Warm and Willing - Lawrence Block [46]
And when she told Bobbie, the tall girl exploded in her face. She had thought they would laugh about it, about the fool Vance was making of himself, but Bobbie didn’t laugh.
“You must have led him on,” she said.
“Are you crazy?”
“You’re just trying to hurt me. Making love to me and flirting with a man at the same time. Men don’t make passes at a girl unless they think they have a chance. They leave me alone.”
“Well, maybe—”
“Maybe I’m not as attractive as you are? Is that what you were going to say?”
“I just—”
It had been one hell of a battle. But the next day when she came home from work, Bobbie gave her a small white gold wedding band, plain and simple. “You wear this, darling,” she said. “Let the men think you’re married and they won’t make passes at you. I’m sorry, Rho. I was a bitch last night and I’m sorry—”
Fighting and making up, crying and wiping tears away, hurting each other, loving each other. Gay? Oh, very gay. Sure.
She fingered the plain gold band on her ring finger. A lot of the girls wore them, she knew. Sometimes girls exchanged them as a sort of symbolic marriage; more often they merely wore them as she wore hers, as a convenient way to ward off predatory males. Her own wedding ring, the one Tom had given her, would have done as well. But the day the annulment came through, she took it off and dropped it down a sewer grating.
She finished her drink. Bobbie would be coming soon, she thought. She wished the girl would hurry. There were girls all around her, a whole mob of girls just like her and just like Bobbie, and she still felt so thoroughly alone that she wanted to cry.
They wound up the night at John’s on Bleecker. She and Bobbie, Lucia Perry and Peg Brandt, Grace and Allie, Megan and Jan Pomeroy. The young Italian waiter winked happily at them and pulled two tables together and they sat together eating pizza with mushrooms and anchovies and drinking cold beer. The blackness of Rho’s mood had left when Bobbie arrived at Leonetti’s.
She had slowed down on the drinking then, and now she just felt relaxed and happy. It was the first time she had been with Megan since they separated. She had run into her now and then, with the first meeting between them awkward and the second one forced and uneasy, but now they were able to relax at the same table. But it still felt strange to her, Meg was a girl she had loved, a girl she lived with, a girl she had finally left. And now they were what? Friends. Just that.
She knew how it had been with Megan after the break-up. The blonde girl finished her decorating job, pulling it through on sheer willpower. She hurled herself in her work, got home late at night and drank herself into a stupor, then got up the next morning and went back to work. Once the job was out of the way, Megan stayed blind drunk for six days. Two weeks and three days after she stopped her heavy drinking, she went to bed with Jan Pomeroy.
Each of the girls kept her own apartment. Neither of them even expected their affair to last for any great length of time. “We’re enjoying ourselves,” Jan had told Bobbie once. “We’ve known each other for ages and I’ve always liked and admired Megan. But we’re not making any marriage. When we stop being good for each other, or as soon as either of us finds someone else, that’s it. No tears.”
It was an unlikely combination, Rhoda thought. Jan was as religiously homosexual as ever, and Megan had always thought of the hollow-eyed girl and her romantic notions as something of a joke. But they seemed to be good for each other. And she was glad Megan had found somebody to take her place.
Now Megan was talking about a job she was thinking of taking. “This woman wants her living room redone,” she said. “She wants a very plush effect, like an apartment for one of those Doris Day movies. I know just how to give her what she wants.”
“Aren’t you going to do it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so,