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.”
