“But the second time?”
She shivered.
“What… bothered you?”
She leaned back in the chair and let her eyes close. In that position her face looked very relaxed and she seemed to be at peace with the world and entirely at ease. But when she spoke her voice came out in a strangled fashion and the effect of relaxation was shattered.
“I felt as though… as though you were raping me, Ralph. It’s hard for me to explain it exactly. You were kissing me and your tongue was in my mouth and I felt as though… as though I was being—”
“Yes?”
“—well, penetrated. I just couldn’t stand it and I was getting more and more frightened and generally shook up until you stopped.”
He thought for a minute. “When… when you kiss a woman, is that how you kiss?”
“More or less.”
“And have women kissed you like that?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then—”
“There’s a difference, Ralph. Not just in the mechanics of the kiss. Ralph, I think I’m just a lesbian and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.”
“Don’t say that!”
“I’m afraid it’s the truth. I’m afraid the reason I’m afraid of you is simply that you’re a man and I’m a freak who only enjoys sex with women. I guess that’s all there is to it, Ralph.”
“I can’t believe that. There’s too much between us for it to be just that.”
“But—”
“It’ll take time,” he said doggedly. “It’ll take a hell of a lot of time, more time than I thought it would at first. But we’ll manage. We love each other.”
“Yes,” she said. “We love each other.”
They talked for a minute or two more; then Ralph covered the canvas once again and left. He was in no mood to do any more painting for the rest of the day and he knew better than to push himself once he hit a real snag. It was too easy to foul yourself up completely that way and ruin a painting that was good until then.
He walked down the stairs again, his feet heavy on the steps. He passed the closed door of his own apartment and hurried out to the street. He wanted to keep moving, to go where nobody knew him and to do pretty much of nothing.
He was in no mood for people — not for Susan or Stella certainly, not for the moment. The IRT subway let him off at Times Square and he deliberated between getting quietly bombed out of his head or trying to lose himself in a cheap movie. The movie won — drinking didn’t sound too attractive with the hangover he had just gone through, and the movie was also a good deal cheaper.
He saw a double feature without seeing it. Afterward he remembered very vaguely that one of the films was something about gangsters and starred either George Raft or Jimmy Cagney, but he couldn’t remember for sure which one it was. The other picture was an “Eastern Western”—the saga of Genghis Khan or some such, with people riding around on rabid camels and shooting rifles which, as Ralph remembered, weren’t in such wide distribution at the time of Genghis Khan. But he couldn’t be sure.
Throughout both movies his eyes stared at the screen while only half seeing it. His mind was elsewhere, wrapped up in the problems he had tried to leave behind him when he walked into the theater. As usual, it didn’t work. He found himself remembering the taste of Susan’s lips when he kissed her — the first time gently, the second time with a passion that had been too much for her.
The taste of her lips, the clean sweet smell of her naked flesh so close to him, her breasts pressing against his shirtfront. His hands meeting behind her back as he pressed her close. The feel of her bare back under his hands, soft and clean and smooth, slender without being thin. The warm taste inside her mouth, the touch of her tongue.
Sensory impressions flooded his brain as his mind turned time and time to the kiss and the conversation that followed it. The impressions mingled with the love he felt for her and killed whatever interest the two movies might have held for him.
He didn’t like movies too much to begin with, generally preferring a paperback book to even a top-notch picture. There was one great thing for both reading and looking at paintings — you could do them on your own time and pace yourself as you pleased. If you were a fast reader you could read quickly; if you felt like it you could slow down. But speeding up a movie or playing a 33-rpm record at 78 didn’t work out.
He left the theatre when the second picture ended and found his way to an inexpensive restaurant on 47th Street. He ate a meal without tasting it and smoked a cigarette without even realizing that he had lighted one. Finally he wandered to the Museum of Modern Art on Fifth Avenue and spent several hours studying some of his favorite paintings.
Modigliani had always been his favorite painter — the feeling and warmth in his nudes and portraits of men and women with long necks and narrow heads communicated itself strongly to him. As he stood for a long time in front of the portrait of the Young Girl with Braids he was reminded vaguely of Susan. Both shared the same quality of innocence in the eyes and around the mouth.
He thought about Modigliani and the kind of life the man had led. Sickly as a child, he moved to Paris while in his early twenties and seemed determined to kill himself as quickly as possible. He drank almost constantly; when he wasn’t drinking he was smoking opium or hashish or experimenting with still stronger drugs.
The artist’s motto had been “Une vie breve mais intense” — a short life but an intense one. That was a perfect description of what he achieved, contracting tuberculosis and dying in his mid-thirties. And then his mistress Jeanne Hebuterne had thrown herself from the balcony of her father’s house to join him in death.
He shook his head. Compared to that, his own life seemed almost sane. But he knew that he was walking a tightrope and could fall either way at any moment. If he lost Susan he was afraid to think what would happen to him. He knew for a fact that he would never paint again. He would pack up his paints and brushes and canvases and chuck them in the nearest trashcan. And he would probably start hitting the bottle fairly regularly, drifting deeper and deeper into the life of perversion and depravity that Stella represented.
For a moment he remembered the night before when he had returned to listen to Stella’s taunts. He hoped again that Stella would leave Susan alone. Even if he himself couldn’t have her, the girl deserved a lot better deal than Stella would hand her.
But what an animal he himself had turned to last night! That’s what would happen to him if he lost the girl; he was sure of it, sure that he would react by throwing up everything and striking back the only way he knew how.
At nine o’clock he left the museum and wandered back toward Times Square. He didn’t want to go back to Barrow Street, not now. He couldn’t face either of the two women who might be waiting for him.
Instead he took a room for the night at a run-down hotel on 47th Street, paying in advance. The room was a rat-trap — a small single bed, about a foot of space on each side of the bed, the bathroom down the hall, the room’s window opening out on a brick wall.
But it was a place to sleep, a place to be alone. That was all he wanted for the time being.
Chapter eight
Susan stared at the closed door for a long time after he left her. Her mind was a jumble of confused thoughts and half-thoughts, a collection of random whirling notions, a hodgepodge of feelings and lusts and drives and inhibitions all rolled together. She didn’t know for sure how she felt or what she wanted.
She stood up and paced the room for a few moments, her trim legs carrying her back and forth from the window to the door. She paused at the window for a moment to see if she could find Ralph but he was already out of sight. Standing by the window, her breasts heaving, she realized all at once that she was naked. She blushed automatically and took a quick step away, wondering whether or not anyone had seen her.