“Best to you, Cleve.”
Vega at Camarillo! Of all the things in the letter none affected her any more than that. Vega had had to bear the loss of her lover and the loss of the girls she adored and her business, her only means of support, within two weeks of each other. Beth bowed her head and cried, without bothering to cover her face or wipe away the tears. Vega had had to face the scorn of a teenage torturer in the person of P.K. all alone. It must have been godawful, terrible even for Cleve, who had to hear it all from her hysterical lips, who had to try to comfort her and care for her.
P.K.…
“Oh, Vega,” Beth said. “Vega, I’m so sorry. Forgive me. I wish you could hear me, I wish I could undo what I did to you. Please Vega, get well.”
Just telling it to the walls was better than keeping it all inside and getting sick on it. Even at that there was a sick feeling in her stomach and it didn’t go away for a long while.
For three days she stayed in her hotel room. Not the lure of seeing Nina or even the search for Laura Landon that had propelled her this far could stir her. She simply lay on her bed and tried to disentangle her thoughts. Now and then she had some food sent up.
She told herself that nothing that had happened was her fault, exactly. It was fate, it was an accident, it was foul luck. But one single person couldn’t have caused it all. The Purvises were wrong to drink so much, Charlie was wrong to be so bad-tempered, Uncle John was wrong to be so inquisitive. Laura was wrong to have walked out of her life nine years ago. Everybody was wrong but Beth, who was only an innocent girl trying to find herself. She had to see it that way or get sick on herself.
She had been in New York for over a week but she hadn’t found Laura. There was Nina—an unexpected discovery—but Nina wasn’t what she came for. It was time, and overtime, to find Laura.
Beth thought about these things as she rode up Fifth Avenue in a bus. She was on her way to Nina’s apartment, just off Fifth, near the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sitting wedged between two ample women with their arms full of bundles, and silently cursing the humid warmth of the late July day.
It was early afternoon. Nina would still be sleeping but Beth wouldn’t disturb her. Being away from her for several days had generated a number of feelings in Beth, all of them at odds. She had to get back and try herself against Nina again. She had to know for sure what she already suspected: that her desire for Nina was mostly a desire for physical love, a desire that required only a pretty body and a certain skill in using it.
Still, and most important, she wanted to find Laura. She had only been down to the Village once, but she would make Nina take her again. Tonight. If Nina didn’t know any Lauras there must be plenty of people down there who did. It was a Saturday night this time and things would surely be busy. Maybe Laura herself… But it both frightened and excited her too much to think about it, to visualize that actual meeting that would come, had to come, some day, when she and Laura would be face to face again, when they would search for the right words, the right gestures, to show their love. It would all be so clumsy at first and then so beautiful, and Beth ached to have it happen. Soon.
Across from her on the bus sat a small heavy man suffering so visibly from the heat that Beth almost smiled to herself. He looked enough worse than the rest to make Beth almost feel cooler. He was balding, with shadows of weariness under his eyes and a hopelessly rumpled seersucker suit, and he reminded her sharply of one of the “Johns” she had seen with Nina the night they had met and gone bar hopping in the Village.
Forlorn and hot and friendless, she thought. He’s probably on his way home to a wife he can’t stand. He’s probably mired in a life that bores the hell out of him. But he hasn’t the guts to get out of it.
She pitied him, for it seemed to her then that escaping from a life you didn’t like was a matter of courage. She had that courage and she was trying to be proud of it. She didn’t dare to wonder if she had the right to leave her life and everyone in it or if the dumpy little man across the aisle had that right. She only saw his dissatisfaction and she scorned him for enduring it. Everything that touched her now she saw in terms of her own problem.
The rest of her thoughts were of Nina as she approached her apartment. They had had three days together, three strange long days and nights when Nina didn’t write anything on her new book or call anyone or even go anywhere. They had simply lain around, not bothering to make up the beds or dress themselves. They had made love and talked and when they got hungry Nina ordered sandwiches from a nearby delicatessen and that was what they lived on.
Nina had made her keep her voice down for fear her neighbors would hear them. “I don’t know what they’d think,” she said. “I can’t afford to have them thinking anything. I had enough trouble finding this apartment and I don’t want any nosey cops coming around answering complaints. It’s not the same as the Village. You can do things there you wouldn’t try uptown.”
Beth had stared at her. “I’m not making
