Whisper Their Love (18 page)

Groggy as she was, two things were becoming clearer to her by the minute. One was that Edith had been drinking, which seemed out of character. The other was that Edith was jealous. She had brought Joyce here to be awed and impressed by Fritzi and Anitra, these free, charming people, and to admire Edith more because she knew them. Anitra wasn't supposed to be patting her and looking deep into her eyes. To complicate things further, Edith liked Anitra and probably wasn't getting anywhere with her. It was a touchy spot to be in.

She wanted to go home. She thought with deep alcoholic sadness that she had no home. No place on earth. She was sober enough to know that if she asked to leave, Edith would be coldly displeased. She blinked, seeing the two women still waiting for an answer. "If you want to."

"Wait right here. I'll get your coat."

There was no doubt about it, Edith wobbled a little when she walked.

The fat man came by with his tray and thrust it at her. "Caviar," he said, pointing. "Lines your stomach." She took one and bit into it. It tasted like BB shot in cold salty glue. Another illusion shot all to hell, she mused sadly. She laid what was left on top of the piano and turned an ashtray over it, mixing ashes with the caviar.

Now she was wedged into a car between Edith and Anitra, one pressed against her on each side. The white line down the middle of the road zigged and zagged. "Whoever's drinking driving," she said. "No, not what I mean." She giggled. She dropped her head on Edith's shoulder and shut her eyes because the wavery line made her feel giddy. Anitra's thin fingers closed around her knee, then pushed her skirt back a little. She smiled anxiously from one to the other. "Like you both," she mumbled, and went to sleep again.

Chapter 17

The place, Club Marie, was a letdown. It looked like a dozen cheap joints she'd walked past, quickening her step and turning her face away from the smell of stale beer, the bursts of laughter, the seamy-faced little old man who always seemed to be sitting on the doorstep. Only this one was brightly lighted. There were thin fluorescent tubes in the ceiling, parallel rows of them picking out glitters on the bottles and showing up the spills and dirt on the bartender's apron and the gummy places on the tables. There were bars of colored light across the top and bottom of the juke box, too, and little red bulbs in the wall beside each table.

Not the kind of place for a respectable girl at one in the morning. Likely she wasn't a respectable girl any more.

This place worked a change in Anitra's guests, somehow. In her house they had looked arty and exotic, if a little strained and tense. Here they looked wilted and second-hand, maybe because of the lighting. Only Tarzan was improved. He was still clothed only in skin and fuzz from the waist up, in spite of the chill night, and he looked unreasonably wholesome. She herself, reflected in the mirror that ran along two walls, was a nice little schoolgirl whose hair needed combing. There was Anitra, who had walked out on her own party and certainly had too much make-up on; Edith, refined but a little unsteady; Arline, and two young men she hadn't noticed at the house. She never did find out whether they too had deserted the party or been picked up. They were both a little hollow-chested and pasty, and they sat together and held hands. Still, they didn't have any of the obvious marks of a queer, no hip-wiggle or visible make-up.

Besides Anitra's group, there were three young sailors at the bar, snickering and making audible comments about the newcomers. Out killing time, probably. But the others—Everyone needed a bath, or maybe it was the lavender-tinted lighting that turned all skins to dull clay and set shadows under the eyes and around the nostrils. At the next table sat a meager little man who might have been a bookkeeper or a bookie, the kind of man—except for some look of decay in his face—who takes his paycheck home unopened. He sat with his arm loosely around the shoulder of a young woman who, from her angular shape, was almost surely a man. High heels and pleated ruffles. Joyce poked Edith and made the least possible gesture, raising her eyebrows. Edith frowned. "Transvestite." It didn't mean anything, she had never heard the word before. "Man in a woman's clothes, or otherwise."

"Oh," Joyce said. She wondered if Anitra was, too, in a more expensive way. Probably not, though. Lots of women wore pants, which made it confusing.

At the table next to this scrambled couple sat two girls about whom there was no doubt. One was thin and flat, with a jutting jaw. The other had heavy hips and a sagging bust. Both had ducktail haircuts like some of the girls at school, but with no softening front waves or little tendril curls. Both wore regular men's overall jeans with fly fronts, heavy pullover sweaters, and one gold ring in the right ear. The heavy one winked at Joyce, who felt embarrassed but smiled back politely. The other followed her friend's look, and shrugged.

The waitress arrived, in flannel slacks. "Honey, what'll you have?"

"Beer, I guess." She hated beer but she was afraid to drink anything stronger after those highballs at The Bluff. The salty taste of the caviar was still in her mouth. The others were looking at her, waiting. "Beer," she said more loudly.

Arline patted her head. "You're smart, honey. I wish to God I could drink beer; these mixed drinks give me the awfullest headache."

"Where's Linda?"

"Sleepin' on Fritzi's bed, I reckon. She passed right out." Arline looked dejected. "Oh, well, more'n likely she needs the sleep. We never did get to bed at all last night. We were havin' a real good fight and I was scared she'd poke me in the ribs with a knife if I shut my little ol' eyes."

"Drunk and disorderly again?" Tarzan rumbled.

"Oh, she thought I was two-timin' her with some ol' married girl lives down the hall a ways. Silly baby, she knows I wouldn't look at nobody but her." She patted Joyce's knee. "Honey, anybody ever tell you you're right cute?"

A haggard, pretty girl in a cheap fur stole stood in the doorway, swaying a little on high, turned-over heels. The thin customer in jeans let out a yell of welcome and rushed over to hug her. "Honey baby! C'mon, let's go home!"

"I want a drink first," the fur-stole girl said. She sat down at the bar and crossed her thin legs, wrapping the fur around her throat with an elegant gesture. She leaned on one elbow and took a compact out of her imitation alligator bag. "Same as always, Herbie. I'm pooped."

"Big night?"

"So-so. You know how it is."

The heavy-set girl wandered around and stood by Anitra, who had gathered all her party's checks into a pile with a fine hospitable gesture. "You mind if I sit down with you folks for a while? My friend's late tonight."

"Not at all. What'll you have?"

"Just a beer, thanks."

Tarzan took his sandaled foot off the rounds of the empty chair and shoved it at her. "Your friend work nights too? Like that one?"

"Not that way. I'm cracked about germs." She scowled. She had a heavy face which, without make-up or curls, looked sullen but wholesome. "She's a waitress in an all-night cafe," she said defensively. "It may not pay much, but what she makes is her own and there's no pimp hangin' around the kitchen door when she gets done."

"True," Tarzan said politely.

"I forgot to tell you, my name's Bobbie."

"Do you work nights too?"

Bobbie looked up from her stein. A wisp of foam clung to her nose; she wiped it away with the back of her hand. "Not if I can help it, days or nights neither. Sometimes I clerk in a bookstore when they need somebody extra, like say Christmas. The boss knows me and he's a good guy. It ain't that I'm afraid of work, I was raised on a farm, only it's hard to find a job where they let you dress like you want to."

"Don't you ever wear regular clothes?" Edith asked. She smoothed her skirt with a slender hand. Joyce could imagine her thinking: After all, I'm not
masculine.
I'm
different.

"Hell, no. What would I do that for?"

She was willing to talk about herself, as if they had all known each other a long time. Joyce forgot her giddy headache and listened with interest. She was nineteen, Bobbie said, and had lived on a farm in southeastern Missouri until her folks died, a couple of years ago. "I always liked to work in the fields, and fool around with animals and stuff. Pa always said I was the best hired man he had." She had never had a date when she was in school, never thought about boys much—she could pitch a ball farther than any boy she ever knew and lift a bale of hay as easy. "Boys never asked me to date, anyhow; guess they wanted somebody who could act cute and flirty."

An aunt here had got her a job as checker in a grocery store, and that was where she met Karla. Pretty soon they were sharing a room, and Bobbie found out about this other kind of love. It made more sense than smirking at fellows. "She meant an awful lot to me. More than a fellow ever could, I'll tell you that. She liked me the way I was, too." But Karla developed a cold that hung on, and when the store nurse sent her to get her chest X-rayed they found an advanced case of TB. She was in a sanitarium now, and Bobbie took a long bus ride to go and see her every once in a while. Francie didn't like it so much, she said, but she figured it was the least she could do. The poor kid had to lay there all day long and worry about herself, and if Francie was jealous, okay. She could get out any time she felt like.

It was while she was living with Karla that she decided to change over to men's clothes. She went to a man's barber shop and got her hair cut. "Real short, you know, he like to scalped me. Now I like this here D.A. better, it's got more style. I always wanted to be a boy from the time I was little. Boys get all the breaks. Like home, Pa always had the say about everything. Ma never got to open her yap about anything. Work, work, work all the time. It's a man's world."

The market fired her for wearing jeans to work under the regular white apron, or maybe it was for trying to make a girl customer who looked lonesome. They never told you the real reason in those places, didn't have the guts to. "I didn't care, I was tired of the crumby job. Now I got so I feel funny with a dress on."

She had lived with five women in all, one at a time. "I wouldn't two-time nobody." The best break she got, she said, was with Janette. Jan was a TV actress but she didn't work at it much, the competition was terrible, she was kept by a rich old guy who set her up in a ritzy apartment and came to see her twice a week regular. Tuesdays and Fridays. "He couldn't do nothing, you know, he was too old, but he sure had some funny ideas. He used to switch Jan on the behind with a little switch he had, till she bled. She didn't care. Just so's he paid the rent and the grocery bills. You know, most hookers don't really like it; it's all business with them and that's why they go gay on the side. You gotta have somebody. That Janette, she was different, she liked men and women both. Take it any way she could get it, two or three times a day, and holler for more."

Two things she made up her mind about when she got started, she said proudly, and she'd stuck with it too. "I won't have nothing to do with a girl that uses dope. Not even tea. They tell you tea won't form a habit, but I never saw nobody stop usin' it. First they do it for kicks, then they gotta have it to feel good, then first thing you know they switched to the strong stuff. You ever see a girl with a monkey on her back? They'll do anything to get a fix then, steal or even kill somebody. I don't trust
no
junkie." The second thing—she wouldn't have anything to do with a streetwalker. "Like that one over there." She nodded at the bar, where the girl with the stole was drinking her third straight brandy while her friend sat watching her, not drinking herself, just watching and looking impatient. "I don't mean if a girl lives with one guy, specially if he's educated and high class. They ain't so likely to get a disease that way. You get mixed up with some common hooker, first thing you know you got a dose of the clap or something. Or that syph, that's mean, that can eat your insides right out. I don't want none of that."

"You're a smart girl," Tarzan told her. "I'm a doctor and I know."

"Yeah? You're damn right I'm smart."

The two sailors at the bar looked at each other. Derision crossed their blurry adolescent faces. They stood up. "C'mon, let's go find us a place with some real women in it," one of them said. "There ought to be some real women in this town."

"Some big shots," Bobbie said.

Anitra asked, "Didn't you ever go to bed with a man?"

"Sure. I'll try anything once. Didn't mean a thing to me," Bobbie said proudly. "If you're a real butch you don't get hot for men. Only sometimes they're okay to have around for buddies, like doc here. I could go for him in a strictly platonic way. Not for lovin' though—uh-uh."

"You're so wise," Anitra said softly. Bobbie smiled at her. The smile lightened her face, gave her a pleasant, almost motherly look. "You're cute," she said. "You got real style. What you doin' in a dump like this?"

"Just looking around."

"See anything you like?"

"Could be."

Bobbie nodded. "Say, come in the John a minute, will you? There's a question I wanta ask you."

They went out together, Anitra walking lightly in her pearl-sewn velvet slippers.

"That's going too far," Edith Bannister said coldly. "I don't care, some people have no discrimination at all. I really mean that. I wouldn't pick up a piece of trash like that for anything."

Tarzan scratched his fur chest. "Oh, I don't know. She's not so bad, if you like women."

Arline patted his shoulder. "That's right, honey. You gotta be broadminded."

The two pallid young men didn't say anything. They had pulled their straight chairs close together, and the tall one was stroking the other's leg.

After what seemed like a long time Anitra and Bobbie came out of the room marked
Ladies.
Anitra leaned over the table. A wisp of hair had come loose from her sleek bun and hung down on her neck. The effect was startlingly rowdy. "I'm going over to Bobbie's place for a little while," she said to everyone in general. "She wants to show me something."