Whisper Their Love (8 page)

She sat down on the edge of the bed and took off her slippers, then snapped off the light and got under the covers. Joyce was acutely conscious of her body, not touching, but close enough for her to feel its warmth. She shut her eyes, feeling truly secure and cared-for at last.

Edith Bannister stirred. "You'd better stay in bed tomorrow," she said calmly, "and it might be a good idea to sleep down here tomorrow night."

That was all right, too. Joyce fell asleep, feeling completely happy.

A confused and blurry day ensued, made up of alternate sleepings and wakings, and food on trays, but then she was too sleepy to eat. She went to sleep with bars of yellow sunshine lying across the floor, and woke to deepening shadows in the corners of the room. It was a sort of convalescence, she thought.

Now it was night, and Edith Bannister's warmth and delicate fragrance, familiar since yesterday, was in the bed beside her. She must have slept after she became aware of that, because when she opened her eyes again there was a late-night feeling in the air. She lay still, not quite sure where she was or what had happened to her. A spot of warmth—someone had rolled over against her and a hand lay on her breast. She realized that it was Edith Bannister lying against her, and that Edith was awake. Joyce moved closer, impelled by a loneliness she couldn't define.

Edith whispered, "Afraid?"

"No."

Joyce felt fingers stroking lightly, a warmth and comfort she had never dreamed of, and then a stirring, an awakening. All over her body sensations arose she had never known before. "Please," Edith Bannister said in a queer husky whisper. "Please."

Joyce wasn't sure what was happening or going to happen. Whatever it was, she liked it. This had no relation to being with a man, the touch and smell of a man. She nestled closer, feeling the fingers unbutton her thin, borrowed cotton nightgown. Electric shocks now, wherever there was contact. She whispered, "Oh, yes."

There was no fatigue or worry left. No yesterday or tomorrow and no world beyond these night-dark walls. Nothing but the stroking hand, and Edith's accelerated breathing at her ear, and the feeling that flooded through her.

Chapter 7

Mary Jean had a theory about love which she expounded practically every time the subject came up, over cokes at the Honey Bee and tonight in Holly Robertson's room. Love, she said, is rugged enough even when everything is in favor of it. Even when all four parents are for it, Mary Jean declared, romance is certainly hell on the nervous system.

"When you have to sneak around and take it on the run," she said sadly, "you don't even have to diet to stay thin. Whether you do or don't," she added as a sop to convention.

Holly Mae picked up the cup Mary Jean had put on the bed. "Going somewhere, dear?"

"Late date." Mary Jean pulled on her tweed jacket, slanted a reminding look at Joyce: the door. Joyce blushed. Last time she had forgotten it and Mary Jean had had to come in through a basement window, which involved dropping several feet onto a sorting table in the laundry. "I'm going, too," she said vaguely, taking one more cooky from the carton and sinking back with her spine against the leg of the bed.

If she'd had a boy friend, she thought gloomily while Holly Mae refilled the percolator—if she hadn't made that Tony character so mad and "he'd asked for another date, she could have talked about him the way Mary Jean did about Bill and the girls would have kidded her, offered good advice and asked prying questions to find out how far it had gone.

One disadvantage of this off-beat love, or whatever you wanted to call it—she guessed Mary Jean would have had a name for it but there were some things she couldn't tell even Mary Jean, not even in that hour after the lights were off, when confidences came naturally—one problem was that you had to keep it to yourself. You can admit being sexy or frustrated, but not abnormal. If love at its crazy best is a special kind of insanity that people hanker after instead of fleeing from it, at least being able to talk about it is a kind of therapy. She guessed that some of the girls got more real pleasure out of sharing their affairs than they did out of having them.

When you're a girl of eighteen, and suddenly all that matters much is a woman almost twice your age, the need to keep it extra-secret makes everything that much worse. For a while Joyce went through her days blind and deaf to everything but Edith Bannister, pretending not to pay any special attention to her—keeping her face composed when they met at the table or in the hall. It would have been even more difficult if she hadn't been feeling vague and exalted at the same time, like a person walking around with about two degrees of fever.

This love hasn't anything to do with movies and the sweet mush of popular songs, or even the poetry she used to copy at the library and carry around in the back of her chemistry book. Those were surface things. Two-dimensional, like pieces of paper.

She slept heavily at night, waking full of a queer excitement and riot rested, rejecting sleep and needing more of it at the same time. She felt always a little hungry and thirsty. Yet it wasn't food she wanted. She ate what was set in front of her without paying any particular attention to it. She walked over to town with Mary Jean and Bonnie and Alberta, who had the same free periods she did, and in the slow interval between the last afternoon class and dinner they bought things to eat: Hershey bars and sacks of potato chips, sundaes with imitation whipped cream and maraschino cherries at the Bee. They were always stopping downtown for Cokes, though it cost a dime and tasted exactly like the six-cent coke in the vending machines on campus.-Once she picked an empty sack off the floor of the room and asked, "Who dropped this?" and Mary Jean said, "Goofus, you just ate the peanuts." She rolled up the bit of paper and threw it away, but she couldn't remember eating any peanuts.

She must have taken showers and dressed, fixed her face, gone to class and recited when called on. She was always finding herself sitting in the library with a book open in front of her, and some of the print got through to whatever she did her thinking with in those days. But she was certainly not all there.

Mostly, she waited. It was appalling how much time you could spend just sitting around and waiting, and the way most days ended in blankness. Edith went out a great deal, evenings. She sponsored school activities and belonged to social and study clubs in town. She dated, too. She went out with a lawyer who was supposed to be looking for a second wife, an eligible bachelor who was on the governing board of the college, a wistful little man who wore the only male beret—red—in Henderson and was supposed to be a painter.

"How can you?" Joyce demanded. "How can you go out with men? Do you like to?"

"I like an evening out now and then," Edith said reasonably. She sat on the edge of her bed, smoking. She smoked a great deal in her own rooms, never in public.

"It doesn't seem honest."

"We can't be honest," Edith said simply. She dropped her cigarette into an ashtray. She sat with her hands in her lap, palms up—a characteristic pose. "We have to be careful."

Joyce touched her shoulder with the tip of an inquiring finger. The first tentative gesture towards what might be, this time,
the
time. "I don't care. I'd like to tell everybody."

"I care," Edith said sharply. "I like my job, apart from having to earn a living. You don't know how they crucify people like us, tear us limb from limb and laugh when we suffer." Her normally cool voice was a little shrill; she shivered. "Everybody hates us."

"There can't be so many—"

Edith sighed. "You'd be surprised how many. All shapes . and sizes." She moved her hand from under Joyce's and took another cigarette from the silver case with the initial G engraved on it. "If any of these brats found out—my God, how they'd love it. Your roommate would have a fine time with it, the little nympho." Her eyes narrowed.

Joyce had no answer for that, because it was true. Mary Jean knew more case histories than Kinsey. Accurate or not, she had a lively interest in everyone's sex life, and she used words Joyce had never heard anyone else use, not even migrant hired men. But still she liked Mary Jean. Even if they couldn't swap clothes, they had fallen into a comfortable roommate-best-friend relationship. She stood between two loyalties, feeling clumsy and childish and frustrated, wanting to cry.

Edith stood up, dropping her cigarette beside the other in the ashtray. She laid her cheek against Joyce's, their own special gesture of tenderness. "There isn't any future for us, Joy. You'll graduate, or maybe I'll get a better job. Or one of us will come to care for someone else."

"I don't care about the future," Joyce said painfully. "I'm thinking about now."

"A good idea," Edith said lightly. The wistful moment was gone. Her hand found Joyce's back and rubbed the tender spot between the shoulders. "I really place a great deal of confidence in you, darling."

"Well, you can. I'd sooner die than hurt you." That was mushy, that was like a Grade B movie, and she felt her face redden. But the hand kept rubbing her back, gently, relaxingly, like someone stroking a sleepy cat. She buried her face on Edith's shoulder. "Really touch me."

"Like this?"

"Oh, yes."

The times were too far apart and much too short. Like eating one salted peanut, Edith said smiling. Joyce didn't think that was funny. Between meetings she burned with desire—yes, she really ached all over, it was like the romantic sentimental poetry you had always laughed at, in the old small-print books. You sat in Spanish class and listened to the teacher going through vocabulary lists and the rules governing use of the dative, and it was only noise that had no meaning to it although your mind kept nagging you that you ought to remember this for future examinations. Looking out of the window, all you could think about was the touch and the mounting thrill and, afterwards, when it had been extra good, the complete relaxation that was like being asleep, only better. Much better.

Late night. She crept downstairs after the building was asleep, after an endless- time of waiting. Nobody ever goes to bed in this damn place, she thought, looking across the moonlit strip of floor to Mary Jean's empty and unmade bed, listening to the snickers and clinkings next door where Marnie and Jo had smuggled in a couple cans of beer with the help of Marnie's boy friend. Two hours of rolling and turning, pulling the wadded and wrinkled sheet with her. Won't the fools ever turn off their light and shut up? The hands of the clock moved with irritating slowness, ten-forty when she looked and then, after ages of waiting, ten-forty-four. What if she's asleep when I get there, and the door locked?

The night light at the end of the hall was a faint bluish glimmer. She looked around the half-open door, ready to scuttle into the bathroom if anybody was around. Anyone can be up to go to the bathroom. She tiptoed down the hall, scared of being caught but pushed by something more urgent than timidity. Nobody was in the first-floor hall. The round china knob of the study door turned silently under her sweating hand. The door swung slowly open. Edith was waiting, not reading, not smoking, simply standing there ghost-pale in the moonlight, but warm and solid in the sudden, mutual and inevitable embrace. A quiescent volcano.

Edith's voice spoke an hour later, no longer cool, but rough and demanding. "Was it good? Did you feel it? Are you satisfied?"

"Oh, God."

Joyce lay on her back, arms and legs spread across the bed, her body wet with sweat. The curtains were closed and the moon had gone behind a cloud; the room was dark. I like the dark, she thought drowsily. She reached out an exploring hand, touched flesh still throbbing and pulsating.

"Yes. I got through to you that time, didn't I?"

In a small voice, diminished by fatigue, Joyce answered, "I'm so happy."

"That's all I want. To make you happy."

"Where did you learn how?"

"I'm thirty-four. There have been others." An edge to the voice, cutting through the moment's contentment. "There will be others for you, too, before you're done."

Jealousy stirred in her. She moved away a littler "There'll be more for you, too, I guess. Maybe there's somebody now."

"Don't talk like a fool." Edith turned on the lamp. She sat up in bed, clasping her hands around her knees. In the small light her skin was smooth and clear. Joyce laid her cheek against the smooth slope of thigh. "It's only that you mean so much to me."

Edith stroked the back of her neck, lightly and rhythmically. "You like to be rubbed? A little more and you'll be purring like a kitten." It was true, she was almost asleep. Her eyes dropped shut under the slow, hypnotic stroking. "A man won't do this for you," Edith said. Her voice was low and even again, as though having released her tensions she was once more in full control. "All men think about is their own pleasure. A man wants to relieve himself, like an animal. There's no tenderness in them. If they do anything for you first, it's only to get you all worked up so that you'll be responsive and they'll have more fun. Ugh!" Her hand moved down Joyce's arm, inside the elbow. "A woman can do this for you because she knows what it means, she sees her own pleasure reflected in it. This is what matters. The rest is nothing but a trap nature has figured out to keep the human race going. What counts is here." She moved her hand again. "This is where the thrill and the meaning are."

Joyce moved her head slowly. Heavy with sleep, drugged and groggy with needing sleep. "I know—now."

"Men don't know anything about women," Edith said in the same voice of quiet conviction. "How can they? Only a woman knows what it's like, the same as looking in a mirror or feeling in her own body."

"I want to do it for you, too. Make you happy."

"Next time you will. Lie still now, sleep a little." This was the time of complete happiness. This is the best of all, Joyce thought, lying relaxed and half unconscious against the body she now knew like her own. She slept.

But at two o'clock in the morning, in the deep stillness that comes before daybreak, she had to go back to her own room. This was even more dangerous than the trip out, because anyone who bumped into her now would guess where she had been and why. "Some day we'll have a place where we can be alone," Edith said, dreaming. "A little shack on the coast of Maine with surf crashing on the rocks, or a country inn in France." You were not supposed to believe this, but it made a picture that dimmed the pang of parting somewhat. They clung together, rested, and feeling rose in Joyce again. "Go quickly," Edith said, opening the door a crack and peering out.