“Yes, but you see, none of those are queer,” he said earnestly.
“Oh, Cleve, that word! That ugly, mean, pitiless word!”
“I’m sorry,” he said, studying her.
Beth finished her drink with a quiver of excitement and desire and disgust—all the feelings that Vega roused in her.
“Vega’s going broke,” Cleve said. “That’s why the studio’s so bare. Looks like a barn. She’s had to hock a lot of stuff and return a lot. She used to support Mother and she told me they didn’t want my goddamn charity. Now they’re getting it—they can’t live without it—but they let me know every time I hand them a check that they run right in and wash their hands as soon as it’s deposited at the bank.”
“Why?” Beth said, shocked.
“Mother thinks I’m a bastard because I didn’t study medicine like my father. Gramp thinks whatever Mother thinks. And so does Vega.”
Beth began to see what a tyrannical hold Mrs. Purvis, in spite of her debilities, had on her children.
“Vega and I understand each other,” Cleve said. “We’re both contemptible.”
For a moment it seemed like he was begging for sympathy and Beth said, rather sharply, “Oh, you’re not so bad. When you’re tight.”
Cleve gave a dispirited little laugh. “We know each other better than we know ourselves,” he said. “Someday you’ll understand us, too,” he said, looking into his glass. “If you keep on running around with Vega.” He sounded almost jealous. He sounded almost like a man warning another man away from his wife, not a friend warning another friend of his sister’s emotional quirks.
Beth cautiously steered him back to finances. “Why is she going broke?” she asked. “She has a nice studio, lots of students.”
“Not so many, not anymore. Their mothers are worried about them. There was a scandal a couple of years ago.”
“I never heard about it,” Beth declared, as if that proved it a deliberate fib.
“You don’t hear about everything in the Purvis family,” he retorted, and silenced her. “One of the girls had an affair with one of the others. Vega knew about it and she didn’t exactly discourage it. And then some of the others found out and told their parents. Vega should have quit then and there and tried somewhere else, but she hates that kid who started it all and she wants to stay here and make a go of it in spite of what happened. Show everybody. Show the girl herself most of all. Damn!” he said, and finished another drink.
Beth thought suddenly of the strange tough little blonde with no makeup and a cigarette drooping froth her mouth in the caffè espresso place. “Who was the girl?” she asked.
“P.K. Schaefer is her name. Vega hates everybody but she hates P.K. worse than poison.”
“Is she sort of a beatnik type? I mean, does she hang out in the coffee houses, does she dress like—”
“Like a goddamn boy,” he finished for her, with the sound of his mother’s disapproval plain in his voice. “Always has a cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth, as if that would make a male of her. As if that would take the place of—oh, hell.” He ordered another drink, staring moodily at the floor.
And Beth knew it was P.K. she had seen. Did Vega love her or hate her? Or, as with the other important people in her life, did she feel both emotions for her? Beth felt a spark of jealousy.
“Vega doesn’t hate everybody, Cleve,” she said. “Maybe you two have had some bad arguments, maybe life with her wasn’t all sugar candy when you were growing up, but, my God, she’s a nice girl. She’s fun, she’s a lovely person. If you think you’re going to make me drop her just by throwing a few old scandals and half-baked suspicions in my face, you’re wrong. We get along fine and I enjoy her. After all, it wasn’t Vega who had the affair, it was her students. She’s not making any passes at me. And from what she’s said about Lesbians I think she’d put the whole damn clan in jail if she had her way.”
“Ah, she’s had you over to The Griffin to see P.K.,” he said, shocking her. “Exhibit A. She works fast, I have to say that for her.”
“How did you know that?” She was mad again.
“She’s given you her famous lecture on the beastly Lesbians.”
Beth blushed. “Thanks for the drinks, Cleve,” she said sharply, starting to rise, but he caught her wrist and pulled her down again. “Why do you think she talks about them if she doesn’t have it on her mind all the time?” he said fiercely, his face close to hers. There was a high pink of excitement in his cheeks, as if he really, secretly, hated these women who were rivals for his sister’s affection; as if he were admonishing Beth, for his own selfish reasons, not to become one of them.
“You said she didn’t even know she was—gay, herself,” Beth protested.
“Right,” he said. “She’d quit spouting all that crap about putting them in jail if it meant she’d be going along with them.” He sighed and gazed intently at her, and she smelled the whiskey on his breath. “Beth, you’re a damn nice girl,” he pleaded. “You’re a lovely girl. You’re bored as all hell with your life, it sticks out all over you. You stumble across my sister and she’s charming, she’s different, she shocks you a little and interests you a lot. You’re looking for kicks; you’re sick of that little house and that great big husband and those noisy kids, and Vega looks like heaven. She’s got all the sophistication, all the glamor anybody could want. Hell, yes, I can understand it.”
And Beth, thunderstruck, only gazed at him in silence, too surprised even to wonder when he had been observing her, when it began to matter to him what she did. Not until Vega began to matter to me, she thought, full of
