basement bar saturated with pink light, paneled with mirrors, and filled
with girls. More girls, more sizes, types, and ages, than Beebo had ever
seen collected together in one place. The place was called the Colophon
and it was decorated with the emblems of various famous publishing
houses.
Jack fought his way through the crush at the bar, absorbing a lot of
pointed merriment directed at his masculinity.
“Sour grapes,” he cried good-naturedly and inspired a chorus of laughter
and catcalls. Beebo, pushing in behind him, became aware suddenly that
she was the object of mass curiosity. She could look over the heads of
most of the girls and her height made her visible from all directions.
Abashed, she closed in on Jack, who was hollering an order to the
bartender. “Maybe we ought to go. I—I mean—” She didn’t know how to
explain herself to him. He was looking at her with a startled frown.
“They don’t seem to like having a man in here,” she said lamely.
Jack began to laugh. “You want me to go, honey? Okay. Just give me two
bits to see a movie.”
She gasped. “That’s not what I meant!” she objected. “I don’t want to be
in here alone!”
“Why not?” He reached between two girls at the bar to grab his beer.
“You’ll make out. I might cramp your style.”
“Jack, damn it, if you go, _I_ go.”
“Okay, pal, I won’t ditch you,” he said, glimpsing her anxious face.
“Relax. We’ll have one more and then cut out.”
She had had quite a bit of beer already, even with Jack finishing them
for her. But she couldn’t stand there with all those eyes on her and do
nothing. Better to drink a beer than gape back at the gapers. She poured
some into her glass and drank it. And then drained the glass and poured
some more.
Jack took her elbow. “I see some friends over there,” he said, guiding
her toward a table near the back. There were introductions all around,
but to Beebo, things seemed different. The other bars had been all male
or mixed. In this one, Jack Mann and the two bartenders, and a small
scattering of “Johns,” were the only men in a big room solidly packed
with women. It excited Beebo intensely—all that femininity. She was
silent, studying the girls at the table while Jack talked with them.
When she shook hands with them, a new feeling gripped her. For the first
time in her life she was proud of her size, proud of her strength, even
proud of her oddly boyish face. She could see interest, even admiration
on the faces of many of the girls. She was not used to that kind of
reaction in people, and it exhilarated her. But she didn’t talk much,
only answering direct questions when she had to; smiling at them when
they smiled at her; looking away in confusion when one or another tried
to stare her down.
They had been there half an hour when somebody came over from another
table and asked her to dance. Beebo turned around, her stomach in a
knot. “Are they dancing?” she asked.
“Sure,” said the girl. “By the jukebox.”
Beebo had heard music without looking to see where it came from. She got
up from the table and went to the back room, realizing as she stood up
how much beer she had drunk. At the back of the crowd surrounding the
dance floor, there was room to stand and watch.
The music was rhythmic and popular. The floor was jammed with a mass of
couples ... a mass of girls, dancing, arms locked around each other,
bodies pressed close and warm. Their cheeks were touching. Quick light
kisses were exchanged. And they were all girls, every one of them: young
and lovely and infatuated with each other. They touched one another with
gentle caresses, they kissed, they smiled and laughed and whispered
while they turned and moved together.
There was no shame, no shock, no self-consciousness about it at all.
They were enjoying themselves. They were having fun in the most natural
way imaginable. They were all in love, or so it seemed. They were—what
did Jack call it?—gay.
Beebo watched them for less than a minute, all told; but a minute that
was transfixed like a living picture in her mind for the rest of her
life. She was startled by it, afraid of it. And yet so passionately
moved that she caught her breath and held it till her heart began to
pound in protest. Her fists closed hard with the nails biting into her
palms and she was obsessed momentarily by the desire to grab the girl
nearest her and kiss her.
At that point she murmured, “Oh, God!” and turned to flee. She felt the
way she had in childhood dreams when she was being chased by some vague
terrible menace, and she had to move slowly and tortuously, with great
effort, as through a wall of water, while the monster gained on her from
behind.
She caught Jack’s shoulders in her big hands and squeezed them hard.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” she said urgently.
He looked at her as if she had lost her senses. “I just ordered another
round,” he said.
“Jack, please!” She pulled him to his feet.
“Jesus, can’t you wait a little while, honey?” he said, and triggered an
outburst of merriment at the table. But she meant it, and he was not too
high to see her panic. He picked his jacket off the back of his chair,
apologizing to his friends. “When she wants it, she wants it now,” he
grinned, shrugging.
“Who are you kidding?” they laughed.
Beebo was already pushing her way to the exit and Jack had a battle to
catch her. He found her waiting for him outside by the door.
“Hey,” he said, and put a friendly hand on her shoulder as they started
to walk toward his apartment. “What happened?”
“I don’t want to go back there, Jack,” she blurted.
“What’s the matter with it? Too much fun?”
“It was awful,” she said, not even knowing why she said it.
“You liked the other places.”
She wouldn’t answer, only striding along so fast in her haste to leave
the Colophon behind that Jack had to run to keep up.
“Was it the dancing?” he said.
She whirled to answer him, her face flushed with emotion. “I suppose
you’ve seen it so many times you think nothing of it,” she cried. “Well,
it’s—it’s _wrong_!”
“Who the hell do you think you are to call it wrong?” Jack demanded.
“Those are damn nice girls. If they want to dance with each other, let
them dance. You don’t have to watch.”
Beebo listened, her anger fading, to be replaced by a fearful desire.
“Did it make you feel ... that way, Beebo?” he said gently.
“It made me feel....” She turned away, unable to face him. “Funny
inside. As if it was wrong. Or too right. I don’t know.”
“It’s not wrong, pal,” he said, speaking to her back. “You’ve been
brought up to think so. Most of us have. But who are they hurting?
Nobody. They’re just making each other happy. And you want their heads
to roll because it makes you feel funny.”
She covered her face with her hands and rubbed her eyes roughly. Through
her fingers she said, “I don’t want to hurt them. I just don’t want to
stand there and watch them.”
“Well, why didn’t you dance?” he said. “Hell, I don’t like being a
wallflower, either.”
“Jack, I can’t dance like that,” she said in a hushed voice.
“Why can’t you?” She refused to answer, so he answered for her. “You
can. You just won’t. But you know something, my little friend? One of
these days, you will.”
“You’re no prophet, Jack. Don’t predict _my_ future.” She started
walking again.
He followed her, throwing up his hands. “Okay, okay. It shook you. But
not because it was vulgar and indecent. Because it was beautiful and
exciting. Besides, you envied those kids on the dance floor. Didn’t
you?”
Her confession never came. They walked in silence the rest of the way to
Jack’s apartment. He closed and locked the front door and turned on the
living room light, tossing his jacket into a chair.
“Beebo,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “You’ve been living with me
almost a month now—”
“If you want me to move, I’ll move.” She was surly and defensive.
“I want you to stay. When you move, it’ll be because you want to,” he
said. “Besides, that’s not what I want to talk about. In the past month,
you have never once told me the most important thing about yourself,
Beebo.”
She felt a flash of fear, piercing as sudden light in darkness. “I don’t
know what you mean,” she said.
Jack gave her the freshly lighted cigarette and she hid gratefully
behind a smoke screen. “You know,” he said. “But I’m not going to insist
on it. I think you want to talk to me, but you’re afraid. I’m trying
every way I know to show you that it won’t offend me, Beebo. You think
about that. You think about the people who are my friends—people I enjoy
and respect—and then you ask yourself what you have to fear.”
There was a long pause. At last she said, “It isn’t that easy, Jack. I
should know what I am. But I don’t know myself at all. Especially here
in this new place. Back in Juniper Hill, I could only see what other
people saw, and I was afraid and ashamed. But here, I look all
different. I even feel different.” She looked at her hands. “Don’t push
me, Jackson.” And she rushed past him suddenly, to cry in the privacy of
the bathroom; to wonder why the girls she had seen that night had moved
her so dramatically.
* * * * *
She did not fall asleep until very late. And when she did, she dreamed
of sweet, supple, smiling-faced girls, dancing sensuously in each
other’s arms; glancing at her with wide curious eyes; beckoning to her.
She saw herself glide slowly, almost reluctantly, over the floor with a
girl whose long black hair hung halfway down her back; a girl with an
old-fashioned name: Mona. Beebo touched the hair, the long dipping curve
of the back till her hands rested on Mona’s hips.
The next thing she knew, Jack was shaking her awake. “Wake up! Jesus!”
he said, grinning at her in the early light. “You’re beating hell out of
the mattress.”
Her eyes flew wide open and she stared at him, stuttering.
“Funny thing about dreams,” he said softly. “They let you be yourself in
the dark. When you can be yourself in the morning, too, you’ll be
cured.”
“Cured of what?” she said in a disgruntled whisper.
Jack chuckled. “Dreams,” he said. “You won’t need ’em.”
Beebo was relieved when he went back to sleep. There was no escaping now
what she was. The dancing lovers in the Colophon had impressed it
indelibly on her. And yet Jack wanted her to confirm it in so many
words, and the idea terrified her. It would be like accepting a label
for the rest of her life—a label she didn’t even understand yet.
And there was no one to tell her that the time would come when the label
wouldn’t frighten her; when she would be happy simply to be what she
was.
* * * * *
They went a while longer without discussing it. Jack was on the verge of
confronting Beebo a dozen times with his own homosexuality. But she
would catch the look in his eye and warn him with tacit signs to keep
still. He began to wonder if she understood about him at all. He had
tried to make it obvious the night they went barhopping. He wanted to
say to her, “Okay, I’m gay. But that doesn’t make me less human, less
moral, less _normal_ than other men. You’ve got the same bug, Beebo;
only with you, it’s girls. Look at me: I’m proof you can live with it.
You don’t need to hate yourself or the people you’re attracted to.”
But if she saw it she kept it to herself. _She’s too wrapped up in
discovering herself to discover me too_, he thought. He tried to kid
her. “You think it’s all right for the other girls but not for Beebo,”
he said, but she wouldn’t give him a smile. He felt stumped in front of
her stubborn silence; aching to help her, afraid of scaring her into an
emotional crack-up.
She was very tense. And then one evening, about a week after her night
out with Jack, over dinner she said, “Mona was in the shop again. I
talked to her.”
Jack looked up in surprise. “What about?”
“I asked if she was Mona Petry. She is.” She seemed afraid to elaborate.
“Is that all?” he smiled.
“You were right about her—she’s gay.” She looked up to catch the smile.
“Did she say so?” he asked.
“No, Pete said so after she left. He said he used to date her but he
dropped her when he found out.”
“Well, he’s got it backwards, but never mind. The point is, Mona’s a
slippery little bitch. She’s good to look at but she isn’t any fun.
She’s out to screw the whole damn world. If I were you—”
“Jackson, I don’t give a damn what you think of Mona Petry,” Beebo said.
“Then why bring her up?”
She colored, and put down a few more bites of the dinner they were
eating. Finally, slowly, with her face still pink, she said, “Do you
think it would be all right if I went out tonight? I mean—alone?”
“If you eat all your spinach.”
“I am asking you,” she said hotly, “because I value your judgment. Not
because I’m an addlepated child.”
“All right,” he said, smiling into his napkin. “Where do you want to
go?”
She looked at her plate. “The Colophon,” she said, making him strain to
hear it.
“Why? Want to drop a bomb on the dance floor?”
She sighed. “Pete says Mona hangs out there.”
“In that case, I don’t think it’s safe,” he said flatly. “But it should
be educational.”
She said, “Jack, I’m scared. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared of
anything in my life.”
“It’s no disgrace to be scared, Beebo. Only to act like it.”
“I feel as if that damn silly bar—the people in it—are a sort of
challenge,” she said, fumbling to express it justly. “As if I have to go
back or I’ll never know....” She shook her head with a self-conscious
smile. “That’s a hell of a place to go looking for yourself.”
“Hell of a place to go looking for Mona,” he said. “I don’t know though,
pal. It has to come sooner or later. It’s time you learned a thing or
two. You’re naive, but you’re no fool. Go on—but go slow.”
* * * * *
Mona was not at the Colophon that night, nor for many nights afterward.
In a way, Beebo was relieved. She wanted to meet her, but she wanted
time to meet other people too, to see other places, and cruise around
the Village without any pressure on her to prove things to herself. Or
to a worldly girl like Mona Petry. Beebo was still a stranger in a
strange town, unsure, and grateful for a chance to learn unobserved.
She would sit and gaze for hours at the girls in the bars or passing in
the streets. She wanted to talk to them, see what they were like. She
was often drawn to one enough to daydream about her, but she never
mentioned it to Jack. Still, she was eagerly curious about the Lesbian
mores and social codes. The gay girls seemed so smooth and easy with
each other; talking about shared experiences in a special slang, like
members of an exclusive sorority.
Beebo, watching them as the days and weeks passed, became slowly aware
how much she envied them. She wanted to join the in-group. And she would
watch them longingly and wonder if their talk was ever about her. It
was.
A few of Jack’s friends, who had met her in his company, would come up
and talk with her, and knowing for certain that they were Lesbians gave
Beebo a vibrant pleasure, whether or not the girls themselves were
exciting. Looking at one she would think, _She knows how it feels to
want what I want. I could make her happy. I know it._ Even the word
“Lesbian,” that had offended her before, began to sound wonderful in her
ears.
She shocked herself with such candid thoughts, but that was only at
first. Little by little, it began to seem beautiful to her that two
women could come together with passion and intelligence and make a life
with and for each other; make a marriage. She dreamed of lovely,
sophisticated women at her feet, aware even as she dreamed that she
hadn’t yet the _savoir faire_ to win such a woman. But she was afire
with ambition to acquire it.
She would walk into a bar, order a beer, and sit alone and silent
through an evening. In her solitude, she seemed mysterious to the
laughing chattering people around her. They began to point her out when
she came in.
At first, ignorance and inexperience kept Beebo aloof. But she quickly
understood that her refusal to be sociable made her the target of a lot
of smiling speculation. When she got over being afraid of the situation,
it amused her. The fact that she attracted girls, even ones she knew she
would never pursue, was almost supernaturally strange and exciting to
her. She submitted to their teasing questions with an enigmatic smile
until she realized that one or two had worked themselves up to
infatuation pitch over her.
There followed a period of elation when she walked into Julian’s or the
Cellar and saw the eyes she knew had waited all night to look into hers
turn and flash in her direction. She always passed them by and went to a
seat at the bar. But each time she came closer to stopping and answering
a smile or asking someone to join her in a beer. And still, she couldn’t
find Mona.
The only wrong note in the tune was a boy, slight and fine-featured, who
watched her and seemed to have persuaded himself that he loved her. He
fell for her with an awkward crush that embarrassed them both. Often, at
the end of an evening when he was pretty high, he would approach her and
timidly offer to buy her a drink.
Beebo kept turning him down, kindly but firmly. He always flinched when
she said no, and she pitied him. He had a gentle appealing face, fair in
the way of extreme youth. She guessed he must be a couple of years
younger than she, and wondered how he could buy drinks in a bar.
“I’m sorry, I’m just leaving,” she would tell him.
And he would watch her go, wistfully. He looked tired and malnourished,
and she wondered once if it would offend him to be offered a free
sandwich. She never quite got up the nerve to find out.
* * * * *
At home, Jack did not press her. But her silence regarding her
activities at night worried him and put a strain between them. She knew
that Jack was waiting for her to talk about it, and she wanted to be
honest with him more than ever. He had been patient, humorously tolerant
with her. And she knew that he was a man of the world. He had made it
clear that he enjoyed the friendship of many delightful gay women, that
he approved of them and that he thought she might enjoy their company.
But he had not said, “Oh, come on, Beebo. You’re gay. Admit it. We both
know it.” He had, however, come closer than she knew to saying it. And
it was hard for Jack himself to realize that his hints and jokes were
couched in a language still foreign to her in many ways. Often they went
over her head or were taken at face value; saved and worried over, but
never fathomed.
So she found herself hung up on a dilemma: she was sure of his
friendship as long as she was an observer of the gay scene, not a
sister-in-the-bonds. But what would he say if she told him she had a
desperate crush on Mona Petry with the long black hair? Or that she got
dizzy with the joy of being in a crowd of gay girls; near enough to
touch, to overhear, to look and look and look until they whirled through
her dreams at night.
Would he say, _You can play with the matches but don’t get burned?_
Would he pity her? Turn on his wit? Would he—could he—take it with the
easy calm he showed in other circumstances?
She thought he could. She felt closer to him now that she had spent
nearly two months under his roof. She knew his heart was big, and she
had seen him in a Lesbian bar talking with his friends there. He was not
being condescending. He valued them.
Perhaps more than anything, she was persuaded by the need to talk it
out; the need for help and comfort. And that was Jack’s forte.
* * * * *
Beebo and Jack were watching a TV show one evening when he asked her,
during the commercial, why she wasn’t going out that night. “Don’t tell
me you gave up on Mona,” he teased.
Instead of answering, she told him about the boy who was in love with
her. “His name is Pat,” she said. “The bartender told me. He looks
hungry, as if he needs to be cared for.” She laughed. “I was never much
for maternal instincts—but he seems to bring them out.”
“I’d like to meet him. He might bring mine out, too,” Jack said.
“Why don’t you come with me Friday? He’s always at Julian’s.”
Jack looked away. “I’ve been trying to give you a free rein,” he said.
“You don’t want me along. I’ll find him myself.”
“I do want you along,” she said. “I like your company.”
“More than the girls’?” he grinned.
She felt herself tense all over. There had been so many chances lately
to talk to him, and she had run away from them all. Now, she felt a
surge of defiance, a will to have it out. He had a right to know at
least as much about her as she knew about herself. He had earned it
through his generosity and affection.
“I read a book once,” she said clumsily. “Under my covers at night—when
I was fifteen. It was about two girls who loved each other. One of them
committed suicide. It hit me so hard I wanted to die, too. That’s about
as close as I’ve come to reality in my life, Jack. Until now.”
He leaned over and switched off the television. The room was so quiet
they could hear themselves breathing.
“I was kicked out of school,” she went on hesitantly, “because I looked
so much like a boy, they thought I must be acting like one. Chasing
girls. Molesting them. Everything I ever did to a girl, or wanted to do
or dreamed of doing, happened in my imagination. The trouble was,
everybody else in Juniper Hill had an imagination, too. And they had me
doing all these things for real.” She shut her eyes and tried to force
her heart to slow down, just by thinking about it.
“And you never did?” he said. “You never tried? There must have been
girls, Beebo—”
“There were, but all I had to do was talk to one and her name was mud. I
wouldn’t do that to anybody I cared for.”
Jack stared at her, wondering what geyser of emotion must be waiting to
erupt from someone so intense, so yearning, and so rigidly denied all
her life.
“My father tried to teach me not to hate myself because I looked like
hell in gingham frills,” she said. “But when you see people turn away
and laugh behind their hands.... It makes you wonder what you really
are.” She looked at him anxiously, and then she said it. “I’ve never
touched a girl I liked. Never made a pass or spoken a word of love to a
single living girl. Does that make me normal, Jack?... And yet I know I
could, and I think now I will, and God knows I want to desperately. Does
that make me gay?” She spoke rapidly, stopping abruptly as if her voice
had gone dead in her throat at the word “gay.”
“Well, first,” he said kindly, “you’re Beebo Brinker, human being. If
you _are_ gay, that’s second. Some girls like you are gay, some aren’t.
Your body is boyish, but there’s nothing _wrong_ with it.” His voice was
reassuring.
“Nothing, except there’s a boy inside it,” she said. “And he has to live
without all the masculine trimmings other boys take for granted. Jack,
long before I knew anything about sex, I knew I wanted to be tall and
strong and wear pants and ride horses and have a career ... and never
marry a man or learn to cook or raise babies. Never.”
“That’s still no proof you’re gay,” he said, going slowly, letting her
convince herself.
“I’m not even built like a girl. Girls are knock-elbowed and big-hipped.
They can’t throw or run or—look at my arm, Jack. I was the best pitcher
on the team whenever they let me play.” She rolled her sleeve back and
showed him a well-muscled arm, browned and veined and straight as a
boy’s.
“I see,” he murmured.
“It was the parents who gave me the worst of it,” she said. “The kids
weren’t too bad till I got to high school. But you know what happens
then. You get hairy and you get pimples and you have to start using a
deodorant.”
Jack laughed silently behind his cigarette.
“And the boys get big and hot and anxious, like a stallion servicing a
mare.”
Jack swallowed, feeling himself move. “And the girls?”
“The girls,” she sighed, “get round and soft and snippy.”
“And instead of round and soft, you got hot and anxious?”
“All of a sudden, I was Poison Ivy Brinker,” she confirmed. “Nobody
wanted whatever it was I had. My brother Jim said I wasn’t a boy and I
wasn’t a girl, and I had damn well better be one or the other or he’d
hound me out of school himself.”
“What did you do?”
“I tried to be like the rest. But not to please _that_ horse’s ass.” Her
farmer’s profanity tickled him. “I did it for Dad. He thought I was
adjusting pretty well, and that was his consolation. I never told him
how bad it was.”
“So now you want to find Mona Petry,” Jack said, after a small pause,
“and ask her if you’re gay.”
“Not _ask_ her. Just get to know her and see if it could happen. She
makes me wonder so ... Jack, what makes a feminine girl like that gay?
Why does she love other girls, when she’s just as womanly and perfumed
as the girl who goes for men? I used to think that all homosexual girls
were three-quarters boy.” She hung her head. “Like me, I guess. And that
they were all doomed to love feminine girls who could never love them
back. It seems like a miracle that a girl like Mona could love a—” she
stopped, embarrassed.