Five Women

by Rona Jaffe

  She left him again, and took the boys with her to live with her mother. Her mother had not changed. She was as depressed and unpredictable as ever, but now she kept adamantly denying that she had ever been depressed at all. But at least it was home—for the moment. Whenever Alastair called, trying to convince her to let him make it up to her, Kathryn got off the phone as quickly as she could.

  She had been living with her mother for three months when Kathryn finally allowed herself to deal with the fact that she could not be happy without him. She missed him and thought about him all the time. Now she had enough distance from the bad parts to be able to remember the good ones. When she thought about their warm family evenings together, she felt nostalgic, and when she thought about their lovemaking, she yearned for him and thought her life was passing her by. This time she let him persuade her to come back to live with him. Six weeks later she was pregnant.

  They found a bigger apartment and moved in. They stopped talking about a house. “When he has a child of his own, it will mellow him,” Kathryn told her mother.

  “Don’t you believe it,” her mother said. “The minute I saw him I thought he was no good. He was too full of himself, showing off his body, all those muscles, how strong he was.”

  But that was what I liked, Kathryn thought. And still do . . .

  At last her mother was feeling better, and had started going to beauty school so she could get a job. Kathryn was glad to see the change in her. But then something else happened at home. Kathryn had left Alastair with her two boys and gone to her mother’s house for a few hours so her mother could give her a permanent. When she came back the boys were all alone, with black smoke issuing out of the bedroom. She ran in to see what had happened and discovered the cushion of the bedroom chair was on fire, shooting flames. Kathryn grabbed the entire chair and flung it into the bathtub and turned on the shower until the fire was out. Her heart was pounding. Where was Alastair? The whole apartment smelled from burned and wet feathers. She could see the forbidden box of matches the boys had been playing with, lying on the bedroom carpet. How could he have left them alone? Then he walked in.

  “Where were you?” Kathryn demanded.

  He looked at the wreckage and took in the situation in an instant. “I went next door to get a fire extinguisher,” he said. “To save them.”

  “Where is it?”

  “They didn’t have one.”

  The two of them stood there looking at each other. “You didn’t need a fire extinguisher,” Kathryn said. “You shouldn’t have left them. The whole place could have burned down.”

  “He went to save us,” Jim Daniel said. He looked up at Alastair as if to get his approval.

  “He saved us,” little Chip echoed.

  Alastair shrugged and pulled out a new pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. She suspected now why he had gone out, but she didn’t want to believe it. He loved her children. He would never do something that stupid.

  Alastair sat on the couch and put the kids on his lap. “You know you’re not supposed to play with matches,” he said to them.

  “We’re sorry.” It was over and they were safe. For all she knew Alastair had panicked after the fire had started, not gone out for cigarettes before it happened. Why would the kids lie? She and her little brothers had never defended her father for an instant, and it never occurred to her that her little boys would want to protect the man who had now become the father in their lives. They were her children; she knew them.

  The kids had learned a lesson and so had Alastair. She didn’t mention the incident to her mother, who disliked Alastair enough already. Kathryn forgot about it, and to the best of her knowledge Alastair never left the children alone again.

  Kathryn was already enormous in her pregnancy, and the doctor told her she was carrying twins. She had no idea how she was going to be able to take care of them, but she figured she would find a way. When the twins were born, they were girls. They named them Stephanie and Gaby. After the birth, Kathryn found out in earnest how hard life was going to be. Her oldest was still too young to go to school, so now there were four little kids at home and she still had her full-time secretarial job at Morgan Life. Luckily Alastair was able and willing to share the childcare and her mother pitched in, too, and there were the blessed baby-sitters. More than ever Kathryn respected the way her embattled mother had brought up four children alone, kept a job, dealt with her father, and survived it all.

  A year went by. Jim Daniel was in first grade finally, and had learned to read. Ever since she’d had him, her first baby, Kathryn had understood the love for a child, but more and more she was beginning to understand what she considered the power of love for a man. She suspected very strongly that she would never leave Alastair permanently, no matter how many times he hit her; that they were joined together forever, not because she was afraid, but because she was so attracted to him, and the worse he was to her, the more she wanted to win him. The only explanation she had for why she was so perverse was that the heart was unscrupulous.

  Then, after the worst fight they had ever had, she woke up on the floor and realized she had been unconscious. She didn’t even know for how long. Her head felt like a watermelon and there was blood in her mouth. Her body hurt so much that she just wanted to stay there on the floor all night, not move, not think. She closed her eyes and drifted away. When the front door slammed, she heard it as a peripheral part of her waking dream. He was partly her husband and partly her father in this dream state of hers; it was now and it was then. This time he didn’t even apologize. My father never apologizes, but Alastair does. . . . It was not until the next morning, when her babies’ wails made her come to attention and drag herself up to try to begin her day, that Kathryn realized Alastair was still gone.

  The police came to her door later. Kathryn knew them and she knew their arrival meant something was wrong. The two cops took in her damaged face in silence, and then they told her, hesitantly, that her husband was dead. He had been shot in a bar. When they told her, Kathryn screamed, and could not stop screaming. She was free and she did not want to be free; she was safe and the loss of Alastair tore at her heart and she wanted him to be alive. She wanted to wake up and find that this news had only been part of her nightmare, but she knew she was already awake and it was over.

  She grieved for him for two years, and remembered him for the rest of her life.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  THE EIGHTIES WERE BOOM TIME. Yellowbird was doing well and Billie had enough money to support herself and someone else. Her apartment in the high rise around the corner from work had two bedrooms. She feared the jokes time played. At seventeen and unprepared to raise a child, you could make one in one shot in the backseat of a parked car. At thirty-eight, appreciative of and yearning for motherhood, you were likely to be going around to fertility doctors. She was thirty-eight years old, and if she didn’t have a baby soon it might be too late.

  Sex, she had realized, was in some insidious way imprinted in the genes really for procreation. It was all about having babies. No matter if you didn’t want one or couldn’t have one; the body hungered. It was why men were attracted to women who were still young enough to be fertile; their unconscious smelled the monthly blood growing in the nest, waiting to nourish their child. The womb called out to them, even when its owner was carefully buying birth control and thought this was just a date. Horniness was nature’s trick.

  Marriage, she decided, was out of the question for her. She had adjusted to living her life alone and independently, and she never wanted to be hurt again. Besides, to find a man she would be willing to marry and who wanted to marry her would take too long. She had been a single woman in New York City for long enough to know how slim the pickings were. This city, or at least Yellowbird, where she spent her waking hours, attracted too many losers, and she had become all too aware that where bachelors were concerned, interesting
and emotionally available seldom went hand in hand.

  She needed seed, not aggravation. A sperm bank was out of the question too. She had her own sperm bank at Yellowbird. She could choose a different man to get pregnant with every month if she wanted to. She never wanted to tell a child of hers that she had bought him from an anonymous donor, even if the donor was a genius. She wanted to meet the prospect, see what he looked like, know about his family history, and conceive her child in the heat of passion so at least there would be a story to hand down, even if it was a fantasy.

  But if she did it on her own there was the one great risk—AIDS. She had to interview the men carefully to find the right one, because foremost on her mind, since she was a sensible person, was always the fear of the risk of the plague that had equated fun with death and ended all their carefree days. He would have to be straight, square, and as safe as she could be sure of short of asking him to have an AIDS test for something that was never going to be a relationship.

  She hoped the child would be a boy.

  Now that she knew what she wanted she looked every night for the man who would be the proper father for her unborn son. Even though she would rather it wasn’t a daughter, she knew that girls tended to look like their fathers, so his looks were important. She didn’t care if he was married; in fact she thought she would prefer it. Married and from another state would be even better. She didn’t want him, whoever he was to be, coming around to stake his claim or, even worse, tantalizing her child and constantly abandoning him.

  Suddenly she became the perfect listener. She would buy each new, unaware, potential prospect a few drinks and ask him about his life, his childhood, his talents and dreams. Men loved to talk about themselves. What Billie wanted to know was everything about the gene pool she was thinking of jumping into.

  “Oh, your sister had a nervous breakdown? How sad. Why?” Next. “It’s so tragic that your father was an alcoholic. So hard to grow up with that.” Next. “Twins run in your family! How convenient to get all your kids in one fell swoop.” Next. “Are your parents still alive? And do you still have grandparents? I just love old people, don’t you?” She felt that since she was not looking for love or commitment, at least she could try to have a shot at perfection.

  When she saw Cal Fortune walk into Yellowbird in the week of her fertility her heart turned over. He had that rangy cowboy look: the jeans, the boots, the blue denim shirt under the expensive jacket—a look many of the men at Yellowbird affected—but on him it seemed natural. She hoped he wasn’t taken, that he might be the one. It wasn’t that he was more beautiful than any of the other men she had briefly considered, but that there was something about him both electrifyingly sexual and familiar. She wasn’t sure what it was. He was her height and wiry, but the golden curls were reminiscent of no one she knew, and his calm, handsome face tantalized her into some kind of memory she couldn’t place. It never occurred to her that he might not want to be seduced by her because it seemed predestined.

  “Do you have a reservation?” she asked him.

  “No, ma’am. I just came into town for a few days and I thought I’d try here.”

  “One?”

  “Yes.”

  “It shouldn’t take too long,” she said, looking through the book.

  She slid into her customary seat at the bar and gestured for him to sit beside her. “Welcome to Yellowbird,” she said. “I’m Billie Redmond. I own this place.”

  “I’m Cal Fortune.”

  “You’re from Texas.”

  “You could tell.”

  “Takes one to know one,” Billie said smiling at him.

  “Dallas,” he said.

  “Not Houston?” And then she knew whom he reminded her of. He was Harry Lawless if Harry had never been in a bar fight, if his life and past had been wiped clean off his face. Harry Lawless . . . so the pull continued, just when she thought she was rid of him, when she thought that the memories were dead.

  Although she had had many lovers through the years she had not been so physically drawn as this to any man since Harry, and it occurred to her as she felt the warmth radiating from Cal Fortune’s knee, which was not even touching hers, that it would serve Harry right if she had a baby with someone who looked just like him, only better.

  “Buy you a drink?” she asked.

  “Thank you.”

  He had a beer, she had a vodka. He didn’t look like a man who drank a lot. They both smoked.

  “And what are you doing here in town?” she asked.

  “I’ve never been to New York. I thought it was time.”

  “It was time,” she said. He didn’t know what she meant, of course.

  “I’ve been to some shows, a couple of museums.”

  “You just came alone?”

  “I’m getting over a bad divorce. The decree came through last week. I thought I’d celebrate or commiserate with myself, as the case might be. She did take the house and the kids.”

  He put the house before the kids, Billie thought. He’d never come bothering me if he ever found out, which he won’t anyway.

  “How awful,” she said. “Divorce is so difficult. How many kids?”

  “Two. A boy and a girl. Three and five.”

  “Young.”

  “We should never have gotten married in the first place. People do stupid things sometimes, trying to make a marriage work.”

  “Better not to marry,” Billie said. “I didn’t.”

  He appraised her admiringly. “But you’ve been asked, many times, I’d bet.”

  “Oh, a few.”

  He glanced around the room. “You’re an independent woman, and doing well, it seems.”

  “I am. And what do you do?”

  “I’m a lawyer.”

  Intelligent. She approved. “Not a divorce lawyer, though?”

  “Corporate. For the Dallas Oil Consortium.”

  She figured him to be her age, maybe a little younger. Virile. Well-rounded, since he was a lawyer who came to New York to forget his troubles and went to museums. Everybody went to shows. “So you just found Yellowbird off the street?”

  “It wasn’t easy.”

  “It isn’t supposed to be.”

  “I was wandering around. I must have walked ten miles a day since I’ve been here. It’s new for me not to be in a car.”

  I hope you didn’t walk in those boots, she thought. “You must be tired,” she said.

  “Not really. I run ten miles every morning at home. Different shoes, of course.”

  She smiled. “Did you take up running for health or fun?”

  “I’m a pretty healthy person,” Cal Fortune said. “Nobody in my family gets really sick and we all live to be ninety. I just wanted to be sure to keep the line going.”

  And so do I, Billie thought. “Another beer?”

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  “Hey,” she said, “I’m sorry there’s such a long wait for your table, but those empty ones are reservations.”

  “Of course, I understand.”

  They talked for another hour and then she let him eat. Since it was late and the restaurant was not full he asked her if she might sit with him for a few moments and she of course agreed. She sat there while he consumed a plate of fried chicken and everything that went with it and said it reminded him of his mother’s cooking, which he meant as a compliment. Billie had a salad. She wasn’t hungry. She wanted to run her palm across the oddly familiar planes of his face, devour his mouth, and, more to the point, open his fly. She imagined her fingers at Cal Fortune’s heavy silver belt buckle and remembered the times when Harry met her on the road and their clothing was on the motel room floor before they even began to talk. It wasn’t the same now, she knew, not really. Nothing would ever be the same as it had been with Harry. But this was close enough, and this one w
as nice. She was not a child anymore. She didn’t need him to take care of her.

  Just give her a son.

  When it got late she told one of the waiters to put on the night tape, as she often did when she was feeling mellow, and she told Cal about her brilliant career. He was impressed, as all of them were. Of course she didn’t tell him what had ended it.

  “Nodes on my vocal cords,” she said. “I started singing too young and too loud and never had voice training. But that can happen anyway, even if you protect yourself. It’s a risk singers take. I’m glad it segued into Yellowbird. I’d hate to be still on the road.”

  “But what memories you have!” he said. “Most people never have a tenth of what you had, and you’re still so young.”

  He put his hand on hers and all the little guard hairs on her arm stood at attention. He looked into her eyes and it was as if Harry were back. If I were a fainting woman, Billie thought, I would faint.

  She left before the place closed, as she often did, and she took him with her. When she got him in her bed he wanted to wear a condom and she was pleased that he was so careful. She wouldn’t let him wear one, of course. He didn’t really mind.

  They were all over each other in the rush of their mutual attraction. He wasn’t afraid of her or of his performance; it was as if his genes knew what she wanted even if his mind deceived him. The accordion of her orgasm sucked him in, and as she pressed her cervix to receive the warm gush of his seed she felt this was both a sensual and a sacred moment. After it was over she wouldn’t get up, not to smoke, not to pee, not to drink water, imagining the beginning of her child’s existence swimming toward the completion of it, like a shooting star.

  Cal brought water, he lit her cigarette. He stroked her skin. She liked this tenderness, that he hadn’t just gotten up and tried to leave. It would be too poignant to have conceived their child and be instantly abandoned; this was a moment to be savored and shared. She was not as heartless as that, she was still sentimental, because this was the story she would have to tell: