Beebo half lifted and half pulled her off her stool. “Come on, sweetheart,” she said in her hoarse low voice. “You’re coming home with me. I’ll tell you about it. Believe me, I felt just the way you feel now when I found out. But that was seven years ago, after she left me. I didn’t think I could stand it but I did.” She spoke with a sweetness that amazed Beth in one so gruff and strange, and Beth clutched at her words for courage. She never thought to argue with Beebo about going home with her. She never even tried to stop and tell Nina where she was going.
But Nina saw her go out with Beebo’s arm around her and Nina said softly to herself, “Damn!” She knew that was the end of her influence on Beth, and Beth had held promise for more pleasure. It was for that reason that she had tried to discourage Beth from meeting Beebo. Nina liked to control her visitor, and she loved to make love to her. It piqued her vanity to see Beth so easily slip out from under her only go to someone she disliked and feared. With alcoholic malice she watched the two of them leave.
Someone else watched them go: a small rotund man, balding, with bags beneath his eyes and an air of fatigue and boredom that seemed never to leave him. When the door of the bar swung shut behind Beth and Beebo, the small heavy man got up and walked slowly toward it and followed them into the night.
Chapter Fifteen
BETH STAYED WITH BEEBO THAT NIGHT AND THEY SAT UP AND talked through most of it. Beebo told her about the two years she and Laura had lived together, what a paradise it had been at first, what a red hell it had become when Laura had fallen out of love.
“She was looking for a substitute for you when I met her,” Beebo admitted. “When I turned out to be myself, not you, she was disillusioned. She held it against me, in a way. And in another way, after a while, I think she learned to love me for myself. But it was never good enough. I was so much older; I’d done my running around and I wanted to settle down. Laura was It as far as I was concerned. The end of the trail. I was through looking over the field, through chasing after new affairs.
“But for Laura it came too soon. She was too young. She hadn’t seen more than a little corner of life and I wasn’t enough for her. She needed variety, she needed to know other women, and that was more than I could bear. And at the same time, she needed security. Somebody had to take care of her, watch over her, provide for her. All of that. I wanted to desperately, but I didn’t qualify. I was a woman and I was a disappointing lover to boot. She needed a man, one who understood that she was gay and would always be gay, and not interfere with that part of her life.”
“Where did she meet him—her husband?” Beth asked. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor in Beebo’s living room, drinking the coffee Beebo had fixed for her, while Beebo sat on the couch above her with her legs split casually over the long coffee table. She was still drinking whiskey and water.
“She met him on a blind date,” Beebo said. “And a few weeks later he introduced me to Laura. He lived down here at the time.”
“What’s his name?”
“Jack. Jack Mann.”
Beth memorized it. “But you and Laura lived together for couple of years before she married Jack?”
“Yeah. They loved each other all along, though. They got very close. The worse things were between me and Laura, the closer they were between Laura and Jack. She always ran to him when anything went wrong.”
“Was she in love with him?”
“No. And he isn’t in love with her. Maybe that’s why they’re so happy. No romance, no jealousy. No matter what passionate affairs they may be having on the outside, their marriage is sacred to them. And it works. It works a hell of a lot better than a lot of straight marriages I know.”
“Do you mean Jack’s gay too?”
“Yes, honey. He’s gay.” Beebo looked down at her, and smiled. “He had ‘Beth’ problems when he married her, too. She was still thinking about you even then. Used to drive him nuts. I remember he finally gave her a lecture about it. Said you’d never see her again, you were gone out of her life and probably married, and Laura had better grow up and realize it.”
“Did she?” Beth asked shyly.
“I’m inclined to think she did,” Beebo said. “As a matter of fact, I can’t help wondering what good it’ll do to open a closed chapter, Beth. If it’s no good for Laura it can’t be much good for you.”
Beth hung her head, watching her cigarette burn and feeling the smoke sting her eyes, without moving the thing or blowing at it.
“Maybe no good at all,” she admitted. “But I have to know. I’ve come so far and I’ve had to face so much. I can’t run out now when I’m so close to finding her. I wonder how she thinks of me now.”
“Probably pretty much the same way, when she thinks of you. Romanticized. You symbolized everything good, everything wise and beautiful for her. You were an ideal love that just by accident, wasn’t so ideal after all. If you ever hurt her
