Strange Are the Ways of Love

3

She woke up suddenly, coming out of a dream, but by the time she had pushed back the covers and sat up in bed, she could not remember what the dream had been about.

It was dark, darker than when she had gone to sleep. She stood up, savoring the feel of the cool air on her bare skin, and before switching on the light she took several deep breaths at the open window and rubbed the sleep from her eyes.

She put on her watch before anything else. It was ten-thirty. Then she dressed rapidly in a cool green blouse and black skirt.

She was hungry, and a little sleepy because of the lack of a transitional period between sleeping and waking. Outside, the moon was full and there was a light breeze scattering the pages of a discarded copy of the New York Post along the Barrow Street gutter. A few people were walking by, some in a great hurry and others very slowly, almost aimlessly.

She found the diner Ruthie had mentioned around the corner on Seventh Avenue. When she had finished her cheeseburger and swallowed half her coffee, she took a cigarette from her purse and lit it. I like this, she thought, blowing the smoke at the ceiling. I like this place. And I like getting up at 10:30 at night and getting dressed and going out.

She looked around at the people. They were a strange crowd — high school kids and truck drivers and old women and serious-looking girls with too much eye make-up and tired-looking Negroes with a vacant stare in their eyes. So many people, and no one that she knew.

She wasn’t used to this. She was used to knowing people, even if she didn’t speak to them, even if she knew no more about them than their names. She was used to familiar faces, and all of the faces in the diner were strange ones.

Part of her liked it. She could be alone, she could have as much privacy as she wanted, she could live by herself and for herself.

But I may be lonely, she thought. I may be very lonely.

She stubbed out her cigarette and finished her coffee. It was cold by this time, but she drained the cup anyway and paid her check, leaving a dime for the counterman. People tipped for counter service in New York, she knew, and that was another small thing that was different. Everything seemed to be different.

Back on the street she looked at everything. She walked north on Seventh Avenue to Sheridan Square, passing a theater and bookstores and restaurants and bars and a small nightclub. The whole city had a beat, a pulsing rhythm to it, and she was in time with the rhythm. She could hear it in all the noises and she could feel it in the air.

At Sheridan Square she turned east and continued along Fourth Street. The Village looked more and more the way she had guessed it would look from the books and articles she had read about it. There was a cellar bar cluttered with beer-drinkers, a coffee house with operatic arias on the jukebox.

And all over were the people. There were people and more people, people being moved along by a policeman, people entering and leaving the coffee house and the bar and all the little shops.

“Don’t buy clothes in the Village shops,” Ruthie had warned. “The prices are half for the clothes and half for the labels.”

Dear Ruthie, she thought. Dear Ruthie, who doesn’t really know me from third base, but who has a mad, wonderful apartment that will be mine for the whole damn summer.

She smiled and kept on walking.

The streets had names instead of numbers, and she decided that this was better and much more interesting. She passed Jones Street and Cornelia Street, crossed Sixth Avenue and walked for one more block, until she came to a sign that said Macdougal Street.

I am here, she thought.

She was at the center of the Village, if the Village really had a center. She looked at Washington Square Park, a block of grass and trees that didn’t seem to belong in New York at all, with benches by the hundred and stone tables where old men played chess. There were pigeons strutting and bums sitting on the benches and people walking all around, back and forth.

Washington Square. She saw the NYU dorms across the way, and the Circle at the foot of Fifth Avenue where the folksingers gathered on Sundays, and she was seeing it for the first time but she felt almost as though she were returning to it. It was all new; at the same time it was all very familiar.

She started to walk through the park, then changed her mind. Instead she turned south on Macdougal, the street Ruthie called “the Village’s most Village-y street.”

She saw at once what Ruthie meant. Macdougal Street was a commercial enterprise and it didn’t attempt to conceal the fact. It was evident in the little shops that tried to attract by their novelty, in the way that every store front was groomed to draw in the passer-by and the tourist. It was artificial and unreal; it was also quite likable.

Macdougal Street looked alive. It was joyously, vibrantly phony, as though claiming that everything could and did happen there, and she liked it. She walked up and down the street, hardly conscious of the fact that she was walking, looking at everything, staring into the windows of the little shops with the jewelry that was too “modern” and the dresses that were too extreme and the decor which would look ridiculous anywhere else, but which somehow seemed to belong here.

She passed all the stores and bars and coffee houses, and the stores selling musical instruments and the stores selling books and records, and the men with beards and bare feet and the men who minced and glided by, and everywhere the tourists, men and women from somewhere else who walked arm in arm and stared at everything.

Finally she entered one of the coffee shops, wondering vaguely how she had managed to select it from all the others. It was called Renascence, for some reason which escaped her completely, and it seemed a good deal more relaxed and natural than the other coffee houses on the block. The men and women at the tables looked and acted as though they all came to the place several times a week; while they were not dressed strangely in any way, they were obviously Villagers and they were obviously at ease in the cavernous candle-lit room.

There was a piece of doggerel in the window by a man who had been hailed as a great poet in the 20’s and had drunk in the 30’s and 40’s and was finally murdered in the 50’s by his wife’s lover. There were four muddy oil paintings on the wall. Heavy oak tables and benches and chairs made dark islands on the cold cement floor.

When she walked inside everyone looked up for a moment. Then, not recognizing her, they ignored her and returned to their chess games or cards. There was a bridge game in progress at the front table and several pairs of men were playing gin rummy.

Jan heard music coming from the back room behind the small kitchen. She walked in the direction of the music, finding a very small room containing one huge table surrounded by benches. Feeling a little like an intruder, she took a seat on one of the benches and sat without moving, listening to the music.

A tall, rangy boy with light brown hair that fell into his eyes was sitting with his back against the wall and one foot up on the bench. He was strumming a guitar, playing sad and driving blues chords and humming along with the music. There was a girl sitting next to him, and Jan thought that she might be pretty if she wore a little lipstick and less eye make-up. There were two others, another boy and girl, but Jan hardly noticed them.

The boy stopped playing the guitar and took a sip of his coffee. “Mike,” the other boy suggested, “play Danville Girl.”

The boy called Mike nodded shortly, took another sip of coffee and set the cup down on the table. He played softly and slowly, and when he sang his voice was husky and sad, almost mournful. Jan had never heard the song before.

He was looking down at the guitar, completely absorbed in the chords he was playing and the song he was singing. He sang it very well. She could feel the strength of his voice and the rhythm of his guitar matching the pulse beat of the city, rising and falling as his foot tapped the bench in time to the music.

The girl’s eyes were on him all the while.

He raised his head slightly and his eyes caught hers. She glanced away nervously but she could see him out of the corner of her eye, still looking at her, probing her with his eyes. He seemed to be singing to her and for her, as if she were the only other person in the room.

Stop it, she thought, angrily. Stop staring at me like that, damn you.

He was good-looking. He shouldn’t have been, for his features by themselves were not good at all. His nose was too long, and when his lips turned in a smile the smile was crooked. And there was a haggard look in his eyes, as though he had stayed up too late for too many nights and eaten too little and smoked too much. But the whole was greater than the sum of its parts — he was definitely attractive.

She was afraid. For a moment she started to think what it might be like with him, almost hoping, almost planning, and then she shook her head resolutely and banished the thought from her mind.

The song was over. For several seconds no one said anything, and then the other boy said, “That was good.”

“Thanks.”

“Damned good,” the other boy said. “When you cut a side, include that one.”

Mike’s eyebrows went up. “When I cut a side,” he said, “we’ll all be over ninety.”

“But you’re good enough to record.”

“Sure,” he said. “You’re my best fan. Almost my only fan, and unfortunately you don’t own a record company. Sad, but true.”

“I’m not kidding, Mike. You ought to be able to set up an audition.”

Mike shrugged and finished his coffee, making a face because it was cold, but drinking it anyway. He put the cup down on the table, struck a tentative chord on the guitar and looked up abruptly at Jan as if he were seeing her for the first time.

“What’s your name?”

“Janet Marlowe.” She answered automatically.

“I’m Mike Hawkins. And this—” indicating the girl — “is Saundra Kane. And these people are Sue and Bob Dallman.”

She nodded.

“You live around here?”

“Yes. I just moved in this morning.”

As soon as she had spoken she regretted volunteering the information. She didn’t want to get involved in any conversation, not with him. It was too dangerous. She should have just mumbled something and left.

But it was too late now.

“Like it here?”

She nodded.

He tossed his head back sharply so that his hair fell back into place. “Anything special you want to hear?”

“No,” she said, nervously, awkwardly. “I have to go now.”

She stood up, stepped back from the table, and smiled at the four of them.

“Wait a minute—”

She didn’t answer, turning instead and walking from the back room through the kitchen and the front room and out the door. All the way out she felt his eyes on her, following her, burning into the back of her skirt and blouse.

She was afraid of him.

And she knew she would see him again.

She wanted a drink, wanted one badly, wanted to hold a drink in her hand and sip it and think and try to figure things out. She wanted to drink in a bar, but first she had to select a bar.

She walked up and down Macdougal Street again, but this time she didn’t notice the stores or the coffee shops. She looked at the bars, trying to place each one mentally and pick the right one, the bar where the drink would taste good and where no one would bother her. She stopped to examine each bar and rejected each in turn for one reason or another.

She paused in front of a bar called The Shadows, a bar with a porch in front of it and a loud jukebox blaring in the rear. Something seemed particularly appropriate about this bar, and she wanted to analyze her reaction before going inside. What made it different? She sensed something, but she couldn’t pin-point it.

A couple emerged from The Shadows. The girl was a fragile blonde in a print dress; the man wore tight black slacks and walked with his shoulders thrown back almost pugnaciously. Jan watched them walk out of the door and down the steps and saw them pass her and continue on down the street.

And suddenly she knew why this place was different.

Because the man was not a man, but a woman, and the two girls were obviously lovers. The Shadows was a Lesbian hangout, a gay bar.

Now you know, she thought. That’s why it appeals to you. You should go home, but you won’t. You should pack up and get the hell back to Indiana and enter a convent, but you won’t do that either.

Quickly, almost desperately, she walked up the steps and into the bar. She realized at the doorway that she didn’t want to go in, that she had no desire whatsoever to enter, but she couldn’t retrace her steps.

Two sailors at the bar were the only men in the place. Girls, feminine and masculine in appearance, sat on stools at the long dark bar or drank at tables in small groups. She walked in and sat down at an empty table near the front, ordering Scotch-and-water and sipping it slowly when the waitress brought it to her.

She didn’t want to look around, but she did. She was afraid she would catch someone’s eye without wanting to, or that she would gape at the girls like a tourist. But the fascination of the room was too much for her; she couldn’t keep from scanning the bar and tables, running her eyes over the girls.

She didn’t like the butches. She heard them talk in their deep voices and watched them dance and snap their fingers to the jukebox, and she knew that they would never attract her. They looked hard and tough and coarse, and totally unappealing.

But the other girls did excite her. It was not a physical attraction so much as the knowledge of what they were and the vague feeling of kinship coupled with the awful fascination of fear that made them attractive.

On the jukebox Dinah Washington was singing So Long. The music was slow and sad, and Jan unconsciously compared it with Mike’s Danville Girl.

She looked at them all, the girls who could pass for men and the girls who could pass for girls, and she began to think, But I don’t want any of them. I really don’t. Maybe’

Then she saw the girl and a shiver went through her.

She was beautiful. She was tall with silky red-brown hair that fell to her shoulders and framed her face. There was a deep, haunting sadness in her eyes and a constrained beauty in her face that Jan knew could only accompany unhappiness. She sat at a table near the dance floor and the table obscured most of her body, but Jan was able to see that it was a good one, slender but with full curves.

She was attractive.

Attractive to Jan.

No, she thought. No, it can’t happen. It’s no good and I don’t want it to happen and I won’t let it happen. I don’t want to think about her.

She took another sip of her Scotch-and-water and turned away from the girl, but she could not think of anything else. When she closed her eyes the image of the girl’s face remained fixed in her mind.

She began to imagine the two of them together, imagined the girl kissing her and holding her, loving her, and she pictured herself holding that slender, graceful body in her own arms and doing those things, things that she was afraid of and didn’t want to do or even to know about.

I want her, she thought. Damn it, I want her and I can’t help it.

The girl looked up and her eyes caught Jan’s. Jan turned away quickly, guiltily, finishing her drink and setting the empty glass down on the table.

One of the two other girls at the table stood up suddenly, and walked to Jan’s table. Jan sensed her approach but didn’t look up until there could be no mistake, until the girl was standing just a few feet from her, looking down at her. Then she raised her eyes slowly to look at the tall, rangy girl with blonde hair that was almost sunflower-yellow.

“Hi,” the girl said. Her voice was a little too deep, Jan thought. A little affected.

Jan smiled, thinking, Go away. Please go away.

“My name’s Kate Simons. What’s yours?”

“Jan Marlowe.”

“You look a little lonely, Jan.”

“No. I mean, I’m fine.”

“Would you like to come and join us? We can use the company.”

“No, I don’t—”

“Come on. There’s just Peggy and Laura and me, and we’d be glad to have a fourth.”

Jan couldn’t speak. She stood up, shaking her head, and dropped a bill for the drink.

“I have to go now,” she said finally. She smiled quickly and started for the door.

“Drop in again soon.”

She reached the door and started down the steps, trying to decide whether Kate’s last words were inviting or mocking or both. She couldn’t tell.

Peggy and Laura and Kate.

And she was either Peggy or Laura.

I’m in love, she thought. I’m in love with a beautiful girl and I don’t even know her name.

Peggy.

Or Laura.