by Rona Jaffe
“Eben who?” Felicity said, and laughed. She could hardly wait for their dinner to be over so she could go to his apartment and feel his arms around her.
“Those of us who didn’t find boyfriends this summer are going to find them this fall,” Kathryn said cheerfully.
“You said we’d find them last spring,” Gara said.
“So I lied. But this is a new season. You’ll see.”
“I don’t even want one,” Gara said.
“You will when you meet him.”
How lucky I am, Felicity thought, to have my life settled, to be peaceful at last. She excused herself, pleading work from the office, as soon as they finished their main course, because she didn’t want Eve to try to share a cab with her. Ever since she had moved to the East Side last year Eve always wanted to share a cab, she never paid, and this time she would certainly be looking to see if Felicity was going to Eben’s.
She didn’t have a key yet to Eben’s apartment, and when he opened the door, wearing the dark blue bathrobe she had given him, Felicity felt relieved and safe. He looked so handsome in the robe that she could hardly wait for an excuse to buy him more clothes. “How was your dinner?” he asked.
“Fine.” She waited for him to say what he usually did: “I haven’t hugged you for twenty-four hours,” or, “for an hour,” whatever it happened to be, keeping track, melting her heart, but he just led the way to his bedroom without a word and they undressed. He seemed a little distant and she didn’t understand, but then when they had passionate sex three times the way they always did she felt reassured.
“I was thinking,” Felicity said, lying with her arms around him and her head on his shoulder, “We should make our reservations now for Christmas in the Caribbean because all the good places will be full. Russell and I used to make them a year in advance when we went.”
“A year!” Eben said. “How could anyone know what he wanted to do a whole year away?”
“A little compulsive,” she said, but she didn’t mean it, really.
“I don’t know if I want to go to the Caribbean,” Eben said.
“You talked about it so often I thought you did.”
“Well, I changed my mind,” he said vaguely, looking off into space as if he was avoiding her eyes.
“Okay. Then where would you rather go?” He didn’t answer. She felt an odd jolt of anxiety, and thought perhaps she shouldn’t pursue it.
What she wanted to say was, You’re acting different and I want to know why; but she had an idea. She knew Eben might be a little nervous now that she was actually single, and that she would have to lead him through these first difficult moments by not putting pressure on him, by being as sweet and winning as she had always been, and let him see she was not going to demand anything he was not ready to offer freely. Before she left in the morning he made breakfast for her, as he often did, and then he made her late for work by insisting on having sex again. She felt better, as if he was his old self again.
When she got to the office Eve called. “So did you meet Eben?”
“Why would you think that?”
“You’re single now, you’re free, you can do what you want.”
“That’s exactly right,” Felicity said, “and stop bothering me.”
That didn’t stop Eve; you could hit her with a mallet and she wouldn’t notice. “I just want the best for you,” Eve said, “because you’re my friend.”
“Thank you. I need to go to work now.” She hung up.
Eben had called six times a day when they were forced to hide and be apart, but today he did not call at all until almost five o’clock. Felicity worried at first that something had happened to him, and then she wondered what had kept him so busy that he could not find time to call her, but he didn’t mention it, and she thought she shouldn’t ask. “I’m going to drive to the Hamptons in an hour,” he said. “I have a meeting. I might as well stay there Friday too, and then you can come out for the weekend.”
“All right,” Felicity said.
She would give him space, if that was what he needed. She saw her therapist, who agreed. After all, Eben had not done anything definitive yet to show that he was a man who wanted only what he couldn’t have, or that he was afraid of intimacy, or any of the other dreadful possibilities. But the next two days Felicity worried and obsessed, as she had done with Jason, and although her therapist had reminded her that it was her nature to be sure she had been abandoned, and that soon she would have the weekend with him, still she couldn’t stop.
She got to his house in the potatoes Friday evening, and she made dinner for them, which they ate on his terrace by candlelight because it was dark early now, and things seemed the same as they had been before her divorce. The sex was as wild as always, and when they slept he held her close. There was a part of him, she knew, that needed her. The body did not tell lies when it was asleep. But then the next day when they were walking on the beach together, the deserted part of the beach where only a few months ago they had joined recklessly in the dunes, he said, “I think I’m going to go to a health spa for two weeks by myself.”
She was stunned, paralyzed. “Oh?” she said, while she thought what she should or should not say. By himself! For two weeks? The two of them had not been apart since they began their affair. She looked out over the gray sea and wondered if that was what her life would be like soon, just that empty, and she knew she would not be able to bear it.
“Mmm,” he said.
Maybe it would be good for him to be alone to think, then he might miss her. Or maybe he wasn’t going at all, and was just saying it, testing her. “That might be nice,” she said mildly, as her fingernails cut into her palms, her hands in the pockets of her jacket, so he could not see.
Another three weeks went by and Eben’s new pattern of calling her only once a day turned into missing a day altogether. However, he said no more about going away alone, so Felicity bided her time. But something else was new; by not communicating he had an excuse not to see her every night, and then it was not for two nights, and then when she was at his apartment his phone rang on several different occasions when she could tell that he was talking to women who were returning his calls.
“Who was that?” she asked finally, when she couldn’t dissemble anymore.
“We should definitely be going out with other people,” he said.
“Why?” she asked, although she knew why; he was tired of her, she had failed in some way, or in many ways. Her whole world was falling apart. Imagining the worst still hadn’t meant it was going to happen, but now it was. Her heart felt as if his hands had tied it into a deformed knot of pain, and the pain shot through her whole body and covered her skin with a sheet of fire. It was the adrenaline, the blood rush of an animal facing death.
“We’ve been too intense,” Eben said.
“Intense? I thought you loved me,” Felicity said.
“I never said I loved you.”
“You did! All the time!”
“I never said I loved you, I never brought you flowers. You must have misunderstood.”
She stared at him. Yes, this was Eben, the same Eben who had made promises and planned their future life together, who had loved her, and who she still loved just as much as she had a few moments ago; but now, for him, everything was different. “What did I misunderstand?”
“Look, you have no claims on me.”
“But you said . . .”
“I offered you friendship,” Eben said. “I wanted to help you.”
“Help me?”
“Isn’t that what you asked me to do, the first time we went to bed together? You asked me to help you leave your husband.”
“Oh, God,” Felicity whispered.
“So I did.”
“Is that what it was?” Her mouth was so dry from panic that she could hardly speak.
“But you loved me. You did . . .”
“I have always had feelings for you, you’re a wonderful person, but I never loved you. I was just caught up in the excitement of your leaving.”
I gave up everything for this man, she thought.
“I have to go now,” she said. She left his apartment as quickly as she could because she didn’t want him to see her cry.
When she got home to her still strange new apartment she called Gara, sobbing, and told her everything that had happened. “‘The excitement of my leaving’ meant the thrill of taking me away from my husband,” Felicity said. “Why didn’t Eben want me? Is it because I’m black?”
“It was a perfect Oedipal situation for him,” Gara said. “He was taking his mother away from his father.”
“But he hated his mother. She was in a miserable marriage and she took it out on him, just the way my mother did on us.”
“And you were in a miserable marriage, too.”
“What will I do?” Felicity wept. “I’m so frightened. I’m all alone.”
“I know, I know,” Gara kept saying soothingly until Felicity got herself under control again. “Think of this,” Gara said. “Eben is neurotic, and totally narcissistic, but you should thank him for helping you do what you wanted. You would never have left Russell without him. Eben was your interim person.”
“I thought he would be my husband,” Felicity said.
“Be thankful he never was. You will get over it eventually. I know it feels like you never will, but I got over Carl and I spent all my adult life with him.”
She could not conceive of being happy again. “What did I do wrong?” Felicity said. “What’s wrong with me? Why didn’t he want me?”
“It’s not your fault. It’s his nature. If you have a pet snake and you take care of it, and then one day when you’re reaching into the cage to feed it, it bites you, it’s not your fault. It’s because it’s a snake. Snakes bite.”
“Snakes bite,” Felicity repeated dully, hanging on to it. “Eben is a snake. Snakes bite.”
“Call your therapist and get some extra sessions,” Gara said gently. “You’re in extremis, she’ll find the time. Work the situation out with her. And above all, don’t blame yourself.”
But of course she blamed herself; she always did. In the morning, with her eyes red, and dark circles under them from crying and sleeplessness, Felicity went to the office. As usual Eve called first thing.
“Well, did you see Eben last night?” Eve demanded instead of saying hello.
“I have something to tell you,” Felicity said. She might as well tell Eve now, let her get her satisfaction, and get rid of her. “I dated Eben for a brief period of time after I officially left my husband, but it’s over now. We broke up.”
“Ah,” Eve said. “Are you very upset?” She was trying to sound concerned, but she could hardly hide her elation. She assumed, correctly, that Eben had done the leaving.
“I’m reasonably upset,” Felicity said.
“He’ll be back, you know,” Eve said. “But he’ll never stay long.”
“I don’t want him.” But she did, she wanted him more than anything in the world.
He never called.
She had thought this confession would get Eve off her back, but she was wrong about that, too. Now Eve called every day with a report of what Eben was up to, who he had been seen with, where he had been seen alone, or simply to talk about him, as if the fact that they had both been wounded by him now made them sisters . . . or perhaps she was really calling just to gloat.
Felicity herself could not bear to be alone. She cajoled friends to have dinner with her, even ones she didn’t much like, so she could be out every night; she went to every function she heard about, even though she was too unhappy to enjoy them; and she went on blind dates where she often had to flee to the ladies’ room so they would not see her break into tears. She missed the sex with Eben so much it was like a fever, and she missed the love and the holding, and the promise of happiness she had believed in. Everything he had done had been manipulative, offering her from his life what she was about to give up in her own. He even knew how much she wanted a child and had served up his daughter on a plate. She couldn’t get him out of her mind. She called Gara several times a day for comfort, crying, leaving messages on her machine, she broke down at the office behind her closed door, she wept in restaurants, she had turned into a fountain.
“Stop that, will you,” Kathryn said impatiently to her one night at Yellowbird. “Get off it. It’s over. Go on with your life.”
Kathryn could, Felicity thought. I’m not Kathryn.
“No man is worth it,” Billie advised her. “Trust me. I know.”
“Eben took a woman to the Caribbean,” Eve reported at Christmas, and that hurt Felicity more than anything else he had ever done. She should have been with him, that had been her trip. “This one seems serious,” Eve added. “I bet he marries her.”
“Eve, could you be a little more helpful?” Gara said.
“I am being helpful,” Eve said.
“I mean, shut up.”
How long did it take to get over such heartbreak? Felicity couldn’t eat and she was getting so thin it frightened her. She remembered her mother when her lover had left her: pining, grieving, starving, scary. Again, she had turned into this woman she never wanted to be. When would she ever find her own way?
Chapter Forty
GARA WONDERED what was happening to their little group of friends. Things seemed different; there were new tensions, new agendas. For a while they still went to Yellowbird every week, but Felicity cried all the time and sometimes simply vanished into herself as if she had become invisible. “The space traveler,” Kathryn called her. She might as well not have been there at all.
Kathryn was ever more restless, and said she felt she was wasting her life by always going to the same restaurant, so sometimes now they met elsewhere, trying new places Kathryn had liked or wanted to find out about, and on these occasions they evaded Eve by telling her they weren’t going out together because each of them had made other plans. Felicity could not bear to be with Eve, Gara was angry at Eve because she was tormenting Felicity, whom she felt protective of, and Kathryn really didn’t care either way.
“I haven’t seen you for a while,” Billie would say with some accusation in her voice whenever they came back to Yellowbird, which they always did eventually because Gara missed it. “Been away?”
Yellowbird, Gara knew, would go on as long as Billie wanted to work, and she wasn’t ever sure whether Billie missed them or the money they spent there. Billie intended to send Little Billie to college in eight years, and by then college would be even more expensive than it was now. “Really busy,” they would answer.
“Eve was here,” Billie would say. “With some guy.” She never sounded particularly pleased that Eve was so faithful to her.
Christmas had gone and Gara was relieved, but now New Year’s Eve loomed ahead. Brad the Consoler had gone to the country for the holidays, to stay in a beautiful house with several other gay men, old friends, none of whom were lovers, none of whom even had lovers to spend their vacation with or families they liked enough to see. He had called and said it was turning out to be one of the best vacations he’d had in years. Since neither she nor Kathryn nor Felicity had a date, nor any prospect of one, Kathryn decided the three of them should spend New Year’s Eve at the Sign of the Dove because it would be so festively decorated and because they had a special with hors d’oeuvres and all the champagne you could drink, followed by dinner.
Kathryn and Gara were used to being alone by now, but Felicity was not. They stood in the crowded upstairs room that had been made into a bar for this night, all dressed up, and Felicity looked grief stricken. Couples and small groups were chattering at little tables,
while waiters passed around caviar and smoked salmon and pâté. There were platters heaped with oysters at the bar beside the bottles of champagne in military rows, like an army ready to advance and make them happy. Gara was determined to have a good time, but it hadn’t happened yet. The banal glamour of the luxurious food only depressed her, and she didn’t feel like getting drunk. Kathryn, in a glimmering silver dress, had fastened on to a young couple from Norway who had come to New York for the first time, for the holiday, because they were on their honeymoon.
“I’m in love,” Kathryn announced, with the open-faced blonde couple in tow. “Aren’t they sweet?” They looked pleased and shy, and also as if they would like to get away from her. As soon as she went back to the bar for more champagne they melted into the crowd.
I should be grateful I have something to do and friends to do it with and the money to afford it, Gara thought, but the only time in her life she had not dreaded New Year’s Eve had been when she was married, and then she and Carl had both virtually ignored the bittersweet holiday on purpose; a bit of caviar and champagne at home and asleep before the ball dropped from the tower in Times Square.
“What are we going to do for the millennium?” Kathryn asked. “We have to do something spectacular.”
“I’ll be dead,” Felicity murmured.
“You’ll be married,” Kathryn said. “Have a drink.”
They sipped their champagne. “I want to take a house somewhere warm for February,” Kathryn said. “It’s a shame you guys have to work or you’d come with me.” She waved and smiled at the young honeymoon couple across the room and they waved back. “Why don’t you take a winter vacation?”
“Can’t,” Gara said.
“I blew my vacation, remember?” Felicity said. “Well,” Kathryn said cheerfully, “maybe I’ll just go by myself. I always meet people.”
Felicity looked around with a desperate look, and Gara knew she wanted to bolt. “Tonight is just another night,” Gara said to her. “Get through it. It’s okay.”
“I’m tired of you sulking,” Kathryn said to Felicity. “Look how nice this all is.”