looked at Beebo’s shoulder when she spoke.
“Thank you,” Beebo said, walking past her into the living room. “It’s
pretty cold outside.” She took off her jacket and handed it to Paula,
who hung it in her front closet.
“Will you have coffee?” Paula said.
“Thanks, that sounds good.” Beebo watched her curiously while the girl
busied herself in a small doorless kitchen. She had a delicately pretty
face, different from Mona’s slick good looks and more appealing to
Beebo.
Paula ran an uneasy hand through her hair and bit her underlip as she
stood by her stove, waiting for the water to boil. “Would you tell me,”
she asked timidly, “just what Mona told you?”
“I haven’t seen Mona for a week,” Beebo said. “A mutual acquaintance
told me she’d be here tonight.”
“Well, your mutual acquaintance has a queer sense of humor,” Paula said.
“Mona and I were never good friends. And lately we’ve been pretty good
enemies.”
“So that was it,” Beebo said. “That’s a hell of a note. I’m sorry, Miss
Ash, I—”
“Paula, please. Oh, it wasn’t your fault,” Paula said. “Mona has done
crazier things than meeting her new lovers in my living room. I’ve known
her almost five years.” She came back with two cups of hot coffee. She
still seemed half-conscious, and when she stumbled a bit, Beebo got up
and rescued the coffee.
Paula made a hissing sound of pain, pulling air between her teeth and
looking at her left thumb.
“Did you scald it? Here. Under the cold water, quick.” Beebo left the
steaming cups on an end table and took Paula by the arm to the sink. She
turned on the tap full force and held Paula’s burn under the healing
stream. Paula tried to pull away after a few seconds but Beebo held her
securely. “Give it a good minute,” she said.
And as they stood there, Beebo studied Paula at close range. She was a
lovely looking girl, even though she seemed non compos at the moment.
“Are you sick, Paula?” Beebo asked kindly.
“No, no. Really. I’m just terribly tired. And then I took some sleeping
pills. Probably too many. I haven’t been sleeping well.”
“If you’re so tired, why do you take sleeping pills?” Beebo asked.
Paula’s dainty face contracted around a private pain. “The doctor gave
them to me. It’s harder to sleep when you’re too tired than when you’re
just tired.” She weaved a little, and Beebo put an arm around her.
“Are you supposed to take so many they send you into a coma?”
“No. But one pill doesn’t work. Three or four don’t work any more. I
just keep swallowing them till I drop off.”
“That’s dangerous,” Beebo said. “One of these days you’ll drop too damn
far.” She turned the water off and reached for a paper towel, blotting
the injured hand gently. Suddenly, to her dismay, Paula pulled her hands
away and hid her face in them to cry. Beebo watched, frustrated with the
wish to touch and comfort her.
Paula’s sobs were short and hard, and she pulled herself together with a
stout effort of will. All Beebo could see for a moment was the top of
her head, covered with marvelous rich red hair. And, when she looked up,
a trail of pale freckles across her cheeks and nose. Beebo handed her a
tissue from her shirt pocket, and Paula blew her nose and wiped her
eyes.
She was a fragile, very feminine and small girl, wearing a pair of
outsized, plaid-print men’s pajamas.
Beebo took a bit of sleeve between her fingers with a smile. “You always
wear these?” she asked.
“Only lately. They aren’t mine. A former roommate left them behind when
she moved.”
“Oh,” Beebo said. “I didn’t think they were your type.”
“They’re not. They’re hers. And she’s gone, and this is all I have left
of her.” Paula shook out her smoldering curls and cleared her throat.
“I’m better now. Shall we have the coffee?” she said. It was obvious
that she had humiliated herself with the unplanned personal admissions,
and Beebo did her the courtesy of dropping the subject and joining her
in the living room.
They drank the coffee in preoccupied silence a while. Beebo lighted a
cigarette and offered it to Paula, who refused. Finally she said
lightly, hoping to cheer Paula up, “Seems to me those pajamas are the
answer to your insomnia.”
“What? How?” Paula looked at her as if suddenly remembering her presence
in a room where Paula had thought herself alone with a ghost.
“Switch to nighties—your own—and get some rest,” Beebo said. “If I had
to wear a plaid like that, I’d have nightmares all night.”
Paula smiled wanly. “I know,” she said. “They’re silly. I just needed
somebody else to say it, I guess. It’s hard to break away from a person
you’ve been close to. You hang on to the stupidest things.”
“Well, her old sleep gear won’t bring her any closer,” Beebo said. She
pulled a sleeve out full length. “Did she play basketball?” Beebo said,
and they both laughed.
“She wasn’t a shorty,” Paula admitted. Her laughter made her wonderfully
pretty. She stopped it suddenly to say, “That’s the first time I’ve
laughed in a month.” She gazed at Beebo with grateful astonishment.
“Looks like I got here just in time,” Beebo said, not realizing till
after she spoke what a hoary come-on that was. Paula’s pink blush
clarified things for her.
“I suppose you want to be getting home,” Paula said shyly, rising from
her chair. She was struck for the first time with Beebo’s size.
Stretched across the sofa, with her long legs thrusting out from under
the cocktail table, Beebo looked too big for a nine-by-twelve living
room.
To her surprise, Beebo found she didn’t want to be getting home at all;
not even to run interference between Jack and Pat. And thinking of Pat
brought a flash of recognition to her mind. “You remind me of a friend,”
she told Paula, sitting up to scrutinize her. “A boy named Pat. A
lovable thing. Shy and just a little childish. In the nice way, I mean.”
“I remind you of a _boy_?” Paula stared.
“More of a child than a boy.”
Paula didn’t know quite how to take it. “In the nice way?”
“Yes. Trusting, affectionate. Still curious about people and life. It’s
a very—endearing quality.”
“And you think _I’m_ like that?” Paula asked.
“You obviously don’t,” Beebo chuckled.
“I’ve been told I’m nasty and spoiled and selfish ... childish in the
bad way.”
“Who told you that? Your friend with the plaid pajamas?”
“Yes.”
“If you were that way with her, she must have done something to deserve
it. You look like a natural-born angel to me,” Beebo said, surprising
them both with her frankness.
“That’s a very nice thing for a stranger to say,” Paula said. “Thank
you.”
“My pleasure,” Beebo said, blanketing her sudden confusion with an
offhand nod.
There was a pensive pause while Beebo tried to remember the books she
had read about Lesbian love. It wasn’t always a question of sweeping
girls off their feet and carrying them away to bed, as Mona had made it
seem at first. How did you approach a sensitive, well-bred girl like
this one? Mow her down with kisses? Certainly not.
Beebo began to wonder how to make herself welcome for the night. It
seemed far better than going back to Jack’s and stewing again until dawn
about her future. She would be leaving Jack and Pat alone together all
night for the first time, and yet it seemed less painful now than it had
before. It would suffice Beebo if she and Paula did nothing but sit and
talk all night.
“I suppose somebody’s waiting for you?” Paula said.
“Nobody.”
Paula frowned at her. “Your roommate?” she asked.
“My roommate is having an affair with a man,” Beebo said and shocked
Paula, until Beebo smiled at her and made her think she was kidding.
“Well ... Mona?” she asked.
“Mona could be on the moon for all I know. I thought I’d find her here.”
“And now you’re disappointed,” Paula said diffidently.
“Not at all. I’m relieved.”
Paula drained her coffee cup and put it down with a nervous clink. “It
must be—awkward—if your roommate is really in love with somebody else,”
she said, in a voice so soft it was its own apology for speaking.
“It is,” Beebo said. “I hate to go home. I’m too long to sleep on the
damn sofa.”
“I’m afraid you’re too long for mine, too,” Paula said. There was a
pause. “But I could sleep on it and you could take my bed, if you will.”
It was such a completely disarming—almost quaint—invitation, that Beebo
smiled at her, prickling with temptation. Paula’s bashfulness was enough
to make Beebo self-assured.
“At least you’re not too long for the pajamas,” Paula said.
“I can’t put you out like that,” Beebo said.
Paula was flustered. She looked at her hands. “I don’t mind,” she said.
“It’s long and I’m short. We’re used to each other.”
“You and the sofa?” Beebo said, and stood up. She went to the closet and
found her jacket. You can’t take somebody’s bed away just because you
told a lie about sleeping on your own sofa. She pulled the jacket on and
zipped it.
“You’re a sweet girl, Paula,” she said, not looking at her. “Miss Plaid
Pajamas must be nuts. Find somebody who deserves you, and she’ll never
make you sleep alone on the sofa.”
She started for the door but Paula, recovering suddenly, jumped up and
put a restraining hand on her arm. Beebo turned around, a shiver of
sharp excitement radiating through her. She was not—she was _never_—as
sure of herself as she seemed.
“Beebo,” Paula said, whispering so that Beebo had to bend her head to
hear her. “I’d like you to stay. Make yourself welcome. Please.”
Beebo was afraid to believe her ears. It had seemed almost easy, in
retrospect, to storm the Colophon. She was not unaware that Mona was
something of a catch, and when she went over the events of that night,
she was satisfied at the way she had acted. Nobody, not Mona herself,
knew how inexperienced and uncertain Beebo was, and nothing she had done
gave her away. Unless it was her exuberance when Mona kissed her.
But now it seemed incredible that this exquisite stranger should reach
out for her from the middle of nowhere. “Paula,” she said, “I think
we’re both just lonely. I think it would be best if I go. You don’t want
to wake up tomorrow and hate yourself.” She was still hedging about the
ultimate test with a girl.
“I _was_ lonely. I will be again if you go.”
“Maybe you’d be better off lonely than sorry.”
“Beebo, do I have to beg you?” Paula pleaded, her voice coming up
stronger with her emotion.
Beebo reached for her in one instinctive motion, suddenly very warm
inside her jacket. “No, Paula, you don’t have to beg me to do anything.
Just ask me.”
“I did. And you didn’t want to stay.”
“I didn’t want to scare you. I didn’t understand.”
“I thought it was Mona. She can make herself so—so tempting.”
“I can’t even remember what she looks like.”
“Aren’t you in love with her?”
Beebo’s hands, with a will of their own, closed around Paula’s warm slim
arms. “I met her last week for the first time. You can’t be in love with
someone you just met.”
“You can’t?” Paula demurred cautiously, looking down at her big pajamas.
“I never was,” Beebo said, feeling sweat break out on her forehead. She
pulled gently on Paula and was almost dismayed when Paula moved docilely
toward her. Beebo became feverishly aware that the plaid pajamas did not
conceal all of Paula Ash. The sweeping curve of her breasts held the
cotton top out far enough to brush Beebo’s chest with a feather touch.
Beebo felt it through the layers of her clothes with a tremor so hard
and real it tumbled eighteen years of daydreams out of her head.
She held Paula at arm’s length a moment, looking at this lovely little
redheaded princess with a mixture of misgivings and want too powerful to
pretend away. Paula took her hands and held them with quivering
strength, returning Beebo’s gaze. Beebo saw her own doubts reflected in
Paula’s eyes. But she saw desire there, too; desire so big that it had
to be brave: it hadn’t any place to hide.
Paula kissed Beebo’s hands with a quick press of her mouth that
electrified Beebo. She stood there while Paula kissed them over and over
again and a passionate frenzy mounted in them both. Paula’s lips, at
first so chaste, almost reverent, warmed against Beebo’s palms ... and
then her kitten-tongue slipped between Beebo’s fingers and over the
backs of her broad hands until those hands trembled perceptibly and
Paula stopped, clutching them to her face.
Beebo reclaimed them, but only to caress Paula’s face, bringing it close
to her and seeing it with amazement.
“I never guessed I’d feel love for the first time through my hands,” she
murmured. “Paula, Paula, I would have done this all wrong if you hadn’t
had the guts to start it for me. I would have manhandled you, I—”
Paula stilled her with a finger over Beebo’s mouth. “Don’t talk now,”
she said.
And Beebo, who had never done more than dream before, slipped her arms
around Paula and pulled her tight. It was a marvel the way their bodies
fitted together; the way Paula’s head tipped back naturally at so
beckoning an angle, and rested on Beebo’s arm; the way her eyes closed
and her lips parted and her hair scattered like garnet petals around her
flower-face.
Beebo kissed her mouth and kissed her mouth again, holding her against
the wall with the pressure of her body. Paula submitted with a sort of
wistful abandonment. Everywhere Beebo touched this sweet girl, she found
thrilling surprises. And Paula, coming to life beneath Beebo’s searching
hands, found them with her.
It was no news to Beebo that she was tall and strong and male-inclined.
But her voluptuous reaction to Paula shocked her speechless. Paula began
to undress her and Beebo felt herself half-fainting backwards on the
sofa into a whirlpool of sensual delight. The merest touch, the merest
flutter of a finger, and Beebo went under, hearing her own moans like
the whistle of a distant wind. Paula had only to undo a belt buckle or
pull off a shoe, and Beebo responded with a beautiful helpless fury of
desire.
It was no longer a question of proceeding with caution, of “learning
how.” The whole night passed like an ecstatic dream, punctuated with a
few dead-asleep time-outs, when they were both too exhausted to move,
even to make themselves comfortable.
Beebo had only a vague idea of what she was doing, beyond the
overwhelming fact that she was making ardent love to Paula. She seemed
to have no mind at all, nor need of one. She was aware only that Paula
was beautiful, she was gay, she was warmly loving, and she was there in
Beebo’s arms: fragrant and soft and auburn-topped as a bouquet of tiger
lilies.
Beebo couldn’t let her go. And when fatigue forced her to stop she would
pull Paula close and stroke her, her heavy breath stirring Paula’s
glowing hair, and think about all the girls she had wanted and been
denied. She was making up, this night, for every last one of them.
Paula whispered, “Do you still believe you can’t love someone you just
met?”
“I don’t know what I believe any more.”
And Paula said, “I love you, Beebo. Do you believe that?”
Beebo lifted Paula’s fine face and covered it with kisses while Paula
kept repeating, “I love you, I love you,” until the words—the unadorned
words—brought Beebo crashing to a climax, rolling over on Paula,
embracing her with those long strong legs.
She felt Paula sobbing in the early dawn and raised up on an elbow to
look at her. “Darling, did I hurt you?” she asked anxiously, not
stopping to think that she had never called a girl “darling” before,
either.
“No,” Paula said. “It’s just—I’ve been so unhappy, so confused. I
thought the world had ended a month ago, and tonight it’s just
beginning. It’s brand new. I’m so happy it scares me.”
Beebo held her tenderly and brushed the tears off her cheeks. Paula put
her head in the crook of Beebo’s arm and gazed at her. “You must have
been born making love, Beebo.”
“How do you know?” Beebo had no intention of setting the record straight
just then.
“I don’t, really. It’s just that I never reacted to anybody the way I
have to you. I never did this with anybody before.”
“Never made love?” Beebo said, surprised almost into laughter. _The
blind leading the blind_, she thought.
“No, I’ve made love before,” Paula said thoughtfully. “With men, too.
It’s just that I never.... You’ll think I’m making this up, but it’s the
truth. I never—oh, God help me, I’m frigid. I mean, I was, till
tonight.”
Beebo lay there in the dark, holding her, torn between the wish to
accept it and the suspicion that she was fibbing.
“You don’t believe me,” Paula said resignedly. “I shouldn’t have told
you. It’s enough that it happened.”
Beebo petted her, smoothing her hair and letting her hands glide over
Paula’s silky body. “Okay, you never came before,” she said. “Now I’ll
tell you a fish story. I never made love before.”
Paula laughed good-naturedly. “All right, we’re even,” she said. “That’s
a real whopper. Mine was the truth.”
Beebo laughed with her, and it didn’t matter any more whether she had
been lied to or not. It was the truth in spirit, and only Paula knew if
it was the truth in fact. Her attraction to Beebo was so real that it
took shape in the night, surrounding her like the aura of her perfume.
Beebo kissed her while she was still laughing. “You have such a mouth,
Paula. Such a mouth....”
“Does it please you?”
“You please me. All of you,” Beebo said, and she meant it. Paula was
wholly feminine, soft and submissive. She was finely constructed,
looking somehow as breakable, as valuable—and as durable—as Limoges
china. Beebo wanted to protect her, accomplish things for her.
She kept touching her admiringly. “You’re so tiny,” she said. “I’m going
to feed you lasagna and put some meat on your bones.”
“Will you buy me a new wardrobe when I get too fat for my old one?”
“I’ll buy you anything. Mink coats. Meals at the Ritz. New York City,”
Beebo said.
“All of it?”
“Just the good parts.”
Paula clutched at her suddenly, first laughing, then trembling. “Beebo,
don’t leave me,” she said. “I do love you.” She seemed dumbfounded. “It
frightens me, it makes me believe all over again in my childhood dreams.
Did you ever feel like that?”
“Only on the bad days. My childhood wasn’t that pretty,” Beebo said.
“When are the bad days?”
“Never any more. Not with Paula around.”
* * * * *
They got up at noon the next day, and it was some time before Beebo
could think rationally about her job. She should call Marie, she should
call Jack and tell him where she was. But it was impossible to get out
of the bed while Paula was in it. And every time Paula sat up, Beebo
pulled her down.
“Let me make breakfast,” Paula smiled, and after wrestling a moment,
pulled free and scampered halfway across the bedroom, pulling a sheet
after her. She stood with her dazzling naked back, delicately sugared
with freckles, to Beebo, who admired it in infatuated silence.
Paula ruffled through her closet looking for a negligee until Beebo
said, “Paula, are you in love with me or that sheet?”
“I don’t want you to see me,” Paula confessed. “You said I was too
thin.”
“I said ‘tiny.’ And beautiful. Honey, I felt you all over; I know you
with my hands. Would it be so awful if I know you with my eyes, too?”
When Paula hesitated, Beebo threw the covers off and stood by the bed.
Paula studied her in silence. “You’re wonderful,” she breathed at last.
“I’m homely,” Beebo answered. “But I’m not ashamed of it.”
“You are many things, Beebo, but homely isn’t one of them,” Paula
declared. She faced Beebo sheet-first, like a highborn Roman girl in her
wedding chiton. “How many girls have admired you like this?”
“Never a one,” Beebo said. She crossed the room toward Paula and saw her
flinch. “Are you afraid of me?” she said, surprised.
“A little.”
“No, Paula.” Beebo reached her, touching her with gentle hands. “I’d
never hurt you. Don’t you know that?”
“Not with your hands, maybe,” Paula said, bending her graceful neck to
kiss one. “But I’m so in love ... it would take so little. And scores of
other girls must want you, Beebo. It would hurt me awfully if you ever
wanted _them_.”
“What girls?” Beebo scoffed.
“Well, for a starter—Mona.”
“Paula, I kissed Mona twice. She stood me up twice. That’s the end of
that,” Beebo said flatly. Abruptly, she pulled Paula’s sheet off and
gazed delightedly on the fresh fair curves beneath. And before Paula had
time to blush, Beebo picked her up, grateful at last for the uncomely
strength in her arms, and placed her on the bed.
“Beebo,” Paula whispered, her arms locked tightly around Beebo’s neck.
“How old are you?”
Beebo couldn’t blurt idiotically, “Eighteen.” Instead she asked, “How
old do I look?”
“Like a college kid,” Paula sighed. “Which makes me older than you. I’m
twenty-five, Beebo.”
“An ancient ruin.” Beebo kissed her nonchalantly, but she was secretly
surprised. Nonetheless it pleased her to have won an older girl.
They made love again, lazily now. There was no wild rush, no fear on
Beebo’s part that it would hurt and disillusion her. They rolled in
caresses like millionaires in blue chips ... ran their fingers over each
other, and kissed and tickled and laughed and blew in each other’s ears.
And all the while Paula kept repeating, with the transparent affection
that is the crown of femininity, “I love you, Beebo. I love you so
much.”
Beebo couldn’t answer. She couldn’t have been happier, or hotter, or
more rapturously charmed with the girl. She could hardly believe she had
found one so lovely, so generous, so responsive, so single.
But there was a lot of roaming restless curiosity in Beebo, and while
she was willing and eager to make love to and romanticize Paula, she was
not willing to fall in love with her.
It wasn’t Paula’s fault, though Paula, with a woman’s quick awareness of
emotions, sensed the situation. It was just that Beebo wasn’t ready for
it. Paula had come too early in Beebo’s life. And that fact alone made
Paula realize how young Beebo must be.
Beebo had caught Paula in a vulnerable state, on the rebound from an
unhappy love affair with the girl in the plaid pajamas. But it was the
culmination of a lot of bad affairs with both sexes that had left Paula
drained and skeptical; hopeless about her future and unable to cope with
her present. She had nearly taken the whole bottle of sleeping pills the
night before, instead of the four that knocked her out.
Beebo was too good to be true, too young to know herself, too masculine
to be faithful. But how strong she was, how sensual and sure; in some
ways, wise beyond her years with that hard-won maturity Jack had
perceived months before.
Paula tried to tell herself, as she lay in Beebo’s embrace, that she had
nothing more than a hot crush that would end as suddenly as it began,
and make her laugh to think she had called it love. She wanted very much
to believe it, because it would have spared her the pain of losing Beebo
Brinker to another girl—a pain she was in no condition to take safely
then.
* * * * *
They ate together in Paula’s kitchen, and Paula obligingly sat on
Beebo’s lap and let Beebo feed her. They were enchanted with each other.
It was the kind of day everybody ought to have once in a while; if you
knew it was coming, you could bear the boredom and solitude in the
interim.
Paula told Beebo about her young years in Washington, D.C., and the
shock that accompanied her suspicions that she was a Lesbian. Because it
was Paula speaking, and because Beebo had never talked heart-to-heart
with another Lesbian, the story seemed remarkable. She held Paula on her
knees, answering with sympathy and affection, troubled and touched by it
... and stirred by the warmth of Paula’s close, firm bottom.
* * * * *
They were startled when the phone cut in on them late in the afternoon.
Paula answered it over Beebo’s protests. “Hello?” she said, and as she
listened her eyes went to Beebo in surprise. Finally she held out the
receiver. “It’s for you,” she said. “Jack Mann.”
Beebo stood up, concerned. “How did he know I was here?”
“You’re his roommate, he says. Roommates ought to keep track of each
other,” Paula said, teasing but with just a trace of chill in her voice.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were straight, Beebo?”
Beebo took the phone with a comical grimace. “You would have guessed,
anyway,” she said. “Hey—do you know Jack?”
“Everybody knows Jack,” said Paula.
Into the receiver Beebo said, “Jackson?”
“I hear you’ve been out stupefying the female population of Greenwich
Village,” Jack said. “You must have something. Paula’s usually a deep
freeze.”
“How did you know I was here?” Beebo said.