Other Women

by Lisa Alther

  Hannah had to stop herself from calling, “Bravo!” Caroline thought she was locking horns with Hannah. But she knew almost nothing about Hannah. She was actually doing battle with the part of herself that longed for Brian Stone’s dubious protection.

  “My hour’s up.” Caroline stood up abruptly and slapped a check on Hannah’s desk. As she stalked to the door, she realized it was all over. She’d just added Hannah’s corpse to the pile. Never again would she sit in this cluttered office and study those sharp blue eyes for clues on how to live in such a vile world. She felt a raging mix of pain, loss, nausea—and relief.

  “See you next week,” said Hannah.

  Caroline did a double take. Hannah stifled a smile. There was hostility in the pleasure she took in thwarting clients’ expectations. It allowed her not to retaliate in other ways. Besides, every job needed fringe benefits. She wrote out an appointment card and handed it to a stunned Caroline, who glanced at it and shoved it wordlessly into her jeans pocket.

  Hannah lit a cigarette and exhaled with a deep sigh of relief to have Caroline gone. Leaning back in her chair, she used her skills from her drugstore perusal of mystery novels to try to predict what Caroline would do next. Chip continued a similar dispute for several tedious sessions. Other clients were too embarrassed after such scenes to come back for a while. But Caroline’s presenting symptom was depression. She responded to her parents at Christmas with depression. Probably she’d plunge into depression. Try to become acceptable to Mummy again by erasing all those nasty emotions, by hanging still and silent in the jump seat. And then what? She might try to kill herself. She said she had once before. The hostility had to go somewhere. She’d be appalled at having turned it on Mummy. She’d turn it on herself. But maybe Caroline trusted her enough by now to ask for reassurance?

  Hannah flicked her cigarette ash into Nigel’s stone and took another drag. Speaking of suicide, she was killing herself with these damn things. When would she summon enough strength of character to give them up?

  She wondered if she’d be able to withstand this junk with Caroline if people hadn’t done the same for her. With great dignity her grandmother endured Hannah’s endless ways of expressing fury toward her parents for deserting her. Hannah roved the narrow winding streets of Hampstead doing her best to wreak havoc. And Arthur endured her fury toward the universe over Mona’s and Nigel’s deaths. For years afterwards she raged at him—over his choice of furnaces, his being away that night, his failure to get home in time to save the antiques. But mostly she raged about how he mowed the lawn, or the fact that she always put new rolls of toilet paper on the bathroom holder. Arthur somehow managed never to descend to Hannah’s level of rancor. Sometimes he walked away. Other times he inquired coolly, “Are you finished yet?” A few times he pinned her arms to her sides to prevent her clobbering him. Eventually he suggested she find something useful to do for someone else in trouble, rather than sitting around a messy darkened house all day feeling sorry for herself. Which she did, returning to school for her degrees.

  During which she met Maggie, who sat in her wing chair on the wine and blue Oriental carpet by the potted bay tree poking and prodding at Hannah’s infected wounds until they broke open again and bled some more. Maggie eventually convinced her to get out photos of all four children and give them to a portrait painter in town. She left the four finished portraits in the trunk of her car without even unwrapping them for several months. When Maggie finally persuaded her to hang them on the wall in her bedroom, she wept and threw the hammer across the room and beat her head against the wall. Then she gathered up the wrapping paper and burned it in the Franklin stove, fixed a martini, and discussed with Arthur when he got home what good likenesses the portraits were.

  And now here she herself sat, drawing on cigarettes and absorbing from unhappy people like Caroline exactly what she dished out to her grandmother, Arthur, and Maggie. It was probably the only way to repay that kind of debt.

  In the next office Mary Beth yelled, “Goddam it to hell, Nathan, just pull yourself together or get out!”

  Hannah felt a flicker of alarm. Outside her office Mary Beth was so sedate, pinched almost, in her high-necked ruffled blouses. Hannah never shouted at clients, as much as she might want to. They shouted at her. But Mary Beth was fresh out of graduate school. Maybe it was a new technique—Confrontation Therapy or something.

  Hannah remembered her first outburst at Maggie, over Maggie’s announcement that she was taking a vacation. Hannah amputated her adoration for the woman in an instant, slamming shut the dungeon door of her heart. She told Maggie she was finished with therapy anyway and wouldn’t be needing any more appointments. Maggie smiled sourly, put on her glasses, and said, “My dear Hannah, I’m afraid you’ve scarcely begun.”

  “I’ve done all I’m doing.”

  By the end of that session Hannah had sobbed, shouted, begged Maggie not to go—and begun to gain some clues about her own agony over desertion by loved ones.

  Hannah gathered together some books and papers, put on her Berber cape, and left her office. The fiery sun was setting over the lake, the thick blanket of new snow blood red. Big deal. In a few minutes it would all be pitch dark. Goddam fly-by-night sunsets. Tucked under the windshield wiper of her Mercury like a parking ticket was a folded note that read, “Hannah, please meet me for a drink at Dooley’s after work. I’ll wait there for you until it closes. I have to talk to you about our relationship. Love, Harold (Mortimer). P.S. I like your new car.” Clenching the muscles in her jaw, Hannah wadded the note into a ball and thrust it into the litter bag on the floor of the car. Relationship? What relationship?

  After a supper of Chicken Kiev a la Arthur, Hannah and he sat on the leather couch with coffee and cognac watching the news, an ordeal Hannah put herself through only a couple of times a week. Walter Cronkite was reporting that some Argentine peasants had kidnapped a thirteen-year-old girl, gang-raped her, cut her open, and sewn a human head inside her. Setting her coffee on the coffee table next to a stack of dog-eared gothic romances, Hannah covered her eyes with one hand and felt her stomach churn. Was Caroline right? Was she a Pollyanna who refused to face the horrors?

  With distaste she glanced at Arthur, who sat frowning at the TV. It must be embarrassing to be a man, she decided. All the ghastly deeds your sex performed. Whenever an atrocity was announced on the evening news, Maggie used to close her eyes and murmur, “Pray God he’s not a Jew.” But men rarely had the luxury of discovering the perpetrator of some horror wasn’t a man. Ninety percent of violent crimes are committed by men….

  A commercial for Silhouette Romances came on, featuring a dark attractive man carrying a woman in a skimpy bathing suit out of ocean waves and into a thatched cabana. Hannah glanced at the stack of romances on the table beside her coffee cup. The cover on top featured a woman in a clinging gown on the deck of a burning ship. Her soldier rescuer in plumes and gold braid parried the sword thrust of a pirate in an eyepatch, bandanna, and gold hoop earring. It was obscene, she realized. Brainwashing women into viewing their rapists and murderers as protectors. You try getting through life without a man to protect you from the violence of other men. She jumped up, grabbed the books, and threw them into the fire. The flames nibbled greedily at the pages.

  “What are you doing?” asked Arthur.

  Whirling around, she glared at him as he sipped his cognac. “Darling,” she said acidly, “would you please explain to me why rape is a man’s idea of a good time?”

  He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. “Maybe we need to feel in command in order to entrust our precious organs to dangerous places like vaginas.”

  “Lovely,” she snapped, plopping down on the couch. “You only run the damn world. What more do you want?” An earnest young man on TV was explaining why he would never use anything but Preparation H on his hemorrhoids. Hannah tried to remind herself Arthur hadn’t raped anyone. As far as she knew. Being with a man you had built-in distance. They we
re a different species. What would life be like with another woman, a replica of yourself? For a moment she envied Caroline the chance to find out.

  She glanced at Arthur, somber in the lamplight. “The nice thing about war is that it keeps you men off the streets.”

  Arthur smiled grimly and sipped his coffee. “What can I say, Hannah? I’m afraid most men are morally retarded.”

  Hannah nodded. “I’m afraid you’re right.” Resolutely she erased the image of the mutilated girl from her mind. If those morons undermined the efficiency of the well-meaning people who heard about them, they’d won. Learn to behave from those who cannot, her grandmother used to intone in the drawing room overlooking the Heath, hands folded beneath her enormous corseted bosom.

  Hannah took a sip of cognac, and swirled it around her mouth like Lavoris, feeling the vapors fumigate her sinuses. Studying the snifter with the dark golden liquid in the bottom, she tried to decide if she drank too much. She certainly relished the feeling of oblivion alcohol induced each evening. It cauterized her nerve endings, frayed from a day of listening to such atrocities, and to the despair they engendered.

  What about her own despair? It didn’t seem to be around much anymore. And when it was, it broke camp pretty quickly, as it had just done. The older she got, the less anything could upset her for very long. Maybe the only real cure for her clients was the aging process. But that could take years.

  • 6 •

  “I’ve just done something awful,” Caroline told Diana as they sat on Diana’s couch drinking wine and listening to Jackie and Jason play the Incredible Hulk downstairs. Heroes were spinning their autos across the melting snow on Lake Glass in the crimson light of late afternoon. Diana was knitting an Icelandic sweater for Suzanne. “Are you going to make her matching booties?” Caroline asked when Diana first began. Today was the first time they’d spoken since Diana told her to leave. Caroline felt numb.

  “What, for God’s sake?”

  “I just told off Hannah.” Caroline’s muscles were so tight she could scarcely move her shoulders.

  “What about?”

  “Who knows? She started talking about joy, and I let her have it.”

  Diana smiled. “Not your favorite word. What did she say?”

  “See you next week.”

  “So maybe you weren’t as obnoxious as you think.” She was counting stitches.

  “I’m pretty sure I was. She’s been so kind to me. I can’t believe it. I marched in there and wrecked everything.”

  “Well, apparently she’s willing to drop it. So why don’t you?”

  “I wish I’d been struck mute when I walked in her door today.”

  “Don’t be so melodramatic,” said Diana, getting up and walking to her kitchen counter. “She’s your shrink. She’s used to clients acting out. That’s what you’re paying her for. Call her. She’ll congratulate you.

  “You don’t understand.” Caroline tossed down half her wine in one swallow. Diana sounded amused. Probably she was pleased.

  “Maybe not,” said Diana, tossing the chef salad she’d invited Caroline to share, a gustatory peace pipe.

  Caroline decided next week she’d be calm and pleasant. She’d apologize. She’d say she’d thought about a diamond on black velvet and decided Hannah was right. She began shivering and wrapped her arms across her flannel shirt. What if, in the meantime, Hannah became fed up? Nobody had to put up with that kind of behavior from another person. What if Hannah called to cancel their appointment? She took the appointment card from her jeans pocket and studied it.

  “God, you look awful,” said Diana as they sat down at her maple butcher block dining table. “Your lips are blue. They match your eyes.”

  “I’m not hungry.” Her stomach was churning like a washing machine.

  “You have to eat.”

  Caroline didn’t reply.

  “Look, call her up. She’ll tell you it’s okay.”

  “But it isn’t okay. The things I said. I was horrible.”

  “So what? We all are now and then.” Diana studied her, fork in midair.

  “I’m going to bed.” Caroline got up and walked to the stairs.

  “Is there anything I can do? Do you want a back rub?”

  “No, thanks.” Not unless you’d like to pump me full of BBs and bury me in a snowbank, thought Caroline.

  “Look, I don’t really want you to move out, Caroline,” Diana called. “I’m sorry I said that. We’ll figure this out.”

  Caroline turned and looked at her. “Thanks. That helps.”

  She phoned Brian and told him she couldn’t go out with him because she was sick.

  “You do sound awful. But I’m a doctor. I could make a house call.”

  “I’m too repulsive right now, Brian.”

  “I’m used to sick people.”

  “I need to be alone.” What was this? One lousy screw and now he owned her?

  He said nothing for a moment, then replied, “All right, I’ll phone you tomorrow. Feel better.”

  “Thanks.”

  Telling the boys she was going to the grocery store, Caroline got in her car and drove up the lakeshore, skirting town, listening to David Brinkley on the radio discussing the Chinese invasion of Vietnam. Her hands on the steering wheel trembled, and her teeth chattered. Her stomach ground like a car that wouldn’t start. Each time she tried to calm herself by picturing Hannah’s smiling face, her agitation increased. She merely felt the full enormity of her loss.

  Well up the lake, she stopped at a Getty station and asked directions to Hannah’s house. After several turns down icy dirt roads, she found it. Not the fantasized ranch house at all, but rather a large renovated Victorian summer house, with light streaming out a front greenhouse window onto a wall of snow piled up in the yard over winter by the south wind. Two cars sat in the driveway under a hoop-less basketball goal.

  Caroline parked behind a bare lilac bush and studied the patch of yellow light on the snow. Could she knock at the door and apologize? Maybe just peep through that window to be sure Hannah was in there? But she’d leave footprints in the snow.

  A shadow moved across the patch of light. Someone was walking around inside. What if Hannah looked out and saw her here, huddled in her Subaru? Lucky there were no neighbors to phone the police. What if Hannah had a dog that was barking?

  Suddenly Caroline saw herself from a distance: an overwrought woman with a messy Afro and no coat, gazing at Hannah’s window with crazed longing. This was insane. Hannah had a home, a husband, children, friends, work. A full complete life that didn’t include Caroline. Caroline was nothing to her. A client who ranted at her when she should be thanking her. You’re nothing but a suburban sellout] Caroline cringed. Hannah wanted nothing to do with her after hours. And probably not even during hours now.

  She should get out of the car, sneak over to Hannah’s Mercury, find some memento….

  With a start she realized she’d been here before—stealing yellow Kleenex from Arlene’s VW, eyes fixed on her office window, feeling just as alone and afraid as she did now. What did this mean? Bemused, she continued to sit in the cold car, the frozen lake stretching out silent beside her.

  The patch of light on the snow vanished, and another appeared upstairs. Hannah was getting into bed with her husband. When the upstairs light disappeared, Caroline drove home, imagining Hannah holding her white-haired husband in her arms as Caroline had wanted Hannah to hold her. Not only would Hannah never hold her, she’d probably never even speak to her again.

  The next morning, having lain awake all night shivering spasmodically despite her electric blanket, Caroline sat in the plaid armchair staring at her phone. At Christmas Hannah gave her her home number and said to call any time. But probably that was just for the trip to Boston. But if she called, Hannah would have to talk to her. Or maybe she’d tell her to go to hell and hang up. But Caroline was already in hell. Her flesh burned as though she were rotating on a spit.

  Ja
ckie came in, dressed in a forest-green sweat suit and cradling his gun, which he was polishing with a cloth. “Hey Mom, what’re you doing?”

  “Uh, waiting for a phone call.”

  “Can I please have some breakfast?”

  Mechanically she cooked, then folded laundry, wondering why she was bothering. Life was pointless. What difference did clean clothes make?

  The phone rang. Caroline dashed to it. Maybe it was Hannah saying everything was okay. What if it was Hannah telling her to piss off? She sat down and studied the ringing phone. Jackie raced out and grabbed it, looking at her oddly.

  “It’s for you, Mom.” He handed her the receiver. She held it at a distance, examining it as though it were pinchers used in the Spanish Inquisition. Jackie screwed up his face and tossed his dark hair out of his eyes. “So answer it, Mom.”

  It was Diana, calling from upstairs to invite her out to ski. Looking out the window, Caroline discovered a brilliantly sunny day was in progress. “Uh, I can’t. Thanks very much, Diana, but I’m tied up.”

  “How’re you feeling?”

  “Fine, thanks.” Then she added, “Not too great actually.”

  “You don’t sound so great. Take it from me: Call the lady. Unless you enjoy feeling bad.”

  Caroline changed the sheets and dusted in a state of terror. She must have been out of her mind. She reminded herself that Hannah gave her an appointment for next week. But probably she’d use it to explain why the relationship was over. Fuck it, if it was finished, it was finished. Why wait around in agony until next week? Why couldn’t Hannah level with her?

  She picked up the receiver and dialed the first half of Hannah’s number. She hung up. If she gave Hannah time to calm down, maybe she’d reconsider the need to end it. Especially if Caroline apologized at the beginning of the appointment. Maybe there was something she could take to say she was sorry. The new sunset shawl? But the bread was a flop. She wasn’t supposed to take Hannah presents.