The following evening Laura got home rather early after seeing a show with Sarah. She rode home on the subway with a dirty gray little man, repulsively anxious to be friendly. He kept saying, “I see you’re not married. You must be very careful in the big city.” And laughed nervously. Laura turned away. “You mustn’t ignore me, I’m only trying to help,” he whined. He babbled at her about young lambs in a den of wolves until she got off. He got off with her, still talking.
Laura wasn’t afraid—just mad. She turned suddenly on the little gray man at the subway entrance and said, “Leave me alone or I’ll call the police.”
He smiled apologetically and began to mumble. Laura’s eyes narrowed and she turned away contemptuously, walking with a sure swift gait that soon discouraged him. Something proud and cold in her unmanned him. At last he stopped following and stood gaping after her. She never looked back.
Laura arrived home, her cheeks warm with the quick walk and with the victory over the little man. God, if I could do that to my father! she thought wistfully. She walked up the flight of stairs from the twelfth floor to the penthouse and swung open the front door. The living room was lighted and so was the kitchen. The bedroom door was open, the room showing a cool blue beyond the loud yellow kitchen. Laura walked in, swinging her purse, thinking of the ugly little man and proud of the way she had trounced him.
She stopped short with a gasp at the sight of Burr and Marcie naked together in Marcie’s bed. “I’m sorry!” she exclaimed, and backed out, closing the door behind her. She collapsed on a kitchen chair and cried in furious disgust for half a minute. Then she stood up and went to the refrigerator, pretending to want a glass of milk just for an excuse to move, to ignore the hot silence in the next room.
For a while no sounds issued from the bedroom. Laura poured the milk busily and carried it into the living room. She was just putting a record on when the bedroom door opened and Marcie slipped out in her bathrobe. Laura had put her milk down. Just the sight of it was enough to make her feel green. She turned to Marcie.
“Hi,” she said, too brightly. “Sorry I had to go and break in.”
Marcie burst out laughing. “That’s okay. Damn him, I told him to go home. I knew you’d get home early. I just had a feeling.” She went up to Laura, still laughing, and Laura turned petulantly away. Marcie didn’t notice. “We took your advice, Laura,” she said. “We haven’t said a word to each other tonight. Well—I said when he came in—‘All right, we’re not going to argue. Don’t open your mouth. Not one word.’ And he didn’t. He didn’t even say hello!” And her musical laughter tickled Laura insufferably.
Burr came out of the bedroom, looking rather sheepish, rather sleepy, very satisfied. He smiled at Laura, who had to force herself to wear a pleasant face. He was buttoning his shirt, carrying his coat over his arm, and all he said was, “Thanks, Laura.” He grinned, thumbing at Marcie. “We’re not speaking. I hear it was your idea.” He swatted Laura’s behind. “Good girl,” he said. He kissed Marcie once more, hard, drew on his coat, and backed out the door, still smiling.
Marcie whirled around and around in the middle of the living room, hugging herself and laughing hilariously. “If it could always be like that,” she said. “I’d marry him again tomorrow.”
Laura brushed past her without a word, into the kitchen, where she poured the milk carefully back into the bottle, closed the refrigerator door, went into the bedroom, and got ready for bed.
Marcie followed her, laughing and talking until Laura got into bed and turned out the light. She wouldn’t even look at Marcie’s rumpled bed. But it haunted her, and she didn’t fall asleep until long after Marcie had stopped whispering.
Jack Mann was small, physically tough, and very intelligent. He was a sort of cocktail-hour cynic, disillusioned enough with things to be cuttingly funny. If you like that kind of wit. Some people don’t. The attitude carried over into his everyday life, but he saved his best wit especially for the after work hours, when the first fine careless flush of alcohol gave it impetus. Unfortunately he usually gave himself too much impetus and went staggering home to his bachelor apartment under the arm of a grumbling friend. He was a draftsman in the office where Burr worked as an apprentice architect and he called his work “highly skilled labor.” He didn’t like it. But he did like the pay.
“Why do you do it, then?” Burr asked him once.
“It’s the only thing I know. But I’d much rather dig ditches.”
“Well, hell, go dig ditches then. Nobody’s stopping you.”
Jack could turn his wit on himself as well as on others. “I can’t,” he told Burr. “I’m so used to sitting on my can all day I’d be lucky to get one lousy ditch dug. And then they’d probably have to bury me in it. End of a beautiful career.”
Burr smiled and shook his head. But he liked him; they got along. Jack went out with Burr and Marcie before and after they got married. And after they got divorced. He was the trouble-shooter until he got too drunk, which was often.
When he arrived with Burr on Friday night Laura was irked to find that she was taller than he was. She had made up her mind that she wasn’t going to enjoy the evening—just live through it. She’d have to spend the time mediating for Marcie and Burr and trying to entertain a man she didn’t know or care about. So she was put out to discover that she did like Jack, after all. It ruined her fine gloomy mood.
Marcie introduced them and Jack looked up at her quizzically. “What’s the matter, Landon?” he said. “You standing in a hole?”
Laura laughed and took her shoes off. It brought her down an inch. “Better?” she said.
“Better for me. Very bad for your stockings.” He grinned. “Have you read Freud?”
“No.”
“Well, thank God. I won’t have to talk about my nightmares.”
“Do you have nightmares?”
“You have read Freud!”
“No, I swear. You said—”
“Okay, I confess. I have nightmares. And you remind me of my mother.”
“Do you have a mother?” said Burr. “Didn’t you just happen?”
“That’s what I keep asking my analyst. Do I have to have a mother?”
“Jack, are you seeing an analyst?” Marcie was fascinated with the idea. “Imagine being able to tell somebody everything. Like a sacred duty. Burr, don’t you think I should be analyzed?”
“What will you use for a neurosis?” Jack asked.
“Do I need one?”
“How about Burr?”
“I’m taken,” Burr said. “Besides, you talk like a nitwit, honey. You don’t go to an analyst like you go to the hairdresser.”
Marcie’s eyes flashed. “Thanks for the compliment,” she said. “I’m not as dumb as I look.”
“Come on, Mother.” Jack took Laura’s arm and steered her out the door. “I see a storm coming up.”
But it was dissipated when Marcie grabbed her coat and hurried after them.
After the play they walked down Fourth Street in the Village, meandering rather aimlessly, looking into shop windows. Laura was lost. She had never been in the Village before. She had been afraid to come down here; afraid she would see someone, and do something, and suddenly find herself caught in the strange world she had renounced. It seemed so safe, so remote from temptation to choose an uptown apartment. And yet here she was with her nerves in knots, her emotions tangled around a roommate again.
Laura pondered these things, walking slowly beside Jack in the light from the shop windows. She was unaware of where she walked or who passed by. It startled her when Jack said, “What are you thinking about, Mother?”
“Nothing.” A shade of irritation crossed her face.
“Ah,” he said. “I interrupted something.”
“No.” She turned to look at him, uncomfortable. He made her feel as if he was reading her thoughts.
“Don’t lie to me. You’re daydreaming.”
“I am not! I’m just thinking.”
He shrugged. “Same thing.”
She found him very irritating then. “You don’t say,” she said, and looked away from him.
“You hate me,” he said with a little smile.
“Now and then.”
“I messed up your daydream,” he said. “I’m rarely this offensive. Only when I’m sober. The rest of the time, I’m charming. Someday I suppose you’ll daydream about me.”
Laura stared at him and he laughed.
“At least, you’ll tell me about your daydreams.”
“Never.”
“People do. I have a nice face. Ugly, but nice. People think, ‘Jesus, that guy has a nice face. I ought to tell him my daydreams.’ They do, too.” He smiled. “What’s the matter, Mother, you look skeptical.”
“What makes you think you have a nice face?”
“Don’t I?” He looked genuinely alarmed.
“It wouldn’t appeal to just anyone.”
“Ah, smart girl. You’re right, as usual. A boy’s best friend is his mother. Only the discriminating ones, my girl, think it’s a nice face. Only the sensitive, the talented, the intelligent. Now tell me—isn’t it a nice face?”
“It’s a face,” said Laura. “Everybody has one.”
He laughed. “You’re goofy,” he said. “You need help. My analyst is very reasonable. He’ll stick you for all you’ve got, but he’s very reasonable.”
Burr, who was walking ahead of them with Marcie, turned around to demand, “Somebody tell me where I’m going.”
“Turn right at the next corner,” said Jack. “You’re doing fine, boy. Don’t lose your nerve.”
“I just want to know where the hell I’m going.”
“That’s a bad sign. Very bad.”
“Cut it out, Jack,” said Marcie. “Where are we going?”
“A little bar I know. Very gay. I go there alone when I want to be depressed.”
It sounded sinister, not gay, to Laura. “What’s it called?” she said.
“The Cellar. Don’t worry, it’s a legitimate joint.” He laughed at her long face.
Marcie laughed too, and Laura’s heart jumped at the sweetness of the sound. It made her hate the back of Burr, moving with big masculine easiness ahead of her in a tweed topcoat, his bristling crew cut shining.
A few minutes later Jack led them down a few steps to a pair of doors which he pushed in, letting Laura and Marcie pass.
Laura heard Burr say, behind her, in an undertone, “It is gay,” and he laughed. “You bastard.” She was mystified. It looked pretty average and ordinary. They headed for a table with four chairs, one of the few available, and Laura looked around.
The Cellar was quite dark, with the only lights placed over the bar and glowing a faint pinky orange. There were candles on the tables, and people crowded together from one end of the room to the other. Everybody seemed reasonably cheerful, but it didn’t look any gayer than any other bar she had been in. She looked curiously at Burr, but he was helping Marcie out of her coat.
“No table service,” Jack said. “What does everybody want?”
They gave him their orders and Laura tried to catch his eye, hoping for more information about the place. She was curious now. There were checkered table cloths, fish nets on the wall, a lot of people—all rather young—at the tables and bar. The juke box was going and somebody was trying to pick up a few bucks doing pencil portraits, but no one seemed very interested. The customers looked like students. There were girls in cotton pants, young men in sweaters and open-collared shirts.
“They all look like students,” she said to Burr.
He grinned. “I never thought of it that way,” he said. “I guess they do, all right.”
She stared at him. And then she looked around the room again, and suddenly she saw a girl with her arm around another girl at a table not far away. Her heart jumped. A pair of boys at the bar were whispering urgently to each other.
Gay, Laura thought to herself. Is that what they call it? Gay? She was acutely uncomfortable now. It was as if she were a child of civilization, reared among the savages, who suddenly found herself among the civilized. She recognized them as her own. And yet she had adopted the habits of another race and she was embarrassed and lost with her own kind.
They looked at her—her own kind—from the bar and from the tables, and didn’t recognize her. And Laura looked around at them and thought, I’m one of you. Help me. But if anyone had approached her she would have turned away.
Jack came back with the drinks and sat down, passing them around. He drank a shot of whisky and said to Laura, “Well? How do you like tonight’s collection?”
“Tonight’s collection of what?” Laura said.
“Of nuts.” He looked around The Cellar. “Doesn’t anyone tell you anything, Mother? Burr, what’s the matter with you? She’s a tourist. Make with the old travelogue, boy.”
Burr laughed. “I thought you didn’t get it, Laura.” He smiled. “They’re all queer.”
Laura’s face went scarlet, but the candlelight hid it. She felt an awful tide of anger and fear come up in her at that word. She felt trapped, almost frantic, and she vented it on Jack. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she said. Her voice trembled with indignation.
“Take it easy, Mother,” he said.
“Tonight’s collection!” she mimicked bitterly. “You talk about them as if they were a bunch of animals.”
“They are,” he said quietly. “So are we.”
“We’re human beings,” she said. “We have no right to sit here and laugh at them for something they can’t help.”
“Can’t help, hell,” Burr said, leaning over the table toward her. “All those gals need is a real man. That’d put them on the right track in a hurry.”
Laura could have belted him. She wanted to shout, “How do you know, you big ape?” But she said instead, “You’re not irresistible, Burr.”
“I don’t mean that!” he said, frowning at her. “Christ! I only mean a man who knows the first thing about women could lay any one of these dames—even a butch—and make her like it.”
“What’s the first thing about women?” Jack asked, smiling, but they ignored him.
“If men revolt her and somebody tried to—to lay her—he’d only make her sick. No matter how much he knew about women,” Laura said sharply.
“Any girl who doesn’t like men is either a virgin or else some bastard scared the hell out of her. She needs gentling.”
“You talk about us as if we were horses!” Laura flared.
“Us?” Burr stared at her.
“Us—us women.” Laura’s face was burning.
Burr watched her as he talked. “Some girls get a bastard the first time,” he said. “It’s too bad. They end up in joints like this swapping horror stories with the other ones.”
Laura hated the way he talked. She couldn’t take it. “What if the bastard is her father?” she said. “And he scares the hell out of her when she’s five years old? And twenty years later some ass who thinks he’s a great lover comes along and throws her down and humiliates and horrifies her?”
Jack remarked, with amusement, and probably more enlightenment than the others, “Jesus, we have a moralist in our midst.” He looked at her as if she were a new species of fish.
“Damn it, Laura, that’s the point,” Burr said. “He wouldn’t humiliate her. I don’t mean some God-damn truck driver with nothing but a quick lay on his mind. I mean a considerate decent sort of guy—a sort of Good Samaritan—” He grinned and Marcie said, “God!” and rolled her eyes to the ceiling.
“—who really wants to help the girl,” Burr finished.
“Why don’t you try it?” Jack said.
Marcie’s face darkened. “Yes, darling, why don’t you prove your little theory? I’m sure we’d all be fascinated.”
“Now damn it, don’t you go yammering at me. I’m talking to Laura.”
“Excuse me!” Marcie said.
Laura leaned toward her. “I didn’t mean to start anything,” she said.
“Nobody ever does,” Jack remarked to himself.
“He said he could lay any girl and make her like it,” Marcie said.
“I said,” Burr said, turning to her and intoning sarcastically, “That any guy with any—”
“We know what you said, boy,” Jack interrupted. “Let’s keep it purely theoretical. Nobody has to prove anything. Burr loves Marcie and Marcie loves Burr. Jack loves whisky and whisky hates Jack. Laura loves animals. Everybody happy?”
Thinking over what she had said while Jack talked, Laura began to feel sick. She wished she had been perceptive enough to see where she was when they first came into The Cellar. But she took things at face value. They had entered a little bar and they were going to have a nightcap. Okay. What was so sinister about that? Why did it have to turn out to be a damn gay bar? And why did she have to react like an angry virgin when she found out?
They stayed long enough to get pretty high. They were stared at by the regular customers, but Laura was afraid to stare back. When she did, once or twice, she couldn’t catch anyone’s eye. She was ashamed of herself for trying to, but she couldn’t help it.
There was a girl at the bar, standing at one end, in black pants and a white shirt open at the collar. Her hair was short and dark and there once again was that troubling resemblance to Beth. There were some other people with her and they were all talking, but the short-haired girl seemed somehow apart from them. Now and then she would turn and smile at one of them and say a word or two. Then she turned her gaze back to the bar or into her drink, or just stared into the mirror behind the bar without seeing anything.
Laura glanced at her now and then. She had an interesting face. It made Laura want to talk to her. It must be the drinks, she thought, and refused another.
“I see by the look in your eye,” Jack said, “that you’ve had enough of this place. It’s nearly midnight. Are you going to turn into a pumpkin?”
“God, I hope not,” said Laura.
“It’s after midnight,” said Marcie. “Let’s go. After all, poor Burr had to get up at six this morning to get to work. He’s probably exhausted. Maybe we should leave him here and let him organize a night school for the ladies.”
“Wouldn’t be any takers in here,” Jack observed, looking around. “They aren’t ladies, they’re lessies.”
“Do you have to talk about them as if they were exhibits in a zoo?” Laura exclaimed.
“God, now we’re quarreling,” said Jack, laughing. But they weren’t really, for it takes two to make a quarrel and he was feeling powerfully good-natured with all that booze in him. “Leave us not forget our dignity,” he told Laura. He enunciated with meticulous care, not to let the liquor trip his tongue.
Marcie laughed at him, and pulled Laura aside as they got up. “Let’s go,” she said, and Laura walked with her to the ladies’ room. It was a glaring change from the softly lighted Cellar. They were nearly blinded with a big bare bulb which hung by a frayed wire far down into the room and watched all the proceedings with an unblinking eye.
“You go first,” Laura said to Marcie. There were few things less appealing to her than a public rest room—especially a one-horse job like this with its staring light, cracked mirror and mounds of used paper towels on the cement floor. She wet her comb slightly in the tap and ran it through her hair. The door opened and the girl with the short dark hair and black pants came in. She lounged indolently against the wall, studying Laura. Laura recognized her from the bar, but ignored her royally. Marcie was talking to her through the john door.
“How do you like Jack?” she said.
“A lot,” Laura said, for the benefit of the girl in the black pants. Her voice was warm enough to surprise Marcie.
“I’m glad,” she said. “I thought once or twice you were mad at him.”
Laura’s cheeks went red again. God, how she hated that! And there was nothing she could do about it. She pulled the comb hard through her hair, afraid to look into the mirror. She knew she would meet the eyes of the girl in the black pants. “He’s very intelligent,” she said to Marcie.
“He’s funny,” Marcie said, coming out of the john. She nearly walked into the strange girl and said, “Oh! Excuse me.”
“My pleasure,” the girl murmured with a grin.
Laura felt suddenly jealous. It was maddening. She didn’t know who she was jealous of. She wanted the other girl to notice her, not Marcie. And she wanted Marcie to notice her, too. She stood a moment in confusion and then she said to the girl in the black pants, “Go ahead.” And nodded at the john. She said it to make her look up, which she did, slowly, and smiled. She looked shockingly boyish. Laura stared slightly.
“Thanks,” said the girl.
She shut the door behind her and Marcie laughed silently, covering her mouth with her hand. But Laura turned away, excitement tight in her throat. “Let’s go,” she said impatiently, dragging Marcie away from the mirror. She was afraid the strange girl would come out and talk to them. She was anxious to get out of The Cellar, out of the Village. She felt a pressing sense of danger.
Marcie turned to her as they went back to the table, and said, “I’ll bet Burr couldn’t have gotten anywhere with that one!” And she laughed. “She’d throw a hammer lock on him and tell him to pick on somebody his own size.”
Laura smiled faintly at her.
“Did you see how she stared at you?” Marcie said.
“Did she stare at me?”
“Yes, but she stared at me too. That’s the awful thing about Lesbians, they have no discrimination.”
Laura suddenly wanted to scream at her. It was so wrong, so false; so agonizing to have your lips sealed when you wanted to shout the truth.
They left the smoky Cellar and walked a few blocks, talking. Jack took a weaving course, and Laura had to steer him with one arm.
“Let’s take a taxi,” Marcie said.
“It’s only two blocks to the subway,” Burr reminded her.
“Can’t you ever spend a little extra on me?” she exclaimed. “Don’t you think I’m good enough to ride in a taxi? Don’t you think I’m worth another buck once in a while? You did when we got married.”
“Yeah, and I went broke. Subway’s cheap.”
“Well, I’m not!”
“Here, here,” said Jack. He took a quarter from his pocket and held it up to Marcie’s face.
“Heads,” she said.
He flipped while Laura thought to herself what child’s play it all was. Jack seemed unsophisticated now and Marcie and Burr had lost the beauty and excitement they seemed to generate together, even in the midst of their quarrels, perhaps because of them. We all look tired and silly, Laura thought, and I wish we were anywhere but the middle of Greenwich Village flipping over a taxi ride.
“Heads!” said Marcie. She poked Burr in the stomach.
“No show next week,” he said.
“You don’t think I care, do you?”
“Never mind, children, this is my treat,” said Jack. He smiled foxily. “I’m no fool with money,” he said. “I grow it in my window box. I give it all to Mother, here, and she invests it for me. Don’t you, Mother?”
“Don’t be an ass,” said Laura, but she laughed at him.
“She loves me,” Jack explained to Burr and Marcie. Suddenly he left them all to dash into the middle of the street, waving his arms wildly at a pair of headlights that were bearing down on him. They screeched to a halt with an irate taxi driver behind them. Marcie gave a little scream and the driver leaned out and said, “You damn fool!”
“You’d better get that punk home and give him some black coffee, lady,” he told Laura as they started uptown. “If you don’t mind a little advice.”
“He’s going to hate himself tomorrow,” Marcie said.
“He’s damn lucky he’s gonna be around tomorrow,” said the cabbie. They all talked about him as if he were deaf. And in fact, he was, for he had fallen asleep almost as soon as he got into the cab.
“Does he do this all the time?” Laura asked Burr.
“He’s a great guy, Laura,” Burr said, as if trying to bolster Jack in Laura’s eyes. “He just flies off the handle now and then. I guess he’s got problems.”
At the apartment Laura got out first. Burr said, “I’ll wake him up, Laura,” but she protested. “Just let him sleep,” she said. “I’d hate to interrupt his dreams.”
“I heard that,” said a ragged voice from the shadows inside the car. “You’re a doll, Mother. Sleep well.”
