Whisper Their Love (17 page)

"Don't be dense," Edith said coldly. "Nobody questions them, don't you see? They're part of the conventional design, the pattern society wants to mold everybody into."

Yes, but then where's the wonderful honesty? She didn't ask it. The one thing she was sure of right now was that she'd better not ask any more questions. "Is this dress all right, or should I have worn something fancier?"

"You look very nice." The blue wool was a schoolgirl dress with a round white collar and little glittery buttons down the front. Mimi's feather haircut had grown out long enough to take a pincurl permanent. Edith approved of that, too. She supposed that was camouflage, too, looking feminine and being part of the social pattern. Keep people from finding out I'm not normal. It wasn't a happy thought.

Anitra Schultz was a painter, primarily, Edith explained. She worked in oil, water color and
gouache.
"She's had several one-man shows," Edith said proudly.

The Schultzes lived in one of those self-consciously informal suburban houses built by people living a little beyond their means. The lawn was manicured. An old-fashioned hitching-post painted shocking pink held a curly black iron sign, "The Bluff." Since the place was flat, she guessed it was meant to be cute. The drive was jammed with ordinary cars, convertibles and those little English models that look as if you could tuck them under your arm while you went shopping. Edith parked in the street and Joyce got out of the car, smoothing her skirt, and looked around. The house door stood open and light streamed out. She felt like a child going to a birthday party. Edith took her hand as they went up the arty flagstone walk, and she was grateful for so much warmth.

Anitra Schultz looked like her house, sleek and expensive, but not quite real. She was tall and slender, with lacquered black hair drawn back in a bun on her neck and green eyes underlined with emerald mascara, fuchsia lips sharply painted on. Only her skin spoiled the picture; it was olive but rather oily and rough. She wore narrow velvet trousers and her feet were bare in flat black velvet slippers embroidered with gold thread and fake pearls. She laid her cheek close to Edith's and they saluted the air in a way that couldn't spoil make-up. "Darling, I'm so glad you could come. Is this your little girl you told us about? Charming. Fritzi darling, bring these nice people something to drink."

Fritzi looked rather like Mary Jean's Bill, stocky and fair, with a crewcut. Masculine type—nobody could call him sissy. He was carrying a tray of drinks, like a butler in the movies, and he gave Joyce a pleasant impersonal smile and Edith a curt nod. "Here, take what you like best. That's rum. That's Scotch and that's gin, with the peel in it." Joyce decided that she rather liked him, but didn't like his wife.

The drink she took felt nice and cold in her hand, smelled good, tasted bitter but slid down easily. It exploded in her stomach; she felt she must be breathing out smoke and flame. There didn't seem to be any place to set down the empty glass; she looked at Edith for a cue, but Edith was still talking to Anitra and she gave Joyce an absent-minded nod indicating: go on, don't be formal, have a good time and circulate. So she walked around, glass in hand, looking at the rooms which opened into one another and then, with rather less curiosity, at the people.

She guessed this was modern decor, or maybe moderne. She wasn't sure how to pronounce decor, but she was always running into it in magazines that told you how to paint your old walnut furniture bright green and make chic curtains out of turkish towels. There were a lot of small tables covered with books and arty arrangements of flowers, weeds, leaves and such things as gilded snap clothespins and little ceramic caterpillars. The davenport curved, but unevenly, and the coffee table was free-form. Some of the chairs were made of rawhide laced crisscross, like the paper-strip mats kids make in kindergarten, and some were wrought-iron with grape leaves and curlicues all over them. There was a grand piano which seemed to be the regular shape; but it was painted a deep pink. Someone had already set a drink on top of it and the glass had tipped over; a clear-liquid was dribbling down onto the keys and splashing on the olive-green rug.

There were twenty or thirty people scattered around. It was hard to reach a closer estimate because the rooms were in series, with partial walls but no doors. A small, frilly, blonde girl sat on a cushion on the floor beside the piano, her knees drawn up in front of her so that the tops of her stockings showed and a stretch of bare leg. An older woman with gray hair and a gray suit buttoned primly around a matronly figure squatted beside her, talking. The girl looked sulky and bored. Some of the women wore full peasant skirts over crinolines, and jangling handmade jewelry. Some were in evening dresses cut right down to the nipples. Most of the men were less formal, they ran to tweed jackets and loud slacks, and there was one husky type who looked like Tarzan with a beard. She bet he hadn't ever wrestled with an ape.
He
wore Bermuda shorts and no shirt at all, just a fine mat of black hair on his chest that mingled with the fringes of his beard. But he looked different from these other characters, more like a real person.

Somebody handed her another drink. Her throat was still hot from the first one, but it looked too silly to walk around with a full glass in her hand so she sipped at it as she went from spot to spot, finding that the burn was less if she took it slowly. After a little while she thought about setting the tumblers behind one of the long hand-blocked curtains, on a sill. There was a wad of chewed gum on the one she chose; she put a glass on each side of it, like a composition in balance.

The lights looked brighter and clearer than they had at first. A fat man rolled up with a platter of Technicolor appetizers, beaming at her. First thing she knew she was sitting on the floor like half a dozen of the others, legs doubled under her, wondering if she'd be too stiff to get up again when the time came. She smiled up at Tarzan, who came over to sit beside her. Nature Boy.

One thing about these people, whether they shared Edith's ideas about the way they were persecuted or not, it didn't show. They didn't seem to have any reticences among themselves. She had thought some of the girls at school were blabbermouths, but they were strong silent types compared with this roomful of party-goers. She looked around for Edith but she and Anitra were both out of sight. A month or so ago that would have been anguish. Now there were a lot of other people around, all talking, and tantalizing scraps floated her way; then Tarzan started telling her about himself and she forgot Edith altogether.

He was a psychologist, he said; a practicing psychologist, which wasn't as good as an analyst so he had an inferiority complex about it. She wondered why, if he admired analysts so much, he didn't have one go to work on him and find out why he was a homosexual. Maybe he knew too much about it or maybe he liked being the way he was. His name was Kenneth Tregillus—call him Kenny—but she went on thinking of him as Tarzan.

"You look like Tarzan," she told him, and he nodded and said, "Thanks. Any other time that would brighten up my whole day, but I'm low right now."

She asked why, trying to sound like a Dale Carnegie friend. The boy he'd been sharing an apartment with had gone off and got married, he said, he was really ambisexual, and a debutante type with a Vassar accent had hooked him. "Trouble is, I don't like fairy types. I don't mean you, old man," he apologized to the tall balding man with a touch of rouge on his cheekbones, who sat on his other side eating canapés and listening.

The rouged man smiled uneasily. "That's okay, Ken. You're a little too rugged anyhow."

"But why talk about him," Tarzan went on gloomily? "There are more interesting people around. Take Arline and Linda."

He indicated two thin girls who sat with their arms around each other drinking something lurid-red out of the same glass.

Joyce was more interested in the drink. "A Bloody Mary, tomato juice and vodka. Sickening, isn't it?" He explained that Linda had been married to Arline's brother for a couple of years and had a baby by him before she realized it was Arline she'd been attracted to all the time. Now the two girls lived together on Linda's alimony, which the baby's father paid to keep them from talking. He had married again, a nice little woman who took care of the child and never had a thought in her head. "Those two gals are nuts about each other," Tarzan said. "Either of them would break your neck if you looked at the other one. They're always fighting because somebody's made a pass, or they think somebody has. It's dangerous to say hello to them.”

Joyce didn't see herself being tempted. The two looked like sisters, bony and tired, with blonde-brown cheaply curled hair and long noses. Distaste stirred in her.

A group of three came in, two women almost middle-aged and a plump pink man who took their coats and handbags and stood in the middle of the floor smiling viciously while they rushed around greeting friends. They all lived together, Tarzan said. "He's more or less married to the short one. The girls share a bedroom and old Donno flops on the davenport." He sighed. "I don't know what he gets out of it; they won't even cook his meals. He's a nice fella too, I could go for him. I don't think he has any. love life at all, though. Either his glands are inactive or he's been repressed—mother fixation, maybe."

Talk eddied around them, almost as visible as the smoke that hung in clouds and swirls on the air. Styles and decorating—Ted Somebody did the display windows for the city's most exclusive store, the one whose ads Joyce often read in the newspapers. Who went to the symphony last night? "I did," the fat Don said, "and I'm telling you the soprano sounded like a bitch in heat. Yowling to be let out of the cellar," he added, offering Joyce the sandwich he had just taken. He'd already had a bite out of it so she laid it gently on the nearest table. Fritzi came around, offering more drinks, and Joyce took one. This one made her feel a little funny and she told Tarzan so.

"Sick?"

"No, only the floor sort of goes up and down."

He said, "You've had enough." He took the glass out of her hand and drank the rest of it.

Arline took her face out of Linda's shoulder and wavered over to sit down beside Joyce. "You're cute," she said owlishly, "who do you belong to?" Tarzan gave Joyce a reminding poke in the ribs. "Cause look," Arline said, "you could come home with us and stay all night. We'd love to have you."

"Oh, I couldn't," Joyce said quickly.

Linda trailed over, smiling coldly. "You're making a fool of yourself as usual," she said to Arline. "I will not have it. I'll go home."

Tarzan patted her thin behind. "Sit down," he said hospitably. She sat cross-legged beside him, put her head on his bare shoulder and went to sleep.

Somebody had brought a violin, somebody a cello. A little night music, Joyce thought drowsily. There were small scraping and tuning noises. Joyce leaned against Tarzan's unoccupied side. He didn't seem to mind being a prop for two women, and it was rather like leaning against a tree, only with hair and skin instead of bark. All that liquor was beginning to do something funny to her sight and hearing. Everything looked a little fuzzy and sounds were intermittent, with gaps in between that she couldn't account for. The room and people were unreal, like those dream sequences in the movies where they dance among the drifting clouds and broken pillars. Don't think I would like this bunch much even if they were real people, she thought, shutting her eyes to rest them. Pretty soon she would wake up back in the dorm—ought to be studying for a Spanish test or something.

Somebody was breathing on her. She took her face away from Tarzan's fuzzy neck, where it seemed to have landed, and looked into Anitra's Egyptian eyes. She had forgotten all about Anitra. "Having fun?"

"I'm drinking too much," Joyce said. "Where's Edith?"

"Around." Anitra lowered herself to the floor with one fluid motion, like a dancer. That made four of them sitting in a row, like birds on a fence. "You look like a bal—ballet dancer," Joyce said with some difficulty.

Anitra smiled. "I've done that too." She leaned against Joyce's back. Her breasts were soft and firm at the same time—no bra, and she must be forty, Joyce marveled, aware of the warmth under the silk blouse. "You're a cunning little thing," Anitra said in a low voice. "How did Edith ever find you? She's always kept her work and her social life apart before. A model of discretion, Edith is."

"You know how those things happen." It didn't seem to mean anything but it sounded like an answer.

"She's a wonderful person. A little cold though, don't you think?"

"She hasn't been cold to me," Joyce said truthfully. The excitement, the husky whispers, the seeking and knowing hand. Maybe it was the drowsiness brought on by alcohol that made all those things seem so far away, like something read about but never experienced. The pressure of Anitra's body made her restless. She remembered for no special reason the cold night air and John Carstairs Jones's sober face. The room felt stuffy. "I ought to get up," she said.

"Look, the party's getting dull. Some of us are going to sneak out for a little while and go pub-crawling." But she's not English, Joyce thought, that's fake. "Like to come along?"

"Well, I don't know."

Edith materialized beside them. Through Joyce's alcoholic haze she looked quite a lot like Arline, the same tiny lines at the corners of the eyes and the same strained look around the mouth, but her pupils glittered instead of blurring.

"Oh, there you are, darling," Anitra said. "I was looking for you. Look, darling, do you want to go downtown for a while? Slumming, some of the gay places?"

Edith took both of Joyce's hands in hers, stooping to pull her upright. "How about it, Joy?"

"Of course she wants to come along," Anitra coaxed. "Don't you, doll?"

"Me too," Tarzan said. "Remember I'm an orphan."" He dislodged the sleeping Arline, who wobbled a little and then sat up, blinking. He scrambled to his feet like a good-natured bear.

"I'll go if you go," Joyce said to him. She felt fond of him, as if he were an old family friend.