“So you want to go back to your husband,” she needled Beth.
“I didn’t say that, either.”
“You don’t say much, do you?” Nina laughed. “What’d you get married for in the first place if you’re gay?” she said. “Think it would cure you?”
“I didn’t know I was gay,” Beth said.
“You seemed to in your letters.”
“They were easier to write that way.”
Nina laughed at her and called one of the waitresses over. “This is Billie,” she said to Beth, and the girl sat down and talked with them. She was extremely pretty; very small and dainty-looking, but with cropped hair and a decidedly aggressive swing in her walk. She spoke softly, however, almost timidly, and left the bulk of the conversation to Beth and Nina.
“Beth is looking for her long lost love,” Nina said, pleased to see the consternation her announcement created in Beth. “What’s her name again?” She glanced at Beth.
“Maybe she comes in here,” Billie said helpfully. “I know them all.”
“I doubt it,” Beth said.
“Come on, her name,” Nina demanded.
“She’s not here,” Beth said, feeling cornered and stubborn. She hated the phrase “long lost love,” so lightly, even sarcastically, spoken.
“So maybe she comes in other times,” said Billie, innocently unaware that Beth and Nina were sparring with each other.
“Bring us another drink, will you, Billie?” Nina said, still staring Beth down. As soon as the girl had left their table she leaned over and said confidentially to Beth, as if making it up to her a little, “Do you like her?”
“I don’t know her,” Beth said warily.
“She likes you,” Nina said. “She’s been cruising you like mad since we came in.”
“Cruising me?”
“Looking you over, sizing you up.”
Beth didn’t believe her. Nina only wanted a rise out of her.
“She wants to be a boy,” Nina said. “She boards with a family on Bleecker Street. She thinks they think she’s a boy. She always wears pants.”
“She had on a skirt tonight.”
“That’s because she has to wear one in here. City ordinance. No women in bars in pants. But she won’t wear the skirt to work. She carries it in a paper bag and changes in the john.”
“She’s crazy if she thinks she can pass for a boy,” Beth said seriously. “She can’t be over five-feet-three. And she’s so pretty. Her features are very feminine.”
And again Nina laughed at her. And again Beth realized she was being made a fool of. Was any of it true? Was Billie so blind as to think she could transform herself into a boy with a pair of pants? Or was Nina showing her at least part of the truth, a sad, even pitiful, intensely interesting little corner of life, cut from the Village pattern?
At the last bar there were other men, but they never seemed to join the girls at the tables. They rather intrigued Beth, who wondered why they spent all their free time sitting quietly on bar stools watching the flirtations, the loves, the dancing and socializing of these women they could never touch. Some of them seemed to know the girls and were greeted affectionately with a nickname or a slap on the back. But they never presumed to follow a girl or to talk before they were spoken to. It was their solitary pleasure simply to watch, and now and then to be permitted a few words, a little sharing of this odd way of life
Beth observed one who seemed particularly pathetic. He was overweight by quite a bit, balding and with blue pockets under his eyes, and he looked not only sad but outright bored—something none of the others did. She wondered why he bothered to come by at all if it depressed him so. His face stuck in her mind later and she pitied him. This third and last place they were in had a larger clientele than the others, probably because it was eleven o’clock by the time they got there.
Beth was absorbed by it. She wanted to wander all night around the Village, look into all the windows and share all the secrets. Behind some curtain, in some doorway or shop window, she might find Laura.
But when she stood up suddenly to go to the ladies’ room she realized with a start that she was drunk. Quite drunk. Nina had been telling her to quit for some time.
“You don’t want to be hungover tomorrow,” she said. But it was so condescending, so solicitous for the “country cousin,” that Beth had defiantly ordered another. And another. She knew now, gripping the table with both hands, that Nina was right, aggravating though her attitude was. Beth should have stopped early in the evening.
Nina appraised her skillfully. “You’re going to feel like hell in the morning,” she said. “Too bad. I was going to take you out for lunch, too. One of my favorite places.”
“I’ll make it,” Beth said. She would feel rotten, all right—that was a cinch. But she’d go. She had to learn her way around here somehow, and doing it with Nina, however embarrassing or even upsetting, seemed safer than going it alone.
They drove home in a taxi, and Beth was disconcerted to find that the warmth and closeness of Nina’s body in the rear seat pleased her. Nina said nothing and that made it easier to enjoy her. When she opened her mouth it threw Beth on her guard automatically and destroyed the sensual pleasure.
Beth left her with a queer feeling of dislike and desire that disturbed her sleep, tired as she was. She couldn’t fathom Nina and the only thing she thought it was safe to count on was that Nina was playing the game only for herself. She had no special favors to grant Beth Ayers, and when Beth ceased to interest her, that would be the end. Kaput. End of guided tour through the Village, and end
