“You mean that once nine years ago you had a fling with some girl,” Nina said, letting her hand drop, “and now you wonder if you’re gay?” She spoke with exaggerated incredulity and the curl in her small mouth was not kind. But it was amused.
“I loved her very much,” Beth said. “I just happened to meet my husband at the same time. I’ve been wondering all these years if I made the right choice. Lately, with things so bad at home, I thought seeing her again would help me make up my mind. Help me understand myself.”
“What makes you think she’ll be so eager to see you? Or help you out? What makes you think she cares a damn about you after nine years? Especially if you hurt her the last time around?”
“I have no idea how she’ll react,” Beth said. She resented the probing mockery Nina subjected her to, but if it was the price of knowledge she was ready to pay it. “I only know she was a very gentle, affectionate girl and when we parted there were no hard feelings.”
“Oh, swell,” Nina said. “She’s had nine years to sit and stew over it, remember. She’s known other women by now, if she has any sense. She can evaluate what you did to her. She couldn’t before when it first happened. Or weren’t you her first?”
“Yes. I was.” Beth glanced up at her. It was true. Laura had experience to measure Beth with now, but Beth had nothing but memories with which to judge Laura. Memories and one abortive sad little romance with a sick woman that only made Laura look the lovelier in her imaginings.
“She may look good to you,” Nina pointed out, “but you may look like hell to her. What if you barge in on a new romance? What if you finally find her and the poor girl is madly in love with somebody new? How glad do you think she’ll be to see you? You could louse up her whole life, throw a monkey wrench into her romance. What’s she supposed to do, laugh it off for old time’s sake? Welcome you with open arms and let the other girl go jump?”
In a burst of irritation and arrogance Beth leaned across the bed, her hands planted deep in the mattress just inches from Nina and the rest of her weight on her knees. “You know something?” Beth said. “I don’t give a damn. I don’t care what I do to her life, as long as she lets me back in it. I want her so badly I can see her in every female I meet. I can smell her the way she used to be after her shower at night when she was covered with scented powder and her hair was still damp. God, God, I can even taste her!”
And Nina twisted her mouth into a laugh. When Beth started to protest she put a hand up and exclaimed, “No, I believe you. You’re in love.”
Beth came down to a more reasonable sitting position. “Does that make me gay?” she asked seriously.
“For the time being.” Nina sized her up. “Why do you worry about it, Beth? Why are you so anxious for a label? What do you care what category you fall into? Just be yourself.”
“I don’t know myself.”
“Then just be however you feel like being and pretty soon the pattern will emerge.”
“I’ve been doing that for thirty years,” Beth said. “There is no pattern, there’s only chaos.”
“Well, maybe that comes from living with a man. Maybe you were never meant to settle down. I know some perfectly nice girls, all straight, who can’t live with men. They can’t live without them, either, of course. It’s a matter of balancing their lives between the men who are important to them, and the other things. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re gay. It doesn’t necessarily mean you should go live with a woman and make love to her, just because you’ve made a flop of your first marriage. So maybe you got the wrong guy. Try somebody else.”
“It isn’t that easy. If you’d ever been married you’d know that.”
“I have been married. I told you,” Nina said quickly
And Beth, seeing that she meant to stick by her fib, said, “Oh, sorry. I forgot.” She hoped Nina liked the sarcasm in her voice. Nina was used enough to dishing it out. But Beth was glad for her words. They put a new light on things, made her see them from an angle that had been closed to her when there had been just her own ramblings in the dark to guide her.
“If Charlie was a mistake, I’ll be paying for it all my life,” Beth said.
“Don’t be silly. What did you pay him for this trip?”
“A lot of misery, Nina. A lot of soul searching and misery.”
“You’ll get that out of life anyway, Beth. You have no corner on misery. That’s everybody’s business. That’s the growing-up process, you might say.” It sounded familiar to Beth. She wondered if she might have read it somewhere in one of Nina’s books. “Your long lost love can probably teach you a few things about misery. Anybody who’s gay knows that subject backwards and forwards.”
Beth reached over to a small end table to squash out her cigarette. When she sat up Nina unfastened the central, cornerstone, button on the tight pajama tops. It was accomplished with one quick movement that caught Beth off guard and the straining button yielded gratefully before she had time to catch Nina’s hand and stop her. At once, the whole thing came unbuttoned, the jacket top failing open over her bare chest.
Rather than protest or lose her temper or button the thing up again, or even use the gesture as an excuse for making a pass, Beth just sat there as if nothing had happened. Her expression, her attitude,
