Wicked Women

by Fay Weldon

  “Don’t call him Grandpa anymore,” said Hetty. “Call him Philip. Grandpa is so ageing.” She was barely forty herself.

  “Bitch,” said Martin again, and now he’d said it thrice it was Emperor’s New Clothes time. The Andrews saw Hetty Grainger more clearly for what she was: a horror came amongst them. All except Philip, of course, so deep in his positive transference was he.

  “Perhaps Martin had better go to his room,” said Philip to Dr. Hetty, and Dr. Hetty said that was a good idea. “Aloneness quiets the unquiet spirit,” said Dr. Hetty Grainger.

  So Martin ran weeping to his room, into loneliness, except that Sal and Sue came running after him to keep him company, and when Martin put his head under the pillow to bury his grief, they did the same, sharing the same breath. They ended up giggling, not crying.

  The grown-ups finished their meal in silence, and that evening Martin made his phone call to his mother longer than ever, this time on purpose.

  “I told them,” said Martin proudly. “I told them what she was. I saw her off. You can rely on me.”

  BAKED ALASKA

  YOU KNOW WHAT IT’S like, Miss Jacobs, when you’re having an affair? Forgetting appointments, neglecting children, running off to the hairdresser, having your eyelashes dyed; stopping and staring in mirrors instead of passing by with averted eyes—as if all of a sudden the fact that you’re alive and have a body matters—and you’re back with the sense of Mystical Connection. I’m an addict to extra-marital love: an addictive personality: one whiff of a cigarette and I’m off again: a drop of sherry in the Bombe Surprise and I’m out of my skull by dawn. I can feel your eyebrows shooting up, Miss Jacobs, even though I can’t see them. I have to lie here on this couch, which is a little too hard and rather short. What do your men clients do? Dangle their legs? Or perhaps you only get to see dwarves? I haven’t been to see you for eight weeks. I’d quite forgotten how dreadful it is—talking into space like this.

  What you always forget is that just because you’re connected, the object of your love is not necessarily, let alone permanently, so. As if you’d made a telephone call and the other person has spoken for a little and then wandered off, and not hung up, so that not only can’t you speak to them, but you can’t use the phone either, for anyone else.

  I know I told you I was going to Alaska, on business. That my employers had sent me on a trip to learn about Alaskan business methods. It was a lie. You mean it sounded true! So unlikely as to be true? Wonderful! Affairs are all lies: one gets really good at them.

  I daresay even you have lovers, Miss Jacobs. There’s someone for everyone: somewhere out there are men who will admire the stony bleakness of your regard, the ferocious tugging back of your hair, the toughness of your blemished skin, your unsmiling mouth. I envy you. You couldn’t even begin to pretend: you are all truth and permanence as I am all frivolity and change. I know only the silly side of the coin: what it is to be loved for blonde curls and sulky looks, and that peculiar gift for idiotic discrimination I foster, which certain men find so entrancing. “Oh no, I can’t possibly go there, or eat this, or see that!” With a flick of red fingernail, despising this, adoring that—men love the carry-on, for a while at least: then they get bored.

  During the last eight weeks I have gone at least twice a week to the hairdresser. Nothing to prevent me blow-drying my own hair: it’s just at such times you feel the need to be ministered unto. As if it takes a bevy of supporting beauties just to get one woman to meet her lover! As if she carries with her the concentrated energy of women everywhere—their desires, their fulfilment, not just her own. Takes a dozen girls to adorn one bride.

  My stylist Joanna had just come back from New York with tales of high life and a mind generally at the end of its tether. The kind of stories that make you think you’d better defect: that they do things better in Moscow. I can only say that kind of thing to you, Miss Jacobs, husband Roland—well, ex-(possibly) husband Roland—being so politically serious. He married me the better to despise my frivolity. He told me only this morning that in fact he now despises me so thoroughly he is obliged to divorce me: I’ll telephone home—home?—when I’ve finished this session with you, and if there’s an answer he hasn’t left and he’s still my husband, and if there isn’t, he’s gone and he’s not. Never a dull moment. I’ve been putting off calling home or ex-home all day. It’s all right if you keep moving and keep talking—it’s only with stillness and silence that the panic sets in.

  Now what Joanna said—her hair is so long she can sit on it, though I can’t think why she’d want to—was that in New York cannibalism is all the rage. Not whole people—parts of people: amputated limbs and so forth. At least I hope that’s what she said. I do have this incapacity sometimes to hear what is actually being spoken. In retrospect, I can hardly have been hearing with any accuracy what Anton—that’s my love, my lover: that is to say, my love, my ex-lover as from precisely seven days ago—was saying, or the end of the affair would not have been quite so unexpected; from bed to nothing in ten swift minutes. Anyway, according to Joanna, human flesh, either discarded bits of body, or—I suppose we have to face it—whole bodies, and tender young bodies at that, especially acquired for the occasion in some appalling and unthinkable fashion, are selling in New York for $2,000 a pound, and served stewed at all the best parties. And the other currently fashionable epicurean delicacy, Joanna says, is the brains of living monkeys, eaten with special long-handled silver teaspoons. Just tether your monkey and slice off the top of its skull and there you are.

  I tried not to think about it. I thought about Anton instead, about wrapping my legs round his thin body and pleasuring him as he pleasured me. About a curl here and a streak there and whether a fringe is really what I need: if the hair is back from the face the character may indeed show, but was it character Anton wanted? I doubted it. And, when it came to it, what he wanted was a space in his head filled: some little wounded part made good, some little chilliness warmed. He had fun with the small words that indicated love, concern, possession, even permanence: he liked me to listen to them. He knew, I fear, that I was waiting and hoping for them—

  And I? I wanted everything. I can’t help it. Men run away from me in droves, as others come running towards me. I am the far end of the swimming pool: the side you have to touch before turning and swimming back. As fast as you can towards: as fast as you can away.

  Doesn’t it frighten you, Miss Jacobs, to think how soon we’re going to die? No, nothing frightens you, because your heart is pure, your soul is good.

  Monkeys’ brains and long silver teaspoons. Shall I describe Anton to you? His beautiful haggard face, his lean body, his brilliant eyes, his quicksilver mind, his charm? Dear God, his worldly importance! Anton never walked if he could run. Yet I’m sure his wife saw him with more accuracy than I ever did: she would see him as I see Roland: as sheer living, walking, snoring, predictable, day-to-day folly. She would see in Anton a man re-running, decade after decade, without any alteration but with much surface embellishment, five glorious years of youth. A man forever between twenty-eight and thirty-three, as life and event rolled by. Yes, of course, Miss Jacobs, he had a wife. Has a wife. Why are you surprised? Men like Anton have wives. In this brave new cannibalistic world of ours, all proper men are married, all proper women too. It’s our prudence, our reality, our safe familiarity while we nibble and guzzle the private parts of comparative strangers. Oh strange new wondrous delicacies!

  I try to forget amputated limbs at $2,000 a pound; I try to forget the monkeys’ brains, as I try to forget, as my husband can’t, the missiles gathering, forget the whole frightening insanity of the world. I try to relish only this: the conjunction of man with woman, in the face of common sense and decency.

  I tell you I loved him, Miss Jacobs: it is how I sanctified disgrace: how I justified the dangerous absurdity of our behaviour: this running through the machine of a different and forbidden tape. I set up this terrible, painful affair, the lit
tle short-lived merry haphazard affair, as an actual alternative, an actual radical alternative, Miss Jacobs, and not as the optional extra that Anton saw it to be. I took it seriously. It was my escape route from death.

  And yet how many times have I not myself seen my accomplice in sex as an optional extra, the affair as a trivial in-and-out relationship, when the man has believed it to be world-shaking, shattering and permanent. Ah, the biter bit!

  Why Alaska, you ask suddenly? Are you keeping up with me? Why did I tell you I was going to Alaska? Because Alaska is cold, cold, Miss Jacobs, and one senses the ice already encroaching upon the fire, before it is even lit.

  Because my mother used to make Baked Alaska, a fundamentally boring dish. Whale-fat ice cream (in her case) encased in meringue made from a packet; contents: dried egg white, stabiliser, emulsifier, permitted (who says?) artificial flavouring and colouring, put in the oven the better to shock the palate with cold and hot—nothing else is going to.

  Anton was great on restaurants: accused me of being unsophisticated because I would not spend £80 on an indifferent meal for two; would rather give it to charity or feed the ducks. He would spend $2,000, I bet you, on a spoonful of the brains of living monkeys, should opportunity present.

  Baked Alaska. My mother. My mother served Baked Alaska and I should be grateful. She was trying to tell us something, I think. Life is not what you think. This warm cosy meringue will turn into cold ice cream and set your metal teeth-fillings zinging!

  Alaska again. Yes. Well, Anton was warm outside and cold inside. He was not swayed by feeling. By a passing curiosity, I think, because I’d got my name in the papers and he loves celebrity. Didn’t I tell you that? I won the Secretary of the Year Award. Yes, little me. I can book-keep like an angel, write shorthand like a dervish, take board room minutes like a High Priestess. I could also stand on my head and run a multi-national corporation if I wanted to, only I can’t be bothered. (That’s what you feel like when you’ve won an Award—it goes to your head.) It was when I’d told Anton I could do his job better than he could—Anton is a director of an oil company, did I explain that?—he became a little cool, and then I complained of his coolness and he became colder, and then I wept and said I loved him, which of course was fatal and the end of the affair. He is the kind of man who must woo and never win. And what am I when it comes to it? Miss PA of the year.

  Life, love, Miss Jacobs. Love is all we have left, and its excitements, while (as Roland keeps reminding me—you know how involved he is in the peace movement: he is so busy loving peace he has no time to love me; no wonder I run around with other men) while, as I say, the nuclear missiles gather, from Alaska to the Western Australian desert. Love. Sex. Missiles. Penises. Yes, of course there is phallic imagery here, Miss Jacobs; did you doubt it? A penetrative fear. I am the victim who invites attack. If I did not invite attack, the missiles would not gather; the men would pass by prudently; the world would be at peace. Mea culpa. Only, Miss Jacobs, this is the energy that makes the world go round, gets the children born: I can’t control it. Takes more than me.

  I have lied and cheated and lost over a trivial affair of the heart—because my heart was involved and Anton’s was not, and that is the nub of the humiliation I now feel—and what can any of this matter? “I cannot feel,” Anton said to me, “about you the way you clearly feel about me. I’m sorry but there it is. I did not mean to hurt you.”

  But he did. It’s better to feast on the living than the dead. The taste is better. That’s why I got fed upon. But this may be the last time. What I feel like now, Miss Jacobs, is the monkey. I tethered myself with my own desire. I invited Anton under my skin with his scalpel blade: slice! he went; oh, sharp, sharp—and then with a long teaspoon he supped off my living brains, trying them out for flavour, and then, finding them really not good enough after all for his epicurean fancy, he spat them out with disdain. And the monkey chatters a little, automatically, and dies. I shall go home to my husband now and calm him down. I bet you anything he’s still there.

  THE PARDONER

  ELEANOR TUGGED AT HER father’s arm. She was excited. “That’s her,” she said. “That’s her over there. That’s my therapist, Daddy. That’s Julie.” And she waved and smiled at a demurely pretty woman of some forty years, dressed in high-necked grey, who stood over by the empty marble fireplace talking to a woman in low-necked black. The woman in grey smiled back, briefly, and resumed her conversation. Bob did not like to see his daughter so easily dismissed, but then he did not like the fact that she was seeing a therapist, and had been for two years.

  The reception hall was beginning to fill up—men in tuxedos, women in long dresses. Two hundred guests were expected, for this the annual Writers’ Benefit Dinner. Many stars of stage, screen, politics and literature were expected: a few would no doubt turn up. This was the first big event that Eleanor had organised for the Writers’ Guild. Bob worried for her. It was important that nothing went wrong. He feared it would. Should the marble fireplace be empty? Shouldn’t a fire be blazing there? And Eleanor had no doubt provided her Julie with a free ticket, otherwise why should she be there, and someone was bound to object. Didn’t he, Bob, pay out enough for her? Her fees had doubled in two years; they were now two hundred dollars an hour. It was outrageous. Eleanor herself seemed much the same as usual, except that she had dieted down and could now wear his first wife Lily’s clothes. But perhaps Eleanor would have done this anyway in the course of untherapied time. How could you ever know?

  But Bob was in a bad mood: he knew he was being unreasonable: his black bow tie dictated a certain shirt, and the collar was uncomfortable. The tie was the old-fashioned kind, which fastened not with a Velcro strip but with a proper ribbon. Lily had made him buy it, years and years ago when she was only twenty-three, but already ambitious socially, longing to count for something in the world of parties and charity events. He knew at the time the tie would turn out to be an enduring penance. And now here was Eleanor, Lily’s daughter, so like her mother it disturbed Bob to see her, wearing on her not quite lovely, slightly podgy, pale face just the same expression of discontent and disappointment that Lily wore. Only on Eleanor the look was not quite yet set: it flickered in and out and round a kind of charming eagerness, a vulnerability which Bob had always loved in her.

  Her father supposed that herein lay the progress of the generations: the mother longed to go to the Ball, the daughter hosted the Ball, albeit in an official capacity.

  Eleanor was wearing layers of what looked to Bob to be black underwear lace: Bob had given her two thousand dollars to spend on an outfit for this special occasion. He had done this on the instructions of Sorrel, his second and true wife. Eleanor’s salary at the Guild, said Sorrel, would hardly run to anything suitable.

  “Don’t be shy, Daddy. You have to meet her,” said Eleanor, and she dragged her father across the room past palely tall flower arrangements in elongated, fluted Grecian urns as once, as a child, she had dragged Bob to meet new friends, new toys, new pet animals, living or dead. Share my experience, Daddy.

  Julie raised pale, hooded, slightly protuberant eyes to Bob’s. She was younger than he had thought, perhaps in her late thirties. She was colourless. She kept her face neutral, impassive. She seldom blinked. She thinks she’s looking wise, thought Bob, but actually she makes herself look merely dull. “This is Daddy,” said Eleanor.

  “Don’t say it,” said Bob lightly. “You’ve heard so much about me!” Julie didn’t smile, but merely nodded.

  Then Eleanor was summoned and left them together, father and therapist, while the daughter welcomed, organised, panicked and chivvied guests into a reception line which kept breaking as ceremony collapsed into the pleasures of old friends, newly met; fresh friends, instantly made.

  The silence between Bob and the therapist became awkward. He raised his glass to her, pleasantly. She made no effort: just stood and waited. She was drinking water. “So you’re the Pardoner,” Bob said.

&nb
sp; “Excuse me?” Her voice was soft and slow. “The Pardoner,” he said. “The one who forgives sins in exchange for money. The Pardoner of the Medieval Church: very fashionable for a time, until the abuses were such the Church backed off and cleaned up its act.” Julie looked puzzled.

  “The Pardoner,” said Bob, “was empowered by the Pope to accept money for the remission of sins. Since Jesus had died on the cross for us, the reasoning went, the eventual heaven of perfect content was assured. In the meantime, the more money you handed over, the sooner you’d get out of Purgatory and into Heaven. Purgatory was the kind of cleansing station you had to go to after death.”

  “I don’t see the connection,” she said. “What are you trying to say to me?”

  Bob could see the imprudence of trying to press his point. He did not want the woman as an enemy. Eleanor trusted her, for some reason, with life, thought, soul. He looked around for Sorrel, his ally in this new world, but he could not see her. She was still in the powder room, no doubt.

  “We both have Eleanor’s interests at heart,” said the Pardoner.

  Bob had a powerful memory of Eleanor’s little face frowning over the edge of her cot, when she was too young for speech, first helplessly pointing at a doll she’d dropped on the floor, then dancing up and down with rage: furious at her father for picking the toy up, handing it over, outraged at her own dependence: out of control, in a tantrum, biting his helpful, paternal hand: tiny, sharp little teeth. Could you cure a nature born to be what it was? Should you try?

  The Popes of the New Age, intermediaries between God and man, be they Freud, Jung, Janov, the Bagwhan, Eric Berne or whatever, empowered their minions to try, enabled them to make a fine living offering confession, remission of suffering, paths out of purgatory into heaven. The more the sinner paid, was the promise, the more sessions they suffered, the nearer heaven would come. The gullible, as ever, believed that heaven was possible, happiness theirs by right, and paid up. They saw the human condition as perfectible; it was obvious to Bob that it was not.