“I’m not going to stand around and be hollered at,” Beth said, picking up her coat with an angry sweep of her arm. “You’re turning into a shrew, Vega.”
“Beth, don’t go! Please!” The last word was almost a sob and Beth didn’t dare to turn around and see her face. She would have succumbed to her own sympathy and weakness again and hated herself for it afterward.
“Beth, I’m warning you here and now, if you leave me I’ll tell Charlie all about this. I’ll tell him everything.”
Beth paused, her back to Vega, and her heart skipped a beat. She kept her voice under control when she answered. “He won’t believe you.”
“You know damn well he will. You said yourself he already suspects monkey business. Well, it won’t take much to convince him.”
“Try it,” Beth said, still bluffing, still afraid to face her.
“You’re goddamn right I’ll try it,” Vega said, with all the meager force she could muster.
Beth turned around slowly, reluctantly. “Vega,” she said. “You’re a viper. I can’t think of anything else to call you. You’re nothing but a lousy snake. You make me sorry I ever laid eyes on you.”
“You’ve laid more than eyes on me, Beth, and don’t forget it,” Vega said, trembling with the fatigue of her feelings. “You owe me something.”
“You owe me something, too, Vega,” Beth said. Her voice was soft but furious. “You waited twenty years for somebody, remember? For some poor idiot like me to take pity on you—”
“Stop!” Vega cried, visibly hurt and beginning to reel slightly. Beth was forced to care for her, to help her to a chair and bring her a shot of whiskey. “Beth, don’t say it,” she begged. “Once those things are said there’s no unsaying them. They hang there in the air and poison things. They destroy even the little white lies you tell yourself when things look blackest.”
And Beth was touched by her misery in spite of herself. “You mean,” she said quietly, “they make you face the truth.”
“Hurt like that goes beyond the truth,” Vega said. “When you’re trying to hurt somebody else you kill them with truth like that. I couldn’t bear it if you left me, Beth. I can’t believe you will. I was so lonely before. It’s not much better now, but it’s better. When you’re in a good humor I almost faint with love for you. I want to lie in your arms and die of joy. I wish we could live somewhere together, just the two of us.”
And Beth, for whom the whole situation had taken such a sickening turn, was caught between pity and disgust. “I—I don’t mean to leave you, Vega,” she said at last, hoping that her phraseology would leave her an out. “But don’t call Charlie. Things are bad enough as it is. Please, leave him out of it.”
She hated to say it, for it gave Vega a powerful ace to play, but she spoke the truth when she admitted that things were already bad enough at home.
There had been a sort of armed truce declared between Charlie and herself. They had very little to say to each other, but for the children’s sake they put on a show of life-as-usual. Beth reached a point where she hated to leave the house, as if her love affair—if the word “love” belongs there—had changed her physically and might give her away to her neighbors. She did the marketing and took the children out, but that was all.
Housework seemed an interminable chore to her. She had never liked it, any more than she liked cooking. But she had always done what was necessary. Now even that oppressed her to such an extent that she would often let things go until the last moment, sometimes failing to make up the beds until just before Charlie got home, and letting days, weeks, go by without dusting or vacuuming. The worse the house got the harder it was for her to do anything about it. She wanted to shut her eyes and forget it.
And all the time, every day, at every hour and in every imaginable posture, she dreamed of Laura. She dreamed of the romance, unfettered with family obligation or dishwashing, free of all the daily drudgery she so despised, free of a husband who was jealous and narrow-minded, free of children who were noisy and nerve-wracking.
Beth yearned for Laura. She was almost possessed with her. It was as if, out of the blue, she had fallen in love with her all over again; and, in a way, she had. She was in love with her own lost freedom, her own smooth young face, her college sophistication, her exotic love for a strange and fascinating girl. All the things that were once but were no more, all the things Beth had been and was no longer. These she loved. And Laura personified them.
To while away the hours, she read. On her shopping trips she picked up books—every book she could find on the subject of homosexuality and Lesbianism. She read them with passionate interest, and found a release in them she had not expected. Most of them were novels with tragic endings. Some were even dull, at least for those whose ruling interest in life had nothing to do with their own sex. Some of them depressed her, but all of them interested her and she gained a feeling of companionship with some of the writers which alleviated her solitude a little. She wrote letters to a few, the ones who impressed her most, who seemed to understand best what it was like to be gay and to be alone and starved for love; for less than love, even—for sympathetic companionship.
A handful of them wrote back to her and she established a correspondence with one or two that relieved her a little. She looked forward to their
