21 Gay Street

The cabdriver, a short stubby man named Irving Goldin, picked up the fare at the Grayhound terminal at 50th Street and Eighth Avenue. He helped her with her suitcase, then hopped into his seat and headed the cab downtown along Seventh Avenue. It was almost four-thirty in the afternoon, the start of the rush hour, and traffic was heavy. Cars moved slowly along the wide street. It was June and hot, and Irving Goldin, who was carrying a little too much weight on his stocky frame, was sweating freely. It was not only a hot day but a humid one as well, and the sweat remained where it was instead of evaporating. Irving Goldin was uncomfortable.

At 42nd Street one idiot made a left turn from the right-hand lane while another idiot helped things along by attempting a right turn from the left-hand lane. Irving Goldin cursed, gently because his fare was female, and bided his time. The light turned, and this time he managed to head the cab across the intersection.

34th Street was, if possible, worse. The cars were piled up and it took two changes of the light before the cab got across the street. Goldin cursed a bit, experimentally, and then began to study his passenger in the rear view mirror. The mirror was slightly clouded, a violation which no cop had spotted thus far, but even so Irving Goldin got a good look at his fare.

Her hair was jet black, shoulder length, hanging loose. She had a high forehead and a clear, light complexion. Her eyes were almond shaped, dark brown and quite large. She had a full mouth with only the slightest trace of lipstick on her lips.

The light turned green and a horn behind him reminded Goldin that he was supposed to be driving, not watching women. He pressed down violently on the gas pedal and shot across the street. Only half his mind was on his driving. The other half was on the girl in the back seat.

A pretty one, he thought. Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two—somewhere around there. Tough to tell their ages nowadays, but there was no question about this one, she was young. And something worth looking at. He tried to remember what her body had looked like. It was an easy body to remember. It went with the face—long legs, slender hips, a flat stomach, good large breasts.

“Hot,” he went on. “Though you know what it is they say: it’s not the heat so much as the humidity. One way or the other, it’s a hot one, all right.”

Goldin shrugged. Evidently the only way to get an answer out of her was to ask her a question. Well, what the hell.

“21 Gay Street,” he said aloud. “That’s the address where you’re going, isn’t it?”

She had a nice enough voice, he decided. Mellow, sort of. Even if she didn’t have a hell of a lot to say.

“The Village,” he went on. “Winding twisting streets. Never can find my way around there. Always keep getting lost. Bad as Brooklyn that way, almost.”

Silence from the back seat. He looked in the mirror, found a face devoid of expression.

“But,” he went on, “it’s supposed to be an interesting place. What I hear, anyway. Never spent much time there myself. Bronx is good enough for me. Some people, though, I guess they like it down there. In the Village, I mean.”

“Hear it’s pretty wild,” he said. “You know, you hear a lot. Most of it’s probably a lot of nonsense, but you hear a lot. Beatniks, free love, queers, you know. Things like that.”

“In the papers,” Goldin sailed on, unable to restrain himself. “You know, like the cops make a raid and arrest a lot of people for selling dope or something. Or a bunch of bearded guys picket a church or something. Maybe it’s publicity, I don’t know, but you hear a lot.”

More silence. The cab went steadily south, across 23rd Street, across 14th Street. The traffic got progressively lighter. The street was still thronged with cars, but traffic moved along at a steadier pace now.

“14th Street,” Goldin announced. “We’re in the Village. Officially, that is.”

“The way I figure it,” Goldin said, “a man has a right to do what he wants. Long as he don’t bother anybody, that is. For instance, I got a brother. A half-brother, actually. My father died and my old lady remarried and they had this kid, he’s what you call my half-brother. About six years younger than me. Anyway, he’s an alcoholic. Not a bum, you understand. What it is, he drinks. Like a fish, more or less. He’ll knock off a quart a day of bonded rye.”

A sports car, a red MG with top down and wheels screaming, cut in on the cab. Goldin hit the brake hard, missed the MG, swore automatically, then took a breath.

“Anyway,” he went on, “this brother, half-brother, that is—people keep saying how terrible it is. How he drinks, I mean. But who’s he hurting? He don’t beat his wife, he makes good money, holds onto his job, does his drinking at home so he don’t fall over on the street. Way I look at it, maybe he’s got a reason to drink. It’s his business. And it’s the same with these beatniks.”

The clarity of that little message was, for the moment, lost even on Goldin. He thought for a minute or two, retraced his words, and figured out what he was talking about.

“What I mean,” he said, “they want beards, let ’em have beards. They want free love, let ’em have free love. They’re hurting somebody? Leave ’em be, for the love of God. Right?”

“The Village,” Goldin went on, “must be exciting. Not for me, but I guess it must be exciting.”

“I wouldn’t know,” the girl repeated simply. “I’ve never been here before.”

There was something about the delivery of the line which made further discussion impossible. Goldin drove in silence, located Gay Street after considerable difficulty, then discovered that it was one way the wrong way. He cursed, more mildly than before, and looped around until he was coming into Gay Street the right way. He found number twenty-one, announced the fact to the girl, and pulled up at the curb. He turned around, saw that the girl’s body was even better than he had remembered it, and took the two dollars that she handed him.

The meter read a dollar fifty-five. It was a bigger tip than usual. “Help you with your suitcase?”

Goldin sat there, watching her. She opened the door, then picked up the suitcase and carried it to the front door of 21 Gay Street. The building was a brownstone, a hundred years old if it was a day, and Goldin wondered why a pretty young girl like that would want to live in such a run-down dump. He and the wife were hardly rolling in dough but they had an apartment in a brand-new building in Morris Park. Well, some people had nutty ideas.

The girl took a key from her purse, opened the door, carried the suitcase inside, closed the door after her. Goldin remained in the cab, his eyes on the door for several seconds after it had been closed. His mind wandered. He thought about the girl, the Village, the wondrous ways of the world.

Then he sighed, let up on the clutch, stepped down on the gas and the cab continued along Gay Street. Irving Goldin relaxed and drove, keeping an eye out for prospective fares while his mind reeled happily with thoughts of Morris Park.

The girl’s name was Joyce Kendall. She was, as Irving Goldin had guessed, twenty-one years old. A scroll of paper which she had casually abandoned at her parent’s home in Schwernersville, Iowa, attested to the fact that she had completed the requirements for a bachelor’s degree at Clifton College in Clifton, Ohio.

Now, in an apartment on the second floor of 21 Gay Street, she thought how neatly everything was arranged for her, how there were no details to be taken care of, no apartment to rent, no furniture to buy, no job to hunt for. Everything was set, cranked up, ready to go.

It was always like that. There was a rigidity to her life that always frustrated her—not a monotony, nothing like that, but an ordered quality that was periodically disturbing. Everything was always planned out well in advance.

Even the move to New York, a bizarre sort of thing which wouldn’t go over well in Schwernersville, was nothing rash, nothing spur-of-the-moment. She had made up her mind, and then she had talked it over with her parents, and then, by George, she had made the arrangements. Other girls didn’t bother with arrangements. Other girls threw clothes into a suitcase and went.

Joyce Kendall did things differently. Joyce Kendall found a copy of the Village Voice, a Greenwich Village newspaper, looked in the apartments for rent section, found an apartment that seemed suitable, and called the landlord long-distance, mailing him a check forthwith for the rent.

Or, for that matter, other girls would come to New York and then look for a job. Again, not Joyce Kendall. It was Friday now and come Monday morning she would report to work as a first reader at Armageddon Publications, Inc., a publishing firm with a Madison Avenue address and a line of vile magazines. The job, like the apartment, was taken care of in advance. Of course, she might have found a more appealing job if she had hunted around a little; just as she might have landed a better apartment for less money if she hadn’t been so anxious to move into a place the minute she hit town.

She finished unpacking and surveyed the apartment. It wasn’t bad, all things considered—a bedroom, a living room, and what the real estate agents jokingly referred to as a kitchenette. Also a bathroom, with a too-small tub and a too-loud toilet. The furniture was respectable if uninspired, stable if old, comfortable if ugly—the usual equipment to be found in a furnished apartment. With a few pictures or travel posters on the walls and a new rug for the living room floor, the place would be livable, even comfortable.

She was tired and hot and sweaty. The bus trip from Iowa had been horrible and the damned cabdriver had talked her ears off. What she wanted to do, of course, was to fall headlong onto the bed and collapse into pleasant unconsciousness. But that was not what she was going to do, not methodical Joyce Kendall, not her. She would get undressed and she would hang up her clothes neatly and she would take a shower, and then she would go to bed. She wouldn’t even permit herself the luxury of tossing the dirty clothes on the floor. Not her. Not Joyce Kendall.

She sighed. Then she stood up and began to undress, unbuttoning the sheer yellow blouse, slipping it from her shoulders and draping it neatly over the back of a chair. Her white bra clung to her like a second skin—perspiration had soaked into it and her breasts itched. She struggled with the clasp, opened it and peeled it off.

The bra hadn’t really been necessary. Without it, her breasts were still proud and firm, soft smooth flesh that was touchable and strokable and squeezable and kissable and—

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Her hands wandered to her breasts and cupped them, touched them, toyed with them. She was ashamed of herself, ashamed of the narcissism of the act, but it was the type of act which, for her, was a usual companion of boredom and exhaustion. When she was tired, when she was sick inside or outside, bored or irritated or aggravated or annoyed, her hands wandered to her body and her breasts tingled from her own touch. She often wondered why.

She straightened up, unhooked the dark gray skirt and stepped out of it. Her panties were a wisp of sweat-soaked silk which she whipped off in a hurry and carried, with bra and blouse, to the laundry bag that hung in the closet. She took off her saddle shoes, rolled off the white socks and put them into the laundry bag also.

She touched herself again—partly because her touch gave her pleasure, partly to reassure herself that she was really there, that it was an afternoon in June and that she, Joyce Kendall, was standing nude and beautiful in a second-floor apartment on Gay Street, in Greenwich Village, in the city of New York.

Then she entered the bathroom, closing the bathroom door for no particular reason, and turned on the shower.

The plumbing in the old brownstone was erratic at best and a proper mixture of cold and hot was hard to come by. She settled for a stream of water that was much hotter than she normally preferred. The butt end of a bar of soap remained in the soap dish and she lathered herself furiously with it, rubbing the soap into her white skin and rinsing herself until her skin squeaked with cleanliness. She spent a long time under the stream of water, washing every trace of the bus trip from her system, then stepped out onto a postage stamp bath mat and rubbed herself dry with a huge orange towel.

When she left the bathroom, she almost keeled over. The bathroom had been like a steam bath and the sudden switch in temperature weakened her. She walked very unsteadily to the bedroom, sat down heavily on the bed, then slipped between the sheets and settled her head on a soft pillow.

She thought about the job, wondered whether she should cut her hair so that she might look more like a New Yorker, thought about prints she would buy for the walls and a rug she would buy for the floor in the living room. She thought also about money—she had almost five hundred dollars in her suitcase, part in travelers checks and part in cash, which should make things easier for her. Monday, during her lunch hour, she would have to find a bank and open a checking account. In the meantime there were plenty of other things to do—shopping, especially. The refrigerator in the kitchenette was a small one but it would have to do. She would fill it with food, lay in a supply of pots and pans and dishes and knives and forks and spoons. It would be cheaper if she ate at home. And when a job paid a miraculous fifty dollars a week, with a ten-dollar raise due at the end of two months, and when your apartment set you back a cool hundred a month, saving money was important.

She thought about these things and she thought about other things, memories mostly, both of Clifton and of Schwernersville. Some of the memories were pleasant and others were not. Her mind took them in turn, lazily, and then her mind drifted on gently.

While Joyce Kendall slept and dreamed private dreams, the tenants of the apartment directly above her, the front apartment on the third floor of 21 Gay Street, Jean Fitzgerald and Terri Leigh, were drinking their dinner.

Dinner that night was primarily gin. While Terri relaxed on the sofa and listened to a Bartok string quartet, Jean combined gin, Italian vermouth and ice in a plastic cocktail shaker and shook the mixture diligently. The vermouth was something of an afterthought. The brew was seven parts gin to one part vermouth because, as Jean maintained, if you are going to drink gin you don’t want to louse it up by pouring wine into it. When the shaking process had accomplished the twin feats of cooling the mixture and hiding the vermouth, Jean located two cocktail glasses in the kitchen cupboard, brought them into the living room and filled them with the liquid. Into each she dropped two pickled onions.

“Voila,” she said. “Gibsons. Made by a master. Michael’s Pub could do no better.”

Terri nodded solemnly. They clinked glasses and drank. Then Jean refilled the glasses and the process was repeated.

Jean was 25 and Terri was 22. Jean was a brunette and Terri was a blonde. Jean’s dark brown hair was cropped close to her head in an Italian-style haircut and Terri’s yellow hair fell almost to her waist. Jean was a secretary to an advertising director and Terri modelled part-time for Village artists. Jean had a long, lean figure, looked good in slacks and wore lipstick sparingly. Terri was built for comfort, looked good in sweaters, and wore too much makeup.

They had been living together for almost a year, going together to gay parties, drinking a little too much at the parties, in lesbian bars, or in the happy privacy of their own apartment and making gentle or violent love in the huge double bed they shared. Jean had never slept with a man and never wanted to. Terri had slept with several and had never enjoyed it.

Now Jean sat in a straight-backed chair and Terri lounged on the couch. The Bartok record finished and a Randy Weston record dropped on top of it. The piano music was hard and driving and, at the same time, extremely intimate. Glasses clinked. Gin disappeared.

“The subway isn’t air-conditioned. Neither are the streets. Neither are the people who breathe on you, especially the mealy little men who pinch your behind in the subway. God, I hate men who pinch! I stepped on one of them today. Ground my heel into his instep. Hurt him like mad but he was too ashamed of himself to yell.”

“Besides,” Jean went on, “air-conditioning is limited. This apartment is air-conditioned. And it’s still too goddamned hot for me to be comfortable.”

Jean grinned. “Could be,” she said. She started to set her glass down on the coffee table, then changed her mind and drained it. Then she put it down and stood up, unbuttoning her blouse as she rose. The blouse was light green silk. She took it off and threw it to the floor.

The bra followed the blouse. Jean Fitzgerald’s breasts were small and went well with the long-limbed, boyish look of her. They were well-shaped and firm. The nipples were tiny rubies set in blonde marble.

Jean undressed with deliberate slowness, doing a gentle striptease to the pulsating jazz on the record player. She let her clothing fall to the floor and ignored it, standing nude and proud in the middle of the living-room floor.

Jean walked slowly to the couch, sat beside Terri, reached for her. The blonde girl giggled as hands raced over the front of her blouse, found the buttons and opened them. Jean’s fingers were deft with the buttons and clumsy when they wanted to be clumsy, brushing against Terri’s full breasts, teasing the blonde girl into a weird sort of excitement.

Jean reached around Terri’s body, straining for the clasp of the bra. Her own bare breasts were drawn up against Terri’s chest and her lips touched Terri’s throat and left a kiss there. Then the bra was off and cast aside. The blonde’s breasts were very large, oversized, but no less perfect than those of the brunette. Suddenly Jean hugged Terri hard, kissing her at the same time, and the two pairs of breasts were pressed tight together.

The effect was electrical. Simultaneously both girls drew in their breath sharply, then pushed themselves apart. Jean’s eyes were glazed and Terri’s face was flushed.

“Not my fault. You did it. Besides, you have to undress me first. Then we can do it.”

Jean grinned. She reached for Terri again, and this time her fingers found the button and then the zipper on Terri’s red Bermuda shorts. She unbuttoned and unzipped, removed the shorts, leaving the blonde in a pair of wispy panties, which didn’t last long.

Jean’s hand’s cupped Terri’s breasts, squeezing, stroking, touching. Slowly the blonde girl fell back on the couch, her long legs stretched out in front of her, her arms thrown back over her head. Her eyes were closed and there was an expression of complete and total abandon upon her face.

Jean’s hands, Jean’s hot aggressive hands, were everywhere. They fondled the very soft skin on the underside of Terri’s breasts, then found the even softer, impossibly smooth silk-skin of Terri’s thighs. Jean’s fingers played desperate little games with Terri’s breasts, stirring both girls to a hot animal desire.

Jean’s mouth, a small mouth, an almost dainty mouth, began to search out the secret places in Terri’s perfect body. They kissed, a long and deep kiss of mouth on mouth with tongues probing and searching and bodies pressed tightly together, breasts against breasts, belly against belly. Then Jean’s mouth moved lower, to Terri’s throat, to Terri’s breasts, and Jean’s tongue flicked out like fire, licking, stroking, searching.

Terri couldn’t stay still any longer. Her whole body burned, itched, ached. Her arms fastened around Jean, holding the dark-haired girl, touching her where Terri knew she wanted to be touched.

Words of love and gestures to match them. Hands going everywhere and touching everything, hands on breasts and bellies and buttocks and thighs, lips and tongues joining hands, desire blazing and racing and growing and churning.

The world turning, pitching, rising. The earth churning, boiling. Sweat gluing two bodies together, sweat and heat and love.

“I love you, Jean. You know I love you, don’t you? You know how much I love you.”

Near-silence. A clock ticking in the bedroom. Auto noises rising from the streets like smoke. People talking in the distance. The clatter of a typewriter in another apartment. Silence, or the next thing to it.

“And we’ll always be together and it’ll always be like this. Even when we’re sixty.”

Bodies reaching for each other. Passion like a furnace. More perspiration and more small animal noises.