“I thought you’d get lost, I thought you’d get taken, I thought the big city would devour you,” Beth cried, almost wishing, out of spite, that it had. “I thought living like an outcast, a Lesbian, would destroy you. All this time I’ve worried and wondered about you. And now at last I find you and—and” she began to laugh a little hysterically—“and you’re happy as a clam. You’ve got the world on a string. You’re the one who did it right, who found the secret. Laura, let me in on it. I’m so damned miserable sometimes I feel like death. Like death.” And she shook Laura with the angry demand for sympathy.
It was not a generous speech. It was not the declaration of love reborn or of gratitude that she had meant to make. It was an accusation. It said, “You have no right to be happier than I!” Laura had it all, Beth had nothing, and Beth showed her grudge in a sudden uncontrollable outpouring of envy and unhappiness. It was not what she had come all this way to discover and it was too much to bear.
Laura understood this while Beth did not. Beth thought she was speaking of love, and she was chagrined when Laura moved out of her arms with a laugh.
Laura walked across the room in her slip, one nylon stocking on, one in her hand, and her laugh burned Beth like salt in a cut. Laura turned and looked at her then, still smiling.
“Beth,” she said, lingering over the name. “I still love you, Beth. God knows why. But now, for the first time in all these years, I can pity you too. It’s a strange feeling. A little like being set free.”
“No, Laura—”
“Don’t talk. Listen! You need a little pity. You need a lot. You’ve spent so damn many years pitying me, Beth, don’t begrudge me the same pleasure. It’s my turn now.”
Beth went over to the bed and collapsed on it. “How did you do it?” she begged. “Where did I go wrong? I never should have let you leave me.”
“No? What would we have done together, you and I? Settled down in a vine-covered walk-up in the Village? Adopted a couple of kids?”
“I don’t want kids, I never did!”
“You said you didn’t have any.”
“I don’t!” Beth shrieked.
“Then don’t get excited,” Laura said curiously. “You could have lived with me once, Beth. Don’t forget that.”
“Anything would have been better than Charlie!”
“Even me?” Laura couldn’t help laughing again.
“No! No! Good God, Laura, Laura, please don’t laugh like that. Don’t laugh at me!” She sounded quite frantic and Laura took pity on her. She was not malicious, only human, and she needed to hurt Beth a little. It was healthy for her. It would clear away the murky, pent-up bitterness and misunderstanding.
“If you don’t want me to laugh at you, don’t be such a fool,” she said.
“Charlie was insufferable,” Beth gasped, clutching at her self-control.
“Charlie loved you, Beth,” Laura retorted. “I don’t know what the situation is now, but you dismissed his love much too lightly a few minutes ago. It was a wonderful love, very deep and strong. If there were blind spots in it, they weren’t weaknesses. He had enough love to smooth them over. I hated him but I respected him always. I knew how much he loved you.”
“Are you saying that whatever happened between us must have been my fault? That I didn’t love him enough?” Beth cried. And the frustrations of the last months colored her voice.
“No. I’m saying you couldn’t have made a better choice than Charlie, if you wanted to get married. And Beth, you did want to. You were cocksure of yourself.”
“Then why didn’t it work? Why wasn’t I happy?” Beth had lost control, even the desire for control. She wept noisy furious sobs like a child, her hands covering her face.
Laura watched her from across the room for a moment and then she went into the bathroom. She came back in a moment with a glass of cold water, walked up to Beth, and threw it in her face. She accomplished this quietly, experimentally, but with a certain satisfaction. She had never thought, in all her daydreams of Beth, that she would have the courage to treat her like another mere human being.
“I don’t know why it didn’t work, Beth,” she said. “Maybe you’ll be happy now. I hope so.”
With an outraged splutter, Beth stopped crying. There was a moment of palpable tension between them. The water clung to Beth’s hair and dripped from her face and for a moment she thought she would explode with rage. But it came to her slowly that she could not get any angrier than she had just been. She hadn’t the strength and there was no way to express it without behaving like a madwoman. She was not that kind.
Beth turned her wet, violet eyes and open mouth up to Laura, struggling to find words, composure. But Laura, still smiling, spared her the necessity.
“Maybe the one thing you learned from living with a man is that you can’t live with a man,” she told her. “It’s a sad, common little lesson. But sometimes those are the hardest to learn.”
After a full minute of wet humiliation Beth brought herself to say, “What if it had been somebody different?” Her voice was unsure of itself, rough. “What if it had been somebody like Jack, maybe, who understood?”
“You said you didn’t understand yourself,” Laura reminded her, putting the empty glass down casually on the bed table. “Do you want to marry a psychiatrist who’ll spend all his time explaining you to yourself?”
“No.” Laura’s words made Beth vaguely aware of her own unreasonable thinking. “No, I wanted that from you. You grasp things others miss. I
