Ann had a date in town with her new love, Lee. She arranged with the
hall guard not to mark down the hour when she went out, for Petit
watched her ceaselessly. Petit knew that Ann was secretly seeing Lee,
and the poor woman’s eternally vigilant jealousy had become the newest
joke of the barracks. Petit questioned the guard, searched through the
register, and was even to be seen lurking in the entry hall, waiting for
Ann to come home. And during her lonely hours of vigil she drank at the
bar, offering rounds to the girls, and taking one or the other of us
into her confidence.
One evening as I was talking to Mickey, Petit got hold of us and
proposed that we come have a drink in a military canteen near Down
Street. It wouldn’t have been healthy for us to antagonize her, and so
we accepted, though Petit was generally known as a bore. And when Petit
was drinking she became more and more lugubrious, and her air of a
little old man became increasingly pathetic.
When Petit opened the door and we entered the canteen, all the soldiers
in the place turned their heads to gaze at us, with particular attention
to Mickey. They seemed to be sizing us up, wondering if the
lively-looking Mickey was in the clutches of the elderly _gousse_,
wondering, I suppose, whether I too belonged to that sect.
Mickey tried to give the men the eye, as though to reassure them that
she was a real woman; but Petit had installed herself directly in front
of us, at a little table, so there could be no side flirtation. Now
Petit began recounting her troubles with Ann.
“Yes, it’s horrible,” Mickey sympathized, with her English intonation,
and opening wide her large blue innocent eyes. Though she was intrigued
by someone like Claude, the love affairs of a real Lesbian like Petit
were a matter of complete indifference to Mickey.
It seemed to me that our indifference, the indifference of the “normal”
world, made the life of such women even more tragic. For they suffered
from their loves, like any other woman, but without the balm of sympathy
and understanding.
Petit went on with her grief. It seemed that the newcomer, Lee, had
acquired a complete dominance over Ann. Lee was very rich, Petit
complained, and showered Ann with gifts. When the three of them were
together, Ann and Lee behaved as though nothing at all were going on
between them. They took pains to turn away Petit’s suspicions. Tricky
lads, Petit said, but she knew the truth well enough. She knew that Ann
was being unfaithful to her. And Lee also, for that matter, for Petit
had gone to bed once or twice with the Englishwoman herself. But Petit
wasn’t going to permit herself to be treated that way. There was going
to be an explosion, they’d see! Ann belonged to her! And she went on
complaining, and then she began to grieve for her life at home in
France, where her two friends were waiting for her, two girls who had
always been faithful to her.
Petit knew, of course, that Mickey had made love with Claude, so she
addressed herself to Mickey, as to someone who was sure to understand.
But Mickey was obviously not listening.
I wondered what Mickey was thinking about. Probably she was letting her
mind roam over her years in the barracks, thinking about Claude, about
Max, about Robert and the other men, and then coming back to Petit, and
drifting from Petit to the Lesbians, and wondering about the soldiers
who were eying her, and remembering a theory of love that Claude had
once propounded to her.
Love, love, love—even what Petit was talking about was love, and my
mind, too, wandered on this all-absorbing subject. I was still like a
bystander at a carnival, watching people risking themselves on a
slippery revolving floor, whirling and bumping and sliding and falling
and half getting up and slipping again, and sprawling on the spinning
floor. Why did they have to do it?
“Come on, come on,” the people sprawling on the floor would cry,
laughing hysterically and beckoning to the timorous bystanders like me.
Indeed, Mickey had often given me the most meticulous explanations of
her love affairs, and of Claude’s theories on the subject. As Petit’s
monotonous complaint continued, I recalled one of these explanations for
love between women.
In every woman, Claude had told Mickey, there is a need rarely satisfied
by men, a need for simply caressing, and she had described how one of
her women friends loved to caress the “neutral parts” of her body for
hours at a time. The neutral parts were the shoulders, the arms, the
throat, the back, the parts that men seemed to forget. The insatiable
desire for tenderness was felt most strongly in these neutral parts,
which were so rarely caressed. Men made love each in his fashion, more
or less expertly, according to Claude, and they were especially fond of
those things in women that were different from their own bodies. When
women made love with men, it was quite often with joy and passion, yet
there was almost always a feeling of deception. It was perhaps the
neutral parts that were disappointed, Claude had instructed Mickey. The
very body of woman seemed to complain, “I want your love over me, aside
from sex, aside from physical desire. I want the feel of your hand
filled with a fraternal affection, forgetting my sexuality, just resting
with pure friendliness on my arm.”
When she had made love with Claude, Mickey had said, there had been long
hours when no one was in a hurry, when it had seemed that the entire
night could pass without the necessity of reaching a final point, and
she had understood Claude’s meaning. This was love between women—to be
able to rest their heads together, to hold hands. The stroking of a
knee, the kissing of a shoulder—all this was part of love between two
women, and this in itself could often suffice.
Inexperienced as I was, I felt that I was becoming something of an
expert on love, matching the evidence offered by my friends, and I
wondered now whether love had the same meaning for Petit, whether with
her also love was a tenderness. And I wondered, almost with dismay,
whether all these physical things they talked about could really express
love. Sometimes when Mickey rattled on with her technical explanations I
felt a disgust growing in me, and had to warn myself that I must not let
this grow, or I might become like Paula, colorless, unlovely.
Now I was suddenly interrupted in my reflections; Petit’s voice had
paused, suspended. I heard Mickey say automatically, “Yes, of course.”
And Petit resumed.
I knew that Mickey did not believe herself to be a Lesbian, although a
sort of understanding had come into being between her and the _gousses_.
Mickey was voluble too about her experiences with men, comparing them
with her experiences with Claude. She had adopted Claude’s technical
explanation, that some women could experience only an exterior climax.
They were frigid within, and could never be satisfied by men. Claude
herself could experience a climax in both ways, and Mickey had
immediately declared that she possessed the same gift.
I wondered if it were so simple. Seated facing Petit, I kept thinking
how sad her life must be, how sad must be the life of Ann, of Lee, of
all these women. Their mournful eyes never laughed, even when their lips
laughed. They lived separately from the rest of the world, cloistered
among themselves, going out together, living together, going to Lesbian
night clubs together, and the only men with whom they had anything to do
were pederasts.
Petit was talking about her farm. It was strange how all of them, before
the war and in their postwar projects, were centered around this love of
the earth. Ann’s one dream was to install herself in the country and
raise horses. Lee had an estate in Scotland. Most of the others who
frequented our bar in Down Street also talked about their farms, or the
farms they were going to acquire.
Then I thought that Mickey’s explanation was altogether wrong. They were
simply more like men, these unfortunate women.
Petit ordered three fresh cups of tea with buns, since no alcohol was
served at the canteen. Then suddenly she looked at her wrist watch. She
got up precipitately.
“Ann should be getting in now. She hasn’t got a late pass. Come on,
we’ll see what she has to say!”
She rose, paid for all of us, and hurried out, glancing over her
shoulder to see if we were following. We arrived at the door of the
barracks at the same moment as Ann.
Petit left us to fall upon Ann. The two of them turned from the door and
went off down the street, talking. We watched the two women for an
instant, disappearing into the fog.
For once, even Mickey’s natural exuberance was smothered. We could not
help but feel a sort of sadness, growing heavier, a sentiment that there
was something rather unjust in Nature itself.
As we went into the dormitory, I realized that among all of the women in
our little group there was not one who was involved in what I had always
dreamed about, in childhood, as love. There seemed to be only frenzied
sexual adventures, promiscuity, or these sad, strange inversions. I
wondered unhappily whether such love could exist in our upset wartime
world, the plain, faithful love between one woman and one man. I thought
of Jacqueline and her passion for her captain, almost as a desperately
wanted token that such love was no childhood myth. I needed their love
to succeed.