Beebo answered huskily, “What do you mean? What girls?”
“Lesbians,” he said. “Want to freshen this up for me, pal?” He handed her his highball glass. She took it with astonishment still plain on her face. When she returned from the kitchen with the new drink, she asked him, “Aren’t they sort of—immoral? I heard the word once before. I thought you weren’t supposed to say it.”
At that, Jack looked up. “Lesbian? You mean you thought it was a dirty word?” he exclaimed, and laughed in spite of himself. Beebo was momentarily offended until he cleared his throat and said, “Forgive me, honey, but that’s the bloodiest nonsense I’ve heard in a long time. Whoever in the hell told you it was dirty?”
“Doesn’t it mean loose women?” Beebo asked.
He shook his head. “It means gay women,” he said. “It means homosexual women. It means women, Beebo, who love other women. The way heterosexual women love men.”
His words put a focus on Beebo’s fascination. She stared at him from the sofa with her lips parted and her eyes fixed steadily on his. “You said Mona was a bitch,” she said finally, softly. “And then you said she was a Lesbian. Doesn’t that make her cheap? Q.E.D.?”
“Some of the staunchest Puritan ladies I know are double-dyed bitches,” Jack said briskly. “And just because Mona is a bad apple doesn’t mean all the gay girls in the world are full of worms. Mona would be bitchy anyway, gay or straight.”
“What’s ‘straight’?”
“Heterosexual,” Jack said.
“Where did you learn all those words?” Beebo said, bewildered.
“I’m a native. I speak the lingo,” he said, but instead of catching his implication, she thought he meant only that he had lived in Greenwich Village so long he had picked it up, like everyone else.
“Does it ever happen that a nice girl is a Lesbian?” she asked him shyly.
“All the time,” he said, opening up the paper and gazing through the ball scores.
“Did you ever meet any?”
“I’ve met most of them,” he chuckled. “They’re just as friendly and pleasant as other girls. Why not?”
“But can’t you tell by looking at them that they’re—” She rubbed a hand over her mouth as if to warn herself not to speak the word, and then said it anyway: “—Lesbian?”
“You mean, do they all wear army boots and Levis?” Jack said with a smile. “Does Mona Petry look like a buck private?”
Beebo shook her head. “That’s why it’s so hard to believe she’s what you say she is.”
“Gay? Why hell, she’s slept with more girls than she has men. And let me tell you, that’s damn near enough girls to elect a lady president.”
Beebo laughed with him, and yet she felt a strange obsession with the whole idea. She half resented Jack’s merriment on the subject, although she was relieved that he displayed no contempt for Lesbians as a group. Only for Mona Petry. She was surprised to find herself wanting to defend Mona, whom she knew so little. And yet she trusted Jack’s judgment. Still, what a pity to think a girl that pretty was that hard.
Jack sipped his drink and picked up his cigarette, still with his eyes on the paper. “There are some nice little gay bars around the neighborhood,” he said. “We’ll have to take some of them in. Maybe this weekend, hm?” He didn’t look at her. His cigarette waggled between his lips as he talked.
“Is it all right to go there?” Beebo asked. “Don’t the police make raids on those places?”
“Now and then!” he conceded. “Of course, if you’d rather not …”
“Oh, I’d like to go,” she said, so quickly that he smiled into the newsprint. “But aren’t they just for men—the gay bars?”
“Men, girls, and everything in between,” he assured her.
“Do you ever go there, Jack?”
Again he was tempted to be honest with her, and still again he restrained himself. “I go when the mood is on me,” he said. Beebo became silent at once, as if she suspected she was trying to learn too much too fast. But she spent the remaining weekdays waiting impatiently for a tour of the bars with Jack.
Jack took her to three or four of his favorite places, and to one strictly Lesbian bar where they admitted only the faces they recognized, through a window in the door. Beebo followed him around quietly, watching, listening, almost breathing in the atmosphere. She said little, and most of what she did say was interrogatory.
Jack answered her calmly while he sipped one beer after another. He would order one for her and let her work at it, but he usually ended up finishing it himself. In every bar he was kept busy greeting people, trading jokes, laughing. Beebo trailed along in his wake, smiling and shaking hands with the strangers who were Jack’s friends, and promptly forgetting their names.
But not their faces. Toward the end of the evening she began to feel that she had seen more faces in one night than she had seen in a lifetime in Juniper Hill. And these faces seemed different to her: rare and beautiful, sharers of a special knowledge. They had bright eyes and young smiles, no matter how old they were.
“They make a big thing of keeping young down here,” Jack told her. “The men are worse than the girls. Nobody loves an old queen.”
It was almost one in the morning when they left the last co-ed bar and Jack asked if she was game for one more. “This one is just for Lesbians,” he said.
She nodded, and a few minutes later they were being admitted to a basement bar saturated with pink light, paneled with mirrors, and filled with girls. More girls, more sizes, types, and ages, than Beebo had ever seen collected together in one place. The place was called the Colophon and it was decorated with the emblems of various famous publishing houses.
Jack fought his way through the crush at the bar, absorbing a lot of pointed merriment directed at his masculinity.
“Sour grapes,” he cried good-naturedly and inspired a chorus of laughter and catcalls. Beebo, pushing in behind him, became aware suddenly that she was the object of mass curiosity. She could look over the heads of most of the girls and her height made her visible from all directions.
Abashed, she closed in on Jack, who was hollering an order to the bartender. “Maybe we ought to go. I—I mean—” She didn’t know how to explain herself to him. He was looking at her with a startled frown. “They don’t seem to like having a man in here,” she said lamely.
Jack began to laugh. “You want me to go, honey? Okay. Just give me two bits to see a movie.”
She gasped. “That’s not what I meant!” she objected. “I don’t want to be in here alone!”
“Why not?” He reached between two girls at the bar to grab his beer. “You’ll make out. I might cramp your style.”
“Jack, damn it, if you go, I go.”
“Okay, pal, I won’t ditch you,” he said, glimpsing her anxious face. “Relax. We’ll have one more and then cut out.”
She had had quite a bit of beer already, even with Jack finishing them for her. But she couldn’t stand there with all those eyes on her and do nothing. Better to drink a beer than gape back at the gapers. She poured some into her glass and drank it. And then drained the glass and poured some more.
Jack took her elbow. “I see some