Five Women

by Rona Jaffe

  She went to the store down the street and got change and used their pay phone to call her answering service and then Harry’s. There were no messages for her, and she left one for him when the service said it didn’t know where he was. “Tell him I’m at the house.”

  Then she went back to the stripped and vacant shell. She sat on the front steps with her suitcases and her guitar beside her and wished she had a drink or just a glass of water to take a pill to make the trembling stop. Was he so broke he couldn’t even have come to the airport? Was he hurt somewhere, in a hospital?

  Billie waited for an hour, until she was cramped and chilled and going crazy, and then she went back to the store down the street and got more change and began using their pay phone to call everyone she could think of, including the guys in the band, to see if Harry was there or had left a message for her. She told everyone she had lost her keys. Then she started calling all the hospitals.

  Nobody knew anything.

  It was dark now, and cold, and she was exhausted. She needed a place to stay for the night. She was reluctant to call any of the guys from the band again. They’d been on each other’s necks for two solid weeks and needed to get away from each other. But she didn’t have any choice. She called Toad and he said to come right over. She pretended to be calm. She needed to keep the band from finding out how broke Harry was until she found out what was going on. She was surprised to see herself so cool and rational, but you just had to put one foot ahead of the other or else you would have time to think and get scared. She still couldn’t let herself believe for one moment that Harry had left her, but what else could she believe?

  “Harry’s probably out getting drunk,” Toad said. He gave her a joint and a glass of tequila.

  “Some welcome from my old man,” Billie said, pretending to be miffed, not terrified.

  “Well, you two have been together for a long time.”

  “It doesn’t seem long to me,” Billie said.

  She slept on Toad’s couch, and the next day she started looking for Harry again, every hour plunging her deeper into depression and fear. That night, when she still couldn’t find out anything, she knew she should go to a hotel, but she couldn’t stand to be alone; she was too upset. She told Toad the whole story, finally, partly because they were both stoned. She told him he shouldn’t get any ideas that she was available on the rebound. All she wanted was to find Harry and get things right.

  “Me, too,” Toad said. “I’d like to know what’s going to happen to the rest of our bookings, if there are any.”

  He called the other musicians and they got together at Toad’s apartment and decided Harry was gone for good. Billie refused to admit it.

  “This must have been going on for a long time,” Legs said. “I got kicked out of a place I owned once; they kept sending me letters and notices and putting things on my front door for months. Harry just didn’t tell you.”

  “Harry handled the business,” Billie said, to defend him.

  But she couldn’t sleep and the days were endless. She called her answering service every half hour and kept leaving Toad’s number on it too. She also called Harry’s service several times a day to see if he had picked up her messages, but they wouldn’t tell her, apparently at his request because he was hiding, and finally his service told her they had been discontinued. Her insides were churning, and she felt lost. Outlaw Records was gone, too, without a trace. The record company office had been in the house, and that had been their answering service.

  She knew she would have to start all over again, knock on doors, go see the record companies with her songs, see if they wanted her voice on someone else’s song, and she didn’t know how she could when just going through the motions of living were all she could handle. All she could think about was Harry, so how could she ever pull herself together enough to write a decent song?

  She kept looking at the notice that had been on their door, and finally she decided she should go out to Long Island City and get back her clothes and her jewelry. She rented a U-Haul truck because she knew she needed something big; she had a lot of stuff. But when she got to the storage place she was greeted by a stubborn little creepy man who said she couldn’t have her clothes or jewelry without presenting all the original sales slips, which of course she hadn’t kept; why would she? Some she had never had; they were gifts from Harry.

  “But they’re mine!” she said. “I’m Billie Redmond, here’s my driver’s license, my credit card . . .”

  “I know who you are,” the man said. “I just don’t know who owns the property. How would it look if I gave it to you and then tomorrow his other girlfriend showed up and she had all the sales slips because it was hers?”

  “He has no other girlfriend,” Billie said, although now she wasn’t sure. “The clothing was in my house. I’ll tell you the labels. I’ll describe my diamond bracelet in detail. How would I know what it looks like and that it was even there if it isn’t mine?”

  “Get me a notarized letter from Harry Lawless that the women’s clothes and jewelry that were in the house were yours and you can have them. That’s the best I can do.”

  He didn’t even say he was sorry.

  Billie cried from helpless rage all the way back in the truck. She felt her property had been stolen from her, and it had. She knew Harry would have wanted her to have her things; he had bought some of them for her, and she had bought some for herself. They were not only expensive but they had sentimental value. Some of the best were from their wonderful trip to Paris. They represented hits, they were her happy memories of love. All she had now was what she had taken with her on the road—her Tank watch, her rings, some earrings—not much because she had been afraid of being robbed in a motel; but now she had been robbed by the law.

  When she got back she told Toad what had happened and he said Harry probably didn’t know she would need all that proof to get her things back. She knew Harry hadn’t even thought about it. She was finally beginning to understand there was a more serious reason he was on the run.

  Two long weeks after she had come home to find she had no home, Harry finally called her. Her heart flipped up with relief and she felt as if the lights had gone on again.

  “Where did you go?” she asked him. “I missed you so much.”

  “I’m not in New York,” he said. “I have some problems with my taxes.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I didn’t pay them for a couple of years. It’s all my accountant’s fault.”

  “That bastard!” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Didn’t you notice you weren’t signing any forms?” Billie said. “Didn’t you ask?” Immediately after she said it she wished she could take it back because she sounded like a nagging wife. That was the one thing she had never intended to be.

  “I’m going away,” Harry said.

  “You are away. I want to go with you.”

  “You can’t, honey. I’m in trouble.”

  “But you can pay back what you owe little by little,” Billie said.

  “They’re calling my plane,” Harry said.

  “Where are you going? When are you coming back?”

  “It was fun, honey,” Harry said, “but it’s over. As the man says, that’s all she wrote. Take care of yourself.” Then he hung up. He was gone.

  Billie sat by the phone for a long time without moving. So deep was her grief that she could hardly breathe, and she wished she wouldn’t have to. Later she remembered that she hadn’t asked him for a letter about her property, and although she was so depressed that she no longer cared about material things, she thought it would have helped if Harry had written it to show he hadn’t totally deserted her, and now she would never know.

  After that she moved slowly, as if she were walking underwater, and she seldom spoke. Harry hadn’t made any more bookings for them
and the band was worried about money. Unlike her, they had an agent, and when a gig turned up to back another singer on the road in a bunch of crappy little clubs, they took it. They had no other choice. The job was available and immediate, and their agent wasn’t interested in representing her at the moment. Billie didn’t think she could have gotten up on a stage right now anyway. She was too depressed. She stayed in Toad’s apartment and paid his rent while he was away, drank, and stared at the wall, and finally one day when she felt slightly better she tried to pull herself together as much as she could considering her mental state and started going around to record companies.

  None of them wanted her, not even the little ones. Then she went to agents. None of them were interested in taking over her career.

  The last agent who was willing to see her was in a hurry and brutal. “Singers like you,” he said, “who were stars in the early seventies are over. You’ve had too many bombs. Disco is in now. You have the wrong songs, the wrong sound. You’re finished.”

  She couldn’t believe he was saying that to her. How could this have happened so fast? “I could keep on touring,” Billie said. “I just want to sing.”

  “Well, maybe little clubs in college towns or something. People who remember you might let you be an introductory act. I wouldn’t be bothered to represent you for that and neither would any other agent when we can start out with a new young artist and make her a star.”

  “I just want to sing,” Billie said again.

  “Trust me,” he said. “Go get a normal job.”

  If she could sing, get up on a stage again, she knew she would heal. But none of them cared what she wanted. They were telling her she was a twenty-eight-year-old has-been. What was she going to do with the rest of her life? She went back to the apartment and sat in front of the television set, the blinds down, a glass of vodka in her hand, smoking. She should never have let Harry run her whole life, she was thinking. But then she thought that perhaps if she hadn’t had Harry no one else would have wanted her. Now she would never know.

  There was an old movie from the fifties called Sunset Boulevard on in the middle of the night and she watched it. It was about a has-been movie star named Norma Desmond who went crazy. Billie identified completely with her pain. When the glory days were over, you were just ridiculous.

  That was when she began thinking seriously about suicide.

  Chapter Seventeen

  KATHRYN AND HER NEW HUSBAND, Ted, had rented a room and bath and kitchenette-in-the-wall in a cheap apartment house—a newlyweds’ first apartment—to stay in until he would get a promotion and maybe she got pregnant and then they would find something bigger and better and get on with what they spoke of as their real lives. They were collecting their dishes and flatware, setting by setting, and his parents had bought them a convertible bed, which later on when they had a real bedroom would become their living room couch. She had been Kathryn O’Mara Hopkins for a while now, but it was still quite unreal; she felt as if she were pretending to be another person with another identity and that underneath this person was her actual self, hiding.

  A few nights a week the young couple went to dinner at his parents’ house. She liked his parents very much because they were normal and were kind to her. Kathryn would clear the table with his mother after their pleasant, peaceful dinner, and wash the dishes with Ted, while he spoke longingly of a roomier, nicer apartment, and she thought how she could happily move in here with these good parents and stay forever, or at least until she grew up. She had no interest in being alone with him.

  She had remained a virgin on her awful wedding night because she was so upset, but afterward they had gone to the Berkshires for their honeymoon and consummated the marriage. Kathryn was so scared of sex, so tight, so virginal, so resistant that the first few times she reluctantly let Ted take advantage of his marital rights, she was not even sure they had gone through with it. Every time they had sex she froze and it hurt. Nothing in her upbringing and experience had given her any reason to think this should be fun.

  She was working now, too. She had gotten a job giving Tupperware parties for the other married women in the area, and because she was an extrovert, she was good at it, although she was bored with the lack of mental challenge. Why not have a baby right away, Kathryn thought; I’m going to have one eventually and it would give me something to do. She stopped dreading their nightly grappling, because now at least it had a purpose. By the time she was getting to like sexual intercourse a little and thinking it was something she might eventually be able to put up with on a regular basis, she was pregnant.

  The pregnancy was easy. Ted got his wish for a pleasant garden apartment, he and Kathryn had a good time decorating it, and their son, Jim Daniel, was born right on schedule. Jim Daniel was an adorable baby, alert and healthy. Kathryn hadn’t really thought about whether she would be maternal or not, but the appearance of this tiny, needy person unleashed a wave of warmth and love greater than anything she had ever felt for anyone. She was very busy and very tired, but content.

  She had not seen her father since he had thrown her out of the house two years ago. She spoke to him only if he answered the phone when she called her mother, and then only to say, “May I speak to Mom?” They had nothing to say to each other. He was still not drinking, but Kathryn was convinced that the damage had already been done and he was crazy.

  Then one afternoon, for no reason, her father appeared at her apartment with the worst-looking dog Kathryn had ever seen. It looked like he had gotten it in a junkyard.

  “This is my new best friend,” her father said. “He’s rabid, but he won’t bite if I tell him not to.”

  In a flash Kathryn imagined the dog mangling her child, and stood in front of the door. “Don’t come in,” she said. “Go away.”

  When they left shortly afterward, she was shaking. She told her mother of the bizarre happening a few days later and her mother said, “Your father never had a dog.”

  When her father did not come back again, Kathryn was relieved. She knew that if he did, she would not let him in.

  She wanted to have another baby right away. It had not occurred to her how much more work two babies would be than one; all she thought was that two would be a family. When you got married, you had children. Besides, she had always had enormous energy. She got pregnant again easily. When her second son was born they named him Charles and called him Chip. He was sweet and happy, smiling all the time, and she and Ted felt lucky.

  Kathryn could hardly believe how much Ted had changed from the popular, fun-loving, fickle college boy she had married by accident. He was the most devoted of husbands and fathers. She hardly ever saw him without a baby on his hip. He came home from work and helped around the apartment, he never made her wait on him, he always shared the care of the two kids, he even did the laundry. She had never stopped working, because boring as it was, she could make a hundred dollars a night giving her Tupperware parties, which she did several times a week, and while she was out Ted willingly baby-sat. She had no previous experience with the example of a father who enjoyed his children and his home, but nonetheless she suspected Ted was unusual. He liked being married much more than she did.

  She had really nothing to complain about, but she still didn’t like being married. She felt somehow betrayed by the way her life had turned out. She didn’t know whether it was because she was too young to be so settled, or because she wasn’t in love with her handsome, thoughtful husband, even though she was fond of him, or because she had never wanted to be married in the first place, never. More and more often lately Kathryn found herself thinking about how she could manage to get a divorce. Then she wouldn’t be a wife, and she wouldn’t have to live with a man. She would keep the apartment and the babies would live with her. She was not afraid of being alone; she had the children. She would take care of them. She had saved her Tupperware money and she was making more all the time. Whe
n she didn’t have Ted around anymore she would hire a baby-sitter.

  Her mother came to visit quite often. “Your father has a girlfriend now,” she said. “She calls the house all the time asking to speak to him.”

  “What kind of woman keeps calling a married man’s house?” Kathryn said.

  “He won’t tell me who she is, but I know what she is. We fight about that woman all the time. The last time I asked him who she was he came after me with a chair.”

  “I’ll bet his friends know.”

  “His friends are no help. They probably do know, but they won’t tell me. Those men stick together.”

  “Now will you leave him?” Kathryn said.

  “I’m beginning to think about it.”

  “Better sooner than later.”

  Then, her father in one of his fits of rage threw her mother down the stairs and injured her back. Sheila was in such unbearable pain that she had to be taken to the hospital, where she was kept for a few days and put in traction.

  Kathryn went to visit her mother in the hospital while Ted stayed home and baby-sat. She brought flowers. Of course her father was not there. The room was dim and peaceful and there was no one in the other bed. Her mother was in her cubicle with the curtains open, her own domain, with her I.V. and her hospital paraphernalia, pulleys and weights attached to her legs; full of painkiller so she nonetheless looked happy and rested; the nurse’s station was right outside, and Kathryn thought how few these hours of peace and safety were in her mother’s life. What a pity that she had to have been brutalized to be able to have what should have been her right all the time.

  “When I get out of the hospital your father will get me a nurse’s aide at home,” her mother said.

  “You’re letting him get you the nurse’s aide?”

  “He will. I’ve given him the money for her.”

  “Why would you have to give him the money?” Kathryn said, annoyed. “Why can’t he do even that for you? He was the one who threw you down the stairs.”