Unlike Others (10 page)

"Think so?"

"Because it's not so easy to find a fellow who’ll take you places. All the girls get married when they're around eighteen or nineteen now. I think he simply got too excited tonight, and it was my fault as much as his. Next time I'll be more careful."

There was no resemblance to Karen now, and the jealousy was a pure hurt that she'd never felt with Karen—not even on the dreadful day when Karen, packing, had stood back to say that she was leaving and would be married. Jo wanted terribly, with a physical longing that was like pain, to slide into bed beside this small girl. To hold her close, to unbutton the blue pajamas and slip them off, to explore her body with tender questioning fingers until she was ready to be roused to ecstasy. She stood still beside the bed, her arms hanging empty at her sides.

"Anyway," Betsy said sleepily, "there's nothing wrong with him. I mean like Chuck." She punched the pillow into shape, turned on her side, and curled herself into fetal position for sleeping. "Anyway," she said, closing her eyes, "he's not a queer."

Her eyes closed. Long eyelashes lay on her cheeks like little fans.

Jo turned away. "I think I’ll take a pill too," she said abruptly. "Like I said, it's Sunday and we don't have to get up until we feel like it. We don't even have to go out for food. There's soup in the cupboard—and stuff."

Betsy didn't answer. Jo resisted an impulse to smooth her covers. Quietly, wanting to cry—pure fatigue, she scolded herself-she tiptoed into the living room and began spreading sheets on the davenport.

In spite of the wild evening and the sedative, it was almost noon before she fell asleep. The chilly day threw a cold foggy veil over everything. Jo lay on the narrow couch, aching with weariness, prickling with desire. Finally she got up and took another pill, knowing that this one would knock her out for hours and leave her feeling groggy and headachy when she did wake.

She slept at last, half conscious of Sunday noises in the building, water running, footsteps overhead, the slamming of the outside door as a tenant left. She dreamed about Karen and Betsy, and about the girl with whom she had spent the early part of the night. All three were confused, changing from one to the other in her arms, becoming one person and then another. The details of the dream were blurred and mixed with sounds from the street.

She woke once, crying quietly and with a feeling of utter hopelessness, to turn the pillow over and go back to sleep.

It's a mess, she thought sadly as she drifted into a real and drug-sodden sleep that would last, blessedly, for hours. It's a terrible mess. How am I going to get out of it?

CHAPTER 10

There’s one good thing about a bursting headache: it makes everything else seem unimportant. Jo went through that Sunday, after a miserable waking in early evening, too tired and queasy to care about anything else. She wasn't even moved by the sight of Betsy, her young body suggested by the lines of the thin pajamas, sitting up in bed to receive the warmed-over coffee Jo brought her. She simply wished that Betsy would go home and let her get some sleep.

Betsy had slept well, as the young do who lay all their troubles on someone else's shoulders. She drank her coffee, gathered her clothes and went into the bathroom to dress. Trim and clear-skinned, her face made up and her hair in order, she thanked Jo for her kindness as though they were strangers brought together by an act of God. Which we are, Jo thought, walking politely to the head of the stairs with her and feeling relieved to see her go.

She came back to sit on the bed and think of things she might do. Wash her hair, clean the apartment, go for a walk. All of them took too much energy. Finally she lay down on the unmade bed, her head on the pillow where Betsy's had been, and fell asleep again.

Around eleven she woke, nauseated and giddy. She got up and found some crackers in the cupboard, opened a can of peaches, and ate standing beside the sink. When her hunger was satisfied she put away the leftover peaches and went back to bed.

Monday morning brought a drizzle of rain and a chill in the air, together with a feeling of depression familiar to her from other weekends. Apparently an emotional hangover had the same symptoms as an alcoholic one. She showered and got into her favorite suit, the gray one, remembering all the women's magazine axioms about building morale by looking her best. Her raincoat was a favorite garment too, thick yellow-green silk with silver buttons, a mad extravagance. This morning she wished she had the money back. That morale stuff must only be for housewives, she thought, turning up her collar and going out into the fog.

There were days when everything she did was simply paper-shuffling. This looked like one of them. Maybe I should call in sick, she thought, passing a drugstore that looked bright and warm, with people having breakfast at the counter. There was an empty phone booth, its door standing open in invitation. But the habit of reliability was too strong and she went on to join the parade of storm coats and plastic rainboots en route to the bus stop.

A fat cheerful woman smiled at her and said, "No fit day for man or beast." They climbed into the big yellow bus and stood jammed against the knees of two tired-looking men, in an atmosphere of damp raincoats and stale smoke.

So much had happened since Friday that the office looked unfamiliar, like a place revisited after long absence. She let herself in with her passkey and walked back to her own office, passing Stan's room with the desk cluttered: a wad of tissues, a library book, a sheaf of half-done work and the pipe he wasn't allowed to smoke at home. Betsy was late too, but her office was neat and impersonal as though she knew her stay would be brief and wanted to leave no trace of herself. Ashamed but compelled, Jo went in and pulled open the desk drawers one after another, looking for some clue to the girl. There was nothing of Betsy there except a bottle of nail polish and a nickel. She closed the desk carefully.

She hung up her raincoat, which felt slick and clammy, and sat down at her own desk. In some way she seemed to have outgrown the place. Like her love for Karen and her griefs for earlier loves, it had already taken its place in the past. She was here, with the November issue to close and no plans for doing anything else, no intention of making any changes in her way of living, but she knew the feeling. It was time to make a change. She sat with her hands in her lap, a little frightened by the strength of her conviction that she was coming to the end of something.

Her feeling for Betsy was alive this morning, now that the nagging headache was gone and her mind felt clear. Granted, Betsy was unreasonable and almost surely unavailable. She wanted to be admired by men, she had no doubt been brought up in the American tradition that evaluates women from the age of thirteen by their appeal to men—the eighth grader who goes steady is already successful in life. It wasn't surprising if Betsy accepted this standard. At the same time she was afraid of love with either man or woman, and whatever warmth she had was hidden.

She had been upset by Stan's failure; but why? Baffled passion or hurt pride? Jo doubted that Betsy herself knew the answer.

Here was a girl who combined in one small well-made body all the inconsistencies that made Jo impatient with women. Straight women, and many Lesbians, seemed unable to do anything in a reasonable manner. It was advance and retreat, go away and come closer. She supposed that her own straightforward reactions were masculine. Anyway, she was past reasoning. Annoyed by Betsy's attitudes, she still desired her.

She had always been scornful of Lesbians who hung around straight women, yearning over what they couldn't have and making fools of themselves. There had been an older woman who worked in an insurance office where she spent several months, a strained-looking creature whose smile covered the panic of finding herself fifty. Jo watched her hovering over an accountant with a husband and small child. Finally, after the office Christmas party, Marie Bartell had made some advance to the girl—nobody knew just what. Two weeks later the office manager called her in and told her they were "reorganizing the department.''

I wonder where she is now, Jo thought. There was that long stretch between forty and sixty-five when women had such a hard time to find work; worst of all for those who walked the lonely path of the homosexual.

The world she lived in had its own rules. You tried to conform, because being found out meant more than rejection by society. It meant losing your job and having trouble finding another. Sooner or later someone who knew your history showed up, and there were washroom whispers.

It was a lonely world, and you cherished your own people. She was twenty-two before she realized that she wasn't alone. Jeannine had taught her that, in the ten months they were together, and that was one of the things she had to thank Jeannine for. Once you admitted to yourself that you were what you were, and stopped feeling guilty about it, you came to realize that you were surrounded by companions. Now there was the boy at the Andes Candies shop on the corner, one of the older women at the branch library, a file clerk in the building with whom she sometimes shared coffee breaks, the handsome young intern who took care of her the winter she had pneumonia. It was like belonging to a secret society.

Friends introduced you to friends, and sooner or later you learned to recognize your own people. It wasn't easy, because Lesbians, contrary to popular belief, have no physical characteristics that set them apart. Sometimes it was easier with men; not always. She'd known Richard for more than a year before she found out, and then she thought the boy who told her must be mistaken. A good thing he wasn't. Richard was the best and truest friend she'd ever had.

There were ways to find out, once your curiosity was aroused. You watched for conversational clues. You carried a book like
We Walk Alone
or
The Lonely Path
to the lunchroom, and waited for the other person to make an opening. That didn't always work, because recently there was a tremendous interest in gay books on the part of straight people, but sometimes you picked up a friend that way. Or you could read one of the special magazines,
Different
or
Spiral,
but that was dangerous because only people who belonged to the club would be likely to have a copy of those. Books were safer.

There were the bars, of course. But they changed all the time, and it cost money to go to them, and Jo wasn't much of a drinker. Too, there was the danger of being picked up by the police. She had never heard of a gay girl being entrapped by a policewoman as men often were by detectives. I'd know a lady cop in any disguise, she thought, grinning at the idea. But women were sometimes taken in when a place was raided.

So it was best to meet people here and there, moving carefully and not taking off your mask unless you were sure. Dirty hypocrites they make of us, she thought. Love ought to be open and honest for everybody. Whose business is it so long as we're not hurting anyone?"

Knowing the percentages, you never betrayed anyone. If you had straight friends who knew what you were and accepted you just the same, without any reservations—she never had, but some of the boys claimed it was possible—you never gave anyone away to them. It was a little world within a world, at least ten million women in the United States according to some sociologist's estimate, and God knew how many men; assorted people walking the streets and working in stores and offices, eating in restaurants and riding on trains like
everybody
else, but set apart in their private lives. Sometimes she thought it was rather like being a freedom fighter or an early Christian. She wished she could go around leaving a token mark on the walls of Chicago's glass and steel catacombs, so those who came after would know that one of their own kind had passed that way.

She didn't think that Betsy was a member of that secret society. Would she ever be? Richard said it was impossible to convert anybody. A man or woman who came over from the straight world had been potentially gay all the time; it was an act of recognition, not a change. She wasn't sure she agreed with him. And she didn't know about Betsy. I'm stuck, she thought. I don't know what to do next. Gayle came in. Jo could hear her moving around the little reception room, going through all her morning beauty rituals. And in a few minutes Stan came in. He came back and sat down in her guest chair, a thing he seldom did. "Hi. How you getting along?"

"Almost ready to paste up. I have a few questions for you when you're not busy."

"Did you use all that extra wedding linage?"

"Sure, there's more fools getting married all the time."

He started to say something, and stopped. She looked at him. He was fidgeting even more than usual. She asked, "How's your mother?"

"She didn't feel very well Saturday night, but she's all right now." He moved uneasily. "The wet weather's hard on her. You haven't talked to Betsy, have you?"

She considered and discarded several good evasions. "I saw her at work Friday." she said. It was true as far as it went. Stan looked relieved. He said, "I just wondered." It always took him forever to get out of a room; be was the kind of guest who lingers at the door, saying good-bye, until a hostess feels like hitting him. She handed him a sheaf of papers to speed him up. One down, one to go.

A few minutes later Gayle came in, bright-eyed and curious, to say that Betsy had called in sick.

I’ll go and see her, Jo thought. Then she remembered that Betsy lived with an aunt who might be surprised at this show of solicitude. If she really wasn't ill at all—if she was out looking for another job, which she very well might be doing under the circumstances—it would be mean to give her away to auntie. The call was out.

But she found Betsy's address and telephone number in the file and wrote them down. She tucked the slip of paper into her wallet, behind the bills. Having it there made her feel better. It was as though, knowing where Betsy lived, she had some assurance of seeing her again.

CHAPTER 11