Beebo Brinker Chronicles 4 - Journey To A Woman (25 page)

"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 said. “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 any more,” 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 flung 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 you 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, no, 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.

*Tm 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 any more? Did you ever really love me?"

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

"Just that what?” Beth demanded.

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

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

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

"I had no warning—” she began.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No. I'm all right."

"Do you want me, to leave?"

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

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

"I was."

"No more?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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