My building was quiet as we went upstairs. I put the key in the lock and opened the door. The lights were off, but I could hear something. I fortified myself, walked to the bedroom, and flipped on the light. Joe and Ruby were naked on top of the covers. He was pushing himself into her. All notions of tearing out eyeballs disappeared as my blood drained out of my head in a sickening whoosh. I averted my gaze and saw Helen. Her face was as pale as cream, and her lips were whiter still. I had to look worse. I mean, there we were-two virgins faced with something we’d only imagined. And what I’d imagined was not what was on the bed. I was stunned, destroyed, heartbroken. Joe reached for his shorts. Ruby slipped her arms into her kimono. I covered my eyes and began to weep.
“I’m sorry,” Ruby’s pretty voice sang to me. “I’m so, so sorry. We never wanted you to find out this way.”
Joe kept his eyes down and his mouth shut. He pulled on his pants and grabbed his shirt and socks from the clothes scattered on the floor. As soon as he had his belongings, he rushed past Helen and me and out the door. He’d played me for a sap, and he didn’t even have the courage to apologize. He didn’t have the conviction to stand by Ruby either. He’d made suckers of both of us. My humiliation was beyond anything I could have imagined. For the first time, I fully understood what it meant to lose face.
“Well,” I said at last, “this stinks.”
“Grace-”
Hearing Ruby say my name hit me like an electric shock.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” she went on. “We realize you don’t know much about sex. Joe and I have always tried to be careful. You usually don’t come home until much later.”
“You mean this isn’t the first time?”
“We waited a long time before I let anything happen, so we’ve only been together for a few months. We were just celebrating the first-year anniversary of when we met. I’ll always be grateful to you for introducing us.”
Helen grabbed my arm to hold me steady.
“But I love him,” I mumbled.
“We knew you were sweet on him. That’s why we waited,” Ruby said sympathetically. “But you kept following him around all the time.”
I needed to get out of there.
“Joe was worried about you,” Ruby confided in a gentle but straightforward voice. “We both were. You’re so nice, but you didn’t even graduate from high school. You’re not in the same world as we are. You can’t play at the same level.” She paused. “Oh, honey, you’re out of your league. It’s time you learned that.”
Here’s how I heard what she said: I was some dumb rube from the sticks, while she was gorgeous and half-naked all the time.
“Do you love him?” I asked.
“Don’t be such a kid,” she answered like she was trying to be helpful and teach me what was what. “You work in a nightclub. I work in a nudie show. You need to grow up.”
When I recoiled, Ruby finally had the decency to glance away.
“We’re like the Three Musketeers, remember?” For the first time, I heard a hint of anxiety in her voice. “We promised we’d never let a man come between us, and I meant it.”
“How could I have ever liked you?” I asked.
“We thought, what you don’t know won’t hurt you,” she continued, going back to sounding like a know-it-all big sister. “We hoped you’d get over Joe and develop a crush on someone else. Maybe get back together with Monroe, or meet another boy your own age.”
I was only two years younger than Ruby! I fought the urge to smack her.
“We wanted you to be happy,” she went on. “We wanted you to come to a place-on your own-that you would be able to look back at your silly little crush as just that. We kept the secret precisely so this wouldn’t happen.”
“What about me?” Helen suddenly asked. “What’s your excuse for not telling me?”
“You’re not even supposed to walk through Chinatown by yourself,” Ruby answered. “I didn’t think you’d want to hear that I was making love with a boy. But really, neither of you should make a big deal about this. Joe and I have been playing around. So what? It’s not that serious.”
Her excuses made me angrier. She’d lied to Helen and me. Her reasons seemed to be based on our being too innocent to accept the truth. I so hated her in that moment.
I turned to Helen. “Let’s get out of here.”
“We should talk about this some more,” Ruby appealed to me. “Please, you need to understand-”
“There’s nothing to talk about!” I screamed from a place inside me that I hadn’t known existed. “I love Joe, and now you’ve ruined everything!”
“For heaven’s sake, Grace. He’s a man. A man doesn’t want puppy love.”
I thought I’d been humiliated. Now I was HUMILIATED.
Perhaps Ruby sensed she’d gone too far. “Try to forgive me-”
“Forgive you? I never want to see you again!”
With that, I pulled my suitcase out from under the bed.
“Don’t go.” Her eyes welled with tears. I’d never seen her cry before, but my usual compassion had been shredded to nothing.
I opened my dresser drawers and stuffed my purse with brassieres, panties, and the envelope with Mom’s emergency money. I packed my newly bought frocks, the dance shoes and practice clothes I’d brought with me from Plain City, and the evening gown that had taken six months to pay off, but I left the trinkets Joe had given me rattling in the bottom of my drawer.
Ruby kept apologizing. Helen waited quietly. I snapped the suitcase shut and picked it up. Ruby flew to the door to block me from leaving.
“Move aside, or I’ll move you.” I sounded just like my father.
The steel in my voice was such that Ruby edged out of the way. Helen took my arm. Her grip was stable and reassuring as we walked through the streets, but I was a whimpering mess. When we reached the Fong compound, Helen led me through a door, up some stairs, and along a hallway. Her room was neat, fairly empty, and not all that different from my room at home: a bed, a side table with a lamp, a dresser, and a mirror. I collapsed on the bed. Helen gave me a handkerchief. I cried, and Helen kept up a commentary-which didn’t cheer me any.
“First she said it was their anniversary,” Helen stewed. “Then she said they’d been doing it for a while. Then she said it wasn’t a big deal. Then she practically said she didn’t even care for him. If all that wasn’t enough, she then tried to make it sound like Joe was forced into babysitting you. Did she change her story because she thought that’s what you wanted to hear?”
I blubbered some more.
Helen disappeared, then shortly returned with a pot of jasmine tea and a plate of cold barbecued-pork dumplings.
“I can’t stay here.” My voice caught-like I was being suffocated.
“Sure you can. We have plenty of room.”
I shook my head. “I mean I can’t stay in San Francisco.”
“Just a minute! You have a job. You have friends. You have me. Don’t do anything you’ll regret.”
But running away was how I knew to protect myself.
“Hollywood,” I murmured. “I’m going to Hollywood. I should have gone there in the first place, because life is in movies, movies are life, and movies are greater than life.”
“You don’t make a decision just like that!”
“I do,” I said as a hard protective shell came down over me. “If I didn’t, I’d still be in Plain City.”
I stood. Done here.
“At least sleep on it,” Helen pleaded.
But nothing she said-and, boy, did she try-changed my mind, forcing her pleas to become more desperate. “The day we first met you promised we’d stick together.”
Around four in the morning she finally accepted defeat. “All right then,” she said. “Wait here.”