Twilight Girl (13 page)

What had possessed her, unknowing then of the reason for her tears or her hatred, what had possessed Sassy to pound on that door with clenched fists? Until Mums—pretty, young Mums—had slid into the hall, closing the door furtively behind her, wrapping the dressing gown to her body with shaky hands. And pressing Sassy against her in a stifling vapor of gin and perfume. "You were dreaming, lovey. Mumsie's little girl was having a bad, bad dream. Now back to bed we go."

And how had Sassy known then why she screamed and clawed and kicked at the pretty young woman who petted, pleaded, pulled her toward the frightening darkness of the bedroom? Beat at Mums with hard, desperate fists (and so had the fists found that same satisfying release... last night... last night... when Lon was someone pretty and young and someone shaking the foundations under Sassy's feet). Sassy, eight, had pounded and struck and hurt, until it had been too late and the warm soggy carpet under her feet had reminded her of the need to go to the bathroom—and there had been nothing to do in that moment of humiliation and rage but scream louder and strike harder.
"Shh! You'll wake your daddy. Daddy doesn't feel well, angel. A good little girl wouldn't disturb her daddy when he's not feeling well."
And then Sassy had been dragged toward her own lonely bed, hearing the final, vaguely understood but piercing indignity:
"Sassy's Mums wants to be proud of her little girl."
Then to lie awake, remembering the guttural sounds... the man sounds. To remember them forever after...

Oh, Mums would be proud of me tonight,
Sassy thought. She remembered the squabble at lunch... Daddy would be prouder still. Look, look—see what Sassy's doing now to make Mums and Daddy proud. Doing it to prove she wouldn't rather be in bed with Mavis. Prove it to them. And prove it to Sassy Gregg! No. It was like opening an old wound to admit that Mavis had been right. But she admitted it; Sassy admitted it.

"Talk to me, Sass... tell me how you feel...
ooh... mmmm
... let me hear!"
God, the sickening sounds.

She cried when it was over. Almost felt sorry for the big, exhausted slob who fiddled with his stubborn zipper and pleaded for recognition. "Was I okay, baby? Enough for you? Have a drink—want more?" Pathetic. Reaching for a pat on the back, asking the sickening questions that made her wonder why men didn't carry a tape measure and chronometer to reassure themselves of their male prowess. Knowing with contempt that she had never asked a girl afterward for a recommendation. With every girl—except, lately, Mavis—she knew!

"What do you want to cry for, Sass? Like you'd just had it for the first time?"

She wiped her face impatiently with her hand. "I'm overcome."

Apparently the bitterness in her voice eluded him. "Sure. It's too much. You don't get it often enough and it knocks you for a loop."

While they dressed, he brought up the inevitable question. Why settle for this catch-as-catch-can proposition when they could make it legal, with a cash bonus from his folks for a wedding present?

"It takes ages to organize a big wedding, Dur," she told him. "We have literally hundreds of friends and relatives—"

The vague reply seemed to satisfy him and she took his mind away from the subject by asking him to hook her brassiere. Slipping into her blouse, she wondered what it would be like to have to stomach this wrestling match nightly without adding to the needlemarks. And how would she conceal the marks if he saw her every night, without a yacht-club pennant handy to drape over the light? The questions blended away into slurping sounds of water licking at the hull, gentle noises she had once loved as she had loved catching salt spray in her face. Long ago, when the ketch was a gull winging its way to Catalina instead of a floating motel. And when cruising meant something besides hanging around the gay bars, looking for new conquests. Without Mavis—but, no, Sassy was through with sailing.

Topside, the air was clean and invigorating, the stars inviting her touch. The Williamsons' sloop was gone from its slip and she visualized them sailing toward the island, wondered with added melancholy whether she would have even the strength for hoisting canvas if her energy continued to ebb as it had lately. Thinking of Catalina recalled a brief conversation she had had with Mavis, driving home after that first meeting with Lon. Something to do with ships and islands—Sassy had forgotten the details. But the memory sufficed to revive a frustration dormant during the bout with Durham.
Lon.
For the habit was no habit, nothing to be concerned about. And her mother and Knips had been quieted. Durham, beside her, looked once more like a satisfied bull elephant. Only one barbed hook remained planted in her insides. A girl who had willingly made a human punching-bag of herself for the sake of Mavis.
Something,
Sassy told herself,
had to be done about Lon.

"Washed out the glasses, straightened the bunk... Nobody would know we were aboard," Durham said. "Had ourselves a terrific time and not a soul the wiser."

"Terrific time," Sassy agreed absently. "Literally terrific."

CHAPTER 10

Another terrific time was scheduled for the following Saturday night. The evening found Sassy, folded arms resting on the concave rim of the open grand piano, listlessly gazing into the cavernous interior where the hammers rose and fell at Mavis's whim, where the taut strings quivered in spasms of anticipation and recognition.

It was only one more Saturday evening, Sassy told herself. Mrs. Knippel had mercifully gone to wherever housekeepers go on alternate weekends. Mums was probably half-shot by now, laughing loud and young and eyeing anything in pants that crowded the Vegas crap table where Daddy, in self-defense, played with life-or-death ferocity. Durham would be by soon and then something would happen, swallowing up the intervening hours until she would return to find Mavis still here at the piano. For Mavis, surely, wouldn't honor the invitation of that dimwit with the absurd mannequin hair, Lon's girlfriend, who had phoned twice during the week, affecting a pitiful nonchalance as she asked Sassy and Mavis to some crummy party.

Six months ago, the idea might have promised a mild kick, though even then Sassy had deplored the unstratified Lesbian society. Wasn't it rough enough to be gay? Shouldn't it at least be possible to be selective? God, the way you were expected to mix with riff-raff just because of your sex life! She had given Violet the polite brush-off that astute hostesses recognize: "We'll make it if we can." And Mavis couldn't go, mustn't go, though here she sat in her black dress, after having let it drop casually that she was "going to make that Violet scene." A cab would take Mavis right to the door if Sassy were sure she didn't want to escort Mavis. A cab would take her right to where Lon would be waiting. Oh, hell!

Sassy pressed closer to the vibrating piano, closing her eyes in supplication, inviting the cool music to permeate her body. And Mavis, oblivious to Sassy's mangled spirit, padded out the chord skeleton of some mundane tune, ignoring the trite melody in a complex improvisation—defiant, personal, free of harmonic or melodic shackles, acknowledging nothing but a subtle, understated beat. Pirouetting around the implied rhythm, her right hand spoke the only genuine Mavis talk. For she might lie about her background, distort her language and lead Sassy through a maze of confusions, but when Mavis played jazz she was manifestly incapable of anything less than the truth. She played now the music that had filled the hours at Ruggio's, the agonizing chit-chat hours with Durham, while Sassy's eyes wandered the long bar, searching for the familiar, nameless figure. It was the music that had accompanied the time-worn excuse and the rubber-legged walk to the ladies' lounge, background music for the Houdini-like palming of folded bills and the white packet slipped into her hidden hand.

But last Monday Sassy had walked in time to someone else's music. She had spoken fearfully, meeting the man later in a closed parking lot, naively wondering (but not for long) why he expressed no surprise over her increased demand. Two of the three caps had been shot during the week. And even in the not-caring, not-wanting hours afterward, she had failed to break Mavis down. Sassy clung to the existence of that remaining capsule now, clung to it like a shipwrecked sailor to a rock. On this night, as on any night since she had lain rigid in her bed and tried to blot out the unimaginable horror that filled a bedroom down the hall, she could not bear to be alone. If Mavis should go out, if she, Sassy, had to endure the self-imposed bleakness with Durham, knowing that Mavis was with Lon, at least she would move through those hours under anesthesia. Nobody, nothing could hurt her.

Mavis stopped playing abruptly, a careless chord saying, "That's all from me."

"I'll call Durham and tell him I'm sick," Sassy said then. "We'll have the place to ourselves. You'll play and I'll read poetry—it'll be the way it was at the beginning, Mave."

"Too dressed up to sit around, Sass. I'm making this big bash. You know?"

"You'll be bored there. You'll wish you had stayed home."

"You come, too."

"Oh, God, that little tub with the hair—and that butch? She'll probably be there, bandages and all. It would be sticky, darling. Let's forget it."

"You got you a conscience, Miz G.?"

"She had it coming." Sassy turned from the piano, weak-jointed, needing a cigarette, not certain yet whether it was all she needed. When she had lighted up, she began a systematic pacing of the room, unsteady on her feet. Mavis curled her legs under her on the piano bench, watching with that enigmatic stare of hers, letting Sassy take the conversational lead. "I'm too tired to argue. I'm too tired for Durham and I'm not up to a cheap clambake. Stay home with me."

"Stayed around here long enough, girl. Stayed alone, too."

"Is that why you're going, Mave? To make me jealous?" A licking, hopeful flame shot up inside her. "Because you know how I feel about that crummy crowd?" She puffed nervously on the cigarette, then set it on the piano rim.

Mavis shrugged her reply. Sassy stopped before the piano bench then, dropping her hands to the slim shoulders. "Mave, you've got to understand about Durham. I can't drift around all my life. You've done it, but I'm not conditioned to anything but luxury." She stroked the hair of the girl on the bench. "Dur's the least obnoxious of the choices open to me, Mave. And, God knows, I can't stay in this house much longer. You know what I go through here. You and I... One of these days this thing is going to explode right in our faces, between Knippie and my mother—oh, God! And if you have to leave, it'll be hell for me, Mave, literally hell."

"You lose me, Sass. I don't dig, somehow."

"Look, I don't want to end up like those prune-faced Lizzies at the boarding schools. I don't want people snickering at me behind my back the way I used to snicker at them. First of all, I've got to shut up everybody—shut them up for good. Nobody's going to throw rocks at me if I have a husband. Are they? A place of my own. Are they?" Sassy moved one hand from the fragile shoulders, extending a finger to tilt the dark, questioning face upward. "We could stay together then, Mavis. Durham's not too bright."

"He's spotted me at Ruggio's. What would you tell him tonight—if he should walk in here and happen to see me?"

"So what if he sees you? He wouldn't dream—"

"You got him thinkin' you're the warmest piece this side of Tiajuana?"

Sassy whirled away from the girl peevishly, throwing the cigarette into a planter. "That's vulgar. Literally vulgar. Do you think I'm damn fool enough to marry him for anything but a front? He's been thrown out of four colleges. His dad's going nuts trying to teach him the securities business when all Dur can think about is—uh—well, all right, that's vulgar, too, but it's true. Mave, listen—Dur read a book by Ripley once. His idea of sparkling conversation is coming up with little gems about six-legged cows and a guy in Nairobi who plays the mandolin with his teeth. He's a muscle-happy jackass, Mave. Can't you see what I'm trying to get across?"

"Gettin' across he's not much."

"I'm telling you I'm willing to marry the stupid bastard only so that you and I can be together!"

Mavis made a snorting sound that might have been intended as a laugh. "Oh, man, man, that's a new hype. Don't you go pinnin' yo' man on me."

"I mean it, Mave. Try to see it my way."

"Trouble is, that's the only way you know, Sassy. Your way. But you were laying up that security before I came on. And any time you wanted out of here with me, I could have gone to work. Could have rented us a pad, cut out of here, blown town, maybe. Uh-uh, Sassy. This jazz I don't buy."

"We could do that," Sassy said, her enthusiasm hesitant. "If that's what you really want, Mave..."

"It's not what you want, girl! You want to be safe gay, comfortable gay, respectable gay." Mavis slid down from the piano bench. "I might support you, Sass. Planning on going back to work, anyway. But not like your daddy keeps you. Not like that lover-boy's going to. Not when you start shooting more junk in a day than I can pay for pounding all week in some crib. Uh-uh. Cain't affo'd you, Miz Gregg." Mavis picked up her long, slim pouch from the floor and started toward the stairs.

"Mave—don't go!"

"Taxi ought to be here. Called him long ago."

"You didn't tell me you'd already called a cab." The accumulated fears of all the nights alone, nights before Mavis, crowded over Sassy now. "Mave, listen to me. I don't need Durham. I don't need the junk. Just stay with me. Is that asking so much? Don't leave me alone. Not tonight. Please, Mave, not tonight." Despising herself for pleading, unable to stop her own prideless whine. "Please!"

Mavis stopped at the first step. "Other nights going to be worse, Sassy, you don't kick off that monkey soon." She shook her head in a hopeless gesture. "It's about enough, anyway, with us. You know? I need a job again. You—you get yourself rid of the junk, hear? Get into that respectable bed. Be fine then."

"Mave, I can't do anything if I think you're with that girl. I don't just mean tonight—any time. I've got to mean more to you than that." The thought of Lon and of her own loss tore at Sassy. An old, violent urge clawed at her and she thought of herself throwing Mavis to the floor, taking her with a wild, inspired possession that would obliterate everyone else from Mavis's life—everyone else! But the hollowness crept into her belly, the strange, malignant growth of emptiness and the first recognizable outer-edged twinge of pain. Her stomach twisted over, righted itself, churned again. "You've never liked crowds, Mave. Why tonight?" She trembled suddenly, the ice-veined chill riding through her body. And stood, watching Mavis, fighting the need to shiver, like a scantily dressed parade queen on a sleet-pelted Christmas float. The racing cold brought with it a bilious wave. By the time she reached the stairs, Sassy could only cling to the rail, her body not yet wracked by its implacable need, but knowing that this was the time... now the time. Still, one more try...!