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  “Did you start late?” She was sorry she had asked; Erika’s face set in a pattern of stern sorrow. Too late Frances remembered what Vince had told her about this girl’s past.

  “Only three, in all my life. And the first two were not so important. I can’t go in bars like a man looking for a whore,” Erika said proudly. “It has to be everything—or not at all. The mind and the inside thoughts, doesn’t that belong with love too?”

  “The same with me. Maybe only one matters. Maybe it’s never the same with anyone else.”

  Erika said abruptly, “Here is a good place for coffee. I found it a few weeks ago.”

  It was a small cheap-looking restaurant, brightly lighted and rather noisy. “No air-conditioning and no Muzak. Do you mind?”

  “I hate air-conditioning and Muzak.”

  “So do I. Also things made of plastic. And commercials on television.”

  “And the poetry in newspapers, like prose only with dots to show where the lines are.”

  “You hate the right things,” Erika said, smiling. She settled back in the booth and stretched a little, as though she were tired. Her face looked drawn in the light, the skin too tight over the cheekbones. Frances said, “Don’t talk if you don’t want to. It’s so hot.”

  Erika said simply, “I don’t sleep.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Nobody sleeps any more. It’s out of style. People take pills to put themselves to sleep, and different pills to wake themselves up.”

  The waitress said, smiling, “Hello, Miss Frohmann. Coffee? A sweet roll or something?”

  “Only coffee, please.”

  They were silent as they waited. It wasn’t like being with Bake, who always had a dozen things to share and who talked well. But it was pleasant. Time to stop thinking about Bake, that was over. She looked at Erika. Erika’s eyes were a light gray-green, flecked like agate. Her eyelashes curled like a baby’s. She wore no makeup at all, and a few freckles spattered her nose and cheeks. She sighed, pushing her hair back from a forehead that was beginning to show faint lines.

  “Vince wants me to ask you to a meeting. Only if you want to, you don’t have to come,” Erika said when their coffee was before them in thick green-banded cups. She looked at the steam rising in delicate spirals. “You take it black? So do I.”

  “What kind of a meeting?”

  “A group for people like us. We have speakers and book reviews—like what are our legal rights, and how can we get better jobs? You don’t need to be afraid, it has nothing to do with the communists,” she added with a little smile. “Everyone in this country is afraid of communists. I don’t know why, there can’t be so many—I don’t know a single one.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “This is a good way to meet people,” Erika said, as though Frances hadn’t fretted through weeks of hot summer nights over just that. “You may have seen the magazine. It’s called Others.”

  “Oh.” She had heard about this organization, at Bake’s place and over the beer at Karla’s. Kay approved. Bake was scornful of it. “A lot of butches and bitches. God knows what they find to talk about. It’s the American mania for joining things, that’s all. Besides, who wants to get on a mailing list?”

  “The last young man Vince asked was so disappointed. He expected orgies. We’re very serious.”

  Frances said weakly, “It sounds interesting.” It didn’t—and how would she account for her evening to Bill?

  Erika’s laugh was unexpectedly deep. “Passing resolutions and answering letters? Someone has to do it. It is nice to sit and drink coffee with people who know what you are, that’s all.”

  “I think I’d like to.” Because how else was she to see Erika again? That was all that mattered at this point.

  “Good. There is a meeting at Vince’s apartment on Friday night. Next Friday, eight o’clock. I’ll write the number for you.”

  “Could I pick you up?”

  “No, I’ll go early.” She found a pencil in her pocket, started to tear a margin off the magazine she had put down, then changed her mind and handed Frances the whole thing, with the address written in a small foreign-looking script along the top. “This is the national magazine. Take it if you want to.”

  It was a small publication, sixteen pages, about six-by-eight inches, neatly printed and decorated with pen and ink sketches. Frances hadn’t known that such a thing existed. She said, “Thanks, I’ll bring it back when I’m done with it.”

  Frances had known about the bars, yes; from her reading she knew that Karla’s and the Gay Eighties had their counterparts everywhere. New York was famous for them, the west coast was supposed to be a paradise for pickups (at least, between spasmodic raids when the police exchequer was low or public feeling ran high); Paris, Vienna, Madrid, everywhere you went, said the travelers, you found the “different” ones, ready to recognize and welcome their own. They ranged from park and washroom pickups to the sober hard-working couples pledged to monogamy and permanence. It was a world within a world, of whose very existence most people were unaware. To Frances it was a comforting thought.

  She had never enjoyed barhopping. She remembered the evenings she had spent sitting bored and tired, drinking too much, waiting for Bake to be ready to go home. But where else can you meet people? She thought of all the women going home to furnished rooms after their day’s work, wishing they had someone to love but forever outside the world of man-woman loving (as though that were not capable of infinite variations), lonely and hungry and not knowing how to look for companionship. And then there were the lucky ones who stumbled upon fulfillment, as she had done with Bake, and sometimes went on for years, warmed by a lasting love. Not many, but a few.

  This might be one way to an answer—an organization, a magazine. For lonely girls in small towns, in colleges, in impersonal cities, at least the reassurance that there were others. She said abruptly, “While you’re talking about hating the right things—I hate that word. Homosexual. It sounds like a disease.”

  “Some people think it is,” Erika said sadly. “The psychologists have one, homophile. Like something that could put you in a violent ward. Or in jail.”

  “It’s been known to happen.”

  “Lesbian isn’t so bad.”

  “Bad enough. What do you say?”

  Erika smiled. “I say so-and-so, whatever the person’s name is. I prefer to think about people. You like string beans, I like spinach, does this keep people from being people?”

  “That’s good if you can do it. Like not thinking some things are masculine and others feminine, as if anybody were entirely one or the other. Why do people make an issue of it?”

  “What other people do doesn’t matter.”

  The cups were empty. They sat looking at each other. Everybody always talks about the subject, Frances thought, let two gay kids get together and they start reviewing the whole history of homosexuality. Like the jokes about the Polish question. Of course it’s a social issue, kind of. But right now—

  Right now she wanted Erika.

  Erika stood up, composed and neat. There was nothing to do but follow her out, stopping at the cashier’s desk to pay the check.

  Nobody could ever own this one, she thought, standing beside Erika in the doorway. But she could give a lot if she really cared. She hasn’t cared for many people. And she’s been terribly hurt.

  “Are you coming back to Vince’s?” she asked.

  “Not today.”

  “I’d like to see you again.”

  “Of course. Friday at eight.”

  But that wasn’t what she meant.

  She stood alone on the sidewalk, watching Erika walk down the street. We could be friends, she told herself, cheered by the rapport that had already developed between them. But friendship was only part of what she wanted.

  She knew she couldn’t rush things with this girl. She wasn’t like Bake, definite, aggressive, ready to come into your arms in a burst of feeling. This one had
been hurt. She kept herself locked away. It would be necessary to go slowly.

  She walked back to the bookstore, feeling that Vince, at least, would listen with sympathy. But he had a paying customer who seemed in no hurry to leave. She picked up another armful of books and left, feeling frustrated.

  She didn’t think she was hard hearted. She had felt sorry for a lot of people. Bob, when he lay spotted and feverish with measles or chicken pox. Lissa, whose heart broke every time she ended an affair—and was healed with a smile. Kay, in the quiet grief of her love’s ending—frightened and heartsick as she herself had been when Bake and Jane began their slow inevitable drift together. She and Kay had shared their renunciation.

  But she had never felt about anyone as she did about Erika Frohmann; and that, she knew, was because her compassion was mixed with desire. The silent dignity of Erika’s loneliness, as though she had endured it silently for a long time, filled her with a physical hurt. The palms of her hands ached, her throat tightened. For the first time she wanted to take someone in her arms and give all she had, with no thought of her own fulfillment.

  She told herself she was being romantic and silly. She went back to the house on Regent Street, and the door opened to let her in. The rooms were cool and spacious—and empty. She had no place there.

  She cooked the evening meal and sat across the table from Bill, eating without knowing what was on her plate, saying yes and no to Bill’s latest installment of what they were doing at the plant. In her mind was a picture of a girl with gray-green eyes and freckled cheeks. It was a kind of love she had never felt before, but she had no doubt that it was love.

  7 BILL SAID, “WE OUGHT TO HAVE A PARTY.”

  Frances’s book slithered off her lap. She picked it up, spreading her fingers protectively over the title.

  “The Wives were just here for lunch and cards.”

  “I mean a real party. Some of the people I’ve been meeting on my job. It’s time we started following up some of these contacts.”

  She knew what he had in mind, the old status climb, but she was damned if she was going to say it for him. She sat waiting, with her book open on her lap.

  “Everybody’s been pretty nice to us. It might be fun to have some people in.”

  Can this marriage last? Read the Ladies Companion and find out how this little woman kept her husband’s love by becoming a gracious hostess. Husbands, let your wives know you appreciate their bird-brained achievements. They sit around the house all day while you work your fingers to the bone, dictating letters and drinking martinis on the expense account.

  But she felt an unwilling pride. After all, the house did look good, and she had the blisters to prove it. She said, “All right, if you want to. I just thought—you’re often out in the evening.”

  “For Christ sake, I can take a night off, can’t I?”

  It didn’t matter. Except that every nice thing she did now was going to make it worse for him when she left at last.

  “I suppose you think I never think about anything but business,” Bill said defensively. “What’s wrong with that? The fellows at the office are all right. And you get along with the girls, don’t you?”

  That was the truth, Frances realized miserably. They were good people, even kind people—as long as they figured you for their kind. Admit that you’re a little different and you’ll be crucified. Why couldn’t he understand that she would never belong?

  It was no use. Her year of hard work, following their reconciliation, had succeeded in one way: Bill now thought of her affair with Bake as an aberration, an unpleasant but temporary interruption to a happy, normal marriage. She had played Mrs. Ollenfield so skillfully that she had Mr. Ollenfield completely fooled. He knew, manwise, that women do wacky things. Other men’s wives carried on with men or drank too much or had to be hospitalized with nervous breakdowns. She had wronged him, too, but with great nobility he had forgiven (but not forgotten) and taken her back into his bed. As far as he was concerned the incident was closed.

  He was going to be so surprised when he found out.

  As far as she was concerned, it wasn’t the three years with Bake that were evil, but the return to unlove. To accept forgiveness for an episode she didn’t think was wrong—that was really immoral. She was twice as guilty as he thought, but not for the reason he had in mind.

  Bill turned back to his figuring. She closed the book and sat with her eyes half shut, trying to come to some meaningful conclusion and failing, as usual. Thoughts of Bake obsessed her lately. Not the Bake of their last unhappy days together, drunk and antagonistic, but the girl who had first taught her the ways of love.

  They had come in tired and dirty from a heavenly day in the autumn woods, and Bake had built a blaze in the fireplace. Sitting side-by-side on the wide couch with the hand-loomed Indian spread, they drifted into talk. Until, at last, Bake had the courage to mention what was in both their minds. Frances could guess now what that initial approach had cost Bake, in her proud determination never to bring a straight girl out; least of all a woman with a husband and half-grown son. Bake had weighed the chance of failure and her own belief that she was doing wrong. But at the time she hadn’t known that.

  She could feel again, thrilling all through her body, the fright and compulsive longing that struggled in her as Bake undressed her and lay down beside her. The panic that swept over her at the first touch of Bake’s hands on her naked body, a woman’s hands for the first time rousing her to desire. And, too, a new pride because Bake found her attractive. Bake’s hands and lips, and the gradual rise to a crest of feeling that was mixed with fear before she finally let go and the wild explosion swept her into a different world.

  This is it, she thought just before the tide swept her away. This is what I always wanted and never knew. She heard herself making low moaning sounds like an animal in distress, heard the soft scream rise in her throat as the fulfillment became more than she could bear.

  And, oh God, the joy of waking in the early morning with Bake’s body lying warm and solid against her, knowing that this marvelous person loved her and was pleased to make her happy. At that moment, growing out of her new-found peace and joy like a flower unfolding, had come the thought: I can learn to do all this for her, I can give her pleasure back again. It filled her with a new confidence.

  Frances moved uneasily, slanting a look at Bill who sat jotting down columns of figures. It had been so long. She had tried to forget. And now things she thought she had forgotten kept crowding into her memory—the memory that lives in muscles and nerve endings. Desire rose in her like a fountain.

  Her love for Bake was the only completely good thing she’d ever had. And this man sitting at his desk, looking things up in Dun and Bradstreet, saw it as something abnormal and evil. I can never tell him, she thought. He’ll never understand. And he has had such a wonderful time forgiving me and taking me back. She looked at him coldly, seeing him as a stranger.

  Because of course Kay was right. There was no doubt in her mind, after a year of “happy normal marriage.” She was a lesbian. (Names again.) The three years with Bake hadn’t been an experiment, but a revelation of the truth about herself. She had denied it. She had tried to change—but does anyone ever change? Isn’t your true basic self alive as long as you live, hidden away, beaten down, but always ready to come alive at a word or scent or a remembered bit of music?

  It was the reunion with Bill that had been an experiment—and it was a failure. For a year she’d done everything he wanted her to do, tried to be everything he asked her to be, restricted her life to the four walls of his house and her behavior to the decidedly stuffy ideas with which he had grown up. She had even tried to be grateful to him. A pushover for a little kindness, she thought in scorn of her softness. She couldn’t go on this way.

  Bill looked up. “How about it, Fran? It wouldn’t be so much work. You could have a woman in to help. You could have somebody all the time if you felt like it, I’m making enough. T
hat’s why I work so hard, so you can have things and Bob can finish his degree work.”

  “Sure. We can have a party. If you want one so badly.”

  “What’s the matter, don’t you want to?”

  She tried to smile. “You know I’m never at my best in a crowd.”

  “It wouldn’t have to be more than four or five couples.”

  Oh, the animals came in two by two. A man for me and a girl for you. Suppose she said, “All right, can I invite my girl?”

  But of course she didn’t have a girl. Yet. She was building all her plans on the weakest of foundations.

  “We could have a catered affair. You wouldn’t even have to step into the kitchen. Most of these people are poker players, no job to entertain them. I could pick up a couple party records—no rough stuff, just an icebreaker. We’ll have fun, Fran.”

  She stood up, a finger between the pages of her book. “All right. I’m going to bed, if you don’t mind. I’m tired.”

  “It’s all right about the party, isn’t it? I don’t want to push you into anything you don’t want to do.”

  Damn him. Now she couldn’t even feel like a martyr. She said slowly, “Sure, you ought to entertain the people who’ve been nice to you, that’s a good idea. I’ll think of a good menu.”

  “I’m not doing it just for myself.”

  Same old record, same old groove, same old dull needle. She waited. He said politely, “What are you reading?”

  “Paperback I picked up. It doesn’t amount to much.”

  He swiveled back to his work. She climbed the stairs slowly, holding the book against the folds of her skirt.

  The book was one of those she had kept hidden in the attic, the boxful she hadn’t been able to throw away even at the hour of her greatest determination to conform. She had put them away, promising herself that some day, when she was brave enough, she would take that box out and burn it. Now the contents seemed like a promise of better times to come. All those books “in the field”—Bannon, Cory, Aldrich, Hall, Taylor, Wilhelm, Foster, as well as the classics—said to her, “You are not alone.” From time to time, when she was safely alone in the house, she chose a title and plunged into the life she thought she had left behind forever.