When they were able to look at each other again he said, “Did you come all the way from California to find her?”
She was undone. She had no secrets. He was too much for her, with his bright eyes that penetrated hers and saw so much and suspected so much more. “Yes,” she confessed. “I had to get away from my husband. I was nearly cracking up. I just wanted to see Laura again. Everything was so wonderful then, so awful now. I thought it might help. I thought maybe that was what was wrong with me.”
He lighted a cigarette for her and one for himself. “Laura doesn’t want to see me again,” he said. “With you it may be different. If you follow her to New York, Beth, you’ll find her, somehow. I want you to tell me about her and where she’s living. I won’t give you cause to regret it. I’ve messed up her life enough as it is. Just tell me when you find her.”
“All right.” She seemed to have no will now. Only a need for Laura, a need for her love so great that it would propel her onward until she found her. “Mr. Landon,” she said, looking at him with all her subterfuges stripped from her. “Why are you kind to me? Why don’t you despise me for what I did to your daughter?”
“For what you did to her?” He gave a scornful little laugh that turned against himself. “If I were guiltless myself I could despise anyone I pleased. I could blame anyone I pleased. But I’m not guiltless.” His words made her feel braver. “If it hadn’t been you it would have been somebody else, Beth. You know that, of course. Laura is a Lesbian. Sooner or later she would have understood that, whether with your help or without it.”
It was logical, it was sensible. But it had never struck Beth quite that way and it hurt. She stood up with a little gasp and walked away from him. “No,” she blurted. “It was special, it was—almost sacred.”
“To you perhaps.”
“To both of us. She couldn’t have done it with anyone else.” She spoke positively because she was suddenly so unsure.
“I didn’t mean to shock you,” he said. “I thought you would have realized long ago that somebody had to be first with her and it just happened to be you. It was no divine choice, just blind accident.”
Beth lighted a cigarette with trembling hands. “I guess it’s because I’ve never known any other woman the way I know Laura,” she said, talking fast to keep the tears back. “I guess it’s because there never was anybody else I wanted like that.”
“And you just took it for granted that Laura never wanted anybody else, either? You’re fooling yourself, my dear. That’s her nature. That’s her life. For you, with a husband and a family, life has been very different. Now, when you want her again, you’re resentful to find that Laura’s life has gone on without you. That she’s found other women, a whole new mode of living, other interests that you don’t share.”
It knocked her ego into a corner. “Oh, you spiteful bastard!” she cried in pure self-defense. And then clapped her hands over her mouth, sinking to a small straight-backed chair and weeping angry startled tears that nevertheless broke the tension and relieved her.
Merrill Landon laughed softly and she was unnerved to hear Laura’s inflection in the sound. “You have a little spirit, after all,” he said. “Good. You’re mad because I’m right. Isn’t that so? Of course.”
And of course he was right, to her chagrin.
“I didn’t even think about her after I’d been married,” Beth said brokenly. It was the first time in all these weary months of wondering and experimenting with the wrong person, of deceiving Charlie and perhaps her own self, that she let go and spoke of it. And it felt good. Landon understood her language. That alone made it possible to speak.
“I was dissatisfied,” she explained to him. “Oh, hell, I was just plain sick to death of the whole mess. The little things with a husband aggravated me even more than the big things. And the kids nearly did me in. When it got so I couldn’t stand to have Charlie touch me, I knew we’d had it. He didn’t, though. He still thinks I’m going through a phase.
“I guess when I changed so much it seemed to me Charlie should change, too. But that was unreasonable of me. Here I am, a completely different Beth, and he’s just the same old Charlie.”
“You fell in love with him that way,” Landon reminded her.
“In love and out,” she said.
“When did it occur to you that Laura might cure your ills?” He handed her a fresh drink and she took a swallow before she answered him.
“I began to dream about her,” she said. “Just a little at first, but then all the time. I met another woman and I tried to find with her what I had known once with Laura, but it didn’t work. Made me think that no other woman would be right for me.” She glanced at him shyly, suddenly recalling that he ought to be shocked and disapproving, wondering where she found the guts to confess as she did. The whiskey? The house, Laura’s house? The man, Laura’s father? She saw no shock in his face, only interest and a certain remote sympathy, and it gave her a new respect for him.
“The other woman didn’t love you?” he asked.
“Yes, she did,” Beth said. He saw her chin quiver and knew she was understating things for him.
“When you find Laura, do you think she’ll be just the way she was when you knew
