Chapter One

      JUNE 8: God help me. God help me to stand it. Today was our second anniversary. If I have to go on living with her I’ll go crazy. But if I leave her—? I’m afraid to think what will happen. Sometimes she’s not rational. But what can I do? Where can I turn?

       That damn party was awful. Anniversaries are supposed to be happy affairs, but this one was more like a wake. Everybody got drunk and sang songs, but there was always that corpse there in the middle of the room … the corpse of that romance. Jack got terribly drunk, as usual. There’s another one. If he doesn’t crack up it won’t be because he hasn’t tried. What’s wrong with us all, anyway? What’s the use of living when things are like this all the time?

      Laura shut her diary with a sudden furtive gesture, her pen still poised, and strained her ears at a sound. She thought she heard the front door open. It would be Beebo coming back. But it was only the dachshund, Nix, scratching himself on a stool in the kitchen. Laura sighed in relief and turned back to the diary. She ordinarily kept it locked in a little steel strongbox on the closet floor, and she wrote in it only when she was alone, in the evenings before Beebo got home from work.

      Beebo had never read it—or seen it, in fact. It was Laura’s own, Laura’s aches and pains verbalized, Laura’s heart dissected and wept over, in washable blue ink. If Beebo ever saw it she would tear it up in a frenzy. She would make Laura swallow it, because it did not say very nice things about Beebo. And Beebo always did things in a big way, the good along with the bad.

      Laura opened the notebook once more and wrote a last brief entry: Jack asked me to marry him again … but I could never marry a man, not even him. Never.

      Then she closed it quickly and took it back to the closet and locked it in the strongbox. She sat down from sheer inertia on the closet floor and picked up a shoe. It was one of her pumps, rather long and narrow—too large to be really fashionable. But it had the proper shape and the newest styled heel. Beebo liked to see her smartly dressed. She cared more about that than Laura did herself. Laura had worn these shoes to the unfortunate anniversary party two nights before.

      Beebo was still hungover from that long night of dreary festivity. Jack was always hungover, so he didn’t count. As for Laura, she had learned from Beebo to drink too much herself, and she was learning at the same time how it feels the next day. Bad. Plain bad.

      It had been a strange night, with moments of wild hilarity and stretches of gloom when everybody drank as if they made their living at it. Laura remembered Jack arriving ahead of everybody else with a couple of bottles under his arm. “Thought I’d better bring my own,” he explained.

      “Jack, you’re not going to drink two fifths all by yourself!” Laura had exclaimed. She always took things at face value at first, a little too seriously.

      “I’m going to try, Mother,” he said, laughing, his eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses sparkling cynically at her.

      Beebo had been in a sweat of preparation all day, and the apartment ended up looking almost new. A fever seemed to have gotten hold of her. This had to be a big party, a good party, a loud, drunk, and very gay party. Because this party was going to prove that Beebo and Laura had lived together for two whole years, and in Greenwich Village that is a pretty good record.

      Friends were invited, to admire and congratulate. Oh, to get drunk and live it up a little too, on Beebo and Laura. But mostly to stand witness to the fact that the girls had been together two whole years. Or rather, Beebo had hung on to Laura for two whole years.

      Maybe that’s a hard way to say it. Maybe it isn’t fair. After all, Laura stuck with Beebo, too. But Laura stuck because she didn’t have the courage to let go, because her life was empty and without a purpose, and living with somebody and loving—or pretending to love—seemed to bring some sanity into her world. But for a long time she had begun to squirm and struggle under Beebo’s jealous scrutiny.

      Laura let Beebo make most of the arrangements for the party. She felt almost no enthusiasm for it. The whole thing had been Beebo’s idea in the first place. Laura felt almost as outside of it as a late-arriving guest. She ran a few errands, but it was Beebo who planned and organized, who put up streamers and cleaned the apartment, who called everybody, who picked up the liquor and the ice cubes, and even made hors d’oeuvres.

      She treated Laura with unwonted gentleness and attention