Perry Scope - When the loving gets rough

"No! Naturally not." Karen became aware of a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach.

Pat nodded her head slowly. She brought a finger to her mouth and chewed reflectively on the nail. "Naturally…" she repeated finally. "You used that word because you don't believe that love between two women could ever be natural, right?"

Karen frowned in confusion. "I didn't say that, Pat." She wished Pat would change the subject. She was beginning to get nervous. "There's all kinds of love between women. Mother-daughter… Between close friends…"

Pat shook her head patiently. "How about the physical, emotional, and intellectual love of two women for each other? The kind of love that women usually waste on men… Don't you believe such a feeling can exist?"

"Of course. I know about that. Only…" Karen thought of the rough-looking women she had seen in the beer-bars by the ocean. For the most part they appeared degenerate. The thought of a beautiful and meaningful love between them was remote to Karen. Then Karen thought of her own marriage. What had happened to the love between her and Al? It had been wonderful at one time – and now it was just as remote.

"Only you don't really believe it's possible," Pat finished. She tapped a cigarette out of her pack. Instead of lighting it, Pat rolled the white cylinder between her fingers. She looked very lonely and vulnerable in this pose. She sighed deliberately, thinking without guilt that she would have made a great actress. "That's what I mean. Didn't you ever have a crush on a girl when you were younger?"

"But that's not the same thing!"

Pat leaned back in her chair. She lit the mutilated cigarette before she spoke. "Isn't it?" She released the smoke slowly, watching the gray swirl rise until it was swallowed up in the misty air. "Love is love. Age is unimportant. Can you remember how you felt with this girl?"

Karen felt a tingling begin at the base of her spine. This girl made half-forgotten events float to the top of her mind. Karen found herself remembering the time during her early teens when she and Lennie had evolved a world of their own. She thought back to the moments of agony when an unkind word would cause a fight between them, and the longer periods of ecstasy when the two girls would be in perfect unison. "Well, we were very close friends." Karen bit her lip nervously. She suddenly remembered one warm spring night when she was fifteen. She was spending the night with Lennie… Their whispered chattering had centered on boys, their ominous strangeness. Karen couldn't recall which girl had turned the conversation to kissing.

"Was it so terrible?" Pat asked softly.

Karen pretended to study a large painting on the wall over Pat's head. She tried to trace this confusing conversation back to its beginning. Pat had a way of making her mind spin dizzily. There had been that crazy talk about not wanting to know Pat if… "Are… are you…" Karen recalled the word, "… gay, Pat?" Karen kept her eyes on the painting. She felt her pale skin begin to burn. A furious pounding started up in her chest.

Pat watched the glowing tip of her shrinking cigarette die out in the ashtray. When she looked up her eyes were coated with a thin layer of tears. They caught and clung to Karen's. "The only happiness I've ever know was in a woman's arms."

Karen didn't know what to say. She felt embarrassed and uncomfortable. She thought again of the obviously homosexual women she had seen. Karen could not imagine Pat fitting into the unnatural world of effeminate men and crude-looking women any better than she.

A pretty girl with long black hair got up and walked to the small stage. She shuffled some papers in her hands and then waved to Pat. Pat waved back. "That's Paula!" Pat leaned over the table. "She's a poet. She's written some fabulous poetry! Listen to her!" Pat turned her chair slightly toward the stage, then twisted back to Karen for a second. "She's gay, too."

Karen was relieved to have something to distract them. She only pretended to listen to the attractive girl on the little stage. Instead, she glanced rapidly from Paula to Pat, trying to conceive a love restricted to women. She had felt tremendously attracted to Pat from the first. And Pat was a lesbian! No wonder other girls met Pat, then fled from her when they found out.

Karen leaned back to listen to the second page of the blunt, sensual poetry Paula was reciting. But she could not concentrate. Once having decided to take Pat's admission with a degree of casualness, Karen was at a loss to explain the peculiar sensation of excitement she still felt. She imagined her-self poised on the swaying edge of a fascinatingly distorted world. She no longer felt like the lonely, frustrated young wife whom nobody understood. Now she was urgently being asked to understand someone else! Karen studied Pat's beautiful face fondly. Then a sudden vision of Pat lying nude over the body of another girl passed before Karen's eyes. Her body started shivering uncontrollably. What was she thinking? Her gaze fell to Pat's naturally-colored lips. She found herself wondering how they would feel on her own…

"The poem I've brought tonight is still untitled." Paula moved her papers again and started to read slowly.

"Days go by and she doesn't comb her hair… She stops nude in a doorway to examine herself, her brain the sudden familiar prophecy of antennaed fingers…"

Karen experienced a quick flash of anger at her husband. He had done this to her! He had allowed her to feel so unloved that the suggestion of warmth from any source, even one so far removed from normalcy, was preferable to none! She had found so much to detest in her husband's bed that Karen was unable now to imagine herself in another man's bed.

"Dead eruption in the stomach. A pulsating mouth continuously breaking, endless rows of gleaming white soldiers. Their heads like hats…"

Karen found her stomach turning slightly as she listened to the last few lines of the strange poetry the girl was reading. "… heads like hats…" she thought, remembering a time shortly after her marriage when Allen had looked down at himself proudly before coming naked to her. The little man with the hat wants in… he had said. Karen shivered.

"Freckled-faced little boys who didn't grow up and marry her. The mischievous angels of childhood, their grubby little hands under the covers at night. Now I lay me down to play…"

Karen wondered if it was a few unhappy relationships, like the one she had with Allen, which made Pat and girls like her the way they were. Did they find what they wanted with other women? Then Karen wondered if Pat found her attractive, if she wanted her. The thought was strangely disturbing.

"I pray the Lord my nucleus to keep, secure with the light on in the hallway. And Mom and Dad fornicating in front of the television set. We couldn't have known then that none of us would have a choice. Once wings of boyhood flew out of her thighs. Leaving only a narcissistic leg to put in or out of the tub."

It never really seemed to occur to Allen that he could do anything definite about her unhappiness… Karen wondered if two women together wouldn't be more sensitive to each other's needs, if the other's needs, in fact, would be their own. She looked again at the clear beauty of Pat's face and a small thrill passed through Karen's body. She had been so lonely and frigid… and now she was finding herself almost titillated by the undercurrent of sexuality emanating from the body of another woman. Karen no longer cared about the why! She was suddenly too grateful just to be feeling anything, anything at all.

"And the lonely fondling of one's own breast…" Paula looked up slowly from her papers, acknowledging the approval the room full of people showered on her with a nod of her head. She moved off the stage leaving it empty and the room too quiet until the vacuum was filled with the sudden chorus of unrelated voices.