Laura remembered how it had been and a sudden flash of physical longing caught her heart and squeezed until she felt her breath come short. She stared at the door, afraid to knock and still hypnotized with curiosity. Her hand was raised, quivering, only inches from the green painted wood.
Tris will open it, she thought, and together they’ll strangle me. Oddly, she didn’t care. She was too tight to care. She had a vision of herself falling into their arms and succumbing without a struggle. Just letting them have her life, her mixed-up, aimless, leftover life.
She knocked—a quick scared rap, sharp and dear. And then stood there on one foot and the other, half panicky like a grade-schooler nearly ready to wet her pants and flee.
Footsteps. High heels. From the kitchen, Beebo’s voice. “Who the hell could that be? After ten, isn’t it?” Oh, that voice! That husky voice that used to whisper such things to me that I can never forget.
The door swung open all at once, ushering a flood of light into the hall. Laura looked up slowly…at Lili! The two of them stared at each other in mutual amazement for a moment. And while they stared, mute, Beebo called again, “Who is it, Lili?”
Lili, her candy-box pretty face overlaid with too much makeup, as usual, broke into a big smile. “It’s Laura!” she exclaimed. “I’ll be goddamned. Laura!”
For a tense moment Laura could feel Beebo’s shock across the rooms and through the walls like a physical touch. Then her courage melted—fizzled into nothing like water on a hot skillet, and she turned and ran.
She heard Beebo at the door, before she got out into the court, saying, “Let her go, Lili. If she thinks I’m going to chase her twice—” And that was all Laura got of it. It shot through her heart like a bullet.
Laura reached the door to the street, tore it open, and rushed out. But once there, with the door shut behind her and no sound of pursuing footsteps, she collapsed against the wall and wept. Between sobs, when she could get her breath, she listened…listened…for the running feet that would mean Beebo had changed her mind. Laura had to believe, at least for a minute, that Beebo would come after her. Because it was all tied up in her mind with Beebo loving her. If Beebo loved her she’d chase her. It was that simple. And it didn’t matter a damn what Laura might have done to Beebo in the past, or how she might have hurt her.
Tris! she thought. I’ve got to see her! She said this to herself very urgently, but curiously, at the same time, she felt no desire to go and find the lovely tormented dancer. She told herself it would be all fight and misery. But in her heart of hearts she knew that real love would brave that misery now, being so close and so starved for passion.
She stood there for fully fifteen minutes before she was able to pull herself together and walk to Seventh Avenue. She went straight home in a cab.
Laura walked slowly up the stairs to her apartment. It was after eleven now, and Jack would be in bed. She had had too much to drink, but she was sober, a tired, bewildered sort of sobriety that made her want to lie down and weep and rest.
In the morning she would tell it all to Jack. Wonderful Jack. He would coax her back to living, coax her with his wit and his compassion and his incredible patience with her. And she would lie in a welter of dejection and let him work on her until she felt like lifting her head from the pillow and raising the shade from the window and going on with life. It was one of the things she loved him for and needed him for the most—this ability to revive her when she was so low that only death was lower.
Tonight was perhaps not quite that bad. But it was bad enough to have exhausted her. And Tris and Beebo! That had been the cruelest blow; the one she should have foreseen clear as a beacon in a black sea. She shoved a trembling key into the lock and walked into the apartment.
It was warm and well-lighted. It was pretty and it was comfortable. It was home. And Laura felt a sort of gratitude to Jack that needed words. She went to find him. But he wasn’t in the living room, nor in the bedroom.
She stood on the threshold of the bedroom and said, “Jack? Hey, Jack! Where are you?”
“Here,” he said from the kitchen.
“Oh. It’s me. I thought you’d be in bed.” She slipped her coat off while she walked through the living room to find him. “Hi,” she said. He was sitting on a kitchen chair and he answered, “Hi.”
Laura stood in the doorway and looked at him. And he stared back at her, and she knew something was wrong but she didn’t know what. Her long fine hair had come loose when she ran from Beebo and she reached up and pulled it down in a shimmering cascade, watching Jack all the while through narrowed eyes.
“Have fun?” he asked.
“Beebo and Tris…are…shacking up.” She threw it at him point-blank. She wanted his sympathy.
Jack put his head back and laughed, that awful bitter laugh she hadn’t heard for months, and she knew with a sudden start of fear and pity that he was drunk. “That makes everything perfect,” he said, still laughing, his eyes wicked and sharp behind the horn rims.
“Jack…,” she said shakily, coming in to sit beside him and seeing now the whiskey bottle on the table in front of him, two-thirds empty. “Jack, darling.” She took his hands and her eyes were big with alarm.
Jack took his hands back. Not roughly, but as if he simply didn’t want to be touched. Not
