Warm and Willing

CHAPTER TEN

The apartment was out of the Village, uptown on Twenty-Third Street and Eighth Avenue. It was in a huge sprawling building with a half dozen different entrances. Bobbie paid the cabbie and they spilled out onto the sidewalk and rushed into the building. The elevator was self-service and they had to wait for it to get down to the ground floor. It took its time, then made its way very slowly up to the sixth floor where the two girls lived. It was maddening. They stood in the car with no way to hurry its progress until it finally reached the sixth floor and the ancient doors opened.

On the way over, Bobbie had told her more about the two girls. “Peg has done this before,” she said. “It’s nothing new. Once she took too many sleeping pills and another time she was up on the window sill and threatening to jump. Not out on a ledge like in the movies but just on the sill. We talked her out of it that time. She doesn’t really want to kill herself. She just wants to come close.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Peg and Lu have been together for almost three years now. That’s a fairly long time. You met Lu. Do you remember Peg?”

“No.”

“She’s about five years older than Lu. And very scared of losing her. That won’t happen, because Lucia is the kind of girl who wants to have her cake and eat it. She wants the security Peg gives her and she also wants a little hit-and-run sex. So she cheats. Peg knows she cheats and she tries not to notice it. Sometimes people can manage to see what they want to see. But every once in a while Lu is too blatant about it and Peg can’t help finding out, and it hurts her.”

“And she tries to-”

“Sometimes. Three times now that I know of. Probably a few more than that.” Bobbie sighed. “One of these days she’ll probably manage it, and without trying to. By accident. Play with suicide long enough and it gets to you, I suppose. I hope we get there on time.”

And later, in the elevator, Bobbie said the same thing. “I hope we’re not too late. I hope she didn’t go off the deep end this time.”

Lucia Perry was waiting in the doorway of her apartment. Her face was fishbelly white and she was wringing her hands nervously. She said, “Bobbie, I had to call you. I didn’t know what to do.”

“Is she still-”

“Yes. She won’t come out. She won’t answer me. I don’t know if anything happened or not. I tied to kick the door in but nothing happens, I can’t move it. I-”

Bobbie hurried past her into the room. She seemed to know her way around the apartment and went straight to the bathroom door. “Peg,” she called. “Peggy, for Christ’s sake, Peggy, what are you doing in there?”

A voice, low, muffled. “Go away.”

“Open the door, Peg.” Bobbie’s voice was calmer now, commanding. “Open the door and let me in.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. Just turn the bolt and open the door. That’s all there is to it, Peg.”

“Do you know what she did?” The voice was firmer now.

“What?”

“She had a girl up here. I don’t even know her name, some two-bit tramp she picked up around Times Square. Here in my apartment. They were in our bed, the two of them, and I walked in on them, God help me, and I saw them-”

Rhoda looked at Lucia Perry. They girl’s eyes were filled with tears. She looked as though she was going to faint. “I’ll get you a drink,” she told the girl. “You need one.”

“I don’t-”

“Where’s the liquor?” She didn’t wait for an answer but went to the living room and found an opened bottle of blended whiskey. She poured a stiff shot into an orange juice glass and made Lucia drink it. The girl had trouble getting it down but it seemed to help.

And Bobbie was still talking to Peg, her voice steady, reasonable. “You don’t want to hurt yourself, Peg,” she said. “You don’t want to do anything bad. Jesus, just open the door, Peg.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I’m going to kill myself, Bobbie. Oh, that little bitch! Why do I let her do this to me, Bobbie?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why do I love her?”

“Open the door, Peg.” There was silence. “Peg, open the door.”

In a whisper, Lucia said, “There are three of us. Maybe together we could break it down.”

“The building’s forty years old,” Bobbie whispered back. “They used real doors then. This one is solid oak. We couldn’t budge it.”

“Then-”

“Let me talk to her.” Louder, she said, “Peg, please. Don’t hurt yourself. She’s not worth it.”

“But I love her, Bobbie-” It was a whine, pathetic.

“Peg.”

Silence again. Then, softly, “I cut myself, Bobbie.”

“Ohmigosh!”

“I’m bleeding. I’m afraid, I’m afraid.”

Lucia was saying that it was all her fault, that if anything happened to Peg she would kill herself, too. And that she deserved it. “What could I do without her? God, I couldn’t live without her!”

The door opened. Peg Brandt, tall and heavy-bodied, took a faltering step toward the doorway. She had slashed both her wrists and dark venal blood flowed from each wound. Her face was pale as death, her mouth slack, her eyes vacant.

Lucia screamed.

Bobbie said, “Get Lu out of the way, knock her out cold if you have to. I’ll take care of Peg. I know what to do, just get Lu out of my way for a few minutes.”

Rhoda herded the girl into a bedroom, made her sit down, got more of the blended whiskey into her. Lucia talked non-stop, babbling about what a horrible thing she had done, proclaiming her love for Peg, swearing that she would never look at another girl again, that it had been a crazy thing, a kid’s trick, a whim, and that it would never ever happen again if only Peg came through, if only everything worked out all right. Rhoda didn’t have to say much. She stayed with the girl and held her hand and tried with incomplete success to calm her down.

Then Bobbie called that it was all right, that they could come in again. They went to the living room. Peg was stretched out on the couch, her feet propped up on a pair of pillows. Her face was still very pale. Both wrists were heavily bandaged with gauze and adhesive tape.

“It was a little close,” Bobbie said. “She got the veins but missed the arteries, which is good because it’s harder to stop arterial bleeding. It spurts and comes faster. She had four trial marks on the wrist. She must have tried four times before she got up the nerve to do the job, and then she just switched the blade and cut the other wrist on the first try. She was bleeding for a while before she opened the door, but I don’t think she lost too much blood. I got it stopped pretty quickly. She’s weak, though. Aren’t you, Peg?”

“I’m all right.”

“You goddamned fool. You’re just lucky everybody loves you.”

“Loves me?”

“Yes. All of us. And Lucia more than anybody. She hurts you because she can’t help it, but that doesn’t change anything. She loves you, Peg, and she was hysterical before. She still is.”

“I didn’t mean to scare her.”

“You didn’t mean to kill yourself, either. You just wanted to come close.”

“I-”

“Take it easy, rest.” Bobbie turned around. She looked exhausted. She said, “Get some orange juice from kitchen. That’s what they give you after you donate blood. To build you up again. Make sure she eats a lot of meat and drinks a lot of liquids for the next few days. Keep her away from liquor as much as you can. She’ll be all right but she’s going to be weak. She has to take it easy. Tomorrow’s Saturday. That’s good-she doesn’t have to work. Keep her home and keep her in bed. And for God’s sake, be good to her. She loves you, Lu. You ought to know that.”

“And I love her, Bobbie.”

“Yes,” she said heavily. “I guess you do.”

The coffee was strong and black and sugarless. Bobbie served it in heavy china mugs that were at least twice the size of an ordinary coffee cup. They drank it in the kitchen, sitting in captain’s chairs at a heavy round oak table, its surface worn with years of use. The kitchen itself was spotless. “I buy old furniture and let it crumble under me,” Bobbie had said, “but I run a clean ship. I may be crude but I’m neat, as the whore said to the sailor. And Claude doesn’t like dirt. It bothers him.”

Claude was in the other room now, sleeping in front of the fireplace. Rhoda sipped the hot coffee and put the mug down on the table. She felt strangely calm now. Peggy and Lucia were far away and their problems were no longer hers. Megan, too, was far away. She was not worried about Megan any longer. Megan would live through losing her.

Bobbie said, “I knew a girl who killed herself. Once.”

She didn’t say anything. The sentence jumped in at her, tore her from her restful mood.

“In Cuernavaca. That was one of the reasons I came back, one of the things that made it impossible for me to stomach Mexico any more. She wasn’t exactly a lesbian. She was bisexual and would sleep with anything if she got in the mood. Her parents were very rich. Old money, a proper Bostonian family, all that.” Bobbie’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “She was the most depraved person I’ve ever met, in the real sense of the word.”

“Tell me about her.”

“I don’t know what to tell. She was thrill-crazy, I guess that’s it. Her parents should have sent her to a psychiatrist instead of to Mexico. She told incredible stories, but most of them may have been lies I don’t think she knew the difference.”

“Did you ever-”

“Oh, of course. Everybody was hysterically promiscuous down there, and she was working her way through everyone who could speak English, and an occasional Mexican for laughs, and she got to me after a while. I never liked her much but I found her…well, fascinating, in a pitiable sort of a way. We weren’t together long. Then a month later she killed herself. She was only twenty-two years old. She was messy about it, awful about it; it was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen in my life. There was a party, everybody drinking. In the middle of everything she took a gun from her purse, a revolver, and she shouted something about this being the biggest kick of all, and she stuck the gun in her mouth-”

Her heart was pounding. “Don’t say it.”

There was a time while neither of them said anything. Rhoda finished her coffee, lit a cigarette. In her mind’s eye she could see that girl, faceless but very real to her, playing her little desperate scene in the middle of a party, picking just the right dramatic moment for announcement and, before anyone could do anything, the act itself.

“Rho-”

Bobbie’s eyes were wide, deep. They caught hers and held them.

“Rho, now.”

The bedroom was almost stark in its simplicity. A Hollywood bed, a maple dresser, a worn rug on the floor. Two chairs, a night table. Walls that needed painting. Bobbie turned on a small lamp on the night table, and killed the overhead light. “I used to be afraid of the dark,” she said. “Can you believe it?”

“But you’re not now.”

“No. But I want to see you.”

They lay down on the bed with their clothes on and kissed. Bobbie was the aggressor, which was as she had known it would be. Bobbie ran her hand over Rhoda’s face, let her hand trail downward to cup a breast gently through the layers of clothing.

This should be a tense moment, she thought. And yet it wasn’t. It took her a moment to realize why this was so. She was taking a new lover, moving from Megan and moving to Bobbie, and yet now, in Bobbie’s arms, she did not feel that any break was being made. But the reason was quickly obvious. She had already become as intimate with Bobbie as she had ever been with anyone. She had committed herself in every way but physically, had developed an emotional rapport with Bobbie that had been tempered by Peg Brandt’s attempt at suicide. What they did now, what pleasure they gave one another in bed, called for no basic change in their relationship. She was not betraying Megan now; she had already betrayed her by what she said and by what she felt. This was no new betrayal. This was only frosting on the cake.

She lay quite still while Bobbie undressed her, removing her clothing piece by piece. The air in the bedroom was cool on her naked flesh. She sighed when Bobbie held her bare breasts, moaned softly when Bobbie ran a hand over her slender legs.

Oh Then she was alone upon the bed. Bobbie had drawn away from her. Rhoda turned her head, opened her eyes. Bobbie was undressing by the side of the bed. She unbuttoned the gold blouse, shrugged it from her shoulders. Her hands reached behind her back to unfasten the bra and remove it. Next her hair-she let it down, and the rich chestnut mane spilled over her shoulders and hung to the sides of her breasts.

She looked like a goddess, Rhoda thought. Bared to the waist, fullbodied and magnificent, wide-eyed and beautiful. And her face showed nothing-neither happiness nor sorrow, neither excitement nor boredom. Nothing at all.

Bobbie took off the rest of her clothes. The tight black slacks, the panties, the shoes. And then she turned to look directly down upon Rhoda, bathed in half-light by the nightstand lamp, and her expression went from blank seriousness to embryonic passion. “My Rho,” she said, “I love you so very damned much.”

“Oh-”

“How soft you are, how soft and warm. And how lovely. I could look at you and touch you forever.”

She had known it would be this way, with Bobbie leading while she followed, with Bobbie bestowing and Rhoda receiving, submitting. She lay still, eyes half-lidded at first, then completely shut. She lay still and quiet, and Bobbie did magical things to her.

Bobbie nuzzled her breasts, caressed them with trembling fingers. Rhoda’s breasts seemed to swell from the touch. Bobbie kissed her there, and Bobbie’s clever tongue coursing over her soft breast-flesh was an agony of yearning aching passion. Bobbie tongued Rhoda’s nipples into stiff longing, caught up each erect nipple in between her scarlet lips and sucked on them like an infant, and yet not like an infant at all. Rhoda’s flesh quivered. The muscles in her legs and feet were tied in knots, all bound up and tense. She wanted to shout, to shriek.

“Oh, God. Oh, yes, there. There-”

All her flesh sang. Bobbie’s hands, Bobbie’s lips, everywhere, doing everything. Everything, everywhere, all.

Fancies: She was a violin and Bobbie was playing songs on her body, wild melodies that twisted and soared. Bobbie was coaxing music from her and she was trembling in Bobbie’s hands. Fancies: She was ice aflame, burning with blue fire. Fancies: There was no time, there was no space, there was no world, there was merely this.

Till human voices wake us and we drown.

In the morning she called Mr. Yamatari and said she was sick and could not come in. Then she called Megan and managed, somehow, to get though the conversation. At first Megan cursed her and called her a vicious little tramp, and then Megan cried and begged her to come back, and finally Megan swore eternal love and said she could not live without her. But Rhoda did the only thing she could do, telling Megan over and that she was going to live with Bobbie and that there was nothing else she could do.

“You’ll want your clothes.”

“I-”

“Give me an hour to get out of here. Then come over and help yourself. I still love you, Rhoda. And you love me.”

She said nothing.

“And always will. Because you never forget the first, darling. The first one everybody always remembers. Oh, kitten, we were so good for each other. What happened to us?”

“I don’t know.”

“People never do, do they? But this is the way a first affair should end, with you the one to break it up. Otherwise it hurts too much, kitten. Oh, come back to me. Oh, Rhoda-”

Silence. Then Megan said, “I’m sorry. Give me an hour, I’ll be out of here. Goodbye, Rhoda.”

The connection was broken. She put the phone down, reached for a cigarette, lit it. Her eyes were fixed on the small silver lighter, her name engraved so neatly upon one side. And she thought of a small gold circle pin. On the back, Forever. Below that, Your Rhoda.