Community of Women

8

Dave Whitcomb took Maggie out to dinner that night.

This was not unexpected. It was a Wednesday night, and Dave always took Maggie out to dinner on Wednesday, before heading over to the weekly poker game at Len Barnes’ house. They went, as always, to The Gables, an old Cheshire Point mansion which had been converted into an Early American style restaurant. They had a pair of extra-dry martinis to start, a pair of shrimp cocktails, a pair of chef’s salads with roquefort. Maggie ordered the roast beef while Dave had a blood-rare strip sirloin. Dave talked about how the shows had gone that morning, and Maggie mentioned her visit to Elly Carr.

The dinner was not exciting. Dave and Maggie did not have an especially exciting marriage, yet it was for each the most desirable solution to their own personal problems. The Whitcombs, man and wife, were united far less by love than by an affectionate tolerance. Each was a support for the other, a help for the other.

Maggie had lied to Elly Carr. Dave Whitcomb was not sterile. He and Maggie had never had any children not because Dave had spent too much time in front of an x-ray machine but because he and Maggie had never made love. They were in their seventh year of marriage, were very happy together, and could not conceivably regard divorce as even a remote possibility. Yet they slept in separate beds, and stayed in their respective beds, and never exchanged more than a public kiss.

There was a reason for this.

Dave was a homosexual, and Maggie was a lesbian.

To look at them, of course, you could never have guessed this cheerful little fact. Dave could hardly have looked less like the popularized concept of the homosexual. He wore his hair in a mud-brown crew-cut, didn’t swish when he walked, and wore standard latter-day Ivy League clothing, maybe a shade quieter than most of his Cheshire Point friends. He never minced, never lisped, and seemed on the surface to be one-hundred per cent heterosexual.

Like the majority of American homosexuals, Dave worked very hard to keep his sex life and his business and social life as far separated as possible. His poker friends were heterosexual, his business acquaintances were also heterosexuals; as a matter of full fact, he was a homosexual with absolutely no homosexual friends. Once or twice a week, when he wanted to meet a lover, he would go to any of several homosexual bars in New York, either in Greenwich Village or around the intersection of 72nd Street and Broadway. There he would meet someone, proceed to the other man’s apartment or to a hotel room, and have sexual relations. He was always careful never to permit his lover to learn his real name or address. He was an up-and-coming man in the television industry, a rising star in the production end; public knowledge of his sexual tastes could not possibly do him any good.

Sometimes, when he had little time to fence around or when his usual haunts failed to turn up a prospect, he would go to a male prostitute. He would meet any of a number of overgrown effeminate juvenile delinquents at a cafeteria on the north side of 42nd Street at Times Square, and for anywhere from five to thirty dollars he would enjoy the young man’s favors. He didn’t like to do this. It was sordid, for one thing; for another, he risked a beating or a robbery. But there were times when he had no choice.

On the surface, Dave Whitcomb’s life was eminently normal, eminently respectable. A happily married man with a beautiful wife and a good position in a dynamic industry.

If Dave did not fit the public image of the homosexual, Maggie in turn could not have less resembled the stereotyped lesbian. Her hair was long, not butch-cut. Her dress was feminine and in perfect taste. She used quite a bit of make-up. She looked, as one male country club member had remarked to another in a wistful voice, as though she might be a joyful nymphomaniac. Every pore of Maggie seemed to ooze sex. The sex, however, was directed solely at other women.

The Whitcombs finished dinner. Dave paid the check, left a large tip, and led the way to the Buick, which was parked in The Gables’ parking lot. He put a quarter into the attendant’s hand, opened the door for Maggie, closed it, walked around the car, opened his door, got behind the wheel, fitted the key into ignition, turned key, stepped on the gas pedal, and drove off.

“Well,” he said finally. “So you’re putting on the make for little Elly Carr.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You don’t have to,” he said. “Not in so many words. Be careful as hell, Mag.”

“I’m a careful person.”

“I’m not kidding,” he went on. “All you have to do is tip your hand before she’s ready to play ball and we’ve had it. The odds are about eighty-three to one that she’ll tell all the world just how gay you are. You know what that would mean?”

“Leaving Cheshire Point, I suppose.”

“Leaving the country,” he said, “would be more like it. We’d be in a pretty little spot. I frankly wish you’d stick to New York lesbians instead of trying to make converts. There’s a maxim — Don’t crap where you eat.”

“You don’t have to worry.”

“Don’t I?”

“No,” Maggie said. “I can be very subtle, David.”

“You’ll have to be.”

“Very subtle. Elly will be the one who thinks she’s dragging me to bed, not the other way around. You want to know something? I think she’s one of those gals who’s gay without knowing it. I was cruising her gently today, giving her big eyes without being obvious about it. She didn’t figure out what I was doing, but I think I was reaching her. It shouldn’t be hard to let her wind up in bed with me.”

“Just be very careful, Mag.”

She told him again not to worry, that she would be tremendously careful. Then they were at their home, a streamlined ranch decorated in perfect modern taste by a homosexual interior decorator who managed to spend two weeks with Mag and Dave without guessing that they were gay. She stepped out of the car, stood for a moment on the sidewalk while the big Buick hardtop pulled away from the curb, then turned and headed up the walk to the front door.

The night was cool, clear. The air had a crisp edge to it and she waited for a few seconds, her key in the lock, filling her lungs with fresh air and letting herself unwind. Then she turned the key, pushed open the door and went inside.

She made herself a drink, putting one large ice cube in a highball glass and covering it with a lot of Scotch and a splash of soda. She sat down with her drink on the long low couch and thought about Elly Carr.

Elly, she thought, was not going to be anywhere near as easy as she had made her sound to Dave. You had to make sex a simple matter for David, because his own attitude toward sexual activity was, in essence, a simple one. Love never entered into his concept of the overall scheme of things, and a permanent or semi-permanent relationship with a homosexual partner was something he could not possibly desire. He was fully satisfied with hit-and-run sex, in which his partner did not know his name and the two of them were together only long enough to arrive at their desperate little orgasms.

She was not built that way. Anonymous pickups and quickie affairs were not her dish of tea, and that was all there was to it. She had tried them — she remembered all too vividly the evening when Rhonda Michaels, her love-of-the-moment, had failed to put in an appearance at the Partial Dome on Cornelia Street. So, oversexed and overtired, she had permitted a butchy type named Jo to pick her up. Jo had small breasts and broad shoulders and a deep voice, and she swore like an unhappy truckdriver. She took Maggie to a filthy apartment on the Lower East Side, filled her with rotgut wine, peeled off her clothes, played with her breasts, and spent about two hours kissing her. She had never seen Jo again. And, if she never did, that was fine.

From a purely physical standpoint, the experience with Jo had been satisfying enough. She’d been extremely excited, and she’d reached orgasm, and that much was fine. But it was sex in a vacuum, meaningless and pointless sex that made Maggie Whitcomb feel cheap and dirty inside. When you were thirsty you drank a glass of water; when you were itchy you picked up someone else who was itchy and you went to bed. That was Dave’s philosophy and Jo’s philosophy as well. It did not work for Maggie.

She needed love, or some reasonable facsimile thereof. She needed affection and understanding and a genuine emotional attachment. She needed a relationship that exceeded the bounds of the bed, a relationship that satisfied more urges than the purely pubic ones. She did not need, or want, a genuinely enduring relationship, a genuinely sincere love. She did not need or want anything that would make her want to leave Dave Whitcomb or anything that would make her live a gay life instead of the one she lived now, complete with its veneer of heterosexuality. More than one affair had ended because her partner had demanded more than Maggie had been willing to give.

She sighed. She sipped her drink, which was a little stronger than she liked it. She lighted a cigarette, smoked, put the cigarette out. She finished her drink, set the empty glass upon an end table, and stretched out on her back upon the couch. For a few minutes her eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling. Then they were closed.

She thought, again, about Elly Carr.

Elly was very lovely. That was the first thing — Elly was beautiful, and Maggie couldn’t help thinking of her in sexual terms, imagining herself cupping Elly’s girlish breasts in her own trembling hands, imagining Elly’s mouth kissing her and Elly’s hands stroking her body in return. In her mind she could taste Elly’s mouth, could sense the thrilling contact of Elly’s bare flesh against her own. Elly’s legs all tangled up with her own legs, Elly’s body pressed tight against her own, Elly, Elly Elly Elly—

She had never before attempted to seduce a woman in Cheshire Point. The arguments Dave had advanced were not ones which had not already occurred to her a thousand times, arguments which flooded into her mind every time she felt herself attracted to a woman in the exurbanite community. But this time she was not going to repress her desires. They were too strong. A lover in Greenwich Village could not dissipate her insatiable ache to get Elly on a bed.

And it was not as though she would be breaking up an ideal marriage. She was hardly the home wrecker type, and she had no intention of taking Elly away from her husband. Elly would go on being married to Ted Carr, and Maggie would seduce her and they would have their fling, and in time Elly would be back in Ted’s arms and none the worse for wear.

And Ted Carr had no right to expect fidelity from his wife. That was another point, and a pretty damned valid one. Ted Carr would and did go for anything in a skirt. He had tried, more than once, to go for Maggie. Not knowing that she was a lesbian, and firmly convinced that he was Christ’s gift to American womanhood, and strongly attracted by her breasts and hips and all-around sexuality, he had made his passes. It had been, if nothing else, a little awkward.

She had solved it neatly. She had told him, gently but firmly, that if he bothered her again with his sexual suggestions she would cut off his manhood.

This worked. He had turned a rather attractive shade of green and had stalked off, never to offer his fair white body to her again. An emasculated Ted Carr would be like an unarmed gunman or a defrocked priest, and the thought alone was enough to put him off permanently.

Ted Carr, though, was a louse.

That was the whole point. He was a louse, and he was cheating right and left on Elly, and what was sauce for the gander was undeniably sauce for the goose as well. Which was why the thought of introducing Elly Carr to the highways and byways of female homosexuality did not exactly strike Maggie as patently immoral.

Her eyes were still closed. She was thinking back now, thinking all the way back to the first time. It had been years ago, many years ago. It had happened at her high school, a fancy girls’ boarding school in New England where only girls from the better families were accepted.

And, she thought, where more subjects were offered than were listed in the school catalogue.

Her first two years had been virtually sexless. The very few dates with boys had done nothing to her virginal status. She was sixteen, in her junior year, before sex reared its lovely head in the majestic person of a girl named Lily Raines.

Lily was tall and slender, a senior girl with a shock of jet black hair and the hollowest, deepest eyes Maggie had ever seen. Maggie was working on the school yearbook, which Lily Raines edited, and they became friendly. That was the beginning.

The friendship ripened. They talked about everything, were together constantly. They discussed sex and love and life. They sipped wine behind closed doors.

And one night it went a little further than that.

They were in Lily’s room. The dark-haired girl put a stack of records on, mood music with muted horns and a few thousand violins. “Let’s dance,” she suggested. “I haven’t danced with anyone in ages.”

They danced. They had been drinking red wine and it had gone to Maggie’s head. She was a little dizzy and a little sleepy. She moved with the music, close against Lily, and something began to happen.

She felt Lily’s breasts pressing against her own breasts, felt Lily’s hands rubbing her back and shoulders. She pushed tighter against Lily, inhaling her sweet perfume, smelling her and touching her, and, all at once, needing her.

Then Lily kissed her. The room rocked, and reason fell out the window, and things began to happen in a cosmic realm away from space and time. Lily handled her breasts, coaxing the rosebud nipples into new awareness, making them swell with passion. Lily kissed the tips of those breasts, ran her tongue around each nipple in tantalizing circles.

The night was long.

And now Maggie Whitcomb was a lesbian. Now she lay on a couch in a ranch house, eyes closed, breathing shallow. She was thinking about Elly Carr. She was going to make Elly feel the way Lily had made her feel, was going to do to Elly all the wonderful and mystic things that Lily had so capably taught her.

She smiled.