Five Women

by Rona Jaffe

  “I’m speechless,” Eve said. Numb was more like it. She realized he’d had plenty of time on his own to do whatever he wanted, but it had never occurred to her that a fat, hairy, conventional man who was only a civilian would want to cheat on her, or even could. Well, of course he could.

  “My wife and I have a history together,” Ben murmured. He looked at Rhoda as if for strength and apparently got it. “I’m sorry, Eve, I never thought you took our dating all that seriously.”

  “Why do you think I’m looking at wedding rings?” Eve snapped.

  “I never mentioned marriage,” he said.

  “Did you lead her on?” Rhoda asked.

  “No!”

  “He did,” Eve said, improvising. “In fact, that sapphire band is the exact same ring he was showing to me.”

  “You pig,” Rhoda said, and pulled the ring off her finger. She did not, however, lay it back on the counter, but stood there with it between her thumb and index finger, undecided, looking from him to Eve and back again.

  “That’s a complete lie!” Ben said. His face got very red. “What are you trying to do, Eve, ruin my life?”

  “Like you ruined mine?” Eve said. “You’re a fool if you marry him again, Rhoda. And you know what else? Ben has turned into a complete freak since you divorced him. He . . .” She lowered her voice conspiratorially, to a stage whisper that everyone in the store could hear. “He likes me to tie him up in bed.”

  “You what?” Rhoda asked Ben, wrinkling her small nose in distaste.

  “She’s crazy,” he said. “Put the ring down.” He wrestled it out of Rhoda’s hand. “We’re leaving. Eve, I’ll have words with you later.”

  Eve noticed people staring, trying not to laugh. A blond woman had her mouth hanging open as if she had been incapacitated with shock. Ben pulled Rhoda out of Tiffany’s, and Eve saw them getting into a cab in front. Bastard, she thought. Liar. Sleazeball. Fatso would be one lucky man if he got his ex-wife to take him back after this. And she herself was fortunate she had found out what he was like before it was too late. She turned to the salesman.

  “How much is that sapphire ring?” she asked. She might as well know what he was trying to spend. “I think I’d like to try it on.”

  Ben called her later. “I’ve always been in love with my ex-wife,” he said in a tired voice that sounded beaten. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’ll be more than sorry when I get through with you,” Eve said.

  “I realize you’re hurt,” he said, “but you almost made Rhoda leave me again.”

  “Excuse me?” Eve said. “Am I supposed to care about that?”

  “I thought you cared about me. A little.”

  “I do,” she said, although she no longer did. “I wasted a year on you. That ought to count for something.”

  “It was important to me, too,” he said.

  “I want that sapphire ring,” Eve said. “It costs forty-five hundred dollars and that’s what I want. The ring or the cash, either one. Call it palimony.”

  “I never proposed,” he said.

  “You led me to believe you would.”

  He sighed. “If you wanted a nice piece of jewelry I would have given you one.”

  “Well, you didn’t, and now you can.”

  He sighed again. “I’ll send you a check.”

  “Damn right you will,” Eve said. “Have a nice life with your midget.” She hung up.

  That night she had a nightmare. There was a row of men in front of her and she was cutting off their dicks and stuffing them into a meat grinder. While she did it she was horrified at what she was doing and wanted to stop, but she was helpless before the power of the dream. She woke up in tears, frightened at the depth of her anger. She lay in bed for a long time, trying to get calm, and then she got up and washed her face and meditated. I have the power, she said, but somehow it didn’t seem like the right mantra. Love and forgiveness, she said, but somehow that didn’t feel right either. She had no idea what to do, so finally she just said Om, and waited to find the center of her soul.

  Chapter Thirty

  BILLIE AND LITTLE BILLIE were extraordinarily close from the time he was born. Unlike other working mothers who could afford it, she didn’t want to hire a full-time housekeeper, especially since the woman would need to share Little Billie’s room. She was content with her twice-weekly cleaning woman, a tiny, ancient Peruvian named Mamacita, who was not as old as she looked. Mamacita did the food shopping and apartment cleaning and laundry. For the first two months Billie hired a nurse. Then, from the time he was two months old, Billie took Little Billie to work with her every night at Yellowbird, in a sturdy canvas pouch that kept him next to her heart.

  He was an extremely easy baby. He thought his life was normal. His mama was always available to feed him from her body, she changed his diapers in the office, and noise and people didn’t bother him. Because she was nursing him Billie still didn’t smoke or drink, although she never stopped missing it. Her customers, however, drank and smoked up a storm. There was nothing she could do about that, but she thought how she had grown up in a world where everyone smoked cigarettes and she was none the worse for it. Better for him to feel her closeness, her love, than to be left alone with a stranger every night.

  And how people admired him! She thought a child had never had so much attention. When Little Billie became too large and active to stay in his pouch, Billie let him sit on her lap. He could sleep clinging to her, like a little Koala bear. Sometimes, when he was deeply asleep, she would put him in the crib she kept in the office. The office was also where she nursed him, since she felt nursing one’s child was too intimate, too private, too important to be done in public, and particularly not in a restaurant where she was the owner. For Yellowbird she needed to be strong. A breast-feeding mother looked too sweet, too maternal, and besides, some customers found it distasteful to watch.

  Little Billie was two years old now, walking, running, talking, into things, not yet toilet trained, and she was still breast-feeding him. She had no real plans to stop in the immediate future. He also ate toddler food, he was strong and healthy, and mother’s milk, she knew, built up immunities and was very nourishing. His nursing time was their time to bond.

  Billie had been flat-chested all her life, and now she had voluptuous breasts. They were full of milk. On her tall, lean frame, they were particularly noticeable, like silicone implants on a model. She had always regretted not having what her mother called “a figure,” and she loved the way she looked now and wanted to stay that way as long as she could. But it was really only an unexpected bonus. The real reward for her was the pull of her baby’s strong, tiny mouth on her nipples, the electricity that passed through her body—a sexual energy that seemed united to the life force—and the look of almost bovine contentment that came over his face as he nursed, his eyelids fluttering closed, his little fist holding her finger. It was a miracle, Billie thought, that she could supply so much of what he needed, that for this brief time she could be his world, and that this world was safe.

  Even when he had teeth Little Billie never bit her. “Titty milk,” he would demand when he wanted it. At three he was pulling at the buttons on her blouse, and at four he could open them. He was a beautiful child with Cal’s golden curls, her eyes, and the face of an angel, the best of both of them . . . no, better than they were. She had promised him that in her fantasy before he was born and her promise had come true: You will be better than both of us.

  When Billie took Little Billie home to see his grandparents for Christmas, her mother demurred. “Well, Billie, don’t you think it’s time he should be weaned?”

  “Soon,” Billie said reassuringly, but she had no idea when “soon” would be. They both liked their bonding time too much.

  He was in kindergarten now, in private school. He had the vocabulary of a child two years older, his tea
cher reported, and Billie knew that was not only because Little Billie was bright but because all his young life adults had spoken to him as if he were one of them. She allowed conversation, never baby talk. And because Little Billie was a good listener he picked up on what the adults around him were saying. When he was restless she sometimes let him run around Yellowbird, stopping at tables when he knew the people, but she never let him get out of hand. She wanted him to be admirably intelligent but not annoyingly precocious, polite and comfortable with other people but not a pest. He had his own corner now, in the back of Yellowbird, with the things that amused him: his TV, his computer, his crayons and toys. He was already teaching himself to read.

  Ever since he had been about three, Billie had realized that she found being with her son much more interesting than being with anyone else. Men found her even more attractive than they ever did because of her newly big breasts, but she wasn’t really interested. She knew she would be again, and that was a decision she was letting ride in the same way as her decision to wean her child. She was a responsible mother now, and sexually transmitted disease was everywhere. Right now she was content. It had been a long time since she had had a real passion, not since Harry Lawless, and she had thought nobody else could ever open her heart. This sturdy and delicate little boy, with his vulnerability and defiance and curiosity and wonder, had. His love for her was as boundless as was hers for him.

  Little Billie’s school day ended at two o’clock. Billie always picked him up. By then she had been to Yellowbird already to make sure things were all right, and then she came back home to rest for the evening; she would go back to Yellowbird at four to go over the reservation book. From two to four she and Little Billie would lie in her bed, watching TV, napping, talking, and most important, he would be having his snack and measure of love from her breast. They both knew that when they went to Yellowbird she would have very little time for him. Mama had to make a living.

  Then, one day when she picked him up from school, Little Billie looked very distressed, avoiding the other children’s eyes, and as soon as Billie got him safely at home in their apartment he started to cry.

  “What is it?” she asked, concerned, holding him, stroking his hair.

  “They laughed at me,” he sobbed.

  “Well, why?”

  He pulled away. She watched him, waiting, not overstepping her bounds, and wondered what had made the other children so cruel. Finally he stopped crying and just sniffled. She gave him tissues to blow his nose and wipe his eyes.

  “We did our afternoon conversation,” Little Billie said. “It’s like Show and Tell, but without stuff. Miss Gribetz asked us each what we have for our after-school snack when we go home. All the other kids said they have Oreos and milk, or a sandwich, or a banana. I said I had titty milk.”

  Oh my God, Billie thought.

  “Everybody laughed,” he said. His face screwed up again to cry. “Miss Gribetz didn’t know what I meant and she made me say it again. I told her ‘Mama’s titty milk.’ The kids all called me a baby.”

  “Oh, Little Billie, that was so mean. You’re not a baby, you’re just as old as they are, and you’re a lot more grown up.”

  “Miss Gribetz is going to talk to you,” he said darkly.

  Billie shrugged, although she could feel his pain and her heart was breaking. She had never thought she was hurting him. “Let her,” she said. She patted the bed and he sat down beside her, looking confused. “I guess it’s time for you to stop eating from Mama,” she said. “Everybody has to stop sometime.”

  “I liked it,” Little Billie said in a tiny voice.

  “So did I. It was a nice time for us to be together, and my milk was very nourishing for you. But you’re a big boy now, and you want to be like everybody else.” She made her voice cheerful, its confident tone promising him conformity, passage, friendship with his peers. “So what would you like today instead: Oreos and milk, or a sandwich, or a banana?”

  “Oreos,” he said, making a face.

  She went to the kitchen and got them, and poured him a glass of milk from the carton in the refrigerator, the milk she used for her coffee. She didn’t know whether to take his grownup snack back to her bed or serve it to him at the kitchen table, so she just stood there with the plate and glass in her hands.

  “I’m not a baby,” he said, frowning, figuring out his life.

  “I know. You’re my big boy.”

  “We could still watch TV in bed,” he said.

  She smiled and brought his snack into the bedroom. Little Billie jumped up on her bed as he always did and began fiddling with the remote control for the TV until he found something he liked. Billie put his snack on the quilt and lay down beside him. She felt guilty and sad, and her breasts were beginning to hurt because they were so full and there was no one to empty them. She knew there was a medicine to dry up the milk quickly because her doctor had already mentioned it to her, several times, and had given her a prescription, which of course she had never filled. She would fill it tonight.

  “Will you still hold me?” Little Billie asked.

  “Till you tell me, ‘Go away.’”

  He smiled and lay back in the curve of her arm, watching the television set, watching her, licking the sugar from his opened cookie, his other hand twitching just a little as if it wanted to go for her blouse buttons of its own accord. She yearned for him, too.

  “Do you want to go to the Museum of Natural History on Saturday?” she asked. “Or do you want a play date?”

  “I bet nobody will play with me,” he mused. “Not if they think I’m a baby.”

  “I’ll take that bet. How much money do you want to put on it?”

  He smiled.

  The next day she was on the phone, lining up a play date where he would go with his friend to the museum, thus accomplishing both goals. The next day, also, Ms. Gribetz called. She had a sweet, precise voice, that of the kind of do-gooder Billie wanted to smack.

  “It’s about Billie,” she said. “I understand you’re still breast-feeding him. That can be very destructive behavior, you know, for a child who is trying to socialize with more mature children his age. Wouldn’t you like me to set up an appointment for the two of you with the school psychologist?”

  “I wouldn’t,” Billie said. “He’s weaned.”

  “But he said—”

  “It only takes one conversation to wean an intelligent four-year-old,” Billie said. “After yesterday he’s on the cow.”

  “Oh, I’m glad.”

  “How are the other kids treating him?” Billie asked.

  “Just a little teasing, but he’s really a very popular boy.”

  “If they try to pick on him I want you to make them stop,” Billie said. “They listen to you.”

  “Well . . .” She gave a little flattered laugh. “Sometimes.”

  “They will. Thank you, Ms. Gribetz, for being concerned.”

  “Thank you for responding.”

  Bitch, Billie thought when she hung up. School psychologist indeed, like they needed mental help.

  She reached for the still unopened pack of cigarettes she had bought the night before, when she got her prescription filled, and looked at it. Then she opened it. Although the first inhalation made her feel faint, she smoked the whole cigarette, and afterward she felt better for it. Almost five years had been a long time. She had known this major separation from her son would come one day, but she had just not let herself think about it. She also knew that all of his life, from now on, even though she was there to raise him and he depended on her, he would be growing away. That was the point, of course, but she still felt melancholy.

  That night at Yellowbird she had a vodka on the rocks. It made her a little high because she was so unused to it, but she liked it as much as she had liked the cigarette. Welcome back to reality, she told herself. We
all need to socialize with people our age. So for the first time since Little Billie had been born, tonight when she looked at the men at the bar she was sizing them up differently.

  She looked at Little Billie in his corner, busily drawing, his head bent over his notebook, a look of intense concentration on his angelic face. Everything in her life was so completely different now that he was in it that it was as if she were living on an alternate planet. Not for one instant anymore did she ever feel alone, but she had various needs, and so did he, and so would he, and so would she. Soon, she knew, she would have to have the feel of a man again. Her son would understand. He knew he would always come first in her life, but everybody needed a play date, even a woman of forty-three.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  GARA WAS FIFTY NOW, she was going through menopause, and she was newly divorced after twenty-two years. Set free into a world that valued youth and beauty in a woman and devalued age and experience, a world where casual sex might mean AIDS, illness, and death, where she didn’t even know how to flirt with and charm a stranger after all these years—not that she wanted to—she thought how unfair and cruel Carl’s timing had been. He should have left her when she was younger and could start again, or he should not have left her at all.

  She and Carl had been separated for almost two years when their divorce became final. For one reason or another he had delayed, and each time she had hoped he might change his mind and come back to her, until finally she wished he would just get it over with and let her try to put her life together, whatever sort of life it was going to be.

  She had heard he was still living with Lucie, and that everyone they had known in Paris knew it. She also felt very sure that he never intended to marry Lucie, and that his procrastination about their divorce was his way of keeping Lucie from insisting. Married to Gara, Carl could be “single.”

  Gara, on the other hand, had felt very married, even though they saw each other only four times. She didn’t know why he still bothered to come to New York on his so-called business trips, or called her to go out with him for dinner. She supposed he still had some separation anxiety, that he even missed her. They had been friends for so long. When they did meet they made small talk, skirting the important issue, the only issue: Do you really love her? Why do you love her more than you do me? They talked about his business, and he told her his Paris gallery was doing well now. She pretended she was glad. His depression over getting older, over not making enough money, had driven him to find ego satisfaction with a woman young enough to be his daughter, and now that woman would be the beneficiary of his new financial success. Gara suspected Lucie had never known Carl was having business troubles, or else she would not have been attracted to him.