Do they think I’m funny? she wondered. Or—exciting? She drank in silence, and ordered another, thinking that the solitude and uncertainty she felt now were worse than those she felt with Jack. For a minute, almost anything seemed better than having to leave Jack, with only fifty bucks a week to spend, no friends, and no place to live.
The bartender brought her another drink while she searched for the last cigarette in her pack. It was empty. The girl sitting next to her immediately offered her one, but Beebo declined. It was partly her shyness, partly the knowledge that it was better to be hard-to-get in the Colophon.
“Do you have cigarettes?” she asked the bartender.
“Machine by the wall,” he said.
She got up and sauntered over, ignoring the outrage on the face of the girl at the bar. The machine swallowed her coins and spit out a pack of filter-tips. Beebo noticed the jukebox, looked at her change, and fed it a quarter, good for three dances. She liked to watch the girls move around the floor together, now that the initial revolt had worn off.
But when she regained her seat, she found most of the patrons paying attention to her, not the tunes. She looked back at them, surprised and wary. The cigarettes in her hand were an excuse to look away for a minute and she did, lighting one while the general conversation died away like a weak breeze. She lowered her match slowly and glanced up again, her skin prickling. What in hell were they trying to do? Scare her out? Show her they didn’t like her? Had she been too aloof with them, too remote and hard to know?
She had started the music, and it was an invitation to dance. They were waiting for her to show them. It wasn’t hostility she saw on their faces so much as, “Show us, if you’re so damn big and smart. We’ve been waiting for a chance to trap you. This is it.”
She had to do something to humanize herself. There was an air of self-confidence and sensual promise about Beebo that she couldn’t help. And when she felt neither confident nor sensual, she looked all the more as if she did: tall and strong and coolly sure of herself. She had turned the drawback of being young and ignorant into a deliberate defense.
It didn’t matter to the sophisticated girls judging her now that she was a country girl fresh from the hayfields of Wisconsin, or that she had never made love to a woman before in her life. They didn’t know that and wouldn’t have believed it anyway.
Beebo recognized quickly that she had to start acting the way she looked. She had established a mood of expectation about herself, and now it was time to come across. The music played on. It was Beebo’s turn.
The match she held was burning near her finger, and because she had to do something about it and all the eyes on her, she turned to the girl beside her and held out the match.
“Blow,” she said simply, and the girl, with a smile, blew.
Beebo returned the smile. “Well,” she said in her low voice, which somehow carried even into the back room and the dance floor, “I’m damned if I’m going to waste a good quarter.” She got up and walked across the room toward the prettiest girl she could see, sitting at a table with her lover and two other couples. It was exactly the way she would have reacted to student-baiting at Juniper Hill High. The worse it got, the taller she walked. Her heart was beating so hard she wanted to squeeze it still. But she knew no one could hear it through her chest.
She stopped in front of the pretty girl and looked at her for a second in incredulous silence. Then she said quietly, “Will you dance with me, Mona?”
Mona Petry smiled at her. Nobody else in Greenwich Village would have flouted the social code that way: walked between two lovers and taken one away for a dance. Mona took a leisurely drag on her cigarette, letting her pleasure show in a faint smile. Then she stood up and said, “Yes. I will, Beebo.” Her lover threw Beebo a keen, hard look and then relapsed into a sullen stare.
Beebo and Mona walked to the floor single file, and Mona turned when she got clear of the tables, lifting her arms to be held. The movement was so easy and natural that it excited Beebo and made her bold—she who knew nothing about dancing. But she was not lacking in grace or rhythm. She took Mona in a rather prim embrace at first, and began to move her over the floor as the music directed.
Mona disturbed her by putting her head back and smiling up at her. At last she said, “How did you know my name?”
“Pete Pasquini told me,” Beebo said. “How did you know mine?”
“Same answer,” Mona laughed. “He gets around, doesn’t he?”
“So they say,” Beebo said.
“You mean you don’t know from personal experience?”
“Me?” Beebo stared at her. “Should I?”
Mona chuckled. “No, you shouldn’t,” she said.
“Did I—take you away from something over there?” Beebo said.
“From somebody,” Mona corrected her. “But it’s all right. She’s deadly dull. I’ve been waiting for you to come over.”
Beebo felt her face get warm. “I didn’t even see you until I stood up,” she said.
“I saw you,” Mona murmured. They danced a moment more, and Beebo pulled her closer, wondering if Mona could feel her heart, now bongoing under her ribs, or guess at the racing triumph in her veins.
“Did you ask Pete about me?” Mona prodded.
“A little,” Beebo admitted. And was surprised to find that the admission felt
