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.
