Unlike Others (20 page)

"Was that why you left?"

"Sure."

Jo picked up her glass. Their eyes met and held.

The waiter, bald and serious, had been waiting for a break in the conversation. Now he returned to the table. Are the ladies ready to order?"

Jo flipped open her menu. "Chicken paprikash," she said mechanically. It was on the top line. Betsy said, "I'll have that too." There was a moment of waiting silence while he gathered up the menus and tiptoed away.

Jo felt electric with energy, alive in every cell of her body. "Betsy, are you sure?"

Betsy nodded.

"Then come to my place and well find out. Only—if you're not happy about it, don't hate me."

"I couldn't hate you " Betsy said softly. "When shall I come?"

"When you want to. But be awfully sure," Jo said. She stood up, took her coat off the chair back and hung it around her shoulders, with the sleeves dangling. She gathered up her purse and gloves, leaving a bill on the table. "I have to go. I'll be home every night this week."

The waiter was coming toward her with a loaded tray. She swerved to miss him, and went on past the cashier's desk through the revolving door, out into the street.

My God, she thought.

Betsy sat with her hand over her mouth. The waiter hovered, his forehead a washboard of anxiety. "Is something wrong?"

"No." I mustn't hurt his feelings, Betsy thought. I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings today. "No, she remembered an appointment. Everything is all right."

She forced herself to sit in front of her plate for at least ten minutes. It looked good, the rust-red chicken and gravy, the neat boiled potato and thin ice-cold slices of cucumber in sour cream. A little picture, a still life. She picked up her fork and arranged the vegetables, took up a bit of the chicken and laid it down again. She couldn't have eaten a bite if it had been manna from heaven. She was full to overflowing with something she had never felt before.

She picked up Jo's ten-dollar bill and looked at it curiously, as though it were the first one she had ever seen. Someone had slashed across Alexander Hamilton's face with red pencil. When the waiter finally brought the bill she paid it with her own money, and by turning out the contents of her purse got enough change together for a decent tip. She folded the ten neatly and put it in her wallet. I'll give it back to her when I see her, she promised herself.

She didn't know why this seemed important. It was as though, having something of Jo's in her possession, she was sure to see Jo again.

She put on her coat and walked out. The daylight seemed remote and unreal, as though she had left everything that really mattered behind her in the candlelit dining room.

CHAPTER 19

By eight o’clock she had cleaned the living room, wiped up the kitchen linoleum and started going through her dresser drawers. Not that anybody cared whether the house was clean or not, but she had to do something and she couldn't think of anything else to do. I'll know by ten, she thought. If she isn't here by ten I’ll know she's not coming tonight.

Then maybe tomorrow. Or the next night. If she hasn't come after two weeks Ill know she isn't coming at all. You had to have a boundary to hope, a limit to despair, even if it's artificially imposed. The human heart can endure just so much.

But she felt that it would be tonight.

The telephone rang. She hurried to answer, with three orphaned stockings in her hand. It was Richard. "Hello darling, are you busy?"

"Killing time. It's good to hear your voice."

“I’ve been trying to get hold of Mag, but she's never home. If I had a pad like hers I'd stay there and enjoy it," Rich said, sounding happy. "Anyway, did I tell you they're dropping the whole Happi Time bit? Somebody fixed it."

"Mag told me. Must be nice to have pull, huh?"

"That's what we need, more friends with influence. There's nothing wrong with having money, either."

"I thought maybe you and I would be meeting at the unemployment place."

"You're all right. They couldn't get out that crummy little paper without you."

"I don't plan to spend my whole life there." She didn't say she was going to New York. He'd heard it before—besides, at the moment it didn't seem to matter. She said, "How's everything otherwise "

"Fine. I met some interesting people the other night. Nothing special, you know how it is, but fun."

She grinned, translating that to mean one interesting person. The boys were lucky enough to switch affections easily—not all of them, but a lot. The pickup, the one-night stand, the merely physical affair. We're always wanting things to last forever, like cotton stockings.

All the disadvantages of being female and none of the advantages, that's us.

She said, "Good enough. Maybe I’ll hit lucky myself, one of these days."

"Care to go to a chamber music session this coming Friday night? They're playing a lot of Purcell."

"I don't know, Rich. My plans are indefinite for the rest of the week."

"Like that, huh?"

She felt her skin prickling as it always did when she was embarrassed. "Don't tease me, Rich. This is serious."

Rich's voice was tender. "I'm not teasing, darling. I wish you all the happiness in the world."

"I know you do."

He did, too. After she hung up and went back to her compulsive housecleaning, she kept on thinking about him, his kindness, his real concern for the people he loved, the patience with which he kept plugging away at a dull job. He had been a music teacher for a few years before deciding that it wasn't possible to do any real teaching in a city system; the formalities of discipline and the pressure from extra-curricular activities and assorted good causes bogged everyone down, and most of his colleagues were not only uninformed but uncaring. He moved to a small town and found the pressure to conform even greater; every hour of his day and night was under constant scrutiny by the board members and the townspeople. "I couldn't even burp without its being heard at the other end of town," was the way he put it. "You're a small town girl yourself, you know how it is. In a city you at least have a little privacy for your personal life."

They were more than a protectorate, she and Rich. They were friends. Just talking to him on the telephone gave her a warm sheltered feeling she hadn't known since she was a very small child, before she realized that the all-wise, all-powerful father, the one person who really loved her, was subject to her mother's whims like the rest of the family.

All Lesbians hate men. That's why they make love to women. It says so in the books. Jo laughed, pulling the used case off her pillow and folding up the soiled sheets so they could go in the hamper. It was easier to work with men than with women and infinitely easier to work for them. They were more objective, less personal, less trivial. They had more sense; that summed it up. Even Stan. She got along fine with Stan, except for her growing irritation over his mother fixation, his constant need of praise, his inability to resolve any of the problems that seemed so simple to an outsider. And when you got right down to it, those were traditional female qualities, the same traits that had irked her in her feminine colleagues.

She realized that she was thinking about everything else—Richard and their friendship, the office, the feasibility of actually saving two or three hundred dollars and making a break—so that she wouldn't have to think about Betsy. It was twenty-three minutes to nine.

She turned the mattress, put on the fitted bottom sheet and smoothed out its tiny wrinkles, put on a clean top sheet and replaced the blue blanket and tailored spread. Looks all right, she thought. She picked a used tissue off the floor, straightened the things on the dressing table, threw a pair of shoes into the closet and shut the door on a tangle of hangers and garments. Short of washing windows or woodwork, there was nothing else she could do.

She should have learned to knit. Women knit in doctors' offices, pushing back terror with action.

She had never cared much for this apartment. It was a standard arrangement of rooms laid out in the familiar pattern: small living room with an adjacent coat closet, kitchen door and bathroom door on one wall, bedroom door on another. A chopped-up layout that left only one place for the davenport, one for the big chair, and permitted no originality. The kitchenette looked out on a paved court and the brick walls of the building next door. She had taken it because it was handy to the train station and because, being in a racially mixed neighborhood, it was cheap. Not as cheap as the budget books stipulated; they allowed one-fourth of the salary for rent, and Jo didn't know a single office worker who managed on that, but cheaper than anything else she could find.

In any case, the furniture was inoffensive. She'd bought it piece by piece at the Goodwill and the Catholic Salvage, scraped and painted it; had made the long full curtains. It was no dream setting for the beginning of a long-time love, but no place within her reach was that.

Suppose she could live anywhere she wanted to, where would she take Betsy? An apartment in Paris, like that girl in
The Well of Loneliness
? A cottage at the seashore, with waves crashing and gulls flying over? A shack in the dunes, where they could be in the sun and go swimming in the lake all summer long? She felt cheered, having at last thought of something possible.

Eight minutes to nine.

She'd go crazy if she had to sit here doing nothing for another hour. She could take a drink, it would relax her; but she wanted to be fully aware. In case.

She went into the kitchen. Blank cupboard doors looked down at her. She measured coffee into the percolator basket, fitted the apparatus together and set it on the stove. On impulse, she got down measuring spoons, a cup and green mixing bowl. Milk—eggs—sugar. There were no raisins, but she could do without. She didn't know who was going to eat oatmeal cookies, maybe she could take some to work, but making them was something to do.

Lesbians hate housework, they can't cook or sew. Hah. She wiped her hands down the sides of her clean slacks, and then tried to wipe off the floury traces with a dishtowel. She had bathed and washed her hair, pushing it into place while wet so it would wave. A touch of cologne. The mirror above the sink showed her face clearly. A good enough face. Whether Betsy could love it, she didn't know. Other people had, and she had noticed that looks had nothing to do with love, really, any more than youth or character or intelligence had. Love, like lightning, strikes in unexpected places.

What Betsy felt and thought was all strange to her, a country on whose border she now stood without a map.

The cookies came off the baking sheet thin and crisp, with lace edges. She ate one before she scraped the brown crumbs from the sheet and spooned out another four rows of batter. Tastes pretty good, she thought, considering I didn't have any dinner. Or any lunch, come to think of it. She wondered how Betsy had felt about her sudden flight.

She was washing the mixing bowl when the doorbell rang. It slipped through her fingers and scattered across the floor in a dozen odd-shaped pieces. She put the slotted spoon in the sink, gently, as though it might break too, and wiped her hands and pressed the button above the stove. Far below she heard the buzzer, and—listening intently—the opening of the outer door. Or perhaps she imagined that.

She turned off the oven. Never mind the half-raw cookies, she'd take care of that mess tomorrow.

She walked into the living room on rubbery legs, telling herself that it might be a tenant who'd forgotten his key, or a door-to-door salesman, or a political canvasser.

But it was Betsy who stood outside the door. She wore her office coat, a dark tweed that hung loosely from her shoulders. Her fair hair was bare and the little tendrils on her forehead were curly. She looked alert and a little frightened.

She said nervously, "Hi. What smells so good?"

"Oatmeal cookies. Come on in and have one."

Betsy came into the room slowly. The clicking shut of the door behind her had a sound of finality. She said, "Do you always have a coffeepot on the stove?"

"Most of the time."

There was this wall around them, transparent but keeping them apart. Betsy handed Jo her coat. Jo found a hanger and put it in the front closet. "Sit down," she said, "and I'll see if the coffee is done."

Betsy was too nervous to sit down. As Karen had done—but with what a difference—she followed into the kitchen. She looked at the broken pieces of bowl on the floor, the small clutter of dishes in the sink, the dusting of flour on linoleum and work table. A smile touched her mouth. "What have you been doing? The living room's so clean it scares me."

"It's in your honor."

"I don't need all this elegance," Betsy said. "That's not what I want." She touched Jo's shoulder. "I don't really want coffee, either."

They stood looking at each other. Jo drew her breath in sharply. The plastic wall was gone. She put her arms around Betsy and pulled her close.

"Promise me," she said in a whisper, feeling the white cotton of Betsy's blouse warm and smooth against her cheek. "No matter what happens, promise you'll never tell me anything but the truth."

CHAPTER 20

"You're beautiful," Jo said softly.

Betsy hung her head. In the soft light from the dressing table lamps she looked like the ivory figurine on Jo's bookcase—slight and white, yet with the promise of warmth in living flesh. Jo shivered a little in anticipation.

Betsy said shyly, "I want to be beautiful for you."

"Are you scared?"

"No." Betsy's head turned; their eyes met. "I was afraid before," she said in a whisper. "Not now."

"If you want me to stop, say so."

"I won't want you to," Betsy said. She took the first step. They came together in a need and desire that was neither Jo's nor Betsy's, but belonged to both.

"Come to bed," Jo said, in a hurry now, impatient with desire.

Betsy pulled her down to the floor. "Now," she said with a new harshness. "Quick, darling, do it to me. Put your hand on me."