bar I know. Very gay. I go there alone when I want to be depressed.”
It sounded sinister, not gay, to Laura. “What’s it called?” she said.
“The Cellar. Don’t worry, it’s a legitimate joint.” He laughed at her long face.
Marcie laughed too, and Laura’s heart jumped at the sweetness of the sound. It made her hate the back of Burr, moving with big masculine easiness ahead of her in a tweed topcoat, his bristling crew cut shining.
A few minutes later Jack led them down a few steps to a pair of doors which he pushed in, letting Laura and Marcie pass.
Laura heard Burr say, behind her, in an undertone, “It is gay,” and he laughed. “You bastard.” She was mystified. It looked pretty average and ordinary. They headed for a table with four chairs, one of the few available, and Laura looked around.
The Cellar was quite dark, with the only lights placed over the bar and glowing a faint pinky orange. There were candles on the tables, and people crowded together from one end of the room to the other. Everybody seemed reasonably cheerful, but it didn’t look any gayer than any other bar she had been in. She looked curiously at Burr, but he was helping Marcie out of her coat.
“No table service,” Jack said. “What does everybody want?”
They gave him their orders and Laura tried to catch his eye, hoping for more information about the place. She was curious now. There were checkered tablecloths, fish nets on the wall, a lot of people—all rather young—at the tables and bar. The jukebox was going and somebody was trying to pick up a few bucks doing pencil portraits, but no one seemed very interested. The customers looked like students. There were girls in cotton pants, young men in sweaters and open-collared shirts.
“They all look like students,” she said to Burr.
He grinned. “I never thought of it that way,” he said. “I guess they do, all right.”
She stared at him. And then she looked around the room again, and suddenly she saw a girl with her arm around another girl at a table not far away. Her heart jumped. A pair of boys at the bar were whispering urgently to each other.
Gay, Laura thought to herself. Is that what they call it? Gay? She was acutely uncomfortable now. It was as if she were a child of civilization, reared among the savages, who suddenly found herself among the civilized. She recognized them as her own. And yet she had adopted the habits of another race and she was embarrassed and lost with her own kind.
They looked at her—her own kind—from the bar and from the tables, and didn’t recognize her. And Laura looked around at them and thought, I’m one of you. Help me. But if anyone had approached her she would have turned away.
Jack came back with the drinks and sat down, passing them around. He drank a shot of whisky and said to Laura, “Well? How do you like tonight’s collection?”
“Tonight’s collection of what?” Laura said.
“Of nuts.” He looked around The Cellar. “Doesn’t anyone tell you anything, Mother? Burr, what’s the matter with you? She’s a tourist. Make with the old travelogue, boy.”
Burr laughed. “I thought you didn’t get it, Laura.” He smiled. “They’re all queer.”
Laura’s face went scarlet, but the candlelight hid it. She felt an awful tide of anger and fear come up in her at that word. She felt trapped, almost frantic, and she vented it on Jack. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she said. Her voice trembled with indignation.
“Take it easy, Mother,” he said.
“Tonight’s collection!” she mimicked bitterly. “You talk about them as if they were a bunch of animals.”
“They are,” he said quietly. “So are we.”
“We’re human beings,” she said. “We have no right to sit here and laugh at them for something they can’t help.”
“Can’t help, hell,” Burr said, leaning over the table toward her. “All those gals need is a real man. That’d put them on the right track in a hurry.”
Laura could have belted him. She wanted to shout, “How do you know, you big ape?” But she said instead, “You’re not irresistible, Burr.”
“I don’t mean that!” he said, frowning at her. “Christ! I only mean a man who knows the first thing about women could lay any one of these dames—even a butch—and make her like it.”
“What’s the first thing about women?” Jack asked, smiling, but they ignored him.
“If men revolt her and somebody tried to—to lay her—he’d only make her sick. No matter how much he knew about women,” Laura said sharply.
“Any girl who doesn’t like men is either a virgin or else some bastard scared the hell out of her. She needs gentling.”
“You talk about us as if we were horses!” Laura flared.
“Us?” Burr stared at her.
“Us—us women.” Laura’s face was burning.
Burr watched her as he talked. “Some girls get a bastard the first time,” he said. “It’s too bad. They end up in joints like this swapping horror stories with the other ones.”
Laura hated the way he talked. She couldn’t take it. “What if the bastard is her father?” she said. “And he scares the hell out of her when she’s five years old? And twenty years later some ass who thinks he’s a great lover comes along and throws her down and humiliates and horrifies her?”
Jack remarked, with amusement, and probably more enlightenment than the others, “Jesus, we have a moralist in our midst.” He looked at her as if she were a new species of fish.
“Damn it, Laura, that’s the point,” Burr said. “He wouldn’t humiliate her. I don’t mean some God-damn truck driver with nothing but a quick lay on his mind. I mean a considerate decent sort of guy—a sort of Good Samaritan—” He grinned and Marcie said, “God!” and rolled her eyes to the ceiling.
“—who really wants to help the girl,” Burr finished.
“Why don’t you try it?” Jack said.
Marcie’s face darkened. “Yes, darling, why don’t you prove your little theory? I’m sure we’d all be fascinated.”
“Now damn it, don’t you go yammering at me. I’m talking to Laura.”
“Excuse me!” Marcie said.
Laura leaned toward her. “I didn’t mean to start anything,” she said.
“Nobody ever does,” Jack remarked to himself.
“He said he could lay any girl and make her like it,” Marcie said.
“I said,” Burr said, turning to her and intoning sarcastically, “That any guy with any—”
“We know what you said, boy,” Jack interrupted. “Let’s keep it purely theoretical. Nobody has to prove anything. Burr loves Marcie and Marcie loves Burr. Jack loves whisky and whisky hates Jack. Laura loves animals. Everybody happy?”
Thinking over what she had said while Jack talked, Laura began to feel sick. She wished she had been perceptive enough to see where she was when they first came into The Cellar. But she took things at face value. They had entered a little bar and they were going to have a nightcap. Okay. What was so sinister about that? Why did it have to turn out to be a damn gay bar? And why did she have to react like an angry virgin when she found out?
They stayed long enough to get pretty high. They were stared at by the regular customers, but Laura was afraid to stare back.
When she did, once or twice, she couldn’t catch anyone’s eye. She was ashamed of herself for