Stranger On Lesbos (9 page)

CHAPTER 7

“Where do you think you're going?"

Frances paused with her hand on the doorknob. "A girl I know is having a party. Any objections?"

"You're certainly leading a social life these days," Bill said. He laid his morning paper, still folded, on the coffee table. His eyes rested on her
accusingly, or only questioningly? "How come?"

She smoothed her hair back nervously. "After all, you're hardly ever home any more. You don't expect me to sit home alone evening after evening, do you?"

"I go out on business. I'm beating my brains out to earn a living for you and Bob, and you damn well know it. There's nothing I'd like better than a chance to stay home with my family once in a while."

"Is that why you play golf every Sunday?"

He ignored that. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you were running around with some other guy."

"Well, I'm not. I haven't got time to stand here and argue, either. I have a right to some friends of my own."

"You might try being decent to my friends for a change. You were snooty to Jack Flanagan again last night."

"I'm getting damn tired of having Jack Flanagan pinch me on the fanny every chance he gets," Frances said coldly. "I don't mind your eyes falling out of their sockets every time Betty leans over in those low-cut necklines of hers, but I don't care for that sort of thing myself." She pulled the front door open.

"This isn't like you."

"Maybe you don't know me very well. You're never home."

She was rather proud of herself for keeping her voice so calm, considering the way her knees were shaking.

There were six or seven people in Bake's small apartment when she got there. The air was soft with smoke and loud with hi-fi blues. Frances made her way through the familiar rooms, trying not to feel that the guests were intruders, not to wish that they would all go home and leave her alone with Bake. She took off her coat and added it to the pile on the bed, reddened her lips and smoothed her hair, pleased that she looked pretty. In the mirror she saw Bake come into the bedroom, closing the door tightly behind her.

"Hi," she said, raising a hand in greeting.

"Hi," Bake said, sounding amused. "It's turning out to be quite a brawl. Are you staying afterward?"

"I can't. Bill made a fuss about my coming at all." She capped her lipstick and dropped it in her purse. "It's the first time he's ever said anything."

"You shouldn't have told him you were going out."

"Oh hell, he's all settled down for a quiet evening at home. I don't know what got into him."

"He doesn't suspect anything, does he?"

"I don't think so. He accused me of being interested in another man," Frances said, giggling suddenly, "but I don't think he meant it. He was just peeved and wanted to hurt my feelings."

Bake lit a cigarette. She broke the match in two and flipped it at the corner wastebasket. "It's too bad you have to take him into consideration at all
and Bob too. I haven't anything against Bob, I'm sure he's a nice kid, but no adolescent really needs a mother. You're just a handy source of food and spending money to him."

Frances thought, I ought to resent that. I love Bob, he's my child, I'm sure he loves me too. Still, it's true that they start to make the real breakaway around this age.

She said stiffly, "Let's forget it. Who's here?"

"Theresa and Kitty, Kay and Jane, Patsy and Barbara." Bake paused to count. "I asked Lissa and Jo, but they've had a big fight and Jo moved out, bag and baggage. There's somebody else, of course. Lissa came alone. I'd just as soon she hadn't."

"Why not?"

"She likes you."

"You don't need to lose any sleep over that."

Frances was silent. The last time she had stayed after a party, it was to put a tangle-footed and incoherent Bake to bed. Bake caught her thought as she so often did.

"I'm sorry about that, darling. I won't drink so much tonight."

"What I hated about it," Frances said in a small hard voice, "was that Bill was awake when I got home. He wanted to make love to me
for a change."

"My God, Frankie."

"Well, what could I do? He's my husband."

Bake snapped off the bedroom light. In the half-dark, she caught Frances' arm in her two hands and shook her. "Did you like it?"

"I hated it."

But that wasn't the whole truth, she thought as she made her way back to the living room and took the glass Pat handed her. There had been a fluttering of response, the more insistent because she had tried to deny it. Even though she tried to lie unmoving and unfeeling until it was over, thinking about something else, it was one of the few times when she had caught a glimmering of what the stories and poems were about. A dozen times, maybe, in sixteen years.

Afterward, lying beside a Bill oddly spent and gentle, more like the young husband of their early days than she had seen him for a long time, she had to fight back a wave of tenderness that threatened to engulf her. She had been short-tempered with him ever since, in an effort to dispel that guilty tenderness, since it separated her somehow from Bake.

It's all her fault, she thought. If I hadn't had to go home all keyed up and unsatisfied

This party was going to be like a dozen others she had gone to. Lots of talk, some music, a great deal to drink. All of Bake's friends drank more than she was used to
but so did all of Bill's friends. Alcohol seemed to be the solvent in which all differences of personality, background, opinion were lost, so that people could endure being together. She walked through the living room, saying hello. She knew the girls now, all but one
the sulky brunette, not more than eighteen, sitting alone in front of the fireplace, who she supposed was Lissa. She shivered, feeling a real sympathy for the girl. God, suppose Bake ever left me, she thought.

Her first impulse was to sit down beside Lissa and try to distract the child from her troubles, but Bake was watching her closely. She took her drink and went to sit with Kay and Pat, who were trading notes on their problems with the public school system.

Being with these women always made Frances miserably conscious that she was a housewife, without status in the world of earners. Barbara and Theresa held office jobs in the Loop; they were two digits in the crowds of young women who took the subway to work every morning. Jane was with an ad agency and had to spend most of her salary on clothes and beauty parlors. Tonight, as a reaction from the chic imposed on her by her job, she wore pedal pushers and moccasins, but her long nails were enameled silver-pink and her hairdo was elaborate. Kitty looked exactly what she was, an unmarried librarian of thirty-five, shrewd, sensible and competent.

Until a few months ago, Frances might have sat next to any of them at a drugstore lunch counter without suspecting that any part of their lives was not open to scrutiny. She had heard a great deal about the telltale marks of the lesbian
mannish walk, severe dress, deep voice, short hair. All of these girls looked and acted exactly like any other youngish career women. Lately she had been looking curiously at other women on the street and in the classroom behind the counters of stores and at restaurant tables, wondering which of them belonged to this world within a world whose existence she had not even suspected till now. There was absolutely no way to tell.