by Susan Isaacs
“She’s not too optimistic?”
“She says we can play with it. You know what that means.”
“At least she didn’t take cyanide. Listen, Nicky, don’t let it get to you so much. Everybody comes up with a stinker now and then. You’re not God. You’re not even his second cousin, rumors to the contrary.”
“It’s going to affect every deal I make. You know that.”
“Nicky, they’ll put the screws on a little, but that’s all. It’s not like you died. You just made one slightly drecky film. Nothing personal.”
“Thank you,” Nicholas said curtly.
Murray stood straight. “Did you read that Steve Greenlick screenplay?”
“Yes.”
“You’re allowed more than yes or no answers, Nicky.”
“Yes, I read it, Murray. I don’t want it.”
“Why not? It’s good.”
“He wants to direct.”
“So? Come on. You can’t direct every film you make. And right now, you’d make a lot of studio people fall madly in love with you again and send you chocolate creams and Valentines if you agreed to do the Greenlick film. It’s a winner. You know it’s a winner.”
“He’ll have final cut?”
“He’s the director, Nicky.”
“I’m the star.”
“Nicky, all I’m saying is to be realistic. Take things a little easy. You’re entitled. You’re not some kid from the slums who’s suddenly made his first million and is crazy afraid of losing it. Let go. It’s the perfect role. Enjoy just acting. You can afford to. You’re established. This is an ideal setup. Three months’ shooting. On location in New York. How can you beat that?”
“What if I don’t take it?”
“I think you would make them happy if you would. Listen, Nicky, one lousy film is one lousy film. Fine. Finished. But now you need a winner.”
“I need a winner?”
“Let’s put it this way. You had the world by the balls. You still do, but one of the balls has slipped a little. It’s up to you. If you want to get both balls back, you have to jiggle things their way. You get me?”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then you’ll be taking a risk. You want to take a risk, that’s fine with me. You’re the conservative one. But using your conservative standards—okay?—I’m telling you, if you take a risk, there are a lot of people who are going to be watching. And if you fall flat on your face, Nicky, they’ll be applauding. And if you fall on your face one more time after that, they’ll start kicking you while you’re down. Real hard. You know them. They’ll make sure you’ll never be able to stand up straight again.”
Jane admitted that she wouldn’t call it a hill. The house was on a rise in the terrain. The land sloped downward in the back and then continued flat. The house—a block of white against the sky—could be seen from almost any point in the back: from the pond and the woods beyond on the right, or from the stables, barn, and farmland on the left.
The land dropped in a sharper angle in the front, so that, a thousand feet down the gravel drive that curved through the trees, all that could be seen through the gray-brown grid of intersecting branches were the two giant stone chimneys.
By the time she reached the mailbox, nearly a half mile from the house, the drive had curved so far to the left that the house might have dematerialized. There was only a gray, battered mailbox with BENSON painted on in black block letters. On close inspection, there was a gray undercoat beneath the “Benson,” a slash of paint that obscured the “Tuttle” they had never had a chance—Nicholas’s fame came to fast—to change to “Cobleigh.”
They’d left the name “Tuttle” on the mailbox until they realized there were fans who had as great a knowledge of Nicholas’s genealogy as he himself had, sometimes a greater knowledge, for he’d stopped reading the articles that connected him with every Tuttle who’d ever passed through New York.
One woman had driven right up to the house and leaned on her car horn for fifteen minutes. When she finally drove off, she left behind an offering, a cage with two live chickens. There was no note to explain their significance. Jane gave them to the man whose farm bordered on theirs and who worked their land. He’d dropped back the next day and told her he’d killed and buried them since the woman was obviously some nut case with Nicholas Cobleigh on her brain and the chickens might be poisoned. “Wouldn’t even feed ’em to the pigs,” he’d told her.
Less than a month after that, a man had walked up from the road, waving, as he approached the house, calling “Nick! Nick!” Nicholas had been in California making a film. The man had worn an orange wool hat somewhat askew; an earlap hung over his eye. “Nick! I’m here!” The police had finally come and taken him away.
Jane had suggested Austen or Brontë for the mailbox, but Nicholas had said they were a dead giveaway and chose Benson, the name of a character in a screenplay he was reading.
The red flag was down, rusted into position. For a short time, before they’d realized things were missing, mail was stolen from their box. Birthday cards, magazines, bank statements, letters: anything with Nicholas’s name printed on it seemed to have value. Now, the housekeeper’s husband—who worked as a handyman and runner of errands—drove into town each morning and picked up their mail at the post office.
Still, Jane stood by the empty box, peering down the road as if expecting the most important letter of her life. This was her task. Walk down the drive. Stand by the mailbox for a full five minutes. Walk back up the drive. She’d worn an old watch of Nicholas’s, one with a second hand. Thirty-five seconds had elapsed.
Her legs trembled. Not nerves, she said to herself. Not nerves. Out of shape. Her right knee buckled and she grabbed the mailbox, hugging it to her waist as if it were an adored child. Six years of inertia, and a half-mile walk on a gravelly road where the rocks were ball bearings, sliding under the slick soles of her flats.
Pretty flats. Yellow outlined with a thin line of bright blue. Frivolous, but she’d done it anyway. And the other pairs on the same page of Bonwit’s catalog, a red accented with purple, a pink with kelly green. For two years she’d bought and bought, studying department store catalogs as she once had Restoration comedy. Buying everything. Cowl-neck cashmere sweaters in six colors, so she would not realize, too late, that she’d forgotten the most important shade; leather pants, leather tunics, leather vests, a leather dress as pliable as cotton; three pairs of cowboy boots; five fringed silk scarves; fourteen leotards and matching tights still in cellophane.
You never wear the same thing twice any more, Nicholas had said. That’s not true, she replied. She’d been wearing a new black terrycloth jumpsuit, which she’d also ordered in forest green and terra-cotta. You were never a clothes horse, he’d continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. She’d demanded, Do you see all those women from Manhattan who come up here? Do you want me to dress like the headmistress of some third-rate school? How would you know what a headmistress looks like? he’d countered. Thanks, Nick. Let’s keep the class lines clear. I didn’t mean it that way, damn it. I just meant you never get out, so how—Forget it, okay? It just bothers me that you’re throwing money away. I am not! I need to look decent. You need something to kill the boredom. That’s why you’re doing it. Spending fifteen minutes on the phone with some salesgirl talking about belts. You never gave a damn about belts. You just—
The shoes pinched her feet. One minute and forty-five seconds. A little dizziness. All right. She was going to get dizzy. Fine. Her heart too. No one ever died from a panic attack, Dr. Fullerton had told her. She believed him. Face what is happening. Give it a number. It was a five.
Five was high, but she was tired. The walk down the drive had tired her. She held on to the mailbox. The rusty seams were probably staining her sweater. A huge fluffy angora sweater. Hand-knitted. French. Beige and white. The week before, the wife of the president of the conglomerate that owned the country’s biggest chain of theaters had worn one. A woman
taller even than she, and about twenty pounds thinner, who had looked at Jane’s suede pants as if trying to come up with a compliment but unable to. A cold, chic bitch in a five-hundred-dollar sweater.
At dinner the woman told Nicholas about her job. She took wives of foreign tourists and diplomats shopping in Manhattan. It paid, she declared, not well but enough to keep her in stockings. Even Jimmy—she nodded at her short, blubbery, rich husband—can’t afford my stockings. I adore really good hosiery, the woman went on. Pantyhose are the scourge of civilization. Jane waited, looking for Nicholas’s look, the one he often flashed to her that no one else could see: Pretentious. The look never came. Nicholas chuckled. He gazed at the woman over his third glass of burgundy, amused, impressed with her job, charmed. Tiny fluffs of the woman’s angora sweater were still in the air the next day.
Everyone was working. Cecily had bought and expanded the town’s bookstore. She worked six days a week now. Everyone Jane knew worked. Her sister-in-law Abby was an assistant U.S. Attorney in New York. Her roommate from Pembroke, Amelia, had gotten her doctorate and was teaching psychology at Northeastern. Her friend from high school, Lynn, who for years had appeared to be the world’s happiest housewife, had opened a store in Cincinnati called the Elegant Table; it sold cloths, placemats, and napkin rings. Even her sister-in-law Olivia worked. She had a loom in her living room and wove afghans that actually sold for six hundred to a thousand dollars each. Naturally, I dye my own wool, Olivia had written. Believe it or not, there’s a lot of interest in quality down here in Washington, and not just in Georgetown.
Two minutes, twenty seconds. Her mother-in-law worked as a volunteer four days a week, taking around the library cart at Sloan-Kettering, the cancer hospital. “I view it as a job,” Winifred had told her. “I’m there at nine on the dot, work until four. Rain or shine. It’s my work. No more dashing from meeting to meeting for me.”
No one was home any more. Everybody had a niche. When she called Cecily at night, she often spoke to Cecily’s new husband. Cecily, exhausted after a day’s work—and, Jane assumed, in love with a man twenty years younger who’d dedicated a book of poems to her—flopped into bed early. Do you want me to poke her? the new husband had asked. She still seems to be breathing. No, Jane said. Let her sleep. I’ll call her in the store tomorrow. Half the time when she did, Cecily said I’ll call you back and then didn’t.
What if this treatment worked? What if she finally got beyond the mailbox, got beyond the next task? One step at a time. One step at a time and she’d be forty and what could she do then? Go to stores and shop? Meet her friends on their lunch hours? Make batches of black raspberry preserves and embarrass herself and everyone else by trying to sell it? “Jane’s Homemade Jams.” They would talk about her behind her back, or someone would get botulism. Of all the people who passed through her dining room, few asked, What do you do? It was obvious. Her house was perfect. Every soap dish, every picture frame, every candle was the best there could be. They didn’t have to ask, they all saw what she did. She did nothing; she bought.
Three minutes, fifteen seconds.
She had been locked out of the world. And now? If she managed to get back in? There was no place for her. She could bake unnecessary tarts or trail Nicholas from location to location and fulfill the two traditional roles women everywhere were abandoning: homemaker and camp follower.
Her legs quivered. Her knee buckled and then, suddenly, it gave out. Her leg shot back. She fell sideways onto the ground, half pulling the mailbox off its post. She sat there staring at her leg. Her stocking was shredded by the gravel, her blue-trimmed yellow shoe plastered with the mud it had unearthed. She picked off the gravel. Her leg was covered with polka dots of blood. A spasm of nausea hit her. Red dots surrounded by black bits of grit. She lowered her head. She was so dizzy. Terribly dizzy. Give it a number. She couldn’t give it a number. Her heart was going smack, smack—and then it stopped. Oh, God! Smack, smack! She dragged herself up. Her heart was stopping more than it was beating. She heard herself whimper, a far-off terrified sound. Then she rushed back up the drive, limping, crying, bleating, I can’t! I can’t! I can’t!
“You’ve had setbacks before,” Judson Fullerton said. “Remember that first time, at your mailbox? This is just one more.”
“I guess,” Jane said. Her hands rested lightly on the chrome arms of the chair. She fought her instinct, which was to clutch them as tightly as she could. She hated his office. The chairs were all chrome and leather. Instead of a desk, he had a rectangle of glass on a chrome base that looked like a model of a DNA molecule. The desk was bare except for a telephone, a rosewood pen and pencil holder, her folder, and a chrome picture frame placed so that the photograph was facing him. To get a look at it, she would have had to walk right up to his desk and lean over. Most of the time she thought the photograph was of his wife, if he had one—he did not wear a wedding ring—and children, if he had any, but now and then she wondered if it was a young, gorgeous, curvaceous, bikinied blond cookie, her lips parted enough to show the edges of her sharp little teeth.
“Well, it’s not the first setback and it won’t be the last. You know that. Do you want to talk about what happened?” he asked.
“Well, I went into town. My assignment was to walk from one end of Main Street to the other and to stop and look in at least four store windows. Ellie Matteo dropped me off, then drove down to wait for me at the other end. And it was all right at first. I stopped at a shoe store. And they have a gourmet cookware store right in town now. All these beautiful cheesecake pans, and I—”
“What happened?”
He interrupted. This was not like regular therapy, her old shop-at-home psychoanalysis. They would let her go on about cheesecake pans. They might talk about cheesecake in her past, or cheesecake’s symbolic value, or what pans meant to her.
“What happened was that I started feeling very uncomfortable. People were staring at me. I know you think I’m being paranoid, but they were.”
“I don’t think you’re being paranoid. You’ve been photographed with your husband a good deal. Most people must know you live in the area. It’s not surprising you’d be stared at.”
“And I haven’t been there in years.”
“Do they know why you haven’t been there?”
“No. Most people don’t know. My friend Cecily said they think I do all my shopping in New York. I guess I do. All I have to do is call and say ‘This is Mrs. Nicholas Cobleigh,’ and someone in every department store and Madison Avenue boutique and fancy food shop leaps to attention. Whenever I call Saks for Nick’s underwear—”
“How did you react to feeling you were being observed?”
“The usual.” Judson Fullerton waited. “My heart,” she elaborated. “Not being able to get enough air. The dizziness. I had to grab on to a lamppost.”
“How did you try to deal with these feelings?”
“Oh, just tossed back my head and laughed them off.” He did not smile. She still didn’t know if he lacked humor or if this was part of his therapeutic technique. In the four months she’d been seeing him, he’d given no hint of being charmed or amused by her, or of even considering her pleasant. “I didn’t try to deal with the feelings. That was the problem. I forgot every single technique I’ve learned and just gave in to the panic.”
He was looking straight at her. She lowered her head. Not that he had a face to make her blush. He was Mr. Average. Dr. Average. When he’d come home from Alaska, Nicholas had demanded, “What does he look like?” Average, she’d answered. Average height, average weight, average face, fiftyish. Hair thinning in front. Or not thinning. Maybe it’s already thinned. He wears wire-rimmed glasses that are too small for his face.
“You didn’t allow the feelings to come?” he asked.
“No, I fought them. I ran from them. All my old routines. And as soon as I could I ran down Main Street to the car. People must have thought I was crazy.”
“Maybe they tho
ught you were in a hurry.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I think you’re being a little hard on yourself, Jane.” What was she supposed to do? Call him Judson? Jud? “Haven’t you ever seen anyone running down a street?”
“Dr. Fullerton, before I ran I was gripping the lamppost for dear life.”
“For dear life?”
“Well, my fingerprints aren’t embedded in the metal, but I was holding very tight.”
“With one hand or two?”
“One.”
“I’ll concede it’s possible people were staring at you and thinking your behavior by the lamppost odd. Now, will you concede that it’s equally possible that they merely thought you had stopped and were resting your hand on a lamppost?”
She breathed out slowly. “I guess so.”
He always stared straight at her. Although his windows were covered with vertical venetian blinds, some sunlight came into the office and reflected off his glasses, so he appeared to be studying her with one eye and one beam of light. She lowered her eyes so as not to meet his glance. He was wearing a flowered summer tie. English. Nicholas had several. The only thing not average about Judson Fullerton was his clothes. He dressed conservatively but elegantly, very much like Nicholas. The suit he was wearing, a beige linen, looked just like the one Nicholas had, although she supposed Judson Fullerton’s wasn’t custom-made.
“You’re doing very well,” he said. “But setbacks occur. It happens to everyone. You shouldn’t let it throw you.” He never moved. He never picked up a pen or shuffled the papers in her folder. “Were you premenstrual that day?”
“About three weeks.” She gave him a small smile he did not return.
“Were you under any particular tension?”
“That was—let’s see—Tuesday. Oh. The night before my husband and I had a little fight. Nothing serious.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“It was about sex.” She’d never mentioned sex before. Neither had he. She assumed he must want to hear about it, being a psychiatrist. He kept looking at her and gave no indication that his interest was aroused—her third psychiatrist wiggled deeper into his chair when anticipating a juicy revelation—but she wondered if he really wasn’t dying to hear about Nicholas Cobleigh’s sex life. Which happened to be her sex life also. “He said I don’t seem interested any more.”