After a moment she resumed, trying to keep her voice level, “Now I want to model a couple of days a week. Is that so very awful? Am I really a case for the bughouse because I want to escape once in a while?” She tried, with her voice, to make it seem ridiculous.
“If it were only once in a while,” he said sadly. They were silent again. Beth had stopped her pacing and he look at her lovely figure, shadowy beneath the nylon film of nightie. He wanted her so much … so much. At last he said, quietly, “Well, I guess it’s better than losing you to Uncle John for half a year.”
She turned around slowly and her face was grateful. “Thanks, Charlie,” she said. “I would have done it anyway, but—” She was sorry she had said it. He looked so despondent, utterly stripped of his husbandly influence, almost a stranger to her. “But I wanted you to approve,” she went on hastily. “I wanted to be able to tell you about it and everything.” He refused to look at her. “She—she’s doing it for nothing.” Beth added, hoping to make it more acceptable to him.
He laughed unpleasantly. “She’s doing it for something, Beth. Not money, maybe, but something. Vega’s not the kind of girl who does things for nothing.”
She went around the bed and sat down beside him. “Look at me, honey,” she said. “I want to thank you.”
“I know,” he answered, but the thought of her kiss suddenly made him weak and a little sick. He sat up, turning to give her his back and was suddenly mortified to feel her lips on it in a brief shy salute. He froze.
“Beth,” he said sternly. “Vega is a strange girl. You should know …”
“Know what?” she said eagerly.
“Cleve has told me,” he said reluctantly. “She’s been married a couple of times.”
“To whom? Beth interrupted, astonished. Vega? Married?
“Well, I didn’t know them. The first marriage was ideal, by your lights: she lived in Chicago and he lived in Boston. For eight years. Cleve said she never let him in her bed. His name was Ray something. She calls him ex-Ray.”
Beth had to grin at his back. It began to sound more like the elegant enigma she knew. “Who was the other one?” she asked.
“Some good-timer, backslapping sort of guy. A roommate of Cleve’s once, before I knew him. Younger than Vega. It’s only been two years since she divorced that one. I guess he didn’t get past the bedroom door either, but he did get into her bank account. Spent all her money and then disappeared. Nobody knows where he is. She never talks about him.”
“Well,” Beth said cautiously, “that’s not so strange. I mean, she obviously wasn’t a good marriage risk, but lots of women have behaved that way. Maybe the men she picked weren’t such prizes either.”
He shrugged. “Maybe.” He turned to look at her. “She lives alone with her mother and her grandfather. Cleve says they’re a trio of cuckoo birds. You can’t get him over there. Except Christmas and birthdays, and he only goes because he feels he has to.”
“Do they really hate each other—Cleve and Vega?” Beth asked.
“Only on the bad days,” he said. “Now and then they quit speaking to each other. But then their mother breaks a leg or Gramp poisons the stew and they get back together. Takes a family calamity, though. Right now they’re as friendly as they ever are, according to Cleve. I don’t know why it should be that way. Doesn’t seem natural.”
“They’re both such nice people. It’s a shame,” she said.
Charlie couldn’t stand to look at her any longer and not touch her. He put his arms around her and felt her nestle against him with a shattering relief. After a few minutes he heaved himself over her to turn out the dresser lamp, returning fearfully to her arms, only to find them open.
“Is this my thanks for giving in?” he said. It was flat and ironical. He couldn’t help the dig. But she took it in stride by simply refusing to answer him. He made up for several weeks of involuntary virtue that night.
Before they slept, Charlie had to say one last thing. He saved it until he knew they were both too tired to stay awake and argue. He didn’t want to ruin things. She lay very close to him, in his arms, too worn out for her usual tears of frustration, and he whispered to her, “Beth?”
“Hm?”
“Darling, I have to know this. Don’t be angry with me, just tell the truth like you did earlier. Beth, I—” It was hard to say, so awkward. He was afraid of humiliating her, rousing her temper again. “I keep thinking of Laura,” he said at last.
“Laura?” Beth woke up a little, opening her eyes.
“Yes. I mean, I can’t help but wonder if you—you know how you felt about her—if it’s the modeling that interests you or if it’s—Vega.”
In the blank dark he couldn’t see her face and he waited, fearful, for her answer. God, don’t let her explode, he prayed.
Beth turned away from him, her face dissolved in tears. “It’s the modeling!” she said in a fierce whisper. And they said no more to each other that night.
VEGA’S STUDIO WAS LOCATED ON THE SECOND FLOOR OF A building that housed an exclusive dress shop and a luggage and notions shop. It was an expensive place to rent and Beth was rather surprised to see how bare it was. There was a small reception room which was tastefully decorated, though there was space for more chairs in it. There was a door marked “office,” which was closed, and there was a large, nearly empty studio room with eight or ten folding chairs, the kind you sit on at PTA meetings.
Beth peered into the studio hesitantly, and instantly Vega materialized from a small group of high school girls who had surrounded her while she spoke to them. There was silence while she walked, regally lovely in flowing velvet, both hands extended to Beth. The teens examined the newcomer with adolescent acuteness, and Beth took their silent appraisal uneasily.
Vega reached her. “Darling, how are you?” she said in her smooth controlled voice, and kissed Beth on the mouth. Beth was shocked speechless. She stared at Vega with big startled eyes.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Vega laughed, seeing her expression. “The doctor says I’m socially acceptable. The TB has been inactive for almost two years—really a record.”
But it wasn’t the infected lung, the possibility of catching TB, that upset Beth. That, in fact, never occurred to her. It was the sudden electric meeting of mouths, the impudence of it, the feel of it, the teen-aged audience taking it all in. Beth was piqued. Vega had no business treating her so familiarly. Still, it was impossible to make a fuss over it, as though she were guilty of some indecent complicity with Vega.
“How are you?” she said uncertainly.
The knot of girls began to talk and giggle again, and Vega turned to them. “Okay, darlings, you can go now,” she said. “That’s all for this afternoon.”
She took Beth’s arm and led her into the studio while the girls filed past them and out, still staring. Beth began to be seriously disturbed. Vega behaved as if they were sisters, at the very least, and at the worst … Beth turned to her abruptly.
“Vega, I hate to say anything, but really, I—I—” She paused, embarrassed. Vega would surely take it the wrong way. Who but a girl with a problem would take the kiss, the familiarity, so hard? What, after all, was so dreadful about a kiss between two women? Even if it was so unexpected, even if it was so direct that a trace of moisture from Vega’s lips remained on Beth’s own.
I’d only look like a fool to complain, Beth thought.