Almost Paradise

by Susan Isaacs

  “Rhodes, you’re not going to gain his respect, his trust, until he sees you can stand on your own two feet and not leave him. He has to see you’re staying with him out of choice, not because you have to. You’re with him because you care about him.” She swallowed. “Because you love him.” Rhodes shrugged his shoulders. “If he knows you can’t function without him, it’s never going to be an equal relationship. You’ll always have to do things his way, because you’ve surrendered control.”

  Rhodes took her hand in his. She gazed down. Their hands were so alike in size and shape, with the same long, slightly flattened fingers, that they might have been part of the same body. “Listen to yourself,” Rhodes said. Some of the sharpness had returned to his voice. Jane tried to inch away, but her brother held tight to her hand. “You give very wise advice, Jane. Now, the question is: what about you?”

  “What do you mean, me? Don’t pull your old trick. We happen to be talking about you. I’m fine. My marriage—”

  “We did very well, considering where we started. Married up, didn’t we? And to two of a kind. Oh, yes, we did. Rich, social, smart, dynamic, powerful. Definitely powerful. Always running the show. God, talk about father figures. It’s so blatant it’s not even worth thinking about.”

  “I don’t think you can compare—”

  “Minus ten.”

  “I mean it, Rhodes.”

  “Minus twenty. Jane, look where they are and then look where we are. Look!” She yanked her hand away from his. “Look, idiot,” he snapped. “We do precisely what they want us to do. They have us just where they want us, unable to live without them. Do you see now? It’s not that they’re gods, above it all, deigning to throw a little gold dust on us by recognizing our existence. They need our love desperately and they take everything we have to give. But they’re shrewd enough and powerful enough to use our love for them—our weakness—to control us. They’re two of a kind, Nick and Philip. And so are we.”

  He was a pig, rutting in the mud. But each time he wanted to get out, to stop being a pig, he slipped and fell right back in. Every day Nicholas made up his mind to end it. Every night Laurel was back in his bed.

  Everybody knew. The third day, the wardrobe mistress came into her trailer. “Oh!” she’d squeaked. She’d dropped Laurel’s costume. He’d been in a chair, fully clothed. Almost. Laurel had unzipped him and climbed onto his lap. They were going at it hard, rocking back and forth. She’d been bare-assed, wearing only knee socks and a little pink T-shirt. “Sorry. I’m really sorry,” the woman whimpered. Then she bolted.

  Minutes later, when he emerged from the trailer, everybody knew.

  People had always kidded him on location, calling him Naughty Nick because he was so straight; teasing him, sending him messages that the hookers he’d sent for had called and were waiting for him back at the hotel; hanging pornographic postcards on the mirror in makeup every morning autographed To Nicky. Thanks for everything. No one teased him any more. Everyone was polite, pretending not to watch when Laurel climbed into the limousine with him each afternoon.

  Murray, who’d been scheduled to fly in from New York, called and cancelled. “I’m really pressed here, Nicky. Do you mind?” Murray’s voice was thick with artificial cheer, and his words rushed over the transatlantic wire, as though he wanted to get them out as fast as he could. “Pressure, pressure. Pure craziness here, Nicky.” Murray had heard. Nicholas hung up the phone numb with shame.

  She was so stupid. He tried to talk to her, but it wasn’t part of her repertoire. Only sex was. Whenever she did anything different, and she had no end of tricks, he’d think how many times she’d done it before. One night she was licking him all over and he thought about all the photographers, magazine editors, garment center executives, producers, directors, and journalists she’d licked before. Her rough, dry tongue was expert and impersonal. But the knowledge did not help him. He could not extricate himself. Whenever he tried to stop being an animal, she’d haul him back into the mud with a new trick.

  He behaved so badly to her. He tried to be pleasant a couple of times, to kid around with her, but he could have been performing to an empty room. She didn’t seem to care how he behaved. Her indifference only made him go at her harder, but nothing got a rise out of her. “Did anyone ever tell you you were a dumb cunt?” He’d actually asked her that. He’d never spoken to anyone like that before. And she’d giggled. The whole thing made him sick.

  The worst of it was, after all the propositions from women—hundreds, thousands for all he knew—after all the years of knowing he could have anyone he wanted and nine tenths of the time not even being tempted, here he was, getting done by a cheap, stupid tramp. That was what she said. “Let me do you again, honey.”

  Everyone knew. The president of the studio called and Nicholas could hear the man’s silky pleasure, his knowledge that he’d located a potential weak spot. “How’s Laurel Blake working out?” the man asked.

  His brother knew. Edward never said a word. He’d just tell Nicholas his plans each afternoon—“Rosie and I are going to a restaurant that’s about an hour away. Mind if I run?”—so Nicholas wouldn’t have to offer any embarrassing explanations for not wanting to spend his evenings with them.

  He couldn’t believe he was doing something like this with a member of his family as witness. Making Edward a silent co-conspirator, the way all of them had been for years when his father came home drunk, stinking from other women.

  No one, not Murray, not even his brother, said, “Stop. Are you crazy? What’s gotten into you? She’s slime. She’s turning you into slime.” He’d become exempt. Everyone wanted him to do whatever pleased him. Nicholas Cobleigh must, at all costs, be kept happy.

  The journalists knew. There were blind and not-so-blind items in gossip columns; photographs, innocent enough, in English and Italian papers. The captions were not so innocent.

  He called Jane one afternoon. “Hi!” she’d said. “You’re early.”

  “How are you?”

  “What’s wrong, Nick?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on. You don’t sound right.”

  “I don’t know. I’m upset.”

  “Why?”

  “There are a lot of rumors going around about me and Laurel Blake.”

  “Oh, that. There are always rumors. When have you made a rumorless movie?” He could just see her, almost reflexively turning on a smile. Some nights, lying awake while Laurel slept, he wondered if Jane knew, if she had, in fact, taken the conspiracy to its limit, to the point where she’d become his most willing accomplice. Cheery, unquestioning, loving. Keeper of the best-documented hearth in America. He wondered if she had believed in his faithfulness all the years he had been worthy of her trust. “Do you think I’m going to start believing that sort of thing at this late date?” she asked.

  “Jane…”

  “What?”

  “It’s worse than usual this time. It’s ugly.”

  “Stop worrying. Oh, Nick, sweetheart, you know it happens every time you go away. No one with any intelligence believes it. And you know I don’t.”

  “I feel terrible.”

  “Don’t. But tell me about her. Is she gorgeous? Built like a brick you-know-what? Should I abandon all hope and call a divorce lawyer?”

  “She’s stupid.”

  “Oh, good! Now come on, I want you to stop sounding so down in the dumps. Please. Oh, hold on a second. I’ve got to read you Liz’s letter. But don’t have a heart attack.”

  “Why?”

  “I think she’s in love. The letter is hilarious. His name is Chris and he lives down the street from Tom and Nan and he’s quote ‘completely icky’ unquote, and then she goes on about his complete ickiness for a page and a half. If that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.”

  “Jane, I love you,” he’d said. “You know I do.”

  “Of course I know. I love you too.”

  There was no Indian summer. A week after L
abor Day and it was autumn. The Manhattan store that three times a week trucked their premium fruits and vegetables to the Cobleigh house at exorbitant rates had included two gallons of the season’s first fresh-pressed apple cider with their last delivery. The cider came in brown crocks and, Jane finally admitted, cost ten dollars a gallon.

  “If she waited one more week, she could have it for less than a dollar at Gil’s farm stand up the road,” Cecily Van Doorn said to Rhodes Heissenhuber. “In plastic bottles.” They were seated across from each other at the dining room table.

  Jane buttered a small piece of homemade bread. Her dinners, small and large, were celebrated. Her recipes had been circulated around the world: “Jane and Nicholas Cobleigh Give a Clambake!” “Signora Cobleigh Prepara Spiedini di Gamberi.” “American Excellence: Easter Sunday Breakfast at the Cobleighs’.” She was wrapped in Nicholas’s renown, and no one cared or dared ask why she was always the hostess, never a guest.

  “But if she got her cider from Gil, she wouldn’t have these adorable little jugs,” Rhodes remarked. “The epitome of country cute. And if dear old Gil—he is a dear old Connecticut farmer, isn’t he?”

  “No,” Cecily said, “he’s in his early twenties and he looks like he sprung from the Jukes and the Kallikaks. Extra-long arms and the eyes a little too far apart.”

  “Well, anyway, even if she could arrange for him to deliver the cider, he might ring the bell and if it were Mrs. Platt’s day off there Jane would be, face to face with the Great Outdoors and Gil. And what if Gil said, ‘Gee, ma’am, these plastic bottles sure are heavy. Could you come out to the car and help me with them?’ Then what would she do? Go out? Jane?”

  “Enough, Rhodes,” Jane said. She pushed up the sleeves of her dress, which was actually an ambitious sweater: a slim tube of red cashmere that stopped at her ankles.

  “Walk out the front door?” Rhodes continued, as though she hadn’t spoken. “Our Jane? Never.”

  Jane set down her fork. “I said enough.”

  “Oh, sorry,” her brother said, but he continued to look at and talk to Cecily. “We all know she could go out if she wanted to. That’s what she says, and if she says so it must be true. But she just hasn’t had a chance to go outside because she’s such a busy little housewife. That’s her job. She’s very, very busy being a feminist housewife. Totally liberated, of course, but she doesn’t have a second to go outside. She probably gave away her coat, so she certainly can’t go out and risk pneumonia for a person with dubious chromosomes and cheap cider. It’s just not worth it.”

  They all thought it was so easy. Just walk out the door. Jump in the car and pick up some cider and a jar of apple butter at the farm stand. Come on. Do it. All that was standing in her way was a little neurosis. A little self-indulgence. A little fear. How many people had taken her aside and said in such satisfied tones, as if they’d discovered a brilliant therapeutic technique, “‘There is nothing to fear but fear itself’”? How many? Fifteen? Twenty? All of them, even all those relentlessly Republican Cobleighs, quoting Roosevelt as if that were all she needed: a good, bracing, Democratic cliché. It had galvanized the masses once before and she was, after all, one of them. Shape up! Show us what you’re made of! You can do it! Snap out of it! Stiff upper lip!

  They all thought she wasn’t really trying, she, who had a husband who—nods of approval all around—did absolutely everything he could for her. Hadn’t he persisted, calling expert after expert until he finally found a psychiatrist who made house calls? Paying five times the man’s normal rate, providing a car and driver to bring him to the house four mornings a week for analysis. They’d worked in the parlor, she lying on a couch, the psychiatrist sitting in an easy chair behind her. All she could see of him was the white of his leg between his pants and his droopy socks. She’d been afraid she’d get emotionally involved with him and slip and say something terribly revealing—tell him she wanted to see what his penis looked like or even that she wished he wore over-the-calf socks—but that never happened. She talked to him about her mother and Dorothy, but she knew he was waiting for her to talk about her father, as if he knew precisely what she was withholding. He had lasted a year and a half. When he left, she was no closer to being able to leave the house than when he’d first arrived. And then there were two others. The woman who kept at her: “Let go of your anger, Jane.” The man who said, again and again, “You have too many ‘shoulds.’” All that help, all that money, all that hope, and nothing to show for it. Come on, Jane, people said. If not for yourself, do it for that husband of yours. That loving, devoted, patient man. Come on! Make him proud of you.

  Did they think it was fun not making him proud? I can’t go to the Academy Awards with you. Standing there in the living room, head hanging, while he shouted Goddamn it! Goddamn it! slamming his fist down on the bass keys of the piano. I can’t, Nick, I can’t, I can’t. Watching him leave for Los Angeles, once with Vicky, another time with Liz, accepting his weary kiss. Take care of yourself, Jane. I’ll call. Watching on television when the camera panned the audience and focused on four other actors and their wives or girl friends and then on Nicholas, holding the hand of a little girl.

  And did they think it was fun those times, being late for her period? Waking up every day nearly deranged with anguish? Go through a pregnancy? Be dragged from the house—shrieking, held on a stretcher with restraining straps—into an ambulance at the very last minute? Or planning how to avoid it, how to kill it? To half poison herself, to murder a fetus with pills, or to risk a coat hanger because she couldn’t go out the door? Did they think it amused her? Did they think she enjoyed breaking down, sobbing with relief until she was faint, when her period finally came? Did they think it was laughs, that she felt every act of intercourse put her life and her sanity on the line?

  Did they think she didn’t mind what she had become? A mother whose children were daily disappointed in her. A wife who could not sit on the front steps and watch a sunset with her husband. The co-owner of a beach house on the Pacific and an eight-room Manhattan cooperative she would never see. I can’t stay in hotels, Nicholas had explained. People find the room. They bang on the door in the middle of the night. Buy a place, she’d pleaded with him. You have to be there so often. It makes sense. Not without you, Jane. Please, she’d begged him. It’s all right.

  Did they know her loneliness? Did they know how often she imagined Nicholas’s loneliness and all the ways all the women sought to comfort him? Did they know what it felt like not to be able to do the things that no one else thought about? Did they know what she would give to have dinner in a restaurant? To take her daughters to the movies?

  Did they know what it was like to have Nicholas plead with her? I love you. Trust me. I’ll hold your hand. Just take the first step with me. Please, Jane. Please. Did they know what it was like to have to say, I can’t. I can’t. I truly can’t. Did they know?

  Cecily finished her cider and glanced at Jane. “That dress is absolutely magnificent on you. Really, I’ve never seen you looking so gorgeous. You really ought to save it for when Nick—”

  “You’re changing the subject, Cecily,” Rhodes interrupted.

  “—for when Nick comes home tomorrow. Don’t be a pain, Rhodes. I know exactly what I’m saying.”

  “Nick called just before you came. He won’t be in until the day after,” Jane said. “Or until the weekend. He’s stuck in Paris.”

  “Pity him,” Rhodes said.

  “He and the screenwriter have to scout locations for his next film in a farm region someplace south of Paris, and he says he’d rather get it over now, on the way home from Yugoslavia, than to have to go back a month from now.”

  “She could be in Paris,” Rhodes said, “checking off numbers at Saint Laurent instead of walking around in that sweater thing that makes her look like an ad for the Playtex Cross-Your-Heart bra.”

  “She looks beautiful,” Cecily said.

  “She looks tolerable. And only becaus
e Nick’s makeup man came up to Connecticut before Nick left and threw her onto the floor and wouldn’t let her up until she agreed to look like an adult.”

  “That didn’t happen,” Jane said to Cecily.

  “Of course not,” Cecily agreed. “I know Rhodes by now.”

  “You know,” Rhodes said, “it’s one thing for Newsweek to call them the golden couple, but it’s another for her to have skin that’s literally golden. Yellow, actually. The sun hasn’t seen her face for months. She has to wear makeup or people will think she has hepatitis.”

  “Rhodes, I’m not going to allow you to get me angry,” Jane said. She smoothed her napkin across her lap over and over.

  “You can’t get angry any more,” he said. “You’re taking so much Valium the most you can get is mildly pissed.”

  “That’s not true. I’m only taking—”

  “Maybe the yellow dye in the Valium is what’s doing it.”

  “Maybe you should just stop,” Jane said. She left her chair and walked to the fireplace. She opened the screen, knelt, and pushed open the flue. “Do you think it’s nippy enough for a fire, Cecily?” she asked.

  “Not yet. By next week.” Cecily turned to Rhodes. “I hear you’re leaving us soon. Tired of Connecticut?”

  “I was tired of Connecticut the minute after I crossed the state line. It makes Ohio seem exciting. No, the man I work for has been calling ten times a day ever since I got here, and it’s either pull the phone out of the wall or go back to Cincinnati, so I’m going back. I really wanted a longer vacation, but the office is falling apart without me. Anyway, it’s been a little less than amusing hanging around here celebrating Be Kind to Shut-Ins Week for nearly a month.”

  “Don’t, Rhodes,” Cecily said.

  “It wasn’t as much fun as I thought. She’s only had one attack, and it was no big thing. All she did was sweat a little and run up to her room.”

  “Shut up!” Cecily snapped. “She’s too good to you for you to treat her like that. I mean it. Have a little compassion.”