by Rona Jaffe
And he’d better lie well. Because when he came back he would have credit card receipts and she would be able to find out where he had really been.
She couldn’t sleep that night, and when Russell came home on Sunday evening Felicity’s eyes were swollen with sleeplessness and all the tears she had shed. She put ice on them and thought how unfair it was that she was looking her worst at the moment when she should be looking her best.
“Well, how was Washington?” she said. “Did you get the investors?”
“No,” he said. “The trip was a waste.”
“Then I guess that was why you didn’t go at all,” she said.
His brows drew together. His face was angry but his eyes were scared. “What do you mean?”
“I called the hotel and you were never there. You lied to me.”
“Well, I . . .”
“Were you in Boston with that creepy little thing again? Or is there someone new?”
The silence hung in the air for a moment. “Okay,” Russell said. “I was cheating on you. But I told you right from the beginning that I could never be a one-woman man. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you, Baby.”
“I’m leaving,” Felicity said. The words just came out of her mouth on their own. She hadn’t expected him to hit her with the truth like that, but now that he had she knew it had to end between them because there would never be any hope. She would have preferred to sound forceful, but her voice came out like a pathetic mew. Nevertheless, she meant it. She went into the bedroom, took down her suitcases, and began to pack. If she just concentrated on one thing at a time, on gathering her belongings, she wouldn’t have to think about what would happen when she had gone and was all alone, missing him and their life together, nursing her broken heart.
He followed her into the bedroom. “Don’t go,” he said.
She didn’t answer. She went into the bathroom and scooped up all her makeup and toilet articles and dropped them into a duffel bag.
Then he followed her into the bathroom so she pushed past him and went back into the bedroom again. She would never be able to get all her clothes into the suitcases. “I’m going to have to leave some things here,” she said, “but I’ll be back to get them when you’re at work.”
“You don’t have to go,” he said.
“Yes, I do.”
“She meant nothing to me.”
“So what?”
“I’ll break it off,” he said.
She shook her head. “You’ll find another one.” She was crying again. She headed for the door, dragging the suitcases and the duffel bag, and her purse and the heavy briefcase of her work from the office, with tears pouring down her cheeks and her nose running and no free hand to wipe it. Let his last sight of her be as this mess; it obviously didn’t make any difference that she had tried so hard to be appealing to him.
“All right,” Russell said. “I’ll marry you.”
Marry her! He would marry her! She put down the suitcases and gaped at him. He handed her some tissues and she blew her nose.
“We’ll get engaged now, I’ll get you a ring, and we’ll be married in a year,” he said. “I need a year to get my act together. This is going to be a very big life change for me. I have to prepare for it.”
“How are you going to do that?” she asked mildly.
“For one thing, I’m not going to see any women but you.”
“Do you promise?”
“I promise.” He looked at her. “Well, do you want to marry me?”
To think that she had given up all hope that he would ever ask. Felicity rushed into his waiting arms and felt as if she had come home, but this was not the frightening home she had escaped from, it was the safe, warm and happy home she had always wanted. “Yes!” she said.
Russell took her to Tiffany’s and bought her a big round diamond, set in platinum with two baguettes. Felicity couldn’t stop looking at it, admiring the way it caught the light. Her mother was thrilled and her father was pleased that she was settled, and with such a good catch. To further convince her of his good intentions Russell put their engagement announcement in the New York Times. Felicity bought several copies and mailed them home to her parents, and sent one to her sister in Cambridge. Theodora had been blessed with twins and so she now had three of her planned four children, the easy way, but Felicity wasn’t jealous. Now she was going to have what she had dreamed of, too.
There was only one problem, but it was a big one. From the time he said he would marry her and give up all his other women, Russell refused to have sex with her anymore. Felicity knew he was punishing her for making him change his carefree life. She was quite sure he wasn’t still cheating, but she didn’t know what he was doing about his sex drive, so she assumed he was secretly masturbating so that she would be the only one who suffered from deprivation. She had tried being seductive and he ignored her, she made advances and he shrugged her off. When she became more aggressive in bed and tried to do what he had always enjoyed, he pushed her away.
“Why don’t you want me?” she asked him.
He was tired, he had a headache, he had work to think about. There was always an excuse.
“Let’s go for couples counseling,” Felicity finally said.
“Don’t be ridiculous. There’s nothing wrong.”
At last, after three months, to keep her quiet, Russell had sex with her. She felt he was just going through the motions, that there was no passion there, and she didn’t know what to do. She was wondering if he wanted to drive her away so she would break the engagement.
But I can never do that, Felicity thought. She couldn’t imagine life without him, he was all she had ever wanted; she was madly in love with him, enslaved. She knew that if she didn’t give up they would eventually get married, and then if Russell still kept her at bay she would get him to go for marital counseling because if they were trying to save their marriage he wouldn’t be so embarrassed. Married couples had sexual problems all the time.
Somehow it seemed to her that being married would solve everything. Despite the disillusioning things she knew about marriage from her parents and her friends and Russell’s friends, she still thought that actually being married would work some sort of magic. Their marriage would be different from other people’s. He would get used to their union, he would grow to like it, and he wouldn’t be angry at her anymore. He was the one who had proposed this time, in order not to lose her, so she knew he loved and needed her. She also knew that Russell always had to win, and because he viewed his capitulation into the world of the domesticated as a defeat, there now were war reparations to be paid. She was paying them. She was convinced she wouldn’t have to pay them forever. He was not impotent, he was withholding; he was just showing her who was boss.
Felicity’s mother came to New York several times during the long engagement to help her plan the wedding. Carolee enjoyed shopping with her daughter and staying in a hotel. Russell wanted to be married in New York because that was where all his friends were. Felicity didn’t care. She just wanted to be married. She didn’t say anything to her mother about their strange sexual situation because somehow it seemed too private to reveal to anyone. Besides, she knew that her mother, true to form, would only blame her.
She thought how fragile and ambivalent her relationship with her mother still was now that she was an adult with a life of her own. As in her childhood, they bought clothes together again, and Carolee was the arbiter of her daughter’s taste. But Felicity was no longer bored and trying to get it over with as she had been as a child; now she enjoyed the attention and liked deferring to her mother’s fashion sense. Those times were close and friendly for both of them. But even though they pretended to have a good mother daughter relationship, as if the past had not happened, or as if they had even discussed it and clarified it and Carolee had asked for forgiveness, Felicity knew how volatil
e every moment was. She knew her mother could turn on her, or make a hurtful remark, at any moment; and she also knew that she would do almost anything to make her mother love her, to be kind to her, to be uncritical, and at those times when her mother chose to be tender she always melted.
Felicity decided she wanted a formal church wedding. Since she had made no church affiliation in New York and Russell didn’t care, she could pick any church she liked. She chose the Cathedral of St. John the Divine because it was so big and imposing, so medieval-looking, like an edifice from the age of faith and fear. She wanted Russell to really feel that he was being united with her in the eyes of God, and that he would have to behave himself forever after, and she felt she needed all the help she could get.
She and her mother chose a long, slim white lace gown with a small train and a long veil. Her four bridesmaids were friends from college and New York, no one from back home; she’d had no real friends there. She was forced by convention to let her sister Theodora be the matron of honor, even though Theodora was so fat after having her twins that she still looked pregnant. Both Felicity and their mother agreed on something for a change: that it was a shame they had to include Theodora because she ruined the composition of the tableau. But what could they do? Theodora would be so hurt to be left out. The reception would be at Tavern on the Green, in Central Park, with the fairyland lights in the trees, the banks of flowers, the colorful Tiffany glass.
Felicity and Russell went back to Tiffany’s, where they chose a simple gold wedding band.
“This way you can look forward to more diamonds on our anniversary,” he said affectionately.
He could be so nice, so sentimental, talking about their long future together as if he wanted it and believed in it as much as she did. But with their wedding day approaching, a year after they became engaged as he had promised, as her fiancé he had had sex with her only four times. After that first time, when he had seemed to be on automatic pilot, he was more passionate, but Felicity couldn’t help wondering if he was being so proficient with the purpose of making her miss sex with him more.
Now she knew why it was called the battle of the sexes and why so many books were written to tell women how to get their man. She was becoming more and more convinced that the whole struggle of getting the man you were in love with to commit wholeheartedly to marriage was genetically ordained. The woman was on one side and the man on the other. She moved in, he retreated. She invaded, he fought back. Strategy was always vital. Once you had entered his camp and gotten him to sign the truce—the engagement announcement—you couldn’t give him an excuse to break the engagement. Russell always kept her off balance. He was obviously a man who didn’t want to be married, to be trapped and tied down, and yet he was so kind to her in other ways that at times she couldn’t help believing he did want domesticity, and with her, the way he claimed he did.
In an odd way, sometimes he reminded her of her mother: charming, unpredictable, sadistic, generous, mysterious. She didn’t know why the two most important people in her life had to be so complicated, so difficult to win.
At last, at last, it was her wedding day. In a few more hours she would be safe. Felicity was euphoric and hysterical with nerves all morning, and when she finally walked slowly down the aisle on her father’s arm she was trying not to giggle from a combination of panic and joy. In five more minutes she would be Mrs. Russell Naylor, and there he was, waiting for her, solid and strong. As she approached the altar, beaming, her mother leaned forward from her seat on the front row aisle.
“Wipe that stupid grin off your face,” her mother hissed.
Felicity’s heart sank. She turned herself instantly into the picture of demure solemnity her mother wanted: the perfect bride doll. She felt foolish and sad. She would never know how to do things right, never. But she wished that at this moment, of all moments in her life, her mother could have managed to keep her bad-tempered advice to herself.
But then she looked up at Russell’s dear familiar face, and she was tremendously heartened to see that he was as close to nervous laughter as she had been. In that shared moment of held-back hilarity she had never felt closer to him. He was her best friend. They were on the same wavelength. Now, finally, she knew everything would be all right. We’ll make it, she thought, sending the thought out to him, willing it into his mind and his heart. We will live happily ever after. We will beat the odds. We will be different.
That night, their wedding night, back in their penthouse apartment, Russell consummated their marriage enthusiastically. She felt legal at last. The next morning he took her to Bora-Bora for their honeymoon, for a week, where they lived in a grass hut on the beach with room service. They had sex four times. She thought everything would be all right now. She thought she had survived the war.
Chapter Twenty-four
AFTER HER MOTHER’S TRIAL was over, Kathryn and her kids had to move in with her mother and younger brother in her mother’s house, since her mother was too depressed to be alone. They had been there for six months now. Her mother was living with guilt and grief, and Kathryn was living with low-grade anxiety. If her mother picked up a bottle of Lysol, Kathryn would wonder if she was going to clean the bathroom or swallow it. When Kathryn went out to fill her orders and left her two little boys with her mother, she wondered if her mother would decide to gas herself and take the babies with her, or cut her wrists so she would return home to find two hysterical children with a corpse. If her mother had been deranged enough to kill once, who knew what she might do now? People did all kinds of crazy things. The doctors at the mental hospital told her to take the locks off all the doors so her mother couldn’t lock herself in and do something to herself.
Ted had escalated his visits. He was over at the house nearly all the time now, trying to help her with the kids. And, as always, every time he left to go back home his two little boys filled the house with their hysterical sobs. They didn’t want him to leave, they wanted to go with him. “Daddy!” they would scream. Chip, the baby, would scream all night. “I want my Daddy! I want my Daddy!” Kathryn’s mother, who was a nervous wreck anyway, would go into the kitchen and bang pots around in frustration. The house was in chaos.
Kathryn had never seen children so attached to their father, especially boys. The older one, Jim Daniel, seemed angry at her and at the world. Kathryn was convinced that if she didn’t put a stop to these visits their father would do more harm to them than good. At the very least, he should see them less. She kept trying to explain that to him, but he loved his children and didn’t want to be away from them. She just wanted to get finished with the divorce and find some peace.
Since he wouldn’t listen she finally went to his parents about his visits. “You’ve got to tell him to stop upsetting the babies,” she said. “They’re too attached to him.” Kathryn knew they had observed the pitiful scenes themselves. Ted often brought the boys home to his parents for the day, and when he had to take them back to Kathryn they knew he was going to desert them again and started crying as soon as he carried them out of the house.
His parents, who only wanted to be helpful, understood and reluctantly took her side, and told him he had to wean the children away from him because he was making them too confused. But Ted didn’t understand. How could he, Kathryn thought. He had the fun of playing with them and she had the consequences afterward. She was the one who had to bring them up. He was only making it harder for her. She wished he would stay away.
The divorce came through. She was single again. It took a long time for his parents to convince Ted that his love and kindness was making his children unhappy, but when he did admit it he decided to leave town altogether because he couldn’t think of any other way to handle the situation. He couldn’t stand to be so close to them and not see them. He got a job as an assistant manager in a department store in San Francisco, and Kathryn hoped he would fall in love and marry again and get over the whole mess. She
had never wished him ill. She had no feelings about him either pro or con. Leaving Boston had been his idea. She had only wanted to be left in peace.
Now that she was on her own, even though she could hardly afford it Kathryn almost always got a baby-sitter, but her mother never liked them and complained constantly. Her mother was so unstrung from everything that had happened to her that having a stranger in their small house was too much for her, and Kathryn would often come home from doing her deliveries to find that the newest baby-sitter had been fired, and the children were alone with her again.
Her mother had not yet returned to work and had no immediate plans to do so. For some reason she had been given her husband’s pension, and his insurance policy with double indemnity due to his unnatural death. It was as if they didn’t know what else to do with them. Kathryn thought the cops had always known what a brutal man her father had been and were on her side. So Sheila had her house, her savings, her insurance, her widow’s pension of fifteen hundred dollars a month, and she was free on five years’ probation. The newspapers had made a terrible fuss about it.
MURDERESS SET FREE, the headlines read. VICIOUS COP KILLER FOUND GUILTY AND RELEASED. In the eyes of the press Sheila had become a threat who was still walking the streets. Sitting at home in a state of mourning was more like it.
Kathryn and her mother did not talk about the murder anymore. Sheila didn’t mention it and Kathryn didn’t bring it up. Without asking each other what to do they had both decided to put any discussion of the past behind them. For Sheila it was too painful, and Kathryn, who couldn’t care less that the brute was dead, just wanted to forget it.