They walked toward Jack’s place with Pat clinging in bewildered pleasure to Beebo, the object of what had seemed so long a futile attraction. But Beebo was lost in herself, wondering if she could make it yet in the city on her own. She was strong and handsome, and she walked, gestured, even swore with a boyish gusto that made her seem more experienced than she was. But she was still untutored in the ways of metropolitan gay life and that fact undermined her self-confidence.
They put Pat, who was high enough to be sleepy, on Jack’s sofa and looked at him. He dozed a little, his fair face averted, and the two roommates were struck with the beauty of his features. Beebo was unnerved to find herself suddenly wanting a girl with blast-furnace intensity.
“I’ll heat the bird,” she offered to Jack, “if you’ll mind the patient.”
“You’re on,” he said.
But she was sorry to have to leave them alone together. Jack was entirely too taken with the boy. Beebo moved pensively around the kitchen, preparing the food with unaccustomed hands.
Jack brought Pat to the table when she called them. Pat looked so slender and peaked that she felt a good doctor’s desire to stuff him full of nourishment.
He leaned against the door frame, gazing at Beebo. “Who are you, anyway?” he asked, drunk enough to be brave.
“Sit down, Hungry,” Beebo said, smiling at him.
Abashed, but unappeased, he obeyed.
“You know what’s wrong with you, Pat? Malnutrition,” she said. “If you had any food under your belt, you wouldn’t give two bits for me.” He turned a baffled face to her. “Why hell, the damn bugs eat better than you do,” she told him. “They get all the garbage that ruins your appetite.”
She tried to feed him but he turned away. “I can’t,” he said. The excitement of coming home with this girl he had admired so fervently for a couple of months was too much; that, and all the beer he had drunk…and a new gentle feeling stirring in him for Jack Mann.
“Sure you can,” Beebo said, and began to feed him as if he were a sick lamb, while Jack cut the chicken bits for her. When Pat tried to protest she popped a mess of spicy meat between his teeth and shushed him, wishing all the while that she were ministering to a lovely girl instead of a lost boy.
Beebo stole a look at Jack, afraid of what she might see. But he was regarding Pat with compassion, the same he had shown to her when he found her…and just a trace of desire, tightly controlled. Jack had kindly instincts. It was one of the things Beebo admired most in him. He took care of people because it made him happy. No one was to blame if, when the person was a beautiful young boy, it made him very happy indeed.
Beebo got the chicken down Pat and made him drink his milk, which he did out of pure infatuation for her. And then Jack filled the silence with one word: “Bedtime.”
But Pat seemed to be in a sort of trance, brought on by fatigue, fascination, and a full stomach. “Are you conscious?” Jack asked him with a smile.
“I was just thinking,” Pat murmured, blinking at Beebo. “Maybe I’m straight.”
They laughed at him, till he got indignant and tried to explain that even Beebo’s marginal femininity didn’t discourage him.
“You need some sleep, buddy,” Jack told him, and took him off to the sofa. “And no damn trash cans for you in the morning.”
“What if I lose my job?” Pat said.
“That would be the best thing that could happen to you.”
“I’ll starve,” Pat whispered.
“Not while I’m around,” Jack said. Pat smiled at him sleepily, and then shut his eyes and turned on his side.
Beebo climbed into Jack’s bed feeling like an impostor. But she was embarrassed to make an issue of it; more than that, afraid. If she offered to take the sofa herself, Jack might grab the chance to have Pat beside him all night.
Beebo felt no physical attraction to Pat; only sympathetic interest. But his puppy love had scorched her a little; just enough to keep her moving and twisting on the warm sheets for an hour, obsessed with the growing need for a girl. A girl to curl in her lap and kiss her and talk away her fears.
Pat’s loneliness shocked her. She saw herself mirrored in his predicament. Who was more alone than a lost and defenseless soul, hungry for something it couldn’t find? Couldn’t even define? It was enough to warp the heart, deform the soul.
It was enough to get her out of bed at midnight that night, make her dress in silence and leave the apartment, undetected by Jack or Pat.
She was almost as surprised to find herself on the street as Jack would have been to see her there. And yet the cool night air washed gratefully over her face and cleared her thoughts. She wandered aimlessly a while, as if trying to ignore the one place she wanted to visit: the Colophon.
But her feet took her there anyway, and she found herself ringing the bell. The owner opened the peek-through in the door and nodded to her. She felt a momentary country-girl shame at being recognized in such a place. But she was glad enough to gain entrance. The glow inside was the color of fluorescent Merthiolate. It seemed almost antiseptic to Beebo, who had painted the undersides of countless cows and sows with disinfectants the same shade prior to a delivery.
She took a seat at the bar. “Scotch and water,” she said.
While
