Pete at eight in the morning. She was somewhat intimidated by the looks
of him and by Jack’s thumb sketch of the night before. He was a
dour-faced young Italian-American with blue jowls and a down-turned
mouth. If he ever smiled—Beebo doubted it—he would have been almost
handsome, for his teeth were straight and white, and he had a peculiarly
sensual mouth beneath his plum-dark eyes. He looked mean and sexy—a
combination that instantly threw Beebo high on her guard.
“You’re Beebo?” he said, looking up at her with an order pad and pencil
poised in his hands.
“Yes,” she said. “Jack Mann sent me. I—he—said you needed a driver.”
He smirked a little. Probably his smile for the day, she thought.
“You’re as tall as I am,” he observed, as if pleased about it; pleased
at least to make her self-conscious about it.
“Would you like to see me drive? I’m a good driver,” she said
resentfully.
“How come you’re so tall, Beebo? Girls ain’t supposed to be so tall.” He
put the paper and pencil down and turned to look her over, leaning
jauntily on a linoleum-covered counter as he did so.
Beebo folded her arms over her chest in a gesture that told him to slow
down, back off; a very unfeminine gesture that ordinarily offended a
man’s ideals. “I can drive. You want a driver,” she said curtly. “Let’s
talk business.” She had learned long ago to stand her ground when
someone taunted her. Otherwise the taunting grew intolerable.
To her amazement, she made Pete Pasquini laugh. It was not a
reassuring sound. “You’re a feisty one, ain’t you?” he grinned.
“You—are—a—_feisty_—one.” He separated each word with slow relish,
enjoying her discomfiture. For though she stood tall and bold in front
of him, her hot face betrayed her embarrassment. She gave him a
withering look and then turned and strode toward the door till she heard
his voice behind her, accompanied by his footsteps.
“No offense, Beebo,” he said. “I’m gonna be your boss. I wanta be your
friend, too. I don’t want people workin’ for me don’t like me. Shake
hands?”
She turned around slowly, unconvinced. Maybe he really thought he was
ingratiating himself with her. But she didn’t like his method much. It
was the thought of her nearly empty wallet that finally prompted her to
offer him her hand. He took it with a rather light loose grasp,
surprising Beebo who was used to the hearty grip of the farmers in her
home county. But when he lifted her hand up and said, “Hey, that’s big,
too!” she snatched it away as if he had burned her.
“Okay, okay, all you got to do is drive, you don’t have to shake hands
with me all day,” he said, amused by her reaction. “I can see it ain’t
your favorite game.”
It seemed peculiar enough to Beebo that they shake hands at all. They
were not officially employer and employee yet, and even if they were,
they were still man and girl. It made her feel creepy. She assumed that
Pete had to get his wife’s approval before he could hire her. Marie was
supposed to run the business.
“Well, come on, I’ll show you where things is,” Pete said.
“You mean it’s settled?” She hesitated. “I’m hired?”
“Why not?” He turned back to look at her.
“Well, I thought your wife? I mean—?” She stopped, not wishing to anger
him. His face had turned very dark.
“My wife _what_?” he said. “You never mind my wife. If I say you’re
hired, you’re hired. I don’t want no back talk about the wife. You dig?”
She nodded, startled by the force of his spite. She made a mental note
not to press that sore spot again. He apparently needed and wanted the
money Marie’s succulent concoctions brought in, but he hated
surrendering control of the shop to her. Yet it was the price of their
success. She knew what she was doing, in the kitchen and in the
accounts, and he was afraid to interfere.
Beebo stood frowning at the sawdust floor.
“What’s the matter, kid? Something bugging you?” Pete asked.
She glanced up at him. It was strange that he should hire her on the
spot without the slightest idea if she could drive worth a damn. “Do you
want me to start deliveries this morning?” she said.
“I’ll take you around, show you the route,” he said. “First we got to
make up the orders.”
He walked toward the back of the store with Beebo behind him. “Mr.
Pasquini, there’s just one thing,” she said.
“It’s Pete. Yeah, what thing?” He handed her a large cardboard carton to
pack a grocery order in.
“How much will it pay?” Beebo asked, standing there with the box,
unwilling to start working till she knew what she was worth.
“Fifty a week to start,” he said, without looking up. He lifted some
bottled olive oil down from a nearby shelf. “Things work out good, I’ll
raise you. You want it, don’t you?” He looked at her then.
There was a barely noticeable pause before she answered, “I want it.”
But she spoke with a sliver of misgiving stuck in the back of her mind.
Pete accompanied her on the delivery route that morning and again in the
afternoon, watching her handle the truck, showing her where the
customers lived. She had spent the night before with Jack studying a map
of New York City and Greenwich Village, but what had seemed fairly
logical on paper bogged down in colorful confusion when she took to the
streets.
Pete swung an arm up on the seat behind her, his knees jutting toward
her legs, and now and then when she missed a direction he would grab the
wheel and start the turn for her. She disliked his closeness extremely,
and throughout the day she was aware of his eyes on her face and body.
It almost made her feel as if she had a figure, for the first time in
her life, and the idea shocked her.
Beebo had broad shoulders and hardly a hint of a bosom. No man had ever
looked at her appreciatively before, not even Jack Mann, who obviously
liked her and enjoyed her company. She was not sure whether Pete admired
her or was merely interested because she was so different from other
girls.
He can’t possibly like me, she thought. Not the way men like women. The
notion was so preposterous that it made her smile and reassured her.
Till Pete noticed the smile and said, “What’s so funny, kid?” He looked
too eager to know and she brushed it off. He let it go, but watched her
more attentively, making her squirm a little.
It was a relief to climb down from the truck that afternoon—and a blow
to feel the heavy clap of a masculine hand on her shoulder. “You did
real good, Beebo,” Pete said, and the hand lay there until she spun away
from him and walked inside to meet his wife.
Marie Pasquini was twenty-six, the overweight and overworked mother of
five little Pasquinis. She did most of the cooking while Pete’s mother
tended her kids, and the two women fell into several pan-rattling
arguments per day. Beebo could hear the soprano squeals of young
children upstairs in the apartment above the store, and a periodic
disciplinary squawk from Grandma Pasquini.
Marie greeted Beebo with a big smile, revealing the shadow of the pretty
face concealed beneath the fat.
“Your accent is French, isn’t it?” Beebo said.
“You got it,” Marie beamed. “Smart girl.” She moved about the kitchen
while they got acquainted, eating, working, and talking incessantly.
Pete slouched against the kitchen door chewing a wooden matchstick and
watching Beebo.
Marie worked hard and she ate hard and she was going all to hips. But
she was friendly and cheerful, and Beebo liked her.
“That’s a good boy, that Jack,” Marie said. “He comes in here two, three
times a week, buys my food. Tells his friends, ‘Eat Pasquini’s stuff,’
and by God, they eat.”
“He gave me some last night,” Beebo said. “It’s good.”
“You bet.” Marie stirred her sauce and glanced at Beebo. “You live with
him now?”
“Well—temporarily,” Beebo said, taken aback both by the question and by
Pete’s silent laughter.
“About time he got a girl,” Marie said briskly. “Even one in pants.” And
she glanced humorously at Beebo’s tan chinos.
Beebo colored up. “Well, it’s not quite like that,” she protested.
“Oh, don’t tell me,” Marie said, holding up two spattered hands. “A boy
and a girl ... well...!” and she gave a Gallic chuckle.
“What you want to do, embarrass the kid?” Pete demanded suddenly with
mock anger. “She don’t sleep with no lousy fag.”
“Shut that big mouth, Pete,” Marie said sharply, without bothering to
look at him. “She don’t want to hear dirty talk, neither.”
Beebo was burning to ask what a fag was, but she didn’t dare. She could
hear in her imagination the cackling it would provoke from Pete.
Marie stirred in silence for a moment. “I never saw a boy put up with so
much,” she said finally. “He got people in and out, in and out, every
damn day, eating him out of house and home.” Beebo squirmed guiltily.
“His only trouble, he got too big a heart. Don’t never take advantage of
him like the others, Beebo.”
“What others?”
“You don’t know?” Marie looked at her, puzzled.
“Well, I’ve only known Jack a little while. I mean—”
“Oh.” Marie nodded sagely. “Well, he got too many fair-weather friends.
Know they can have whatever he got they want. So they take. And he lets
them. Can’t stand to see people go without. He’s a good boy. Too good.”
“He ain’t all _that_ good, Marie,” Pete drawled, grinning at Beebo. “You
just like him because he comes in here and gives you that swishy talk
about what a good-looking dame you are. All that proves is, he got bad
eyes. Now, Beebo here might have trouble with him, you never know. If I
was her, I wouldn’t climb in his bed.”
“Pete, you got a mind even dirtier than your mouth,” Marie said. “Get
out of my kitchen, I don’t want the food dirtied up too. Out, _salaud_!”
Beebo was amused by her accent, comically mismated with the
ungrammatical English she had learned from Pete.
Marie threw a potlid at her husband. “See?” Pete shrugged at Beebo,
catching the lid. “I try to say a few words and what do I get? Pots and
pans. And she wonders why I go out at night.”
“Out!” Marie stamped her foot and he left them, disappearing bizarrely
like a wraith into the gloom of the darkened store. After nearly a full
minute had elapsed Beebo became aware with a silent start that the
fingers of his left hand were curled around the door frame: five
orphaned earthworms searching for the dirt.
Beebo stared at them with something very near loathing. She wondered if
she was supposed to see them, and if he thought they would please her
for some obscure reason. Or was he hiding, thinking the fingers out of
sight? No, he knew damn well she could see them, and would. They were
his gesture of invitation, unheard and unseen by his wife.
Beebo began to sweat with alarm and revulsion. She chatted determinedly
with Marie for almost fifteen minutes before those five pale fingers
retreated from their post. Maybe it was supposed to be a gag, Beebo told
herself. She didn’t want to mention it to Marie. It would make her look
a fool, perhaps even hysterical if the whole thing was only a joke.
That’s what it is, Beebo told herself firmly. That’s what it has to be.
She stood up and thanked Marie, accepting a bag of hot fresh-cooked
chicken to take home for dinner, and walked through the front of the
shop. She held herself together tightly, and if she had seen the least
movement, heard the least whisper, she would have lashed out in abrupt
terror. She had the uncanny feeling that Pete was somewhere waiting with
those loathsome hands. But she couldn’t see him, she didn’t hear him,
and she reached the door and the outside with a gasp of relief.
The relief was so deep that it turned into a laugh, soothing her and
making her a little ashamed of herself. Away from Pete she could scold
herself for her aversion to him. Maybe it wasn’t fair. He was just a
guy, not a ghost, not a snake. He was spooky, but Marie seemed as
healthy and normal as her good foods.
Beebo was disturbed by the strangeness of Pete’s manner, but she could
never believe that any man would truly desire her, no matter how creepy
he was. Not even a nut like Pete Pasquini. For his own reasons he was
making a study of her, but beyond that he would never go. She began to
feel safe and comfortable again as she rounded the corner to Jack’s
street. She felt unassailable in the fortress of her flat-chested,
muscular young body. It was not the stuff that male dreams are made of.
* * * * *
As Jack explained to her later, it was himself and others like him who
had talked the Pasquinis’ shop into a financial success. Rather
abruptly, Pete and Marie found themselves making money, and Pete, after
an adolescence full of alley wars and hock-shop heists, found himself
taking a belated interest in the dough: not the flour kind, the folding
kind.
He had married Marie overseas when he was in the service and brought her
back to his inheritance: the foundering grocery shop his father had left
him. Undismayed, Marie set out to bear his kids and learn his mother’s
recipes. By a combination of luck, sense, and skill, Marie pulled them
out of the dumps.
It was still nominally Pete’s business, yet he did little more than run
his wife’s errands and pocket all the money Marie would let him have. He
always demanded more, but he respected her French thrift. The money she
refused to give him went back into the business and made it possible for
him to insist on more gradually as time went on.
This arrangement galled Pete but he preferred it to poverty. Still, he
had to get even with her. So he did it by openly sniffing up skirts
around Greenwich Village. He would even flaunt a girl at Marie now and
then and she, stung, would call him half a man who played with other
girls because he didn’t have what it took to keep one good woman
satisfied. Or else she ignored him entirely, which enraged him.
It was not a quiet cozy family. Pete did not know or like his children
very well. He got on famously with his mother, but his mother and his
wife were lifelong enemies. Beebo began to learn about them as she
worked near them in the shop.
Pete watched Beebo move around during the first week, making her feel
clumsy as a young colt; getting in her way deliberately (she was sure)
to make her dodge around him; turning up in out-of-the-way corners where
she didn’t expect to see him. Her antipathy to him was lively, but
fortunately she didn’t see much of him. Filling orders took less time
than delivering them and she was out of the shop most of the day. In the
truck she was disposed to be pleased with her job. She liked to drive.
She liked to talk to people, and the customers were friendly. She even
liked the chore of carrying the heavy cartons up and down all day. It
pleased her to feel strong, equal to the task.
A week ago all her hopes had been crashing around her. She had retreated
in disgrace from a cruel predicament. Then she found Jack Mann, a
friend; a job, and some self-respect, one right after the other. She was
grateful, full of the resilient optimism of youth.
* * * * *
Without any specific words on the subject, Beebo and Jack came to an
understanding that she would live with him for a while, till she could
afford a place for herself. “You’ll be better off with a roommate,” Jack
advised her casually. “I’ll have to introduce you to some of my
upper-class female friends.”
“Sure,” she grinned. “‘Pamela, this is my lower-class female friend,
Beebo Brinker.’ And she’ll say, ‘Dahling, you’re absolutely crashing,
but I can’t possibly share my apartment with those pants.’” She made
Jack laugh at her. “Besides, Jackson,” Beebo added rather shyly, “I’ve
already got a roommate. He only has one fault—he won’t let me pay my
half of the rent.”
“I like to pay bills,” Jack said. “Gives me a sense of power.”
“Marie says you’ve got too big a heart,” Beebo told him. “And she’s
right.”
“Marie’s a good girl,” he said. “How are you getting along with Peter
the Wolf?”
“Fine, as long as he’s out of my sight.”
Jack grinned. “You can handle him, honey. Just keep a can of corn beef
in your pocket. If he tries to lift your wallet, clobber him.”
“It’s not my wallet I’m worried about,” she said. “There’s nothing in
it, anyway. It’s just that he’s always under my feet when he should be
on the other side of the store.”
“I suspect it’s for Marie’s benefit,” Jack said. “Every female who comes
into the store gets the once-over from Pete—provided Marie is looking.
And most of the time, she is. She likes to keep score, I guess.”
“There was a girl today,” Beebo said. “She came in the shop about noon,
when Marie was fixing lunch. I waited on her.” Her face became intent,
as she summoned the girl’s image in her mind’s eye.
“What about her?” Jack said curiously.
But Beebo, coming to herself at the sound of his voice, said, “Oh,
nothing. But she was more Pete’s type ... _any_ man’s type.”
“What was she like?”
“She had long black hair,” Beebo said, as if it were very special.
“People don’t let their hair grow like that any more. It was lovely. She
let it hang free down her back. And her face....” She was gone again,
seeing it in her imagination.
“She must have been a looker,” Jack said, frustrated by the reticence
between himself and Beebo. He knew what hundreds of questions she needed
to ask, what a wealth of help she would be wanting soon. But she didn’t
dare start asking and because she didn’t, Jack dared not force the
answers on her yet.
“She was absolutely gorgeous,” Beebo said with a certain wonderment and
innocence that touched him. “I never saw such a girl in my life before.”
There was a small silence. Beebo’s words hung in the air like a neon
sign and reduced her abruptly to confusion. To cover up, she said, “She
wasn’t a very nice girl, though. Not by your standards.”
“My standards?”
“She’s not afraid of boys,” Beebo grinned. “At least, she wasn’t afraid
of Pete. But I think they knew each other from somewhere. He called her
... Mona.” She spoke the name self-consciously. “It sounds
old-fashioned, doesn’t it?”
“I wonder if it’s Mona Petry,” Jack said. “She has black hair, but I
didn’t think it was that long. Still, I haven’t seen her for a while.”
“Who’s Mona Petry?” Beebo asked, her eyes intent on Jack.
“Old flame of Pete’s,” Jack said. “She used to come into the store a lot
three or four years ago. She and Pete got quite a charge out of putting
poor Marie on. Mona isn’t the charitable type. She likes to land a man
who belongs to some other woman—more to spite the other woman than
because she wants the man. As soon as she won Pete, she dumped him like
a sack of meal. For some reason, Pete never fought back. Makes me think
she really meant something to him. God knows, none of the other broads
do.”
“Is she one of those man-hungry girls that can’t get enough?” Beebo
said. “I forget what they’re called, but there’s a name for it.”
“The name is nymphomaniac,” Jack said. “But Mona doesn’t love men. She
just plays around with them. They’re good ego builders.” He lighted a
cigarette, seeing without seeming to, the concentration on Beebo’s face.
The question was there on her tongue, in her mind, but she couldn’t get
it out. _If Mona doesn’t love men_, she was thinking ... _then who_?
“There’s another word for Mona,” Jack said. Beebo tensed up. “Bitch.” He
threw her a grin and made her laugh with nervous relief. “Actually, Mona
loves girls,” Jack went on, speaking in a smooth casual flow, a
conversational tone that bespoke no shock, no disapproval, nothing but
ordinary interest. He deliberately looked at the front page of the
evening paper as he spoke.
Beebo answered huskily, “What do you mean? What girls?”
“Lesbians,” he said. “Want to freshen this up for me, pal?” He handed
her his highball glass. She took it with astonishment still plain on her
face. When she returned from the kitchen with the new drink, she asked
him, “Aren’t they sort of—_immoral_? I heard the word once before. I
thought you weren’t supposed to say it.”
At that, Jack looked up. “Lesbian? You mean you thought it was a dirty
word?” he exclaimed, and laughed in spite of himself. Beebo was
momentarily offended until he cleared his throat and said, “Forgive me,
honey, but that’s the bloodiest nonsense I’ve heard in a long time.
Whoever in the hell told you it was dirty?”
“Doesn’t it mean loose women?” Beebo asked.
He shook his head. “It means _gay_ women,” he said. “It means homosexual
women. It means women, Beebo, who love other women. The way heterosexual
women love men.”
His words put a focus on Beebo’s fascination. She stared at him from the
sofa with her lips parted and her eyes fixed steadily on his. “You said
Mona was a bitch,” she said finally, softly. “And then you said she was
a Lesbian. Doesn’t that make her cheap? Q.E.D.?”
“Some of the staunchest Puritan ladies I know are double-dyed bitches,”
Jack said briskly. “And just because Mona is a bad apple doesn’t mean
all the gay girls in the world are full of worms. Mona would be bitchy
anyway, gay _or_ straight.”
“What’s ‘straight’?”
“Heterosexual,” Jack said.
“Where did you learn all those words?” Beebo said, bewildered.
“I’m a native. I speak the lingo,” he said, but instead of catching his
implication, she thought he meant only that he lived in Greenwich
Village so long he had picked it up, like everyone else.
“Does it ever happen that a nice girl is a Lesbian?” she asked him
shyly.
“All the time,” he said, opening up the paper and gazing through the
ball scores.
“Did you ever meet any?”
“I’ve met most of them,” he chuckled. “They’re just as friendly and
pleasant as other girls. Why not?”
“But can’t you tell by looking at them that they’re—” She rubbed a hand
over her mouth as if to warn herself not to speak the word, and then
said it anyway: “—Lesbian?”
“You mean, do they all wear army boots and Levis?” Jack said with a
smile. “Does Mona Petry look like a buck private?”
Beebo shook her head. “That’s why it’s so hard to believe she’s what you
say she is.”
“Gay? Why hell, she’s slept with more girls than she has men. And let me
tell you, that’s damn near enough girls to elect a lady president.”
Beebo laughed with him, and yet she felt a strange obsession with the
whole idea. She half resented Jack’s merriment on the subject, although
she was relieved that he displayed no contempt for Lesbians as a group.
Only for Mona Petry. She was surprised to find herself wanting to defend
Mona, whom she knew so little. And yet she trusted Jack’s judgment.
Still, what a pity to think a girl that pretty was that hard.
Jack sipped his drink and picked up his cigarette, still with his eyes
on the paper. “There are some nice little gay bars around the
neighborhood,” he said. “We’ll have to take some of them in. Maybe this
weekend, hm?” He didn’t look at her. His cigarette waggled between his
lips as he talked.
“Is it all right to go there?” Beebo asked. “Don’t the police make raids
on those places?”
“Now and then!” he conceded. “Of course, if you’d rather not....”
“Oh, I’d like to go,” she said, so quickly that he smiled into the
newsprint. “But aren’t they just for men—the gay bars?”
“Men, girls, and everything in between,” he assured her.
“Do you ever go there, Jack?”
Again he was tempted to be honest with her, and still again he
restrained himself. “I go when the mood is on me,” he said. Beebo became
silent at once, as if she suspected she was trying to learn too much too
fast. But she spent the remaining weekdays waiting impatiently for a
tour of the bars with Jack.
* * * * *
Jack took her to three or four of his favorite places, and to one
strictly Lesbian bar where they admitted only the faces they recognized,
through a window in the door. Beebo followed him around quietly,
watching, listening, almost breathing in the atmosphere. She said
little, and most of what she did say was interrogatory.
Jack answered her calmly while he sipped one beer after another. He
would order one for her and let her work at it, but he usually ended up
finishing it himself. In every bar he was kept busy greeting people,
trading jokes, laughing. Beebo trailed along in his wake, smiling and
shaking hands with the strangers who were Jack’s friends, and promptly
forgetting their names.
But not their faces. Toward the end of the evening she began to feel
that she had seen more faces in one night than she had seen in a
lifetime in Juniper Hill. And these faces seemed different to her: rare
and beautiful, sharers of a special knowledge. They had bright eyes and
young smiles, no matter how old they were.
“They make a big thing of keeping young down here,” Jack told her. “The
men are worse than the girls. Nobody loves an old queen.”
It was almost one in the morning when they left the last co-ed bar and
Jack asked if she was game for one more. “This one is just for
Lesbians,” he said.