She was startled when Marcie said at her elbow, “Burr wants to see me.” When Laura didn’t answer, Marcie said, “He feels Godawful about the whole thing. He wants to apologize to me.” Another silence. “I want to apologize to you, Laura. But you won’t let me.”
Laura shut her eyes in pain for a moment, as if to avoid the sight of Marcie’s face. And then she opened them and without looking at her, said, “We’ve been all through this before, Marcie. I don’t want your apologies. You have nothing to apologize for.”
“I do.”
“You don’t!”
Marcie gave a long sigh of exasperation. “All right, then why won’t you speak to me?”
“I will, Marcie. When I can.”
“When will that be?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why not now?”
“I guess I’m sick. Maybe Jack was right, I need to see his analyst.” She tried to smile a little.
“Because of your father? What he did to you?”
Laura looked down at her arms, folded on the cement railing. “I guess so,” she almost whispered.
“Laura, say something to me. This is unbearable.” Marcie was pleading with her, as Laura had pleaded herself with Jack on the phone. She turned and looked at Marcie, standing close beside her, two delicate lines between her eyes betraying the tension inside her. For a moment Laura just looked at her. It had been over a week since she looked at Marcie that way. In the soft spring night, in the golden light fading up from the streets below, with the myriad muffled noises that are the music of a great city around them, they gazed at each other. And Marcie was very beautiful with her hair lifted gently in the breeze and her eyes big with anxiety. She was wrapped in a blue silk negligee and the lines of her slim young body showed through it.
Finally, prompted by the necessity to speak, Laura said, “It’s so hard to talk, Marcie. Words are so inadequate sometimes.”
“Any words will do, Laura. Except ‘Excuse me.’ That’s all you’ve said to me for days on end.”
They smiled a little at each other, and Laura took her hands. She pulled just a little on them, and Marcie responded softly, coming toward her. “Laura, tell me I’m forgiven. Don’t say there’s nothing to forgive me for. I just want to hear you say it.”
“No.”
“Please.” Her voice broke.
“No, no, no,” Laura said, gazing curiously at Marcie. Did she really feel so guilty? She hadn’t done anything that bad. Laura had a strange feeling of finality, of the end of things, of everything ending at once so that nothing really mattered anymore. As if Marcie would turn and walk out of her life, and her job would end, and Beebo would never see her, and Jack and Terry would break up. It made her pensive and sad. She wondered at all the new feelings in her: the inability to care about her job, her meanness with Beebo, her unreasoning fear of Merrill Landon in the hotel lobby. Nothing seemed very real, up there on the roof. It didn’t seem to make much difference what she did. She gave another little pull and Marcie came still closer, touching her up and down the length of her body.
Laura touched her hair. “You look so much like a friend of mine,” she said. Marcie reminded her of Beth again at this moment; the Beth she had lost so long ago, a million years ago, it seemed.
“I do? You never told me that.”
“I forgot.”
“What’s she like?”
“Oh, she was tall, short dark hair, purple eyes. Rather boyish.”
“You talk about her as if she were dead.”
“She is. As far as I’m concerned.”
Marcie frowned at her. “She doesn’t sound at all like me.”
“No, I guess she doesn’t,” Laura said. “There’s something about your face; I don’t know how to define it. I thought I saw a resemblance.” She had seen it in Beebo, too. And even in the curly-headed little blonde who had approached her in The Cellar the night she was looking for Beebo. They couldn’t all look like Beth. It was very strange.
“Were you good friends?” Marcie asked.
Laura smiled a little and put her arms around Marcie. In the still night she answered simply, “We were lovers.” It was very quiet, dreamlike, as if she spoke in a trance.
Marcie stared at her, motionless, as if to determine whether she were joking. She stood in Laura’s arms, unable to move one way or the other; uncertain and a little scared.
Laura saw her consternation, but it didn’t worry her. She spoke again, still feeling as if it weren’t real, any more than the glittering city below was real, or her father’s wrath, or Jack, or Beebo, or the doctors and Sarah… “That was the ‘great love’ I told you about, in college,” she said. “It was Beth.”
After a long pause, Marcie said in a whisper, “What happened?”
“She got married,” Laura said.
Marcie was dumbfounded. “I’m sorry,” she said awkwardly and then retreated into herself, embarrassed. She had no idea what to say, what to do.
Laura could see that, but at first she didn’t try to interpret it. It didn’t frighten her yet. “That’s why I was so shocked when Burr said you told him we were lovers,” Laura said. “I wish we were, Marcie. But I never touched you.” Marcie was studying her now, her eyes brimming. “When he accused me of it, and believed it and said you told him so, I was so hurt I didn’t know what to do or say. I thought of a million crazy explanations. The only one that seemed to make sense was that you felt the way I do.” She
