Beebo Brinker Chronicles 4 - Journey To A Woman (26 page)

She remained shut up in a cocoon of private suffering and wondering for nearly seven days, meandering around New York in the afternoons and lying on her bed at night, sleepless. She drank quite a bit of whiskey. It seemed to ease her.

Every day she stopped at the post office, until at last there was a letter waiting. It was from Cleve, but she hadn't the heart or the interest to open it right away. She was curiously without feeling, as if she had lost her capacity to care.

Her feet were stiff and aching in then: heeled shoes when she finally reached the hotel. She started to walk past the desk but the clerk called to her and held up a letter to-catch her eye. For some reason it alarmed her and brought her back to life. A letter from Cleve was all right, but not two.

It was from Merrill Landon, of course. He had her hotel address; there had seemed no reason to hide it from him. The odd feeling of foreboding, of distress at the sight of the letters, stayed with her and settled in her stomach. She threw them on the dresser in her small stuffy room, placed a newly purchased bottle of whiskey beside them, threw off her clothes and showered, before she tried to read.

She opened the letter from Landon first. He was a reserved man, a cautious man, and he expressed himself carefully, but his pleasure was evident even in the controlled phrases that thanked her for having found his daughter.

"I owe you any joy there may be left in my life,” he said, and the admission touched her. His note was brief. But at the end he added a shocker, in his terse sensible prose. “By the way, your husband is in Chicago. I found out through my ‘spies’ on the paper. Sorry I can't tell you more."

Beth sat on the bed with a stiff drink in one hand and the note in the other. Charlie in Chicago! Why? What in God's name for? He knew then, from her aunt and uncle, that she had run away. What else did he know?

She jumped up and grabbed Cleve's letter with quivering hands. Maybe it would explain, maybe it was a letter of warning about Charlie.

It was.

"Dear Beth,” he wrote. “I just found out about this—hope it's not too late to tell you. There's been a detective following you ever since you left Chicago. Your uncle John and Charlie have gotten together. John told Charlie everything he got from the detective so all our little precautions have been for nothing. Charlie has known all along where you are and what you are doing—more than I know by a long shot. He left yesterday for Chicago. I don't know what will happen now. He has the kids with him—they're both fine."

The little domestic interjection almost threw her for some reason she couldn't fathom and she had to stop reading to clear her mind of guilty thoughts of her children.

"One last thing,” Cleve wrote. “Just to make everything perfect. Vega has disappeared. She had been spending the weekends with us and seemed so much better. Sunday night I was going to drive her back to the hospital, but Mother called in a panic and said she was gone. Went out in back to help Gramp feed the cats and when his back was turned she got out somehow. Strangely enough, P.K.—that lessie Vega was always hollering about—has disappeared too. Romance? God, I hope not. Anyway, don't worry. I'm sure well find her. Will keep you posted. Cleve."

But he had only told her to make her worry, she knew that. She knew it was the one small revenge he had for the sick sister Beth had foisted on him, and she didn't blame him. She looked at the letter, with the written lines uneven and shaky, and she wondered if he had written it with a glass of booze in one hand, which was just the way she had read it.

God, we're all so weak, she thought dismally. I'm no better than the Purvises. We can't even face the crises in our lives without this. She made a face at the drink, and then she shut her eyes and finished it.

And suddenly she remembered something, hazily at first. Just a figure, small and dumpy, male and tired-looking. Then a face, round, heavy-eyed, high-crowned and balding. A short, heavy man. Who was he? She had seen him around the Village. She had seen him going far uptown on a bus, the same bus she was on.

"He was no damn ‘John,'” she said aloud. “He was the detective. He's been following me all this time.” For a moment she swayed a little and her stomach turned. And then she straightened up and stared at her empty glass. The bitterness she expected to feel, the resentment, the injury, were dissipated.

Everything seemed suddenly ridiculous. Love was senseless, life was hopeless. She didn't know what she was doing there in that stuffy room in a hotel in a city that was foreign to her. She didn't know what she had come to find or whether she had found it. Nothing was simple, nothing was clear, and she felt dangerously as if she didn't give a damn.

She had another drink. And another. And then she put her clothes back on and went out.

"You had another call, Mrs. Ayers,” the hotel clerk told her, but she didn't even look at him and when she was out of earshot he told the elevator boy, “Snippy bitch."

* * * *

She went to the Village. She went to all the bars she could remember having been in and drank in all of them. She went to some she had never seen before with girls she didn't know, and by early morning it seemed as if she knew all of them, as if they had all grown up together.

In the afternoon (who knew what afternoon?—the clock merely said two-thirty and the sun shone) she woke up in an apartment that” stank of cats and orange juice. The girl in the bed beside her was still sleeping, her back to Beth. She was naked. Beth knew with a shudder, as she saw her, that they had made love. But she couldn't remember her name. She couldn't remember her face. She didn't know where they had met or what they saw in each other.

At first her physical pains were sharp enough to engross her mind, and she didn't worry about the girl. She got out of bed, holding her head, found the bathroom and tried to wash and dress herself. In the mirror her face looked tired and she felt a little dizzy. When she leaned over to brush her teeth a wave of nausea clutched her and she threw up precipitately into the washbasin. When she straightened up she discovered a number of curious bruises scattered over her limbs and body, as if she had fallen down. But she had no recollection of falling.

She opened the bathroom door to find the girl she slept with standing there, evidently waiting for her. She seemed fairly cheerful and she tweaked one of Beth's breasts familiarly, as though she had the right.

"Hung over?” she said, and went past her into the bathroom.

Beth had raised a quick angry hand to stop the tweaking but it was too late. The girl laughed at her and said, “Bad-tempered Beth,” in a singsong voice.

And suddenly Beth was frightened. What in hell was her name? Why had she picked this girl? She found her purse and opened it, almost surprised to find her money still there. She ran a comb through her tangled hair and then she bolted for the front door like a prisoner on the run, buttoning her dress as she went.

"What's the matter, honey? Don't you want breakfast?"

Beth looked up to find her leaning in the open bathroom door, smiling suggestively. She was still undressed and laughing at Beth's confusion.

Beth gave her one last look, wild and accusing, and then went out.

"Come and see me again sometime,” the girl called after her and her voice rang down the narrow hall. “When you can stay a little while."

Beth found her way out of the labyrinthine apartment house and down a couple of very crooked streets full of homogeneous brown houses. She burst upon Seventh Avenue abruptly, without recognizing it, and found a restaurant.

It was small and not overly clean, in keeping with the nightmare atmosphere she was in, but it had food for sale, cooked. She ordered breakfast, but after letting her enumerate the items and tell him how she wanted her eggs, the waiter said, “What's the matter, sister, can't you tell time? It's three in the afternoon. We got no eggs after ten, in the morning."

She gave him a baleful look and settled for pastrami on rye. As an afterthought she ordered a beer. Unexpectedly it went down well and she ordered another.

When she left there seemed to be nothing to do but wander again, lost and looking, through the Village streets. The hotel depressed her unutterably; she couldn't go to Laura, she wouldn't go to Nina. And somehow, without exactly understanding where it started or how, she wound up in a bar again, drinking too much, talking too much, forgetting names and faces.

Late in the evening she found Franny's telephone number in her pocket—Franny, the girl Nina had in bed with her one morning, and who had been taken with Beth. On an impulse Beth called her.

It was almost worse to wake up in bed the next day and know who she was sleeping with than it had been to wake up with a stranger. At least that other way it had been impersonal. But now, feeling sick and full of hate for herself, she had to net up and talk to Franny, apologize, make an effort to explain It only alarmed her when Franny responded with all the exaggerated understanding and sympathy of a crush aborning Beth wanted to grab her hands and say, “No, don't fall for me Franny, don't even like me. I'll hurt you. I hurt anybody, everybody, who gets in my way, anybody who tries to stop me from going—” From going where? She didn't know.

She spent a couple of days with Franny and she kept on drinking and crying and trying to explain all the things she couldn't understand about herself. And Franny, a good natured girl with a shock of innocent blonde hair and a smile reminiscent of Jean Purvis's, listened in passionate silence, her eyes riveted on Beth. Her heroine worship upset Beth, who didn't want it and couldn't return it and so responded to it with a twinge of guilt. She asked Franny about Nina but Franny only shrugged and stuck her tongue out, giving Beth to understand that that affair was dead.

Beth finally escaped, leaving during the day when Franny was at work. She couldn't face her hotel room. Her clothes were getting raggedy and quite plainly dirty, and still she couldn't return. Not yet Tomorrow, maybe. Tomorrow she would go back, set her affairs in order, clean herself up, contact her family and confess what they already knew in a pitiful effort to salvage her self-respect She would collect her small courage and get it over with.

Tomorrow, that is. Not today.

She went drinking again. Somewhere along the way she saw Nina. They were both quite drunk at the time and it was a curiously friendly meeting, though brief. Nina sat down, putting an arm around Beth's waist, and said, “Guess who's gay?” And she began to call out names like a drill sergeant, names of movie stars, names of Broadway luminaries, names of writers, names of generals, names of celebrated female social workers and adventurers and courtesans.

"All gay,” she said, pausing for breath, while Beth listened in a sort of mesmerized silence, wondering what possessed Nina to rattle these names off in her face, both interested and ashamed of her interest.

"If they're all gay, what're you worried about?” Nina said. Beth said nothing and Nina went on, “Did I ever tell you you listen beautifully? You make a beautiful listener, Beth. That's what you ought to do. Just go out and listen. To hell with sex. Forget about it. Just sit around and listen, honey, you do it so well. It's a shame you're such an independent bitch.” She kissed her, lightly and briefly, and Beth remembered with a drunken ache why she had been so fascinated with the girl in the first place.

It was the only encounter she recalled over a period of several days. The next time she woke up she was sick. Really rotten from top to bottom and too trembly to make it out of bed. She didn't know where she was and she didn't care. There was a period, after her first wakening, of four or five hours when she slept again, fitfully and in spite of rhythmic pains in her head.

At the second wakening she got her bearings. She was in a small, gently worn but comfortable bedroom on a familiar bed. Lifting her unwieldy head cautiously, she looked around. And then she sat up and surprise eased her throbbing pain for a moment. She was in Beebo's apartment.

Very slowly, gingerly, she lifted the covers and got up, stumbled into the bathroom which opened directly off the bedroom, and took a shower. She stood in it for fifteen minutes, just letting the water rain on her, warm and soothing. At first she thought she would never feel clean again. At least not inside. But the shower relaxed her, cleared her head a little.

She was startled to hear the bathroom door open and see Beebo step hi. Beth looked at her from around the shower curtain, inexplicably frightened of her. Just a little, but still frightened.

"You aren't drowning are you?” Beebo said with a smile. “You've been in there a while."

"No.” Beth turned the water off and then stood uncertainly behind the frail shelter of the curtain while Beebo faced her, arms folded over her chest, smiling.

"Towel?” she said at last, handing one over leisurely.

"Thanks.” Beth grabbed it and dried herself behind the curtain. “Where did you—find me?” she asked diffidently.

"I doubt if you've ever heard of the place,” Beebo said. “And you probably wouldn't recognize it again if they threw it at you."

"Just the same, I'd like to know,” she said.

"It's called The Gorgon's Head,” Beebo said.

"God.” Beth made a face, stepping carefully out of the tub. One foot slid a little and Beebo caught her, steadying her, and helped her out the rest of the way. The towel had come loose and Beebo handed it back to her before Beth even realized that a long sweet curve of flesh was open to view. She snatched the towel gratefully from Beebo with a sudden shyness and irritation and pleasure were scrambled up inside her momentarily aggravating her headache.

"Here,” Beebo said, opening the medicine chest over the washbowl. She took a couple of pills resembling aspirin from an unmarked plastic drugstore container and handed them to Beth, along with a glass of water.

"What are they?” Beth said, looking at them as if they were capsules of arsenic.

"What the hell do you care? You couldn't feel any worse, could you?” Beebo grinned.

Beth took them, and Beebo said when she saw them disappear, “They're hangover pills. Aspirin, codeine, caffeine, and God knows what else. Should bring you back to life.” She stepped out of the way when Beth moved toward the bathroom door, letting her find the way back into the bedroom.