Beebo Brinker

“It’s no disgrace to be scared, Beebo. Only to act like it.”

“I feel as if that damn silly bar—the people in it—are a sort of challenge,” she said, fumbling to express it justly. “As if I have to go back or I’ll never know …” She shook her head with a self-conscious smile. “That’s a hell of a place to go looking for yourself.”

“Hell of a place to go looking for Mona,” he said. “I don’t know though, pal. It has to come sooner or later. It’s time you learned a thing or two. You’re naïve, but you’re no fool. Go on—but go slow.”

Mona was not at the Colophon that night, or for many nights afterward. In a way, Beebo was relieved. She wanted to meet her, but she wanted time to meet other people too, to see other places, and cruise around the Village without any pressure on her to prove things to herself. Or to a worldly girl like Mona Petry. Beebo was still a stranger in a strange town, unsure, and grateful for a chance to learn unobserved.

She would sit and gaze for hours at the girls in the bars or passing in the streets. She wanted to talk to them, see what they were like. She was often drawn to one enough to daydream about her, but she never mentioned it to Jack. Still, she was eagerly curious about the Lesbian mores and social codes. The gay girls seemed so smooth and easy with each other, talking about shared experiences in a special slang, like members of an exclusive sorority.

Beebo, watching them as the days and weeks passed, became slowly aware how much she envied them. She wanted to join the in-group. And she would watch them longingly and wonder if their talk was ever about her. It was.

A few of Jack’s friends, who had met her in his company, would come up and talk with her, and knowing for certain that they were Lesbians gave Beebo a vibrant pleasure, whether or not the girls themselves were exciting. Looking at one she would think, She knows how it feels to want what I want. I could make her happy. I know it. Even the word “Lesbian,” which had offended her before, began to sound wonderful in her ears.

She shocked herself with such candid thoughts, but that was only at first. Little by little, it began to seem beautiful to her that two women could come together with passion and intelligence and make a life with and for each other; make a marriage. She dreamed of lovely, sophisticated women at her feet, aware even as she dreamed that she hadn’t yet the savoir faire to win such a woman. But she was afire with ambition to acquire it.

She would walk into a bar, order a beer, and sit alone and silent through an evening. In her solitude, she seemed mysterious to the laughing chattering people around her. They began to point her out when she came in.

At first, ignorance and inexperience kept Beebo aloof. But she quickly understood that her refusal to be sociable made her the target of a lot of smiling speculation. When she got over being afraid of the situation, it amused her. The fact that she attracted girls, even ones she knew she would never pursue, was almost supernaturally strange and exciting to her. She submitted to their teasing questions with an enigmatic smile until she realized that one or two had worked themselves up to infatuation pitch over her.

There followed a period of elation when she walked into Julian’s or the Cellar and saw the eyes she knew had waited all night to look into hers turn and flash in her direction. She always passed them by and went to a seat at the bar. But each time she came closer to stopping and answering a smile or asking someone to join her in a beer. And still, she couldn’t find Mona.

The only wrong note in the tune was a boy, slight and fine-featured, who watched her and seemed to have persuaded himself that he loved her. He fell for her with an awkward crush that embarrassed them both. Often, at the end of an evening when he was pretty high, he would approach her and timidly offer to buy her a drink.

Beebo kept turning him down, kindly but firmly. He always flinched when she said no, and she pitied him. He had a gentle appealing face, fair in the way of extreme youth. She guessed he must be a couple of years younger than she, and wondered how he could buy drinks in a bar.

“I’m sorry, I’m just leaving,” she would tell him.

And he would watch her go, wistfully. He looked tired and malnourished, and she wondered once if it would offend him to be offered a free sandwich. She never quite got up the nerve to find out.

At home, Jack did not press her. But her silence regarding her activities at night worried him and put a strain between them. She knew that Jack was waiting for her to talk about it, and she wanted to be honest with him more than ever. He had been patient, humorously tolerant with her. And she knew that he was a man of the world. He had made it clear that he enjoyed the friendship of many delightful gay women, that he approved of them, and that he thought she might enjoy their company.

But he had not said, “Oh, come on, Beebo. You’re gay. Admit it. We both know it.” He had, however, come closer than she knew to saying it. And it was hard for Jack himself to realize that his hints and jokes were couched in a language still foreign to her in many ways. Often they went over her head or were taken at face value; saved and worried over, but never fathomed.

So she found herself hung up on a dilemma: she was sure of his friendship as long as she was an observer of the gay scene, not a sister-in-the-bonds. But what would he say if she told him she had a desperate crush on Mona Petry with the long black hair? Or that she got dizzy with the joy of being in a crowd of gay girls; near enough to touch, to overhear, to look and look and look until they whirled through her dreams at night?

Would he say, You can play with the matches but don’t get burned? Would he pity her? Turn on his wit? Would he—could he—take it with the easy calm he showed in other circumstances?

She thought he could. She felt closer to him now that she had spent nearly two months under his roof. She knew his heart was big, and she had seen him in a Lesbian bar talking with his friends there. He was not being condescending. He valued them.

Perhaps more than anything, she was persuaded by the need to talk it out; the need for help and comfort. And that was Jack’s forte.

Beebo and Jack were watching a TV show one evening when he asked her, during the commercial, why she wasn’t going out that night. “Don’t tell me you gave up on Mona,” he teased.

Instead of answering, she told him about the boy who was in love with her. “His name is Pat,” she said. “The bartender told me. He looks hungry, as if he needs to be cared for.” She laughed. “I was never much for maternal instincts—but he seems to bring them out.”

“I’d like to meet him. He might bring mine out, too,” Jack said.

“Why don’t you come with me Friday? He’s always at Julian’s.”

Jack looked away. “I’ve been trying to give you a free rein,” he said. “You don’t want me along. I’ll find him myself.”

“I do want you along,” she said. “I like your company.”

“More than the girls’?” he grinned.

She felt herself tense all over. There had been so many chances lately to talk to him, and she had run away from them all. Now, she felt a surge of defiance, a will to have it out. He had a right to know at least as much about her as she knew about herself. He had earned it through his generosity and affection.

“I read a book once,” she said clumsily. “Under my covers at night—when I was fifteen. It was about two girls who loved each other. One of them committed suicide. It hit me so hard I wanted to die, too. That’s about as close as I’ve come to reality in my life, Jack. Until now.”

He leaned over and switched off the television. The room was so quiet they could hear themselves breathing.

“I was kicked out of school,” she went on hesitantly, “because I looked so much like a boy, they thought I must be acting like one. Chasing girls. Molesting them. Everything I ever did to a girl, or wanted to do or dreamed of doing, happened in my imagination. The trouble was, everybody else in Juniper Hill had an imagination, too. And they had me doing all these things for real.” She shut her eyes and tried to force her heart to slow down, just by thinking about it.

“And you never did?” he said. “You never tried? There must have been girls, Beebo—”

“There were, but all I had to do was talk to one and her name was mud. I wouldn’t do that to anybody I cared for.”

Jack stared at her, wondering what geyser of emotion must be waiting to erupt from someone so intense, so yearning, and so rigidly denied all her life.

“My father tried to teach me not to hate myself because I looked like hell in gingham frills,” she said. “But when you see people turn away and laugh behind their hands … It makes you wonder what you really are.” She looked at him anxiously, and then she said it. “I’ve never touched a girl I liked. Never made a pass or spoken a word of love to a single living girl. Does that make me normal, Jack? … And yet I know I could, and I think now I will, and God knows I want to desperately. Does that make me gay?” She spoke rapidly, stopping abruptly as if her voice had gone dead in her throat at the word “gay.”

“Well, first,” he said kindly, “you’re Beebo Brinker, human being. If you are gay, that’s second. Some girls like you are gay, some aren’t. Your body is boyish, but there’s nothing wrong with it.” His voice was reassuring.

“Nothing, except there’s a boy inside it,” she said. “And he has to live without all the masculine trimmings other boys take for granted. Jack, long before I knew anything about sex, I knew I wanted to be tall and strong and wear pants and ride horses and have a career … and never marry a man or learn to cook or raise babies. Never.”

“That’s still no proof you’re gay,” he said, going slowly, letting her convince herself.

“I’m not even built like a girl. Girls are knock-elbowed and big-hipped. They can’t throw or run or—look at my arm, Jack. I was the best pitcher on the team whenever they let me play.” She rolled her sleeve back and showed him a well-muscled arm, browned and veined and straight as a boy’s.

“I see,” he murmured.

“It was the parents who gave me the worst of it,” she said. “The kids weren’t too bad till I got to high school. But you know what happens then. You get hairy and you get pimples and you have to start using a deodorant.”

Jack laughed silently behind his cigarette.

“And the boys get big and hot and anxious, like a stallion servicing a mare.”

Jack swallowed, feeling himself move. “And the girls?”

“The girls,” she sighed, “get round and soft and snippy.”

“And instead of round and soft, you got hot and anxious?”

“All of a sudden, I was Poison Ivy Brinker,” she confirmed. “Nobody wanted whatever it was I had. My brother Jim said I wasn’t a boy and I wasn’t a girl, and I had damn well better be one or the other or he’d hound me out of school himself.”

“What did you do?”

“I tried to be like the rest. But not to please that horse’s ass.” Her farmer’s profanity tickled him. “I did it for Dad. He thought I was adjusting pretty well, and that was his consolation. I never told him how bad it was.”