Five Women (31 page)

“Today?”

“If you're free.”

She only hesitated for an instant. “I'd like that very much,” she said.

She let him choose the restaurant, and even though she had an expense account and it would be easy for her to take him, she let him orchestrate everything because he seemed to want to. He took her to a pub with photos of authors on the walls and simple but good food. He was known there, and obviously felt comfortable. She had never been there before. Jason seemed very pleased to be with her; he introduced her to his waiter as if she was going to become a regular there herself, and told the waiter that when she came back he should take good care of her. There was something fresh and new about going out to lunch with Jason Collins, as if it were a date, as if for this one hour she had no angry, critical, jealous husband to go home to at the end of the day; that she was free, her own woman, wondering if this charming, attractive man would be the one she fell in love with. And, of course, in the fantasy Jason was single too.

“Did you always write?” she asked.

“Always. I starved for a few years, but then I hit it lucky when I was in my twenties. So I've been a professional writer ever since. My parents, unfortunately, never thought it was a real job. This is my twentieth book, and I think they're finally getting it, that I won't starve again. I'm glad they lived long enough to see that.”

“Do you have children?”

“Yes, a boy and a girl. Both at Yale. I never went to college myself, so it's a thrill to have them there.”

She supposed she should ask him about his wife. This was, after all, not a date, and he was not single, but she knew there were degrees of availability and she was curious to know more about him.

“And does your wife work?”

He nodded. “She's a teacher. She's five years older than I am. In fact, she supported me before we were married, when we were living together and I was still struggling. I think I married her out of gratitude. Now I often wonder if I did her such a favor. I didn't do myself one and she knows it. I don't like being married; I never did, except for the kids. They have always given me a great deal of pleasure.”

“But you wouldn't get divorced?” Felicity said.

“What would be the point? I'm never going to get married again.”

So he just cheats, she thought.

“Tell me about you,” he said.

“I'm not supposed to tell the clients about my unhappy marriage,” she said, smiling, pretending to be lighthearted about it.

“Then it's unhappy?”

“Yes. My husband is a lot older and very controlling. I've grown up since we were married, and the things I used to be impressed by . . . well, I made a mistake, too.”

“So here we are,” Jason said. “Two more statistics.”

“I know,” Felicity said. “It's so sad. There is no one who believed in love and happily ever after more than I did.”

“But you could get divorced,” he said. “You're too young and beautiful to stay in a loveless marriage.”

Beautiful? she thought, surprised. “Thank you,” she said.

He smiled at her in a flirtatious way. “And you smell so good. Is that your perfume or is it you?”

“Writers!” she said. Oh, God, he likes the way I smell, she thought. I'd like to record this moment and stick it in Russell's face.

“It's true,” Jason said. “Am I embarrassing you?”

“No, I love it.”

“And is there someone else in your life?”

“Of course not,” Felicity said. Then she thought she had sounded offended and sanctimonious. “But if there were,” she added lightly, “why would I tell you? You know enough about me already to put me completely in your power.”

“Really?” he said, pleased, his tone as light as hers.

“Do you like that?”

“Actually,” Jason said, “I do.”

He called her afterward, and they met for lunch again, and then again, filling each other in on all the details of their lives before they had met, while Jason's compliments and flirtatious remarks flattered her and made her feel more and more attractive and desirable; and gradually Felicity began to feel aroused, like a sexual woman thinking about having a relationship with a man who was her equal. She never mentioned these lunches to Russell. It took a few months before Jason suggested seriously and not just in banter that they have an affair. She knew he understood her more than any man she had ever met, and she felt she meant the same to him. They were two kindred spirits. By then she was in love.

You could put me completely in your power. Do you like that? Yes, I do.
Looking back on it later, when Jason was the emotional master and she was the emotional slave, Felicity remembered exactly when they had established their future relationship and laid down their roles, without premeditation, simply by instinct. It had started at that luncheon table, on their first date, with a chance remark; and she knew then that nothing is only by chance.

* * *

Jason had a little pied à terre where he went with women he was seeing, an apartment borrowed from an understanding friend. The first time Felicity went there she was nervous, but Jason was so passionate and appreciative of her body that he awakened her to her own sexuality at last, to a degree she had never dreamed was possible. She thought of him as her own private sexual revolution. Afterward she was glad she had gone, and knew she could not stop going, but she felt guilty and she never stopped feeling guilty.

I'm doing just what my mother did, she thought, reproaching herself for becoming what she had hated. It's immoral, it's unkind, it's unfair, it's bad. But the sex was so incredible with Jason, and it made up for everything she was suffering at home. Jason was affectionate and believed in foreplay. He complimented her. All the sexy romantic things Felicity had tried to no avail with Russell were now a part of her ardent lunchtime experiences with her lover. Jason made her feel attractive and sensual and wanted.

He also knew how to keep her off balance, to make her doubt herself and their relationship and want him more. That was the part where he was the master—master of his besotted slave and master of manipulation. She didn't know if he was seeing other women or not. He said he wasn't. But then, so did her husband. Sometimes Jason said he loved his wife, that it was only marriage he didn't like, not the woman he had promised to live with forever, and that hurt. There were long gaps, two weeks sometimes, when Jason really wanted to torture Felicity, when he didn't call her at all, or return the messages she sent him. She would give up and mourn having lost him forever, cry secretly in the bathroom so Russell wouldn't hear, and then Jason would call and make three dates with her for the same week.

She bought a cellular phone and gave Jason the number so he wouldn't have to go through the office receptionist. When Russell saw it Felicity said she had bought it so he could always find her, and he was pleased and said it was about time she joined the electronic age. How little he knew. She and her lover had been sending each other coded messages on their computers since the beginning.

Sometimes now Felicity and Jason were reckless. One night they met each other after work. She told Russell she was working late at the office, she turned off her cell phone, and she didn't come home until midnight. That was the second time Russell hit her. He accused her again (but this time he was right) of having a lover. She was reminded then that he could be dangerous and easily incited to violence, and after that she became the most reassuring of coy little girl-wives. She always remembered the day her mild-mannered father had come home to threaten her mother and her mother's lover with a gun. Russell had never been mild-mannered on the best of days—he was more like an angry bull—and now Felicity knew she could never be sure of what he would do if he found out about her.

She felt it was worth the danger, though. The affair with Jason was the first time in her entire marriage that Felicity had felt alive, and she hadn't even noticed she was dead.

She hated Russell now and wished she had the courage to leave him. She hated the way he screamed at her, the way she never knew whether he would turn on her or not. But she was sure that if she did leave Russell that Jason would leave her in turn, because she would be too available. It was safer for Jason the way it was; she was married and afraid of her husband. She had a husband and a lover, and she really didn't have either of them.

Now suddenly, for some reason, on some of the days she had been with Jason secretly at lunchtime Russell wanted to have sex with her at night. This was the husband who had belittled her, who hadn't wanted to touch her, who had pushed her away . . . now she was the one avoiding him. She never wanted to have sex with Russell again. Maybe that was why he was aroused by her, when nothing else had worked.

Sometimes she had to let him do it. And sometimes now the sex with Russell was great, not because he was any less selfish than he had ever been, but because she discovered having two men in the same day was an aphrodisiac; it made her feel powerful. It made her feel desired. It made her feel she had a buffer against either of them hurting her too much. It was not about Russell or Jason, it was all about her.

Felicity decided Jason was the only thing that was saving her marriage. Her marriage was the only thing that was keeping Jason. She was trapped in this triangle that made her feel guilty and frightened and unbalanced. If she left Russell and then—immediately, inevitably—Jason left her, she would be all alone.

She had learned the message from her mother too well: without a man she did not exist. Without having sex to fill her up Felicity felt empty, a kind of shrieking, hollow, yearning space with the shell of a person around it, walking through life pretending to be whole.

On Friday evenings when Felicity knew the long lonely weekend was ahead, when she was in their townhouse in solitary confinement with her husband, she bought vast amounts of prepared food, and then she ate it all, secretly in the kitchen, when Russell was watching TV or asleep. After she ate it she would make herself throw up so she wouldn't get fat. She was bulimic again, just as she had been when she was younger, trying to fill up that endless emptiness, quell the fear. Her life had gone out of control once more, and she couldn't think of any way to save herself.

Chapter Twenty-seven

G
ARA AND
C
ARL
had been married for twenty years. She had never been able to believe their happy marriage had lasted so long, not at the beginning and not even now. She would count the years on her fingers to make sure she hadn't made a mistake. Twenty years—what a record, what an oasis of love and support and peace and friendship in a city that seemed filled with lonely people who had been betrayed by love, or the lack of it. Whatever had happened in her and Carl's marriage that had been difficult—arguments, forced separations, business worries—had been part of life, and she knew she was lucky to have avoided worse disasters.

His sons were grown and gone, Cary to Paris to work in an art gallery, Eric to New Mexico to be an architect. She and Carl visited them once in a while, or they came to New York, but it was clear that they were wrapped up in their own adult lives now. She always had to keep remembering that they had a mother, that she was only their father's wife, and nothing would change that. She didn't mind. Other women, she knew, had their own children who avoided them. That, she also knew, was what really hurt.

Carl's gallery in New York was not doing so well these days. He worried and brooded, and sometimes now he was short-tempered with her and wanted to be alone. She knew when he got home at the end of the day that he wouldn't call out his customary cheery hello that was part question to be sure she was there to make his life safe, that he wouldn't come to find her with his face alight with love; that instead he would pour a glass of wine and sit in front of the television set channel surfing and not watching any of it.

“Don't cook, let's go out to dinner,” he would say finally, his first words to her. She preferred that too, because on the few occasions they had dinner together alone in their apartment now, he didn't say a word. At dinner out, in a small neighborhood restaurant where they were known, he would pretend for the waiters' sake that life was wonderful, and then he would tell her quietly how worried he was about money.

“I'm making enough money for both of us,” Gara said several times. “You laughed when I saved it so carefully, but now we have it.”

“I know,” Carl would answer. “You're rich. You're lucky.”

“
We're
rich. It's
our
money.” But she could tell because she knew him so well that he couldn't live with an arrangement like that. He needed meaningful work and success, he needed to pick up the check, and he never intended to retire.

That summer, as always, they went for weekends to their little gray house on the beach in Amagansett, on the Long Island shore, and she took the month of August off as all the therapists did and she and Carl were able to go there for longer weekends. But this summer things were tense and melancholy. Carl walked on the beach alone and asked her not to join him, and sometimes at dusk she saw him on the deck looking out over the ocean with the strangest look on his face, as if he would never see it again.

He went to Paris more often, to see Cary and survey the art scene, but when he was there he called her every day. Carl was much nicer, more cheerful and affectionate, when he was away. Gara knew how difficult it was for him to be in his late fifties and feeling his life had jumped away from him, taking its own course, leaving him helpless just when he should be learning to be serene. She was as supportive as she could be, but she felt helpless too.

“I've decided to open a gallery in Paris,” Carl said finally.

“In Paris?”

“Yes. It's going to give me a fresh start. I have contacts there, and Cary is going to work for me and help me.”

“Then he'll run it?”

“No, of course not. He's not as experienced as all that. I'll run it.”

“You?” She realized she was blocking the painful reality of what the move would mean, that it was so far away they would see much less of each other. “What about your gallery here?” she asked, trying to sound calm.

“Lucie can continue to run it. I'll be back and forth.” He smiled. “I feel young again.”

“Yes,” she murmured, knowing it was true. “You look younger.” Carl looked completely different now. She finally felt chilled and afraid about what his life decision would mean. “But what about me?” she asked. “What will I do?”

“You can't desert your patients. You don't speak fluent French and you certainly couldn't start a new practice in Paris at this point in your career, even with Americans. Your work is here. You'd hate living there with no job, no language, me away all day. I'll be back and forth to New York all the time.”

So it was that or bankruptcy? It still seemed like his fantasy, his living so far away so much of the time, his new life. If he were her patient she would join the resistance, tell him it was a wonderful idea, wait for him to express the doubts that had to be there because he was changing the entire structure of their marriage. But he was not her patient, he was her husband, and she did not want to act pleased. “I guess you've given this a lot of thought,” she said.

“Of course. This will get me out of the financial hole I'm in. The new gallery will be a real opportunity for me.”

“Carl, I don't want to dissuade you, but this is something we should discuss. I don't want to be apart from you for so long . . .”

“Neither do I, but I have no choice. Please understand.”

What could she do? Argue with him and alienate him, destroy his confidence, make him stay against his will and feel so useless and frustrated that he would finally leave her? She knew she could never give up everything to follow him, because she had a life too, and her life was here, and she would only end up resenting him. For a moment she wished she were a different kind of person, that she was a housewife, content to follow him, to make do with loneliness, to search for new friends, to create a home in a foreign place where he could be the one with the interesting career. But if she were, he wouldn't want her. That was not the woman he had married.

“I do understand,” Gara said finally. “And I agree, I think it's a great opportunity for you.” She forced herself to sound enthusiastic, to imagine it an adventure for her too, an addition to her life, the excited American in Paris. She had always enjoyed their vacations there. “And I'll come to stay with you whenever I can,” she said.

He didn't answer, and very briefly she thought it was odd he didn't concur, didn't reassure her that of course she would visit often, that she could afford it, that she could rearrange her schedule and take long weekends in the winter as well, but then she told herself that he didn't have to answer; he knew she would be there.

She talked to her best friend Jane about the move, on the phone several times a week. Gara realized she discussed her feelings about it much more with Jane than she did with Carl, but he seemed so fragile, so desperate, that she was afraid to tear him down. “What am I going to do?” she asked Jane.

“You have to let him go,” Jane said. “You have a career here. What if you give up everything to be with him and then the Paris gallery fails? Then you'll both be out of work. It's different for me; I'm an old-fashioned wife. I don't mind being bicoastal, running the apartment here and the house in L.A., and if Eliot goes on location I go with him and bring the Porthault sheets. That's what I do. But you would hate that.”

“I know. But he'll be lonely. What if he cheats? He's still attractive, he looks younger than fifty-eight. And men can be old and ugly, it doesn't matter, women still want them.”

“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, did it really fall at all?” Jane said.

Gara had to smile. “I guess it will be more romantic to live apart for a while,” she said. “Whenever we get together it will be fresh and new. After twenty years it's good to shake things up a little.”

“Absolutely,” Jane said. “Give him a giant box of condoms. Join the resistance, as you like to say.”

“I wouldn't go that far,” Gara said.

He left in September. It was not until Carl was packing that the reality of the situation hit her. He was really going; this was a big move. Suddenly he was taking not just a small suitcase but almost all his clothes. He seemed in a hurry, and as she stood there watching him Gara fought back tears. Once he had made up his mind, everything happened very fast. A moving company appeared and took the art and the sculptures that had been in the apartment for years because Carl had decided to ship them to Paris so he wouldn't be so lonely, and, as he pointed out to her, she had never liked them anyway. She realized they had always been his, not hers, because he had chosen them and paid for them, and some of it had belonged to him before they had even met, but still she felt somehow betrayed that he was taking his meaningful things with him on this journey and leaving her behind.

He's taking his totems, she told herself reassuringly. It's okay. He needs them. He's frightened too. But in an odd way she felt divorced, although neither of them intended it that way. She supposed this was what divorce felt like.

“I'll stay with Cary until I find an apartment,” Carl said. “I can save money that way.”

“In that little apartment?”

“He's hardly ever there. He has a new girlfriend.”

“You're going to put the art in his apartment?”

“I don't know what I'm going to do,” Carl said, and he sounded testy. She allowed the matter to drop.

He was gone then, and Gara was stunned by the empty, final feeling in their apartment. She wandered around looking at the new spaces, avoiding his barren closet. This was not another of his brief business trips with a foreseeable end; this might be a separation of a month or more, and the back and forth could go on for years.

As it turned out, it was two months before he came back to see her, and then he stayed for only five days, full of business talk and excitement.

“I'm so busy,” he said. “Opening a new gallery is a lot of work.”

“I want to come to see it,” Gara said.

“You will.”

“Why don't we plan that I come to see you this time? I'll come for the Thanksgiving holiday. I can take a week off.”

“But I might be back here then,” Carl said. “I'm going to close the New York gallery. It's costing me too much money.”

“I'm sorry,” Gara said, but she realized it was inevitable.

“Let's wait and see who visits who over Thanksgiving,” he said. “My life is so unpredictable now. You have to be adaptable. You know I can never make plans until the last minute.”

“You never could,” she said. “I've always accepted that.”

She was trying to settle into her new routine. In some ways she was surprised to find herself so content. Carl called her every morning, for only a minute because it was so expensive, but after he called and she knew he was all right and still loved her Gara would become absorbed in her work. At night she would read in bed or watch television, able to do what she wanted to do when she wanted to do it, without worrying about anyone else. The refrigerator was nearly empty now, with small packages of leftover takeout lingering until the end of the week when she threw them all out. She tried not to think about sex, and although she often pretended his arms were still around her when she slept, she was also rather guiltily relieved to have the whole bed to herself.

Their social life had formerly been couples. She realized that all her women friends were married, and so now she sometimes went to the movies alone when she had nothing else to do, and she discovered she liked it. There was no one else to complain that he wanted to leave in the middle of the movie, or to make her stay. The apartment was not so lonely anymore, but she still found herself counting the days until Carl might be back; doing magical numbers, alchemy, putting out her vitamin pills and thinking, He'll be back before these are gone, he has to be back before the bottle is empty. Somehow the little routine made her feel safe, as if things had not changed that much.

One brisk Saturday afternoon Gara went downtown to say goodbye to Carl's old gallery, since he was going to close it. There was a new woman there at the desk, middle-aged, with dark hair.

“Where's Lucie?” Gara asked. “Off today?”

“Lucie?”

“You know, Lucie, the young Frenchwoman, the manager.”

“I'm Martha. I've been here for two months. Lucie went back to Paris to work in Mr. Whiteman's new gallery there.”

“You mean now?”

“No, when I came. Can I help you?”

Lucie went to Paris when Carl did? She had been there for the past two months and he had never mentioned it? He had said she was going to run the gallery here in New York. Had he simply changed his mind?

“No thanks,” Gara said, and left. She hadn't even bothered to tell this woman, who didn't know her, that she was Mr. Whiteman's wife.

She walked all the way home, a distance of miles, through the blowing paper, the honking traffic, the shuffling crowds, numb and confused. It was probably nothing. She was reasonably sure there was nothing going on between Carl and Lucie. Lucie was twenty-eight, with a slender, long-legged young girl's body, and short, spiky, bleached-white hair. She had a pouting upper lip and a high, childish voice just this side of babyish, that went up at the ends of sentences as if they were all questions. Carl could not possibly take someone like her seriously.

Nevertheless, when Carl called the next day Gara said, “I went by the gallery yesterday and there's a new manager there.”

“Oh, she's terrible,” Carl said. “She's just temporary.”

“I didn't know you took Lucie to Paris.”

There was a tiny pause, as if she had caught him. “Well, she's so good,” Carl said. “And she's French, which helps me.”