Warm and Willing - Lawrence Block [45]
She was sitting alone at the bar in Leonetti’s, nursing a drink, watching a cigarette burn itself out in the ashtray. The place was crowded. Most of the tables were taken, and over a dozen other girls crowded around her at the bar. She knew most of them but didn’t feel like talking, not to them or to anyone else.
She sipped her drink. It was mostly melted ice now, flat and tasteless. She looked up. The bartender was down at the other end of the bar, busy with a complicated cocktail. She stubbed out her cigarette and drained her drink. She glanced at the window again, at the falling snow outside. Bobbie would be coming soon. Bobbie would join her, and they would take a table and have few drinks together, and maybe drop over to somebody’s apartment for more drinks and some food and conversation, and then home, and then to bed.
All at once she stopped thinking and closed her eyes and listened. Leonetti’s was jammed, and she had been sitting at the bar with her thoughts turned inward and her ears turned off, the crowd noise shut out. Now she let the voices come to her, let herself be immersed in the glut of sound.
So many girls all talking at once. And, with the rush of their voices, with the strained urgency that crept into their hectic conversation, she was overwhelmed by a feeling that the whole scene was slightly pathetic, pathetic and even laughable. A bar filled with girls, a whole mob of lesbians who had nothing better to do than waste their time in a bar with others like themselves. And the bar was filled with them simply because it catered to them. The drinks were overpriced, the decor unappealing, the service nothing remarkable. But the gay girls flocked to it because they were welcome there. That alone assured the bar’s success.
Gay. She almost laughed—it was as though she were catching the deeper meaning of that merry word for the first time. So elaborately gay, so determined to maintain the appearances of joyous exhilaration. Heavy drinking, raucous laughter, wild jokes, never a dull moment. Unless you stopped to catch your breath and realized, startled, that all of the moments were slightly dull.
The bartender came and filled her glass and took her money. She did not sip this one so very slowly but knocked off half of it in one quick swallow. Gay? If they were all so gay, what were they doing at Leonetti’s? If they were all so profoundly happy, why did they fight so much? If life was such a bed of roses, why did they slash their wrists?
Gay.
She and Bobbie were gay, all right. And in love. But they were also screaming at each other half the time and sulking the rest of the time. She didn’t know why it worked out that way but it did. They still loved each other, more than ever, and it looked as though they would last—for a long time, if not forever.
But the fights were hell. Jealousy started some but not all of them, and both of them were equally capable provoking jealousy and of being moved by it. The jealousy fights, though, were at least a confirmation of love. The other fights were madness. One would want to go a party, one would want to stay home—and in minutes one would be yelling and the other crying. Or she would complain that Bobbie never did the dishes, or Bobbie would complain about Rhoda borrowing a dress without asking, or Rhoda would say something about the omnipresent Siamese cat. Anything could start things going. Any spark was dangerous when you lived in an oil refinery. Two weeks ago, she remembered, Ed Vance had come to see her again, if only to prove that his skin was as thick as his heart. “You stood me up awhile ago,” he told her, grinning. “I thought I’d give you another chance. How about it, Rhoda?”
She brushed him off quickly and brutally, telling him in very definite terms that she was not interested in seeing him, that she would never be interested in seeing him, and that she would greatly appreciate it if he would make a point of avoiding her in the future. Not even a man like Ed Vance could misinterpret her this time. He stepped back as though he had