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  "Yeah. I usta think about I was a big movie star. I know whatcha mean."

  "I almost—feel that way now."

  "About me?" Violet asked, coy. Her hand moved, rested where no hand had rested before, and still the coarseness of thick denim between them. Lon shuddered.

  "Maybe you'd rather be with Sassy—"

  Violet shrugged once more. "Oh, I dunno. You're jest as good-lookin'. She got a better car, prob'ly, but you're jest as good-lookin'. The way you act so hard to get you get me all steamed up, honey."

  "I'm not playing games, Violet. I'd like to be a friend of yours." But I'm haunted by a proud tan face, Lon thought by almond-shaped eyes staring indifferently.

  "There's a lot more to it than jest that, hon." Violet's arms lifted to encircle Lon's neck. "Want I should do everything?"

  And it was like poetry, suddenly, with Violet's coarseness melted away in the brush of the pink velvet cheek against Lon's face and the deep forest sweetness of violet cologne. Suddenly like poetry and music, this softly surprising glow of intimacy, with a wave of attraction beyond Lon's understanding undulating between them, rushing toward some destination fearfully, sacredly, irresistibly unknown. And she wondered in that hesitant moment, what would Sassy Gregg do? If Mavis should lift the cherry lips, what would Sassy do? And Lon trembled with not knowing.

  "Jeez, honey, loosen up. I ain't poison."

  "Oh, God, Violet—I don't know..."

  "Go ahead an' kiss me, Lon. You wanna."

  "I don't know. . .!"

  "Holy cow, quit shakin'. Lookit how easy!"

  The little mouth that was so like an 0 mashed against Lon's lips. Too late for a sudden intake of needed air. Violet's face fused with her own and the world around them floated in a nest of lavender spun-glass. It was like holding a delicate Christmas angel in your arms; pastel-tinted and yielding, when always before, when she had reached out to touch, her hands had met the unrelenting coldness of steel and the heart had returned, bruised and uncomprehending, to its hiding place. There to wait for this moment in time.

  Twined and thrown off balance in the exquisite suffocation of their embrace, Lon emerged with a sobbing cry. Yet Violet's excitement appeared to be well-disciplined. Practically, she said, "This damn sweater's so hot. Lemme get it off, hon."

  "Sure," Lon said, breath coming hard.

  "How 'bout you, kid? Jeez, it's roastin' in here." Violet's words muffled in the bulky white wool as she pulled the sweater carefully over her vegetable-colored claim to glamor.

  "Its warm, all right." Lon hesitated.

  "It'll be okay, jest with me." And sliding with an economy of motion out of the purple toreador pants, taking with them all that separated her from Lon's eyes.

  Lon was aware of the beer-daze, yet submitted to it in mechanical, zombie movement. Until, naked and fearful in her muddled anxiety, she stood opposite the Easter-egg roundness, the pink and white and lavender prettiness that flooded her eyes.

  They faced each other for what may have been an eon or perhaps only a grace note in time. And then the coil-spring that had lain wound and waiting freed itself inside Lon. With a cry that culminated all the cries suppressed within her, that echoed the muffled sobs of lonely nights when the softness was only a pillow, she grasped at the proffered body. Her sudden movement threw them to the couch, Violet squealing her delight. And Lon's kisses were the repeated, thirsty gulps of a body parched, a spirit long dehydrated. Kisses prodded into frenzied repetition by the tinny, ecstatic sound that reached her ears: "Oh, Jeez, Lon! Oh, Christ, you're ketchin' on—" Violet voicing her approval, the beer-numbness shutting out Lon's fear of venturing to where Violet's approval became an inarticulate sound, like the moaning of wind.

  * * *

  Long afterward, like a dreamer shaken from sleep, she heard Violet speak again, this time with an awed reverence. "Holy Mother, you're the livin' end!"

  And with a calm that had not fallen upon her in all the years she could remember, Lon observed that the bleeding heart on the wall had been treated with luminous paint. If the lamp light had been turned off, she thought, it would have glowed in the dark.

  CHAPTER 5

  There were moments in the last weeks of June, and in the early days of the July that followed, when the tiny pin-pricks of dimly perceived guilt would threaten to puncture Lon's lungs; times when the growing knowledge of her new and shrouded sisterhood would leave her gasping hungrily for familiar air.

  She might be shampooing the Wilson's Pomeranian, or watching a ball game on television with a nervously eager father and a proportionately disinterested Eddie, Jr., when it would strike her that the Lesbian sorority went about its clandestine business behind higher and more forbidding walls than those she herself had constructed to shield the Island from others—and others from herself. Not once did she delude herself that what she shared with the gayest of all the gay kids transcended the senses to reach that inner void reserved for love. But on mornings after a rite of the flesh with Violet, Lon would revivify the scene, prodding her memory to bring it so clearly into focus that her thighs would itch against the rough-textured mohair sofa. And the taste of purple-plum lipstick would lie heavy in her mouth.

  At times such as these, Lon would not think, as she had thought of the Island, I have a secret!—but, more precisely, I am a secret! For it was the very secrecy of her carnal bouts with Violet that excused them from examination by her conscience. Like the mystic rituals of her island, these moments of sensual pleasure were apart from that inhospitable world outside,—and, in this sense, they were experiences new, but not alien. Concerned as they were with her personal flesh, they were not mysteries outside herself. "I am a secret!" And what is less intriguing, less worthy of attention than an open book—which is what Lon conceived herself to be to herself?

  If she devoted less and still less time to the Island, it was, she told herself, because Violet and Mavis—and others chosen from the gay crowd would some day fit into her long-range plans. It was essential to know them and know them well. So that getting to know them involved two, sometimes three evenings each week spent at The 28%—then the scarlet-lighted release with Violet following in what Lon accepted now as necessary routine. Ecstasy measured by the length of the carnival season. For they never discussed which couch would accommodate their passion when Violet's mother had dispensed the year's last hot-dog.

  Evenings at the club were costly and more time was consumed in supporting them; Lon, happily, was needed on Mondays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at Beckwith's Pet Paradise. Bathing and Clipping our Specialty! Her salary was divided proportionately among the demands of her budding social life; gasoline, beer, cigarettes (though just for the effect), mints and Sen-Sen to counteract the latter two items before she drove home from Violet's, polished cotton peggers, white dress shirts and a violently red sweater-vest that Violet praised as looking sharp with Lon's now professionally clipped dark hair.

  The wardrobe was Lon's most practical investment, for it was important, along with absorbing vocabulary and gestures, to dress in the sharpest butch fashion. Clothes, and the male swagger with which they were worn, established a competitive camaraderie with the other butches. They were as much a part of the pattern as the suggestive quips that never failed to produce the desperate gay laughter. Or dancing with a variety of fems only long enough to establish Lon's desirability, yet never long enough to let any one doubt that the popular, exotic, crazy, way-out violet girl who knew all the kids had staked a claim on her.

  Already attractive by virtue of her freshness in the jaded hunting ground of The 28%, Lon improved upon the other butches' style by remembering and imitating the taciturn aloofness and strength of Sassy Gregg. Lon learned from the fem reaction—and gained a further confident appeal from the knowledge—that she was not "stuck" with Violet. But she continually searched with her eyes the amber dimness of The 28% in the even dimmer hope that one night Sassy Gregg's girl would come again. Mavis.

  Mavis. Lo
n would murmur the name over suds-whitened boxers and shivering spaniels. The proud features would evade her memory, but not the essence of the girl whose skin was recalled now not as richly creamed coffee, but something less opaque. Tea with milk; translucent and delicate. A collie would whine in the flea-soap bath and a multi-colored mongrel bitch would spray the air with water in a frenzy of drying herself. And Lon would repeat the name. Mavis what? Jus' Mavis. She would come to the club one night and this time Lon would meet her on equal ground. For how long can a Second High Priestess stay away? And Mr. Beckwith, who knew more about sarcoptic mange than any man alive and was prepared to prove it if someone would spare the listening time—Mr. Beckwith would make of her a captive audience while she worked, unknowing that his wisdom fell upon deaf ears. Mavis!

  * * *

  Then, too, the time Lon had once devoted to contents of the bottom desk drawer was devoured even more voraciously by Lon's mother. The questioning face would look up from committee plans, nervous fingers would tug at stray ends of the chemically-fried hair. And the thin voice would climb a ladder of doubt and suspicion.

  "Are you expecting me to believe that's all you do? Just sit around this girl's house? This girl that you never mentioned before and I've never seen?"

  "That's about all. We see a movie at the drive-in once in a while."

  "What are her parents like?"

  "Nice."

  "Is that an answer, Lorraine? Nice. I think we deserve to know something about her family, considering the time you spend at that house. Is that all you can say? Nice?"

  "I don't talk to them much. They seem okay."

  "Does this Violet ever invite anyone else over?" Pronouncing the name as though it had to be a myth. And wringing three syllables from the one-word question, "Boys?"

  "No."

  "I suppose you meet them at the drive-in?”

  "We see some of the boys from school. Sure. You wave and say 'hi.'"

  "But you don't sit in cars with them?" Her eyes asserting, "You do, you do!"

  "Oh, Christopher!"

  "I'm entitled to a decent answer, young lady!"

  "No, we don't sit in the cars and neck with boys!"

  "Don't shout at me, young lady! Last night it was until twelve-thirty. Saturday night it was one o'clock in the morning. Dragging yourself in like an alley-cat for all the neighbors to see. Now I'm asking you to tell me what it is that you do."

  "I've told you. We sit around. Just talking.”

  "Until one in the morning?"

  "I had a flat that night. You don't have to believe me if you don't want to."

  And there would be a tenuous silence before the nerve-scraping interview would proceed, Lon thinking, she expects me to lie. She wouldn't believe the truth and she doesn't believe me when I lie. But she expects it. And the next phase taking on the despicable confidential tactic:

  "I don't see why you don't invite your girlfriend here. You'd think that your father and I didn't like young people."

  "She doesn't have a way out. If she comes here, I have to go and get her and then drive her home. Four trips back and forth."

  "She just might be interested in our young people's group at church. You should be interested, seems to me. It's very embarrassing to me, Lorraine, your not attending those meetings when your own mother supervises the Sunday School."

  "Sorry."

  "Don't you like the other young people?"

  "Will you leave me alone? Please?"

  "Is someone hurting you? Is it so terrible to have your mother ask a few questions? I have a right to know what you're doing when you leave this house."

  "Okay, I told you. Can I go back to my room?"

  "May!"

  "May I go back to my room, Mother?"

  "I have a few things to say to you first." Then, softening the shrill voice to the painfully studied mother-daughter tone, "You'll meet lots of nice boys at church, dear. You remember that membership contest... I was so pleased with the results. Everyone was amazed, though, of course, they never appreciated the work that went into the planning. And what I'm trying to tell you, dear, is that you don't have to sneak around behind my back to meet boys..."

  "I don't sneak around behind..."

  "… because it's a perfectly natural interest If you'd pay some attention to the way you look...”

  "I don't give a damn about boys!”

  "Lorraine!”

  "Well, I don't."

  "Don't raise your voice at me, young lady. Don't you dare raise your voice at me! You aren't leaving this house again until I know where you're going. Is that clear?"

  "Okay, okay."

  "That's understood?"

  "Yes, yes, yes!"

  "Catch me believing you spend all that time with a girl. I wasn't born yesterday, Lorraine. I've raised two daughters and I don't mind telling you I did a good job. When they went out at night I met their escorts at the door!"

  "Why don't you hire a detective and have him follow me, while you're at it?"

  "That will be enough, young lady!"

  "Well, don't go accusing me of things I don't do."

  Lon stamped away from the argument with her mother's clinching point shrilling behind her: "I know some things you don't know, young lady!"

  She had been saying that for a long time, Lon thought, closing the bedroom door with pointed finality. Mother had always known things that no one else knew; why the custodian at the Junior High had been fired—the size of the mortgage on the Women's Club—who would preside over the PTA in the coming year. She knew everything except how to tear aside the curtain that separated her from a third daughter who could not be like the first and the second. She was a woman burying herself in her own excavation, digging out new inconsequential secrets, so that she could impart secret civic knowledge, but never finding time to listen, except to compare the called-for answers with answers preconceived. And never understanding a problem that could not be resolved by appointing a committee. Until now, at last—and Lon permitted herself the shadow of an ironic, satisfied smile—now, at last, while she assumed the sins of boy and girl in the back row of the drive-in, the third daughter of Mrs. Harris knew something that Mrs. Harris didn't know.

  CHAPTER 6

  "Yeah, maybe the cute colored one said fer you t' call," Violet argued, "but that society one didn't give me any come-on. I wouldn' take the chance a callin' an' gettin' snobbed!"

  They sat at their favorite corner table among the 28%, with the restlessness playing between them more palpably than the cry of the juke. Someone, the record wailed, had stolen the keys to someone else's Cadillac car. And Lon considered Violet's logic carefully. If pride made a telephone call unthinkable, and since it was unlikely that Sassy would return to their hangout, what was the matter with looking for her, and for Mavis, elsewhere? Not that the present arrangement was not mutually satisfying. But as Violet amplified, "It's a good deal, the way we got it. But we're the broad-minded types, hon. I could even be broad-minded about you makin' a play fer dark cloud, 'cause I gotta admit she's sharp-lookin'. And, Jeez, how I could go fer that stuck-up butch!" Then, apologizing for Sassy, "She's gotta be snooty, kid. She's society."

  Violet was an exception, Lon decided, for nowhere in The 28% had she encountered signs of prejudice. "Regardless of race, religion or color," a phrase hackneyed and insincere from too much use, was faithfully observed here, where the only ticket of admission was being gay. Still, Violet was not unreasonable. "Wanna go look aroun'?" she asked.

  "It's up to you," Lon told her, squashing down enthusiasm.

  Violet fluttered the weighted lashes. "Not jealous, sweetie?"

  "Why should I be?" Then, in her newer vein, "Why the hell should I be?"

  "Well, I'm pretty loyal to Rags an' Betty, but there's other gay joints."

  "Where?"

  "There's this mixed joint. The boys go there, too. Over on the beach."

  "What makes you think they'd be there?"

  "They gotta hang out
somewhere, don't they? Then there's this place up in the canyon."

  "What canyon? Mint, Topanga, Coldwater... I know a million canyons."

  "Oh, some crappy Spanish name. I ferget. You have to go in with somebody who goes there regular, so that's out. Tonight, anyways."

  "Do you know how to get to the beach place?"

  "Yeah, I been there once. Wanna go?"

  Lon arched her brows, feigning indifference. They finished their beers before they got up to leave.

  "Hey, you're leaving early," Rags called to them. And then it was her turn to arch the eyebrows, stretching her mouth into a grim Rags smile. "I know how it is, kids. Have fun!"

  * * *

  The Mermaid, unlike the club from which Lon and Violet had departed, was not a teen-age hangout. In fact, a sign to the effect that minors were positively not admitted had been dutifully posted at the door. If the law were waived at the entrance of the Misses Harris and Polivka, it was not a deliberate violation of the statute, for the proprietor had retired to the beach with her current friend and the girls behind the bar were too entranced by lavender hair and the skin-tight white jersey dress into which Violet's roundness had been poured—much too startled—to concern themselves with the age of her pseudo-bored escort.

  "Wow, am I gettin' the once-over," Violet whispered ecstatically. There was no room for them at the tiny tables, the little brown cigarette-scarred tables with their tincan-protected candlelight and the faces around them blurred in the smoke haze. So they pushed their way past others for whom there was no room and stood awkwardly near the bar, Violet eyeing the prospects and Lon noting that half the patrons looked so elegant that they must be slumming, the other half so deliberately stamped with the hoodlum label that they seemed crashers at a swank affair.