Warm and Willing - Lawrence Block [39]
So complicated. So awfully complicated.
Bobbie brought her a fresh drink and she took it gratefully. “I might become a drunk,” she said softly. “I think I am developing a taste for it.”
“You’re in good company.”
“I’m in marvelous company. Sit next to me, Bobbie.”
Bobbie was beside her now. Rhoda sipped the scotch and closed her eyes and thought how comfortable she was now. So much of life was devoted to the simple pursuit of comfort. She had never realized this before. And it was this hunger for comfort which had sent her to Bobbie. Not a craving for excitement, not some furious dark passion, but the basic desire to be where she could most comfortable. Bobbie was with her now, and the two of them might get a little drunk together, and they would be drawn closer and closer, until ultimately their lovemaking would climax the evening, symbolizing and emphasizing the bond that was growing up between them.
“You’re a funny girl, Rho.”
“Am I?”
“Uh-huh. A lot of the time you seem a hell of a lot younger than you are. Like a lost lamb, like a schoolgirl. How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“That’s what I would have guessed, I suppose, but part of the time you seem about seventeen.”
“I was seventeen until a few weeks ago.”
“I know what you mean. Yes, that’s what I thought. You were just a girl all that time, weren’t you? And spent two years pretending you were a woman, only it didn’t take. And then became a woman overnight.”
“Yes.”
“And they say we get this way by being led astray at an early age. The horny hands of a lady gym teacher, or an inquisitive tongue in a boarding school dorm room, every little thing that can warp us and ruin us before we have a chance to blossom out as child-producing man-loving automatons. What crap that is. My mother sits in too large a house in Grosse Pointe and tries to forget she ever knew me. She can’t forget all the time, because once a month she has to send me my check. A combination of conscience money and insurance; insurance because as long as the checks come regularly she knows I won’t darken her upper middle class doorway, and conscience money because she sits there scratching her head and wondering what she did wrong. Because she’s damned sure she must have done something wrong. Her darling daughter is a lesbian, and Mumsie is dead certain something like that couldn’t happen by chance. She couldn’t believe I might be born this way. And she can’t imagine that I’m a person underneath it all. Like some people when they look at a Negro. All they see is black skin, they don’t see a person. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“All my mother sees is a dyke. She broke down one time and cried and told me that she couldn’t look at me without imagining me in bed with another girl. What the hell sense does that make? I can look at her without visualizing her in bed with my father. For heaven’s sake, Rho, we’re all human beings.” She stopped for a minute. Then, “That woman was terrified when I wrote her and told her I couldn’t stand it in Mexico any more. I wanted to tell her the truth, that everybody in Cuernavaca was hopelessly depraved, but that wouldn’t have registered. She thinks I’m hopelessly depraved, so she would have thought I belonged there. But I got a letter from her and I saw she was scared. She thought I was coming back home to Detroit. She wrote that it would be awkward, inconvenient—oh, she found a lot of polite adjectives. I didn’t write her again until I was here in the city. I wrote her then and said I had a long lease on an apartment and that I would be staying in New York for a long time. I never mentioned her letter. Sometimes I hate her.”
For a long time neither of them said anything. Then Bobbie finished her drink and put her glass down. The Siamese paraded slowly but confidently across the room, and seated himself sedately upon the floor in front of Bobbie. His eyes were steel blue.
“My man Claude,” she