Five Women

by Rona Jaffe

  “What were you two in such deep conversation about?” he asked.

  “Parents and childhood.”

  “Oh.” He nodded noncommittally.

  The wine had made Gara bold. She leaned over and looked into Michael’s face. “What kind of parents did you have?” she asked.

  So then he finally told her, and about his childhood, and as he did Gara realized that his was as bad as hers had been in a way that was both unique and similar. A father who had abandoned him while physically remaining at home; a helpless, demanding mother who had spousified him, leaning on him too much and too often to make him be her little man; and finally, a wife who had left him, the way Carl had left her. He sketched in his life with short, sharp strokes, and as she listened Gara thought how lucky she was that he had not ended up as another confused caretaker of the nonthreatening wounded, those wary and conflicted men entangled with women young enough to be their daughters.

  And then she thought: But I am the nonthreatening wounded. For all my bravery and independence during the time I was trying to save my life, the other part of me remains, too. He can probably sense it, even if he doesn’t really know. And I thought I was so good at fooling everybody.

  It was late; they both had to leave. He walked her to her door, their cab waiting, and they kissed in that same brief, frantic way that was almost experimental. She thought for the first time that some night she would actually invite him up.

  After that when she thought about him she was often physically aroused, a feeling she had thought was lost to her forever. She looked at her breasts in the mirror, and touched them, wondering what he would think, pretending he was with her and didn’t notice. In the years that had passed she had begun to think of the artificial one as real, as much a part of her as the other. It was part of her; she was who she was. “He’ll like the whole gestalt,” she would tell her women patients, trying to convince them that the unreal standards of beauty they tried to live up to were so mingled with who they were as lovable people that all would be well. “If you’re his fantasy you can vomit and he won’t care,” she would say. Was she his fantasy? And did his fantasy also include the specter of the recurrence of disease and a possible early death? Gara did not believe she would get sick again, she was sure she would live a normal life the way all her doctors felt she would, but what would he believe? Would he think caring about her was worth the risk?

  I won’t have to find out if I don’t let him near me, she thought. It felt comfortable to have more time, to be guarded again.

  She allowed herself to think about him only when she had nothing else to do. When her work day was finished, when she had been to the gym, when she had done her professional reading, then she could relax and let him enter her mind and take over. She knew it was not obsession if she doled out these little periods of emotional passion in this way. She and Michael had been out together twelve times now, and sometimes when she thought about him she was so nervous that she never wanted to see him again. She wondered if he noticed. At other times she thought she was in love. She hoped he did not notice that.

  They always went somewhere or did something: movies, theater, art galleries, parties, happier with each other than doing it alone; they never sat across from each other at a little table and talked about their emotions and the relationship, but they glowed when they were together, she saw it. And at the parties they sat together and talked to each other as if they had just met and had forgotten there was anyone else in the room.

  Now when she looked in the New York Times every weekend to see what there was to do in New York Gara always thought about doing it with him, elated at the thought of discovering something new in a photography exhibit, or an art exhibition, or a play. She had never been like Kathryn, a self-starter. She and Michael recommended books to each other, albums. His taste was eclectic, far ranging, and her mind ranged along with him, opening, alert. He told her often that he liked her, that she was growing on him—and, ambivalent, she made sure it meant nothing to her when he said it, told herself he was conceited to think she cared—and then when she was alone she pulled out the memory and relived it in the safety of her isolation.

  I’ll give him six months to become dependent on me, Gara thought. Then I’ll invite him up.

  Of course, it happened much more quickly than that. One night he simply rode up in the elevator with her. Then, when he was at her door, she said, “Come in.” He did.

  Suddenly Gara remembered the first time Carl had come to her apartment, so many years ago, that masculine presence filling the room, making her apartment seem girlish and small. Now her adult apartment seemed too precise, too lonely, too self-centered; and as if it had a life of its own, adapting warily to Michael’s step, his energy, the space he took up by existing at all. He looked at her books, her records, her art, her photographs, trying to know her.

  “Is this your ex-husband?” he asked, picking up a framed photograph.

  “No,” Gara said, smiling at his mistake. “It’s my father.” Her father in that picture had been the age of a man she could be dating now.

  “Then is this Carl?” He indicated another, which was. She had kept out one photo of Carl, finally, because he had been her family, and because their time together had been mainly good and that was something to remember.

  “Yes,” she said. He put it down and didn’t comment. His curiosity was assuaged now and he didn’t care.

  She looked frantically through her collection of CDs for something with no memories. In despair, finally, she put on the radio; late-night jazz playing softly, hoping it would be a long time between commercials. It would be difficult to try to have sex during something so unromantic and intrusive as a commercial, but silence seemed frightening, like something watching her.

  Then he kissed her, and she remembered how much she liked it. They kissed for a while, and along with the growing passion she sensed his fear as if it were her own. She told herself that everyone was nervous the first time with someone new, but she knew for her it was worse, because it was the first time in years. Then what was he nervous about? Performance? Rejection? Or crossing the boundary between friendship and something more complicated and threatening: emotional intimacy, the most demanding and alarming thing of all?

  They went into the bedroom. She put on a dim light so he would not be able to see what he was not supposed to see, and in that dimness she saw that he had a good body, in shape, but gone to some softness around the middle, which made her like him more because it made him vulnerable, not perfect, thus perhaps less likely to judge her. Then when they were naked and partly hidden under the sheet she had pulled up, he had his fingers on the artificial breast, trying to stimulate the nipple he thought was real, and she put his hand gently on the real one, as if she had a preference and a preference was reasonable.

  She began to relax under his hands, his lips, her hands and lips roaming over him, too, remembering the joy of making love to a man, feeling happy that he wanted her and that he was giving back to her the pleasure she had not had for so long. But when he finally entered her it hurt sharply at first, and she wondered if she had closed right up from disuse. What must he think, that she didn’t like him? He knew how difficult this was for her and was gentle, and didn’t seem to mind what he somehow instinctively sensed was the result of long abstinence, and after a while she began to enjoy it, and felt as if she had found her own self again. He didn’t seem nervous anymore, nor was she.

  What a wonderful thing, Gara thought, to have a friend and sex together in the same person. Neither of them said anything about love; in fact, neither of them spoke at all.

  Michael slept with his arms around her, as Carl had years ago. She thought she could get used to that again, and thought the women he had gone to bed with before her were lucky. She felt more affectionate toward him than she had ever before, and more tolerant of herself. She felt feminine again, and blooming. No ma
tter what happened tomorrow, tonight had been the resurgence of possibility for her as a desirable woman and a sexual being.

  In the morning she made coffee for them, and they drank it together at the kitchen table. “How long ago did you have breast cancer?” Michael asked casually. So he had noticed after all.

  “Five years,” Gara said. “I’m okay now.”

  “I’m glad.”

  They didn’t mention it again. They read the newspaper, and then they went off to their separate work lives. He kissed her goodbye. “I’ll call you later,” he said.

  We’ll see about that, Gara thought.

  But he called her that night, with plans for things they would do later in the week. They picked a play and a movie, and a restaurant they wanted to try. He said he wanted her to meet two of his good friends. So life would go on, and they would continue their discovery of each other. She knew she could not ask for more, and that was really all she wanted.

  Chapter Forty-four

  IT WAS A CRISP FALL EVENING, and Gara was meeting Michael at Yellowbird, a place they still went to from time to time because they liked the music and the atmosphere, they liked Billie, and because it had a sentimental relevance to them because it was where they had met. She got there a little early and sat in the booth they had begun to call their own, and looked around. On the sound system Janis was singing “Try.” “Try, just a little bit harder . . .” Don’t we all, Gara thought; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

  She looked at the unfamiliar faces in the room and thought again, as she had almost two years ago, that New York was a city always in flux, where people were constantly remaking their lives. It was like the filing system on a computer: folder within folder within folder, neatly hidden away but accessible. You could navigate skillfully from place to place, from old friend to new friend, or hide and see no one. Sometimes people wondered what had happened to you; more often they just thought you were busy. Often you were. Sometimes they thought you didn’t like them anymore. Sometimes you didn’t. As you remake your life, Gara thought, you also remake yourself.

  Eve’s show was doing well, and she was still in Hollywood. Gara and Felicity had watched it once, to see her, and had gotten a good laugh at the way she was disguised. Although she had a small part, Eve had hired a press agent, who occasionally put things in the newspapers as if she was important. The most important thing about Eve—still and probably always—was that she was Nicole Bader’s mother, a role she had never wanted in life but which had helped her get what she did want, a career.

  Occasionally Gara got a phone call from Kathryn, from Palm Beach or Italy or Hawaii or Paris or Canyon Ranch, and Kathryn was always busy and cheerful, regaling Gara with her adventures. “I deserve this,” Kathryn kept reminding her, and Gara agreed. She told Kathryn she was seeing a man now, and Kathryn was surprised. “Well,” Gara told her, “I’m surprised too.” It had occurred to her many times in the past few months that she, the unlikeliest one of them all, was the only one with a relationship.

  Felicity and Gara were still close friends, but Felicity didn’t come to Yellowbird anymore. Felicity said the food was dreadful and the atmosphere reminded her of a middle-aged singles bar. When they had dinner together they went to elegant restaurants, the sort Felicity had gone to with Russell, where she could now go with the people she chose. She was still looking for a man, either black or white, still with a toe in each world and not quite figuring out where she needed to belong, still hoping she could have a baby before she was too old, but she was not frantic about her social life. Sometimes she said she was lonely. Sometimes she said she was happy. The one thing she never seemed to be was afraid.

  Billie, of course, was still Billie. Some things never changed.

  But some did, of course. Gara looked over at what had been their favorite table, and there were four women sitting there, with one man, and they did not look like tourists; they reminded her of herself and Kathryn and Eve and Felicity and Brad. She almost resented that these strangers were sitting at “her” table, totally unaware of all the things that happened there during the past two years. The strangers were laughing and talking and drinking, looking around to see who was coming in, and Gara felt a kind of nostalgia for whatever those Yellowbird evenings had been in her own friends’ lives, in that time that somehow now seemed so long ago.

  They could be us, she thought. They all have their secrets. They’re all survivors of something. As were we. As we are now.

  Rona Jaffe (1931–2005) was the author of sixteen books, including the bestselling internationally acclaimed novels The Best of Everything, The Road Taken, The Cousins, Family Secrets, Mr. Right is Dead, Mazes and Monsters, The Last Chance, and Five Women, as well as the classic bestseller Class Reunion. She founded The Rona Jaffe Foundation, which presents annual awards to promising women writers of literary fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. It is the only national literary awards program of its kind dedicated to supporting women writers exclusively. Ms. Jaffe was a lifelong New Yorker.