“My love,” she said. And she said the words not so much to Megan as to herself. This was her love, this was the person whom she loved. This goddess, high breasted and gloriously blonde, this was the person who warmed her and excited her.
“Lie with me,” she said.
The phrase seemed slightly biblical. Lie with me. As Adam knew Eve, and she conceived and bore Megan was beside her. In the bed. Megan’s body was next to her own body, close to her own body, and she could feel the heat of the blonde girl, could smell the perfume of her. The lights were on this time. Before, they had come together in darkness. Now she could see the sweet flesh of the girl who had made sweet love to her.
“I don’t know what to do, ” she said.
“Just kiss me. ”
“I-”
She took Megan in her arms, drew Megan close. At first she kissed her very tentatively, not knowing quite how to go about it, not wanting to do anything that wasn’t good form. Her arms were around Megan and her lips touched Megan’s lips gently and briefly, and she felt Megan’s body against her own, and all at once she knew what to do, knew precisely how she ought to behave.
Her tongue moved to caress Megan’s lips. Megan’s mouth opened in response, and Rhoda’s tongue probed that mouth, stretching the kiss and turning it into something much greater than any kiss had ever been. And she thought suddenly that Tom had taught her to kiss this way, or had tried, and that she had thought it disgusting and unpleasant. But now it was neither, now it was good.
Her hands moved, moved instinctively. And she kissed Megan and taught herself the contours of Megan’s body, and she looked into Megan’s half-lidded eyes and saw how they swam in passion, and she knew that she would be able to learn all that had to be learned, that in her she already seemed to know all the secrets of love. She would be good. She would make Megan happy.
Afterward, she never quite dropped off to sleep. She dozed lightly. Outside, the sky grew light with the overture of dawn. She stayed in bed until seven-thirty, then slipped out soundlessly and went into the living room to dress. She looked at the couch, all made up with sheets and a blanket, and she thought how she had tried to sleep there, how she had fought a battle with herself and had neither lost or won, this depending upon one’s point of view.
She had won, she knew. She had gained a world, and all that she had given up was better lost. Loneliness, frigid independence, unsound self-sufficiency-these were gone, and she was better off without them. So that battle on the narrow couch had been a victory.
She dressed quickly, went back to the bedroom to look for Megan. The blonde girl was sleeping soundly. In the kitchen she found a pad and pencil. She wrote: My love, I’m off to work. Meet me for lunch, if you can. Or meet me after work and help me move in with you. She paused, chewed on the end of the pencil, then added: I feel so wonderful, so very wonderful. I can’t believe it. I did not think I would ever be this gloriously happy. See what you’ve done to me? You’ve got me running off at the mouth. Not at the mouth, I guess, because I’m writing this, not saying it. Running off at the pencil? Oh, I’m silly. I ought to tear up this silly note and start over. I love you, I truly do.
She was outside on the street before she realized that she did not know where she was. Megan had told her what street they were on, but she was bubbling with wine at the time and the street name had not sunk in. She memorized Megan’s house number, then walked to the nearest corner. Megan lived on Cornelia Sheet, she saw and she was now at the corner of Cornelia and Bleecker, which meant that she was only four or five blocks from her own room. She had probably walked past Megan’s building a dozen times, never dreaming she would know a girl who lived inside.
Not so strange, she realized. The Village was not so very large, and she had walked down all its streets at one time or another. Now she headed over to Seventh Avenue, found a diner and had a quick breakfast, smoked several cigarettes and drank three cups of black coffee. She had had hardly any sleep at all during the night, and yet she was somehow not at all tired. She paid her check and hurried off to work.
The shop was as she had left it, the work itself the same as always. And yet everything was entirely different this morning and she knew it, could feel it in the air and in herself. Her step was quicker and lighter, her voice firmer and easier when she spoke. People seemed different-more human, even. They were the same hurrying tourists with the same lack of taste as always, and she knew this, but she found herself relating to them in a different fashion.
It took no stroke of genius to guess what was responsible for the change. The world had not turned suddenly rosy; it was she who was wearing rose-colored glasses. And all of this had come about because of the night with Megan. It was that simple. All at once the words to all the silly popular songs seemed to make sense.
Megan met her for lunch. They sat in a booth around the comer and ate hamburgers. Megan said, “I got your note. You’re sweet.”
“It was a silly note.”
“I loved it. Why didn’t you wake me?”
“You were sleeping so well.”
“I didn’t see the note at first. I was afraid you had left me.”
“Why? How could I leave you?”
“I thought you were sorry for what we had done. It’s hard to face the fact that you are out of step with the rest of the world. Society has a pretty picture of normal people and an ugly picture of us. Homosexuals are supposed to be sick or twisted or evil. When you grow up believing that, when the image is reinforced at every turn, it’s hard to wake up and realize that you’re one of the sick and evil and twisted creatures. I didn’t know how you would react.”
“I don’t know myself.”
“How do you feel?”
“Beautiful.”
“You should feel beautiful. Because you are.”
The morning had hurried by; the afternoon crawled. She kept waiting for it to be five-thirty so that Megan would come for her. Now that she was set to move in with Megan, the idea of remaining for an extra moment in her furnished room was horrible. The squalor of the room did not bother her. The room was sterile and shabby compared to Megan’s apartment, but this shabbiness had never seemed to depress her unduly. It was more that the move was a move from the old life to the new, from life alone to life with Megan.
She remembered the apartment she had shared with Tom during those years of marriage. It had been a pleasant place in a good neighborhood, expensive to rent and expensively furnished, although the decor had been generally unimaginative. And yet she had never liked that apartment. There were times when she actively loathed it, times when she was on the verge of begging Tom to move to some other place in some other area of the city.
The apartment itself had not been at fault. It was the life she led there which made her loathe the place itself. A reaction to an apartment, she thought, was an intensely personal thing. It was based less on the place itself than on the life one lived there. She had spent a bad two years with Tom; it would have been inconceivable that she could have liked the place where those two years were spent. And she had spent a lonely and wretched batch of months on Grove Street, so that room could only emerge as a symbol of loneliness.
She had spent the finest night of her life at Megan’s apartment on Cornelia Street. How could she help falling in love with the apartment, as with Megan?
Megan was there at five-thirty. They hurried through crowded streets to her rooming house and climbed the stairs and went into her room. Megan looked around the little cubicle and shook her head.
“This isn’t you,” she said.
“It was. For awhile. I was someone else before last night.”
“A bud that hadn’t opened.”