“I’m open now.” She felt giddy, ready to break out into foolish laughter. She danced into the middle of the room and threw her arms wide apart. “I’m a flower,” she said. “See my pretty petals? I’m a flower in full bloom.”
“You’re a little idiot whom I love.”
“So kiss me. Be a bee and steal my precious nectar.”
“I think you’re a little bit crazy.”
“Is that bad?”
“Not very.”
“I feel so young,” she said. She got a suitcase from the closet, opened it on the bed and began throwing things into it. “I’m twenty-four and I feel about seventeen. How old are you, Megan?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Just a year older than me. You know so much more.”
“Clean living.”
“You make me feel like a child, sometimes. Have you slept with very many girls?”
“You’re the only one.”
“Seriously. Have you?”
A pause. “Not so many.”
“Is that something I shouldn’t ask? I’m sorry. I just want to know everything about you, that’s all. Were you ever with a man?”
“Yes.”
“You weren’t married or anything?”
“Hardly.” A long sigh. “I was young, very young, and in college, and there was another girl, and we made love. I was too young to know what I was doing, I guess. And then I was very scared. You know how it is at that age. The most important thing on earth is to be like everybody else, and here I was so obviously different from everybody else. I couldn’t let myself believe that I was really different. I managed to convince myself that it was a question of adjustment. That I could be perfectly normal if I tried hard enough.”
“Heavens.”
“Uh-huh. Oh, I tried, all right. I very nearly got pregnant in the process. I tried with half a dozen different men, tried my damnedest to feet something more profound than boredom and disgust while they grunted over me.”
“And it didn’t work.”
“Of course not. It took a while for me to understand what I am, and to accept it. It may be hard for you.”
“It isn’t now.”
“But it may be.”
There were three suitcases and an armful of coats and dresses. They carried everything downstairs and Megan hailed a cab. They rode to her building. Rhoda paid the driver and they carried the suitcases and loose clothes inside and upstairs to Megan’s apartment. Their apartment now. The Apartment of Megan Hollis and Rhoda Moore.
She took half the closet and one of the two dressers in the bedroom. She hung her toothbrush in the holder in the bathroom, put one of her towels over a towel bar. She came out. Megan was holding two glasses of red wine. She took one and they touched glasses.
“Hello, roommate,” Megan said.
“Hello, lover.”
They drank deeply.
Megan did not refill the glasses.
They turned and looked at each other, and Rhoda felt passion flow through her flesh like an electric current. From that moment on neither of them spoke. Words would have been in the way.
They walked to the bedroom, bodies brushing lightly together as they walked. They left the lights on, undressed quickly and efficiently, and they turned to look at one another, and passion caught Rhoda by the throat and shook her. She looked at Megan, at Megan’s body, and she thought that she had never seen anything beautiful or so desirable. She moved toward the blonde girl, her hands outstretched, groping. Megan stood still, waiting. Rhoda’s hands fastened on Megan’s shoulders, moved down over her bare arms, slipped over silken skin to embrace Megan’s full and beautiful breasts.
They sank together to the bed, wordless, breathless. Their mouths met in a kiss, and their tongues tangled and the world went black and white and black and white. They kissed, and their bodies were drawn sharply together, breasts against breasts, belly against belly thighs urgently drawn against thighs, loins speaking love to loins.
Rhoda was caught up in it all, unable to think of anything, unable to do anything at all but surrender herself entirely to the waves of desire that dominated her. She moved on the bed, aching to embrace the totality that was Megan, mad to touch everything, to kiss everything, to give pleasure and get pleasure until the world sank under the sea. Her lips found Megan’s breasts and teased them into a turbulence of love. Her hands stroked the sheer silk that was Megan’s hips and thighs. Her fingertips were alive with the shimmering glory of Megan’s secret beauties.
Her hands were fierce with Megan’s breasts. Her mouth was busy, planting a trail of burning kisses along a perfectly formed leg.
Pleasure screamed in the night. The bed rocked urgently. The peak of passion was sharply etched, clear and beautiful, and sleep came fast on its heels.
CHAPTER FIVE
The weekend had the quality of a dream. Time was suspended, thoughts were never pressing. Sometimes they strolled together through Village streets, walking easily side by side. And no one could tell a thing by looking at them, Rhoda thought. They walked together like two friends, and nobody could guess that they were so much more than that.
The walks were an education in themselves. She had lived in the Village for several months, had walked back and forth over these streets, but when she went walking with Megan she felt as though she had done that walking with her eyes closed, or wearing blinders. There was so very much she had simply failed to notice.
The men and boys who loitered by the western rim of Washington Square at twilight. “Gay boys,” Megan told her. “Male prostitutes, mostly. Young ones who sell themselves to older men, for a meal or for money. They tend to have a more cavalier attitude toward sex than we do, kitten. They’ll go for hit-and-run love or even buy it on the market place. Pickups in filthy men’s rooms-that sort of thing. You rarely find girls like that. We tend to be more long-term in our love affairs, we sensitive lesbians.”
A small dark coffeehouse on Sullivan Street. “No one ever goes there, Rhoda. Not for coffee or companionship. I understand they sell mescaline there. It makes you hear sounds and see colors, it creates psychotic hallucinations. It’s not strictly illegal, like narcotics, but it’s only handled on the black market. I’ve heard they sell marijuana there, too, but I’m not sure of it.”
A subterranean bar on Barrow. “One of ours, honey. A dyke joint. That’s one of the more compelling names for girls like thee and me, you know. Dykes, lessies, butches, lady-lovers-they call us the nicest things. This place is more refined than most. No dancing and not too much in the way of a butchy element. A lot of the uptown career girls come down here, and it’s all right for a quiet drink. Places like The Shadows on Macdougal are so cruisy that you have to be very hard-up or very scummy yourself in order to tolerate them, but this place isn’t bad at all.”
A girl passing by. “Did you see the way she looked at us? I’ve seen her around but I guess she doesn’t know me. She was trying to decide about us, whether or not we’re gay. You didn’t notice, did you? Gay girls can’t afford to be obvious. Just a glance, a stare held a moment too long, subtle signs like that. Like passwords.”
There was a whole world in the Village she had never known, a furtive homosexual underground with its special places and its own recognition signs, and she was becoming a part of it without ever having been aware of it. A men’s shop that catered exclusively to male homosexuals, a beauty shop where a crowd of gay girls got their hair done, gay bars, a gay coffeehouse, a gay restaurant. These weren’t necessarily meeting-places, Megan told her. They were refuges as much as anything. When you were more or less obvious about your homosexuality-a short-haired butchy bull dyke, a mincing queen-you ran into trouble even in the Village. You wanted a place reserved for your own kind.
And even if you weren’t obvious, you needed the relaxation of gay society. “I know a gay man who works at Manning and Roblin,” Megan had told her. “A public relations outfit, and a good one. He comes on completely straight up there, lives a masquerade five days a week from nine to five. When he’s done with work he wants to unwind. He doesn’t mince and he doesn’t wear lipstick, but he likes to go to a place where he doesn’t have to pretend to be something he’s not.”