Almost Paradise

by Susan Isaacs

  “No!”

  He threw the shreds of the newspaper he was still holding to the floor. “You promised me we’d talk about it before you spoke to any reporter. You promised. You knew how I felt about that prick doctor exploiting you.”

  “He wasn’t exploiting me. He wasn’t.” She tried to slide past him. “He’s a dedicated psychiatrist and he’s helping people, and I’m helping people by going public with this.” She was wearing a black slip; with it and the bright red lipstick she was wearing she looked like an over-age 1950s starlet. “Nick, please. Let’s both of us calm down. Please. Read the article calmly and you’ll see there’s nothing bad about you in it. Everything it says about you is good, how you cared and worried about me and were supportive and tried everything—”

  “Shut up!”

  “Stop yelling at me!”

  “Shut up, damn you!” He was screeching, out of control again.

  “Listen to yourself!” she screeched back. “Just listen!”

  “You lied to me, goddamn it. You said you wouldn’t do anything—”

  “They were planning a whole big piece on agoraphobia.”

  “Then they didn’t need you. Did they? Did they? Answer me, goddamn it.”

  “They did,” she said. “I was the hook.”

  He wanted to slap her, throwing around bullshit PR talk. He balled his right hand into a fist and punched his left palm. She recoiled. “Why didn’t you ask me?” he demanded.

  “You were in California.”

  “Aren’t there phones? You call me two, three times a day. ‘Nick’—he used a falsetto—‘do you think I should get tassel pulls for the shades in the apartment? Nick, Lizzy says all her friends are going to camp in Scotland and she wants to go too. What do you think, Nick? What should I do? Should I go to the bathroom, Nick? I have to pee.’”

  She slapped him so hard across his face his teeth clamped down on the inside of his cheek. Then she ran out of the bathroom. Before he could follow her, he had to spit a mouthful of blood into the sink.

  “I don’t have to justify what I do!” she shouted as he entered the bedroom. She stood on the far side of the bed, using it as a barrier. “I’m a person too, damn it! I have a right to say whatever I want to say.”

  He held onto the low post of the bed as if it alone could support him. His mouth was filled with the salty taste of blood. “Even when you’re destroying me?” Bloody saliva dribbled down his chin. He wiped it on the shoulder of his robe.

  “I’m not destroying you.” She edged backward, watching him all the time.

  “What the hell do you think I’m going to do?” he shouted. “Spring at you?” She stepped into her closet and came out with a dark dress. She held it up against her. The coyness, the false modesty made him sick. “Where are you going?”

  “I have a lunch date in the city.”

  “With whom, if I’m allowed to ask.”

  “With Dr. Fullerton and someone—” she paused for an instant—“with someone from Newsweek.” She turned her back to him, slipped the dress over her head, and then faced him again. “You don’t have to worry. You’ll come out just like you did in the Times piece, smelling like a rose. Better than you deserve.”

  “What do you mean?” She didn’t answer. She began to fasten the long row of buttons that ran up the left side of her dress like a military tunic. She buttoned with rapid precision. “I said, what do you mean, better than I deserve?”

  She did not look at him. “I mean, you never really wanted me to get better.”

  “What?”

  She lifted her chin to fasten the buttons on the tunic collar. She spoke to the ceiling. “I know that now. You had me just where you wanted me. Your devoted, adoring prisoner. You had my undivided attention. Nothing to distract me from being the perfect little wife for you.”

  The knot in his stomach pulled tighter. “You know that’s not true.”

  “Isn’t it? If I’d been able to go out, to be my own person—”

  “Jesus Christ—”

  “If I had a job, do you think I’d have had time to be the perfect mother, spending hours and hours with them, reading, critiquing their homework like it was Ulysses, baking five million gingerbread men? All so you could go away for four or five months with a clear conscience, knowing they wouldn’t shrivel up from missing Daddy. And would I have had the time to make dinner for your thousands of business people or keep your family together because your mother gets rattled when she has to serve more than three cups of coffee, much less Thanksgiving dinner? Oh, and entertaining your father’s endless parade of girl friends. ‘Dad, how nice of you to drop in.’ ‘Jane, I want you to meet Prissy. Oh, sorry, Missy. I’m just teasing. I know it’s Sissy.’ And I’d say, ‘Oh, do stay the weekend, Dad.’ And if I’d had a life to call my own—just listen to me, damn it—would I have been able to read every screenplay that came into the house? To go over and over your characterizations with you? To—”

  “You wanted to!”

  “It was the only thing I had.”

  “And you think…you think, Jane, that all those nights I held you and you cried and I begged you, Please let me help you, let me find someone else to help you, I love you, I want to help…”

  She walked back to her closet. “Maybe you weren’t aware of what you were feeling. It’s possible. I’m not saying you consciously subverted me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She came out with a pair of black and red high-heeled sandals, the sort of shoes an expensive call girl would wear. “Dr. Fullerton said—are you going to listen or not?—he said sometimes the spouses of agoraphobics have a vested interest in maintaining that kind of abject dependency.”

  “You’re crazy! You’ve gotten things twisted. What has he done to you? I mean it! What has he done to you?”

  “He’s gotten me better, that’s what. He’s gotten me out of the house and you can’t tolerate it, can you? I’m not forced to live vicariously any more. I’m not forced to wait three, four, five months while you’re off on location, waiting for you to come home so I can help you prepare for your next film. So I can give you the summaries of all the novels I read and then have you toss them aside and say, ‘Oh, thanks. I’ll get to them in a couple of weeks.’ Thousands of terrible books, just to find the perfect vehicle for you. Reading screenplays twenty, thirty times, making sure they were perfect for you.” She sat on the bed and fastened the strap of the shoe around her ankle.

  “No one forced you to do a goddamn thing.”

  “No? How else was I supposed to express my talents?”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “That is painfully obvious. You can’t see beyond yourself any more, can you? Let me refresh your recollection. It so happens I was involved in the theater long before you were.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Are you serious?” She fastened her other shoe and stood. “Have you become so totally egocentric that you can’t see anyone else any more?”

  He stared at her. She had thick red combs holding back her hair. Huge black button earrings. All black and red, with that shiny red slash of a mouth. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. He didn’t. She looked hard, dramatic: an expensive tramp. Men would notice her.

  “I’m saying,” she droned, with exaggerated patience, “that if it weren’t for me, you’d be some drudge in a law firm today. I coached you. I guided you every step of the way.”

  He couldn’t move from his place at the bed. He couldn’t speak. She strolled to her dresser, opened a bottle of perfume, and dabbed it onto her neck, her arms, behind her knees.

  “I gave up my career for you,” she said.

  “Jane!”

  “I did.”

  “You were the one who—”

  “I’m not saying I begrudge it. I did it freely. But the point is I did it, and if I had it to do all over again, I don’t know if I would. I mean, it was a different era. A
nd I was so in awe of you and wanted you to be happy and—”

  “Jane, I begged you not to give it up. I was driving a taxi, remember? Don’t you remember? I pleaded with you to keep at it.”

  “But it was better that I did give it up. Wasn’t it, Nick? That’s what you really wanted me to do. That gave me all the time in the world to work with you, to nurture your talent. You got the actor’s dream: a live-in coach. And she did the dishes too, and anything else you wanted. Not bad for the price.”

  He wasn’t going to cry again. He wouldn’t give her that.

  “Just once,” she said, “after we had Vicky, if you had just come and said, ‘Okay, I’m making some money now, why don’t you try and audition? We can get a babysitter.’”

  He wasn’t going to cry. “Do you want to know why I didn’t?” he asked. She leaned against her dresser and looked at him. “Really. Do you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  “I didn’t want you to audition because I didn’t want you to get hurt.” Her big, made-up eyes opened wide. “You’re making me say this, Jane; I didn’t want to. You just never had the talent.”

  Jane delved through the blueberries in the colander, taking off stems and leaves. “Do you know how they say that if you cook with love the food will come out tasting wonderful?”

  “And?” Cecily asked.

  “It’s not true. I’m filled with hostility and I made the sauce for the vitello tonnato and it’s perfect. Exquisite. And the pasta salad will be perfect and the blueberry tart will be perfect too. He’ll have an absolutely exquisite birthday dinner.”

  “Maybe you’re not as hostile as you think.” Cecily sat at Jane’s kitchen table tracing her initials in the wet frosting of a glass of iced coffee. “Maybe subconsciously you’re still madly in love with him.”

  “Well,” Jane said, “he’s my husband.” She picked out two undeveloped green berries and put them in the pile of stems and leaves. “I don’t not love him.”

  She could no longer say that she did. She felt empty. She avoided looking at him. When she did, she saw the familiar face of an actor she’d seen in many, many films. She knew he felt something close to what she did. His manner was polite and distant, as if they were two strangers in a foreign country who, by some fluke, had been forced to share a hotel room. In bed, they slept so close to the edges of the mattress that it was only a matter of time before one of them would fall off during the night. He’d reached for her only twice in six weeks. The first time he didn’t kiss her. The second, his erection disappeared and he’d said, “Never mind.”

  They exchanged information. “Vicky’s guidance counselor says she should apply for early admission to Brown.” “Murray asked if we could make an appearance at the American Film Institute dinner.”

  Tension pervaded their lives. In their Manhattan apartment, she’d walked in on him as he was drying off from a shower, his leg up on the toilet seat, and he’d glared at her as if she were a crazy fan who had invaded his dressing room. She’d turned and walked out, not saying a word. When the Newsweek article became a cover story about behavioral psychology—with her picture on the cover—he did not speak to her for an entire week. Instead, he gave her the ripped-out pages of the article, with his underlinings in red ink.

  “I felt utterly hopeless,” Jane Cobleigh said. “There was no place for me to turn. My husband was gone for three, four months at a time….” She had her first panic attack in 1968, when Nicholas was in California making his first film…. And in her case, there were pressures that far exceeded those of the average housewife-victim. Her husband is one of the most sought-after men in the world, an object of almost universal desire. His reputation is that of a cool, sometimes unapproachable aristocrat. He is also a busy, highly successful businessman whose economic savvy puts him in a league with the shrewdest money-men in the country. Associates say he spends as much time on his holdings as he does on his films.

  Cecily went to the freezer, took a handful of ice cubes, and dropped them into the already iced coffee. “Jane, you can’t sustain a level of tension like this.”

  “Want to bet?”

  “Stop quipping, okay? I’ve been married three times. I’ve had fights all three times. Bad ones. I’m an expert. Chip was always insecure and could never make a decision, and Chuck was terribly domineering and every time I said no to something he’d take it personally and go fuming off, slamming doors. And Steve is moody. And not just if a poem gets rejected. If something happens to the fan belt on his car he’ll be nasty for the next three days. But there’s always an end to it. With all three of them. Eventually you kiss and make up. But there’s no end with you and Nick. It keeps escalating, and that makes it dangerous.”

  Jane wiped her hands on a paper towel and sat at the table with Cecily. With her thumbnail, she pared bits of blueberry out from under her other nails. “What am I supposed to do, clam up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “All our lives, it’s been Nicholas first, last, middle. Aren’t I entitled to something?”

  “Of course you are. But your something is in complete contradiction to his something, his mania for privacy.”

  “But I’m not talking about him. I’ve had chances to invade his privacy, and I never, ever would. Four different publishers have contacted me, wanting me to write a book about being agoraphobic, but I know what they really want is some juicy stuff about the marriage. I’m not naive. They want my story, but they also want some goodies about Nick. I wouldn’t do anything like that. I told him that.”

  “What did he say?”

  Jane chewed her lower lip for a minute. “He said the only reason I’m getting attention is that I’m his wife, that if I were Mrs. Joe Blow no one would care. And that’s partly true, but it’s not all true. I have something to say, and I say it well.”

  “I know you do.”

  “But Nick says it’s all a smokescreen. All they really want to know is what he’s like, and since he won’t talk they’ll get what they can from me. He says the only reason People did that piece was because their reporters have been trying to get up here for five years, and this was the only way they could do it. He twists everything so he gets all the credit. Nicholas Cobleigh is the center of the universe; everything revolves around him. And I’ve betrayed him. I’ve humiliated him. I’m an ingrate. I have no class. I’m the walking wounded. That’s what he called me. He said I was a sick woman, and that it was in Judson’s interest that I don’t get well.”

  “Judson’s interest?”

  “Stop looking at me like that. We’ve been working together on the publicity and the phobia conference, and he said it would be easier if we were on a first-name basis.” Cecily was peering into her glass as if it were holding a fascinating liquid she’d never seen before. “Cecily!”

  “I think you’re getting emotionally involved.”

  “I’m not!”

  “Is he married?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He told me.”

  “He told you?”

  “God, Cecily. He happened to mention he and his wife were going off to the Cape in August.”

  “All I know is that for the last few months, it was Dr. Fullerton this, Dr. Fullerton that, Dr. Fullerton walks on water.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “And now it’s Judson. I think you’re putting your energies in the wrong place. I think you should forget about Judson. Concentrate on your marriage and work things out.”

  “I appreciate your interest.”

  “Yours very truly. Jane, don’t shut down on me. Listen to me. It’s normal to get a crush on a shrink, but—”

  “I don’t have a crush on him! We have a good working relationship. I have a great deal of respect for him, and that’s that.”

  “Okay, he’s your colleague. Fine. Great. But what about your husband?”

  “My husband screamed at me last night because I dared to invite his family
up for his birthday without telling him. As if it were a huge surprise. I only do it every single year.”

  Cecily sipped her drink. The ice had melted, and the coffee looked like brown-tinged water. She made a face and set it aside. “Did you ever consider that your husband is in a bad emotional state? His entire life has changed. You’ve come out of the closet, so to speak. You’re challenging him for the first time in your relationship. The whole political balance of your marriage is changing. He needs time to adjust.”

  “Cecily, he won’t even try. He won’t talk to me. If I accidentally brush him when I walk past, he recoils. I said to him Please, let’s talk and he said, Why? You do all the talking you need to the media.”

  “He’s hurt.”

  “He’s self-involved. I can’t begin to tell you what it’s like. The whole world wants to please him. I’m the only one who doesn’t, and therefore I’m sick.”

  “Did he actually say that?”

  “Yes. And if I’m not sick…when we went to that Retarded Infant Services Ball, and I was wearing that ice-blue gown with the low back, he told me I looked like a hooker. Excuse me. An over-age hooker. I’m over-age. He’s so busy running to dermatologists getting different face creams because he has a wrinkle in his forehead that he doesn’t have time to breathe. Did you ever have that? Get into bed with a man and the moisturizer smell is coming from him? It’s a real turn-on.”

  Cecily reached across the table and put her hand on top of Jane’s. “Jane—” Jane yanked her hand away.

  “And he’s so wonderfully sensitive. My husband cannot meet a woman any more without turning on that famous understated smile. You know, where he barely shows his teeth. Oh, they love it. I can see how much they love it. Do you know how? Because he keeps showing me. We’re standing right next to each other and he’s lighting fires under every woman who walks by. He puts his arm around them, takes their chin in his hand, and holds it to look at them better. Looks right into their eyes. He won’t touch me. And do you know what? When I tell my beloved husband that his flirting bothers me, it humiliates me, do you know what he says, Cecily? He says, ‘Why don’t you discuss your anxieties with Dr. Fullerton?’”