Five Women (47 page)

“I don't want him.” But she did, she wanted him more than anything in the world.

He never called.

She had thought this confession would get Eve off her back, but she was wrong about that, too. Now Eve called every day with a report of what Eben was up to, who he had been seen with, where he had been seen alone, or simply to talk about him, as if the fact that they had both been wounded by him now made them sisters . . . or perhaps she was really calling just to gloat.

Felicity herself could not bear to be alone. She cajoled friends to have dinner with her, even ones she didn't much like, so she could be out every night; she went to every function she heard about, even though she was too unhappy to enjoy them; and she went on blind dates where she often had to flee to the ladies' room so they would not see her break into tears. She missed the sex with Eben so much it was like a fever, and she missed the love and the holding, and the promise of happiness she had believed in. Everything he had done had been manipulative, offering her from his life what she was about to give up in her own. He even knew how much she wanted a child and had served up his daughter on a plate. She couldn't get him out of her mind. She called Gara several times a day for comfort, crying, leaving messages on her machine, she broke down at the office behind her closed door, she wept in restaurants, she had turned into a fountain.

“Stop that, will you,” Kathryn said impatiently to her one night at Yellowbird. “Get off it. It's over. Go on with your life.”

Kathryn could, Felicity thought. I'm not Kathryn.

“No man is worth it,” Billie advised her. “Trust me. I know.”

“Eben took a woman to the Caribbean,” Eve reported at Christmas, and that hurt Felicity more than anything else he had ever done. She should have been with him, that had been her trip. “This one seems serious,” Eve added. “I bet he marries her.”

“Eve, could you be a little more helpful?” Gara said.

“I am being helpful,” Eve said.

“I mean, shut up.”

How long did it take to get over such heartbreak? Felicity couldn't eat and she was getting so thin it frightened her. She remembered her mother when her lover had left her: pining, grieving, starving, scary. Again, she had turned into this woman she never wanted to be. When would she ever find her own way?

Chapter Forty

G
ARA WONDERED
what was happening to their little group of friends. Things seemed different; there were new tensions, new agendas. For a while they still went to Yellowbird every week, but Felicity cried all the time and sometimes simply vanished into herself as if she had become invisible. “The space traveler,” Kathryn called her. She might as well not have been there at all.

Kathryn was ever more restless, and said she felt she was wasting her life by always going to the same restaurant, so sometimes now they met elsewhere, trying new places Kathryn had liked or wanted to find out about, and on these occasions they evaded Eve by telling her they weren't going out together because each of them had made other plans. Felicity could not bear to be with Eve, Gara was angry at Eve because she was tormenting Felicity, whom she felt protective of, and Kathryn really didn't care either way.

“I haven't seen you for a while,” Billie would say with some accusation in her voice whenever they came back to Yellowbird, which they always did eventually because Gara missed it. “Been away?”

Yellowbird, Gara knew, would go on as long as Billie wanted to work, and she wasn't ever sure whether Billie missed them or the money they spent there. Billie intended to send Little Billie to college in eight years, and by then college would be even more expensive than it was now. “Really busy,” they would answer.

“Eve was here,” Billie would say. “With some guy.” She never sounded particularly pleased that Eve was so faithful to her.

Christmas had gone and Gara was relieved, but now New Year's Eve loomed ahead. Brad the Consoler had gone to the country for the holidays, to stay in a beautiful house with several other gay men, old friends, none of whom were lovers, none of whom even had lovers to spend their vacation with or families they liked enough to see. He had called and said it was turning out to be one of the best vacations he'd had in years. Since neither she nor Kathryn nor Felicity had a date, nor any prospect of one, Kathryn decided the three of them should spend New Year's Eve at the Sign of the Dove because it would be so festively decorated and because they had a special with hors d'oeuvres and all the champagne you could drink, followed by dinner.

Kathryn and Gara were used to being alone by now, but Felicity was not. They stood in the crowded upstairs room that had been made into a bar for this night, all dressed up, and Felicity looked grief stricken. Couples and small groups were chattering at little tables, while waiters passed around caviar and smoked salmon and pâté. There were platters heaped with oysters at the bar beside the bottles of champagne in military rows, like an army ready to advance and make them happy. Gara was determined to have a good time, but it hadn't happened yet. The banal glamour of the luxurious food only depressed her, and she didn't feel like getting drunk. Kathryn, in a glimmering silver dress, had fastened on to a young couple from Norway who had come to New York for the first time, for the holiday, because they were on their honeymoon.

“I'm in love,” Kathryn announced, with the open-faced blonde couple in tow. “Aren't they sweet?” They looked pleased and shy, and also as if they would like to get away from her. As soon as she went back to the bar for more champagne they melted into the crowd.

I should be grateful I have something to do and friends to do it with and the money to afford it, Gara thought, but the only time in her life she had not dreaded New Year's Eve had been when she was married, and then she and Carl had both virtually ignored the bittersweet holiday on purpose; a bit of caviar and champagne at home and asleep before the ball dropped from the tower in Times Square.

“What are we going to do for the millennium?” Kathryn asked. “We have to do something spectacular.”

“I'll be dead,” Felicity murmured.

“You'll be married,” Kathryn said. “Have a drink.”

They sipped their champagne. “I want to take a house somewhere warm for February,” Kathryn said. “It's a shame you guys have to work or you'd come with me.” She waved and smiled at the young honeymoon couple across the room and they waved back. “Why don't you take a winter vacation?”

“Can't,” Gara said.

“I blew my vacation, remember?” Felicity said. “Well,” Kathryn said cheerfully, “maybe I'll just go by myself. I always meet people.”

Felicity looked around with a desperate look, and Gara knew she wanted to bolt. “Tonight is just another night,” Gara said to her. “Get through it. It's okay.”

“I'm tired of you sulking,” Kathryn said to Felicity. “Look how nice this all is.”

“Have pity,” Felicity said. “I'm trying.” Her eyes filled with tears.

“I'm going to talk to those people, I know them from my trip to Italy,” Kathryn said, and disappeared, surfacing at a corner table where everyone was laughing.

“I need to go home,” Felicity said.

Gara felt abandoned by Kathryn and depressed by Felicity. Felicity's mood was too catching. “Stay for a while,” Gara said. “Don't just leave me.”

“All right,” she said, distantly, already vanishing into herself and the sad place where she kept reliving parts of her life. “At least when I was married to Russell I wasn't alone,” she said.

“You claimed you were.”

“You're right.” Felicity flashed her a hint of a smile. “Just keep reminding me, please, how unhappy I was.”

“You were miserable. You were bulimic. You kept saying you hated him.”

“Thank you.”

Gara was relieved when the waiters announced dinner was to be served. They went downstairs to the main rooms, which were bright and colorful and festive and glittering, with cozy tables and a gourmet dinner with wines. Gara remembered the times she and her parents had gone out somewhere to celebrate when she was a child, and how she had sat there with the grownups, vaguely bored, vaguely lonely, and thinking: When I grow up I'll have my own life and it will be different. Well, she was grown up now, and this was her own life, and somehow it wasn't that different at all. Even Kathryn, who was normally chatty, had fallen silent, defeated for a moment by the palpable gloom.

There was a band afterward in the downstairs bar, and the flashing lights were almost black. Kathryn was her old self again, and was dancing with a man. “Dance!” she cried to them. “Dance!”

“I'm leaving,” Felicity said, and did.

Gara stood there for a few moments, watching the dancers, feeling invisible. There were balloons and pointed hats, and streamers, and people were counting the minutes to midnight.

I'm alive, she thought to herself. I'm alive and I'm not sick and there's tomorrow. There was no one for her to speak to so she spoke to God, as she sometimes did these past few years because it made her feel so much better. Thank you, God, she said silently, for giving me my five years, and for loving me, and for helping me to help myself. I told you I would renegotiate, and now I'm doing it. I want more. Many, many more.

She did not ask that she might meet a man in the New Year because it seemed impossible, and also because love and sex seemed to bring with them so much grief. She only asked to continue to be well and to appreciate her days. She asked to be able to help her patients and send them on to happier and more productive lives. She asked for Felicity to recover soon.

At midnight the revelers gave a cheer. And at two minutes after twelve she felt free. It was over, and she was not obliged to go through the Happy New Year bullshit for another whole year.

“I'm going,” she said to Kathryn. “Happy New Year.” She took a cab home alone, surprised and grateful to find one.

Kathryn called her the next morning. “I left right after you did,” Kathryn said. “I wasn't having much fun.”

“I thought you were.”

“No. I was bored.”

“We'll have better times this year,” Gara said.

“Of course we will.”

Chapter Forty-one

K
ATHRYN WAS MOVING ON.
It was time, the New Year was calling, and she had places to see, people to meet, things to do. She had known, when she had been bored during that New Year's Eve dinner, that it was time. Life was short, and she had many years to make up for in the years she had left, however many they might be, until she was too old to care. She could not imagine ever being too old to care.

Despite the constant heavy blizzards that made New York unappealing, she sublet her beautiful Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment for an outrageously large sum of money to a couple who wanted to stay there for a year, and planned her itinerary. First she would go to California to see her mother. Her mother was in her eighties now. Her mother's husband, Arlo, had died, leaving her the beauty salon and enough money to live comfortably, and by now of course the salon was sold, so she had more. She was living in a little apartment in Marina Del Rey, with a terrace that overlooked the Marina with all the sailboats and yachts, and enjoying her retirement.

Kathryn had talked to her mother on the phone, planning her visit. She wanted to take Sheila on a nice trip, and offered to take her wherever she wanted to go. It had occurred to Kathryn, after Gara had tried to make her remember things that night at Yellowbird, that her mother had saved her life. Now that so many years had gone by she and her mother got along very well, although they didn't see each other very often.

“Arlo and I used to go to Hawaii,” Sheila said. “I'd like to go back.”

“Done deal.”

She would also visit her children, Kathryn thought, scattered as they were around the country, but she wouldn't stay long. A few days always did it with grown children, no matter how much you loved them and how much fun you had. Then, for the months of February and March, she had the rented house in Palm Beach, where some of the women she played tennis with were going to be, and after that she would go to Canyon Ranch. Spring would be the time for Paris. In early summer she was planning a safari in Africa, which she had never done. In August, back to a house in a different part of Italy, or maybe the south of France, with a different recently divorced woman friend, Pamela, since Susan, the one she'd spent last summer with, had remarried.

After that, who knew? She would see where the breezes blew her. Whenever she missed New York she could always come back for a while and stay at a hotel. But there were so many places she hadn't been to yet, so many things she hadn't done, that Kathryn doubted she would miss it for a long time, although of course she would always keep her apartment. The apartment was one of her trophies. It was also a good source of income.

She called Gara to say goodbye. Gara seemed sad at the thought of her deserting them again. “Let's have a going-away dinner,” Kathryn said.

“At Yellowbird.”

“Oh, no, do we have to?”

“Please? Felicity will want to come, and I guess we should have Eve. It will be like old times.”

“I have never been attracted to old times,” Kathryn said, laughing, “but we did have fun together, and we will again.”

When they met for dinner and sat at their usual table there was a small wrapped present at her place. “What's this?” Kathryn asked.

“From me,” Felicity said. “It's nothing, really, just the thought that counts.”

Kathryn was touched. She opened the package and there was a Janis Joplin CD with all her most famous songs, the songs they had heard so often at Yellowbird.
Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose
, the card said, in Felicity's precise handwriting.
I love you, Kathryn, and I will miss your great spirit. Felicity.

“Oh,” Kathryn said, “thank you.” She was beaming, but there was a lump in her throat. What a sweet woman Felicity was. “I want to find out you're happy when I come back,” Kathryn said sternly.

“I'll try.”

“I'll give her some of my power,” Eve said. “Then she can move the world. Or one prick.” She laughed. “Get it? Move one prick?”

“We get it,” Gara said dryly.

“Gara doesn't believe in mysticism,” Eve said. “She is wrong. Sex is mysticism. The yin and the yang of the two opposing spirits, always conflicted, always needing one another.”

“Whatever works,” Kathryn said.

They ordered their usual broiled chicken, and Eve her chicken-fried steak, and they had a bottle of very expensive wine, which Kathryn insisted on paying for even though she was sticking to her vodka and wouldn't have any of it. “I hate that you're leaving,” Gara said, “and I'm going to miss you. Who's going to buy us Montrachet?”

“Visit me. I'll be in so many wonderful places.”

“What a life you have.”

“You wouldn't want it,” Kathryn said. “You live for your work.”

“Well, I do love my work, that's true.”

“Maybe I'll get bored and want to work again some day,” Kathryn said. “You never know.”

Billie came over, wearing red satin jeans and a tiny black sweater, with a red silk scarf around her neck, hiding her scar. Kathryn thought that even if she went to aerobics class every morning of her life she would never look that good in tight pants. Billie was a knockout.

“So Gara says you're leaving New York,” Billie said. “I can't imagine wanting to live anywhere else.”

“I'll be traveling, not settling down,” Kathryn said. “And just for a year.”

Or maybe forever, she thought. She didn't say it. It occurred to her then, apropos of nothing in particular, that New York was such a strange city that if you came back and didn't call anybody you could be here for years and they would never know it. Or you could walk down the street and run into six people you knew, from all different areas of your life. She had been in this town for eleven years, and she knew how mysterious it was. She had made more friends than any of the other women she knew, even Gara, who had been born here.

“Well, that's nice,” Billie said. “I guess.”

No, not more friends than Billie. Billie knew the whole world. But Billie's friends were mostly men, and Kathryn's friends were mostly women. Being horny and actively hunting made all the difference. Kathryn knew that in the unlikely event she met a suitable man and fell in love she might change her mind, but right now she didn't care if she never had sex again. She didn't even care if she never fell in love again.

Alastair Uland, she thought. Wow, that was a name from the past. He was the only one of her husbands she had ever loved, and she certainly had no idea why. He and their life together was so far away now it was less than a memory, more like a dream, or a story that had happened to someone else. Everything, Kathryn thought, that had happened to her had happened to a person she no longer was, who she would never be again. Every cell in her body had been replaced many times, and so had most of the people. Pare down, move on, live for the moment. The moment was all you had. That was her philosophy now, and it was what she intended to live by. It unquestionably made life simpler.