“It might have been Venus,” Paula said.
“If it had, I’d have botched it. She would have laughed at me.”
“Her show is on,” Paula said, looking at the clock-radio by the bed. “Want to watch it?”
“No thanks.”
“I think you should. Come on, I’ll watch it with you.” Paula got up smiling and pulled her halfway out of bed.
“Paula, honey, I don’t give a damn—”
“No fibs!” Paula cautioned, throwing her pink silk wrapper around herself. “Come with me, Beebo.” She stood at the bedroom door, waiting, and Beebo couldn’t turn her down. She stood up, but not without misgivings.
The show had already started and the commercial was in progress. Beebo took Paula in her arms and together they settled back on the sofa.
“If you had refused to look, I would really have been scared,” Paula admitted. “I would have thought you were still tied to Venus emotionally—too much to bear to see her, even on the screen.” She twisted around in Beebo’s arms to look at her face and kissed her swiftly a dozen times till Beebo was suddenly embracing her tightly and murmuring her name eagerly.
Paula was trembling with the immensity of her feeling, full of whirling thoughts hard to word. “I know you don’t love me yet the way I love you, Beebo,” she said at last. “But God, I hope you will. It’s kept me going—that hope—all this time. You felt so right to me.”
Beebo stroked her hair and gazed at her, unaware that Venus, in black satin, was singing, “I’m Putting My All on You.”
“You’ve only seen the rough side of gay love,” Paula told her. “People can be so cruelly selfish. Even the people who try to be good to you, and I guess Venus tried.
“Darling, Lesbian love doesn’t have to be brief or heartbreaking, just because it’s a love between two women. I want to teach you that. I want to live with you and do things for you and even let you do things for me.
“Oh, Beebo, don’t you see it? Women have a special knack for loving. Even Venus, in her way, found that knack. There’s a tenderness, an instinctive sympathy, between two women when their love is right…it’s very rare in any kind of love. But it comes near perfection between women.
“You haven’t known that tenderness yet. You’ve only known a hectic affair with a fantastically difficult actress. I want to give you a home. I want you to come back to me every night and know you’ll be loved and cared for and spoiled. Beebo, darling, I want you to spoil me a little, too.”
“Paula, it’ll be a pleasure,” Beebo smiled.
Paula relaxed in her lap and Beebo put her hand back on the cushions. They watched the end of the song as the camera closed in on the face of Venus Bogardus. She was talking the words the way Beebo had suggested, her head tilted to one side and her eyes full, glittering with a give-away brilliance of real tears.
At the end, she let her head drop so that her gleaming hair swung around her face and hid her eyes. The tune—just a gimmicky little love song to begin with—had become a torch. And for just one moment, Venus was living flesh for Beebo again.
Beebo moved Paula off her lap and got up, going to the TV and turning it off. “It’s not that I’m still close to her, Paula,” she said, coming back to the sofa. “It’s just that that was goodbye. From her to me.”
They looked at each other. “Did you really love her, Beebo?” Paula whispered.
Beebo sat down and took both of Paula’s hands in hers and kissed them in a gesture that had become special to them both. And then she pulled Paula down on the couch in her arms and kissed her neck until she squirmed and laughed. “I won’t know for sure what love is till I’ve spoiled you for a while, sweetheart,” Beebo grinned.
