Strange Are the Ways of Love

1

Summer.

July, she thought. Summer in New York, with no shade trees or swimming holes, and the sun would be unbearably hot. The taxi turned a corner with its wheels screeching and headed south on Seventh Avenue. She glanced momentarily at the back of the driver’s head, then turned to gaze out the window, running her fingers nervously through her hair.

A rubber band held her black hair in a long pony tail, and she decided that both the rubber band and the pony tail would have to go. Maybe she would just let her hair fall free, straight down her back with the wind blowing through it.

Was there ever a breeze in New York in the summer? There had to be. New York was the same, every place was the same, in July or September or January. And outside on Seventh Avenue the people were the same, and downtown in the Village they would be the same.

And she was just another silly little girl from the Midwest, another corn-fed bit of fluff from Indiana making the famous pilgrimage to the big city.

The cab stopped for a red light. She sat up suddenly to stare out the window at the crowds on the sidewalk and sat back just as suddenly, forcing herself to relax.

Everything would be all right. But she felt wrong, somehow. Even the brown leather suitcase on the seat beside her seemed too small and too large all at once, too small to hold all the clothes she would need and too heavy for her to carry up the steps and into the apartment.

What’s wrong with me? she wondered.

I’ll find out, she answered herself. I’ll find out here, if I do nothing else, and if nothing’s wrong I can go back to Indiana, and if something is wrong, then—

Then I’ll stay here.

The cab turned right at another corner and the driver said, “You say it’s 54 Barrow? Right down the block here?”

She nodded; then, realizing that the driver couldn’t see her, she said, “Yes, that’s right.” It seemed to her that she ought to be able to say something else, something sharp or clever. But she couldn’t think of anything, so she just ran her fingers through her hair again and in a few seconds the cab pulled to a stop at the curb.

She opened the door immediately and stepped out of the cab, pulling her suitcase after her and setting it down on the sidewalk. The meter read $1.45; she gave the driver two singles and waved him away, watching the taxi move slowly down Barrow Street. Then, with a strange feeling of reluctance, she turned to look at her home.

It was disappointing. Paradoxically, it was exactly as she had anticipated and a disappointment at the same time. Her building was one of three red-brick buildings four stories tall, with an iron railing running alongside the front stoop. The red-brick front looked cold, almost shabby.

Janet Marlowe lives here, she thought. In two minutes they would be able to put up a sign in front of the building, not on the lawn because there was no lawn, and the sign could say: Janet Marlowe Lives Here. And everyone who passed by could wonder just who Janet Marlowe was, and why in hell she rated a sign.

She lifted her suitcase and walked to the door, opening it and stepping up into the vestibule. There was a row of buzzers and mailboxes, each with a card, each card with a strange name. 1-D had no card, and she made a mental note to put one in as soon as she got a chance.

Setting down the suitcase, she reached into her purse and fumbled for the key to the inner door. After a moment of panic she found it beneath a handkerchief. She turned it in the lock; magically, the door opened. Once again she picked up the suitcase and carried it into the hallway, closing the door gently behind her.

She paused in the hallway. It was very long and very narrow and incredibly drab, not as she had expected it at all. She had pictured something altogether different, wide and colorful with abstract prints hanging on the walls and some sort of oriental rug on the floor. Instead the walls were painted a nondescript gray and the brown carpet was monotonous and threadbare.

At the same time there was something satisfying about the hallway. It seemed to possess a comfortable anonymity, so that she could pass people there without saying hello if she wished. She could remain as much alone as she wanted to.

I must be crazy, she thought. It’s just a hallway, for God’s sake. I don’t have to pitch a tent here and live in it.

She carried the heavy suitcase to a door with a large gold D on it, fished around in the purse for the other key, found it quickly this time and opened the door.

As she moved through the apartment she realized how perfect it was and how much she liked it and how easy it would be to live there. There was a small bedroom in the rear with a single window facing out upon another wall, so that with the light out it was almost as dark in the daytime as it was at night. “It’s ideal,” Ruthie had written. “You can sleep whenever you like and it doesn’t make any difference.”

There was a tiny kitchen in the middle of the apartment with a two-burner gas range and a small refrigerator, and there was a large room in front facing out on Barrow Street, with a giant window Ruthie had said was quite excellent for looking out of.

The apartment was a bit extreme, which was in keeping with Ruthie’s taste. There was no rug on the bare and polished hardwood floor. Furniture was kept to a minimum. There was a bright red sofa along one wall with two equally bright blue pillows nestling on it. By the side of the window there was an unpainted wooden bookshelf loaded with paperbacks. Jan glanced through the books for a moment, wondering if Ruthie had actually read any of them, or if she bought them for show, or if they came with the place.

There were several Klee and Miró prints taped at random spots along the walls, and there was a little table loaded with more books and magazines, and a chair that looked comfortable. Ruthie’s last-minute instructions were typed on a sheet of yellow copy paper on top of the little table; Jan picked up the paper and sat down in the comfortable-looking chair. She lit a cigarette and began to read.

There was more — two paragraphs of uneven typing and disjointed prose telling her where to eat and what shows not to see and how to get places on the subway and where to buy clothes and a welter of miscellany. Jan drew deeply on her cigarette and laughed as she finished the letter. Ruthie was nuts, she thought, but very practical in her own way and very sweet and helpful, and now Ruthie was off to Mexico with some Village idiot who painted.

“I’m going to find out what it’s all about,” Ruthie had written once. And now she was in Ruthie’s apartment in New York to do the same thing.

The cigarette burned down and she stubbed it out in a large copper ashtray on the little table. She yawned, suddenly feeling very tired from the long train ride and the cab from Grand Central and all the rush and excitement. Resolutely she stood up and returned to the kitchen, lifting the suitcase and carrying it back to the bedroom and setting it down on the bed. She opened it and began unpacking things, putting some clothes in the small closet and others in the dresser. She put everything away methodically, devoting only half her mind to the task and letting the other half wander.

I am excited, she thought. I’m excited and I don’t know for certain what excites me. I’m excited over what is going to happen, but I don’t have the slightest idea what it will be.

Anything could happen.

I could die tomorrow, she thought. Or I could meet a man and marry him, or I could write a book or get a part in a play or became a heroin addict or start sleeping with an artist or get a job in a sweatshop or almost anything.

Anything could happen.

She picked up two small bottles of cologne from the suitcase and carried them into the bathroom. It was a very small room: she saw at once that she would have to take showers. She was not tall, but the tub was still too small for her.

The sink was a shiny white, stained a deep rust-brown where the water ran from the tap to the drain. She started to open the medicine cabinet over the sink to put away the cologne, pausing to look at herself in the mirror on the front of the cabinet.

Her eyes were very brown and her hair was black and her skin very smooth and clear. She ran her fingers lightly over her face, touching the lips that were red without lipstick and the cheeks that were rosy without rouge, the pointed chin, the high forehead, the hollow of her throat.

“You know,” she told the mirror image, “you’re rather pretty. Not bad at all. Nice to look at, sort of.”

She didn’t smile. She studied the image very seriously, her eyes fixed upon the eyes reflected in the mirror.

“Pretty,” she repeated.

“And you’re free and white and precisely 21, and you’re all alone in New York in Greenwich Village and you don’t know a soul, and you’re going to have an exciting summer. Because anything can happen.”

“What can happen?” asked the reflection.

“Anything. You can write a book or act in a play or get a job or take dope or live with an artist or—”

“Or what?”

Her hand tightened on the bottle of cologne.

“Or what? Tell me.”

She stared into the mirror, her eyes burning into the eyes reflected there. She couldn’t breathe.

“Say it,” the mirror image demanded. “Damn you, say it!”

“Or you can sleep with a girl,” she said.

The bottle of cologne dropped from her hand. It bounced once on the floor; miraculously, it didn’t break. For several minutes she studied the mirror image without moving. Then, finally, she stooped over and picked up the bottle and placed it in the medicine cabinet. She left the bathroom quickly, closing the door.

When everything was unpacked and put away she stretched out on the bed and lit a second cigarette. The smoke tasted good. She held it in her lungs until it made her feel a little dizzy and then blew it in a cloud toward the ceiling. There was a network of thin cracks in the ceiling and she lay on the bed hardly thinking, studying the cracks in the plaster as if they were a map.

I’m a little girl from Indiana, she thought. A little girl from a little town called Rushville, a little girl who went to Indiana University to study literature and learn French and supposedly grow up.

Indiana University.

When you told people you went to Indiana University, they thought immediately of one of two things. The football team or the Kinsey Institute. Those were the two most important things the damn place had.

Kinsey. A snoopy bastard, she thought. Snoopy, prying son-of-a-bitch. Collected sex lives on little white IBM cards like high school kids collected dirty pictures.

She had never been interviewed. She wondered idly what it would be like to tell her life story to some bland, moon-faced little interviewer. Did many of the girls lie? It might be fun to feed them a line, to make up some good stories and throw their silly survey for a fall.

Suppose they interviewed her. Suppose she told them the truth and they wrote it all down and filed it away on a white IBM card.

What would the card say?

Janet Marlowe, she thought. Nickname: Jan. Age: 21. Socio-economic background: Upper-middle class. Father: Attorney. Mother: Deceased. Siblings: None.

Marital status: Single, she went on. Premarital experience: necked twice in a parked car during high school, kissed dates properly and went all the way once. Once, she thought. The lady tried it once and she didn’t like it.

Oh, there would be plenty of fascinating information on that white card. It probably wouldn’t even get a raised eyebrow from the interviewer, but then they were supposed to be utterly shock-proof.

The typical crush on a teacher in high school. The typical unnaturally strong attachment for her dead mother. The typical overwhelming awareness of the beauty of another girl. Everything was very typical, just the way the book said it was supposed to be when people didn’t turn out the way they were supposed to at all.

All the symptoms, strong enough and pronounced enough to send her reading through books on the subject before anything even happened.

And then, of course, something had happened.

What happened was also typical. It happened during her freshman year in college when she was rooming with a tall lovely blonde girl named Anne Daugherty. Anne was also majoring in literature and interested in the same things, they became friends, they went places together, they talked. It was the first time Jan had felt truly comfortable and close with another person.

And then... then, one day—

One day Anne kissed her.

It was almost ridiculous. They were sitting on the edge of Anne’s bed, sitting and talking, and all at once Anne leaned toward her and her mouth fastened on Jan’s.

It was over almost as quickly as it had happened, with Jan wide-eyed and shocked and Anne embarrassed and furious with herself for losing control. It was over in an instant, and instantly the closeness that existed between them was also over. They hardly talked after that; Anne’s mumbled apology went unheard.

And it might not have meant anything at all. Nothing like that happened again. The two girls avoided each other, and at the end of the semester Anne went to share a room with another girl in a dormitory on the other side of the campus.

It might have meant nothing at all — except that Jan realized that she had enjoyed the kiss, that she wanted the same thing Anne did.

And that meant a good deal.

That would have to go on the IBM card too, of course. It was typical, and it surely belonged on the card with the rest.

Janet Marlowe, the card would say.

Janet Marlowe: Lesbian.

She felt funny. For the first time she had coupled them up — the word and the name — and the sensation was both good and bad. Bad because it was a label she didn’t want for herself; good because any label was belter than a question mark, ignorance was not bliss. It was hell.

Lesbian. It wasn’t such a terrible word, not so ugly as “dike” or “butch,” not so weird-sounding and sterile as “hermaphrodite” or the other pseudomedical terms. It sounded almost gentle, gentle and peaceful.

She stood up after a moment, looking at herself in the mirror on the bedroom door, a full-length mirror slightly discolored at the edges. Christ, she thought, the whole place is full of mirrors.

Quickly, mechanically, she began to remove her clothes. She unbuttoned her dress and pulled it smoothly over her head. Then she unclasped her brassiere, stepped out of her panties, and unrolled her stockings. She placed them all neatly on the chair next to the bed and stood quite naked before the mirror.

She had a good body. She didn’t need the mirror to tell her that men and boys told her with their eyes, stripping her as naked as she was now. Her body, she thought, certainly didn’t look as though it ought to belong to a Lesbian.

Her legs were long and shapely; her breasts were firm and well-formed. She dipped them gently with her hands, looking at herself in the mirror.

She liked her breasts.

I want to be touched, she thought. But I’m not sure whom I want to touch me.

And she began laughing softly.

When she flicked the switch on the wall and turned out the light the room was almost as dark as Ruthie had said, almost as if it were night. She pulled back the covers and slipped into bed. The sheets were wonderfully cool and smooth against her bare skin, the pillow soft under her head.

She closed her eyes.

Jan Marlowe, she thought. You’re a virgin once removed. You tried it once and you didn’t like it.

She opened her eyes, trying to make out the pattern of cracks in the ceiling, but it was too dark to see it. She yawned sleepily and let her eyes close again.

But at least you tried, she thought.