69 Barrow Street (12 page)

“Yes?”

“—well, penetrated. I just couldn’t stand it and I was getting more and more frightened and generally shook up until you stopped.”

He thought for a minute. “When…when you kiss a woman, is that how you kiss?”

“More or less.”

“And have women kissed you like that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then—”

“There’s a difference, Ralph. Not just in the mechanics of the kiss. Ralph, I think I’m just a lesbian and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.”

“Don’t say that!”

“I’m afraid it’s the truth. I’m afraid the reason I’m afraid of you is simply that you’re a man and I’m a freak who only enjoys sex with women. I guess that’s all there is to it, Ralph.”

“I can’t believe that. There’s too much between us for it to be just that.”

“But—”

“It’ll take time,” he said doggedly. “It’ll take a hell of a lot of time, more time than I thought it would at first. But we’ll manage. We love each other.”

“Yes,” she said. “We love each other.”

They talked for a minute or two more; then Ralph covered the canvas once again and left. He was in no mood to do any more painting for the rest of the day and he knew better than to push himself once he hit a real snag. It was too easy to foul yourself up completely that way and ruin a painting that was good until then.

He walked down the stairs again, his feet heavy on the steps. He passed the closed door of his own apartment and hurried out to the street. He wanted to keep moving, to go where nobody knew him and to do pretty much of nothing.

He was in no mood for people—not for Susan or Stella certainly, not for the moment. The IRT subway let him off at Times Square and he deliberated between getting quietly bombed out of his head or trying to lose himself in a cheap movie. The movie won—drinking didn’t sound too attractive with the hangover he had just gone through, and the movie was also a good deal cheaper.

He saw a double feature without seeing it. Afterward he remembered very vaguely that one of the films was something about gangsters and starred either George Raft or Jimmy Cagney, but he couldn’t remember for sure which one it was. The other picture was an “Eastern Western”—the saga of Genghis Khan or some such, with people riding around on rabid camels and shooting rifles which, as Ralph remembered, weren’t in such wide distribution at the time of Genghis Khan. But he couldn’t be sure.

Throughout both movies his eyes stared at the screen while only half seeing it. His mind was elsewhere, wrapped up in the problems he had tried to leave behind him when he walked into the theater. As usual, it didn’t work. He found himself remembering the taste of Susan’s lips when he kissed her—the first time gently, the second time with a passion that had been too much for her.

The taste of her lips, the clean sweet smell of her naked flesh so close to him, her breasts pressing against his shirtfront. His hands meeting behind her back as he pressed her close. The feel of her bare back under his hands, soft and clean and smooth, slender without being thin. The warm taste inside her mouth, the touch of her tongue.

Sensory impressions flooded his brain as his mind turned time and time to the kiss and the conversation that followed it. The impressions mingled with the love he felt for her and killed whatever interest the two movies might have held for him.

He didn’t like movies too much to begin with, generally preferring a paperback book to even a top-notch picture. There was one great thing for both reading and looking at paintings—you could do them on your own time and pace yourself as you pleased. If you were a fast reader you could read quickly; if you felt like it you could slow down. But speeding up a movie or playing a 33-rpm record at 78 didn’t work out.

He left the theatre when the second picture ended and found his way to an inexpensive restaurant on 47th Street. He ate a meal without tasting it and smoked a cigarette without even realizing that he had lighted one. Finally he wandered to the Museum of Modern Art on Fifth Avenue and spent several hours studying some of his favorite paintings.

Modigliani had always been his favorite painter—the feeling and warmth in his nudes and portraits of men and women with long necks and narrow heads communicated itself strongly to him. As he stood for a long time in front of the portrait of the Young Girl with Braids he was reminded vaguely of Susan. Both shared the same quality of innocence in the eyes and around the mouth.

He thought about Modigliani and the kind of life the man had led. Sickly as a child, he moved to Paris while in his early twenties and seemed determined to kill himself as quickly as possible. He drank almost constantly; when he wasn’t drinking he was smoking opium or hashish or experimenting with still stronger drugs.

The artist’s motto had been “Une vie breve mais intense”—a short life but an intense one. That was a perfect description of what he achieved, contracting tuberculosis and dying in his mid-thirties. And then his mistress Jeanne Hebuterne had thrown herself from the balcony of her father’s house to join him in death.

He shook his head. Compared to that, his own life seemed almost sane. But he knew that he was walking a tightrope and could fall either way at any moment. If he lost Susan he was afraid to think what would happen to him. He knew for a fact that he would never paint again. He would pack up his paints and brushes and canvases and chuck them in the nearest trashcan. And he would probably start hitting the bottle fairly regularly, drifting deeper and deeper into the life of perversion and depravity that Stella represented.

For a moment he remembered the night before when he had returned to listen to Stella’s taunts. He hoped again that Stella would leave Susan alone. Even if he himself couldn’t have her, the girl deserved a lot better deal than Stella would hand her.

But what an animal he himself had turned to last night! That’s what would happen to him if he lost the girl; he was sure of it, sure that he would react by throwing up everything and striking back the only way he knew how.

At nine o’clock he left the museum and wandered back toward Times Square. He didn’t want to go back to Barrow Street, not now. He couldn’t face either of the two women who might be waiting for him.

Instead he took a room for the night at a run-down hotel on 47th Street, paying in advance. The room was a rat-trap—a small single bed, about a foot of space on each side of the bed, the bathroom down the hall, the room’s window opening out on a brick wall.

But it was a place to sleep, a place to be alone. That was all he wanted for the time being.

S
USAN STARED AT THE CLOSED DOOR
for a long time after he left her. Her mind was a jumble of confused thoughts and half-thoughts, a collection of random whirling notions, a hodgepodge of feelings and lusts and drives and inhibitions all rolled together. She didn’t know for sure how she felt or what she wanted.

She stood up and paced the room for a few moments, her trim legs carrying her back and forth from the window to the door. She paused at the window for a moment to see if she could find Ralph but he was already out of sight. Standing by the window, her breasts heaving, she realized all at once that she was naked. She blushed automatically and took a quick step away, wondering whether or not anyone had seen her.

Of course it really didn’t matter one way or the other. But everything was turmoilish enough as things stood without her inflaming some poor man outside who happened to be star-gazing. She tossed herself down in the armchair out of sight—but now that the idea had come into her head the idea of sitting around naked made her uncomfortable.

She remembered that time when she and Sharon had discovered a Peeping Tom in the building across the street. The nervy son of a bitch had a pair of binoculars trained on their window and was getting himself a good eyeful. He must have been getting his kicks in style—instead of watching one girl take off her clothes he had the rare opportunity of watching two girls making love.

But after they spotted him and his damned binoculars they ruined his little game forever by lowering the blinds before so much as unzipping a zipper or unbuttoning a button.

She dressed nervously now, her whole mind still reeling in circles. She had been telling Ralph the whole truth, and it was tough for her to tell the truth in a case like this. For that matter it was hard to be sure just what was true and what wasn’t. The whole affair was wholly unlike anything she had experienced in the past. She was really in love with Ralph, deeply in love with him. No other word but love could possibly convey the feeling she had for him.

But—

That, she admitted, was the hang-up.
But.
The almighty but, the omnipresent but, the little word that got in the way and turned everything upside-down.

But.

But me no buts
, she thought fiercely.
But me no goddam buts
.

But where did she go from here?

It was as much of a mix-up as she could imagine, and thinking about it she had to laugh to herself. She was a lesbian, a dyed-in-the-wool, twenty-four karat, one hundred percent dyke, a man-hating, lady-loving daughter of Sappho—and she was in love with a man. It was so ridiculous it made her laugh and so horribly hopeless she felt like shooting herself.

And, to top it all off, she needed sex desperately. It had been quite a while now—a long time between drinks, and she was getting pretty damned thirsty. Not since Gloria, and that was how long? She couldn’t stop to remember, but it was a long time.

She needed a woman.

It would be much nicer all around, she reflected, if she needed a man. Then she could go find Ralph and crawl in bed with him and they would both be happy. Then everything would be just hunky-dory, happy and all, and there would be no more problems for little Susan.

But it wasn’t that way at all.

She needed a woman.

But who? What did you do when you needed a woman? She could do what she had always done—make the rounds of the gay bars until she ran into some other frustrated babe out on the town and hungry for a playmate. That was generally easy enough. Then off to somebody’s bedroom and to hell with everything but the pure physical and emotional hunger that had drawn the two of them together in the first place.

But she didn’t want that. That was the sort of thing she had never wanted, the blindly promiscuous craving that made most male and female homosexuals more than a little repulsive to her. It was as if their abnormality gave them a right to flout all the other conventions of the world along with the basic convention of heterosexuality. Once the one bridge was crossed, nothing was supposed to stand between them and the fulfillment of their physical needs.

She didn’t go along with that notion. Just because she preferred women was no reason for her to take sex without anything more than unreasoning hunger. Why, there were men and women who chose sexual partners without so much as an interest in physical attraction! If those people just found somebody willing to sack out with them, that was all they were interested in. That wasn’t her idea of the way to run your life at all.

Which left her right where she started from.

In love—but with no way to consummate that love. And in heat—with no way to cool off.

When the answer came to her she couldn’t figure out how she had managed to go so long without thinking of it. It seemed tremendously obvious, and it was a wonder to her that it hadn’t hit her mind right at the beginning.

Because there was a woman she was attracted to, a woman she had wanted from the moment she first laid eyes on her. A woman who wanted her and would be ready and willing to start an affair with her. A woman she wouldn’t have to worry about hurting because the woman seemed to be immune to emotional pain.

A woman named Stella James.

Yes, it would be purely physical. And blindly promiscuous. All the things she reviled. But—

But Stella would want her; Stella would be quick to accept her love. And with Stella it could be quick and simple, a relationship based upon mutual need and mutual attraction, with no strings on either side. With Stella she wouldn’t feel that she was cheating on Ralph, either—if only because the affair was going to be so basically empty on all but a physical plane.

Then she would be able to make up her mind. Once she unwound and was able to relax physically her mind would be able to work on the problem that was currently banging it into walls. Once she could lie down in Stella’s arms for a quick and desperate orgasm, then the sex bit would leave her alone long enough for her to get some serious thinking done.

That was the answer.

She looked at herself in the mirror and decided quickly that a sloppy blouse and a pair of dungarees was hardly the outfit for a love affair. She changed into a dress—it was the first time in weeks she had had occasion to wear one. The dress was navy blue and it fit her figure perfectly, accentuating the calves and thighs and breasts. She went overboard and put on a pair of high-heeled shoes. She combed her hair very methodically until it was all quite perfect and placed a drop of her best perfume behind the lobe of each ear.

“You,” she said to her reflection, “look remarkably young and lovely.”

And she blew a kiss at the mirror and walked out of the apartment and down the stairs.

Now that her mind was made up she didn’t waste time. She walked at once to the door of the first floor apartment and knocked three times. She wasn’t even nervous anymore. Indecision was worse than any decision for her—once her mind was settled she was always much calmer, much more relaxed in every way. When Stella opened the door a smile came at once to her lips and stayed there.

Stella had spent the earlier part of the day doing next to nothing. She was dressed quite informally in comparison to Susan but looked lovely nevertheless. A skimpy polka dot halter encased her huge breasts and matching short-shorts covered her hips and thighs like a coat of paint. Her eyes lit up when she saw Susan.

“Well,” she said. “Come in.”

Wordlessly the girl followed her inside. Stella led the way to the couch in the front room and the two sat down on it side by side. Susan waited for Stella to speak; Stella, on the other hand, said nothing in an effort to force the younger girl to take the initiative.