Journey to a Woman

Ann Bannon

www.spice-books.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Introduction

I. Foreword/Forward

II. Personality Portraits

III. The Partying

IV. Afterword/Afterward

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Endpages

Copyright

Introduction
I. Foreword/Forward

When these stories of lesbian love were forged nearly half a century ago, I thought—I knew—that I was writing ephemeral literature for a casual audience. That was what was being asked of me, and what I tried to do. I had no fine ideas of recording the saga of a community, nor that these stories would come to have real sociological or historical value. Quite truly, I had no thought that I was preserving a slice of GLBT history that would help to form the perceptions of the era for succeeding generations. I thought I had been given the opportunity to write popular throwaway tales for an avid, if fleeting audience, and that was quite enough. I would write them the very best I could, understanding from the beginning that the first one would be forgotten even as the second was being written. I had not the slimmest sliver of recognition that what I was really given was the opportunity to speak for my generation of young gay and lesbian people.

It is interesting to speculate as to whether or not such knowledge would have destroyed these books. It would have made them more carefully crafted, but also immeasurably more cautious. It very likely would have made them self-conscious and defensive, as well. Instead, they are fully flawed and full of life. It’s a trade off, and on the whole, perhaps for the best. All I can say now to the wonderful young people who power our amazing community is, “Thank you for caring about these stories. Take what you can, learn what you can, and know that they flowed uncensored from the imagination of a girl in her twenties, sitting alone by a typewriter and dreaming up a life she wanted to share with you. Bless you for being there to read about it.”

When it was suggested to me that I write introductions to most of the new Cleis Press editions of my books, it sent me back to reread the original stories. It also propelled me back in time. It had been over twenty years, dating to the Naiad editions of the early 1980s, since I had immersed myself in them. And twenty-five years before that when the actual writing had been accomplished.

Perusing my novels again was a trip in a time machine, an exercise both embarrassing and exhilarating. How very young I was! How deep those feelings ran! And how startlingly sparse was my worldly knowledge. All of the books were completed and in print before I was thirty years old. And now in my sixties, I resisted going back to visit them again. But the rereading was essential. As George Santayana is supposed to have said, “How do I know what I think till I see what I said?”

As I reacquainted myself with my authorial life and times, several themes seemed to emerge and to run like threads through all of the books. There is not room to analyze all of them here, but one or two stand out. The first is the emotional development and personality portraits of the characters themselves; the sheer punch of the interior drama, that so fascinated me. I wanted to follow them and discover how the characters connected to one another, why they chose the partners they did. The other was the symbolic use of liquor and cigarettes as the banners of liberation. I’d like to look at these themes as they apply to Journey to a Woman.

II. Personality Portraits

Not everybody likes to travel, but almost everybody loves a journey of self-discovery, especially if it leads to the uplands of love. This book is an odyssey from sorrow to sunshine; from the drama and heartache of breakup to the astonishment of passion. If the preceding book, Women in the Shadows, was a story of breaking away from smothering relationships and claiming the right to define yourself (even if you got it wrong, be it said!), Journey to a Woman is more about achieving youthful maturity, coming to terms with who you really are. It’s about what happens to three strong, beautiful women when one of them—Beth—rediscovers her passion for another—Laura—only to fall headlong into the arms of the third—Beebo Brinker herself.

When I first started writing these books, I was a woman in love—not just with a few individuals, but with a whole community, the entire world full of wonderful women and endearing gay men. I idealized them all. I was in love with being in love with them. They could do no wrong in my eyes. But time went by. I listened, I watched and learned. I was also doing my own growing up and having to accept, book by book, that people aren’t perfect—fascinating and lovable but not flawless. I had to include myself in that “not-flawless” category, too.

People have asked if I am the Beth in these stories. I am reminded of the response Gustave Flaubert gave when he was asked the identity of Madame Bovary. “Madame Bovary,” he replied calmly, “is me. Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” The French have been scratching their heads and repeating the phrase ever since. But Flaubert had hit on something. For any writer, all of our various characters are “us” when we create them. I have always responded that Beth was based, physically and socially at least, on a former sorority roommate who inspired lust in many hearts, more than one of them womanly. That said, however, perhaps it is fair to allow that there is a lot of me in Beth, and a lot of her problems are the ones I was wrestling with in my twenties, especially the awkward relationships, skewed by chaotic, unsorted emotions. Beth was a woman who needed women, heart and soul, and didn’t know how to give herself permission to reach out to them. We differed most in two ways: she spoke out to her husband about her fears and misgivings while I swallowed mine. And she was dubious about her feelings for her children while I was passionately attached to mine.

So Beth was vulnerable when the lovely but dangerous and fatally wounded Vega crossed her path. We have all had the experience she had: a first breathtaking glimpse of a bewitchingly beautiful human being, and perhaps even the pleasant shock of seeing a responsive spark in that person’s eyes. But after you bring them home you find something scary under the irreproachable veneer. They are hurt and want to hurt someone back; they need you to fix them, while you need them for love. They don’t have it to give, and you can’t supply the fix. It’s a match made in purgatory. What to do? This is where you learn fast how rocky saying goodbye can be.

There was a woman living near me in Southern California who served as the original of Vega Purvis. She was handsome, sleek and chic, witty, and, in Edward Arlington Robinson’s apposite phrase, “imperially slim.” She could be endearingly funny about her physical ills, in a way that made you want to cuddle and comfort her. It was Vega herself who described her abdominal scars as resembling a ball of yarn tangled up by a kitten. But she carried a freight load of psychological damage everywhere with her, and it gave her a mercurial temperament. I could never wait to spend time with her, and never wait to get away home.

My fictional Vega was also a woman whose prejudices reflected almost perfectly those of her homophobic family, and yet who broke out of that box from time to time. Her forays were thrilling, risky, and ultimately disastrous, as Beth discovered. But they do bespeak the strength of that drive to find and possess and yes, love, one of your own. And always, in that era and even now, there were perplexed and resistant men hovering in the background—impatient husbands or brothers or uncles, wondering why their influence doesn’t sweep away such treacherous notions from their women’s heads.

Some women take refuge behind a man, as Laura did, and some men behind a woman, as did Jack Mann in this tale. Laura never gave up her delight in women, and they remained the romantic joy of her life. But she wanted children and so did her supportive and affectionate best gay friend, Jack. They made common cause to provide a home for their child and a facade of respectability each for the other, a sort of honorable camouflage to shield them from the ostracism of their social circle.

Knowing none of this, and running almost as much from Vega as Charlie, Beth arrives in New York obsessed with tracking Laura to earth and virtually devouring her with the resurgent sexual excitement she thought she had forever abandoned with her marriage. And when, in her search, she runs into the provocative and manipulative writer, Nina Spicer, who leads her to Beebo Brinker, the stage is set for a fiery intersection of different personalities, conflicts, and clashing needs. And ultimately, of course, for resolution in love. (These were the pulps, after all!)

III. The Partying

So many of us in that tough age, whatever our social class, grew up thinking we had to be what our parents and society told us to be: “nice girls,” “good girls.” We had no notion that we could give ourselves permission to “transgress.” Yes, there was too much booze and too much angst. But you know what? We romanticized it all. We really thought that since we couldn’t give ourselves permission to be who we were, the liquor could. At the very least, it relaxed the strictures against marginalized social roles. It let us look at and think about the women we suspected we might truly be with affection, not socially mandated contempt. It was a conspiratorial act when a bunch of handsome, adventurous young women sat down to share a beer and cigarettes. But more than that, we were carrying a flag handed off from our mothers, both straight and gay, claiming autonomy and equality for women. That’s what made the brew and the smokes so appealing. They had a significance for us beyond the mere conviviality they fostered.

Those of us who were young in the 1950s and 1960s have bright memories of mothers who, in their turn, were the “flappers” of the 1920s: the pert girls in the cloche hats, growing up in a prosperous era, flattening their breasts, wearing their hair in “boyish bobs,” and raising their skirts above their knees. The Great War to end all wars was over and the world was throwing a decade-long party. For the first time, women were starting to claim the theretofore masculine privileges of smoking and drinking. It was a way of demanding parity with men, of trying to be taken seriously by donning the trappings of the ruling class. Many of them were playing at this game, but a significant few took it seriously.

And the new advertisements were seductive. A man lights a Chesterfield and his woman companion gazes into the curling smoke. “Blow some my way,” she says. Murad brand, with a not very subtle nod to the ladies, adopts the slogan, “Be Nonchalant—light a Murad.” And here’s the one that got so many women: “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.”

But shockingly, the Great War and the Great Prosperity were followed by the Great Depression. Women were thrust back into their traditional routines of kinder, küche, kirche. In their millions, they broke out the white ruffled aprons and little wash dresses and rediscovered the joys of floor wax and tuna casseroles. Still, they could not forget the brief, exhilarating fling with freedom of a sort. When Prohibition ended in the early 1930s, many young women participated enthusiastically in the afternoon “cocktail hour,” which seems to have entirely replaced the hour for high tea. One expanded one’s wardrobe to include a semi-formal outfit for late afternoons that became known as a “cocktail dress.” That useful article of furniture, the once-and-future “coffee table,” became the “cocktail table.” Fashionable young women drank highballs or bourbon on the rocks, right alongside their mates.

If the men bought the booze, women could share a “wee drop of the creature,” too. My own mother, preparing for her second wedding in 1934, was given that trendiest of bridal parties, a “liquor shower,” including highball glasses, engraved pewter liquor labels on little chains, glass swizzle sticks, and her own personal hammered silver flask, in case she got chilly at a football game. It was the height of young, trendy 1930s urbanity, in the grand style of the charmingly bibulous Nick and Nora Charles—“The Thin Man” and his delectable mate.

When World War II intruded on our lives, for many women, and aside from genuine hardships and losses, it truly was a glimpse of a brave new world. They came out of that experience more changed than the surface serenity and convention of the 1950s would suggest. Cigarettes and liquor had been offered everywhere and to everyone during the war; they were blended in the memory with recreation, rest, relief from stress and fatigue, and just plain fun. Freedom to smoke and drink without the intermediary of a protective male became associated at last, for better or for worse, with a defiance of past constraints on women’s lives. It became, in short, an outward show of independence.

When I arrived in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s, this perception was firmly entrenched and I did not think to question it. There were wonderful women everywhere I looked, and many intriguing gay men. When they gathered to socialize at a Village pub, they enjoyed a smoke, they took a drink, they created a charmed circle. If you wanted to join them, to fit in, you did as they did. If you went a little over the top, they picked you up, dusted you off, spared you the sermons, and took you home to sleep it off on their sofas. You, in time, returned the favor as needed. It was another form of bonding, of “us against the world.”

But a time does come in one’s life when it is prudent to step back from all that seemed fully pellucid in the first enchantment of one’s twenties; a time to take stock and a time to question. I am reminded of Max Ehrmann’s wise and compelling advice: “Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.” (“Desiderata,” 1927). I did, as in good time and with luck, we all must. Finally, for all those who press reproach without understanding, this is just to say how it was for so many of us back then.

IV. Afterword/Afterward

No, I didn’t become an alcoholic. I even stopped smoking in my early twenties and today drink only the occasional, if welcome, glass of wine. And I can reassure you that Beebo and Beth, at the end of Journey to a Woman, made it out happy and intact. How do I know this? Because I know where they are now: sitting on the pages of a manuscript written some years ago and awaiting resurrection and revision. Beth went through a sort of fever dream in extricating herself from her marriage and fashioning a life for herself that differed greatly from the one imagined by a younger Beth in her undergraduate days. It’s often in such a fire that we forge and purify our true identities, and that’s what her journey was all about. Parts of the personal odyssey are daunting and parts of it are brilliantly beautiful, and both reveal us to ourselves as no other experience could. Not everyone has the stomach to take this sort of interior trip. If it were easy, wouldn’t everyone do it? But for survivors, it brings the gift of deeper self-knowledge and a capacity for sweeter and more selfless love of others.

And so, we come to the endpoint in this story. Beth at last meets Beebo, and all sorts of good things start to happen. She has fought her way through the tough stuff and earned the joy, and so, in the earlier tales, had Beebo. I should have written a novel then that pursued them into their life together. Now, I will.

Ann Bannon

Sacramento, California

September 2002

Chapter One

SHE LAY IN THE DARK AND CRIED. SHE LAY CLOSE AND WARM IN her husband’s arms while their breath slowed to normal and their hearts quieted together and she wept silently at his sigh of relief. She had learned to cry without making a sound. It had taken a while but she had had plenty of opportunities to learn. If he caught her crying there was always a terrible scene. He started out by questioning her love and ended by questioning his own manhood.

“Goddamn it, Beth!” he had cried to her once, when they had been married only two months, “If I’m doing it wrong, tell me! How do I know what you want me to do if you don’t tell me? A woman isn’t like a man. I can’t tell if it’s any good for you or not.”

He was blaming her for his own faults of love she thought, and, stung, she snapped back, “What am I supposed to do, give you a play-by-play analysis? Can’t you figure it out for yourself, Charlie? You did well enough before we were married.”

“So did you, before we were married,” he flung at her. He got out of bed, lighted a cigarette in the dark, and sat down on the floor. They could not afford chairs yet, and he didn’t want to share the bed with her for a few minutes. Not until the anger wore off.

“Beth, you’ve got it just backwards,” he said. “Most girls can’t enjoy it until they’re married. Their consciences hurt, or something. They’re afraid they’ll get pregnant. But not you. Not Backwards Beth. The minute we get married it’s no fun anymore. Does love have to be immoral or illegal before you can enjoy it, honey?”

Insulted, she turned her back to him and pulled the covers over her disappointed body. She was afraid to think of what he had just said. It had too much the shape of truth and she had had to work very hard to forget it completely. Charlie finished his cigarette and climbed gingerly back into his place in bed, more chilled by his wife’s behavior than the night vapors.

It had been nine years since the first such quarrel. There had been others, but Beth had learned fast to hide the tears of frustration. True to her contrary nature, there were times when she loved Charlie—if love can be an on-again, off-again affair. And sometimes, when she didn’t expect it, desire sneaked up on her and made the moments in his arms unbearably lovely, the way they had been in college. But that was only sometimes, and sometimes was not enough.

On this night, like so many others, she got up after he had fallen back to sleep and went into the bathroom and washed herself. It comforted her obscurely to tidy herself up this way. And when she went back to bed, she dreamed. Beth dreamed often and vividly.

But tonight it wasn’t a dream like any other. She dreamed of Laura. Just Laura, sitting on the studio couch of the room they had shared in college, looking at Beth and smiling. Laura with her long light hair and periwinkle eyes. Laura, who didn’t know herself until Beth discovered her. Laura, who loved her and who had disappeared from her life like frost from a spring lawn, and who never came back.

That was all. Beth spoke her name, trying to make her answer and explain herself, but Laura only sat and smiled. Beth repeated the name until suddenly she wakened and pressed a hand over her mouth. Had she spoken aloud? But Charlie slumbered undisturbed and she relaxed again, leaning back on her pillow and staring at the dark ceiling.

I haven’t even thought of her for months, she pondered. How strange. It’s been years since I dreamed of her. I’d half forgotten. I wonder how she is … where she is. In Chicago with her father, I suppose. He always ruled her life like a tyrant. She wouldn’t have married, of course.

In the morning she told Charlie, “I dreamed of Laura last night.”

“Oh?” He looked up from the financial page of the paper. He spoke casually enough, although he stiffened inwardly. Charlie remembered Laura, too. A man does not easily forget a rival and for a few months, many years ago, when they were all in college, that was what Laura had been. A strange cool girl she was, with a capacity for violent love that Beth had almost accidentally roused. It had only lasted a short while—the space of a semester—and for Beth it had not seemed serious, for she was falling in love with Charlie at the time, and Charlie won her handily. That was when Laura had disappeared.

Beth and Charlie had talked it over, had even tried to help Laura. There was little about the curious affair that Charlie didn’t know; little that he couldn’t forgive. And, it should be added, little about it that he understood.

When he and Beth married he was confident that she would forget it, and to a large extent she had. At first, anyway. She liked men, she was married to one. She had children now and a stable home. Most important in Charlie’s eyes, she had him. And besides, she was a sensible girl. When Laura dropped out of Beth’s life physically, Charlie had faith that she would drop out emotionally as well.

Beth had rarely mentioned Laura over the years, and now, when she spoke of her dream at the breakfast table, it was the first time Charlie had even thought of Laura in over two years. So he was startled, but he didn’t want it to show.

“What was the dream?” he asked.

“Not much. Just Laura, sitting there.”

“Where?”

“That room we had on the third floor at the Alpha Beta house.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all. Polly, damn it, don’t wipe your fingers on your dress!” Her four-year-old daughter grabbed a paper napkin guiltily.

“Don’t swear at the kids, honey,” Charlie said mildly.

“Don’t scold me in front of them,” she said.

He sighed, feeling a quick hot frustration, a sensation that was much too common for comfort these days, and picked up the paper again. “What else about Laura?” he said.

“Nothing else. Silly dream.”

But it haunted her. And Charlie had a feeling there was more to it than she told him. He kept his eyes on the paper another five minutes and then rose from the table. “Got to get going,” he said. He kissed his two children goodbye and then came around the table behind Beth.

“ ’Bye, honey,” he said into her ear, and blew into it gently.

“Have a good day,” she said absently.

He wished gloomily that she would see him to the door.

“Daddy, when you get home will you make me a kite?” Skipper said suddenly. He was five, just a year older than his sister, and he looked very much like Beth.

“Sure,” Charlie said, still looking at the short dark curls on the back of his wife’s head. He stroked her neck with his finger.

“Yay!” Skipper cried.

Beth squirmed slightly, irritated by Charlie’s wordless loneliness and a little ashamed of herself. Charlie left her finally and went toward the front door, slipping into his suit coat as he went. Beth felt his gaze on her and glanced up suddenly with a little line of annoyance between her eyes.

“Something wrong?” she said.

“No. What are you doing today?”

“I’m flying to Paris,” she said sarcastically. “What else? Want to come?”

“Sure.” He grinned and she softened a little. He was handsome, in a lopsided way, with his big grin and his fine eyes. The kids set up a clamor. “Can I come too? Can I come too, Mommy?”

And when Charlie went out the door he heard her shout at them in that voice that scared him, that voice with the edge of hysteria in it, “Oh, for God’s sake! Oh, shut up! Honest to God, you kids are driving me insane!”

And he knew she would slam something down on the table to underline her words—a jam jar or a piece of tableware, anything handy.

He drove off to work with a worried face.

Chapter Two

BETH LOVED HER KIDS THE WAY SHE LOVED CHARLIE: AT A distance. It was a real love but it couldn’t be crowded. She had no patience with intimacy. The hardest years of her life had been when the two babies arrived within eleven months of each other. One was bad enough, but two! Both in diapers, both screaming and streaming at both ends. Both colicky, both finicky eaters.

Beth was completely unprepared, almost helpless with a screaming nervousness that put both Charlie and the kids on edge. She never quite recovered from her resentment. A few years later, when the worst was over, she began to wonder if her quick awful temper and desperation had made the children as nervous as they were. She blamed herself bitterly sometimes. But then she wondered how it could have happened any other way.

But when Polly shut herself in a closet and cried all afternoon, or Skipper threw a tantrum and swore at her in her own words, or when Charlie sulked in angry silence for days on end after a quarrel, she began to wonder again, to accuse herself, to look wildly around her for excuses, for escape.

Beth had just one friend that she saw with any regularity, and that was the wife of Charlie’s business partner. Her name was Jean Purvis, and she and Beth bowled together on a team. Beth had been searching for ways to get out of it since she had started it. Bowling bored her and so did Jean. But you couldn’t help liking the girl.

Jean Purvis was a good-hearted person, a natural blonde with a tendency to plumpness against which she pitted a wavering will power. She had two expressions: a little smile and a big smile. At first Beth envied her sunny nature, but after a while it got on her nerves.

She must have had days like other people, Beth thought. She must get mad at her husband once in a while.

But if Jean ever did it never showed and her eternal smile made Beth feel guilty. It was like an unspoken reproach of Beth’s sudden wild explosions and cloudy moods, and it made her resent Jean; it made her jealous and contemptuous all at once.

Jean Purvis and her husband Cleve were the only people that Beth and Charlie knew when they first moved to California. Cleve and Charlie were business partners now, manufacturing toys, and it had been Cleve’s drum-beating letters that encouraged Charlie to give up his law apprenticeship and move to the West Coast.

Beth reacted angrily at first. “I like the East!” she had exclaimed. “What do I know about California? Everybody in the country is headed for California. It’ll be so crowded out there pretty soon they won’t have room for the damn palm trees.”

“Cleve has a good start in business,” Charlie said.

“Charlie, what in God’s name do you know about making toys? I’d be glad if you’d make one decent slingshot for Skipper and call it quits,” she told him.

But his stubborn head was already full of ideas. “One craze, one big hit—we’d strike it rich,” he said. “One Hula Hoop, one coonskin cap, something like that.”

“You sit there like a grinning happy idiot ready to throw your whole career, your whole education, out the window, because your old fraternity buddy is making plastic popguns out in Pasadena and he says to come on out,” Beth cried, furious. “I don’t trust that Cleve Purvis anyway, from what I’ve heard about him. You always said he was a heavy drinker.”

But he had made his mind up, and with Charlie that was the same as doing a thing. He could not be moved.

Charlie left Beth and the two babies in Chicago with her uncle and aunt while he went out to Pasadena to join Cleve and find a place to live.

Beth loved it. Her Uncle John was fond of spoiling her. Beth was his daughter by proxy; he had no children of his own. She had been dumped in his lap, sobbing and runny nosed and skinny at eight years, when her parents were killed. Miraculously, she had learned to love him and he returned her love. With Aunt Elsa it was all a matter of keeping up good manners, and she was automatically friendly.

For four months Beth slept and ate and lazed around the house. It was delicious to be waited on, to have civilized cocktails in the afternoon, to let somebody else pick Polly up when the colic got her. To go out for whole evenings of food and glittering entertainment and know there were a dozen capable baby-sitters at home. Beth refused to join her husband in California until she threw him into a rage.

She realized with something like a shock that she didn’t miss Charlie’s love-making at all. She missed Charlie, in a sort of pleasant blurry way, and she loved to talk about him over a cold whiskey and water, laughing gently at the faults that drove her frantic when they were together. But when she heard his anger and hurt on the telephone it came to her as a surprise, as if she would never learn it once and for all, that a man’s feelings are urgent, even painful. She remembered feeling it like that once, long ago, in college. Was it Charlie, was it really Charlie that did it to her? Or was it somebody else, somebody tall and slight and blonde with soft blue eyes, who used to sit on the studio couch in their room at the sorority house and gaze at her?

Charlie was in a sweat of bad-tempered impatience when she finally, reluctantly, agreed to come out and resume their marriage.

Marriages would all be perfect if the husband and wife could live two thousand miles apart, she thought. For the wife, anyway.

And Charlie missed the kids. “He misses them!” she cried aloud, sardonically. But she knew if they were far away she would miss them too. She would love them at her leisure. They would begin to seem beautiful and perfect and she would forgive them their dirty diapers and midnight squalling sessions.

It scared her sometimes to think of this streak in herself; this quirk that made her want to love at a distance. The only person she had ever loved up close, with an abandoned delight in the contact, was … Laura. Laura Landon. A girl.

Charlie drove her home from the International Airport in Los Angeles. He was bursting with excitement, with things to say, with kisses and relief and swallowed resentments.

“How’s business?” she asked him when they were all safely in the car.

“Honey, it’s great. It’s everything I told you on the phone, only better. We did the right thing. You’ll love California. And I have a great idea, it’ll sell in the millions, it’s—oh, Beth, Jesus, you’re so beautiful I can’t stand it.” And he pulled over to the side of the road, to the noisy alarm of the car behind him, and kissed her while Skipper punched him in the stomach. He laughed and kept on kissing her and they were both suddenly filled with a hot need for each other that left them breathless. Beth felt a whole year’s worth of little defeats and frustrations fade and she wished powerfully that the children would both fall providentially asleep for five minutes. She was amazed at herself.

They got home after an hour’s driving on and off the freeways. It was a small town just east of Pasadena: Sierra Bella. It was cozy and old and very pretty, skidding down from the mountains, with props and stilts under the oldest houses.

It was quite dark when they drove into their own garage and Beth couldn’t see the house very well. But the great purple presence behind them was a mountain and it awed and pleased her. She was used to the flat plains and cornfields of the Midwest. Below them were visible the lights of the San Gabriel Valley: a whole carpet of sparklers winking through the night from San Bernardino to the shores of the Pacific.

“Like it?” Charlie said, putting an arm around her.

“It’s gorgeous. Is it this pretty in the daytime?”

“Depends on the smog.” He grinned.

Inside the house she was less impressed. It was clean. But so small, so cramped! He sensed her feelings.

“Well, it’s not like Lake Shore Drive. Uncle John could have done better, no doubt,” he said.

“It’s—lovely,” she managed, with a smile.

“It’s just till we get a little ahead, honey,” he said quickly.

Beth fed the children and put them to bed with Charlie’s help. And then he pulled her down on their own bed, without even giving her time to take her clothes off. For fifteen minutes, in their quiet room, they talked intimately and Charlie stroked her and began to kiss her, sighing with relief and pleasure.

Suddenly Skipper yelled. Bellyache. Too much excitement on the plane. Beth jumped up in a spitting anger and Charlie had to calm the little boy as best he could.

Beth was surprised at herself. She was tired and she had had an overdose of children that day. And still she responded to Charlie with a sort of wondering happiness. She didn’t want anything to intrude on it or spoil it. Maybe this was the beginning of a new understanding between them, a better life, even a really happy one.

A half hour later Skipper woke again. Scared. New room, new bed, new house. And when Beth, nervous and impatient, finally got him down again, Polly woke up.

Beth’s temper broke, hard. “Damn them!” she cried. “Oh, damn them! They’ve practically ruined my life. They’re driving me nuts, Charlie, they’ll end up killing me. The one night we get back together after all these months—” she began to cry, choking on her self-pity and outrage—“those miserable kids have to spoil it.”

“Beth,” Charlie said, grasping her shoulders. His voice was stern and calm. “Nothing can spoil it, darling. Get a grip on yourself.”

Polly’s angry little voice rose over Charlie’s and Beth screamed, “One of these days I’ll croak her! I will! I will!”

And suddenly Charlie, who adored his children, got mad himself. “Beth, can’t you go for a whole hour without losing your temper at those kids!” he demanded. “What do you expect of them? Skipper isn’t even two years old. Polly’s a babe in arms. Good God, how do you want them to act? Like a pair of old ladies? Would that make you happy?”

“Now you’re angry!” she screamed.

He clasped his arms against his sides in an expression of exasperation. “You were in love with me five minutes ago,” he said.

Beth didn’t know quite what had gotten into her. She was tired, worn out from the trip and the emotions, fed up with the kids. She had wanted him, coming home in the car. Now all she wanted was a hot bath and sleep.

She walked out of the bedroom and slammed the door behind her. But Charlie swung it open at once and followed her, turning her roughly around at the door to the bathroom.

“What’s that little act supposed to mean?” he said.

She stared at him and the kids continued to chorus their sorrows in screechy little voices. Charlie’s big hands hurt her tender arms and his eyes and voice had gone flat.

“I won’t argue,” she said, her voice high and shaky. “I won’t argue with you. You don’t understand anything about me. You never have understood me!”

He looked into her flushed face and answered coolly, “You never have understood yourself, Beth. If you knew who you really were it wouldn’t be so hard for me to know you. Or anybody else.”

That infuriated her. She hated to be told that she didn’t know herself and it was one of the things Charlie always told her when he was mad at her. She hated it the worse because it was true.

“You lie!” she cried. “You bastard!”

Charlie pushed her back against the wall, so hard that her head snapped and hit the plaster with a stuffy thump. He kissed her. He was not very nice about it.

“If you think you’re going to make love to me, tonight, after the way you’ve just been acting—” she panted furiously at him, struggling to free herself— “if you think I’ve come two thousand miles just to let you rape me—”

“You shut up,” he said harshly, and kissed her again. He nearly crushed her mouth and she would have screamed again if she had been able. When he released her she slashed at him with her nails and he pulled her by her wrists back into the bedroom.

Beth tried all the old favored tricks of crossed women. She kicked, and flailed with her dangerous nails; she tried to bite him; she whacked him with a knife-heeled pump, thrilled to see a slightly bloody scratch bloom on his shoulder.

But Charlie smothered her with his big body. He just rolled on top of her and told her, “Shut up. You’re noisier than those poor kids you complain about all the time.” The sheer weight of him overwhelmed her. Struggle was futile, arguments were useless.

While he fumbled with her underthings she said, “You’re a brute. You bring me home to this miserable little cracker-box, you drag me all the way to California for this. This!” She tried to gesture at the four walls, to make him feel her disdain. “At least in Chicago I’m treated like a human being.”

He kissed her angrily.

“I am a human being, in case you didn’t know.”

He kissed her again, and his hands found her breasts.

“If you touch me I’ll be sick. I’ll throw up every goddamn thing I ate on that plane. Including the biscuits.”

But he touched her. He touched her all over, shivering all through his large frame and groaning. Beth began to sob with hurt and confusion and rebellion. And most dreadful of all, most humiliating, with desire. She wanted him. He was wonderful like this, the live weight of him on her yielding flesh, the thrust, the warmth, the sweat, the sweet moaning. When he took her like this, like a master claiming a right, she submitted, and she experienced relief. She did not know who she was, but for a little while he made her think she knew. He made her feel her womanhood.

And when he had forced her to surrender once, she gave in again without fighting. He kept her busy for a long time. If the kids kept up the noise their parents didn’t know it and didn’t care. Charlie wouldn’t let her out of his arms. He wanted her there where he could fill his nostrils with the scent of her, his arms with the smooth round feel of her. Four months is a damn long time for a husband in love with his wife to make love to a pillow.

It had not been quite like that between them since their college days and it was not like that again very often.

Chapter Three

THEY FELL INTO THE ROUTINE THEN WHICH BECAME SO DULL and empty to Beth over the next few years. At first she was too busy getting settled in her new home to be bored. She inspected the holly, the palms, the poppies, the bamboo that grew, rare and exotic, in her own backyard. She breathed in the mountains in back and the sparkling valley in front. But little by little she grew used to them. You can’t live with the marvelous every day and keep your marvel quotient very high.

Charlie and Cleve worked hard on the toys, and Charlie loved it. He liked keeping his own hours, being the boss, running the show. Almost imperceptibly he began to take on the lion’s share of the work and, with it, the lion’s share of the decisions. He was willing to spend nights in the office working out new plans or briefing new men. It made Beth cranky with him. And the crankier she got the more he stayed away. It was the start of a vicious circle.

“It must be my fault. I must bore you to death!” she cried. “No, Beth, you don’t bore me,” he said, climbing into his pajamas while she watched him from her place in the bed. “You scare me a little, but you don’t bore me.”

“I scare you! Ha!” She said it acidly, but only to cover her chagrin. She didn’t dare to ask exactly what he meant, and he didn’t bother to tell her. But her fits with the children, her depressions, her lack of interest in the love that should have sparked between them, had something to do with it.

Charlie reached the point where he couldn’t tell if Beth ever wanted him or not. She got him, because he didn’t have the strength or the patience to turn monk. But there was none of the old smoldering response that had used to thrill his senses and reassure him of her answering passion. She was quiet and she made the minimum gestures mechanically. As he had blurted unintentionally, it scared him. Dismayed, he had tried once or twice to talk to her about it. Not knowing how to be subtle, he simply exclaimed that something was wrong and she had damn well better tell him what it was before it got worse. But Beth had given him a smirk of half amusement and half contempt that had withered his pride and driven him to silence.

So things rolled along. The business was never quite good enough to get them a bigger house or the flashy sports car Beth wanted. Cleve was never quite drunk enough to botch his job. Beth didn’t have enough love and Charlie didn’t have enough insight. And that was their life.

For Beth it was dismal. She yearned for a diversion, an escape hatch, anything. Travel, a new car, an affair even. But all she had were her boisterous children, her irate husband, and bowling twice a week with Jean Purvis. Her mood was desperate.

Things took an odd turn finally, one night when Jean and Cleve invited Beth and Charlie to a birthday party. It was for Cleve’s sister, Vega Purvis. Beth remembered Vega very well. She had met her shortly after she arrived in California, and though she had never gotten to know Vega well, she was interested in her.

Vega was a model. She was a very tall girl, at least as tall as Beth herself, and excruciatingly thin. Throughout her twenties she had worked at modeling in Chicago and then suddenly came down deathly sick with tuberculosis, ulcers, and Beth had never known what else. Everything. It had meant the temporary finish to her working days and a long trip to the West Coast, where she went directly to the City of Hope for help. She was there for over two years.

Vega had sacrificed a lung to her tuberculosis, a part of her stomach to her ulcer, and perhaps more of herself to other plagues. And still she was stunningly beautiful. Still she smoked two or three packs of cigarettes a day—something that struck Beth as insane but rather wonderful, as if Vega had taken a bead on Death and spat in his eye. Nobody else would have gotten away with it. Vega brushed it off, laughing. “The first thing I asked for when I came out of the anesthetic,” she said, “was a cigarette. The doctor gave me one of his. Tasted marvelous.”

Vega had deep-set eyes, almost black, and fine handsome features, and she was witty and interesting. She was running her own model agency now on Pasadena’s fashionable South Lake Street—mostly teenage girls, with one or two older women who took the course for “self-improvement.” Or, perhaps, self-admiration.

Beth recalled the night she had first met Vega. They waited for her, Cleve and Jean and Beth and Charlie, in a small restaurant near her studio. Vega came late. It was necessary to her sense of well-being that she arrive late wherever she went. So Charlie and Beth and the Purvises waited for her in a small booth in the Everglades, where everything was chic and expensive.

Vega swept in at last, forty minutes late, wrapped in a red velvet cloak, and she was so striking that Beth had stared a little at her. She sat down and ordered a martini—double, dry, twist of lemon—before she greeted anybody.

She had a lovely face but it was, like the rest of her, painfully thin, with the fine bones sharply outlined. It soon became apparent why she didn’t put on weight. Vega rarely ate anything. She drank her dinner, though they had ordered her a steak. She seemed to depend on booze for most of her calories. Cleve persuaded her to take one bite, which she did, promising to finish the rest later—but of course she never did. Charlie and Cleve finally split the meat and ate it, but the rest was wasted.

Charlie was interested in her too. Beautiful women interest almost any man without making much of an effort.

“What do you do here, Vega?” he asked her. “Cleve said something about modeling.”

“I teach modeling,” she said, accepting a fourth drink daintily from the waiter. “Women are my business. Men are my pleasure,” she added, smiling languidly.

Charlie smiled back, unaware of the silly look on his face. Beth saw it, but it didn’t alarm her. It struck her funny, and before she had time to think about it, she was laughing at him. And suddenly the fun and flavor went out of the game for him, and he turned his attention to his meal. Beth saw his embarrassment and rebuked herself.

I should have been quiet, damn it, she thought. I should have let him have his fling. Such an innocent little fling. What’s wrong with me? But it was too late. Charlie was carefully casual with Vega the rest of the evening. It didn’t console him much, when he got home that night, to check his muscles in front of the mirror or stretch to his full six feet two. He was baffled and shamed by his wife, who laughed at even his normal masculine reactions. He was almost defeated by his inability to make Beth’s life mean something. On Vega’s birthday night they waited, as before, at the Everglades for her entrance, drinking whiskey and waters, and talking. Beth felt warm and relaxed after the first two drinks and she squeezed Charlie’s arm. It caused him some concern, instead of reassuring him, because it was unexpected.

“Good whiskey?” he asked, nodding at her glass. That must be the source of her pleasant mood.

“The best,” she said and smiled. “Why aren’t you nice like this all the time?” she teased clumsily.

“I’m only nice when you’re a little tight,” he said. “The rest of the time I’m a damn bore.”

It was so short and sad and true that it almost knocked the breath out of her. She looked at her lap, despising herself for the moment, feeling the tears collect in the front of her eyes. When she had to reach for a piece of tissue to stem the flood he murmured, “I’m sorry. God, don’t do that in here.” He had a masculine horror of scenes, especially in front of Cleve and Jean. Jean had noticed the little exchange between them and her smile—her permanent smile—wavered, but Cleve was talking to her and didn’t see.

“Come on, honey, this is a birthday party,” Charlie whispered urgently in Beth’s ear, exasperated and helpless like all men before a woman’s public tears.

Beth pulled herself together. She would save her bad feeling for later. Now she wanted to enjoy herself, to let the liquor take over, and the muted lights and the piped music. She wanted to forget her kids, forget she was married. Charlie lighted a cigarette for her.

“Peace pipe,” he said. And when he snapped out the match he saw Vega coming and added, relieved, “Here comes the guest of honor.” He got up as she approached the table and took her coat for her.

“Thank you, Charlie Ayers,” Vega said with a smile. She had a habit of calling a man by his whole name, as if it made him completely special, unique, valuable—and perhaps a little bit labeled. But the men loved it. It sounded foolish when you tried to explain it to somebody else, because it was impossible to imitate Vega’s intonation, her peculiar lilting voice in its contralto register; but when she said your name, your whole name soft and low and very distinct, the whole company reacted. You were looked at, and the beautiful woman who had spoken to you was looked at, and it was a wonderful, slightly silly, but charming, ceremony.

Vega sat down between Cleve and Beth, and the waiter, who was an old buddy of hers, came up, as soon as she had adjusted herself, with her usual order: a martini, double, dry, with a twist of lemon. The waiter went up to the bar as soon as she had thanked him for it and began mixing the next. She always took the first three or four on the run. It amazed Beth to watch her. Oddly, Vega never seemed drunk.

Vega was all in black with a single small diamond clip at her throat and diamond earrings. On her they looked real, whether they were or not. Vega looked very very expensive, though she was quick to tell you the price of anything she was wearing. Her clothes were usually bargains picked up at sales in the better shops. Some of the shops gave her discounts, in return for which she told people she bought her clothes exclusively from them. She had this arrangement with at least five shops, all of them unaware of the others, and she lied to them all with charm and grace.

Beth watched her with an interest that intensified as the total of highballs went up. There were two gifts in the center of the table, one from the Ayerses and one from the Purvises. Vega ignored them.

“I’ve been teaching my girls how to walk,” she told them, “to rock and roll records. Are you familiar with Elvis Presley?”

“Polly’s got a crush on him,” Beth said. “I think he’s godawful myself.”

“You’re wrong,” Vega said. “He’s very useful. Especially with a gang of teenage girls. You put one of his records on and suddenly you’ve got—cooperation.” She emphasized the word and smiled. “They walk around the studio like so many duchesses—just what I want. I used to play Bing Crosby for them but all it got me was a slouch and a lot of behind-the-hands giggling. Now I play crap and suddenly they’re ladies.” She turned to Cleve. “Explain that to me, brother,” she said. “You know all about ladies.”

Cleve ran a finger over his moustache in the wrong direction. “Simple,” he said. “You have one rule: treat a bitch like a duchess and a duchess like a bitch. Never fails.”

“What has that got to do with Elvis Presley?”

“You didn’t ask me about Elvis Presley.”

“Cleve, are you drunk?” Vega said. “It’s against the family rules. You can’t be. We never get drunk,” she explained to Beth and Charlie. “Limber, but never drunk.”

“You’re right.” Cleve ordered another round and when the drinks came he stood up and Beth saw that he really was pretty high. “A toast,” he remarked, “to my charming sister, who is thirty-nine years old today. For the fifth time.” He glanced down at her and Vega smiled seraphically at the ceiling. “Her company is charming,” Cleve went on, while heads turned to grin at him from across the room, “her face is beautiful, her manners are perfect. Thank God I don’t have to live with her. Vega, darling, stand up and take a bow.”

Vega stood up with a lovely smile and told him tenderly, “Go to hell.” They both sat down and drank to that while Jean laughed anxiously.

“They’re always like that,” Jean said, “It strikes me so funny.”

Beth wanted to put a gag on her. Jean only wanted to make it seem friendly, teasing. Everybody in the Everglades had heard her husband and his sister. She wanted them all to know it wasn’t serious.

But Beth liked to think they really hated each other, for some weird romantic reason. It gave an edge to the scene that excited her.

They ordered their meal and Vega, as always, ordered with them. Beth wondered why she bothered. Maybe it was just to give the men an extra helping. Maybe it was to ease her conscience about her drinking. At least if she had a plate of food in front of her she could always eat; she had a choice. If she didn’t order anything her only choice would be to drink, and the people with her would take it for granted she was a lush. That would never do, even when she was with her own friends, her own family, who knew the truth anyway. It just didn’t go well with her elegant exterior, her control.

So she ordered food, and ate one bite. It was a sort of ritual that comforted her and shut up the worriers in the party who tried to force French fries or buttered squash down her. When they had all finished she could divide her meal among the men unobtrusively.

Beth yearned to ask Vega how old she really was, but she didn’t dare. She wondered at her own curiosity. Everything about Vega seemed valuable and interesting that evening. The glamorous clothes, the strange feud with Cleve, the dramatic entrance, the illnesses, the modeling.

I wonder how she’d like being a suburban housewife, she mused, and almost laughed aloud. Vega, with kids. Vega doing dishes. Vega, with—God forbid—a husband! On some women all the feminine ornaments and virtues only look out of place. Those women seem complete in themselves, and so it was with Vega. Beth couldn’t imagine her, sleek and tall and with a hint of ferocity beneath her civilized veneer, being domesticated by any man. There was something icily virginal beneath her sophistication that made Beth doubt whether Vega had ever given herself to a man.

Vega opened Beth’s birthday gift to her while the rest of them ate. “How did you know?” she said, so quietly that Beth almost missed it.

“It’s only a book,” Beth murmured.

“You picked it out yourself. I’ve been wanting to read it, too.”

It was such a personal exchange, almost intimate, that Beth was taken aback. Vega treated the book like a private present from Beth—as if Charlie, who after all paid for it and wrote his name on the card with his wife’s, had nothing whatever to do with it.

Beth found herself oddly drawn to this lovely, rather secretive woman; to the warmth of her voice and the way she spoke. Vega articulated carefully, conserving the small quota of air in her one remaining lung. And yet, her voice carried. She had turned the handicap into an asset, learning to develop and project her voice with the skill of a musician. It was pleasant to hear her talk, and she arranged her breathing so artfully that one was never aware that it was a chore, or that her very life’s breath came to her in half doses.

At the end of the evening the three women went to the powder room together. Beth found herself impatient with Jean, wanting her out of the way.

What for? she thought, amused at herself. And still her impatience persisted. She stood next to Vega at the mirror while Jean leaned against the wall and waited for them to finish with their makeup. Beth wanted to say something, something memorable and witty and complimentary to Vega, but her mind was too busy admiring the woman. She only stared at Vega’s large brown eyes and parted lips and puzzled over her.

“You know,” said Vega, startling her, “you should model. You have a good figure for it.”

Beth was nonplussed. When could Vega have studied her figure? But Vega was adept at observing people without seeming to. She had seen the restlessness in Beth, just as she had seen the ardent mouth and purple eyes and short brown curls, without apparently even looking at her. Now she turned to appraise her.

“I speak purely as a professional,” she said, her mouth showing a humorous twist at the corners. She gazed frankly at Beth now, up and down, stem to stern. “Turn around,” she said.

Beth said, “Vega, I could never model. I’m too old.”

“Nobody’s too old. Except my mother, and she was born fifty years B.C. You have nice hips, Beth.”

The remark, so casual, sent an unwelcome tremor through Beth, who tried to shrug it off. “I’m thirty,” she said. “Who wants to show their clothes on a thirty-year-old when they could show them on a teenager?”

“You’d be surprised,” Vega said. “Me, for one.” Beth stared at her. “Oh, not my own clothes. Only a scarecrow like me can squeak into those. I mean I like the way a woman your age wears her clothes, and so do the men who hire them. They have something no teenager has.”

“A woman my age?” Beth repeated dolefully.

Vega laughed. “You still look like a college girl, Beth. You aren’t, of course, let’s face it. But you look it.”

Beth gave her a wry grin. “I don’t know the first thing about modeling, Vega,” she said.

“I’ll teach you.”

Beth was secretly pleased, very pleased. But she wasn’t thinking of the makeup tricks, or the poise she might acquire. She was thinking, in spite of herself, of the pleasure of spending some time in Vega’s company. She had never been able to bring herself to form a lot of friendships with women. It was not possible for her to be friendly with them, curiously enough, just as it is rarely possible for a man to be friendly with women. Beth had known Jean Purvis for years now and knew her well, but they were still only acquaintances, not friends. And Jean, though she regretted it, understood this, and had given up long ago trying to pull Beth closer to her.

“I don’t know if I could afford it—” Beth began, but Vega interrupted her.

“It’s free, darling,” she said, with an injured air, and Beth, transfixed, felt the “darling” echo through her head with a dangerous delight. She hardly heard Vega add, “Charlie won’t mind. You have a housewife pallor, anyway. You need to get out. Come on down next week and we’ll make you over. Not that you need much remodeling.” Vega glanced again at Beth’s trim torso and smiled. Beth smiled back and there was a single brief electric pause before Vega said quickly, “Everyone all set? Let’s go.” And turned to leave.

The three of them filed out, Beth so close behind Vega that she stumbled against her once.

Chapter Four

BETH, RIDING NEXT TO CHARLIE ON THE WAY UP TO SIERRA Bella, put her head back and pondered Vega’s offer with a smile.

“What’s up, honey?” Charlie said, seeing her expression in the red glow of a stoplight.

“Nothing.”

She wouldn’t tell me to save her own skin, he thought resentfully, and a wave of hatred for her secretiveness, her airs, came over him. He tried to swallow it down. He didn’t want to ruin another evening, and this one held promises. Just a few, but still, a few. She had been receptive, pleasant with him, at the Everglades.

“Have fun?” he said, starting the car up again as the light changed.

“Um-hm.” How can I tell him so he won’t say no? she wondered. For she felt instinctively that he would object to her desire. It seemed to Beth that all the things she truly wanted to do, he didn’t want her to do. Travel— “You can’t leave me!” Work— “Your place is at home with the kids.” Hire a nurse— “You’re their mother!” Get a little tight— “Beth, you’re turning into a damn souse.”

She thought he was staid, stuffy; he thought she was wild, or would be if he didn’t keep a tight rein on her.

They undressed quietly by the light of one dresser lamp, and Charlie, watching the clothes slip off her scented flesh, revealing the fluent curves of her back and breasts, felt his body flush all over. He was overcome with tenderness, with a desire for wordless communication.

Just be gentle with me, yield to me this one night, he thought, trying to press the idea into her head with the sheer force of wishing. He would never have spoken such a wish; it would have aroused her contempt, or worse, her amusement.

Beth pulled open the wardrobe door, reaching around the corner for her nightie. But he pulled her arm away. “You don’t need it,” he said. “Not tonight.”

She let herself be held, submitting quietly to his kisses. When he seemed all warm and loving and tractable she whispered, “Charlie, I’m going to study modeling with Vega. Starting next week.”

He only half heard. “Let’s not talk. Let’s not spoil it,” he said.

But she felt that if he didn’t acquiesce now, in the mood he was in, he never would. “If you don’t say yes I’m going to do it anyway,” she whispered into his ear.

“Do what?” he murmured, pulling her closer.

“And we’ll have one hell of a fight over it.”

“We’re not going to fight, darling,” he told her with the confidence of his passion. “Never again. We’re just going make love twenty-four hours a day.”

“Where? The toy factory? That’s where you spend most your time.” Her sarcasm cut through his euphoria and the words registered harshly in his ears. He shut his eyes tight, shifting his weight a little. “Not tonight, Beth,” he begged her. “Please, not tonight.”

The pleading in his voice irritated her. If she had been another kind of woman she might have responded with a wealth of sweet reassurance; she might have been able to respond that way. But instead she felt disdain for him, the sort of scorn most women reserve for a man who shows himself a weakling. Charlie was not a weakling and Beth knew it. And yet it seemed that over the years, as the ominous cracks developed in their marriage, he had made most of the concessions to keep them together, and that too aroused her scorn. It was true that she would have suffered fits of guilt and loneliness if he hadn’t, and she was grateful to him for his “tact.” But the very role she forced him to play and thanked him for in her secret conscience, lessened him in her eyes.

Dimly, Charlie realized this too. But he was caught in the squirrel cage and there was no way out.

Carefully Beth said, “I just want you to say it’s okay.”

With a weary sigh he loosened his embrace in order to look at her. “Say what’s okay?”

“If I model with Vega a couple of days a week.”

His eyes widened then as he heard and understood, and he turned away from her, picking up his pajamas and carrying them in front of him. His unwanted love was too obvious and it embarrassed him. “Vega Purvis is a Class-A bitch,” he said.

Beth’s cheeks went hot with indignation. She whipped her nightie out of the closet and slipped it over her simmering head. If she threw her anger in his face now he would never agree to it. But to call Vega a bitch, when he hardly even knew her!

“I think she’s delightful,” she said haughtily, when the covering of the nightie gave her some pretense to dignity.

“Sure. Delightful. What in hell do you want to learn modeling for? From that winesop?” He climbed under the covers and lighted a cigarette, and there was a flood of misery in him at the sight of her drawn up stiff and chilly in her resentment.

“You say modeling like you meant whoring!” she flashed.

“Well, what does it mean?” he asked with elaborate courtesy. “You tell me.”

“I’d probably go down there once or twice a week,” she said, suddenly softening in an effort to bring him around. “It would be just for fun, not for money. I’d never model professionally. But it would be something to get me out of the house, something really interesting for a change. Not that goddamn interminable bowling Jean dotes on.”

“I can’t see that walking around with a book on your head is so damn much more interesting than shoving a ball down an alley.”

Her fleeting softness vanished. “I knew you’d be this way!” she cried. “Just because I want something, you don’t want it! When in doubt, say no. That’s your motto.” She continued to berate him for a moment until it became clear that he wasn’t listening. He was staring past her, beyond her, at nothing, thinking. And his eyes were dark and heavy. He held his cigarette in one hand, so close to his chest that she had a momentary fear the hair would catch fire and scorch him.

“Charlie?” she said, after a moment’s silence.

“Beth, tell me something,” he said seriously, and his eyes, still aimed at her, focused on her once again. “I want you explain to me what is the matter with our marriage.”

For a long minute neither of them spoke. And then Beth sat down on the bed, at his feet, biting her lower lip. “You explain it to me,” she said.

“I’ll gladly tell you all I know,” he said. “I know we have two lovely children. I know we have a pleasant house to live in, even if it is small. I know I love you.” There was a significant pause, in which she should have said, Of course I love you too. But she didn’t. He sighed. “I know we should be happy. There isn’t anything specific you can put your finger on that’s out-and-out wrong with us. So why do we argue all the time? Why, when we’re still together, we still have each other, and things are going along the right way—why aren’t we happy, Beth? Because we’re not. We sure as hell are not.”

Beth couldn’t look at him, at his frowning face. “If you’d pick up after yourself once in a while,” she said. “if you’d agree, just once, to let me do something I really want to do.” The spite in her voice piqued him.

“Oh! Now I understand. This would be a gloriously happy household if it weren’t for me, is that it? If the husband and father would just get the hell out, the family would be perfect. Right?”

“Cut the sarcasm, Charlie,” she said. She tried to sound firm but her chin trembled.

“I get it from you, dear. It’s catching,” he said. “Besides, I’m not convinced that you’ll swoon happily in my arms if I pick up my socks in the morning.”

She made a helpless gesture with her hands. “All right, Charlie, I’m at fault too. Is that what you want me to say? I fly off the handle, I’m cross with the kids. I—I—”

“You kick me out of bed three or four times a week.”

She turned a blazing face to him. “Charlie, goddamn it, I’m your wife. But that doesn’t mean that any time you feel like having me, I feel like being had. Three or four times a week is too much!”

“It didn’t used to be,” he said, his voice as soft as hers was loud. “What happened?”

Tears started to her eyes for the second time that evening and she turned away. “Nothing,” she exclaimed.

“Something must have happened, Beth. You just don’t want it anymore. Ever. You give in now and then to shut me up—not because you really want me.”

She covered her face with both hands and wept quickly with fear and confusion. “I don’t know what happened,” she admitted finally.

He leaned toward her, hating to hurt her. “Beth, I’d do anything for you,” he said earnestly. “I’d let you go model in Timbuktu if that would make you happy. But it won’t. All these things you think you want so badly—did you ever stop to examine them? What are they? So many escapes. You’re running away. The one thing you can’t stand, you can’t bear to face or live with or understand, is your relationship with me. Your home. Your kids. But mostly me. Are you sorry we got married, Beth? Tell the truth?”

There was a terrible, painful pause. It took all of her courage to admit, “I don’t know. That’s the truth. I don’t know.”

He shut his eyes for a moment, as if to recover a little.

“Do you love me, then?”

She swallowed. “Yes,” she said. Her courage would not stretch so far as to let her hedge on that one. “Do you love the kids?”

She caught her breath and bit her lip. I will be truthful, I’ll be as truthful as I can, she told herself sharply.

“Do you love the kids, honey?” he prompted her.

“When they’re not around,” she blurted, and gave an awful sob, covering her wicked mouth with one hand. When she could talk a little she said, “I love them, I love them terribly, but I just can’t stand them. Does that make any sense?”

He lay back on the bed and gazed at the ceiling. The sight of Beth tore his heart. “Not to me, it doesn’t,” he said. And seeing her despair, he added, “But at least it’s the truth, Beth, Thank you for that much, anyway.” There was no sarcasm in his voice now.

Beth got up and walked back and forth at the foot of the bed. “I know I’m not the world’s greatest mother, Charlie. Far from it.” She wiped her eyes impatiently. “Or the best wife. I guess I hound you all the time because I’m ashamed of my own behavior. At least that’s part of it. You’re no dreamboat yourself sometimes.” She turned to look at him and he nodded without answering.

“The trouble is, I just don’t know what I would be good at,” she said helplessly. “I don’t know what I want to do. I wish I could want something, good and hard, and it would be the right thing. Sometimes I wish somebody would tell me what I want. Maybe my ideas about traveling and the rest of it are just daydreams. Escape, or whatever you said. But Charlie, that’s not criminal. I need an escape. I really do.” She felt a note of semi-hysteria pulling her voice higher and higher and she stopped talking for a minute to catch her breath.

“I wanted to go to Mexico last year. You said no. I want to get that MG we saw in Monrovia. You said no. I have a couple of cocktails by myself in the afternoon and you blow your top. You think I’m headed for Skid Row. I ask to go home and visit Uncle John. No again.”

“The last time you visited Uncle John,” Charlie pointed out with heat, “I didn’t see you for four whole months.”

“And those four months saved my sanity!” she cried, thrusting her angry chin toward him.

He lighted another cigarette in offended silence.

After a moment she resumed, trying to keep her voice level, “Now I want to model a couple of days a week. Is that so very awful? Am I really a case for the bughouse because I want to escape once in a while?” She tried, with her voice, to make it seem ridiculous.

“If it were only once in a while,” he said sadly. They were silent again. Beth had stopped her pacing and he look at her lovely figure, shadowy beneath the nylon film of nightie. He wanted her so much … so much. At last he said, quietly, “Well, I guess it’s better than losing you to Uncle John for half a year.”

She turned around slowly and her face was grateful. “Thanks, Charlie,” she said. “I would have done it anyway, but—” She was sorry she had said it. He looked so despondent, utterly stripped of his husbandly influence, almost a stranger to her. “But I wanted you to approve,” she went on hastily. “I wanted to be able to tell you about it and everything.” He refused to look at her. “She—she’s doing it for nothing.” Beth added, hoping to make it more acceptable to him.

He laughed unpleasantly. “She’s doing it for something, Beth. Not money, maybe, but something. Vega’s not the kind of girl who does things for nothing.”

She went around the bed and sat down beside him. “Look at me, honey,” she said. “I want to thank you.”

“I know,” he answered, but the thought of her kiss suddenly made him weak and a little sick. He sat up, turning to give her his back and was suddenly mortified to feel her lips on it in a brief shy salute. He froze.

“Beth,” he said sternly. “Vega is a strange girl. You should know …”

“Know what?” she said eagerly.

“Cleve has told me,” he said reluctantly. “She’s been married a couple of times.”

“To whom? Beth interrupted, astonished. Vega? Married?

“Well, I didn’t know them. The first marriage was ideal, by your lights: she lived in Chicago and he lived in Boston. For eight years. Cleve said she never let him in her bed. His name was Ray something. She calls him ex-Ray.”

Beth had to grin at his back. It began to sound more like the elegant enigma she knew. “Who was the other one?” she asked.

“Some good-timer, backslapping sort of guy. A roommate of Cleve’s once, before I knew him. Younger than Vega. It’s only been two years since she divorced that one. I guess he didn’t get past the bedroom door either, but he did get into her bank account. Spent all her money and then disappeared. Nobody knows where he is. She never talks about him.”

“Well,” Beth said cautiously, “that’s not so strange. I mean, she obviously wasn’t a good marriage risk, but lots of women have behaved that way. Maybe the men she picked weren’t such prizes either.”

He shrugged. “Maybe.” He turned to look at her. “She lives alone with her mother and her grandfather. Cleve says they’re a trio of cuckoo birds. You can’t get him over there. Except Christmas and birthdays, and he only goes because he feels he has to.”

“Do they really hate each other—Cleve and Vega?” Beth asked.

“Only on the bad days,” he said. “Now and then they quit speaking to each other. But then their mother breaks a leg or Gramp poisons the stew and they get back together. Takes a family calamity, though. Right now they’re as friendly as they ever are, according to Cleve. I don’t know why it should be that way. Doesn’t seem natural.”

“They’re both such nice people. It’s a shame,” she said.

Charlie couldn’t stand to look at her any longer and not touch her. He put his arms around her and felt her nestle against him with a shattering relief. After a few minutes he heaved himself over her to turn out the dresser lamp, returning fearfully to her arms, only to find them open.

“Is this my thanks for giving in?” he said. It was flat and ironical. He couldn’t help the dig. But she took it in stride by simply refusing to answer him. He made up for several weeks of involuntary virtue that night.

Before they slept, Charlie had to say one last thing. He saved it until he knew they were both too tired to stay awake and argue. He didn’t want to ruin things. She lay very close to him, in his arms, too worn out for her usual tears of frustration, and he whispered to her, “Beth?”

“Hm?”

“Darling, I have to know this. Don’t be angry with me, just tell the truth like you did earlier. Beth, I—” It was hard to say, so awkward. He was afraid of humiliating her, rousing her temper again. “I keep thinking of Laura,” he said at last.

“Laura?” Beth woke up a little, opening her eyes.

“Yes. I mean, I can’t help but wonder if you—you know how you felt about her—if it’s the modeling that interests you or if it’s—Vega.”

In the blank dark he couldn’t see her face and he waited, fearful, for her answer. God, don’t let her explode, he prayed.

Beth turned away from him, her face dissolved in tears. “It’s the modeling!” she said in a fierce whisper. And they said no more to each other that night.

Chapter Five

VEGA’S STUDIO WAS LOCATED ON THE SECOND FLOOR OF A building that housed an exclusive dress shop and a luggage and notions shop. It was an expensive place to rent and Beth was rather surprised to see how bare it was. There was a small reception room which was tastefully decorated, though there was space for more chairs in it. There was a door marked “office,” which was closed, and there was a large, nearly empty studio room with eight or ten folding chairs, the kind you sit on at PTA meetings.

Beth peered into the studio hesitantly, and instantly Vega materialized from a small group of high school girls who had surrounded her while she spoke to them. There was silence while she walked, regally lovely in flowing velvet, both hands extended to Beth. The teens examined the newcomer with adolescent acuteness, and Beth took their silent appraisal uneasily.

Vega reached her. “Darling, how are you?” she said in her smooth controlled voice, and kissed Beth on the mouth. Beth was shocked speechless. She stared at Vega with big startled eyes.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Vega laughed, seeing her expression. “The doctor says I’m socially acceptable. The TB has been inactive for almost two years—really a record.”

But it wasn’t the infected lung, the possibility of catching TB, that upset Beth. That, in fact, never occurred to her. It was the sudden electric meeting of mouths, the impudence of it, the feel of it, the teen-aged audience taking it all in. Beth was piqued. Vega had no business treating her so familiarly. Still, it was impossible to make a fuss over it, as though she were guilty of some indecent complicity with Vega.

“How are you?” she said uncertainly.

The knot of girls began to talk and giggle again, and Vega turned to them. “Okay, darlings, you can go now,” she said. “That’s all for this afternoon.”

She took Beth’s arm and led her into the studio while the girls filed past them and out, still staring. Beth began to be seriously disturbed. Vega behaved as if they were sisters, at the very least, and at the worst … Beth turned to her abruptly.

“Vega, I hate to say anything, but really, I—I—” She paused, embarrassed. Vega would surely take it the wrong way. Who but a girl with a problem would take the kiss, the familiarity, so hard? What, after all, was so dreadful about a kiss between two women? Even if it was so unexpected, even if it was so direct that a trace of moisture from Vega’s lips remained on Beth’s own.

I’d only look like a fool to complain, Beth thought. She’d think I was—queer—or something. How she hated that word!

“Something wrong?” Vega said helpfully.

“I—well, I’m just not so sure I should do this, that’s all,” she said lamely. “Charlie said—”

“Charlie be damned. Charlie’s as stuffy as Cleve. They make a beautiful couple,” she shot at Beth, who was startled by the sharp emphasis. “However …” Vega turned away, walking to one of the folding chairs to pick up her purse and fish out a cigarette. “Maybe he’s right. Maybe you shouldn’t try to do this.”

“What?” Beth exclaimed. “After all you said—”

“Oh, just for today, I mean,” Vega laughed. “I don’t feel much like giving another lesson. I get so sick of this damn place,” she added plaintively, and her change of expression impressed Beth. Vega looked tired for a moment, and perhaps not as young as usual. But her face smoothed out quickly. “You don’t really mind, do you?” she said.

“Well, I—I do a little,” Beth admitted. After what she had gone through to get Charlie’s approval she minded a lot. But Vega intimidated her somehow, and she hadn’t the nerve to show her irritation. “But if you’re tired …” She paused.

“I am,” Vega said. “But I have no intention of abandoning you, my little housewife.” She swung a plush coat over her shoulders. “I’m tired and fed up and sick to death—not really,” she added with a brilliant smile that did not reassure Beth at all. The edge in Vega’s usually soft and low voice made her words sound literally true. Tired, fed up, sick. And those eyes, so deep and dark and full, had turned lusterless again, as if Vega were defying her to look into them and see her secrets.

“Let’s go slumming,” she said, and the way she said it, the quick return of life to her face, the odd excitement so tightly controlled, was infectious.

“Where?” Beth said, intrigued.

“Well, you look so nifty we can’t go too far astray,” Vega said, looking at her professionally. And yet not quite professionally enough. “Do you have your car?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’ll show you where my girls hang out. My teenagers.” She spoke of them with visible affection. “It’s a caffè espresso place—The Griffin. It’s not far. Have you been there?”

“I’ve heard of it but I never thought I’d see it. It’s the last place in Pasadena that would interest my adventurous husband.”

“Let’s go!” Vega spoke gaily and caught Beth’s arm. They left the studio together, walking down the narrow flight of stairs to the street, and Beth thought, My God, I never even got my coat off.

“I like your studio, Vega,” she said, because the silence between them was becoming too full.

“Do you?” It was almost a listless response. “I’m going to redecorate it. That’s why it looks so bare.”

Beth tried to look at Vega’s face but they had reached the foot of the stairs and she had to pull the door open for her instead. Vega would not release her arm, even through the clumsy maneuver of getting out the door, and Beth was peeved to find her clinging to her still as they walked down the street toward the car. She was grateful when they reached it for the semi-privacy it afforded.

“Where to?” she said, starting the motor.

The Griffin was dark and dank, jammed with very young, very convivial people very sure of themselves. In a corner an incredibly dirty minstrel twanged on a cracked guitar and sang what passed for old-English ballads. There were beards aplenty on the males and pants aplenty on the girls. Only a few females, Vega and Beth among them, wore skirts. And there was coffee of all kinds but no liquor. Not even beer.

“Coffee—that’s all you can get in here,” Vega said. So they ordered Turkish coffee and drank it while Vega told her about the place. “It’s just an old private house,” she said. “The kids have redone it all themselves.”

“They did a godawful job,” Beth commented and immediately sensed, without being told, that she had injured Vega, who seemed actually rather proud of the place.

“Yes, I guess they did,” she admitted. Vega looked around, her eyes bright and probing, wafting smiles at the familiar faces and studying the strange ones. Beth saw her nervous pleasure, her fascination, quite plainly in her face. So it startled her to see that same lovely face cloud over abruptly, with angry wrinkles spoiling the purity of her brow. Vega glanced at Beth and realized her emotions were showing. Rather diffidently she nodded at a tableful of girls about ten feet from them.

“See those girls?” she said. There were five of them, all in tight pants, all rather dramatically made up, with the exception of one who wore no makeup at all. Her hair was trimmed very short and she had a cigarette tilting from the corner of her mouth. Beth’s gaze rested on her with interest. She looked tough, a little disillusioned. Her blonde hair was unkempt but her eyes were piercing and restless and her face made you look twice. It wasn’t ugly, just different. Quite boyish.

“They’re disgusting,” Vega said. “I can’t bear to look at them.”

Beth saw her hand trembling and she looked at her in astonishment. “For God’s sake, why?” she said. “They’re just kids. They look pretty much like the others in here. What’s so awful about them?”

“That one with the cigarette—she ought to be in jail,” Vega said vehemently.

“Do you know her?” Beth said, glancing back at the tough arresting face. Vega’s heat amused and scared her a little. Vega was so frail. How mad could you get before you hurt yourself, with only one lung, a fraction of a stomach, and a bodyful of other infirmities?

“I don’t know her personally,” Vega said, stabbing out her cigarette, “but I know enough about her to put her in jail ten times over.”

“Why don’t you, then?” Beth asked.

Vega looked away, confused. Finally she turned back to Beth and pulled her close so she could whisper. “That lousy bitch is gay. I mean, a Lesbian. She hurt one of my girls. Really, I could kill her.”

“Hurt one of your girls?” Beth could only gape at her. What did she mean? She sounded tense, a little frantic.

“One of my students. She made a pass at her,” Vega fumed.

“Well, that couldn’t have hurt very much,” Beth said and smiled. “That’s not so bad, is it?” She looked curiously at the girl.

But Vega was displeased. “I don’t imagine you approve of that sort of thing?” she said primly, and Beth, once again, was lost, surprised at the changes in her.

“I wouldn’t send her to jail for it,” Beth said.

Vega stared at her for a minute and then she stood up. “Let’s go,” she said. “If I’d known she was in here I wouldn’t have come.” She was so upset, so obviously nervous, that Beth followed her out without a protest. They walked to the car, neither one speaking.

“Take me home, will you, Beth?” Vega said when they got in, and lapsed into gloomy silence. Beth began to see what Charlie meant by strange. Moody and restless. In fact, Vega’s mood had changed so radically that the bones seemed to have shifted under her skin. Her face looked taut and tired and much older now. She slumped as if weakened by her angry outburst.

At last Beth asked softly, “Why do you go in there, Vega, if it bothers you so?”

“I didn’t expect her.”

“What did you expect?”

“My girls, of course. They’re in there all the time.”

And Beth could hear, in the way Vega said “my girls,” how much her students meant to her, how much she needed their youth around her, their pretty faces, their respect. “I like to let them see me in there once in a while,” she added, trying for a casual sound in her voice. “Gives them the idea that I’m not a square. You understand. You see—I mean, well, they mean a lot to me,” she went on, and there was a thread of tense emotion in her voice now. “Everything, really. They’re all I have, really, I—” And unexpectedly she began to cry. Beth was both concerned and dismayed. She reached a hesitant hand toward Vega to comfort her, controlling the car with the other.

“It’s all right, Vega, don’t cry,” she said. “Do I turn here?”

Vega looked up and nodded.

They turned down the new street and Beth ventured softly, “You have your mother and grandfather, Vega. And Cleve. Your family. You aren’t alone. And you have friends.”

“My family is worthless! Worse than worthless. They hang like stones around my neck,” Vega said and the bitterness helped her overcome her tears.

“I’m sorry. I should keep my mouth shut,” Beth said.

“And I haven’t any friends,” Vega cried angrily. “Just my girls. They’re sweet to me, you know, they bring me things—” and abruptly, as if she was ashamed, she broke off. “I’d like you for a friend, Beth,” she said. “I really would. I liked you right away. I’ve never been much good at making friends with women, and for some reason I get the feeling that you’re the same way. It makes me feel closer to you. Am I right?” She paused, waiting for an answer.

Beth was alarmed by her behavior, afraid to aggravate her, and yet she felt it served her as warning not to get too close to Vega. The older woman was lovely, quick and charming. But Charlie was right—she was strange. Beth had a premonition of that wild fury with the world that displayed itself against the Lesbian and against Vega’s family turning on herself someday. But she couldn’t delay answering. You offer your friendship gladly, without deliberation, or you don’t offer it at all.

“I’d like to be friends with you, Vega,” she said, but it sounded hollow to her.

To Vega it sounded beautiful. “I’m glad,” she said, and Beth felt that the mood had passed. Vega put a hand on her arm and left it there until they reached her house.

“Come in for a cocktail,” she said. She was telling Beth, not asking her, and Beth was unable to refuse. “There’s just one thing,” Vega cautioned as they walked up the driveway to the small bungalow. “Mother can’t drink anything. But anything. Really. It would kill her. She’s an absolute wreck. You’ll love her, of course, but she is a mess. I sometimes think she just keeps on living to remind me of the powers of alcohol.”

Beth blanched slightly at this, but Vega laughed at her own remarks. “Anyway, Mother drank like a fish for twenty-three years and suddenly she went all to hell inside. Liver, bladder, God knows what-all. The doctor tried to explain it to me, but all I know is she aches all over and she has to make forty trips to the bathroom every day.”

The little crudity brought Beth up short. It was so homely, so out of place on Vega’s patrician lips. But Vega was full of contradictions; they were, perhaps, her only consistency.

As they paused, they were approached abruptly by a slight shadow of a man in worn corduroys and a jaunty deer-hunting cap. His arms were full of cats and his eyes full of mischief. What cats couldn’t find room in his arms sat on his shoulders.

“Gramp!” Vega exclaimed. “You scared me to death.” She relieved him of two cats, the ones that were having the most trouble hanging on. “This is Beth Ayers,” she told him. “Beth—my grandfather.”

“How do you do, Mr.—?” Beth began clumsily, holding out a hand to him.

“Gramp. Just call me Gramp.” He ignored her hand. Even with two of the cats transferred to Vega’s arms he was still too loaded to let go and pursue the normal courtesies. “My best friends,” he grinned, nodding at the soft animals.

“Your only friends,” Vega amended. “The only ones he trusts, anyway,” she told Beth. “We were just going in for a cocktail, Gramp. I was telling Beth about Mother.”

“What about her?” His eyes snapped with good-humored suspicion.

“Just what a mess she is.”

“Well, forewarned is forearmed,” he said to Beth. “She’s really quite harmless.”

“Except for her tongue,” Vega said softly.

The three of them headed for the front door again. “Fortunately she’s much nicer than she looks,” Gramp explained. “She likes to laze around in nothing but an old beat-up bathrobe. Saves pulling down her pants all the time. You see, she has to take a—”

“I know, I know, Vega told me,” Beth said quickly. Why did they take such a delight in exposing all the ugly comical little family weaknesses to her? Did it make them easier to bear? Or were they punishing themselves for something? Beth stopped where she was.

“What’s the matter?” Vega and Gramp asked with one voice, pausing and looking back at her.

“Vega, your mother doesn’t want any visitors,” Beth said. “She’s sick.”

“Sure she’s sick. We’re all sick. It’s part of the family charm,” Gramp said. “Come on in and join the fun.”

“You’ll see what I’m going to look like in another ten or twelve years, according to Mother,” Vega said.

“The last thing she’d want is visitors,” Beth tried once more, but Vega shushed her with a laugh.

“Bull,” Gramp commented. “Hester’s sick and proud of it. She likes to show it off. She gave up appearances years ago. Actually takes pride in being a wreck. She’s delightful. You’ll love her. Even the cats enjoy her company.”

And Beth, reluctant, bashful, but overwhelmed with curiosity to see what Vega would “look like in ten years,” followed them in.

“Don’t mention liquor,” Vega hissed just before she pushed the front door open. “Remember.”

Beth’s first impression was that the house was stiflingly hot; and the second, that it was jam-packed with rickety furniture. Vega flitted around the room lighting lamps and dissipating the gloom, and Beth suddenly became aware of an old woman sitting in a corner who appeared to be broken into several pieces. She wore a gray, once-pink dressing gown; she had been listening to a speaking record until she heard Vega and Beth enter. Vega kissed her head briefly in salutation.

“Mother, this is Beth Ayers,” Vega said “I told you about her. Mother’s blind as a bat,” she said cheerfully to Beth, who advanced to take the old lady’s outstretched hand. “I forgot to tell you that.”

“But not much else, hey?” her mother said, holding out a hand. “How do you do, my dear?”

Beth murmured something to her, grasping her hand gingerly. And then Vega said, with a wink at Beth, “Let’s all have a Coke. Mother, you game?”

“Are you kidding?” Mrs. Purvis said. “It’ll have to be Seven-Up, though. Gramp busted the plumber one with the last Coke. There’s still fizz all over the john.” And she cackled with pleasure. Gramp, unperturbed, was arranging himself in a harem of cats on the couch. Beth stared at Mrs. Purvis, repelled and fascinated and amused.

Vega in ten years? Utterly incredible! Never.

“What the hell did you do that for, Gramp?” Vega called from the kitchen. “The plumber hurt one of the cats?”

“No, they disagreed about the plunger,” her mother answered, cutting Gramp off. “Gramp said the head was German rubber and the plumber said they don’t make rubber in Germany. So Gramp pickled him in fizz.”

“He deserved it. He was wrong,” Gramp said mildly.

Beth smiled uneasily at them all, slipping out of her coat and feeling the sweat already trickling down her front. God, it must be a hundred degrees in here, she thought. How does Vega stand it?

Vega came out of the kitchen, apparently standing it very well, with some glasses on a tray and a bottle of Seven-Up. She poured it for her mother and handed Beth a glass with two inches of whiskey and an ice cube in the bottom. Gramp got the same and settled back into the cats with a conspiratorial sigh.

“Tell us what you did today, Mother,” Vega said, while Beth made signs to her that she wanted some water in her drink. Vega took the glass back to the kitchen while Mrs. Purvis answered.

“Listened to a book,” she said.

“A good one?”

“Good book, but a lousy reader. They cut out all the good stuff anyway. I guess they figure we poor blind bastards will die of frustration if we hear the good parts.” She chuckled. “With me it’s all a matter of nostalgia, anyway,” she added. “How old are you, Beth, my dear?”

“Thirty,” Beth said, taking her glass again from Vega.

“On the nose? Any kids?”

“Two,” Beth said. “Boy and girl.”

“Ideal,” said Mrs. Purvis. “Just like the Purvis clan. You know,” she said, leaning toward Beth, “what a harmonious family we are.” There was a mischievous leer in her smile.

“I’m sure you are,” Beth said politely.

Mrs. Purvis roared amiably. “Everything we ever did was immoral, illegal, and habit forming,” she said. “Until Cleve turned straight and earned an honest living,” she added darkly.

“God, Mother, you make us sound like a pack of criminals,” Vega protested.

“We’re all characters. But not a queer one in the bunch.” Mrs. Purvis took a three ounce swallow of Seven-Up. “Too bad you never knew my husband,” she said to Beth. “A charmer.”

“Daddy was a doctor,” Vega said, and Beth noticed, uncomfortably, that she was working on a second drink of straight whiskey.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Purvis energetically. “Specialized in tonsils. Once a week he went down to his office—Monday mornings, usually—and sliced out eighteen or twenty pairs. That was all. Never did another thing and never lost a patient. Made a pile too, all on tonsils. Kept us quite comfortably for years. It’s a shame he wasn’t around to carve Vega up when the time came.”

“My tonsils are the only things they didn’t cut out, Mother,” Vega reminded her.

“Well, it was a good life,” Mrs. Purvis said. “Lots of leisure time, lots of money for booze and the rest of life’s necessities. Of course, I drink tamer stuff these days. How’s your Seven-Up, girls?”

“Oh, it’s delicious,” Beth said quickly, but something in the old lady’s face told her that Vega’s silent boozing didn’t escape her mother. Whiskey didn’t sound any different from Seven-Up, but it smelled different.

“I hope you split them up fairly, Vega,” Mrs. Purvis said. “There were only two.” She smiled inwardly at herself, slyly.

“There were three, Mother. One in the back of the shelf. You missed it,” Vega lied promptly, with perfect ease.

“Oh.” Her disappointment seemed to remind Mrs. Purvis that it was time for another of her incessant trips to the bathroom, and she heaved unsteadily to her feet.

“Can I help you?” Beth exclaimed, half rising, but Mrs. Purvis waved her down.

“Hell no, dear,” she said. “This is one thing I can still do by myself, thank God. When I can’t make it to the john anymore I’m going to lie down with the damn cats in the backyard and die.”

“If they’ll have you,” Gramp murmured.

“Besides, she needs the exercise,” Vega said. “It’s the only walking she does, really.”

“I get more exercise than you, my dear daughter,” said her mother from the door. “You just sit around on your can all day and tell other people how to walk. You should try it some time. Every twenty minutes. Never gives the circulation time to get sluggish. There are many advantages to being old and diseased, as you will soon discover,” she said, chortling with expectation at Vega. “Not the least of them are virtue and exercise.”

“All right, Hester, get the hell in the bathroom before you lose it,” Gramp snapped impatiently, and Beth saw Vega’s temper rising too. Beth didn’t know whether she was amused or repelled by the whole scene: the ugly crumbling old woman, the way Vega lived, the wise-cracking with the hint of violence under the humor. She didn’t understand why she said yes when Vega fixed her another drink, then another. And Vega drank two for her every one.

Beth began to forget, or rather to get accustomed to, the hothouse atmosphere. She unbuttoned her blouse at the top and pushed the dark hair off her perspiring forehead, and talked and laughed with Vega and Mrs. Purvis. They were both a little daffy, she decided, but in a macabre sort of way they were fun. And Vega was so beautiful … so beautiful. Beth saw her now with slightly fuzzy outlines. Vega became animated in a careful sort of way, even laughing aloud, which was an effort for her. Every little while she would disappear with their empty glasses and come back with a couple of inches of liquor in them. Mrs. Purvis had long since finished her Seven-Up.

“No, thanks,” Beth said finally, laughing in spite of herself when Vega offered her another. “I can’t, really, I’m driving.”

Vega raised an alarmed finger to her lips, and Mrs. Purvis said, “That crap will kill you, dear. It’s the bubbles—they’re poison, I swear. Whiskey is much better for you, believe me.” And Beth thought her sagging old face looked crafty and pleased with itself—or was it just the effort of trying to figure the two young women out?

Beth rose to go, throwing her coat over her shoulders.

“Oh, wait!” Vega pleaded. “Wait a little while. I’ll make some dinner for us.” She put a hand on Beth’s arm and this time it didn’t bother Beth at all. Or rather, the bothersome sensation was welcome; it was all pleasure. They smiled at each other and Beth felt herself on the verge of giving in. She felt at the same time a warmth in Vega that she hadn’t suspected.

“Stay and have some dinner with us, Beth,” Mrs. Purvis said genially. “Vega’s a lousy cook unless she has company to fix for. The damn pussies eat better than we do.”

“They’re healthier, too,” Gramp interposed.

Beth looked at her watch. It was past six o’clock, which struck her funny. “I can’t, thanks,” she said. “My kids, my husband—”

“Can’t he cook?” exclaimed Mrs. Purvis. “Hell, I used to make the doctor sling his own hash three or four times a week. And we were sublimely happy.”

But what happened? Beth wondered. Your family split up and went all to hell. Everyone but Cleve, and even Cleve drinks too much. Charlie gripes about it.

“Charlie can boil water,” she said, “but that’s all. It’s past dinnertime now.” She adjusted her coat and headed for the door.

Vega scooped up a couple of mewing cats from the couch and followed her, balancing her drink precariously at same time.

“Tell her to stay for dinner, Gramp,” Mrs. Purvis said.

“Canned cat food. The finest,” he offered with a grin.

But Beth suddenly felt the need to escape, and Vega, seeing it, took her hand and led her outdoors. “That’s enough, you two,” she called back to her family. “Don’t scare her off!”

Beth turned and looked at Vega one last time before she left. She felt giddy and silly and she was aware that there was a smile on her face, a smile that wouldn’t go away. “Thanks, Vega,” she said.

“You know, you don’t need modeling lessons, Beth,” Vega said slowly, as if it were something they had a tacit understanding about. “I like the way you walk. It’s not quite right for modeling—too free swinging—but I wouldn’t change it for anything, even if I could. It would ruin you—the lovely effect you make.”

Beth stammered at her, unable to answer coherently, only aware that she was deeply flattered.

“Tell Charlie you had a first-rate lesson,” Vega went on. “Tell him you walked three miles back and forth in a straight line and you learned how to treat your hair with olive oil. Tell him anything, only come back on Friday.”

Beth, smiling and mystified and pleased, said softly, “I will.”

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