It was almost worse to wake up in bed the next day and know who she was sleeping with than it had been to wake up with a stranger. At least that other way it had been impersonal. But now, feeling sick and full of hate for herself, she had to get up and talk to Franny, apologize, make an effort to explain. It only alarmed her when Franny responded with all the exaggerated understanding and sympathy of a crush aborning. Beth wanted to grab her hands and say, “No, don’t fall for me, Franny, don’t even like me. I’ll hurt you. I hurt anybody, everybody, who gets in my way, anybody who tries to stop me from going—” From going where? She didn’t know.
She spent a couple of days with Franny and she kept on drinking and crying and trying to explain all the things she couldn’t understand about herself. And Franny, a good-natured girl with a shock of innocent blonde hair and a smile reminiscent of Jean Purvis’s, listened in passionate silence, her eyes riveted on Beth. Her heroine worship upset Beth, who didn’t want it and couldn’t return it and so responded to it with a twinge of guilt. She asked Franny about Nina but Franny only shrugged and stuck her tongue out, giving Beth to understand that that affair was dead.
Beth finally escaped, leaving during the day when Franny was at work. She couldn’t face her hotel room. Her clothes were getting raggedy and quite plainly dirty, and still she couldn’t return. Not yet. Tomorrow, maybe. Tomorrow she would go back, set her affairs in order, clean herself up, contact her family and confess what they already knew in a pitiful effort to salvage her self-respect. She would collect her small courage and get it over with.
Tomorrow, that is. Not today.
She went drinking again. Somewhere along the way she saw Nina. They were both quite drunk at the time and it was a curiously friendly meeting, though brief. Nina sat down, putting an arm around Beth’s waist, and said, “Guess who’s gay?” And she began to call out names like a drill sergeant, names of movie stars, names of Broadway luminaries, names of writers, names of generals, names of celebrated female social workers and adventurers and courtesans.
“All gay,” she said, pausing for breath, while Beth listened in a sort of mesmerized silence, wondering what possessed Nina to rattle these names off in her face, both interested and ashamed of her interest.
“If they’re all gay, what’re you worried about?” Nina said. Beth said nothing and Nina went on, “Did I ever tell you you listen beautifully? You make a beautiful listener, Beth. That’s what you ought to do. Just go out and listen. To hell with sex. Forget about it. Just sit around and listen, honey, you do it so well. It’s a shame you’re such an independent bitch.” She kissed her, lightly and briefly, and Beth remembered with a drunken ache why she had been so fascinated with the girl in the first place.
It was the only encounter she recalled over a period of several days. The next time she woke up she was sick. Really rotten from top to bottom and too trembly to make it out of bed. She didn’t know where she was and she didn’t care. There was a period, after her first wakening, of four or five hours when she slept again, fitfully and in spite of rhythmic pains in her head.
At the second wakening she got her bearings. She was in a small, gently worn but comfortable bedroom on a familiar bed. Lifting her unwieldy head cautiously, she looked around. And then she sat up and surprise eased her throbbing pain for a moment. She was in Beebo’s apartment.
Very slowly, gingerly, she lifted the covers and got up, stumbled into the bathroom which opened directly off the bedroom, and took a shower. She stood in it for fifteen minutes, just letting the water rain on her, warm and soothing. At first she thought she would never feel clean again. At least not inside. But the shower relaxed her, cleared her head a little.
She was startled to hear the bathroom door open and Beebo step in. Beth looked at her from around the shower curtain, inexplicably frightened of her. Just a little, but still frightened.
“You aren’t drowning are you?” Beebo said with a smile. “You’ve been in there a while.”
“No.” Beth turned the water off and then stood uncertainly behind the frail shelter of the curtain while Beebo faced her, arms folded over her chest, smiling
“Towel?” she said at last, handing one over leisurely.
“Thanks.” Beth grabbed it and dried herself behind the curtain. “Where did you—find me?” she asked diffidently.
“I doubt if you’ve ever heard of the place,” Beebo said. “And you probably wouldn’t recognize it again if they threw it at you.”
“Just the same, I’d like to know,” she said.
“It’s called The Gorgon’s Head,” Beebo said.
“God.” Beth made a face, stepping carefully out of the tub. One foot slid a little and Beebo caught her, steadying her, and helped her out the rest of the way. The towel had come loose and Beebo handed it back to her before Beth even realized that a long sweet curve of flesh was open to view. She snatched the towel gratefully from Beebo with a sudden shyness, and irritation and pleasure were scrambled up inside her, momentarily aggravating her headache.
“Here,” Beebo said, opening the medicine chest over the washbowl. She took a couple of pills resembling aspirin from an unmarked plastic drugstore container and handed them to Beth, along with a glass of water.
“What are they?” Beth said, looking at them as if they were capsules of arsenic.
“What the hell do you care? You couldn’t feel any worse, could you?” Beebo
