Читать книгу Return to Lesbos - Valerie Taylor - Страница 9

3 FURNISHING AN EIGHT-ROOM HOUSE IS WORK, BUT it comes to an end eventually. Two weeks after that rainy moving day, Frances backed down off a stepladder and stood looking up at her new curtains. There wasn’t another thing she could do to the place. Not one.

Now what?

Bill was apparently there to stay. He had given her a guided tour of the place, pointing out the solid foundations, hardwood floors and full-size basement and attic. The bathroom and downstairs lavatory were not only tiled with real tile but equipped with copper piping guaranteed to last a lifetime. The roof was fireproof, the siding waterproof. What more could anybody want?

A home-owner’s pride colored his voice when he suggested, “You could make a swell TV room down here. Put in one of those portable bars.”

“Why don’t you mention it to Mr. Bowers?”

His look accused her of treason. “Hell, he’ll never get back to work. He ought to retire and move to Florida or someplace where it’s warm. Be glad if I took the place off his hands.”

She was trapped, then. These were the prison walls closing in around her, decked out in new large-figure wallpaper.

Standing at the foot of the ladder, she wondered bleakly how Kay’s confident prophecy was going to come true. She might take a male lover—what was a little adultery in the executive echelons? But if she made a pass at a girl—wow!

She supposed it happened now and then, in a country where one-tenth of all women were supposed to be gay. But she knew, miserably, that Bill would be suspicious of any friendship she made. His ostentatious forgiveness didn’t stretch that far. And it made her miserable to tell lies.

She couldn’t discuss it with him. He went all tight lipped and gimlet eyed whenever they passed a butch type on the street. It was no use to argue that “the girls” were like everybody else, except in their sex life—and that wasn’t as different as he thought! She couldn’t say, “Look, we’re people too.” He wouldn’t let her bring the subject up.

And yet, according to the law of averages, two or three of the chicks in his office had to belong. Secretary, file clerk, ad writer, switchboard operator.

Thinking about it made her restless. She showered, pulled on a printed blue silk dress with a little ruffle at the neck—a Mrs. William Ollenfield dress, chosen to conform to Bill’s idea of a womanly woman—and doused herself with Je Reviens. She’d go downtown and look at clothes. Have a facial, manicure, hair-tint job, wave and set—hell, why not have her nose pierced too, while she was at it? She might even eat lunch in a tearoom, something squishy in a patty shell, and a fattening dessert. It was what the Wives would do.

Maybe if you did the housewife bit for ten or fifteen years you got used to it. Maybe a fifteen-minute bedding twice a week, without active participation, came to stand for sex. A pretty prospect.

THE CABBIE SAID, “Where you want to go, lady?”

She gave him her best smile. “I don’t know, I’m new in town. Where’s the best place to get my hair done?”

He looked her over carefully, twisting around in the seat. Apparently she qualified. “There’s Shapiro’s. That’s about the best store in town, and they got a regular beauty parlor. They got everything Marshall Field’s has, except the escalator.”

“All right, let’s try Shapiro’s.”

She gave him fifty cents more than the meter said, and he thanked her politely but without enthusiasm and drove away, leaving her standing in a completely strange place, trying to organize her thoughts.

This was Main Street. The sign at the corner said so, and besides it looked like Main Street. Parking meters, stores, banks, traffic lights. Shapiro’s was four stories high. The Waubonsie State Savings and Loan towered five floors above it, on the corner. She already felt at home with the Savings and Loan; a book of its pale-green checks lay alongside the lipstick in her handbag.

Shapiro’s was air-conditioned. She went in, past the display windows with a few summer evening frocks and accessories, past the lady clerks who were surely older than their hair styles and younger than their feet, past the impulse tables of jewelry and gloves, suntan lotion, and dark glasses. In this familiar setting her timidity melted away. She was wafted to the top floor in a slow elevator piloted by a young tan girl in white gloves, and found the beauty salon by the acrid smell of wave lotion. The reception desk was standard and so was the reception: they were booked solid, but they would try to fit her in.

She chose one of a long row of identical metal mesh chairs and looked around at the other waiting women. They all looked married. Business girls, of course, would come in on their lunch hour. Halfway through her second cigarette the receptionist said, “Miss Bernadette will take you now,” and there was Miss Bernadette, plump and pleasant in her yellow nylon uniform. With a wedding ring.

But it seemed to her that surely, if she looked searchingly and didn’t miss anybody, she would find someone. Her hair rinsed and dried and baked into little tight curls, she sat through the boredom of a manicure. The woman at the next table, having her nails tinted a pale silvery mauve, was slim, gray haired, haughty. She returned Frances’s inquiring look with the polite disinterest of one to whom other women are only relatives or neighbors.

I give up, Frances thought. But she was unable to give up. A need she didn’t want to admit sent her through the aisles of the store, looking at the counter displays, buying a box of stationery here and three pairs of sheer nylons there, sizing up the clerks and the women who were desultorily shopping. She knew she was being silly. She and Bake and the others had talked about the wacky idea people have that “you can always tell.” The men in the insurance office had bragged about “knowing one every time,” looking past her as she sat filling out forms. Every woman in the room could be available and it wouldn’t show. “Still,” Kay had insisted, “sometimes you sort of know. It’s not the clothes or the hairdo. I don’t know what it is.” And Bake, flicking out her cigarette, “Pure wishful thinking.”

Frances kept on looking.

It was a hot day. Her back ached from shoving furniture around and her scalp itched from the wave lotion. Her toes pinched. She went out into the torrid street carrying her packages, remembering too late that she had meant to look at dresses.

There were other stores, none so large or up-to-date as Shapiro’s but all carrying familiar brand names. A Sears Roebuck on one corner faced a Steinway on the other corner. Kresge, Woolworth, and Ben Franklin were lined up on the same block. There were jewelry stores with engagement rings in little slotted boxes. She passed a tavern that looked cool and dark, thought about going in for a pre-luncheon martini and realized that she didn’t know the customs in Waubonsie. Maybe nice women didn’t go into bars unescorted. She walked along.

What was she looking for, she wondered, an oriental bazaar with teak and spices and carved ivory?

A sign with Chinese characters, red on gold, caught her eye. She moved toward it. And there was her bazaar.

The window was narrow, with a dozen books lying at careless angles. A complete edition of Shakespeare in half calf, open at the Balcony Scene—nice clear print with curly serifs and elegant capitals. Half a dozen remaindered novels. A thin volume that could only be hand-set poetry, jacketed in burlap. Katherine Mansfield’s Journals, both volumes, faded purple. And in the front of the window, flanked by a chunk of uncut rose crystal and a small, flowered bowl, lay a wood carving of a cat done with love and skill, the essence of catness. I’ve got to have that, she decided, entering to a thin tinkle of chimes.

A young man floated forward to meet her. If she had felt baffled about the women in the store, unable to tell which were her own kind, there was no doubt about this boy. The insurance salesmen would have placed him without a second look. His face was pretty rather than handsome, his hair a little too long and too carefully disposed; he came to an elegant stop leaning on the counter. It was shirtsleeve weather, but his narrow striped collar was held by a little gold pin. A little fine-drawn, a little precious; and in this alien land her heart warmed to him. She could have hugged him.

A little nellie, she thought in automatic criticism. And realized, reddening, that he was sizing her up too and what he was seeing was Mrs. William Ollenfield. She was a little angry that he should judge by appearances. The boys are all artistic and the girls are all athletic. Kay, for instance—Kay wouldn’t walk across the street if she had cab fare. She said coldly, “The cat in the window—it’s for sale?”

“It’s nice, isn’t it? I have a friend who carves them. All different and individual—you’ll never see it duplicated.”

She was reluctant to ask what it cost, as though originality could be paid for in money. It didn’t matter anyway. Mrs. William Ollenfield had plenty for little impulsive purchases. Looking around, delaying her commitment to the cat, she saw that the place was really a secondhand store, a little dusty and shabby. But a length of Persian silk in dull reds and blues lay across a small table, there were three or four small water colors on one wall, and a shelf held several pieces of handmade pottery. “The pictures?”

He made a small modest gesture. “Mine. I have fun doing them, and every once in a while somebody buys one.” He smiled. “Why don’t you look around, if you’re not in any hurry? I mean, if you’re interested in books. You don’t have to buy anything.”

It was true, the place was empty except for the two of them. She knew the story: the boy sensitive, working in a store or an office at a job perhaps made for him by an uncle or friend of the family, always out of things, always nervous about his hidden personal life. Dismissals, the staff being cut, the company reorganized, never the real reason, always an embarrassed excuse.

He was looking at her. She said, “Thanks, maybe I will. I just moved here from Chicago, and I haven’t met anybody yet.” And remembered the freshly curled hair and the printed silk, the idiotic ruffle. Take off your mask, but how? He said politely, “It’s not a very interesting town,” and turned away. She had no answer. If she said, “Yes, but I have to go where my husband goes,” it would only bear out the lying testimony of the ruffled dress.

It seemed odd, now, that she had never had a close male friend. Bake had half a dozen, two nice boys who shared an apartment on the floor above her, a gray-haired man with an invalid wife who took her to concerts—you saw him in Karla’s now and then, having a drink with one girl or another before going back to his furnished room. But she had never known any man well enough to count him as a friend. She thought she might like to know this boy better.

The doorbell jingled again. Sunshine poured in, outlining the figure of a girl on the threshold. She came in slowly, pulling the door shut behind her. In outline, against the harsh outdoor light, she seemed like a slender boy of fifteen or sixteen, his angles not yet blunted into manhood. Once in the room she was neither fifteen nor a boy. There were fine creases at the corners of her eyes and around her thin neck, and the line of her shoulders was purely feminine. She had high cheekbones and ash-blonde hair cut short; where it curled around her forehead it was dark with perspiration. She wore blue slacks and a striped cotton shirt, with sneakers; her bare ankles were fine-boned.

She said, ignoring Frances, “I just wanted to tell you the committee meets tonight at Joe’s. The books they ordered have come.”

“All right.”

I ought to leave, Frances thought. They know each other and I’m an outsider. But she was unable to go. Embarrassed and a little frightened, but compelled, she said, “You look like someone I know.”

“Are you a parent? I’m a teacher, so naturally I meet a lot of parents.”

“No. I only meant—”

She was floundering. The boy came to her rescue. He said, “She’s new in town and she likes John’s cats. If she has any sense at all,” he said, lifting his narrow shoulders, “she’ll go right back where she came from. No matter where it is, it can’t be as bad as here.”

The girl was sizing her up. Frances gave back the look. She looked like Kay. There was no real physical resemblance; Kay was taller and more filled out, and her hair was reddish-brown. It was the boylike air. Put this one in tights and tunic and she could play Rosalind, half boy and half woman, a face crossed by fleeting part-expressions. Looks or no looks, in some way that really mattered, she was like Kay.

She said, “No, you look like a girl I know. Used to know. Would you both like to go somewhere and have a drink?”

The appraising silence was like Kay’s, too. Then the fair girl gave her a polite smile with no depth to it. “Thanks, but I have an engagement. Maybe another time.”

Frances was helpless. She wanted to grab this stranger by the sleeve and beg her not to go away. To say, “Look at me, listen to me, I’m not what you think I am, so don’t look at this disguise I have on. I’m your kind of person and I need to know you. Because I’ve been away from home for a long time.”

You can’t do these things.

She might be wrong, tricked by an accidental resemblance. She stood silent while the girl left, the little bell over the door fading away into silence. Walking lightly in dirty sneakers, moving like a dancer, she was gone.

The boy said, “Don’t let Erika bother you. She’s a wonderful person and she’s had a rough time. Her best friend was killed in an accident last winter and she was in the hospital for a long time.”

“I like her.”

The statement fell on its face. He let it lie there. “Why don’t you just browse around, if you feel like it, and I’ll be in the back room if you find something you like. My name is Vince,” he added with a charming smile.

She was too confused to look at books. She bought the carved cat, paid for it and left clutching it, with change in her sweaty hand.

The heat didn’t bother her now, or the toe-pinching shoes, or the fact that she had missed both breakfast and lunch. She walked unseeing through the noon streets without considering where she was going. At the corner she almost bumped into a woman who swerved aside to miss her, then called her by name. Half a block later she realized that it was one of the Wives—which one, she had no idea. It didn’t matter.

Thank God, there was someone. Someone whose last name she didn’t know, who had barely spoken to her and then only to rebuff her. Erika, a teacher—and she had lost someone in a tragic accident. “Best friend” was the way Vince had put it, of course. That meant she was alone and probably lonely.

I have to see her again, Frances thought, worried. But how? And how to undo this horrible first impression?

Through the bookstore boy, of course. Anyone can buy books.

It was after twelve. The sun stood high in the sky behind a stone church with square towers, flying buttresses, and the most lurid stained glass windows she had ever seen, dominating a downtown corner as though the town had grown up around it. As it probably had.

She felt tired. She signalled a cruising cab.

Halfway home, she remembered that she had left her nylons and letter paper in the bookstore. That meant she would have to go back and pick them up. Blessed Freudian slip, giving her a good excuse for what she most wanted to do.

It was Friday, the end of the week. There was the weekend to get through, and a triumphant Bill who was already in the swing of things at the plant, very much on top, already confident with success. Already the top-echelon men at the factory were replacing his city friends in his dinner-table monologues and, so far as she could tell, in his affections. He had found a good barber, a satisfactory place to lunch and a quiet bar for a five o’clock drink. At home he was happy and undemanding, asking only that she appreciate him. True, Sunday was coming up and he would probably start fumbling at her before she got the dinner dishes stacked, but she could stand it.

She shut her eyes and leaned her head back against the slippery upholstery, thinking about a slender sad-faced girl with fair hair and a light way of walking.

I’ll find her, she thought, smiling a little, and next time I’ll be myself. I’ll find some way to let her know.