Beth looked down at her with a spellbound smile. “Laura,” she said, with her lips against Laura’s cheek, drifting over her face toward her lips. “I love you.” Laura’s arms tightened about her and brought her desire hot to the surface. Beth pulled her over to the couch and down beside her.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, completely, Laura had Beth again. Whatever the sorcery that won her, it was potent, and it lasted. A week passed and they made plans in secret to leave the house. Every night, in defiance of chance, they slept together in the room, and strangely enough, nobody noticed. Nobody barged in on them. Nobody suspected anything.
Beth laughed at their luck. “Wouldn’t you know,” she said. “We might as well be kicked out as leave by ourselves. Might even be more honorable. But as long as we don’t give a damn we’re perfectly safe. They’d never dream of anything amiss in this room. Lightning never strikes twice in the same place.”
Laura laughed with her.
Charlie was getting desperate. He called, and almost never spoke to Beth. When he did, she was brusque with him. He saw her at the Union, where she couldn’t escape him, and she gave him only a few cursory minutes in public. He tried to pick her up after classes and she ignored him or took refuge in the ladies’ room.
He was aching to explain, to talk, to hold her and to restore the love and logic to his world. Every time he saw her he felt a frantic need to touch her, to force her to listen. Nothing was sensible any more. He stopped her in the hall at the Union one day and said, “Beth, this has gone far enough. For God’s sake, talk to me.”
She eyed him coolly. “I have nothing to say to you, Charlie.”
“Well, I’ve got something to say to you.”
She folded her arms patiently. “All right,” she said.
“Here?” His voice was hard.
“This is as good as any place.”
He studied her for a minute in silence. “Not quite, Beth,” he said finally, and walked off and left her alone. It was the first time he had done it, and he caught Beth by surprise. She stared after him for a minute and then went down the hall in the opposite direction. Charlie went off tormented and angry, wild with impatience and doubt, afraid he might never reach her, never touch her again, and the idea made him half mad.
He went home to the empty apartment, poured himself a stiff drink, and threw himself into a chair. He fixed the wall with an angry stare while he finished the drink and poured another. And then he said to himself, Why? What the hell’s wrong with the girl? And then he said it out loud, as if he expected an answer from the listening wall: “What the hell is wrong with her?”
He stood up, glass in hand, and began to walk slowly up and down the room. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with her,” he told himself aloud. “She doesn’t want to see you.” He turned sharply around and demanded sarcastically, “Does that mean there’s something wrong with her?” He emptied his glass and then glared balefully at the wall, filling the glass again. “Be sensible, be sensible…” he admonished himself. “Okay, we’ll be sensible,” he said. “We’ll be logical. We’ll start with her family. Anything wrong there? No, she gets along fine with them.”
He fortified himself with a swallow. “Now,” he said. “Friends. First category: men. God, let’s see. Men.” He sat down suddenly. “Damn them,” he murmured. “God damn them all.” When she had told him about the others, he had taken it in stride. He had been full of her, warm and passionate and wildly in love. He had her in his arms, and she had made a brave and painful confession to him. It had stunned him, but he rallied. It was easy to forgive her; she loved him, she needed him, she hated the others as much as he did. But now, thinking of them, with Beth remote and icy, with the same room they had made love in cold and lonely and haunted with Bud and Emily’s sorrows as well as his own—he broke down, enraged.
“Oh, God,” he snarled through closed teeth, “send every one of those stinking bastards straight to hell.” His voice subsided to a whisper. “And as for her—as for her—” He drank a little more, and then dropped his head in his hands. “Make her love me,” he said in a broken voice. “Just make her love me.”
After a few minutes he straightened up again and refilled his glass. “Men,” he said softly. “I know she has no other men. I’d know that right away—Mary Lou would tell Mitch and he’d sure tell me.”
He drank. It was becoming rather difficult to pursue the logical approach. He tried to retrace his steps. “Family,” he muttered. “Friends. Men. Women.” He laughed a little and lifted his glass and then put it down again on the table. He shook his head to clear it. “God, how drunk am I?” he said, looking at the glass and then at the bottle. After a long pause he said it again, aloud but very quietly, “Women?” And then he took a long swallow. He stood up again and walked uncertainly around the room, pulling at his chin, rubbing his head, squinting with concentration. Finally he walked up to the wall and stopped, leaning against it. From months past came a hazy argument with Beth. He remembered gazing at her over the top of a diner table. He was saying, “I can tell when a person has a crush on me. Can’t you? Laura doesn’t.”
“Well, she does,” Beth had said.
She had said it several times, insisted on it. Charlie raised his clenched fists over his head, his whole body relying on the wall. “Laura?” he whispered, and the strength seemed to go out of him.
