Lawrence Block - Warm and Willing

The room quieted down. The dark-roots blonde and the younger girl were still kissing on the divan across way. Someone said something short to them. They separated.

“I’d like to read some poetry,” Jan Pomeroy said. “ I hope you all enjoy this.”

“Little chance of that,” Megan whispered. Rhoda felt a laugh forming and smothered it. She squeezed Megan’s hand in the darkness.

“The first poem was written by Sappho on the Isle of Lesbos,” Jan announced. Her voice had taken on a theatrical tone. “Lesbos had been renamed since then. Mytilene is its present name. And Sappho’s little colony has long since been dispersed. There are some of us who dream of returning to that little island in the Aegean, of forming a society where we can be alone with people like ourselves. Some day, perhaps that dream can be realized completely and perfectly.”

“Picture it,” Megan whispered. “All of us frolicking nude in the sun, with nary a man around. I wonder if she really believes all this.”

“It sounds that way.”

Jan stared their way and they stopped whispering. She took a deep breath, leaned over so that the two candles stood on either side of her face. Her eyes, circled with heavy make-up, looked hollower and deeper than ever in the candle light.”

She read;

Oh Chryseis

The budding beauty of your Cretan soul

Echoes from hill to hill.

Come to me.

Night is a barren notion

Fitting the heart

For love in shaded places.

Teach me of torment

In Sweet hysteria,

O Chryseis!

There was a scattering of embarrassed applause. A candle flickered briefly but did not go out. Jan Pomeroy closed her hollow eyes momentarily, lowered her head reverently. The applause died out. Jan straightened up, opened her eyes, turned a page of the book. “Thank you,” she said. “This next work is also Sappho’s. It is a somewhat longer poem, an ode to one of the young girls Sappho loved so deeply. It-”

Megan groaned.

After the little performance with Sapphic odes and candlelight, Jan Pomeroy did what she always did at her parties. She got thoroughly drunk, cried without interruption for ten full minutes, and then abruptly passed out. Two girls carried her into her bedroom and wedged her fully clothed between the bedsheets, stopping only to remove her shoes. She slept soundly. Her eye make-up looked wildly unreal on her sleeping face.

With the hostess out of the way, the party moved into gear. The mahogany pedestal was wrestled out of the way, the candles blown out and put aside, some lights left off, others switched on again. An angular girl stacked records on the hi-fi-dance music, some vocal sides, Billie Holliday, Sarah Vaughan, Anita O’Day. One or two couples drifted off homeward. Others talked intensely in little groups. A girl cried in a corner, another locked herself in the bathroom and refused to open the door. Others danced.

The dancing seemed odd at first to Rhoda. They had danced before, once or twice at the apartment, moving together slowly with the dancing serving as a prelude to the act of love. But dancing had never before been a social phenomenon. There was something disarming about it, as though the roomful of dancing girls burlesqued heterosexual dancing, as though all the dancing couples were less intent upon enjoying themselves than in proving something to the world.

The feeling died as she caught the mood of the evening. Megan held her lightly in her arms, taking the man’s part and leading her slowly and smoothly around the floor. She closed eyes, relaxing in Megan’s embrace. She had never danced much as a girl, had hardly ever gone dancing with Tom Haskell. Once, maybe twice before they were married. Afterward, never.

She danced two dances with Megan. Then the blonde girl stepped away from her. “We have to mingle,” she said. She moved aside and a young redhead with very blue eyes introduced herself to Rhoda as Sara. The music started and their bodies moved together.

But something was wrong. She didn’t understand at first, and then Sara looked up at her and said, “I’m sorry, I can’t lead. Could you lead, Rhoda?”

It felt very strange. Her feet were not entirely sure of what they were supposed to be doing, but she did the best she could, taking the redheaded girl in her arms, holding her rather stiffly, and leading her around the makeshift dance floor. The mechanics of taking the man’s part were foreign to her, and she realized suddenly that she and Megan had always taken it for granted that Megan would lead and that she would follow.

“I’m not doing very well at this,” she told Sara.

“Oh, this is fine.”

The dancing itself was asexual enough. She held the girl almost at arm’s length, as if close contact would be either dangerous or unpleasant. And yet, somewhere, there was a vague stirring, a faint sexual call to arms. She thought at one point that it came from acting the male role in the dance, as though it were a part she wanted to play. She was glad when the record ended and Sara went off to find another partner.

Megan found her and they went off to have a drink together. They finished their drinks and started to dance, but then another girl cut in halfway through a number and began dancing with Megan, and Rhoda went for another drink and came from the kitchen as the record was ending. Bobbie Kardaman took her arm and whirled her out onto the dance floor.

Bobbie led. She had rather thought that would happen.

They danced through two records that way before Megan cut in again. And, dancing with Bobbie, she felt something that went beyond the simple pleasure of dancing with another girl. Bobbie’s right hand was halfway around her waist, Bobbie’s cheek close to hers, Bobbie’s breasts pressing now and then against her own breasts. At first she told herself it was accidental, convinced herself that such sudden contact was inevitable in a room so full of people.

It was more than that and she couldn’t avoid realizing as much. There was purpose in the way Bobbie held her, design in the contact of leg with leg, of breast with breast. Bobbie wanted her.

And she couldn’t help feeling her own response.

She tried to push the feeling aside, tried to tell herself that it was crazy or wrong or both. She loved Megan and Megan loved her, and yet Bobbie was making some sort of play for her and she didn’t have the good sense to get away from the girl, couldn’t help responding to the sweet stimulus of Bobbie’s embrace. Nothing would happen, she told herself angrily. The record would end finally, and she would be with Megan again, and she and Megan would go home together and Bobbie would find some other girl and everything would work out, there would be no more of this foolishness.

The record ended. She got away from Bobbie and scanned the room looking for Megan. Megan had just asked a flat-chested mousy girl to dance. Rhoda bit her lip and hurried off to the kitchen for another drink.

Once, between dances, she was in the kitchen when two girls in their thirties stumbled in and embraced. She was embarrassed, but she couldn’t leave the room because they blocked the door. She tried not to look at them, tried not to hear them. They kissed, and one of the women ran a hand over the other’s body.

And one said, “Oh, darling, you can’t go home. You can’t, you have to stay with me.”

“God-”

“You love me. You know you love me.”

“I think Harold suspects. I’m so afraid-”

“Tell him. And leave him, darling.”

“But he’s my husband. And I love him, I do, but-”

“He doesn’t know you. He’s not right for you, darling.”

“I never should have let you love me. I should have stayed away from you.”