Warm and Willing

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Outside, snow was falling. It wasn’t sticking to the pavement yet, but she had heard a weather report earlier which had said that it would turn colder after midnight and that there would be two to four inches of snow by morning. The announcer had said something about having a white Christmas after all. But there was no way to tell, she thought. Christmas was two weeks off, and this was the first real snowfall of the season. There had been flurries now and then, but nothing more than that. There might or might not be snow for Christmas, and she didn’t particularly care one way the other.

She was sitting alone at the bar in Leonetti’s, nursing a drink, watching a cigarette burn itself out in the ashtray. The place was crowded. Most of the tables were taken, and over a dozen other girls crowded around her at the bar. She knew most of them but didn’t feel like talking, not to them or to anyone else.

She sipped her drink. It was mostly melted ice now, flat and tasteless. She looked up. The bartender was down at the other end of the bar, busy with a complicated cocktail. She stubbed out her cigarette and drained her drink. She glanced at the window again, at the falling snow outside. Bobbie would be coming soon. Bobbie would join her, and they would take a table and have few drinks together, and maybe drop over to somebody’s apartment for more drinks and some food and conversation, and then home, and then to bed.

All at once she stopped thinking and closed her eyes and listened. Leonetti’s was jammed, and she had been sitting at the bar with her thoughts turned inward and her ears turned off, the crowd noise shut out. Now she let the voices come to her, let herself be immersed in the glut of sound.

So many girls all talking at once. And, with the rush of their voices, with the strained urgency that crept into their hectic conversation, she was overwhelmed by a feeling that the whole scene was slightly pathetic, pathetic and even laughable. A bar filled with girls, a whole mob of lesbians who had nothing better to do than waste their time in a bar with others like themselves. And the bar was filled with them simply because it catered to them. The drinks were overpriced, the decor unappealing, the service nothing remarkable. But the gay girls flocked to it because they were welcome there. That alone assured the bar’s success.

Gay. She almost laughed-it was as though she were catching the deeper meaning of that merry word for the first time. So elaborately gay, so determined to maintain the appearances of joyous exhilaration. Heavy drinking, raucous laughter, wild jokes, never a dull moment. Unless you stopped to catch your breath and realized, startled, that all of the moments were slightly dull.

The bartender came and filled her glass and took her money. She did not sip this one so very slowly but knocked off half of it in one quick swallow. Gay? If they were all so gay, what were they doing at Leonetti’s? If they were all so profoundly happy, why did they fight so much? If life was such a bed of roses, why did they slash their wrists?

Gay.

She and Bobbie were gay, all right. And in love. But they were also screaming at each other half the time and sulking the rest of the time. She didn’t know why it worked out that way but it did. They still loved each other, more than ever, and it looked as though they would last-for a long time, if not forever.

But the fights were hell. Jealousy started some but not all of them, and both of them were equally capable provoking jealousy and of being moved by it. The jealousy fights, though, were at least a confirmation of love. The other fights were madness. One would want to go a party, one would want to stay home-and in minutes one would be yelling and the other crying. Or she would complain that Bobbie never did the dishes, or Bobbie would complain about Rhoda borrowing a dress without asking, or Rhoda would say something about the omnipresent Siamese cat. Anything could start things going. Any spark was dangerous when you lived in an oil refinery. Two weeks ago, she remembered, Ed Vance had come to see her again, if only to prove that his skin was as thick as his heart. “You stood me up awhile ago,” he told her, grinning. “I thought I’d give you another chance. How about it, Rhoda?”

She brushed him off quickly and brutally, telling him in very definite terms that she was not interested in seeing him, that she would never be interested in seeing him, and that she would greatly appreciate it if he would make a point of avoiding her in the future. Not even a man like Ed Vance could misinterpret her this time. He stepped back as though he had been slapped, and she caught anger and fury in his eyes. Then he forced a smile. “You’ll never know what you’re missing,” he managed, and then he got out of there.

And when she told Bobbie, the tall girl exploded in her face. She had thought they would laugh about it, about the fool Vance was making of himself, but Bobbie didn’t laugh.

“You must have led him on,” she said.

“Are you crazy?”

“You’re just trying to hurt me. Making love to me and flirting with a man at the same time. Men don’t make passes at a girl unless they think they have a chance. They leave me alone.”

“Well, maybe-”

“Maybe I’m not as attractive as you are? Is that what you were going to say?”

“I just-”

It had been one hell of a battle. But the next day when she came home from work, Bobbie gave her a small white gold wedding band, plain and simple. “You wear this, darling,” she said. “Let the men think you’re married and they won’t make passes at you. I’m sorry, Rho. I was a bitch last night and I’m sorry-”

Fighting and making up, crying and wiping tears away, hurting each other, loving each other. Gay? Oh, very gay. Sure.

She fingered the plain gold band on her ring finger. A lot of the girls wore them, she knew. Sometimes girls exchanged them as a sort of symbolic marriage; more often they merely wore them as she wore hers, as a convenient way to ward off predatory males. Her own wedding ring, the one Tom had given her, would have done as well. But the day the annulment came through, she took it off and dropped it down a sewer grating.

She finished her drink. Bobbie would be coming soon, she thought. She wished the girl would hurry. There were girls all around her, a whole mob of girls just like her and just like Bobbie, and she still felt so thoroughly alone that she wanted to cry.

They wound up the night at John’s on Bleecker. She and Bobbie, Lucia Perry and Peg Brandt, Grace and Allie, Megan and Jan Pomeroy. The young Italian waiter winked happily at them and pulled two tables together and they sat together eating pizza with mushrooms and anchovies and drinking cold beer. The blackness of Rho’s mood had left when Bobbie arrived at Leonetti’s.

She had slowed down on the drinking then, and now she just felt relaxed and happy. It was the first time she had been with Megan since they separated. She had run into her now and then, with the first meeting between them awkward and the second one forced and uneasy, but now they were able to relax at the same table. But it still felt strange to her, Meg was a girl she had loved, a girl she lived with, a girl she had finally left. And now they were what? Friends. Just that.

She knew how it had been with Megan after the break-up. The blonde girl finished her decorating job, pulling it through on sheer willpower. She hurled herself in her work, got home late at night and drank herself into a stupor, then got up the next morning and went back to work. Once the job was out of the way, Megan stayed blind drunk for six days. Two weeks and three days after she stopped her heavy drinking, she went to bed with Jan Pomeroy.

Each of the girls kept her own apartment. Neither of them even expected their affair to last for any great length of time. “We’re enjoying ourselves,” Jan had told Bobbie once. “We’ve known each other for ages and I’ve always liked and admired Megan. But we’re not making any marriage. When we stop being good for each other, or as soon as either of us finds someone else, that’s it. No tears.”

It was an unlikely combination, Rhoda thought. Jan was as religiously homosexual as ever, and Megan had always thought of the hollow-eyed girl and her romantic notions as something of a joke. But they seemed to be good for each other. And she was glad Megan had found somebody to take her place.

Now Megan was talking about a job she was thinking of taking. “This woman wants her living room redone,” she said. “She wants a very plush effect, like an apartment for one of those Doris Day movies. I know just how to give her what she wants.”

“Aren’t you going to do it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so, because it’s not my kind of thing I mean, I would have to put together a room that I wouldn’t be able to walk into without getting slightly dizzy.”

“But if she’s happy-”

“Megan’s the great artist,” Peg Brandt said. “Chockful of artistic integrity. Something I can’t afford to have, incidentally. We folks up at McClellan Products Gazette just do what we have to do. No long words in the crossword puzzle, no bosomy girls in the cartoons, and no expression of opinion that isn’t the precise opinion of one Harvey McClellan. I envy you, Megan.”

Lucia hurried to bolster Peg. “Now stop it,” she said. “You’re in a different field, that’s all. You don’t want to be artistic in your job, Peggy, because it’s something else. It’s being professional that’s important, in doing the job the way it ought to be done. And everybody knows you’re tops.”

There was a momentary lull. Rhoda drank beer straight from the bottle and put the bottle down on the table top. “I wish I could do something,” she said.

She must have said it more plaintively than she meant it. Everyone was looking at her.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I just don’t do anything. Megan is a decorator, Peg is an editor, Lu models-”

“And Bobbie drinks.”

There was laughter. “I’m serious,” she went on. “What do I do? Oh, Bobbie doesn’t work, I know, but she’s interested in a whole load of things. She reads like mad, she writes poetry-”

“Bad poetry,” Bobbie put in.

“And what do I do?” She shrugged. “Nothing. I go to work and stand there like an idiot selling ugly things to tasteless people, and I come home and relax, and then I go to work again. Anybody could do what I do. I have a college diploma, but I could work as well for Mr. Yamatari with a fourth grade education.”

“Not everyone works at something interesting,” Bobbie said. “I don’t. The only job I could get would be something like yours, and I don’t need the money, so I don’t work at all. And an awful lot of girls have jobs that don’t do anything but bring them income.”

“But I’m not involved in anything-”

“Oh?” Grace winked broadly at her. “And here we all thought you were involved with Bobbie.”

“You know what I mean.” She took a cigarette, lit blew out smoke. “I wish I were caught up in something, all excited about something. It wouldn’t have be terribly artistic or anything.”

“Maybe you could open a shop,” someone suggested.

“A shop? What kind?”

“Anything. Antiques, clothes, jewelry. Some little shop that reflects your inner self.”

“That’s a beautiful straight line,” she said. “I won’t bother with a punch line. But it takes a fortune to open a place, doesn’t it? And I don’t know the first thing about business.”

“What to know?” Jan Pomeroy was talking. “You buy things and sell them, and you try to sell them for more than they cost you. That’s all you have to know about business.”

“But-”

“Don’t you see? You and Bobbie could be partners. Working together, all united in this exciting venture.”

They didn’t stay on the subject for very long. Jan and Megan started talking about holiday plans and the table shifted over to that subject. Jan was having a Christmas party and there were half a dozen New Year’s parties already in the planning stage, and the holiday season looked promising. Not everyone would be in town, of course. Alice had to go home to visit her parents in Baltimore, and Grace was trying to decide whether or not she should go with her. Alice’s parents had told her it was all right to bring a friend but Grace was sure they would suspect something. “And yet I don’t want to be away from Allie that long,” she said. “She needs somebody to take care of her, and it would be a hard time for her to be alone.”

Rhoda only half followed the conversation. She was thinking about that idea someone had tossed out, of having a shop of her own. It seemed exciting and she let her mind toss it around.

The conversation caught her up again and she let go of the thread of thought. Maybe sometime she could think more about it, she told herself. But not now. She was too busy living the good gay life.

Terry Langer didn’t look gay.

That was the first thing she thought when she met him, and her next thought was that nothing could be stupider. By now she should have realized that you didn’t have to look gay to be gay. She didn’t look gay, and Bobbie didn’t look gay, and neither did the majority of the girls she knew. But she did not know many male homosexuals, so she still thought of them in terms of the convenient stereotypes.

Terry didn’t fit the image. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a deep voice and a strong chin and a rugged profile. He had none of the mannerisms of the effeminate male, and yet he was a thoroughgoing homosexual. That was why she was with him now.

The whole thing had been arranged just a few hours before. Bobbie got a frantic phone call late in the afternoon, talked quickly, then turned to Rhoda. “It’s Bernie Jaeckel,” she said. “You remember him, don’t you? He’s a gay boy, I think you met him at that big blast at Rita’s.”

She remembered him vaguely. “So?”

“He’s with a boy named Terry Langer now. And Terry got a letter, this morning, that his parents are coming to town. The surprise visit bit, Rho. They want us to front for them. Double up with the boys tonight. Terry’s folks don’t know he’s gay and he doesn’t want them to suspect anything. And you know, two fellows sharing apartment.”

It was funny, she thought. Before she met Megan, before she got herself caught up in the shadow world of homosexuality, she never would have thought twice about two men sharing an apartment. It was cheaper that way, it was less lonely. But once you were on the inside you began looking at things in a different light. If two men lived together, and if their apartment was in Brooklyn Heights or the Village or around Broadway and Seventy-second, and if they didn’t go out much with girls, you began to suspect that they were homosexual.

“Is it okay, Rho?”

She said it was and Bobbie settled the arrangements. The Langers were due around four in the afternoon. At two-thirty, she and Bobbie cabbed over to the boys’ apartment on West 69th Street. For a little over an hour the four of them sat around a bridge table drinking coffee and talking about people they knew, about plans for New Year’s Eve, and, finally, about the best way to handle Mr. and Mrs. Langer. Now and then Bernie Jaeckel would dart around the apartment destroying evidence-picking up a stray male physique magazine and tucking it out of sight, deliberately shoving furniture out of place or overturning an ashtray to disrupt the apartment’s almost feminine neatness.

“We ought to change the furniture,” he said at one point. “If we really wanted to do this in style, we would move out all the furniture and re-do the pad in Early Heterosexual. You know, blonde Danish modern from Grand Rapids. Metallic pole lamps. Long wrap-around sectional couches.”

“Ughhh,” Terry said.

Bobbie suggested hanging a bra in the bathroom. “But we have to walk a thin line,” Terry said. “I have to seem straight, but we don’t want to give them the idea that Rhoda and I are living in sin.”

“Would they mind?”

“My parents would. I’m an only child, you know. I think the moment of my conception was the only time my parents made love.”

“You don’t even want a few stockings tossed over the shower curtain?”

Terry chuckled. “Nothing,” he said. “Just so they see that I have a girl friend. That’s all it should take.”

“Don’t they suspect-”

“They have no idea,” he said.

The Langers arrived a few minutes early. Mr. Langer was short and heavy set, with a prominent nose and a bulldog chin and a perpetual cigar in his mouth. Rhoda had a mental image of Berne and Terry spending the next two weeks trying to air cigar smoke out of the draperies. She could picture them running around frantically and spraying everything with Chanel. Mrs. Langer was a small and slender woman who did not talk much. Terry kissed her on the cheek and shook hands firmly with his father.

After introductions, Terry said, “You should have let me know you were coming. We already had plans with the girls for tonight.”

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Langer said.

“We’ll get out of your way,” Mr. Langer offered. “We can take in a show tonight and see you tomorrow, Terry.”

But Terry explained things. Bernie and Roberta-he didn’t call her Bobbie-would be having dinner with another couple. But he and Rhoda could beg out and have dinner with Terry’s parents. Then the four of them could spend a few hours together until nine or ten, at which time Terry and Rhoda would have to join a party some friends of theirs were having.

“At least we’ll have some time together,” he said. “And you’ll get a chance to know Rhoda. She’s been wanting to meet you.”

The Langers were delighted-they did enjoy meeting Terry’s friends, Mrs. Langer explained. And Terry’s plan was satisfactory all around. It gave Bernie a chance to get out from under in a hurry, hustling Bobbie off to a phony dinner date. And, with the mock party serving as an out around nine or ten, it kept the evening from dragging on too long.

Things went smoothly enough. Bernie brought out a bottle of bourbon and the six of them sat nursing drinks until five-thirty. Then Bernie and Bobbie made their excuses and got out of there. Terry called a good East Side restaurant and reserved a table for four. The Langers went back to their hotel to dress for dinner, and Terry poured Rhoda a fresh drink and collapsed into a chair.

“It’s such a trial,” he said. “Just dropping in to surprise me! You would think they’d know better.”

“It’s not so bad.”

“Well, you’re a sweetheart,” he told her. “They’ll have a good time in New York now, and they won’t suspect anything. And they’ll go home sure that I’m living the ideal bachelor life, and starting to get a little bit serious about you. They’ll ask about in their letters, of course. I’ll let our mythical romance bubble along for a few months and then write a sad letter saying that you went and married someone else. Then I’ll pretend to nurse a broken heart for awhile before it’s time to find some other girl to front for me.”

There was a brittle quality to his voice, that special sort of forced cheerfulness one heard so often at gay bars and gay parties. She studied him. He was about thirty, she knew, a moderately successful furniture designer. Bernie was a commercial photographer. She thought of the special lie the boys lived and wondered how long they could carry it off.

“Any time I can return the favor-”

“What?” She hadn’t been listening.

“Any time your parents or relatives make the Grand Tour I’ll be glad to return the favor. That’s all.”

“Oh,” she said, “No, my parents are dead.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“It happened a long time ago,” she said. There was an awkward pause. “So don’t worry about returning the favor. I’ll settle for another drink.”

Dinner was a relaxed affair at a very good and very expensive French restaurant on East Sixty-second Street. They had cocktails first, wine with the meals, and cordials with their coffee. The food was excellent and the service crisply professional, and the Langers turned out to be surprisingly good company. She had been afraid that the conversation would be stilted and awkward, but it worked out better than she had expected.

“I couldn’t stand living in New York,” Mr. Langer said. “I’d put on twenty pounds a year with food like this.”

“But you do anyway, Dad.”

“Wise guy.” Mr. Langer grinned. “Just watch your own self in a couple of years. But you’re in good shape, Terry. Do you work out at a gym?”

“Sometimes.”

“I used to, years ago. It’s a good habit to stay in.”

They wound up drinking coffee again at Terry’s apartment. Around eight-thirty, Mr. Langer led Terry into the kitchen. “Private men’s talk,” he explained-and Rhoda sat alone on the couch. Mrs. Langer smiled oddly, then crossed the room and sat next to her. Here it comes, Rhoda thought. How serious is it between you two? And isn’t Terry a fine young man? But Mrs. Langer said, “It’s sweet of you to do this for him, Rhoda.”

She stared.

“Terry doesn’t know that I know. And Fred doesn’t know anything about it, and I’m glad, because it would hurt him horribly. His son, you see. But I know about Terry.”

“I-”

“I’ve known for years.” The woman lowered her eyes. “I’ve wanted to talk to him now and then. It’s hard not to want to. He’s my son and I love him, of course. But he wouldn’t want me to know. It would bother him, and so I’ve never let him find out.” She nibbled her lower lip. “Of course I’d love to believe that you and Terry are lovers-but I’m afraid I know better. He’s with that boy Bernie, of course. Thank you for being such a good friend to Terry.”

She did not know what to say.

“And I suppose you-”

“Yes.”

“You and Roberta?”

She felt her face reddening. “Yes.”

“It’s very strange,” Mrs. Langer said. “I think my generation is a very awkward one. If we understood a little more, or even a little less, things might be simpler. We seem to know and understand just enough to be utterly confused. The awkward age, which is what we used to say about teen-agers. You won’t tell Terry about this, will you?”

“No.”

“I hope you won’t. I suppose I shouldn’t have said anything at all, but I felt that I wanted to. You’re a very sweet girl. If only-”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

The Langers did not stay long after that. When they left Terry offered to see her home.

“I can manage,” she said.

“Really, I don’t mind.”

“I can get home alone. But thanks.”

She called Bobbie, told her she was on her way. Then she went downstairs and walked to Broadway and took the subway home.