“And no children. You were a fool to have children, Beth. “I love them,” she said humbly.
“Ha!” Nina cried. “Then what are you doing here? Why aren’t you with them?” After a suggestive pause she prompted, “Was the old long lost love that tempting?”
In the midst of such sharp and painful needling Beth couldn’t speak Laura’s name. She couldn’t bear to have it laughed at and she clammed up for a while. When she could control her voice a little she tried to explain.
“I left my kids because I treated them badly. I was unjust, I was unreasonable, I hurt them over and over. Even if there had never been any ‘long lost love,’ I think I would have left them. The more I hurt them the worse I hurt myself until I thought we would all go crazy.”
Nina saw what a whirlpool of guilt and resentment she had stirred up, and, interested, she stirred it a little more. “So your solution was to dump the kids in the river and run to New York in search of a girl you haven’t seen in nine years? Not very sensible, was it?”
“Not very!” Beth conceded. “Not much fun, either,” she added sharply.
Nina dropped her smile at once. “I’m not laughing,” she said with a solemn face. But of course she was, inside, in the dark and silence of her private self. “My first husband and I had it worked out a little better than that, that’s all. You should have used your head.”
“Your first husband?” Beth snapped. “Where in hell is your second?”
“Oh I mean my ex-husband. My former husband,” Nina corrected herself.
“Well, say so, then.” Beth had caught her lying. She had never married. It simply pleased her ego to say she had, to make Beth feel that no experience Beth had ever had was unique or different from any Nina had had. Nina had to be one up on you, or at least on a level with you, or she couldn’t enjoy herself. Ordinarily she lied to this end with great skill, gracefully and casually. It gave Beth her first peace of mind with Nina to catch her in a blatant fib, to see that startled look flicker over her face.
Nina had the good sense to take it lightly. She passed over it, coming to the couch where Beth sat and settling beside her. She cocked one foot against the coffee table and said slowly, “Would you like to spend the night?” The conflict of desires on Beth’s face tickled her, restored her self-assurance.
“I don’t think so,” Beth said.
“Why not? Afraid of me?”
“Not of you.” Damn her!She would make a test of it, a challenge, How can I turn her down now? But Beth wasn’t absolutely sure she wanted to turn her down.
“Afraid of what, then?”
“You don’t really want me to stay.”
“Why do you think I asked you?” Nina had made her mind up. Beth was moody, she was pretty, she was new. Nina smiled at the swell of her breasts beneath the simple suit she wore and wondered how they looked undraped.
“Stay,” she said. And when Beth didn’t answer she added, “I have a nightie you can borrow. Go take a shower and I’ll get you a towel. Go on!” She shooed her as she might have a wayward child or a chicken, and Beth got up and obeyed her. It exhausted her to try to make a decision. It was easier to let Nina make it for her.
She showered and dried herself, gazing at herself critically in the mirror of the medicine chest, wondering just how big a fool she was to stay, to walk into whatever trap Nina might be laying for her. The small consolation was that you could only walk into Nina’s kind of trap once. Nina had a way of stripping your innocence off with both hands. It hurt, but Beth was learning. She sensed that the lessons Nina taught her would bolster her when she faced the gay world alone.
“Finished?” Nina called outside the bathroom door. “Here’s some pajamas.”
Beth opened the door a few inches and grabbed them and saw Nina grin at her modesty. She slipped the blue cotton pants on and found they were too short. The jacket was too tight through the bust and she laughed silently at the picture she made in the mirror.
Nina was waiting for her, curled up on the foot end of the sofa-bed she had pulled out from the love seat in the living room.
“You can sleep in here,” she said. “There’s plenty of room.” There was in fact room for two, but Nina had her own bed in the other room and Beth was relieved to know they would sleep apart.
She sat down on a pillow as far from Nina as the length of the bed would permit, and Nina fixed them both a nightcap. They drank in silence for a moment, and then Beth spoke. Maybe it was the liquor that prompted her, or the informality of the pajamas that were too small and looked silly, or just the need to know. At any rate, she spoke of the things closest to her then.
“How do you know if you’re gay, Nina?” she asked.
“Simple. You go to a fortune teller,” Nina said.
“Is that how you found out about yourself?”
“No.” And Nina’s face became more serious. “No, I did it the hard way.”
“What’s the hard way?”
“I got hurt.”
“Well, I’ve been hurt before,” Beth said. “A thousand times, a thousand different ways. It didn’t teach me a thing.”
“You weren’t a good student, then.”
“I don’t mean with women, Nina.”
“I thought you were in New York trying to find some woman.”
“I am. But she never hurt me. I hurt her, but she never did a thing to me.”
“Well, there must have been others.”
There had been Vega, of course. But Beth couldn’t talk about her, and there seemed no reason to confess that sordid little chapter to Nina, who would only have laughed at it anyway.
“No,” Beth said.
