brought herself to say, “What if it had been somebody different?” Her voice was unsure of itself, rough. “What if it had been somebody like Jack, maybe, who understood?”
“You said you didn’t understand yourself,” Laura reminded her, putting the empty glass down casually on the bed table. “Do you want to marry a psychiatrist who’ll spend all his time explaining you to yourself?”
“No.” Laura’s words made Beth vaguely aware of her own unreasonable thinking. “No, I wanted that from you. You grasp things others miss. I wanted you to tell me.” And she wanted Laura to apologize for that glass of water; it was obvious in every inflection of her voice. Redeem yourself; say you’re sorry. Damn you!
But Laura was on top of the situation now. She could play it her way.
“Tell you what, Beth?” Laura said suggestively, and brushed cold water from Beth’s breasts. Beth shied away from her and stood up.
“Tell me what to do,” she said through clenched teeth. “Who I am.” She gave a tortured little laugh through her sobs and said, “God it’s funny. It’s so funny. I thought I’d know just by looking at you. I thought all you’d have to do was walk through that door and I’d suddenly understand everything. Just the sight of you would make it all clear.”
“You were always a great one for oversimplifying things,” Laura said. “I’m not the fortune teller who can read your palm. I’m not so easy to hurt anymore either, or so easy to teach. I’ve learned to protect myself. You gave me my first lessons years ago. Tell me something, Beth. Why did you think you had to find me to find yourself?”
“I don’t know,” Beth said and shook her head. Laura handed her some face tissue to wipe the last of the water off with and Beth snatched it from her, haughtily. She blew her nose. “It sounds—crazy, now. Irrational, even. But a few hours ago it seemed like the most natural thing in the world.”
“And now I’ve disappointed you, haven’t I?” Laura said. She seemed privately pleased at the idea; it might show Beth the folly of oversimplifying things, of hurting other people to spare herself. “Poor Beth. Poor silly Beth. It was all going to be so easy, wasn’t it?” she said sympathetically.
Beth was without dignity, without resources. She could only mumble, “I guess I expected too much.”
“You expected the impossible,” Laura chided her. “And I thought at first you really wanted me. Really desired me again.”
“I—I did.”
“No, it was something completely different. Oh, not that you minded that part in bed a little while ago. But that was supposed to be the frosting on the cake. You could have done without that if you’d had to.”
“Laura, don’t persecute me,” she whimpered, sitting down in a stuffed chair by the window. “If I had only found a guy like Jack!” she said, pounding her legs harshly with her fists. “If only—”
“You aren’t going to make things better by copying my life,” Laura said. “Even if you could, that’s no answer.”
“It was the answer for you,” Beth snapped.
“But you’re not me,” Laura said. “Come on, Beth, you know that much.”
“We’re a lot alike,” Beth persisted.
“We’re entirely different. We always were.”
Beth stood up again, turning her back to Laura. She stood tall and angry, hurt and bewildered, but recovering her pride. “Are you telling me you won’t help me?” she demanded. “You refuse? I’m not worth the trouble? Or am I just a hopeless case?”
“Not yet, but you’re trying awfully damned hard to make yourself hopeless,” Laura exclaimed. “What right have you to get on your high horse with me? When you need help, Beth, you ask for it. You don’t order it, like a meal. At least not from the people who don’t owe you anything.” There was another blazing silence. The air between them seemed very heavy.
“Is there anything I can do?” Laura said finally, placatingly. “I doubt it. But if there is, tell me.”
“I want you to tell me!” Beth cried, turning on her in near despair. “Why do you think I’m here? Why do you think I’ve given up everything just to find you? What do you think I’ve been saying to you all morning?” And to emphasize her anger, to avenge herself for that shameful glass of water, she picked up Laura’s bed pillow and swung it hard against the table. It broke. Together, silent, they watched the feathers snow down. Beth was too mad to feel sorry. She was entitled to ruin something, after all Laura had put her through.
Laura nodded distantly at the mess. “That’s right, Beth,” she said, and her composure infuriated Beth the more. “When things go wrong, throw a tantrum. When they aren’t right, break them. You’ve always thought that way, haven’t you? You’re still a child. I guess that’s the real cause of all your troubles.”
“I’m a woman!” Beth cried. “A grown woman!”
“A grown woman would know herself, control herself. She’d know breaking a pillow wouldn’t solve her problems. She’d know I couldn’t change her whole life.”
“You did once.”
“I hardly touched it.” Laura bent over and picked up a goose feather, and Beth watched her, fascinated and angry. “I passed through your life, I loved you. And it didn’t work out because you didn’t love me. We parted, as we should have, and it was over. I yearned for you for a long time. And what did you do? Got married to a handsome, intelligent, affectionate s.o.b. you were in love with. Was it so godawful, Beth? Was it really as bad as all that? Or did you just begin to be bored with housewifery? Did you just want to play around again, the way you played around with me?”
“I loved you, Laura,” Beth said helplessly and suddenly went to her knees among the feathers. “I loved you, how can you think anything else?”
Abruptly, Laura’s understanding, that wonderful understanding that Beth had needed and demanded and had traveled out of her life and over a continent to find, was unwelcome. It was painful and embarrassing, because it exposed the truth. Beth, on her knees, recoiled from it at the same time that she pleaded for it. It was a question which was worse: the endless wondering about herself, about her true sexuality, or knowing the truth and having the truth be ugly and selfish and pitiful.
“You loved what you couldn’t have, Beth,” Laura “You still do.”
“But I could have had you! I know that, we both know that!” Beth shouted passionately.
“The minute you found out you could have me, you didn’t want me anymore,” Laura said. She turned her back on Beth, who was still kneeling, and began to comb her marvelous hair. “I wonder if that isn’t what happened between you and Charlie. Once he married you he was hooked. He was yours. It was all sewed up, legitimate and approved of, and maybe that’s why it bored you.”
Beth felt a terrible rage rising in her. She wanted to scream, “Look at me!” Instead she said in a shaking voice, “I’m on my knees to you, begging for help, Laura. Give it to me. I’m not a dog.”
“Then get off the floor,” Laura said without turning around.
“You stand there and comb your goddamn hair!” Beth shouted.
“My hair needs combing.”
Beth wondered if she could stand it or if her brains would boil in her head. Laura controlled the situation by controlling herself. Every shriek that escaped Beth made her own position weaker and sillier. With a supreme effort she held herself in check. “Charlie said once that I could only love when love was forbidden,” she said. The admission gave her a little dignity; it was very adult.
“Then he sees what I see,” Laura said.
“But you’re wrong,” Beth whispered. “You’re both wrong. I can love without that. It doesn’t have to be wrong to be desirable. That’s so—so childish.”
“Yes, it is. But that isn’t what you came all this way to tell me,” Laura said. “You didn’t really come to see me at all. I think you’re running away.”
“No, I’m not. I’m facing things, Laura! For the first time I’m facing the things I should have faced years ago, but didn’t have the guts to. I love women. I love you. And if you think it was the easy thing for me to run away and leave my—” She broke off, afraid to mention her children now that she had denied their existence. “It took all my courage, everything I had,” she said, and her voice twisted with the enormity of it, the remembered pain.
“Beth, how long have you been divorced?” Laura stopped combing long enough to look at her.
“That’s none of your business!” Beth shot back.
“You’re making it my business. You’re throwing your whole messed-up unhappy life in my lap. Listen, Beth,” she continued kindly, “no matter how fast you run you can’t catch up with the past. You’ve found me, all right, but you haven’t found our college days. You haven’t found a dead romance and brought it back to life. We’re two different people now; we can’t capture the past and live in it as if it were the present. I tried to run away, too. For years. Believe me, it’s the one sure way to get trouble to follow you.” Her voice was gentle; she meant what she said. Maybe it would help. She could see Beth had been pushed pretty far. But to Beth it was like being a naughty child again and getting lectured for misbehaving. She listened in pale anger.
“You’re in love with all the things you can’t have, Beth, with all the things you’ve never seen and never tasted. Once you do see them they lose their fascination for you. If had to live with a woman, don’t you think pretty soon you’d be hollering for a man?”
“You mean—” Beth gaped at her. “You mean it has nothing to do with sexuality? It has nothing to do with love and desire? It’s just a compulsion for something new? Oh, Laura. Now you’re the one who’s oversimplifying.”
“It has a lot to do with love and desire, but that’s only part of it. You were never cut out to settle down and put out roots anywhere.”
“Laura, for God’s sake, are you telling me no matter what I do or where I turn I’ll never be happy? I’ll always make myself unhappy?” It was a cry of desolation and protest.
“I’m telling you what you’re like now,” Laura said. “I’m not saying you can’t change. Nobody has a right to say that to you but yourself.”
“How do you know you’re right about me? What makes you so sure?” Beth said brokenly.
“I don’t know for sure. You brought me your troubles and said, ‘Here, help me. Straighten me out.’ Well, I’m trying.” There was impatience in her voice, but also sincerity.
“Laura, darling Laura, don’t you love me anymore? Did you ever really love me?”
“You know better than to ask. All the years that you and Charlie were getting along and still happy, I was dreaming of you. It’s just that—” She glanced down at the tortoise shell comb in her hand.
“Just that what?” Beth demanded.
“Just that my love for you is different now.”
Beth stood up, anger and triumph all over her face. “Then why did you make love to me the way you did? An hour ago we were making love, Laura! Or have you forgotten? Why?”
Laura gazed at her again, matching her own composure against Beth’s hot, breathless emotion.
“I had no warning—” she began.
“Exactly! So you reacted naturally!” Beth exclaimed, her face flushed and excited. “That’s what I wanted, that’s exactly what I wanted!” She walked toward Laura, talking and gesticulating. “If you had known I was there you would have put me off, you would have behaved like a friend, nothing more. But you didn’t know. It all took you by surprise and you gave yourself to me without a fight, without resisting me at all. The most natural thing in the world.”
Laura looked into her feverish face, standing her ground royally as Beth approached. “Beth, if you’re going to think of it that way, I can’t do a damn thing to help you. You love your own delusions too much.”
“Well, how in hell am I supposed to think of it?” Beth flashed. And in a sudden hopeless surrender to her misery, in the need to be right with Laura just once, Beth threw herself on Laura like a cat gone mad. She snapped the straps of Laura’s slip with one hard desperate pull and caught the tender breasts beneath with angry rough hands. With a small startled scream, Laura lost her self-control. She struggled wildly against Beth but Beth had worked up a reserve of hysterical strength and tore the slip from her.
“Let me look at you!” Beth cried, throwing Laura to the floor and falling on her. Laura tried to scream again but Beth kissed her savagely and bit her neck and shook her shoulders till her head hit the floor painfully.
“Stop! God!” Laura moaned. “Beth, stop!”
“An hour ago you weren’t too good for me,” Beth sobbed. “Now all of a sudden you don’t want to be touched.”
“I don’t want to be hurt. I can’t stand to be hurt,” Laura said, tears on her face.
“I’m not welcome, I’m not loved, I’m not understood,” Beth went on in a strangling voice. “And you—you don’t give a damn, do you? You stand there and comb your hair and turn your back on me and throw cold water in my face and tell me to go to hell—” Her face was scarlet and Laura, terrified, threw her hands up to protect herself.
But Beth didn’t know how to hurt her. She was lost. All she had was her thoughtless fury, her shapeless unhappiness. It all came together inside her and exploded in bitter kisses, sharp bites, and sudden agonized passion. She vented it all on Laura and it gave her only a sour sort of satisfaction to know that Laura couldn’t resist it, that Laura had succumbed to the animal fury of it and let herself go.
Beth lay beside her on the scratchy wool rug and sobbed when it was over. And then, slowly, she was overcome with a deep lassitude, a suspension of mind and emotions that would finally let her come back to normal.
Laura sat up beside her and stroked her back and after a while she said in a low voice, a voice that let Beth know she was forgiven, “Have you any idea what a shock it was? Do you suppose I didn’t dream of making love to you every day and every night for over a year after I left you? Do you think I hadn’t imagined every detail of it? I’d have given my soul for that experience once. Only, Beth, it came too late. It was beautiful, it was so beautiful this morning. I can’t pretend I’m sorry, I can’t pretend I would have done it a different way. But that’s just it, you see. It’s as if my reaction were planned years ago. As if the whole thing went according to plan in spite of me. I saw you, suddenly, with no warning, the way I always dreamed I’d see you. And we were alone, the way I always dreamed we’d be. And we made love.”
Beth rolled over to look at her; at her lovely body with the fresh marks of teeth and nails in vulnerable spots. Beth touched the bruises and wept. “I’m sorry. I had to—”
“I know, I know. Just like I had to be nasty. It’s over now. We can be friends now. Can you understand that, Beth?”
Beth heard, clear and genuine, the pity in her voice and she said, “I understand that you made love to me, that you wanted me, that it wasn’t any different than it ever was, this morning.” Then she paused, hovering between defiance and adoration. “That’s all I understand.”
“That’s not enough,” Laura said gently. “Grow up, Beth. Your problems aren’t hopeless, you can solve them. You don’t need me, you need yourself.”
“If I hadn’t started talking, if I’d just kept my damned mouth shut and stayed in bed with you, it would have been all right.”
“Do you know how many times you’ve said ‘if’ this morning?” Laura said. “If only this, if only that—everything would have been all right. That’s a child talking.”
They remained a moment in silence and then, as if with one accord, got painfully to their feet. Beth couldn’t look Laura in the face.
“I hope I didn’t hurt you!” she said. “I’d rather die than hurt you.”
“No. I’m all right.”
“Do you want me to leave?”
“No, of course not,” Laura said. Beth’s eyes climbed only as high as Laura’s breasts, faltered, and fell again.
“Are you in love with that girl? Betsy’s piano teacher?” she said.
“I was.”
“No more?”
“Not so much. But I wouldn’t do anything to hurt her.”
“Not till Betsy can play the ‘Minute Waltz,’ at least.”
“You didn’t hurt me till you learned how to play at love from me,” Laura reminded her. “You were no fool You didn’t get rid of me till you were sure you didn’t need me anymore.”
Beth deserved the dig. She finished dressing silently, with ferocious concentration, still ashamed of the hungry love and revenge she’d forced on Laura.
Laura slipped a negligee over her torn slip and watched Beth without speaking.
“Stay and have lunch with me,” she said when Beth had finished, but Beth wanted to get away from her.
“I thought once I’d found you I’d hang on for dear life,” Beth said. “But I’m so full of feeling, so damned mixed up, I don’t think I could bear to sit here and let you watch me puzzle it out. I just want to be alone.”
“Whatever you say,” Laura said. “How about dinner?”
“I don’t know.” Beth looked at her and the corners of her mouth trembled. “You never find what you set out looking for, do you?” she whispered. “Damn. It’s queer. Life is so queer.”
Laura could see the bitter disappointment on her face and she put her hands tentatively on Beth’s waist.
“I want you to come back, Beth,” she said softly. “I’ve been hard on you, but I had a right to be. You got even. So we’re square.”
Beth still couldn’t face her. “Do you love me still?” she asked again.
“I’ve already said it.”
“Say it just once more. I’ll think of it before I think of the other things. The things that hurt.”
“I love you,” Laura told her simply.
And Beth turned around and walked out of her bedroom and across the living room. She stopped a moment, remembering Jack’s messages. “Call McCracken and cancel the order,” she called back to Laura in an unsteady voice. “And send a check to Dr. Byrd.” Then she went out the front door.