Wicked Women

by Fay Weldon

  As if little Eleanor, scowling over the edge of her cot, biting the hand that fed her, only sporadically endearing, loveable only in spite of herself, would ever be capable of living in, let alone creating, heaven! Poor Eleanor. When Lily left Bob, walked out on him with her lover, Eleanor had been only five, and Bob’s anxiety had been all for her, not for her little sister Kate, aged only two, or her even littler brother Edmond. Not his baby, this last one, he was sure of it, though he was still seeing the boy through college.

  “My heart always went out to Eleanor,” Bob thought, clarifying the notion in his head, but he did not say it aloud. Perhaps he’d given his daughter too much of it? Sometimes his heart beat strangely. He could feel it pounding now. He smiled at the therapist. Still she did not smile back. “Don’t we?” she persisted.

  “Of course,” Bob said, as lightly as he could for the hammering of his heart. “And I do hope you’ll forgive my bow tie. Pardon it, like the Pardoner you are. It’s hopelessly out of fashion; nearly thirty years old, like Eleanor. Not a Velcro tie, mind you: I have that to say for myself, at least I don’t wear a Velcro tie; I offer my neck for strangling.”

  The Pardoner looked puzzled. Such an expression seemed to sit naturally on her face. She’d look puzzled: her interlocutor would offer further explanation. Bob felt himself fall into the trap.

  “Isn’t that the function of the tie?” he asked. “To announce to the world that the soul had been satisfactorily separated from the body? Look at me, says the tie, look at me, you guys, I’m in command of my animal urges! No need, ladies, to worry in case I rape or attack. These two ends are my peace offering. If I step out of line, all you have to do is seize the ends and strangle me.”

  The Pardoner studied him curiously, seriously. Was there no making this woman laugh? How did Eleanor stand it? Did he pay thousands of dollars a month for this? His heart was beating regularly now. He relaxed.

  “I always feel uneasy at formal gatherings,” Bob confessed, and Miss Julie liked that and she smiled, just a little. An Hispanic waitress with sores around her mouth offered Bob more wine from a silver tray. Something had gone wrong. Was this Eleanor’s responsibility? Perhaps his daughter had no idea of how not to employ a servant with sores around her mouth? It was perfectly possible that she still hadn’t learned that life was tough, and that you couldn’t stay a warm, kind person without damaging your own interests. Perhaps that was the Pardoner’s role—to preserve Eleanor’s good opinion of herself.

  Over at the reception line photographers became overintrusive; Eleanor drifted away, leaving the problem to others. The Pardoner excused herself and turned her back.

  Bob looked round for someone to talk to, and found no one. Some of the older, grander publishers had turned up: he recognised a few faces from the old literary days; but mostly the guests were new young blood, who’d come along to pay their dues to culture, much good might it do them. And of course no one wanted to talk to Bob. The coast-to-coast chain of record shops he owned, which brought him a satisfactory enough income, scarcely edged his status with the glamour others liked to brush up against on such occasions. Lily had always longed for glamour: Bob had failed to provide it. Lily had hoped for column inches, not just income, when she married him, but had failed to tell him so.

  Wasn’t that Ivana Trump over there? Certainly it was. Arthur Miller? Even the Pardoner was gawping. The waitress with the pustules moved amongst them. Amazing! Bob was glad, when it came to it, that Eleanor had failed in ruthlessness. She might get married yet. At the thought, Bob could almost feel the sharp baby teeth digging into his hand. Eleanor’s sister Kate had never bitten: not because she was any nicer but because she’d always been too wary, too hard, too proud ever to lose control. Kate had been born more conventionally pretty than Eleanor: blonde curls, blue eyes, hard-hearted; forever dimpling and charming, though seldom meaning it. She’d put Eleanor out of countenance and enjoyed it. He imagined that Kate made a self-righteous mother, rather than a warm one. Kate had taken her mother Lily to extremes, and done it all, Bob sometimes thought, just to annoy Eleanor: messy, uncertain Eleanor, Daddy’s little girl who sometimes tried to be what Bob wanted, and sometimes the opposite, and got it all wrong anyway.

  But how, in God’s name, was this Julie, this rather drab and cowlike creature, so censorious, so unopen to any ideas but her own and those of whichever Pope of whatever God had given her permission to practice—how was this creature to pardon Eleanor, to understand more than a flickering of what went on in Eleanor’s head? Since this Miss Julie would only have Eleanor’s account of it, in any case, in Eleanor’s rather limited vocabulary, Miss Julie would be on Eleanor’s side, never Kate’s, never Lily’s, never Bob’s, let alone poor Sorrel’s, the wicked stepmother. Eleanor would have it easy, would never learn to be self-critical, would always stay a victim.

  And if in two years, twice a week, Eleanor was still not “cured” of insomnia, or anxiety, or bulimia, or whatever symptom of neurosis had originally afflicted her, what could the Pardoner offer her client next, by way of analysis and cure?

  Bob felt the Pardoner’s suspicious eyes still following him. Supposing she had taken offence? He wished the conversation had not taken place. He had been hopelessly imprudent. The woman was dangerous: she had entered his life unasked, and now had unreasonable power in it, through the daughter he loved.

  At last he caught sight of Sorrel, in her familiar deep blue velvet dress. He hurried over to her. She stroked his tuxedoed arm to soothe him. She knew the pattern of his agitations. “What’s the matter?”

  “I so hate this kind of event,” Bob said. “We’re in uniform. I’m always suspicious of crowds of men in uniform. They’re sinister, always in the act of justifying the unjustifiable. They smack of cabal. At least my bow tie is out of fashion. That’s some comfort.”

  “You look very handsome,” said Sorrel, and it was true. Bob had caught sight of himself, framed in a brass column as he’d entered the hall, and been almost pleased with what he saw. Still broad-shouldered, patrician-nosed, clean-chinned, a good figure of a man, in upright and energetic condition: just never good enough for Lily—“Such a fool Lily was,” Sorrel said, “to let you go. But I’m glad she did, because then I got you.” Sorrel always knew when he was thinking about Lily. Knowing he loved her, she felt safe in balancing his pain with the announcement of her pleasure. The second wife understood how he still suffered from the divorce of the first, though the event was now more than twenty years behind them. He had never quite recovered from the insult, not just the loss of a wife he loved, in spite of himself, but from Lily’s behaviour afterwards.

  All the things that Lily had done, she’d blamed Bob for—from infidelity to desertion—and though she had to flick the whole world quite upside down to do it, she had for a time managed to persuade the children of their father’s overwhelming depravity: his meanness, his lasciviousness, his callousness with others’ feelings, and the rest of it. The more lavishly he had supported Lily, the more she took his generosity as evidence of his guilt. Lily had remarried: a plastic surgeon. She seemed happier now; she had the column inches she felt she’d always deserved, the woman at the party for whom the flashes pop, if only by double-proxy. Wife of surgeon-to-the-stars.

  Eleanor came across to kiss Sorrel on the cheek. A Judas kiss; the thought came to Bob and made him uneasy. “You should keep your husband in order,” Eleanor said to her stepmother, and he remembered the little spiteful pre-tantrum eyes she’d had as a child. “He’s really upset Julie.”

  “Who’s Julie?” asked Sorrel, mildly. She always spoke mildly, kindly to Eleanor, avoiding danger. “And why should your father have upset her?” The familiar joke. Who’s at fault? Your husband. No, your father!

  “Julie’s my therapist,” said Eleanor. “And Daddy was being really aggressive towards her! Julie didn’t want me to ask you two here tonight. I ought to be more independent, Julie says, more like Kate. And it’s such a wonderful thing we’
re doing here tonight, and here you are trying to spoil it. I know it was stupid of me to think you and she would get along, Daddy, but you could at least have made the effort. You know how I blame myself for the separation, how difficult it is for me, how painful.”

  “Sweetheart,” said Bob, “shouldn’t you be paying attention to the function, not worrying about this kind of thing? We’ve been standing around too long. Shouldn’t we all be going in to dinner?”

  “If I’m in such a mess,” said Eleanor, “it’s because you find fault all the time. And now you start on poor Julie!” Eleanor’s cheeks were pink; she would flush so like this before she bit. Did children never give up?

  “Eleanor,” said Bob, “if you don’t stop this at once, I’m not paying for any more therapy. It’s not doing you any good.”

  “Bob,” said Sorrel, warningly, “let’s give ourselves time to think about this.”

  “That’s definite, Ellie,” said Bob. “You want therapy, you pay for it yourself from now on. This evening has cost me twelve thousand dollars to date, just so a bunch of chicken-shit writers can sit down to eat with a bunch of A-list performers, who’d rather, like me, be home watching TV, and all you can do is insult me for it. You could have bought that outfit for five dollars in a thrift shop and turned out looking more decent, and saved enough for three months of Miss Julie.”

  Eleanor’s face crumpled and fell. There were tears glistening in her eyes.

  “You’re such a mercenary bastard,” she said. “I don’t know why I bother trying to please you.”

  And then Eleanor had gone, on her heel; over to where the Pardoner stood, gently tapping her foot, smiling vaguely. Bob wondered for a moment whether Eleanor and Julie had some kind of sexual liaison but dismissed the thought. Guests started to drift in to dinner without benefit of announcement.

  Sorrel kept hold of Bob’s hand, calming him down. His heart had started struggling again. By the time they reached the table, ornate with white napkins in flutes and folds, Bob’s equanimity had returned. I told her, he thought to himself. I finally told her! He thought if he looked at his hand he’d see the two little red marks left by baby teeth, so he didn’t look.

  Sorrel sat next to Bob, leaning into him so far as decorousness would allow.

  “I love your tie,” Sorrel murmured, “it’s the lean, sleek part of you. I don’t care if you did buy it with Lily. I don’t care if it’s old-fashioned. It’s part of you as your children are: I accept them.” Thus she spoke her familiar litany and Bob smiled and felt better.

  But the sense of something ominous in the air remained. Eleanor was sitting a table or so away, next to the Pardoner; she had her back to him; he could not see the expression on her face and was glad he could not.

  Bob had asked as his guests old Eisenstein and his wife: and Lara the ex-opera singer and her music-producer husband Pierre, who’d just sold eight million rock reissues, quite an achievement, the music business being in the state it was. Lara seemed to be doing her best to disconcert the old dog Eisenstein, to make the ancient frog eyes of Mrs. Eisenstein blink. The pair of them had their heyday back in the fifties: Eisenstein the pianist, Sara Eisenstein the composer, into New York out of the Holocaust. They’d been to see Schindler’s List and liked it. It had brought memories back. Any memory would do, it seemed, so long as it was of youth.

  Tonight old Eisenstein was wearing one of the new bow ties; floppy, large, lush, the black gold-threaded through. The fabric cut off a weary head from a withered body, but the aplomb remained. Lara was speaking in her loud throaty voice about a current law case, a famous father, a rock star, accused of ritual child abuse: the equally famous model wife, now suing for alimony, his accuser: the child’s remembrance of events, ten years back, the stuff of fantasy and horror films; multiple rape, sexual torture, bondage, snakes, toads, flies, all the nasty things of the outside world internalised, introduced into the body.

  “The child has sexual fantasies but understands nothing,” Lara said, in a voice which could be heard on at least four other tables. “The child is hopelessly vague about orifices, objects of penetration, has heard cries in the night suggesting pain, knows something exciting is going on but not what, is furiously jealous anyway, angry at being left out: works out what she can, inadvertently brings herself to orgasm. What pleasure, what horror! How can I be so disgusting, thinks the girl child! Did these visions really come from out of my head? I don’t believe it! Along comes the therapist in later years: quite right. ‘Sweetheart,’ she says, ‘you didn’t invent those nasty things, you’re much too nice, much too sweet. They were real. Daddy did them.’ And thus everything is explained and the childhood guilt absolved. The world returns to its natural order. If the universe is to be good, the father must be bad.”

  Sorrel was staring at Lara, upset. Orgasm was still not part of dinner talk, not in her book. “No smoke without fire,” said Sorrel.

  Oh, Sorrel, Sorrel. You, too? Bob begins to see the future. His heart starts to beat its promise-of-death tattoo. Pietre says, “Lara’s right. There always has to be a scapegoat, so God can be understood as good. Once we had witches, but now women are the ones who condemn, so it’s the fathers’ turn.”

  “Once it was us,” old Eisenstein says. He has chicken soup on his bow tie. His chin has shrunk so the fabric collects the drips, not the flesh. “The finger of blame moves on, thank God.” The table falls silent.

  After dinner, it was much as Bob expected. Julie came up to him, followed by Eleanor. Eleanor was crying.

  “Now see what you’ve done,” said the Pardoner.”

  “I’ve lost my job,” Eleanor wept. “You upset me so much, Daddy, I didn’t know how to handle it. I was only on trial here, you know. It was a temporary post. They said I had no eye for detail, and I tried so hard.”

  “Face your father,” said Julie the Pardoner to Bob’s daughter. “Tell him. Face the past, face yourself, finally face what happened to you. It’s going to cost us all a lot of pain and money, Bob, if we’re going to help Eleanor. I need a cheque for five hundred thousand dollars, and I need it here and now: it’s essential that your daughter, still in her heart that poor bullied and abused little girl of long ago, witnesses this act of contrition and apology from you. The money will go to the best cause of all: what Eleanor’s treatment will cost, if she is ever to recover from the trauma.”

  “Trauma?” asked Bob. “What trauma?”

  “We worked so hard, Eleanor and I,” said the Pardoner. “You’ve no idea how painful it is, achieving flashback memory. Your daughter ran a fever, she had pains in her joints. But she did it! And this evening, finally, it all made sense. All the memories are there, available.”

  “Came to her between soup and fish, I expect,” said Bob. “The soup was cold, the fish was sour.”

  The Pardoner stared at him, at last showing signs of emotion. “You fathers are unbelievable,” she said. “Still so callous! The night-time visits, the foul intruding member, the threats, the bribes, the terror! And then your wife Lily became aware of what was going on,” said the Pardoner. “Lily left you in order to rescue her little girl. Of course your wife hated you: you were hateful. An abusing father.”

  “This way everything is explained, Daddy,” said Eleanor, piteously. “Please understand. Everything is explained.”

  So Bob took out his cheque book and signed a cheque for five hundred thousand dollars on the spot and Sorrel came hurrying up and said, “What is going on here?”

  Bob said, “I am just paying for the remission of uncommitted sins, so that I can go to heaven,” at which Sorrel hit the Pardoner and Eleanor actually spat at Sorrel.

  Bob took off his bow tie, elaborately untying the long silk ends, feeling the ache in his shoulders, still broad, still strong in spite of it all, and said, “This thing is strangling me.”

  HEAT HAZE

  I AM COMING TO see you, Miss Jacobs, because my father fears I am anorexic. I know I am not. I am simply a dancer, so the l
ess weight I carry the better, the less strain on muscles and joints. I am not self-destructive: I mean to live a long time and in good health. But I love my father very much, and if it relieves any anxiety he may have, I am happy to go through the motions of seeing a psychoanalyst, even in relation to eating problems I do not have.

  Yes, I know you are not the analyst I will eventually see: that you act as a kind of clearing house for your co-professionals. It is your function to recommend me to someone you believe will be sympathetic, someone who will like me and whom I like. Though I am not convinced that in this field “liking” is essential: some kind of intellectual rapport, yes. “Liking” just somehow sounds kind of sloppy. But do what you see fit.

  Yes, I am eighteen. Yes, people do say I am mature for my age, and composed. Dancing is discipline; and to discipline the body is, albeit inadvertently, to discipline the mind. And since my mother died when I was thirteen I have been very much in charge of my own life, and made my own decisions in most things, and on the whole have done it well.

  No, I have no boyfriend in the sense you mean, though I have suitors enough. Yes, I am satisfied with my appearance: ballet-dancerish; large-eyed, long-necked, long-backed, long-legged, a trifle boyish I suppose. If you stretch enough you don’t get lumpy or over-muscled. A translucent look, true—but that comes from having a naturally pale skin, not I think from any nutritional deficiency. In this I resemble my mother. She died in a car accident, not from illness. I do not, you must understand, suffer from the self-doubt, the obsessional fears and the suicidal impulses which characterise the anorexic. But try telling that to my father.

  Do I sleep well? It’s strange you should ask me that. Actually, I don’t. I used to, like a log, but since last summer I’ve tended to wake suddenly, and very early, and not be able to get back to sleep at all. I hate it. It makes me feel I am not properly in charge of my own self-improvement. Lack of sleep is bad for concentration, what is bad for concentration is bad for dancing.