Return to Lesbos - Valerie Taylor Femmes Fatales

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two of them. She knew the story: the boy sensitive, working in a store or an office at a job perhaps made for him by an uncle or friend of the family, always out of things, always nervous about his hidden personal life. Dismissals, the staff being cut, the company reorganized, never the real reason, always an embarrassed excuse.

      He was looking at her. She said, “Thanks, maybe I will. I just moved here from Chicago, and I haven’t met anybody yet.” And remembered the freshly curled hair and the printed silk, the idiotic ruffle. Take off your mask, but how? He said politely, “It’s not a very interesting town,” and turned away. She had no answer. If she said, “Yes, but I have to go where my husband goes,” it would only bear out the lying testimony of the ruffled dress.

      It seemed odd, now, that she had never had a close male friend. Bake had half a dozen, two nice boys who shared an apartment on the floor above her, a gray-haired man with an invalid wife who took her to concerts—you saw him in Karla’s now and then, having a drink with one girl or another before going back to his furnished room. But she had never known any man well enough to count him as a friend. She thought she might like to know this boy better.

      The doorbell jingled again. Sunshine poured in, outlining the figure of a girl on the threshold. She came in slowly, pulling the door shut behind her. In outline, against the harsh outdoor light, she seemed like a slender boy of fifteen or sixteen, his angles not yet blunted into manhood. Once in the room she was neither fifteen nor a boy. There were fine creases at the corners of her eyes and around her thin neck, and the line of her shoulders was purely feminine. She had high cheekbones and ash-blonde hair cut short; where it curled around her forehead it was dark with perspiration. She wore blue slacks and a striped cotton shirt, with sneakers; her bare ankles were fine-boned.

      She said, ignoring Frances, “I just wanted to tell you the committee meets tonight at Joe’s. The books they ordered have come.”

      “All right.”

      I ought to leave, Frances thought. They know each other and I’m an outsider. But she was unable to go. Embarrassed and a little frightened, but compelled, she said, “You look like someone I know.”

      “Are you a parent? I’m a teacher, so naturally I meet a lot of parents.”

      “No. I only meant—”

      She was floundering. The boy came to her rescue. He said, “She’s new in town and she likes John’s cats. If she has any sense at all,” he said, lifting his narrow shoulders, “she’ll go right back where she came from. No matter where it is, it can’t be as bad as here.”

      The girl was sizing her up. Frances gave back the look. She looked like Kay. There was no real physical resemblance; Kay was taller and more filled out, and her hair was reddish-brown. It was the boylike air. Put this one in tights and tunic and she could play Rosalind, half boy and half woman, a face crossed by fleeting part-expressions. Looks or no looks, in some way that really mattered, she was like Kay.

      She said, “No, you look like a girl I know. Used to know. Would you both like to go somewhere and have a drink?”

      The appraising silence was like Kay’s, too. Then the fair girl gave her a polite smile with no depth to it. “Thanks, but I have an engagement. Maybe another time.”

      Frances was helpless. She wanted to grab this stranger by the sleeve and beg her not to go away. To say, “Look at me, listen to me, I’m not what you think I am, so don’t look at this disguise I have on. I’m your kind of person and I need to know you. Because I’ve been away from home for a long time.”

      You can’t do these things.

      She might be wrong, tricked by an accidental resemblance. She stood silent while the girl left, the little bell over the door fading away into silence. Walking lightly in dirty sneakers, moving like a dancer, she was gone.

      The boy said, “Don’t let Erika bother you. She’s a wonderful person and she’s had a rough time. Her best friend was killed in an accident last winter and she was in the hospital for a long time.”

      “I like her.”

      The statement fell on its face. He let it lie there. “Why don’t you just browse around, if you feel like it, and I’ll be in the back room if you find something you like. My name is Vince,” he added with a charming smile.

      She was too confused to look at books. She bought the carved cat, paid for it and left clutching it, with change in her sweaty hand.

      The heat didn’t bother her now, or the toe-pinching shoes, or the fact that she had missed both breakfast and lunch. She walked unseeing through the noon streets without considering where she was going. At the corner she almost bumped into a woman who swerved aside to miss her, then called her by name. Half a block later she realized that it was one of the Wives—which one, she had no idea. It didn’t matter.

      Thank God, there was someone. Someone whose last name she didn’t know, who had barely spoken to her and then only to rebuff her. Erika, a teacher—and she had lost someone in a tragic accident. “Best friend” was the way Vince had put it, of course. That meant she was alone and probably lonely.

      I have to see her again, Frances thought, worried. But how? And how to undo this horrible first impression?

      Through the bookstore boy, of course. Anyone can buy books.

      It was after twelve. The sun stood high in the sky behind a stone church with square towers, flying buttresses, and the most lurid stained glass windows she had ever seen, dominating a downtown corner as though the town had grown up around it. As it probably had.

      She felt tired. She signalled a cruising cab.

      Halfway home, she remembered that she had left her nylons and letter paper in the bookstore. That meant she would have to go back and pick them up. Blessed Freudian slip, giving her a good excuse for what she most wanted to do.

      It was Friday, the end of the week. There was the weekend to get through, and a triumphant Bill who was already in the swing of things at the plant, very much on top, already confident with success. Already the top-echelon men at the factory were replacing his city friends in his dinner-table monologues and, so far as she could tell, in his affections. He had found a good barber, a satisfactory place to lunch and a quiet bar for a five o’clock drink. At home he was happy and undemanding, asking only that she appreciate him. True, Sunday was coming up and he would probably start fumbling at her before she got the dinner dishes stacked, but she could stand it.

      She shut her eyes and leaned her head back against the slippery upholstery, thinking about a slender sad-faced girl with fair hair and a light way of walking.

      I’ll find her, she thought, smiling a little, and next time I’ll be myself. I’ll find some way to let her know.

      At last she got up, too restless to lie still anymore and afraid that her turning would wake Bill. She showered, put on her old terry robe, and went downstairs, feeling her way along stair railings and groping for doorknobs in the still-unfamiliar house. Under the bright overhead light of the kitchen she made coffee and sat writing shopping lists while it perked. Things she needed for the house: a sofa, rugs, curtains, a telephone stand. Things she needed for herself: a light jacket, gloves, shampoo. In the morning she would read it all over and decide how much of it made sense; she always felt wide-awake and alert at this hour, but in the light of day her ideas sometimes looked quite different.

      She knew, in the back of her mind, why she was doing all this. With a handful of lists she had a valid reason for going downtown in the morning, and while she was there she would visit the bookstore. That was what she had been waiting for all through Friday night, Saturday and Sunday—might as well admit it.

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