Chapter 5
The Dean of Women surveyed them in confusion for a moment before she folded her hands over her blotter and took on an official air.
"I have decided on what I hope is the fairest thing I can do under the circumstances," she began. "As you no doubt know, Mrs. Webster is hysterical and has told everyone of this situation, thereby making it impossible for you to remain on the campus. If that hadn't happened, I think we probably could have arranged something that would have allowed you both to remain in school."
She looked rather disgusted, Vivian thought. The Dean was young, married, and well-trained; she had a doctorate in clinical psychology. Her impatience with unglued housemothers was not successfully concealed.
The Dean picked up two transcripts and studied them with a rather sad air. "You're both excellent students," she sighed. "You'll have no trouble transfering to another institution, and I have written letters of recommendation for you both."
She handed them an envelope apiece. "There will be nothing on record to suggest an expulsion," she said. "The one thing I can't in conscience do is to recommend you for security clearances, and I'll tell you that right now. However, that's rather far-flung, with your respective career aims. Just don't ever work for the government. Since it's so close to the end of the school year, you may remain in class for the next two weeks. I have found rooms for you both in the town with married faculty members whom you will find congenial, I'm sure. Vivian, you may exchange services as a babysitter for your rent if necessary."
Vivian did not see Louise alone after that day. The older girl refused to have anything to do with her. She was not angry; she was simply crushed and shocked.
Their last conversation occurred in the hallway after the Dean had dismissed them.
"It's no good, this life, no good," Louise whispered, shaking her head. "Look what's happened already! Imagine a whole life like this. Afraid, stealthy, sneaking around-"
"You don't want to get married, do you?" Vivian cried. The thought of Louise with a man was hideous to her.
"No, I just want my work. I want to be a doctor. To hell with everything else!"
She rushed away. Vivian watched her hurry through the door. She was gone. Louise was gone....the only person who had ever made her feel that she belonged.
They caught glimpses of each other on campus during that final two weeks. Each time, Louise locked away, her face unbearably sad.
Vivian moved woodenly through exams, miserable and full of self-hatred. It had been her fault. Why hadn't she locked the door? She had, all those other times. Why...?
Had she secretly wanted to be found out? She thought about the changes in herself that had upset Louise-the haircut, the shirts, the ring. Had she been advertising herself? Had she wanted people to know? Lesbianism had become her identity; what good was an identity if people were not aware of it? Had her mind been working, unconsciously, in that direction?
She thought she had locked the door; she could swear she had. Yet obviously, she had not.
She was miserable without Louise, and more miserable in her guilt. It was her fault. Louise's career had been hurt, and it was her fault....
What would she tell her parents? She would have to tell them something. She could not come back to State, and there was no money to go to a private school. Her own career was finished, and her parents had worked so hard and sacrificed so much to keep her in school.
She could not bear to face them. When school ended, she wrote and told them she was not returning in the fall, nor would she come home. She went to San Francisco and got a dull job in an office, which she quickly came to hate. Sometimes, she sent for art school catalogs, read them, and thought vaguely about going back....someday.
But art school would be a reward, a pleasure, and she did not deserve such things. Everything that had happened was her fault, and she had to punish herself. She did not draw; she threw out, eventually, the work she had brought away from school.
Her identity as an artist was gone; she hated the meaningless job she had. There was only one identity left.
There were plenty of gay bars, and she found them. Each Saturday night she went to one, and she never returned home alone. The bars were always packed full of people who had done the same thing she had done, the thing that had gotten her and Louise thrown out of school. She did not feel guilty when she was in the bars.
After while, she began going to the bars on week nights as well. By the time she had been in San Francisco for a year, she was going every night. She spent all her money on two things-her bar bill and boys' clothes. Vivian was tall, slender and young; she could wear pants made for a teenage boy, and wear them very well. She kept her hair short and became a butch. She was feminine in spirit, but being a butch was more of an identity because there was more of a noticeable external look about it. Louise was gone, art was gone, her family was gone; she had to attach herself to something, so she chose flagrant dykehood.
The weekend hangover became the daily hangover. She found that she could not stop drinking. Human nature reacts to guilt in a perverse way. Instead of saying: I was bad; I will be good, she said: I was bad; I will be worse.
One day, without having slept at all the night before, she went to work still drunk. She was fired on the spot. She took an odd pleasure from the disaster; it proved to her that she was as bad as she had intended to be.
The shortly pressing problem was money. She wanted to be broke, to do without, to live in a dumpy room. It all seemed somehow right and actually appealing. She had fleeting daydreams about Spartan surroundings, imagining a monk's cell for herself. There was pleasure to be gained from the idea of not owning anything: a barren external life symbolized a barren emotional life. If there were nothing and no one around, there would be nothing and no one to hurt.
She took on an almost hypnotic interest in the dried beans at the grocery store. They were terribly cheap; what poor people ate. Another fleeting fantasy-pleasurable, agreeable, even exciting-of herself, cooking those beans on a hot plate.
It was all punishment-exactly what she wanted.
The idea of part-time work had its charms. In the first place, she would have more free time-in which to do nothing. Secondly, it would mean less money. She did not consciously think of these things beforehand; rather, she experienced them after the fact. She gained a sense of uselessness from the first and deprivation from ;he second.
The job happened to be on a newspaper. She went to the personnel office with a typing job in mind, but when they saw that she had had a year as an art major, they sent her to the art department. She worked twenty hours a week doing simple page layout for the society department.
Her hair began to grow long again for the simple reason that she could not afford to have it cut. As she began to look more feminine she attracted the attention of a young sports writer named Timothy Lawler, who began to take her with him to various ball games.
He had a square, unyielding face, an Irish Agrippa. His outlook was Draconian in the extreme. He was ready to re-shape the country according to the eternal truths, the Ten Commandments, and Edgar Guest. At the first game they attended together, Timothy caused a scene by pulling to his feet a man who remained seated during the singing of "God Bless America."
He began a great many of his sentences with the phrase: "If it were up to me...."
If it had been up to Timothy, he would have: put picketers in detention camps, cancelled Social Security, outlawed labor unions, cut off immigration, impeached Earl Warren, armed everybody who agreed with him and investigated everyone who did not.
When Vivian married him, it was a form of punishment-exactly what she wanted Now, twenty years later, she lay awake listening to him snore. Vivian now knew a number of things she hadn't known then. At the time of their marriage, she had been just this side of a pitiful waif and therefore no threat to him. Now, coiffed, well-dressed, sophisticated and possessing the allure that only a woman of forty can have, she was a threat, and had been for several years.
She knew, too, what was the matter with herself. When a woman hits the forties she begins to get an eleventh-hour urge. She becomes either a sexpot or a culture-vulture. Vivian had had a go-around with the former, and was now going into the latter. The thought of studying art again should have been satisfying and exciting to her. Indeed, it had been until tonight.
Why did she have to remember Louise and her past now, after all this time?
She tossed restlessly. Art in her mind, was all tied up with lesbianism and guilt. She was afraid that in taking up the one, she might also take up the other, too.
Maybe, she thought, that's what was wrong in the motel tonight. How depressed and frightened she had become in the dusk-darkened room-it had been just the same time of day when she first slept with Louise. That, plus the knowledge that she would start her art classes tomorrow, had reminded her of too much.