“I just-”
It had been one hell of a battle. But the next day when she came home from work, Bobbie gave her a small white gold wedding band, plain and simple. “You wear this, darling,” she said. “Let the men think you’re married and they won’t make passes at you. I’m sorry, Rho. I was a bitch last night and I’m sorry-”
Fighting and making up, crying and wiping tears away, hurting each other, loving each other. Gay? Oh, very gay. Sure.
She fingered the plain gold band on her ring finger. A lot of the girls wore them, she knew. Sometimes girls exchanged them as a sort of symbolic marriage; more often they merely wore them as she wore hers, as a convenient way to ward off predatory males. Her own wedding ring, the one Tom had given her, would have done as well. But the day the annulment came through, she took it off and dropped it down a sewer grating.
She finished her drink. Bobbie would be coming soon, she thought. She wished the girl would hurry. There were girls all around her, a whole mob of girls just like her and just like Bobbie, and she still felt so thoroughly alone that she wanted to cry.
They wound up the night at John’s on Bleecker. She and Bobbie, Lucia Perry and Peg Brandt, Grace and Allie, Megan and Jan Pomeroy. The young Italian waiter winked happily at them and pulled two tables together and they sat together eating pizza with mushrooms and anchovies and drinking cold beer. The blackness of Rho’s mood had left when Bobbie arrived at Leonetti’s.
She had slowed down on the drinking then, and now she just felt relaxed and happy. It was the first time she had been with Megan since they separated. She had run into her now and then, with the first meeting between them awkward and the second one forced and uneasy, but now they were able to relax at the same table. But it still felt strange to her, Meg was a girl she had loved, a girl she lived with, a girl she had finally left. And now they were what? Friends. Just that.
She knew how it had been with Megan after the break-up. The blonde girl finished her decorating job, pulling it through on sheer willpower. She hurled herself in her work, got home late at night and drank herself into a stupor, then got up the next morning and went back to work. Once the job was out of the way, Megan stayed blind drunk for six days. Two weeks and three days after she stopped her heavy drinking, she went to bed with Jan Pomeroy.
Each of the girls kept her own apartment. Neither of them even expected their affair to last for any great length of time. “We’re enjoying ourselves,” Jan had told Bobbie once. “We’ve known each other for ages and I’ve always liked and admired Megan. But we’re not making any marriage. When we stop being good for each other, or as soon as either of us finds someone else, that’s it. No tears.”
It was an unlikely combination, Rhoda thought. Jan was as religiously homosexual as ever, and Megan had always thought of the hollow-eyed girl and her romantic notions as something of a joke. But they seemed to be good for each other. And she was glad Megan had found somebody to take her place.
Now Megan was talking about a job she was thinking of taking. “This woman wants her living room redone,” she said. “She wants a very plush effect, like an apartment for one of those Doris Day movies. I know just how to give her what she wants.”
“Aren’t you going to do it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so, because it’s not my kind of thing I mean, I would have to put together a room that I wouldn’t be able to walk into without getting slightly dizzy.”
“But if she’s happy-”
“Megan’s the great artist,” Peg Brandt said. “Chockful of artistic integrity. Something I can’t afford to have, incidentally. We folks up at McClellan Products Gazette just do what we have to do. No long words in the crossword puzzle, no bosomy girls in the cartoons, and no expression of opinion that isn’t the precise opinion of one Harvey McClellan. I envy you, Megan.”
Lucia hurried to bolster Peg. “Now stop it,” she said. “You’re in a different field, that’s all. You don’t want to be artistic in your job, Peggy, because it’s something else. It’s being professional that’s important, in doing the job the way it ought to be done. And everybody knows you’re tops.”
There was a momentary lull. Rhoda drank beer straight from the bottle and put the bottle down on the table top. “I wish I could do something,” she said.
She must have said it more plaintively than she meant it. Everyone was looking at her.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I just don’t do anything. Megan is a decorator, Peg is an editor, Lu models-”
“And Bobbie drinks.”
There was laughter. “I’m serious,” she went on. “What do I do? Oh, Bobbie doesn’t work, I know, but she’s interested in a whole load of things. She reads like mad, she writes poetry-”
“Bad poetry,” Bobbie put in.
“And what do I do?” She shrugged. “Nothing. I go to work and stand there like an idiot selling ugly things to tasteless people, and I come home and relax, and then I go to work again. Anybody could do what I do. I have a college diploma, but I could work as well for Mr. Yamatari with a fourth grade education.”
“Not everyone works at something interesting,” Bobbie said. “I don’t. The only job I could get would be something like yours, and I don’t need the money, so I don’t work at all. And an awful lot of girls have jobs that don’t do anything but bring them income.”
“But I’m not involved in anything-”
“Oh?” Grace winked broadly at her. “And here we all thought you were involved with Bobbie.”
“You know what I mean.” She took a cigarette, lit blew out smoke. “I wish I were caught up in something, all excited about something. It wouldn’t have be terribly artistic or anything.”
“Maybe you could open a shop,” someone suggested.
“A shop? What kind?”
“Anything. Antiques, clothes, jewelry. Some little shop that reflects your inner self.”
“That’s a beautiful straight line,” she said. “I won’t bother with a punch line. But it takes a fortune to open a place, doesn’t it? And I don’t know the first thing about business.”
“What to know?” Jan Pomeroy was talking. “You buy things and sell them, and you try to sell them for more than they cost you. That’s all you have to know about business.”
“But-”
“Don’t you see? You and Bobbie could be partners. Working together, all united in this exciting venture.”
They didn’t stay on the subject for very long. Jan and Megan started talking about holiday plans and the table shifted over to that subject. Jan was having a Christmas party and there were half a dozen New Year’s parties already in the planning stage, and the holiday season looked promising. Not everyone would be in town, of course. Alice had to go home to visit her parents in Baltimore, and Grace was trying to decide whether or not she should go with her. Alice’s parents had told her it was all right to bring a friend but Grace was sure they would suspect something. “And yet I don’t want to be away from Allie that long,” she said. “She needs somebody to take care of her, and it would be a hard time for her to be alone.”
Rhoda only half followed the conversation. She was thinking about that idea someone had tossed out, of having a shop of her own. It seemed exciting and she let her mind toss it around.
The conversation caught her up again and she let go of the thread of thought. Maybe sometime she could think more about it, she told herself. But not now. She was too busy living the good gay life.
Terry Langer didn’t look gay.
That was the first thing she thought when she met him, and her next thought was that nothing could be stupider. By now she should have realized that you didn’t have to look gay to be gay. She didn’t look gay, and Bobbie didn’t look gay, and neither did the majority of the girls she knew. But she did not know many male homosexuals, so she still thought of them in terms of the convenient stereotypes.
Terry didn’t fit the image. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a deep voice and a strong chin and a rugged profile. He had none of the mannerisms of the effeminate male, and yet he was a thoroughgoing homosexual. That was why she was with him now.