Five Women

by Rona Jaffe

He called her that same day, before lunch. She was stunned and flattered. “I just found myself free for lunch,” he said. “Would you be free too, by any chance?”

  “Well, yes I am,” said Felicity, in a tone that implied surprise at this fortunate coincidence. Actually, she never went out to lunch unless it was someone’s birthday, and was therefore almost always available, but if she hadn’t been she would have made herself so.

  “How about ‘21’ at twelve-thirty?”

  “That would be lovely. See you then.” When she hung up she stifled her shriek and giggle of triumph. “All right!”

  He had assumed she knew where it was, that other successful men had taken her there, but since she had never been there she had to look for the address in the phone book: “21” was such a famous restaurant that even she had heard of it. Her boss ate there sometimes when he had an important client to entertain. It was just lunch, she reminded herself, but it was a beginning. Suddenly she felt sensual and attractive. Who knew what would happen?

  It turned out that “21” was in a townhouse with a line of jockey statues going up the side staircase, and when she got inside it looked like a men’s club, all dark wood and horse pictures. She was on time and Russell was late. When she told the man at the door whom she was meeting he obviously knew who Russell was, but he wouldn’t let her go to the table; he made her wait in an anteroom with a big television set in it and a view of the front door. Felicity couldn’t decide whether she had to stay here in limbo because she was only a woman, a young woman at that, and therefore suspect, or because she was black. But they knew Russell Naylor and seemed cordial, so it must just be her. She was aware again, as she often was recently, of how women were often treated as if they were nothing unless they had a powerful man on their arm, and how sometimes that made it even worse.

  When Russell came in they all made a big fuss over him, greeting him as if they knew him well and were glad he was here, telling him there was a young lady waiting for him, noticing again that she existed. Russell beamed at the sight of her and Felicity felt better. He took charge immediately, and as they went into the bar where their table was he was shaking hands, greeting and being greeted by name by what looked like every tuxedoed man who worked there. He was like royalty in his castle.

  They sat side by side at a small table with a red and white checkered tablecloth, under a profusion of boy’s toys hanging from the ceiling. The place was full of white businessmen, with a few older white women who looked like society types, and a picture flashed through Felicity’s mind of the tea room where she had to go years ago with her mother and her mother’s lover. But she didn’t know why, since this was certainly more like a men’s club than a tea room and she was grown up and with her own date.

  Her mother was watching her, she supposed, always in her mind even when she least expected it. Her mother would have been pleased to see her today.

  They ordered bottled water and swordfish. “You certainly are important,” Felicity said. “You’re like a king.”

  He laughed. “The great acting teacher Stanislavsky was once asked by one of his students: ‘How do you play a king on the stage?’ And Stanislavsky answered: ‘You don’t have to do anything to play a king. The audience knows you’re a king by the way the other actors behave.’ That’s why there are certain restaurants where I like to go regularly.”

  She digested that and was impressed. “You must read a great deal.”

  “Some,” he said. “Not really. I used to go out with an actress and she told me that.”

  “The education of the bachelor comes from all the women he went out with,” Felicity said, pretending to be teasing him.

  “And you?” Russell asked. “How is your education?”

  “Unfinished. I’m still pursuing it.”

  “I hope I can help.”

  “I’m sure you can.”

  They smiled at each other and she felt the spark. I could learn a lot from him, she thought. She asked him about his work and his life, she hung on every word, she was as pliant and seductive as she had been taught, which was by now almost second nature to her, and she even pretended to be as interested in sports as he was. Why were men so devoted to watching other men trying to take a ball away from each other? She told him nothing about her dysfunctional and crazy childhood because he had obviously liked his own parents, and poverty had been his only, albeit great, problem growing up. As they talked she was aware that he was sizing her up and that he liked what he saw. All she wanted was for him to save her. She was not sure from what, but she thought perhaps everything.

  He told her about his travels, his vacations to exotic places—Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, a cruise down the Nile; Hong Kong, Singapore, Bali—always with one woman or another. Felicity wanted to be that woman.

  “I just got back from two weeks in the French wine country,” he said. “I had a date with me and we had a car and fold-up bicycles. We would go into a little town and stop at a wonderful inn, and then we would ride our bikes for miles out into the country and have a picnic of charcuterie and cheese and fresh bread and good local wine, and then we would ride back in time for dinner. The next day we would be on to the next town. The scenery was so spectacular.”

  He’s middle-aged but he’s in good shape, Felicity thought. All that bike riding lets him eat things I would never eat, and look at him.

  “I think you met her,” Russell said. “She was with me at the party.”

  Felicity nodded. “‘Date’ or girlfriend?” she asked. She was jealous already.

  “Was my girlfriend, now is a date. We’re winding down.”

  “Maybe I could become her replacement,” Felicity said flirtatiously.

  “Maybe,” he said, smiling. “You have beauty and brains. I’m very impressed.”

  “Thank you.”

  And although she was determined she would never give up her work, luckily her work was part of what made her appealing to him.

  She knew her life with him would be so different from anything she had ever known that she felt like an innocent little hick with her fingers and nose pressed against the window to a magical world. I must be in love, Felicity thought. She wondered if it was success itself that was such a turn-on, or the fact that he had been able to achieve it. How could you separate the two anyway? She wondered what she could possibly do to keep from becoming another one of Russell Naylor’s social statistics.

  They had to go back to their offices then. The next day Felicity wondered if she should call Russell to thank him for the lunch, or if that would be too forward and if maybe she should write him a brief note instead. She wanted to keep the connection. While she was pondering this dilemma flowers arrived.

  Thank you for brightening my day, the note read. Russell.

  All right! Felicity shrieked to herself, and hugged herself as if she were her own best friend.

  Then she didn’t hear from him for a week. She hoped he was out of town on business, but she knew he was with the girlfriend, “winding down,” if indeed he was. Why is dating torture, she thought, why can’t people just have an arranged marriage to someone perfect and avoid all the bullshit? Then he called and invited her out to dinner. She took an unaccustomed lunch hour and rushed to Saks where she bought a sexy black dress she couldn’t really afford, to wear for him.

  Russell took her out to dinner three times, always to an expensive restaurant where he told her stories of his sophisticated adventures. His stories made her yearn for him with a feeling that was like pain. Finally he invited her to his apartment. Felicity knew what the invitation meant and she was ready.

  She was overwhelmed by his apartment, a small penthouse in the sky, with the glittering city spread out below them, and a view of three bridges, strung with lights. Then when they went to bed she was even more stunned by what a good lover he was. Nothing in her experience had prepared her for this. He starte
d at her perfectly pedicured toes and worked up slowly, slowly, teasing her until he gave her the best oral sex she had ever had. He didn’t even let her do anything to him. He was hugely endowed, the biggest she had ever seen, filling up the emptiness of her body, her heart, her life, replacing it with pleasure. When he had finished with her she was besotted and lost. Older men are the best, she thought, the best. I want to marry him and live with him forever.

  She chased him for a year, happy and serene when she was with him, anxious and miserable when she was not. She attended sports events with him and pretended to be as enthusiastic as he was; on the weekends that he was in the city she cooked wonderful meals for him in his apartment and helped entertain his friends; she played wife, she became, at least, good friend and confidante. He finally told her he was falling in love with her.

  After that first night in bed together he had begun to let her do to him whatever he did to her, which made her feel more equal, but then later on he became the passive one, letting her do most of the work. But Felicity didn’t mind; she loved him, she wanted him, and she didn’t want him to get tired of her. She knew he was still seeing other women and she wanted to be better at sex than they were—better at everything. She wanted him to love her more and more, until he had to have her in the way she wanted—as his wife.

  By then Russell was calling her Baby and she was calling him Slugger. Her nickname for him had a kind of sports reference, although Felicity was not unaware that in their choice of nicknames she was the little mild one and he was the big tough one. He was only her height, but he outweighed her by fifty pounds. He was as muscular and chunky as a bull; if he had wanted to he could have thrown her across the room, but he was Ferdinand the Bull who smelled the flowers. Secretly she named their unconceived children.

  In June of their first year together he took her on their first trip, a ten-day cruise to the Greek islands and Italy. They flew to Nice, took the boat to Catania and drove to Taormina, looking down on the gorgeous Mediterranean seascape below. The tiny ancient town was hanging off the side of a cliff, with lemon trees and olive trees and flowers everywhere, the air redolent of their mixed perfumes. Their hotel was a twelfth-century monastery, where they made love, laughing at the incongruity of tourists like themselves indulging in carnal pleasures in the former dwelling place of the celibate. The narrow, cobbled main street of the town was full of restaurants and trattorias, and shops with chic, expensive designer clothes and leathers. Russell bought her almost anything she admired.

  There were a great many unfinished houses. He told her that when a girl child was born the family began to build a home for her, as her dowry, but since they had seventeen or eighteen years to finish it the men of the family worked on it only on weekends or whenever they felt like it. He liked to plan trips, and did extensive research on everything; he knew as much as a tour guide. Every day she was with him Felicity became more convinced that he was the most exciting man she could ever hope to meet, and she wanted his life, she wanted him, and she couldn’t tell the difference.

  “Are you happy?” she asked him.

  “I’ve never been so happy, Baby.”

  “I’m happy too. Do you know what I wish for most in the world?”

  “What do you wish for? I’ll get it for you.”

  “That you and I get married.”

  The happy smile disappeared from his face in an instant and was replaced by a look of cold and superior amusement as if he had shut a door. It made her feel stupid, and it hurt.

  “Don’t you think there’s a reason why I’ve never been married?” he said.

  “Is there? What is it?”

  “I’m used to a lot of women,” Russell said. “I don’t know if I could be satisfied with only one.”

  “I know you’ve been seeing other women,” she said carefully. “That’s why I hate dating so much. You tell me you love me but I still have to share you.”

  “If it makes you feel better, Baby, you’re the only woman in my life right now.” She didn’t believe it, but she nodded and pretended she did. “Marriage, though,” he continued, “is very serious business. Marriage means committing to an emotional and sexual connection of years and years.”

  “Why don’t you give me a chance?” Felicity said. “I know how to really work on making it exciting. You’ll see.”

  “You used the word ‘work’. That’s the trouble with marriage. Why should it be work?”

  “Because it is. But so is even one date. You and I try to please each other. Is that so difficult?”

  “It’s easy. Right now.”

  “It would be easy too if we got married,” Felicity said. “Then maybe we could have a baby. I’d love that.”

  “A pretty little baby who looks like you,” he said, smiling.

  “I’ve always wanted children. Couldn’t we just live together and see how it works?” Felicity asked. It made her feel humiliated to have to beg him like that, but she couldn’t help trying.

  “Oh, look there! Isn’t that beautiful?” he said, grabbing her arm, pointing, changing the subject. Felicity did not pursue it because she didn’t want to spoil their vacation.

  At the end of their first year together, as if she had passed a test, or perhaps because he finally loved her enough, Russell finally let her move in with him.

  “This is not a prelude to marriage,” he warned her.

  “Oh, I understand.” But of course she paid no attention to his protest because she felt enormously encouraged. Time was not her enemy yet; she was still young and he was not.

  The following year when she took her vacation they went to London and Paris for two weeks because she had never been there. He wined and dined her, he showed her the sights, he paraded her through museums, and one night, walking hand and hand with him along the Seine, high on champagne and melting with love, she proposed again—and again he said no. Felicity was beginning to realize that living with him didn’t make her feel any safer than dating him had, although she’d thought it would. She knew he was still seeing other women—how else could he explain the weekend absences for “business” when he could easily have let her come along? They had been together for a long time, for him, and she wondered when he would finally decide to abandon her. If he married her it would be harder for him to leave.

  She was still trying to get her mother to love her, even though she was an adult now, living in a distant city, with an independent life of her own. In spite of everything that had happened between them she wanted her mother to be her friend and confidante, the good, wise mother who had always popped up briefly to tantalize her but then suddenly turned on her, the stable mother who existed only in her dreams. At Christmas when she went home to Detroit to visit for a few days, Felicity asked her mother what to do about Russell.

  “Cater to him in every way,” her mother said. “Make his life so convenient he won’t be able to live without you.”

  “I’m trying,” Felicity said in despair.

  “Try harder.”

  “I can’t think of anything else to do.”

  “You just have to know how to play the game right,” her mother said. “It’s your fault if you can’t get him.”

  Why is everything always my fault? Felicity wondered. The pain in her heart was overwhelming. She shouldn’t have gone home at all.

  Chapter Nineteen

  IT IS SAID THAT FOUR O’CLOCK in the morning is the time when most suicides occur. At four in the morning in that black night that was only day on the clock and certainly not in her life, Billie stumbled half-drunkenly around Toad’s apartment looking for something to help her die. Pills were of course her first choice, but whatever he had collected he had taken with him on the road, and whatever she had collected she had already consumed over the last weeks of her deep depression. She was in no condition to go out anywhere tonight to score more.

  She had grown u
p with guns around and was comfortable with them, but she didn’t have one or it would have been easy. Knives made her sick. She could cut her food, but a knife slicing into living flesh in a movie made her turn away her eyes and shudder, and the thought of it happening in real life was more horrifying. She could much more easily have put a bullet through her heart than open an artery. She was not even confident that she could do a good job with a razor and a vein, and besides, Toad had taken his razor and hers was electric.

  She thought of jumping off the top of his building. He lived in an apartment in a four-story brownstone in the Village, on a street of similar small houses, and if she missed the fire escapes and the trees that could break her fall she supposed she could do it. She had not been out of the apartment in two weeks. The liquor store and pizza parlor delivered, no matter how bad you looked, as long as you had the money. Somehow the thought of going out now, even if it was to meet her welcome death, was off-putting. She wanted to burrow into her hole and disappear. Fatal accidents happened to people all the time at home. The kitchen and bathroom were dangerous places. But the stove was electric, like her razor, and she didn’t know how to drown herself. She was afraid some last moment of survival instinct, or perhaps just the agony of exploding lungs, would make her rise and gulp the air.

  If you read the newspapers or watched television it seemed it was easy to be mugged, to die in a drive-by shooting, to be pushed onto the subway tracks by a lunatic, to be run over by a car, but when you wanted to commit suicide peacefully at home it was harder than she had thought.

  Toad had cartons and cartons of old LP records, every one he had ever owned, tied up with rough, scraggly rope, pushed into closets, into corners. Billie blinked blearily and realized she had found what she had been looking for. Hanging would do just fine.

  She went into the bathroom and pulled several times on the shower rod to be sure it would support her weight. Then she got the kitchen shears and sawed through the packing rope from several of the boxes and fashioned herself a nice noose. It was more like twine, but it would do. People hung themselves with neckties, with shoelaces. That was why when you were in jail and were suicidal, or even if you weren’t, they took such things away.