Warm and Willing - Lawrence Block [28]
The room quieted down. The dark-roots blonde and the younger girl were still kissing on the divan across way. Someone said something short to them. They separated.
“I’d like to read some poetry,” Jan Pomeroy said. “I hope you all enjoy this.”
“Little chance of that,” Megan whispered. Rhoda felt a laugh forming and smothered it. She squeezed Megan’s hand in the darkness.
“The first poem was written by Sappho on the Isle of Lesbos,” Jan announced. Her voice had taken on a theatrical tone. “Lesbos had been renamed since then. Mytilene is its present name. And Sappho’s little colony has long since been dispersed. There are some of us who dream of returning to that little island in the Aegean, of forming a society where we can be alone with people like ourselves. Some day, perhaps that dream can be realized completely and perfectly.”
“Picture it,” Megan whispered. “All of us frolicking nude in the sun, with nary a man around. I wonder if she really believes all this.”
“It sounds that way.”
Jan stared their way and they stopped whispering. She took a deep breath, leaned over so that the two candles stood on either side of her face. Her eyes, circled with heavy make-up, looked hollower and deeper than ever in the candle light.”
She read;
Oh Chryseis
The budding beauty of your Cretan soul
Echoes from hill to hill.
Come to me.
Night is a barren notion
Fitting the heart
For love in shaded places.
Teach me of torment
In Sweet hysteria,
O Chryseis!
There was a scattering of embarrassed applause. A candle flickered briefly but did not go out. Jan Pomeroy closed her hollow eyes momentarily, lowered her head reverently. The applause died out. Jan straightened up, opened her eyes, turned a page of the book. “Thank you,” she said. “This next work is also Sappho’s. It is a somewhat longer poem, an ode to one of the young girls Sappho loved so deeply. It—”
Megan groaned.
CHAPTER SEVEN
After the little performance with Sapphic odes and candlelight, Jan Pomeroy did what she always did at her parties. She got thoroughly drunk, cried without interruption for ten full minutes, and then abruptly passed out. Two girls carried her into her bedroom and wedged her fully clothed between the bedsheets, stopping only to remove her shoes. She slept soundly. Her eye make-up looked wildly unreal on her sleeping face.
With the hostess out of the way, the party moved into gear. The mahogany pedestal was wrestled out of the way, the candles blown out and put aside, some lights left off, others switched on again. An angular girl stacked records on the hi-fi—dance music, some vocal sides, Billie Holliday, Sarah Vaughan, Anita O’Day. One or two couples drifted off homeward. Others talked intensely in little groups. A girl cried in a corner, another locked herself in the bathroom and refused to open the door. Others danced.
The dancing seemed odd at first to Rhoda. They had danced before, once or twice at the apartment, moving together slowly with the dancing serving as a prelude to the act of love. But dancing had never before been a social phenomenon. There was something disarming about it, as though the roomful of dancing girls burlesqued heterosexual dancing, as though all the dancing couples were less intent upon enjoying themselves than in proving something to the world.
The feeling died as she caught the mood of the evening. Megan held her lightly in her arms, taking the man’s part and leading her slowly and smoothly around the floor. She closed eyes, relaxing in Megan’s embrace. She had never danced much as a girl, had hardly ever gone dancing with Tom Haskell. Once, maybe twice before they were married. Afterward, never.
She danced two dances with Megan. Then the blonde girl stepped away from her. “We have to mingle,” she said. She moved aside and a young redhead with very blue eyes introduced herself to Rhoda as Sara. The music started and their bodies moved together.
But something was wrong. She didn’t understand