Strange Women, The (19 page)

"I ought to know a lot of things," she said bitterly, put the glass to her lips and drained it. Mack had poured at least a double shot; she felt it burn in her stomach and hit her quickly; but she no longer cared. She held out the glass and reluctantly he poured her another.

"I guess you know when to stop."

Suddenly it poured out of her. "For God's sake don't treat me like a fragile little expectant mother," she exploded, and drank again, shaking. "I'm not pregnant—I couldn't even have
that!
I just found out—Kit doesn't know—I don't know how I'm going to face telling him," she said, strangled with pain. Mack dropped the glass and sprang toward her. He caught her close and held her; he almost rocked her.

"Nora, Nora. You poor baby, poor kid! You love him so much—that makes all the difference?"

She had lost all caution between misery and the drinks. "I don't know if I love him or hate him! He wants
—
I don't know if I can stand it to be just the part of me that Kit wants, just his wife, not a person—I'm not making sense—"

"Oh, yes you are," he soothed. "I know, I know. Neither of us have much luck, Nor. First you get that goddamn conceited Rannock kid who wanted to tie you up with a houseful of brats right away, and I get that Rhoda girl who wanted a gray flannel suit walking like a man. And then when we do want to be tied down, I get a girl who won't marry me, and you—" he spread his hands helplessly. "We're a pair of suckers, Nora. We yell for independence, and when the time comes when we want a family, we can't even manage that—"

He leaned down and kissed her. Gently, his hands cradling her cheeks, he kissed her again; this time not a brother's kiss of comfort, but a man's kiss; hard, virile, demanding. His arms went roughly around her.

In disbelieving shock, Nora felt the old love surge up, the never-forgotten passionate hunger. She knew she was drunk, but it didn't matter.

This
was what she had wanted. Mack, the beloved, the one she loved best, had pushed her away, rejected her; all these years she had fenced herself from a similar rejection by being, like Mack, strong; masculine; self-sufficient. Mack rejected her; and she had never again been sure of herself as a woman. Now, wide-eyed and shaken as the child she had been them, she lay looking up into his eyes, fear swept away by alcohol and her own inner conflicts.

He muttered, "I don't give a damn what—" and again the heat and hunger in his mouth silenced them both. His big hands moved on her.

"Why didn't I know? All these years, Nor, I've been looking for
you.
Someone who wouldn't crowd me—I was afraid to treat you like a woman, so I tried to make you over—"

She was passive in his arms; he pushed her back on the bed, murmuring, "I haven't touched a woman since I left Jill in Mayfield..."

She had known it would be like that for him; he was not a man for casual affairs, and they went deep when they happened. She could feel the long hunger and frustration in him, making his hands tremble. "Nor," he said, "Nor, do you—want it like this?"

Swiftly, he began to unfasten her dress. The rain beat hard on the windows, and his face, pale and tense, bent above her. Suddenly, a spasm of shock and disgust swept through her, a wave of revulsion. The pendulum, pulled too far, sprang to the other extreme.

"No," she said hoarsely, "No—I'm drunk, but—no, Mack!" She felt stripped to the humiliated roots of her being. Desire had died in her, leaving only shame.

So Mack was just like them all. All they wanted was to get you on your back beneath them, solve all your problems with sex... prove themselves on you—

She forgot that she, herself, had begun this. With that vivid imagery she saw Jill's face, raised in love and surrender. To Mack, to Kit, she might be simply a woman to be conquered and calmed with sex. To Jill—to Pammy—she was the strong commanding force in herself. Buttoning her dress with scornful swift fingers, she shook off Mack's worried hand, only half aware of his dismay.

"Nor— Nor, I'm sorry I lost my head—don't look like that—" but she hardly heard. So he, so imperious when she lay beneath him like a yielding woman, was now worried and whimpering? She pushed by him, disregarding his frantic "Nora, for God's sake, you're sick—" and walked out, down the hall, into the cold rain again.

* * *

She never knew where she walked in the next hour. After a long time, cold and wet, soaked through, she found herself standing outside a neon door and the spilling noise of a jukebox;
Flora's.
As if waking from a somnambulist's nightmare, Nora pushed the swinging doors and went in.

The smell of stale beer and whisky greeted her. The women crowded at the bar and the tables might almost have been the same woman. She gave her order. The brainstorm which had sent her out into the rain was quieting; she was capable now of surprise at her own behavior, and of dismay and distress. How had she come to Mack's arms? The surge of revulsion was still with her; the distaste at showing herself a woman, pliant, vulnerable.

As a woman I'm not so much. I can't even have a baby.

She watched a tall woman in slacks dancing with a pretty little fair-haired girl of twenty or so. She knew a curious fellow-feeling.

I wasn't woman enough to compete with Pammy as a girl. In seducing her I proved myself as much a man as Mack...

Homosexual.
She tried the word over, softly, to herself. Was that what she really wanted, then? She had not wanted Mack. Even Mack, whom she had loved so long. She picked up her drink. The comfortable blur of emotion was wearing off, growing sharp-edged; she wanted to blur it again.

Flora Danbury, her raddled cheeks pale under the rouge stopped by her table. "Why, Doctor Caine, nice to see you. You're getting to be one of our regulars," she said familiarly.

Nora set down her drink untasted. She managed a nod, murmured something about a hurry, and went out. The chilly rain in the streets cleared her thoughts again.

No. Even if she were irretrievably homosexual, she wouldn't find the answer in Flora's, surrounded by desperate women trying to find, in the phony warmth of a drink, the answer to problems they couldn't solve outside, in the cold rain. The courage she might find there was a false courage that would evaporate with the hangover.

Whatever her choice, her life must be lived outside the small enclosed world in which confessed lesbians found self-centered happiness.

Flora, calling her
doctor,
had recalled her to herself. She was always, primarily, first and forever, a doctor. She could never go there as one of them. Only as a tourist; an outsider. She might be a misfit among wives; but she was a worse misfit in the closed circle of those who made a career of being lesbians.

If she had destroyed normal life, normal love for Jill, then she had some responsibility and she would accept it; but if that was her choice, she and Jill would have to make a world outside the easy one of lesbian bars and bright talk about unconventionality.

She found herself standing at the top of the stairway in the Lenox apartments. Under oath she could not have told how she had come there. Margaret came out into the hall, and Nora blinked as if surfacing after a very long dive. "Marg, is it you?"

"Of course it's me. I do live here, you know." Margaret looked at her sharply. "Nora, what's the matter? You're soaked through. Come inside—I was just going out, but I'll stay if you like. Or—was it Jill you came to see?"

Nora drew a careful breath. She said, "Thanks, Marg. I—I think I do have to see Jill alone. If you don't mind. But don't let us drive you out of your own home, we'll go out somewhere—"

But where? Flora's? Is that the only place left?

"No, Nora. Whatever this is, you don't have to take it out on the streets. That's the worst thing, having no place—don't you think I remember when neither my family or Ramona's would have the other one under their roof?" She laid her hand lightly on Nora's arm. "I'll be out till midnight. You can count on that."

Before Nora could speak, she had gone on down the stairs, closing the street door behind her. Nora tasted something curiously salt and sour in her mouth. The feel of being on a swaying pendulum had quieted, now, to a great ticking, as if her steps were vibrating inside a clock.
Arrhythmic tachycardia, usually neurotic in origin. Tension symptoms, connected with emotional shock, usually subside spontaneously without medication.
She walked through the door Margaret had left open.

"Jill, are you there?"

Jill came out of her bedroom. She stared at Nora in amazement, and, as Margaret had done, said, "You're soaked through!" She came and took the raincoat from Nora. "Let me hang that up for you."

Nora surrendered it, and Jill fussed with spreading it out on a chair to dry. "I guess you know Mack's in town again?"

"I suppose he came straight to you—Nora, I'm not fit to marry him. He wouldn't want me if he knew."

"Jill, listen to me," Nora said, "Do you want to marry Mack? Or not? What do you
really
want?"

Jill twisted her fingers. "I don't know," she said at last, and Nora was startled—yes, and disappointed.

What did I expect? Did I expect Jill to throw herself into my arms again and say she only wanted me? Yes, yes, I'm a fine one to be asking Jill what she wants, when I don't know what I want myself!

Jill said suddenly, "But I'm a fine hostess, I must say! I lived in your house for months, and when you come to mine, I don't even offer you a cup of tea! Or would you rather have a coke? There are some in the icebox."

"Nothing, thanks." Nora realized with relief that she was at last completely sober again. She was surprised at Jill. She had never associated these domestic details with the girl. It occurred to her that there were large sections of Jill's personality wholly unknown to her; she had never seen Jill in a normal state, only driven by strange storms. From the day she had walked into Nora's office—pregnant, afraid, driven by the memory of betrayals—Jill had been haunted. What was the real Jill like? She felt a seething ache to know what Jill might be, free of these storms. The pendulum weighted; dipped.

Kit, Mack—they see only a woman to build her life around them. Kit loves me, he wants me to do the work I was trained for—provided I don't neglect
him.
It will never occur to him—that the part of me he owns, isn't all there is to know about me!

"Jill," she said, "I'm going to Mayfield tonight. Alone—without Kit, that is. Some things have changed. I've found out that I'm not pregnant, and I suppose—" it came hard to say it, but she said it, clearly, facing Jill, "I suppose it's best, because it leaves me free until I've completely settled what I want. So I understand how you felt the other day."

It hung between them; a half offer, an understanding. Nora held herself back by force from offering or demanding more. Strangely, it was Kit's words that came to her;
a stranger's harbor.
I don't want that. If Jill chooses me just as an easy escape from Mack, I don't want her. I don't want her to—drift to me because it will avoid solving a problem. The storm's over, and one way or the other, the anchor's going up. Together or apart, we must go out under our own steam.

With a word, she knew, she could bind Jill to her forever. That would be the easy way.

"Nora, I—are you saying what I think you're saying?"

Nora nodded, but she didn't speak. Literally she was frantic with the pain like a vise at her throat; but Jill must choose, too.

Mack's browned, shaggy face haunted her. Mack, who had rejected her as a child; so for years she had to prove herself stronger. She had seduced Pammy—she knew it now; Pammy had made the overt gesture, but Nora had invited it; unable to be a girl with Pammy, had played the part of a boy to her; a sort of play at
being
Mack. And when Mack had brought his wife to her, again there had been the compulsion to prove herself the better man.

Like a flash of lightning it hit her;

But Mack—Mack had
not
rejected her!

Mack had wanted her as a woman! For the first time in her life, she saw herself and Mack clearly. Why, Mack hadn't rejected her—ever! He had been
protecting
her— with all the strong and honorable manhood in him, he had fought to guard the little girl he had called his sister. He had even exiled himself from the home he loved; so that he would not be tempted, again, to hurt or disillusion the girl he loved as a sister, although she was not.

And how had she rewarded him? By seducing away his wife? Mack had reached an impasse with Jill; even his love could do no more.

The ache and panic were still with Nora. Could Jill take that one step to Mack, or would she drift around, rudderless, at the mercy of anyone who would seize her and pull her into a moment's safe harbor?

If I have broken up Mack and Jill, I'll have to take the responsibility for her. After that, I have no right to—to abandon her, too. If I leave her, what will happen? Will she let Mack go, and drift into the world of Flora's, with anyone who'll give her a little love and security? At least she would be safe with me. I've acted like a silly, frustrated adolescent; it's time I faced up to the mess I made.

She thrust her hands in her pockets to keep from stretching them to Jill, and touched something flat and hard; the bankbook. Again, in memory, she heard Mack's words;
I've got a big brotherly shoulder, if you want to do some crying.
She had been too proud to admit herself a woman, in need of comfort; and her pride had taken a worse fall when she flung herself into his arms.

She handed the bankbook quietly to Jill.

"I don't know when I'll see Mack again—"

"I don't either," said Jill. Nora's heart turned over, but she kept her voice level.

"But it's something you have to settle with him. If you don't want to marry him, that's up to you. But this much you owe him—you never needed it, but I kept it for you."

Jill opened it, slowly, while Nora sat tense and pale. What had Mack said? Jill thinks only one kind of woman will take money from a man. Would Jill explode into rage at Mack, for this blow to her pride? Had she finally weighted the scales, unfairly, against him—turning Jill against him forever at the last?