Stranger On Lesbos (10 page)

"Frankie, wake up. This is the third time I've spoken to you."

Frances blinked. "I'm sorry I was just thinking what a good-looking crowd this is."

"Conventional looking, you mean." Jane smoothed down her pedal pushers, a gesture she had acquired from wearing sheath dresses. "What did you expect, a lot of butches?"

"Well
"

"There are some, you know. You'll see, if we go pub-crawling after a while."

Bake asked, "Who's going pub-crawling?"

"All of us, after you kick us out."

"After the booze is gone you mean," Pat suggested.

"I’ll go too," Bake said, "if it will get you out of here any sooner."

Frances laughed. But there was a restless feeling in the room tonight that neither music nor liquor could dispel. She wanted to be alone with Bake, not only for the excitement and fulfillment of love but to talk. I'm not a party girl, she admitted, recognizing the onset of the boredom that always overcame her when Bill persuaded her to go to a dance or a bridge party. She looked around, but Bake was being a hostess, urging drinks and sandwiches on people.

"I'll go too," she said, taking a third Martini.

It became evident after a while that the idea was growing. Maybe it was the tang of spring in the air, rising above the exhaust fumes and the varied smells of city life. Maybe it was the unrest fostered by the swollen eyes and drawn face of Lissa, who sat drinking steadily and silently. At last Kay said, "Well are we going slumming or are we not?" and there was a gradual gathering up of handbags and jackets. Bake snapped off the lights and replenished her supply of cigarettes and kitchen matches. "Going along, Frankie? You don't need your coat, you can pick it up later."

Lissa said in a low voice, going downstairs beside her, "I met you somewhere, didn't I?”

Pat said, "She's Bake's girl.”

"Oh."

"Come on, Frankie, ride with us."

She looked around for Bake, who was backing out her own car. "Okay. Where are we going?"

"Wherever Bake wants to go, I guess. It's her party. Besides, she knows all the places."

Lissa asked, "Have you been with Bake very long?”

"About five months."

"I was with Jo a year and a half."

Jane said, "For God's sake, baby, stop thinking about Jo. She'll come back."

"No she won't. She's got somebody else."

"Look, kid, we've all been through it. You'll feel better pretty soon."

"I want to die," Lissa said. Her pretty childish face puckered into a new burst of crying.

Jane gave Frances a look that said plainly, never mind, there's nothing to do for the poor kid. They were silent. Frances thought, will Bake and I separate some day, too? Is it impossible to stay together and go on loving?

She asked timidly, "How long have you been with Kay?"

"Fourteen months. Let's see
it'll be fifteen months next Wednesday." She turned the heavy silver ring she wore on her engagement finger. "We gave each other these on our first anniversary."

"And before that?"

"I don't know about Kay. She came from out on the Coast somewhere. But of course you know I used to
" She stopped suddenly, looking sharply at Frances.

"What?"

"Nothing."

Frances was silent. It was the first time she had thought about the future, and the picture was disquieting.

Karla's, where they rejoined the people from the other car, was a basement place on the near North Side, flanked by apartment buildings and lighted by a dim red neon sign. Frances had gone with Bake to three or four similar places, just outside the business district, but she still felt that there was something a little sinister about them.

She followed Jane down a flight of steps, paid her admission dollar, and helped group chairs around a too-small table so the nine of them could sit together. An awkward number. Here, as in the heterosexual world, where she lived with Bill, the animals came in two by two. She touched Bake's shoulder lightly as they took their places.

Bake ordered drinks all around. She had already had too much, Frances thought; her walk and speech were all right, but she had the shrewd narrow-eyed look with which she barricaded herself when she was beginning to feel her liquor.

Frances said, low, "Don't take any more."

"Why not, for Christ's sake?"

"You've had enough."

Bake scowled. "Oh, all right. Dance?"

It still felt odd to be dancing with another woman. More than any other single thing, the sight of girls dancing together, which had reminded her of a high-school gym class the first time she saw it, made her feel how far she had come from the world of conventional man-woman relationships. She went into Bake's arms feeling that this embrace, rather than the one they shared when they were alone, was unnatural. Yet there were only women in this place, some of them in dresses, some in the Ivy League shirts and tight pedal pushers you saw everywhere, a few in obviously masculine garb. Jane and Kay went by, cheek to cheek, and then little Lissa with a stranger. Bake waved at a girl with startling red hair, cut short and tightly curled.

"That's Cathleen Archer. She used to go with Barby."

"It makes me feel funny when you talk like that."

"Look, baby, nothing's permanent. How many married couples do you know that are still in love after, say, two or three years?"

Bake's hand was a reassuring warmth against her back. She shut her eyes and let the jukebox music, strongly accented, take over.

"Wake up," Bake said. "We're going on to someplace more interesting."

CHAPTER 8

“How about another drink all around?”

Frances shook her head. Motion made it ache and she stopped. "Had too much now," she said owlishly.

"The hell I have."

"Somebody has to drive."

Bake thought this over, leaning against the bar. "Okay. You're all wrong, but I'm not going to argue with you. If you want me to drive, I'll drive. Lissa, drink?"

"I feel so terrible," Lissa whispered. She had started crying again, and her eyes were swollen almost shut. "What difference does it make?"

"That's the spirit," the girl standing beside her said. She wore the heavy sweater and fly-front jeans that were regulation here; her hair was cut short and slicked down. "You got trouble, baby?"

"Her girl left her," Jane said sadly.

"Poor kid. Listen, why don't you come home with me? I got a double bed. You could get a good night's sleep."

"I bet," Jane said. "Goddam butch."

Kay said urgently, "What's it to you? That's what makes me so angry, darling. It happens every time. Every time I ask you to be nice to some little tramp, just out of politeness, you go overboard. What do you care where she goes or who she goes with?"

"She's just a child," Jane said with drunken dignity. She pushed her hair back to give Kay the full benefit of a cold look. "An innocent little child. Somebody has to take care of her."

"Look, you take care of me. Just concentrate on that. You don't need to worry about anybody else."

She sounded like Bill. Frances said, "Oh, my God, what time is it?"

Bake squinted at her watch. "Twenty past two. That can't be right, can it?"

"I have to go home."

"But you're supposed to go home with me," Bake said in a hurt voice. "You promised."

"Just for a little while, then."

Bill would be sound asleep by this time. Or would he? She had a crazy mental image of him still sitting in the armchair where she had left him, his feet propped on the hassock, watching the door accusingly above yesterday morning's
Tribune.
Bill Ollenfield, model of domestic virtue and handy man around the house
once every six months. Why did he have to pick a night when she had a date? Was she supposed to sit around the house night after night, waiting for him to get tired of his drinking and whoring customers and come home to her loving arms?

Or maybe he was lying tense and wide awake as she had done so often, watching the lights of passing cars sweep across the bedroom wall and waiting for the sound of her step on the stairs. She giggled.

"Sauce for the gander," she said.

"Right, right," Jane said, not knowing or caring what she was talking about.

Bake said, "Who's that girl in the green dress? The one that just came in? I'd swear I know her from someplace."

Frances followed her gaze to the doorway, where a party of three men and three young girls stood, looking around curiously. "Goddam tourists," the girl beside Lissa said. "Out to get a great big thrill looking at the queers." She tipped her glass.

"I've seen her too. On campus, I think."

"That's great," Bake said. "Just great." She laid a shaky hand on Frances arm. "Come on, let's go home. I'm tired."

The girl in green stared at them as they left, and then laughed. It was a mean laugh. It chilled Frances. She pushed her way out behind Bake. The crowd had thinned. There were half a dozen parties like their own, trying to spin the evening's festivity out to breakfast time, and three or four couples sitting drink-sodden and silent at small tables; also a few single women, mostly middle-aged, cruising. There were five or six butches waiting for their girls to get through work.

Jane said, "Crummy bunch, huh?"

Kay shrugged.

"There aren't any sunrises in this town," Frances complained. She found the car keys in Bake's pocket, since Bake seemed unable to locate them, and handed them to her. "We had sunrises at home. Here the sky just keeps getting lighter, and pretty soon it's time to get up." The eastern sky was changing from lead gray to smoke gray. She felt very sad.

"Why do I do these things? Why do you let me?" Bake backed out expertly. The street was deserted except for a cruising taxi and a prowl car. "God, that's a grim place. I don't know why we went there."

"It seemed like a good idea at the time."

"A good expensive idea. I was going to buy that South American pottery this week."

"We spend too much on booze."

"You're telling me."

The dawn air was cold. Frances shivered. She put her hand in the other girl's jacket pocket. "I don't want to go home, Bake."

"I thought you were coming home with me. That was the idea in the first place."