frigid independence, unsound self-sufficiency-these were gone, and she was better off without them. So that battle on the narrow couch had been a victory.
She dressed quickly, went back to the bedroom to look for Megan. The blonde girl was sleeping soundly. In the kitchen she found a pad and pencil. She wrote: My love, I’m off to work. Meet me for lunch, if you can. Or meet me after work and help me move in with you. She paused, chewed on the end of the pencil, then added: I feel so wonderful, so very wonderful. I can’t believe it. I did not think I would ever be this gloriously happy. See what you’ve done to me? You’ve got me running off at the mouth. Not at the mouth, I guess, because I’m writing this, not saying it. Running off at the pencil? Oh, I’m silly. I ought to tear up this silly note and start over. I love you, I truly do.
She was outside on the street before she realized that she did not know where she was. Megan had told her what street they were on, but she was bubbling with wine at the time and the street name had not sunk in. She memorized Megan’s house number, then walked to the nearest corner. Megan lived on Cornelia Sheet, she saw and she was now at the corner of Cornelia and Bleecker, which meant that she was only four or five blocks from her own room. She had probably walked past Megan’s building a dozen times, never dreaming she would know a girl who lived inside.
Not so strange, she realized. The Village was not so very large, and she had walked down all its streets at one time or another. Now she headed over to Seventh Avenue, found a diner and had a quick breakfast, smoked several cigarettes and drank three cups of black coffee. She had had hardly any sleep at all during the night, and yet she was somehow not at all tired. She paid her check and hurried off to work.
The shop was as she had left it, the work itself the same as always. And yet everything was entirely different this morning and she knew it, could feel it in the air and in herself. Her step was quicker and lighter, her voice firmer and easier when she spoke. People seemed different-more human, even. They were the same hurrying tourists with the same lack of taste as always, and she knew this, but she found herself relating to them in a different fashion.
It took no stroke of genius to guess what was responsible for the change. The world had not turned suddenly rosy; it was she who was wearing rose-colored glasses. And all of this had come about because of the night with Megan. It was that simple. All at once the words to all the silly popular songs seemed to make sense.
Megan met her for lunch. They sat in a booth around the comer and ate hamburgers. Megan said, “I got your note. You’re sweet.”
“It was a silly note.”
“I loved it. Why didn’t you wake me?”
“You were sleeping so well.”
“I didn’t see the note at first. I was afraid you had left me.”
“Why? How could I leave you?”
“I thought you were sorry for what we had done. It’s hard to face the fact that you are out of step with the rest of the world. Society has a pretty picture of normal people and an ugly picture of us. Homosexuals are supposed to be sick or twisted or evil. When you grow up believing that, when the image is reinforced at every turn, it’s hard to wake up and realize that you’re one of the sick and evil and twisted creatures. I didn’t know how you would react.”
“I don’t know myself.”
“How do you feel?”
“Beautiful.”
“You should feel beautiful. Because you are.”
The morning had hurried by; the afternoon crawled. She kept waiting for it to be five-thirty so that Megan would come for her. Now that she was set to move in with Megan, the idea of remaining for an extra moment in her furnished room was horrible. The squalor of the room did not bother her. The room was sterile and shabby compared to Megan’s apartment, but this shabbiness had never seemed to depress her unduly. It was more that the move was a move from the old life to the new, from life alone to life with Megan.
She remembered the apartment she had shared with Tom during those years of marriage. It had been a pleasant place in a good neighborhood, expensive to rent and expensively furnished, although the decor had been generally unimaginative. And yet she had never liked that apartment. There were times when she actively loathed it, times when she was on the verge of begging Tom to move to some other place in some other area of the city.
The apartment itself had not been at fault. It was the life she led there which made her loathe the place itself. A reaction to an apartment, she thought, was an intensely personal thing. It was based less on the place itself than on the life one lived there. She had spent a bad two years with Tom; it would have been inconceivable that she could have liked the place where those two years were spent. And she had spent a lonely and wretched batch of months on Grove Street, so that room could only emerge as a symbol of loneliness.
She had spent the finest night of her life at Megan’s apartment on Cornelia Street. How could she help falling in love with the apartment, as with Megan?
Megan was there at five-thirty. They hurried through crowded streets to her rooming house and climbed the stairs and went into her room. Megan looked around the little cubicle and shook her head.
“This isn’t you,” she said.
“It was. For awhile. I was someone else before last night.”
“A bud that hadn’t opened.”
“I’m open now.” She felt giddy, ready to break out into foolish laughter. She danced into the middle of the room and threw her arms wide apart. “I’m a flower,” she said. “See my pretty petals? I’m a flower in full bloom.”
“You’re a little idiot whom I love.”
“So kiss me. Be a bee and steal my precious nectar.”
“I think you’re a little bit crazy.”
“Is that bad?”
“Not very.”
“I feel so young,” she said. She got a suitcase from the closet, opened it on the bed and began throwing things into it. “I’m twenty-four and I feel about seventeen. How old are you, Megan?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Just a year older than me. You know so much more.”
“Clean living.”
“You make me feel like a child, sometimes. Have you slept with very many girls?”
“You’re the only one.”
“Seriously. Have you?”
A pause. “Not so many.”
“Is that something I shouldn’t ask? I’m sorry. I just want to know everything about you, that’s all. Were you ever with a man?”
“Yes.”
“You weren’t married or anything?”
“Hardly.” A long sigh. “I was young, very young, and in college, and there was another girl, and we made love. I was too young to know what I was doing, I guess. And then I was very scared. You know how it is at that age. The most important thing on earth is to be like everybody else, and here I was so obviously different from everybody else. I couldn’t let myself believe that I was really different. I managed to convince myself that it was a question of adjustment. That I could be perfectly normal if I tried hard enough.”
“Heavens.”
“Uh-huh. Oh, I tried, all right. I very nearly got pregnant in the process. I tried with half a dozen different men, tried my damnedest to feet something more profound than boredom and disgust while they grunted over me.”
“And it didn’t work.”
“Of course not. It took a while for me to understand what I am, and to accept it. It may be hard for you.”
“It isn’t now.”
