“Because Mona Petry told you I was staying at home today.” Paula put a bite in her mouth as if it were a ball of cotton. There was little more said, and the silences between words became unbearable. They did not make love, they didn’t laugh. Beebo’s lapse of the previous night hung between them like a fog. She was almost too inhibited when it was time to go to kiss Paula. At last she leaned over and gave her a shy peck on the cheek. Paula accepted it with solemn dignity, but would not return it.
“May I see you tonight?” Beebo said.
“If you think you can put up with my mood.”
“I’m afraid the mood is my fault. Let me come over, please, Paula.”
Paula gave her a faint smile. “I won’t be very nice to you,” she said.
It was the first of many quiet cool nights, when Paula’s intense desire for Beebo, and Beebo’s unadmitted desire for Venus, kept them restrained and doubtful with each other.
Beebo picked Toby up the next day and spent the afternoon with him. He turned into a handy helper, carrying orders with her and keeping her busy with his talk. He was interested, as a child five years younger might have been, in the panorama of the city, especially the areas that were new to him. Though he lived there much of the time, he saw very little of New York.
He would fire a broadside of questions at Beebo and leave her wallowing in his wake, searching for answers, while he hurried on to set up the next bunch. Fortunately, it seemed more important to him to be able to ask than to get answers. Beebo didn’t want to disappoint him with her ignorance.
They became quite good friends in the following few weeks, and to Beebo’s surprise, they accomplished it without any sideline coaching from Venus. Venus, in fact, stayed out of sight, though she kept on ordering from Marie Pasquini. And Beebo, knowing, as Toby did not, that Venus was sacrificing her pleasure for his sake, was grateful to her.
Beebo dreaded facing her, even though it seemed inevitable sooner or later. And when it happened, Beebo foresaw her relationship with Paula going down the drain; her friendship with Toby smashed; and her self-respect, already dipping, destroyed completely.
It was something to be spared the encounter for a while. Everything in Beebo’s life felt very temporary and precarious to her. But at least she had a breathing space, a time to test her feelings before they were exposed to others.
Alone, she was miserable with the problems of where to live, who to live with, how to control her urgent new emotions. But with Toby, she forgot a little and studied his troubles instead. They kidded each other and they laughed a lot. And they talked. At first it was mostly about guns—Toby’s forte; or horses—Beebo’s. Boy talk. Getting-to-know-you talk. The necessary preliminaries to a heart-to-heart. And it did Beebo as much good as it did Toby.
When they first met, Toby had blurted some awkward and ugly things to Beebo about his life with Venus. He seized upon her empathy for him and used it brashly because for all he knew he would see her once and never again. And it might be years before somebody else came along who seemed able to understand it. It had to be someone Toby instinctively liked and respected or it wouldn’t ease his troubled young heart to bare it. So Beebo was special and he had grabbed her and said too much too fast.
So he back-pedaled into gun-talk, horse-talk, horseplay, and finally friendship, now that he could approach it more slowly. A little at a time, he unbent with her. He told her about the girls he knew in Bel-Air, California, where they lived when Venus was working in a film.
“I love it out there,” he said. “We have five horses. Leo rides with me. You’d love it. Say, maybe you could come out and take care of them for us. You know all about it from your dad. It’s too bad other girls are so square. You know, I took one riding once, and she was scared to death.”
“You just got the wrong one,” Beebo said. “Lots of girls like to ride.”
“Not the ones I know,” he said. “Or if they like to ride, they don’t like me.”
“You haven’t looked around enough.”
“It’s embarrassing,” Toby said. “The dumb ones can’t talk to you about anything. And if you find a decent one, you can’t talk to her. It’s awful.” He smiled ruefully while Beebo laughed at him, and then added, “Why can a guy talk to other guys but not to girls?”
“You talk to me,” she said.
“You’re different,” Toby said, with no inkling that he might have scraped a sore spot. He meant it as a compliment and she took it that way. “I don’t think I’ll ever love a girl, Beebo. You can’t trust them.”
“You think they’re all like your mother,” Beebo told him.
“They are.”
“No more than all men are the same.”
“According to my mother, all men are dirty dogs. That includes me. Sometimes I think the reason she named me Toby was because it makes me sound like an alley cat. Toby the Cat, and Leo the Lion. What a zoo she lives with. I wonder why she didn’t name me Fido. She treats me like a hound most of the time.”
“Hey, buddy,” Beebo said. “Maybe she’s mixed up but she’s still your mother. You know what we talked about that day when I was there? How much she loves you. She cried because you don’t believe her.”
Toby pressed his lips together, unwilling to concede a single virtue to Venus. “My name isn’t Bogardus,” he said finally. “It’s Henderson.”
“Your mother loves you, Toby Henderson.”
“My father lives in Chicago. Were you ever there? He runs a dairy processing plant in
