Beebo Brinker

“I fall in love twice a year,” he said. “Once in the fall and once in the spring. In the fall the kids come back to school, a few blocks from here. There are plenty of newcomers waiting to be loved the wrong way in September. They call me Wrong Way Mann.” He glanced up at her, but instead of taking the hint, she was puzzled by it.

“I didn’t know there was a wrong way,” she said earnestly.

“In love, as in everything else,” he said. “I just—well. Let’s say I have a talent for goofing things up.” He wondered if he ought to be frank with her about himself. It might relieve her, might make it possible for her to talk about herself then. But, looking at her face again, he decided against it. The whole subject scared her still. She wanted to learn and yet she feared that what she learned might be ugly, or more frightening than her ignorance.

He would have to go slowly with her, teach her gently what she was, and teach her not to hate the word for it: Lesbian. Such a soft word, mellifluous on the tongue; such a stab in the heart to someone very young, unsure, and afraid.

“And in the spring?” she was asking. “You fall in love then, too?”

“That’s just the weather, I guess. I fall in love with everybody in the spring. The butcher, the baker, the candlestickmaker.” He smiled at her face. She was amused and startled by the male catalog, and afraid to let her amusement show. Jack took her off the hook. “Good, hm?” He nodded at the food.

Beebo took a bite without answering. “What’s it like to live down here? I mean—” She cleared her throat. “In the Village?”

“Just one mad passionate fling after another,” he said. “Try the cheese.” He passed it to her.

“With the butcher and the baker?” she said humorously and made him laugh.

At last he said, “Well, honey, it’s like everyplace else. You eat three squares a day, you sleep eight hours a night, you work and earn money and obey the laws … well, most of the laws. The only difference between here and Juniper Hill is, we stay open all night.”

She laughed. And suddenly she said, “You know, this is good,” and began to eat with an appetite.

“So’s the salad.” He pushed the bowl toward her. “Now you tell me something, Little Girl Lost,” he said. “Were you ever in love?”

She looked down at her plate, uncomfortably self-conscious.

“Oh, come on,” he teased. “I’m not going to blackmail you.”

“Not real love,” she said. “Puppy love, I guess.”

“That kind can hurt as much as the other,” Jack said, and Beebo was grateful for his perception. “But it ought to be fun now and then, too.”

“Maybe it ought to be, but it never was,” she said. “I guess I’m like you, Jack. I goof everything up.”

He pointed his fork at her plate. “You’ve stopped eating again,” he said. “I want you to taste your future employer’s cooking.”

“My what?” she exclaimed.

“Pasquini needs a delivery boy. Can you drive?”

“I can drive, but can I be a boy?” she said with such a rueful face that he laughed aloud.

“You can wear slacks,” he said. “That’s the best I could do. The rest is up to you.”

His laughter embarrassed her, as if perhaps she had gone too far with her remark, and she said as seriously as possible, “I learned to drive on a truck with six forward gears.”

“This is a panel truck.”

“Duck soup. God, I hope he’ll take me, Jack. I have exactly ten bucks between me and the poorhouse. I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself.”

“Well, you haven’t got the job yet, honey. But I told Pasquini you had lots of experience and you’d do him the favor of dropping by in the morning.”

“Some favor!” she grinned. “Me, who couldn’t find Times Square if my life depended on it, making deliveries in this tangled-up part of town.”

“You’ll catch on.”

“What are the Pasquinis like?” she said.

“You’ll like Marie. She’s Pete’s wife. Does all the cooking. It’s her business, really. It was just a spaghetti joint when Pete’s dad ran it. After he died Pete took over and damn near went bankrupt. Then he married Marie. She cooks and keeps the books—like nobody can. She used to be a pretty girl, too, till she had too many kids and too much pizza.”

“What about Pete?”

“I don’t know what to tell you about that guy. I’ve known him slightly for the past ten years, but no one knows him very well. As far as Marie’s concerned, he’s her number one delivery boy. As a husband and a father, he’s her idea of a bust.”

“You mean he cheats?”

“He’s out every night of the week with weird girls on his arm. As if he were proud of it. He picks out the oddballs—you know, the ones who haven’t cut their hair since they were four years old, and wear dead-white make-up and cotton lisle stockings.”

“Lousy taste,” Beebo said, but when Jack smiled she looked away. She wasn’t going to give him the chance to ask what her own taste might be.

Jack paused, sensing her reticence, and then he went on, “Pete used to run a gang when he was in his teens. He was our local color.”

“You mean he’s a juvenile delinquent?” Beebo asked naively. “Are you sending me to work for a crook?”

“He’s an ex-j.d.,” Jack chuckled. “He went on to better things the day they broke his zip gun.”

“My God! Is he a criminal, Jack?”

“No, honey, don’t panic. He’s just a kook. He’s more of a loner now. It comes naturally to him to skulk around. But as far as I can tell, he only skulks after dark. And after Beat broads. He hasn’t been arrested since he was nineteen, and that’s been ten years.”

“He sounds like the ideal employer,” Beebo cracked.

“You could do worse; you with ten bucks in your pocket,” Jack reminded her. “Besides, he’s lived here all his life. He may be odd but you get used to him.”

“Just how ‘odd’ is he?”

“Honey, you’ve got to be a little odd down here, or you lose your membership card,” he said. “Besides, I’m not asking you to cut your veins and mingle blood with him. Just pass out the pizzas and take his money once a week.”

Beebo shook her head and laughed. “Well, if you say so,” she said. “I guess I’m safe as long as I don’t wear cotton lisle stockings.”

She got the job. Pete Pasquini had more deliveries than he could handle alone. Marie’s sauces, salads, preserves, and pastas were making a name and making a pile. The orders were going up so fast that it would take a second driver to deliver them all.

Beebo, dressed in a clean white shirt, sweater, and tan slacks, faced Pete at eight in the morning. She was somewhat intimidated by the looks of him and by Jack’s thumb sketch of the night before. He was a dour-faced young Italian-American with blue jowls and a down-turned mouth. If he ever smiled—Beebo doubted it—he would have been almost handsome, for his teeth were straight and white, and he had a peculiarly sensual mouth beneath his plum-dark eyes. He looked mean and sexy—a combination that instantly threw Beebo high on her guard.

“You’re Beebo?” he said, looking up at her with an order pad and pencil poised in his hands.

“Yes,” she said. “Jack Mann sent me. I—he—said you needed a driver.”

He smirked a little. Probably his smile for the day, she thought. “You’re as tall as I am,” he observed, as if pleased about it; pleased at least to make her self-conscious about it.