She made up a little song and sang it to herself. It went to the tune of Let’s go Barmy, We’re in the Army from the Three-Penny Opera. She sang quietly, enjoying herself:
She broke off in the middle of the parody, leaving the window, finding a cigarette and putting a match to it. She smoked silently, trying to get her mind organized. She had not seen Maggie since Tuesday morning, when they had first made love quite magnificently and then had ridden back to the Point on the train. She had talked twice to the redheaded girl on the telephone, but she had not yet been to see her.
The thing was that she had to make a decision, and whichever way she made it, she had a hard life staring her in the face. She was certain now that her lesbianism was a genuine thing, that her only chance for sexual happiness and emotional satisfaction lay in the arms of women, not men. So she was more than willing to continue her homosexual relationship with Maggie Whitcomb.
That was not the problem.
The problem was along those lines of course. The problem lay in the fact that, for the first time, Maggie Whitcomb was wholeheartedly in love. And the type of relationship which Maggie had previously found to be ideal now would not do at all.
“I’m in love with you,” Maggie had told her on the phone. “I don’t want to share you, Ell. Not with anybody.”
That meant no marriage. According to Maggie, she had two choices. They could break up, in which event she would remain with Ted and hide her lesbianism under a nymphomaniacal bushel. Or she could go off with Maggie, divorcing her husband while Maggie divorced Dave, sharing an apartment in Greenwich Village or some similar place, and leading the gay life all the way.
She could not, Maggie had explained, both have and eat her cake. Love would not permit such a relationship. She could be Ted’s or Maggie’s, but not both.
Which, of course, was a problem.
Because she would have liked to have her cake and eat it as well. She wanted the respectability of marriage to Ted; the idea of leaving mate and child and becoming a sexual pariah did not particularly appeal. But the thought of giving up Maggie and all that Maggie meant was no more appealing. She was caught in a neat little bind, and either way out seemed to be a pitfall, and on top of everything else it was raining.
Hell.
Hell and damnation.
Hell!
“Look at it this way,” Maggie had explained, her voice persuasively logical. “We’ll be hiding, Ell. Hiding everything, worrying about exposure, playing secret little games. And eventually some prying snooping long-eared nosy son-of a bitch will find out, and then we’ll be in the worst possible kind of mess. That’s no good, Ell.”
True enough. That was distinctly no good.
“And we don’t have each other, not as well as we should. I don’t want to make love to you while I’m looking at my watch. I want you around all the time. I want to go to bed with you at night and wake up with you in the morning. I don’t want to share you, not sexually or emotionally. I want you for more than sex, Ell. I’m in love with you.”
And, naturally, she was in love with Maggie. She knew how Maggie felt and felt the same way herself. But was she ready to commit herself that completely? Was she ready to toss everything overboard and become a full-time lesbian? Maybe what she was going through was a passing phase, maybe some morning she would open her eyes and discover that lesbianism was less than absurd, that she wanted to sleep with men rather than women.
Maybe—
Hell.
The rain was not letting up. It was getting worse, if that were possible, and Elly thought hysterically that it was going to go on like this for forty days and forty nights. The thing to do, she told herself, was to get busy building an ark. She would make it forty cubits long and thirty cubits deep and twenty cubits wide, and into it she would put two members of each species of every living thing. But she would put in two women of each species. It would be the first lesbian ark in history.
She laughed. Outside the rain kept coming down.
21
Nan Haskell was taking a bath. There was enough water outside for her to bathe in the yard, but she hadn’t gone quite that far yet. Ted was breaking down her reserve, pushing her inhibitions a little farther each time, but she had not yet reached the point where she would go out and bathe in the rain.
She rarely took tub baths. She usually preferred showers — they were faster and simpler, and you didn’t wind up lolling in a tub of dirty water that way. But this morning she was taking a bath. She was not interested in getting clean, since she had already had her morning shower. She was sitting in a tub of hot water because she ached.
Ached.
Her muscles were sore, and her flesh was sore, and her stomach was weak from throwing up. The little fun-and-games episode at the Star Bright Motel had left her broken and vomiting. It had been one for the books, all things considered.
She never would have believed herself capable of such perverted behavior, never could have imagined herself submitting to such bestiality and, what was more, getting an insane sort of kick out of it. And yet she had submitted, and had gotten those insane kicks, and now her whole body ached.
Ached from the spanking, and from being kicked. And from throwing up, sick with herself, humiliated and ashamed. She had done things no woman should do, had done them with a man who was evil and twisted and vile. And now she lay in the tub, soaking herself in steaming water, trying to bring herself back to life again.
Maybe she should kill herself.
It was a tempting thought. All you did was take your life and put an end to it, and then all the little worries, along with yourself, simply cased to be. God, what was the best way to kill yourself? A doctor had assured her once at a party that the simplest and most pleasant suicide method called for a lethal intravenal injection of morphine. This had impressed her at the time, but less than a year later that same doctor had placed the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth, triggered the gun with his toe, and blown his brains all over Westchester County, thus killing himself off in as painful and unappetizing a manner as possible.
The poem was one of Dorothy Parker’s, and it summed things up precisely enough. She put her head in one hand, thinking now what a cockeyed course events had taken. She’d started out bored, and had entered into an affair with Ted to escape somehow from boredom. And now she was thinking of suicide, which was nothing but the ultimate boredom of death.
It was the town, she thought. Cheshire Point. When all was said and done, the town of Cheshire Point was nothing but a grass-covered tree-shaded trap. You wound up with all the inconveniences of country life and all the pressures of city life, the unpleasantness of either way of life all rolled into one unpalatable pill. You watched your husband go off to the city each morning, and you waited in occupied monotony for him to return, while other women waited in the same manner in all of the other houses in town.
You waited, and you went crazy. You lived in a fundamentally artificial manner, living in the town but not really a part of it, with your social world composed solely of people in your own special notch, other expatriate New Yorkers with the same problems and the same frustrations.