Five Women

Also by Rona Jaffe

The Cousins

An American Love Story

After the Reunion

Mazes and Monsters

Class Reunion

The Last Chance

Family Secrets

The Other Woman

The Fame Game

The Cherry in the Martini

Mr. Right Is Dead

The Last of the Wizards

Away From Home

The Best of Everything

Five Women

Rona Jaffe

I
NTER
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IX
B
OOKS
, N
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ORK

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

FIVE WOMEN

An InterMix Book / published by arrangement with The Rona Jaffe Foundation

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Donald I. Fine Books edition / July 1997

InterMix eBook edition / February 2014

Copyright © 1997 by Rona Jaffe.

“Chain of Fools” by Don Covay, © 1967 (Renewed) Pronto Music, Inc. and 14th Hour Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014; “Down On Me.” Copyright © 1967 Strong Arm Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission. “Piece of My Heart.” Copyright © 1967 Web IV Music, Inc. and Ragmar Music Inc. Renewal rights secured by Web IV Music, Inc./Unichappell Music and Sloopy II Music Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

“Me and Bobby McGee.” Words and Music by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster, © 1969 Temi Combine Inc. All rights controlled by Combine Music Corp. and administered by EMI Blackwood Music Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

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AUTHOR'S NOTE

This novel and all the characters in it are a work of fiction in which I have let my imagination fly. Nonetheless, because a novelist wants her readers to identify with the story and characters, it is not unlikely that the fictional universe that I have created is populated with bits and pieces from the real world—bits and pieces acquired through research, partly by accident, and partly because our collective experiences and consciousness link us all in some strange way so that what happens to a fictional character in the novel may have actually happened to someone in the real world. Also, although we sometimes don't like to admit it, the monsters from the id may arrive unbidden to our keyboards, so that characters and situations are constructed in part from some of our own secret feelings, from situations that we might never act out, but which give us great satisfaction to create. Why is a novelist drawn to tell a certain story and not another? This is why.

 

An unhappy childhood is the wound that never heals.

Recently I saw a medical ad in a magazine that read:

“Do you have a wound that will not heal? Come to The Wound Center.”

And I thought:

“What about my heart?”

Dear Reader:

Five Women
is a novel about survivors. It is also about women's relationships to their mothers, their fathers, their children, their men, and their own bodies. At a certain point in our lives, maybe at thirty or forty, we start to wonder how much longer we can carry the destructive baggage of the past without moving on. The devastating events of childhood led to the mistakes and pain of adult life, to the personality that keeps making the same errors, or is afraid to live at all.

The young couples after World War II had their dreams, and this is what happened to their daughters—us—after those dreams fell apart. Our parents all had such high hopes for a better life. But through the years, and even half a century later, their daughters grappled with the necessity to create that life for themselves, in a way that their mothers would never have imagined.

I hope you enjoy this story of five women trying not just to survive, but trying to make their dreams come true.

Sincerely,

Chapter One

N
EW
Y
ORK IS A CITY ALWAYS IN FLUX
, where people are constantly remaking their lives. It is like the filing system in a computer: folder within folder within folder, neatly hidden away but accessible. You can navigate skillfully from place to place, from old friend to new friend, or hide and see no one. Sometimes people wonder what has happened to you; more often they just think you're busy. Often you are. Sometimes they think you don't like them anymore. Sometimes you don't. As you remake your life you also remake yourself.

On a Wednesday evening in January 1995, Gara Whiteman had these thoughts as she dressed to go out for what had become a weekly ritual of drinks and dinner with three other women with whom she had recently become friendly. She had always liked Wednesday: she thought of it as the day that broke the back of the week. She was a successful psychologist, with her own busy practice, and she loved it, but by the weekend she'd had enough of worrying about other people's misery and confusion. Of course, you never really stopped.

Gara was a very attractive, trim, youthful woman of fifty-five, with dark hair and light eyes and a look of receptivity. She smiled easily and warmly. She had always been a caretaker all of her life, in one way or another, and after the years of therapy she had been in she realized quite well that she had never felt entitled to anything and therefore had deprived herself of many of the pleasures she could have enjoyed. She was slowly trying to rectify that.

She looked around her apartment—a lot of white, a lot of silk, very feminine, part of the reinvention of herself as a successful single woman after the divorce she had never wanted. Her ex-husband, Carl, had been as careless as a large, golden furred animal, and she had made their apartment together into a brown cave filled with the memories and possessions he had had before she entered his life. She had lived with him in that cave in love and trust, in safety, and there had been nothing she would not do for him, freely. It had obviously not been enough.

Her weekly evenings with her new friends at Yellowbird, a lively East Side bar and restaurant where they felt comfortable, was another step toward ending her isolation. People always asked how the four of them had met. She supposed they asked because the little group seemed so different from each other but laughed so much together, or perhaps because those people who asked were lonely and isolated too, and wanted to know how to meet people.

She had met them at New York parties, they had gotten to talking; it was simple. She enjoyed that they were not in her field. She had never really liked to socialize with other psychologists when she wasn't working, preferring a more eclectic group of friends. It was one of the things she had liked about her ex-husband, that his life was so different from hers; that she had been able to learn about art, about business, that they traveled in such an interesting way.

He was an art dealer, and because of their separate, time-consuming careers he had often traveled without her. Never let them take trips alone, she thought now. But then she would also have to say, Never let them go to the office, never let them meet anyone they don't tell you about. But what good would that do? Even if they told you things, it wouldn't necessarily be the truth. What was the saying: The shoemaker's children have no shoes? Physician, heal thyself? Do what I say, not what I do?

One of her patients had asked her once if a therapist shouldn't have a perfect life, as an example of what mental health and happiness could be. As a role model. Gara had laughed. “We're only human,” she said. “I'm here to help you, I'm not a goddess.”

For years it had been only in her therapy sessions that Gara felt that kind of power. Now she sometimes felt it with her friends. Because she was trained and comparatively wise, they often used her as a sounding board, advice dispenser, and good mother figure. Sometimes she got fed up with this, because just like many of her patients, they nodded agreement while on another level they weren't listening at all. But sometimes she liked doing it anyway. This support was what friendship was supposed to be about.

She changed from her sedate professional clothes to black leggings, cowboy boots, and a long, thick ruby red chenille sweater. Whenever she dressed like this, admiring her hard-earned muscles, she remembered the uncomfortable girdles her mother had sent her off to college with. She had worn them on dates, with nylons and high heels, in the snow. When pantyhose came out she considered them one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century. Her mother, however, was too fat, out of shape, and modest to try them too. For years she had been an old woman, and she had been younger than Gara was now.

Gara brushed her teeth, put on ruby red lipstick that matched her sweater, and tied her hair up in a ponytail under a peaked wool cap. From a distance she looked forty years old. Maybe there would be some interesting men in Yellowbird tonight, maybe even one for her. Of course, she thought, I wouldn't know what to do with him, but that's a different story. I'll settle for a smile.

* * *

In her penthouse apartment overlooking the twinkling lights of the city and the empty, moonwashed paths of Central Park seen through the black sticks of leafless winter trees, Kathryn O'Mara Henry hummed along to Bobby Short and poured herself a glass of wine as she got dressed to go out and meet her new friends at Yellowbird. Life was wonderful; she'd just had another great day. An hour at the gym with her trainer at seven a.m., followed by an aerobics class, two hours of tennis with some new girlfriends at the health club, lunch at Cipriani's with some other ladies who were spending their fuck-you alimony, a quick turn through the Metropolitan Museum to see what was new, a pass through Barney's to buy a Chanel belt, a bubble bath by candlelight overlooking her view, and now a night out.

She wasn't that crazy about Yellowbird—she would have preferred to try a different restaurant every week, but her little group felt safe there. They were creatures of habit. Kathryn knew there was no such thing as safety; it was a total illusion. She also knew you could never trust anything to be what you thought. This was not a bad or dangerous thing; it was just a fact. She was still here. She was a survivor. She spent very little time even thinking about it. She was like a cork on the ocean: whenever a wave smashes it down it bobs up again.

Kathryn was a chic, pretty, happy, bubbly redhead, a woman who drew others to her not only because she was attractive but because when she wanted to be she was so friendly. She'd had a good face lift and was a young fifty-seven. She didn't mind telling her age, although she usually took a few years off. This was not too easy when your oldest child was nearly forty. She'd had three marriages and had four grown children whom she adored, and she thought that in a few years she might even marry again, not because she particularly liked marriage after all her mistakes, but because the men she became involved with wanted to marry her and she always thought: Why not?

She couldn't understand why Gara thought her own life was over in that way, thought she'd never find love or romance or companionship. You didn't have to have all three anyway. One was enough, for as long as it lasted. She'd seen a lot worse. You had to make your own life great. And
she's
the therapist, Kathryn thought, smiling to herself. Sometimes it was better to let the past lie, put it out of your mind. You healed and went on. Gara worried too much.

* * *

Late as always, Felicity Johnson was hurriedly refreshing her makeup in her cream-colored marble and mirrored bathroom in the East Side townhouse she shared with her husband, Russell Naylor. She had so much work at the office she could have stayed there until midnight, but she had brought it home as usual even though tonight she was going out with her friends.

Her house was a double-width four-story building that had once been the mansion of a large, rich white family around the turn of the century. She and Russell, a very successful builder, were the only black people on the block, but she was used to that. Her father was a doctor, and she had been brought up in an affluent white suburb because her parents wanted her to have “all the advantages.” There had also been the disadvantages: bigotry, loneliness, not fitting in. But now she was a literary lawyer, with a good career and a husband people considered a catch, she was sexy and smart, everybody told her she was beautiful—although she was the only one who didn't think so—and she seemed to move easily between the two worlds of black and white.

Actually, she knew she didn't really fit into either. In case she didn't know it, her husband told her all the time. “You're deluding yourself,” he would say. “Our black friends don't really like you. You don't try to be a part of their lives.”

“I do so,” she would say. “I know they like me. Who said they don't like me?” Silence. That bull's glare of his with lowered head and folded arms. Russell was a short, compact, muscular man, and a bully. If she had known then what she knew now, she would never have married a man who was only her height, and nearly old enough to be her father. He treated her like a trophy wife and a silly, disobedient child.

“And my white friends accept me,” she would say. Sometimes she really hated him.

“That's what you think,” he would say.

Once a week, for dinner, she got away from him and was able to see her women friends at Yellowbird. It was a night she looked forward to. She could pretend she was single again and out on the town with the world full of limitless possibilities. Not that she would do anything. She had a jealous husband she was afraid of, and an unpredictable, irresistible lover she was obsessed with, and that was almost more than she could handle as it was. The guilt over cheating on her husband, of being such a bad person, tormented her all the time. But it had seemed a natural progression, a desperate restoration of her desirability, after what Russell had done to her during the first five years of their marriage, when she had been even more vulnerable than she was now.

Felicity let her hair loose from the bun she wore it in at work. It fell free, long, dark, and wavy. She had high cheekbones and slightly slanting greenish eyes. Her skin was light brown. Maybe she wasn't so bad-looking. She wished she had more confidence. The only thing she knew was that she didn't have a line on her face: her mother's great genes. She was forty and looked twenty-five. Almost too late to have a baby, though. She wanted that more than anything.

But Russell didn't want her to have a baby. She was
his
baby, and he didn't want to share her with anyone. How could she have been so stupid to have chased him all those years, to be so thrilled when she finally got him, never realizing that she didn't know him at all? She was probably lucky she had never become pregnant. He would have been as domineering a father as he was a husband. She would have been stuck in her unhappy marriage forever.

Who was she kidding? She was stuck in this marriage anyway. Jason, her lover, was never going to get a divorce, and she wouldn't marry him if she could. She couldn't trust him not to cheat on her, too. She was a fool for love, but not that big a fool. And Russell might have been a wonderful father. Babies and little kids were infinitely malleable. She, of all people, should know that. Russell could have had a child who worshipped and adored him, no matter how he behaved toward it. She certainly knew about that, too.

She went out into the den. Russell was watching college basketball on TV. He would watch anything as long as it was a sporting event. It was a kind of meditation for him, an altered state. In the early years of their marriage she had tried to watch with him, but she got sick of it, and she had too much work from the office anyway. The pressure to churn out the firm's mandatory individual billable hours was incredible. Russell was lucky. During the day he could deal with the hard hat guys and at night he could turn into a vegetable.

The remains of the chicken dinner their housekeeper had prepared for him, which Felicity had heated up, was on the coffee table in front of him. “Was that good?” she asked solicitously.

“Great. Who did you say you were meeting?”

“I told you. Gara and Kathryn and maybe Eve.” She hoped not Eve. Maybe she could get out of the house before Eve called.

“Call me from the restaurant,” Russell said.

“You know I will.”

She hated the way she had to check in all the time like a parolee. She had to carry around her cellular phone, which meant she could never have a decent evening bag unless she was out with her husband; the rest of the time she had to lug a big one.

“You like Yellowbird so much,” Russell said, “maybe I should go with you some time.”

“I told you that you were invited,” she said, hoping she was disguising her lack of enthusiasm. But she knew he would never join them. He wasn't interested in being with her girlfriends, of whatever color. He didn't even like having them around, which was why she never had guests unless they were his friends. He was jealous of her friendships, of the easy laughter women had together. He felt shut out.

“Good night, Slugger,” Felicity said, kissing him lightly.

“Good night, Baby.”

She was almost to the front door when the phone rang. She knew it was Eve. Damn.

“Will you get that, Baby?” Russell said. “Maybe it's for me.”

Yeah, sure. “Hello?” she said cautiously into the receiver.

“I want to go to Yellowbird tonight,” Eve Bader said, in her abrupt, demanding voice. She never said hello, considering pleasantries a waste of time. Silence. “Are you going?”

Felicity sighed. “Yes,” she said.

“What time?”

“Now.”

Eve Bader was only a peripheral member of their little group because she kept trying to be with them and they kept trying to get away from her. An actress somewhere in her forties (she would never tell just where), Eve was a volcano of anger and pushiness, with manic energy, a dangerous quality, hot hands and hot eyes and flying hair.