69 Barrow Street (4 page)

“I’d like to paint you some time,” Ralph said.

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe sometime.”

“I mean it, Susan. You’re a very lovely girl.” She looked away.

“This isn’t a line,” he went on. “And I enjoy being with you. Hell, you’ve broken down my painter’s block. This is the first time I’ve felt like painting anything in a long while.”

“I’ve never posed before, Ralph.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“I probably wouldn’t be a very good model.”

“You’ll be all right.”

She thought for a moment. “Where would you do it? Your apartment?”

“If there’s no place better. The lighting’s kind of weak. What floor are you on?”

“Fourth floor front. Why?”

“You get a good north light there,” he explained. “I could paint there, if you’d let me. It would be a lot better than my place.”

She nodded absently. Then she took a puff of her cigarette and studied the glowing tip of it for a moment before she spoke.

“Ralph,” she said, “how would you paint me?”

“In oils.”

“I know that. I mean…nude?”

“Not if you’d rather not, if you prefer I’ll do a head and shoulders study of you. But I’d rather do you full figure, with or without clothes. Your head and your body go very well together.”

“They’ve been together a long time.”

He laughed. “That’s not what I meant. An artist looks at everything a little bit differently, especially people. Sometimes the various parts of a person complement each other more than other times. Your particular head looks better attached to your particular body, and vice-versa.”

“Naturally,” she said. “Either of them would look kind of silly just rolling around by themselves.”

“That’s not what I—”

She laughed, delighted. “I know what you meant, silly. I was just teasing you. But I do think it might be nice to pose for you, if you really want me to.”

“I do.”

“I will, then—and we can use my apartment if you’d rather. I think I might be embarrassed posing at your place anyway.”

“Whatever way you want it.”

“And…Ralph?”

“What, Susan?”

She closed her eyes for a minute. Then she opened them and said: “I know you told me before that you weren’t a guy on the make. But I have to make sure, Ralph. I…I’m not looking for anything remotely resembling a sexual relationship. Not for the time being and not for the foreseeable future.”

“I understand.”

“I don’t want to keep harping away at this,” she went on. “It’s just that this is such a standard set-up in the Village. Village artist meets Village girl and asks her to pose for him and they go to an apartment and crawl into a bed. I don’t think that’s what you want but I want to get everything set straight at the beginning so that neither of us will be disappointed.”

“I understand,” he said again. “Besides, there’s already a girl. I told you.”

“I know. But down here it’s not too uncommon for a person to be sleeping with more than one person at the same time.”

Thanks for telling me,
he thought, thinking of Stella.

“But I really would like to pose for you,” she said. “I like you, Ralph. As a person, I mean. I like you very much and I think I’d enjoy getting to know you better. But only as a person.”

“I like you, too, Susan. We hit it off pretty well together. I usually have trouble talking to people.”

She smiled softly. “So do I. But I want to emphasize that no matter how well I get to know you or how much I get to like you, our relationship will have to stay on a purely platonic level. Just friends.”

“Okay,” he said. “And I’m just as glad that you put everything out in the open at the start. Down here if a guy doesn’t make a pass at a girl the first day he meets her she feels insulted, or else thinks he’s a fruit or something. If you hadn’t said something I might have had to throw you a pass just to keep up appearances.”

“Don’t ever do that. Maybe we’ll be very good friends, Ralph. That’s a rare enough thing.”

“Right,” he said. “Hello, friend.”

“Hi,” she said. “Hi, friend.”

She insisted on paying half the check. Then they left the restaurant and walked back to 69 Barrow Street, walking slowly with the sun beating down on them. Ralph glanced at his watch and noted that it was close to noon. Where had the time gone to? Evidently they had been talking for quite a while.

The traffic was getting heavier and he could hear trucks and buses rolling by on Seventh Avenue. Barrow Street was filled with neighborhood children playing the myriad games that children played in New York, where there was no place to play but the street. Stickball, stoop-ball, chinese handball—the kids never seemed to tire of the street games, never lacked a way to amuse themselves.

Just like Stella,
he thought.
She can always find a way to amuse herself. And it’s usually in a horizontal position.

Not always horizontal, he realized. Stella had a marvelous imagination.

At 69 Barrow he opened the door for Susan and followed her inside. They said goodbye at the staircase and he returned to the door of his apartment, fitting the key in the lock.

He listened to Susan’s footsteps on the staircase for several seconds before turning the key and entering his apartment.

S
TELLA WAS SMILING
when he walked into the apartment.

“Well,” she said. “Two-timing me, huh?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just now. With the little brunette.”

“Oh,” he said. “The two of us had breakfast together. She just moved into the building.”

“Sort of a long breakfast, wasn’t it?”

“We were talking for a while,” he said defensively. There was nothing for him to be defensive about, but Stella had the knack of making him feel guilty for no reason whatsoever.

“What’s her name?”

“Susan Rivers.”

“She’s very pretty, Ralph.”

“I know. I’m thinking of doing a painting of her. That’s what we were talking about.”

Stella pouted. “You don’t want to paint me anymore?”

“I just wanted to try something different.”

“That’s all right,” she said quickly. “I don’t really mind. As a matter of fact, I intend to get to know the girl myself.”

He looked at her, puzzled.

“You see,” she went on, “we’ve met before. She’s the one I was telling you about yesterday. The one I intend to take to bed sometime in the very near future. Susan Rivers, you said? I’ll have to remember her name.”

His mouth dropped open but no words came out. Stella looked at him for a moment and suddenly burst out in harsh, strident laughter.

“You mean you didn’t know? You couldn’t tell?”

“You’re crazy!”

“You couldn’t tell!” Her eyes were laughing at him. “My God, Ralph—why, it stands out all over her. She’s so obviously gay I’m amazed you didn’t spot her right away.”

“Stella—”

“You’re a real artist, aren’t you? One look at a person and you can tell things other people wouldn’t notice. But anything that’s perfectly straightforward and obvious sails right past you.”

“Stella,” he said again. “Stella, I don’t want you to bother that girl.”

“
Bother
her?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Why don’t you say what you mean? There’s a better word than bother for what I had in mind.”

“I want you to leave her alone,” he said. “She doesn’t want you.”

“You’re wrong, Ralph.”

“She doesn’t. And I want you to leave her be. Do you understand me?”

“Of course I understand. That doesn’t mean I’m going to listen to the nonsense you’re spouting. What in the world’s got into you, anyway? Have you fallen for our little Miss Rivers? That won’t matter. You can have a crack at her when I’m done—”

“Shut up!”

She grinned. “You know, I think that’s it. You’re in love with her!”

“Don’t be silly.”

“You must be. You’re a real nut, Ralph—falling in love with a dyke.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” he said, frowning. “I like her, that’s all. Even if she is a lesbian, she’s one hell of a nice person—which is something you’d never understand. And I don’t want you to get your hooks into her, Stella. You ruin people. You turn them all rotten inside.”

She crossed her legs and reached for a cigarette. “Aren’t you being a little too dramatic, dear? Whom did I ever ruin?”

He stared at her.

“Tell me. I’d like to know.”

“Leave me alone, will you?”

She stood up and walked to him, pressing up against him and putting her arms around his neck. He tried to brush her away but she clung to him.

“Come on,” she said. “Tell me who I’ve been ruining.”

“Me,” he said brokenly. “You’ve made a mess out of me. How’s that for a starter?”

He expected her to laugh but this time she didn’t. Instead she released him and took a step backwards. There was a new expression in her eyes, a mixture of pity and contempt.

“You really think I ruined you?”

He nodded, not looking at her.

“No,” she said. “Not me, Ralph. You were a wreck before I ever laid eyes on you.”

Susan Rivers read the same paragraph three times in succession.

The third time around she realized that the paragraph seemed familiar. She closed her eyes for a second and came to the realization that it had taken her twenty minutes to read five pages of the book she held in her hand. And on top of that she could no longer remember anything that had been on any of the five pages.

Disgusted, she closed the book and returned it to the bookshelf. She curled up in the mammoth armchair, the only really nice piece of furniture in the apartment, and tried to force herself to relax.

It didn’t work. It never worked. There were some things you couldn’t force on yourself, and relaxation happened to be one of them.

She closed her eyes once again and thought about Ralph Lambert. It was, all things considered, quite pleasant to think about Ralph Lambert. He was nice company. And she didn’t seem to feel afraid of him.

With most men she was afraid, almost petrified. Not with gay men, of course, and she had been quite friendly with one or two of them from time to time. But a friendship with a male homosexual was never particularly satisfying. It seemed forced, as if the two of them were friends primarily because homosexuality served as a common bond.

Men who were straight generally frightened her. The thought of a man touching her with his coarse hands, forcing her and hurting her, bending her down onto a bed and kissing her, touching all the private parts of her body and then…then…

When she opened her eyes she realized that she had been shivering with fear and disgust.

But with Ralph she felt comfortable, and she hoped that he wouldn’t try to change their friendship into anything sexual. Not only was he a man, but she was fairly certain that the woman he was living with was the woman she had passed the day before on the stoop, the woman she had found so damnably attractive.

Would anything come of her attraction for the woman? Half of her being hoped the two of them would have an affair, if only a brief one. The other half prayed that they would live their separate lives and that their paths would never cross in any manner more intense than an occasional meeting in the hallway. While she wanted the woman, sexual involvement of any sort was one thing she desired desperately to avoid for the time being.

Susan had been a lesbian for almost two years, a relatively short time. In the course of those two years she had made love with six women. The six affairs ranged in duration from five months with Gloria to one night with a girl named Alicia whom she had met in a Village bar. She remembered the first time—it seemed so long ago, and yet it all happened less than two years ago, just a month before her twenty-second birthday. Perhaps she had been a lesbian before that without knowing it; the fact that she had avoided any sexual relationship with men on a deep level suggested that to her. But the first real affair began in September, several months after her graduation from art school.

She had spent the summer as arts and crafts counselor at a summer camp in the Catskills, and when she hit the city she had nothing to do and no place to go. She wanted to get some sort of job that would let her continue with her work in ceramics, but jobs of that type didn’t grow on trees. So she lived with her parents in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, read the Help Wanted ads every morning in the
Times
, and spent her evenings strolling around Greenwich Village, drinking
cafe espresso
in the little coffee houses, listening to modern jazz in a dimly lit bar and watching people feeding pigeons in Washington Square.

It was on one of those evenings that she met Sharon. She and Sharon had been in art school together. Sharon was a year or so older and the two of them had never been very friendly, knowing each other well enough to exchange nods in the hallway but not much more than that. But when she met the older girl in the Village, Sharon gave her a heavy welcome and Susan was lonely enough to be grateful.

They went out drinking in a quiet bar; she couldn’t remember anymore which bar it had been. It was a warm evening and they drank dry martinis on the rocks. The drinks were very refreshing and very cool and very effective, and Susan had never been much of a drinker to begin with.

She got quite high in a short amount of time.

Thinking back, she couldn’t remember whether Sharon had told her she was a lesbian before or after they went to the older girl’s apartment. Probably after, because she probably would have refused to go if she had known.

At Sharon’s apartment, a little one-room-with-kitchenette place on Bank Street, everything happened with phenomenal speed. The first part was not fresh anymore in her mind, but she remembered that almost as soon as they were inside the door Sharon was kissing her, covering her mouth with lips that were soft and tender and sweet. And what followed, followed swiftly, with Sharon pressing her down on the bed without even bothering to remove the spread, pressing her down and lying on top of her and grinding her body into hers. It had ended almost before it began.

Then they were lying together on the bed, with Sharon’s long red hair hanging to her waist and contrasting beautifully with her pale, milky skin. Susan was in a state of shock at the time, numb with the liquor and even more numb with the realization of what she had done. And Sharon had explained to her exactly what she was and what they had done, and the sort of life she could expect to lead in the future.