“The minute you found out you could have me, you didn’t want me anymore,” Laura said. She turned her back on Beth, who was still kneeling, and began to comb her marvelous hair. “I wonder if that isn’t what happened between you and Charlie. Once he married you he was hooked. He was yours. It was all sewed up, legitimate and approved of, and maybe that’s why it bored you.”
Beth felt a terrible rage rising in her. She wanted to scream, “Look at me!” Instead she said in a shaking voice, “I’m on my knees to you, begging for help, Laura. Give it to me. I’m not a dog.”
“Then get off the floor,” Laura said without turning around.
“You stand there and comb your goddamn hair!” Beth shouted.
“My hair needs combing.”
Beth wondered if she could stand it or if her brains would boil in her head. Laura controlled the situation by controlling herself. Every shriek that escaped Beth made her own position weaker and sillier. With a supreme effort she held herself in check. “Charlie said once that I could only love when love was forbidden,” she said. The admission gave her a little dignity; it was very adult.
“Then he sees what I see,” Laura said.
“But you’re wrong,” Beth whispered. “You’re both wrong. I can love without that. It doesn’t have to be wrong to be desirable. That’s so—so childish.”
“Yes, it is. But that isn’t what you came all this way to tell me,” Laura said. “You didn’t really come to see me at all. I think you’re running away.”
“No, I’m not. I’m facing things, Laura! For the first time I’m facing the things I should have faced years ago, but didn’t have the guts to. I love women. I love you. And if you think it was the easy thing for me to run away and leave my—” She broke off, afraid to mention her children now that she had denied their existence. “It took all my courage, everything I had,” she said, and her voice twisted with the enormity of it, the remembered pain.
“Beth, how long have you been divorced?” Laura stopped combing long enough to look at her.
“That’s none of your business!” Beth shot back.
“You’re making it my business. You’re throwing your whole messed-up unhappy life in my lap. Listen, Beth,” she continued kindly, “no matter how fast you run you can’t catch up with the past. You’ve found me, all right, but you haven’t found our college days. You haven’t found a dead romance and brought it back to life. We’re two different people now; we can’t capture the past and live in it as if it were the present. I tried to run away, too. For years. Believe me, it’s the one sure way to get trouble to follow you.” Her voice was gentle; she meant what she said. Maybe it would help. She could see Beth had been pushed pretty far. But to Beth it was like being a naughty child again and getting lectured for misbehaving. She listened in pale anger.
“You’re in love with all the things you can’t have, Beth, with all the things you’ve never seen and never tasted. Once you do see them they lose their fascination for you. If had to live with a woman, don’t you think pretty soon you’d be hollering for a man?”
“You mean—” Beth gaped at her. “You mean it has nothing to do with sexuality? It has nothing to do with love and desire? It’s just a compulsion for something new? Oh, Laura. Now you’re the one who’s oversimplifying.”
“It has a lot to do with love and desire, but that’s only part of it. You were never cut out to settle down and put out roots anywhere.”
“Laura, for God’s sake, are you telling me no matter what I do or where I turn I’ll never be happy? I’ll always make myself unhappy?” It was a cry of desolation and protest.
“I’m telling you what you’re like now,” Laura said. “I’m not saying you can’t change. Nobody has a right to say that to you but yourself.”
“How do you know you’re right about me? What makes you so sure?” Beth said brokenly.
“I don’t know for sure. You brought me your troubles and said, ‘Here, help me. Straighten me out.’ Well, I’m trying.” There was impatience in her voice, but also sincerity.
“Laura, darling Laura, don’t you love me anymore? Did you ever really love me?”
“You know better than to ask. All the years that you and Charlie were getting along and still happy, I was dreaming of you. It’s just that—” She glanced down at the tortoise shell comb in her hand.
“Just that what?” Beth demanded.
“Just that my love for you is different now.”
Beth stood up, anger and triumph all over her face. “Then why did you make love to me the way you did? An hour ago we were making love, Laura! Or have you forgotten? Why?”
Laura gazed at her again, matching her own composure against Beth’s hot, breathless emotion.
“I had no warning—” she began.
“Exactly! So you reacted naturally!” Beth exclaimed, her face flushed and excited. “That’s what I wanted, that’s exactly what I wanted!” She walked toward Laura, talking and gesticulating. “If you had known I was there you would have put me off, you would have behaved like a friend, nothing more. But you didn’t know. It all took you by surprise and you gave yourself to me without a fight, without resisting me at all. The most natural thing in the world.”
Laura looked into her feverish face, standing her ground royally as Beth approached. “Beth, if you’re going to think of it that way, I can’t do a damn thing to help you. You love your own delusions too much.”
“Well, how in hell am I supposed to think of it?” Beth flashed. And in a sudden hopeless surrender to her misery, in the need to be right with Laura just once, Beth threw herself on Laura like a cat gone mad.
