Lawrence Block - Warm and Willing

She said nothing.

“And always will. Because you never forget the first, darling. The first one everybody always remembers. Oh, kitten, we were so good for each other. What happened to us?”

“I don’t know.”

“People never do, do they? But this is the way a first affair should end, with you the one to break it up. Otherwise it hurts too much, kitten. Oh, come back to me. Oh, Rhoda-”

Silence. Then Megan said, “I’m sorry. Give me an hour, I’ll be out of here. Goodbye, Rhoda.”

The connection was broken. She put the phone down, reached for a cigarette, lit it. Her eyes were fixed on the small silver lighter, her name engraved so neatly upon one side. And she thought of a small gold circle pin. On the back, Forever. Below that, Your Rhoda.

Outside, snow was falling. It wasn’t sticking to the pavement yet, but she had heard a weather report earlier which had said that it would turn colder after midnight and that there would be two to four inches of snow by morning. The announcer had said something about having a white Christmas after all. But there was no way to tell, she thought. Christmas was two weeks off, and this was the first real snowfall of the season. There had been flurries now and then, but nothing more than that. There might or might not be snow for Christmas, and she didn’t particularly care one way the other.

She was sitting alone at the bar in Leonetti’s, nursing a drink, watching a cigarette burn itself out in the ashtray. The place was crowded. Most of the tables were taken, and over a dozen other girls crowded around her at the bar. She knew most of them but didn’t feel like talking, not to them or to anyone else.

She sipped her drink. It was mostly melted ice now, flat and tasteless. She looked up. The bartender was down at the other end of the bar, busy with a complicated cocktail. She stubbed out her cigarette and drained her drink. She glanced at the window again, at the falling snow outside. Bobbie would be coming soon. Bobbie would join her, and they would take a table and have few drinks together, and maybe drop over to somebody’s apartment for more drinks and some food and conversation, and then home, and then to bed.

All at once she stopped thinking and closed her eyes and listened. Leonetti’s was jammed, and she had been sitting at the bar with her thoughts turned inward and her ears turned off, the crowd noise shut out. Now she let the voices come to her, let herself be immersed in the glut of sound.

So many girls all talking at once. And, with the rush of their voices, with the strained urgency that crept into their hectic conversation, she was overwhelmed by a feeling that the whole scene was slightly pathetic, pathetic and even laughable. A bar filled with girls, a whole mob of lesbians who had nothing better to do than waste their time in a bar with others like themselves. And the bar was filled with them simply because it catered to them. The drinks were overpriced, the decor unappealing, the service nothing remarkable. But the gay girls flocked to it because they were welcome there. That alone assured the bar’s success.

Gay. She almost laughed-it was as though she were catching the deeper meaning of that merry word for the first time. So elaborately gay, so determined to maintain the appearances of joyous exhilaration. Heavy drinking, raucous laughter, wild jokes, never a dull moment. Unless you stopped to catch your breath and realized, startled, that all of the moments were slightly dull.

The bartender came and filled her glass and took her money. She did not sip this one so very slowly but knocked off half of it in one quick swallow. Gay? If they were all so gay, what were they doing at Leonetti’s? If they were all so profoundly happy, why did they fight so much? If life was such a bed of roses, why did they slash their wrists?

Gay.

She and Bobbie were gay, all right. And in love. But they were also screaming at each other half the time and sulking the rest of the time. She didn’t know why it worked out that way but it did. They still loved each other, more than ever, and it looked as though they would last-for a long time, if not forever.

But the fights were hell. Jealousy started some but not all of them, and both of them were equally capable provoking jealousy and of being moved by it. The jealousy fights, though, were at least a confirmation of love. The other fights were madness. One would want to go a party, one would want to stay home-and in minutes one would be yelling and the other crying. Or she would complain that Bobbie never did the dishes, or Bobbie would complain about Rhoda borrowing a dress without asking, or Rhoda would say something about the omnipresent Siamese cat. Anything could start things going. Any spark was dangerous when you lived in an oil refinery. Two weeks ago, she remembered, Ed Vance had come to see her again, if only to prove that his skin was as thick as his heart. “You stood me up awhile ago,” he told her, grinning. “I thought I’d give you another chance. How about it, Rhoda?”

She brushed him off quickly and brutally, telling him in very definite terms that she was not interested in seeing him, that she would never be interested in seeing him, and that she would greatly appreciate it if he would make a point of avoiding her in the future. Not even a man like Ed Vance could misinterpret her this time. He stepped back as though he had been slapped, and she caught anger and fury in his eyes. Then he forced a smile. “You’ll never know what you’re missing,” he managed, and then he got out of there.

And when she told Bobbie, the tall girl exploded in her face. She had thought they would laugh about it, about the fool Vance was making of himself, but Bobbie didn’t laugh.

“You must have led him on,” she said.

“Are you crazy?”

“You’re just trying to hurt me. Making love to me and flirting with a man at the same time. Men don’t make passes at a girl unless they think they have a chance. They leave me alone.”

“Well, maybe-”

“Maybe I’m not as attractive as you are? Is that what you were going to say?”

“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.