Warm and Willing - Lawrence Block [11]
“Did you love her very much?”
“Very much.”
“And you came back to see me today because you wanted—to make love to me?”
“Partly that. Partly because I liked you and I wanted to know you. I was surprised when I realized you weren’t an overt lesbian. And then I figured you out.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, I decided that you were gay without knowing it. The instincts are there. The way you reacted toward your husband, the way heterosexual relations did nothing for you. You were a lesbian but no one had shown you the way.”
“Maybe I’m just frigid.”
“No.”
“You seem so certain. How do you how that?”
“You know it yourself. You’ve had sexual feelings. You’re a sexual person, Rhoda. It shows in the way you talk and the way you move and everything else. It shows in your own awareness of your own body. You couldn’t possibly be sexless.” She smiled. “There are sexless people, Rhoda. I’ve met some of them, women with no feelings in their bodies. Some of them play with lesbianism when nothing else works for them, and lesbianism leaves them just as cold. They can’t love, they don’t have love living inside them. I’ve met them and I know what they’re like. But you’re not like that, Rhoda.”
“I don’t know.”
“I do.”
She lit another cigarette. Her hands were steadier now. She felt excitement percolating within herself, but she had no immediate fear, no odd feeling of anxiety. The discussion was a calm and cool one now. They were talking about her sexual impulses, analyzing her possible homosexuality in a slightly dispassionate fashion, and she was quite relaxed about it. The undercurrent of tension and excitement was not unpleasant or disturbing.
“You were made to love,” Megan told her, “You tried to give that love to a man. You know how impossible that is. Why don’t you try giving it to me?”
“I—”
“You can’t bury it. You’ve been trying to do that. You know how it works out.”
“It hasn’t worked out so badly.”
“Hasn’t it? You have the same nightmare over and over again. You live a lonely life and you feel the loneliness of it. You’ve been trying to starve your own need for love and you need to give love and you need to receive it. It’s a stubborn force, Rhoda. It won’t let itself be starved out. It’s too real a need to be dismissed that easily.”
She started to say something, to offer up some objection, then changed her mind. She smoked her cigarette and asked if there was any coffee left.
“I’ll get some.”
Megan brought back two cups of coffee. The coffee was hot and strong. Rhoda sipped hers, set the cup down in the saucer. She took a last drag on her cigarette and put it out. A line from Eliot—I have measured out my life in coffee spoons. In coffee spoons, in cigarette butts, in days awake and nights asleep. She had been measuring out her own life, parceling it out piece by piece. Years were passing, filled with nothing, and she was twenty-four years old and unutterably alone.
How much was Megan offering her? And how much would it cost her to accept Megan’s offer?
She sipped more coffee. “I’m all lost,” she said.
“Poor girl.”
“Poor girl. Yes. I had such a sweet time tonight. Dinner, the wine, being with you. I haven’t had an evening like that since I left Tom. Or since longer than that. I needed it, the friendship, all of it. I thought you would be my friend.”
“I am your friend.”
“I thought that was all you wanted.”
“I want that and more. I want to be your friend. And your lover.”
“My lover.”
“Yes.”
“What would we do? I don’t understand.”
“Does it matter?”
“I—”
“I would make love to you,” Megan said, “I would make you feel like what you are, like a woman made for love. I would show you the dark side of the moon, I would make you laugh and cry. And we would be close and warm and nothing