69 Barrow Street

Chapter six

The days passed.

Times goes by everywhere, and in this case Greenwich Village is not an exception. By day the sun beat down hot and bright between the buildings and at night the buildings held the heat in close. It was summer in New York, and like every summer in New York it was thoroughly unbearable.

But Ralph didn’t find the heat too objectionable. He was settling down into what was for him a relatively comfortable routine. Every afternoon he mounted the stairs to Susan’s apartment and worked on the portrait. The work went slowly; Susan’s beauty had an elusive quality about it which was difficult to capture in oils. Every brushstroke was important and every shade lighter or darker made a tangible difference.

He left his painting supplies in Susan’s room each day when he finished his work. The partially completed canvas he covered with a white cloth, instructing the girl not to remove it to look at the painting.

“I want you to see it all at once,” he told her. “No sneak previews.”

She teased him, anxious for a look. But he was adamant.

And, as the days passed, Stella demanded less and less of his time. With Maria established permanently in a tiny room on the second floor Stella had found a ready and willing outlet for her sexual abnormalities, and the two women were together almost constantly.

More than once that week Stella had given him Maria’s key and told him to leave them alone for the evening.

Ralph was glad to be left alone. For the first time in a long time he was completely absorbed in his work, wrapped up in it so deeply that his mind was on the painting even when he was far from Susan’s room, even when he was lying in bed and ready for sleep. After only a few days with the girl he could have painted her portrait from memory, so firmly was her appearance fixed in his mind. Every shadow and line, every perfect detail of her perfect head and body was imprinted upon his memory.

But the thought of finishing the picture alone was a thought that he couldn’t take seriously for a moment. He enjoyed Susan’s company much too much to give up a second of it. For the first time in his life he found himself able to talk to a girl, to tell her all the things that were on his mind and to listen to everything she had to tell him. He talked to her about his childhood, about the small town in Ohio and the small local college, about his hitch in the army and the void that followed it.

He told her about Stella — about the cruel and twisted woman he lived with. And he told her all these things without shame or fear, knowing that she was listening sympathetically and accepting all that he told her.

For the first several days he did the bulk of the talking. She would be sitting on the chair in the pose he had selected, both feet on the floor a foot or so apart, her small hands folded over her pubic area, her back straight and her mouth unsmiling. She would sit and listen, her face never changing expression while he went over his life in detail.

Then, after a while, she began to talk. She too started with her childhood and moved on, through the years in school to the years after school. One afternoon with no show of embarrassment she explained to him that she was a lesbian. Inwardly he flinched but he made no outward show of surprise or irritation. After all, he had been almost certain of it already.

She told him about the women she had been with, about the fear of men that overwhelmed her. And even as she told him these things, even as she bared her soul and confessed her secret, something happened to him.

Something that had been happening all along. Something that he had refused to see coming, but something that he was quite unable to prevent.

He fell in love with her.

That evening he left the building as soon as he finished the day’s painting. He walked out the door without even pausing at his own apartment, and he walked west on Barrow Street toward the Hudson River.

He walked slowly.

The love he felt for Susan was something new and different, something totally out of the ordinary and totally removed from emotions he had felt in the past. It was a fresh, vibrant feeling, and it was all the more beautiful for the absolute hopelessness of it all.

Ralph had been in love before. In a way he had even been in love with Stella, although he felt less and less for her every day. But all his previous affairs had begun with a strong physical attraction that had sexual gratification as their prime objective. After that they occasionally ripened into something more, something approaching love if not love itself.

This was different.

He never laid a hand on Susan. From the moment he met her he was conscious of the striking beauty of the girl, but somehow he had never thought of her as a woman to take to bed, a woman to make a pass at. Instead she represented friendship to him — friendship in the classic sense, coupled with a deep exchange of ideas and a sharing of secrets. That in itself was a very valuable and rewarding sort of thing, and the ensuing relationship had turned out to be a wonderful one.

But now—

Now he was in love with her.

What did it mean? How in the world could he be in love with a girl whom he would never be able to make love to? He not only could never marry her, but he could never take her in his arms, never kiss her or touch her. What kind of love was this?

He kept walking, laughing bitterly to himself. It was a typical Ralph Lambert play, he decided. Only a guy like him could do a scatterbrained, useless thing like this. Only a guy like him could fall in love with a lesbian and get all hung up about it.

What in the world would happen? She hadn’t had any lovers since she had moved to Barrow Street, but he knew that in time she would have to. Then what would he do? Maybe he’d be jealous of the other girl. That would be one for the books, wouldn’t it? Ralph Lambert jealous of a dyke. Pretty funny, huh? Yeah. A riot.

Fantasies flooded his mind, fantasies of possible courses of action. He knew that she had never been with a man, and he guessed that her traumatic fear might stem as much from ignorance of sex as anything else. He remembered reading that blind, ignorant fear was a prime cause of what one author termed “the homosexual neurosis” — that a person who was afraid of sex was less likely to fear someone of the same sex than someone of the opposite sex. To Susan another woman might represent the Known, something she was familiar with because it was similar to herself. A man, on the other hand, was the Unknown — and she had to fear him more because the Unknown was so much more terrifying.

He fancied himself for a moment as a knight on a white charger coming to rescue her from her homosexuality by showing her that she had nothing to be afraid of. Then the barriers would break down one by one until she came to him and he held her in his arms, held that sweet and beautiful body that he had studied so carefully and reproduced so faithfully.

Then—

Suddenly the hilarious impossibility of the situation struck him full force and a hysterical laugh shrieked forth from his lips. He stood on the sidewalk, unable to stop laughing, and was forced to grab onto a lamppost for support. Other people on the street stared at him as he laughed and laughed over something that was not funny at all.

Finally he caught his breath and started walking again. He walked all over the west side of the Village, looking for something but not knowing what it was that he was looking for. He kept walking until he found the bar.

It wasn’t much. It was a run-down longshoreman’s bar down by the docks where the liquor was cheap and the air foul-smelling. A jukebox in one corner blared forth with raucous rock-and-roll. A tired prostitute sat at a table in the back, a professional smile on her once-attractive face. A row of tired-looking, husky men drank shots with beer chasers at the long brown bar.

It was a place to drink. That was all he wanted, a place where he could be alone by himself without being entirely alone, a place where he could sit and drink with nobody bothering him.

A place that had neither Stella nor Susan around, a place where the only woman present was a cheap waterfront whore.

He walked into the bar. One stool was vacant and he sat down on it. He ordered a shot of the bar whiskey and a glass of draft beer for a chaser.

The shot was a quarter and the beer was a dime. It was about as cheap as you could get any place in the city.

When he had finished pouring the shot down his throat he knew why it only cost two bits. It was rotgut — cheap moonshine brought in from Kentucky and sold with ease because the cop on the beat knew who was paying him. A steady diet of it would raise hell with the lining of a man’s stomach, but it was cheap and it would get a person stoned out of his head as quickly as the stuff that went for six bucks a fifth.

He sipped the beer. It was a little watery but not too bad. He finished it and motioned for the bartender.

This time he ordered a double.

Stella dressed quickly after she finished her shower. Maria had already returned to her room on the second floor, and for some reason Stella felt empty and unfulfilled. She wasn’t sure why, but for one reason or another her evening with the little brunette had left her less satisfied than before.

Why? The girl was cooperative enough. Their little game of the bad little girl being punished by her angry mother had gone along nicely for some time now, and each time the punishments themselves had been more extreme and consequently more exciting to Stella. At one time or other she had struck every surface of Maria’s shapely body with harsh blows until the little girl was black and blue all over. She had devised many different exotic methods for causing Maria to sob and quiver with pain, each method more stimulating to both of them than the last.

Maria never called her by name any more. She referred to her always as Mummy and demanded punishment constantly. Idly Stella wondered what event deep in Maria’s childhood had brought on this unnatural craving for punishment and pain. What had the girl done?

It didn’t matter. What mattered right now, Stella decided, was finding some way to calm herself down. Whatever the reason, Maria had been unable to still her hunger and she felt a desperate need for something more, something that would enable her to relax. Mentally she went over the men and women that she could call up for an evening’s diversion.

There were none she could think of that interested her in the least.

Where was Ralph? She had been seeing less and less of him lately, but what was even more aggravating was the fact that he seemed to be slipping away from her. She needed Ralph. She needed someone permanent, someone she could hold onto.

Was there something between him and the little dyke who was posing for him? It didn’t seem likely. If any girl had impressed her as an obvious lesbian, Susan Rivers had. But Ralph was obviously interested in the girl — and he was spending plenty of time with her.

Christ, maybe she had hit the nail on the head that time when the two of them had breakfast together! Suppose Ralph had fallen for the girl. It was just the sort of bonehead maneuver the guy was capable of, and with her posing for him every day it was more than possible.

If that was the case—

She smiled, her lips curling into a vicious grin. If that was the case her own course of action was clear. She could utterly crush Ralph and enjoy herself at the same time. It would all be quite perfect.

She left the apartment and closed the door behind her. Then, very deliberately she climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. She found Susan Rivers’ door and knocked gently on it.

She waited impatiently, shifting her weight from foot to foot until the door opened.

Susan was standing there. She was dressed in a blue kimono. Her feet were bare.

Stella let her eyes run impudently from Susan’s face all the way to her bare feet and back again. Then a smile appeared on her face.

“My name is Stella James,” she said slowly. “Could I come inside for a minute?”

Ralph’s fingers closed around the shot glass. He tried to remember how many drinks he had had so far but couldn’t. Then he tried to remember how many drinks he had poured down his throat since he stopped bothering with beer chasers.

He couldn’t remember that either.

He stared into the liquor. A face swam on top of the liquor. The face had short dark brown hair and no make-up. The face was not smiling. The face was also very beautiful.

The face looked familiar. It was, of course, the face of Susan Rivers. And a very lovely face it was.

He drained the glass and set it down gently on the top of the bar. The face was gone.

The liquor hadn’t burned his throat on the way down. That was one of the good things about a drinking bout — after a few drinks the bilge didn’t taste vile anymore. As a matter of fact it didn’t have any taste whatsoever. It just worked its way down his throat and into his stomach, and the alcohol seeped into his stomach and nothing seemed to matter as much as it did when he was sober.

There was, he reflected, very little point in being sober. When you were sober you could see things quite clearly, much too clearly for your own good. And there was very little point in seeing things clearly. No point, actually. No point at all, not when your name was Ralph Lambert and you lived with a bitch named Stella and loved a lesbian named Susan Rivers. No point at all.

The bartender, whose name happened to be Charlie, came over and looked at Ralph with a puzzled expression on his flat face.

“Ya wanna nudder?” Charlie demanded.

“Ah,” Ralph said. “Hello, Charlie.”

“Hello.”

“You don’t mind if I call you Charlie, do you?”

“It’s my name.”

“Some people might mind.”

“Live a little,” Charlie suggested. “Call me anything you damn please.”

“In that case I’ll have another.”

“Another double?”

Ralph nodded drunkenly.

“You drink like a goddamn fish,” Charlie said.

“That’s nothing. I swim like an alcoholic.”

“Huh?”

“I drink like a fish and swim like a drunk.”

“Oh,” said Charlie. “I get it. Better it should be the other way around.”

Ralph nodded.

“You do this often? Not that it’s any of my business. I just wondered.”

“Only when I fall in love with a lesbian.”

“Huh?”

“A lesbian,” Ralph explained, waving one hand at no one in particular. “I fell in love with a lesbian.”

“That’s a female fairy?”

“Precisely.”

“Jeez,” Charlie said. “And you’re really in love with the broad?”

“Precisely.”

“Ain’t it a bitch. What are you gonna do?”

“I’m going to have another drink.”

“That sounds like a wise move,” Charlie said. “I mean what the hell else can you do?”

“Precisely.”

“Jeez,” Charlie repeated. “A lesbian.”

Ralph nodded.

“She good-looking?”

“She’s the most beautiful woman in the world.”

“You getting anything?”

“Not a thing.”

Charlie poured a double shot of the bar whiskey and pushed it across to Ralph. “Live a little,” he said. “This one’s on the house. This don’t happen every day.”

Ralph gulped the drink. “I should hope not,” he said. “It would kill me.”

Susan sat alone in her room. Stella had just left, a haunting smile on her lips and a provocative swing to her hips as she walked out of the room.

Susan was afraid again.

She stood up and began pacing the floor, up and down, back and forth. Her breath came in quick, short gasps. She walked from the living room to the bathroom to the kitchen, looking vaguely for something but unsure what it was that she was looking for.

Fear.

It seemed as though she was going to live her entire life immersed in a sea of fear. There was no getting away from it. There was nothing she could do, no way out that was open to her.

She had been afraid of Stella from the first time they met on the stoop. That was bad enough, but with the passage of time her fear had begun to fade away. Even Ralph’s descriptions of Stella, his explanation of the type of woman she was — even this had not truly shaken her.

But one conversation with Stella James had her shaking. She could hardly think straight anymore.

The funny thing was that Stella hadn’t actually done anything. She simply came in and sat down and started an extremely innocent conversation about how she had seen Susan from time to time and how she wanted to meet her. That was all.

It was what went unsaid that set the girl on edge. Stella made it obvious that she was ready and willing to play, that she was more than game for a hot little dose of lesbian love. She didn’t have to say anything to get her point across. It was obvious in every act, every word, every gesture and every glance.

No, it was more than that. It would be bad enough if she was merely offering herself. Then Susan would still have the prerogative of refusing the offer, and while that would be difficult it would be her choice, her right to choose between sex and solitude. But instead Stella was saying I’m going to have you and you can’t stop me.

And this was very frightening. More than frightening.

Terrifying.

Because she didn’t want sex with Stella. Well, she had to admit to herself that this wasn’t entirely true. In one way, a purely physical way, she wanted sex with Stella desperately. She had been alone for too long and her body was beginning to crave a woman’s hands on it, her mouth to hunger for a woman’s lips pressing against them. But this was a physical hunger and nothing more.

Both intellectually and emotionally she wanted only to be left alone. While the idea of a woman making love to her was less repelling by far than that of a man doing the same things, she knew that it was necessary for her to live a celibate life for the time being, if only so that she could get her bearings and determine precisely what course she was going to follow in the future. This was a hard thing to do, but it was a vital thing also.

Ralph was good for her. He was never on the make, never hungry or grasping. And he was always there, always ready to talk or to listen to her, always sharing a part of himself with her. There was absolutely nothing she wouldn’t be willing to tell him, no secret she wouldn’t reveal to him. He seemed to understand virtually everything, or at least to accept whatever he didn’t understand.

She wasn’t afraid of Ralph. And because she could be with him and open herself up to him she was beginning to relax, beginning to calm down a little inside. She could even feel that her life was becoming somehow healthier and more meaningful.

And then Stella had to walk into her life.

Well, right now there was nothing she could do. She had to wait for things to straighten themselves out in whatever fashion they chose. Tomorrow she could tell Ralph what had happened. Tomorrow everything would be easier because she would have someone to confide in.

Why, Ralph was almost like a psychotherapist for her! He made her feel so much better. Now, if only Stella would leave her alone…

Resolutely she shook her head and walked to the side of her bed. She slipped out of the blue kimono and crawled into bed. She lay on her back for a long time, her eyes staring blankly at the ceiling.

She couldn’t stop thinking of Stella.

And, inevitably, her own hands began their gentle course, stroking her breasts and then her stomach, moving downward to her very private and secret place. She touched herself and thought of Stella as she had done before, stroking herself and whispering to herself, thinking of strange and obscene delights.

Just as she had done before.

Only this time she was ashamed of herself.

Ralph floated home.

That wasn’t exactly how it happened, but that’s how it seemed at the time. He bid Charlie a cheerful goodbye and floated out of the bar. Then he floated into the taxi that Charlie had insisted upon calling for home. Then the taxi floated around for a while until it came to rest in front of 69 Barrow Street. He paid the driver, tipped him two dollars, and floated up the walk to the stoop.

The driver, who hadn’t had a two-dollar tip since V-J day, stared long and thoughtfully after Ralph. Then, shaking his head and smiling gently to himself, he started the cab up again and drove off.

Ralph had an enormous amount of difficulty fitting the key into the lock. He managed it, however, and when the door opened he felt enormously proud of himself. Then he floated down the hallway to his apartment and played games again, trying to get the other key in the lock.

He managed that also and opened the door, feeling more proud of himself than ever. He floated into the room.

Stella was in the bedroom. Surprisingly enough she was alone.

“Hello,” he said. “Do you mind if I call you Charlie?”

She just looked at him.

He sat down on the edge of the bed. “Oh,” he said. “I thought you were a bartender.”

He stood up again and got undressed and ready for bed. Then he sat down again on the edge of the bed and smiled drunkenly at Stella.

Stella said: “I’m going to sleep with your girlfriend.”

He shook his head. He figured he must be hearing things, so he waited for her to go on.

“I went up to see her tonight,” Stella said. “We had a pleasant chat. She’s quite lovely.”

“No,” he said. He wanted to say more but he couldn’t remember just what it was that he wanted to say.

“Yes, Ralph. What’s the matter?”

“Don’t.”

“Why not?” Her smile taunted him.

“Just don’t.”

“But you’ll have to tell me why not. I can’t just accept things on your say-so.”

“Because she doesn’t want you.”

“Are you sure?”

He stared at her.

“Don’t be too sure,” Stella was saying. “Don’t be too certain about anything.”

“Leave her alone.”

“Why?”

He was silent.

“Are you in love with her, Ralph?”

He turned away from her.

“Are you?”

He didn’t answer.

“Tell me, Ralph.”

“Yes,” he said, finally. “I’m in love with her.”

“In that case,” Stella said, “I’ll be sure to let you watch.” And she began to laugh hysterically.

He turned to her again. Something flared in him all at once and he couldn’t hold back the hate and fury that had been building within him. He grabbed her by one arm and hauled her out of bed, sinking one fist into her stomach.

She folded up like an accordion. Then she began to laugh again through clenched teeth.

“Damn you!” he exploded. He hit her again and again, ringing blows with his open hand that landed on her face and breasts.

But he couldn’t still her laughter.

Then, at last, he made love to her. Making love is perhaps the wrong term; what he made was hate. He took her with fury burning through his bloodstream, forcing her back down on the bed and pummeling her with his fists, then taking her cruelly and viciously, hurting her as much as he possibly could.

As soon as he had finished with her he rolled away from her and his head swam. He closed his eyes.

Then, mercifully, the liquor and sex combined and he was unconscious.