Beth lighted a cigarette. “This has happened before, hasn’t it?” she said quietly.
“Yes,” Vega sighed. “Now you know why I’ve been waiting twenty years. It wasn’t pure virtue.” She gave an acrid little laugh. “You thought my mother was ugly, didn’t you?” she said. “I’ll bet you didn’t know how ugly a woman could be until now.”
“Vega, please,” Beth said, exasperated with her and with herself. She was in a state of tremulous nervousness, keyed up to a fever one moment with aching desire, and almost nauseated with shock the next. Somehow, in the space of a few short weeks, this lovely woman she had known well enough for a period of years had appeared to her as a lover. Suddenly Vega, who had been only Cleve Purvis’s sister since Beth came to California, was all the promise of love, of womanhood to her. Vega became Beth’s own passion resurrected in the flesh.
And now, with brutal suddenness, she had seen her mutilated body, repellent and pitiable, and she could not find her desire anymore. It had dissipated.
But surely I loved her, Beth told herself miserably. When you love, you love more than a body. You love a mind and heart, too, or your emotion is a cheap fake. She knew this was true. She knew that if her “love” had been real it would somehow have survived, even in platonic form. But all she wanted now was to get out, to leave, to breathe the open air, to be free of her cruelly misshapen dream.
The very sight of Vega, the small sounds she made, drove Beth’s disappointment through her like a knife. She was ashamed of her selfishness but quite impotent with it. She had wanted a whole woman, warm and yielding. She had dreamed that her hands would touch the smooth perfumed flesh of a body that knew how to love. It had been a vital part of her desire and now she had little more than a face to hang her dreams on. Vega’s face, covered with tears.
“You’d better go,” Vega told her suddenly, and Beth wanted nothing mote than to obey. But shame and pity held her to the spot beside Vega on the bed.
After a moment Vega turned and gazed at her. “Surely you can’t stay, after what you’ve seen?” she said in a leaden voice.
“Vega,” Beth said painfully. “I said—I said I loved you. I’ve grown very fond of you over the last few weeks. I don’t know how or why it happened. I only know that I can hardly bear to hurt you, to see you lying there in despair.” It was meant as solace, to ease Beth’s parting. Nothing more. But Vega in her desperation took it for more. She turned to gaze at Beth and there was a new look on her face. The eyes were less empty, the mouth less tragic.
“You mean you’ll stay?” she whispered almost inaudibly. Once said, the words trapped Beth. For a moment she couldn’t answer and her mind flew frantically from lie to lie, but there were no excuses, none that wouldn’t hurt Vega mortally. She had seen Vega’s ugliness and she had been sickened. Her passion had flickered and gone out, and now she was tired and ashamed and she wanted to be gone.
“Of course I’ll stay,” she said softly, hopelessly, to Vega. It was her conscience, her compassion, that spoke for her. If the incredulous pleasure, the stammering gratitude she produced in Vega could have reawakened the needs of Beth’s body, Beth would have fallen on her with delight. Instead she lay wordlessly beside her, taking Vega into her arms and murmuring kindnesses to her.
“I knew you were better than the rest,” Vega said, and her voice broke with emotion. “Beth, darling Beth, I knew it somehow. I had a feeling about you. Maybe because I wanted you so much. I did, you know. I do. Oh, Beth.”
And Beth, as she kissed her, wondered with sad irony why Vega couldn’t have said that to her before when she wanted so much to hear it, why she couldn’t have played the game gently and broken the secret mercifully. Perhaps she hoped she could catch someone like Beth someday who had too much pride and pity to treat her like an outcast. Perhaps she hoped her pathetic condition would finally snare somebody the way it had Beth. She had waited a long lonely time for this, and she clung to Beth as if to let go for even an instant was to lose her forever.
Beth made love to her. It was restrained, partly because she saw with awful clarity in her mind’s eye every part of Vega that her hands touched, and partly because Vega herself had not the breath or strength to throw herself into her feelings. Beth clung tight to her composure, swallowing her tears of frustration and giving Vega all she could muster of tenderness and patience. Vega could not be satisfied unless Beth appeared to be so, for otherwise it would be too clear that Beth was doing this for her out of charity. So there was the fatiguing necessity of pretending to enjoy it, pretending to feel the thrill that was nothing but a gruesome parody of the happiness she had anticipated.
Vega lay in her arms throughout the rest of the night and she slept like a guiltless child. Beth, beside her in the dark and afraid to move and disturb her, did not sleep at all. She stared into the night and cursed the unkind fate that had promised so much and delivered so little. All the dormant fires of her younger days had sprung to life and they burned in her still, tempting her, torturing her, until she knew she would have to find release somewhere or die of it. She even
