on Christmas Day in the Islands. Hot? Mamma mia! I nearly passed out myself. Melted almost as fast as the goo I was giving away. But I loved those kids.”
“Then why aren’t you married? Why don’t you have some kids of your own?” she prodded. It seemed peculiar to her that so affable a man, especially one who liked children, should be single.
“Beebo, my ravishing love, why don’t you get married and have some kids?” he countered, disconcerting her.
“A woman has to do the having,” she said. “All a man has to do is get her pregnant.”
“All,” Jack repeated, rolling his eyes.
“Besides, I don’t want to get married,” she added, her eyes veiled and troubled.
“Hell, everybody gets married,” Jack said, watching her closely. Maybe she would open up a bit now and talk about what really mattered.
“Everybody but you,” she said.
He hunched his shoulders and grinned. “Touché,” he said. Then he opened the oven door to squint at the bubbling ravioli, and drew it out with a potholder, spooning it onto their plates.
They sat down at the table and Jack told her, “This is the greatest Italian food you’ll ever eat. Pasquini on Thompson Street makes it up.” He glanced up and found Beebo studying him. “What’s the matter? Don’t like pasta?”
“Jack, have you ever been in love?” she said.
Jack smiled and swallowed a forkful of food before he answered. She was asking him, as circuitously as possible, to tell her about life. She didn’t want him to guess it, but that was what she wanted.
“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.”
