Bea didn’t think it was possible to feel worse, but she bent at the waist and groaned. “I’m so, so dumb.”
Leo wrote the limerick the next day using the byline “Anonymous.” He typed it up and made copies and before lunch nearly the whole school had enjoyed his handiwork, featuring an unnamed student, his string of romantic conquests, and the moment in the backseat of his car when the boy would get the girl alone and inevitably, lamentably, prematurely ejaculate. The identity of the boy was obvious to the students but so cleverly done, so easily denied, that it didn’t cause trouble for Leo. And then there was this: For Conor himself to object would mean casting himself as a premature ejaculator, which Leo knew he’d never do. At first, everyone thought Bea was “Anonymous,” and even though she never denied it, any number of women Conor had mistreated claimed credit for the piece and then started writing their own punishing rhymes (with Leo’s subtle encouragement and often with his assistance) about Conor and soon other school miscreants. Finally the administration stepped in and put a stop to anything by the increasingly notorious and multiheaded Anonymous that became the highlight of that school year. Later, Bea would think how the silly limerick was really the start of what Leo would create with SpeakEasy—at the beginning anyway, before it turned kind of desperate and dirty.
She opened her Millay to one of the poems Tuck had loved and sometimes read to her: I pray if you love me, bear my joy. She was too antsy to read the whole thing. She refilled her cup of tea. Jesus, she was horny. How long had it been? She went into her room and rummaged through her bedside drawer for her miniature vibrator. She pulled it out and switched it on. Nothing. The batteries were dead.
She looked up and saw herself standing in front of the mirror, braids sloppy and uneven from sleep, some of the hairs around her face turned gray and wiry. She was winter pale and her eyes were bloodshot and unfocused from the weed. Was this who she was now? A middle-aged woman with a spent vibrator and a pile of typed pages that she was hoarding like they were dead cats? She was extremely high. She could hear Lena Novak’s voice as if Lena were standing in her bedroom. “It must be hard—being Beatrice Plumb.”
“Must be hard to be me,” she said to her reflection. “Hard to be Bea.” She threw the vibrator back in the drawer and went to get her coat. Bear my joy, that’s what she would say to Leo. Read these pages and tell me they’re good and let me have them and bear my fucking joy.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Weeks after (barely) graduating from college, Jack moved to Greenwich Village with a very particular goal in mind: to have sex, lots and lots of sex. Vassar had been somewhat disappointing in that regard. At first, Jack attributed the lack of free and easy fucking that he had assumed would come with his student ID and highly coveted dorm single to statistics: A former women’s college, there were fewer gay men than women on campus. Then he assumed the problem was AIDS, which was cutting a terrifying swath through the gay community. But the gay population at Vassar seemed more angry than scared. Ninety miles south in New York City, Larry Kramer was sending up his clarion cry of outrage and the mostly well-to-do, mostly white sons and daughters of Vassar were complying—in spades. They organized, marched, protested, heckled, debated, and demanded. Outrage, Jack learned, was not an aphrodisiac; it was exhausting.