“All I want to do is love you, Vega,” Beth said, and felt tears of frustration and passion struggling for supremacy in her. “Can love destroy a person?”
“The wrong kind can!” Vega said.
“But this isn’t wrong.”
“You only say that because you want it, because you’re too weak to deny yourself,” Vega cried.
“I’ve done without it for more than nine years.”
“I’ve done without it for more than twenty years!” Vega said. But something in the parting of her lips, in the warmth of the kiss she had returned, gave Beth courage. Perhaps Vega feared her mother, perhaps she couldn’t help knuckling under to her mother’s ideas. But her body, her secret heart, seemed to beg for that proscribed love.
“I don’t believe you,” Beth said. “Your own beauty would trap you in a score of affairs.”
“I’m not that beautiful,” Vega said candidly. “I might have been once but I’m not anymore.”
“I never saw anyone lovelier,” Beth said. “I never saw anyone I wanted so much.” The thought of Laura flashed before her eyes and reminded her that she was lying. But that had been so long ago, this was so here and now. “Vega,” she said in a voice husky with pleading, with need. “Please come to me. Please, don’t let me stand here alone in this strange room speaking love to a stranger. Let me know you, darling. Let me be close to you. Don’t shut me out. Vega, do you know how long I’ve waited, turned this out of my mind and lived like a robot? No, worse—a robot can’t suffer. I did it because there was no one I could love.”
“You did it because Lesbian love is wrong and you know that,” Vega said, and Beth could hear the echo of her mother’s voice speaking, the way she had heard it in Cleve’s speech. “And it’s still wrong, Beth. More for you than for me. You have a husband. And children.”
“That’s why I need it so!” Beth cried in a storm of misery. She was ready to explode with the feeling inside her, a whirlwind of contradictions and desires.
“Yes. You need it, not me,” Vega said bitterly.
Beth couldn’t stand it any longer. She rushed toward Vega, but Vega very swiftly and unexpectedly opened her diaphanous dressing gown, holding it wide away from herself so that Beth should see every detail of her white body.
Beth stopped abruptly, within a foot of her goal, and stared. She made a small inarticulate sound, and Vega searched her face with horrible anxiety. “If you can make love to that,” she whispered, “then I’ll believe you love me. I’ll accept it.”
She was a complex of scars that twisted every which way over her chest, like yards of pink ribbon in snarls. She had no breasts, and the operation to remove her lung had left a bad welt that Beth returned to once or twice with a prickle of revulsion. Even Vega’s dainty little abdomen had its share. And the bones, the poor sharp bones without the ordinary smooth envelope of tender flesh that most girls take for granted and even rail against when there’s too much. Vega’s bones were all pitifully plain and frankly outlined.
Beth put her trembling hands over her mouth, to stifle her horror, and let the tears flood from her eyes. She shut them tight for a moment, but when she opened them Vega was halfway out of the open window.
With a little scream Beth lunged at her and caught her, pulling her to safety over the most violent protests of which Vega was capable. Beth held her, struggling and swearing hysterically, in her arms for some time, thinking all the while of Cleve and his unhappy eyes and his talk of Vega and their mother. She stroked Vega’s hair and let her own unhappy tears fall.
After a while sheer exhaustion forced Vega into silence. Beth felt her drooping and she bent down and put an arm under Vega’s legs and another around her shoulders and lifted her up. She was surprised at how slight the burden was. Beth was a big girl and she was strong, and she had always been proud of these unfeminine qualities in herself.
There was plenty of whiskey left, and Beth, after laying Vega down tenderly on the bed, poured her a drink. Neither of them had spoken a word.
Vega gulped the drink and then handed it back; she turned her face away and put one hand over it. Beth let her weep undisturbed for a while. At length Vega murmured in a broken voice, “You don’t need to tell me how you feel now. I saw it in your face.”
“Vega, you damn fool,” Beth said gently. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you spring it on me that way? I could have taken it, if you’d only let me know. If you’d only prepared me a little for it.”
“No,” Vega said, reaching for a tissue from her pocket and wiping her eyes. “No, what you mean is, you could have controlled the look on your face. You could have made up a kind little speech and said it right away, before your silence spoke for you.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Beth protested.
“Don’t you see, Beth,” she said, turning to look at her and forcing herself to face those eyes that had seen her saddest and ugliest secret, “if I had told you beforehand you would never have confessed your love to me at all. You would never have tried to know me or touch me. That counts for something, believe me. That’s one thing to be grateful for, even if it can’t last. But aside from that it wouldn’t have
