by Joy Fielding
Jill nodded. "They want me."
"Well, that's great. Why the long face?"
Jill reached for her glass of water while the attentive waiter removed their salad plates and replaced them with the main course. She stared at her plate of ginger chicken on a bed of green noodles and immediately lifted her fork, absently twirling the green noodles, cooked, she knew, to al dente perfection, around and around the sterling silver utensil. "I love this restaurant," she said. "Remember when we used to come here a lot?"
"I remember. Did you forget my question?"
"No," she said, "I’m just not sure I want to answer it.”
“What is it that they want you to do on this show, Jill? Work nights?"
''No," she answered quickly, wishing she could have said yes.
“You want to write it down on the napkin and slip it to me under the table?'' he asked boyishly.
She laughed, her fork now fat with pasta. "I don't know how to say this except to just say it," she said. "I've made too much of it already. I'm sure you won't have any objections. I'm just being silly."
"Jill—" he said, with growing exasperation.
"The episode that they want me to produce is about wife-beating." Immediately, she saw his eyes narrow. "To be more specific, they're interested in not just the general phenomenon, but in Beth Weatherby. They feel her desire to plead self-defense opens up a lot of interesting legal possibilities that might make for an equally interesting television show."
"I bet they do," David scoffed. "And they just happened to pick you."
"No, they picked me quite deliberately. Irving made that very clear."
"Well, what did he say when you told him no?"
Jill laid down her fork but continued to stare at it. "I didn't tell him no," she said. "I told him I'd think about it."
"What is there to think about?" he demanded.
"It's not so simple, David. This might be the last chance I get."
"Baloney! There's always another chance. You know that as well as I do."
"What would be so wrong in my doing it?"
"Everything!" he almost shouted, surprising Jill by the vehemence in his voice. "You'd use your friendship with Beth; you'd use Al’s memory; you'd use me, for God's sake."
"How would I be using you?"
"If it weren't for me, you'd never have even met Al Weatherby!"
"You forget," Jill reminded him, "that I met Al Weatherby the same way I met you. Doing my job!"
"And that's all that's important to you, isn't it?" he said, angrily. "Not me, not Beth, not Al. It doesn't matter who you hurt!"
"Who says I'd be hurting anybody?"
"Jill, for Christ's sake, you're not a child. You know that someone's going to be hurt if you do this story. Why else would you need time to think about it?"
"Because I felt I should discuss it first with you and with Beth."
"Well, you have my reaction. I think it stinks! I think that anything that lends any credence to Beth's disgusting allegations is a disgrace and I would object very strenuously to my wife having anything to do with it. And as for Beth, how do you think she'd feel knowing you'd exploit her friendship to get yourself back into television?"
"I didn't go seeking this job, David. It came to me."
"If you accept it, that's hardly relevant, is it?"
"I don't think Beth would view it as exploitation," Jill ventured.
David shook his head. "No, probably not. It might play right into her hands. You realize, of course," he continued, after a slight pause, "that no lawyer in the world would allow her to appear on the program."
"Oh, obviously," Jill quickly concurred, delighted they could agree on something. "I would never ask that. The angle of the show, from the way I read Irving, would hinge much more on the moral and legal aspects of what Beth did and her reasons for doing it."
"Great” David muttered, sarcastically. Jill noticed that neither of them had touched their food. "So, your mind's made up." Jill started to shake her head in protest. "Who are you kidding, Jill?" David asked her quickly. "Your mind was made up before you walked into my office. If you think anything else, then the only person you're fooling is yourself." He shoved his plate away. "You don't want my opinion. You want absolution. You want me to say, sure, go ahead, destroy what's left of a fine man's reputation. Use me and my firm and everyone around you. I'm right behind you. Well, I'm not, and I can't say it. I think it's wrong, and I don't want you to do it."
They stared at each other across the table. When Jill spoke, her voice came from deep inside her chest. "And if I decide to do it anyway?" she asked. "I mean, I really think I could do a good job of being fair to everyone, not blackening anyone's memory—"
"Wake up, Jill," David snapped. "Stop lying to yourself!"
"I don't think I am," she protested.
"Well then maybe you're too naive for television." He stood up. "At any rate, the answer to your question, which I believe was 'and if I decide to do it anyway?' is that it's a decision with which we will both have to learn to live."
"What does that mean?" she asked.
"Exactly what it says," he answered, putting thirty dollars on the table. "Look, I have to get back to work now. There's no point in running this thing into the ground. Finish up, take your time. I'll be home later." He bent over and kissed her forehead. "Don't wait up," he said.
Jill remained seated, staring down at her plate. Her appetite was gone.
"The food is not to your liking?" asked the waiter, several minutes later.
"The food is fine," Jill told him. "I'm just not feeling very well."
"I'm sorry to hear that," the waiter said with sincerity. ''Some tea, perhaps?"
Jill shook her head. "No, thank you," she said. "Nothing."
Chapter 23
Jill wasn't sure at what precise moment she realized her husband was having an affair with Nicole Clark. She was sure only that it was a fact that was now a part of her life.
She sat in the staff room between the periods of her two morning classes and tried to focus her attention on the morning paper. Two men and three women had been found in a rooming house stabbed to death. Probably drug-related, the police surmised. Another man had murdered his wife and two children because he claimed that Christ had told him to do so in a dream the night before; yet another woman had been shot to death by her insanely jealous husband because he felt she'd smiled too long at the mailman. Jill flipped the page. A woman had been given a jail sentence of two years less a day for crushing the skull of her infant son; another couple, three of whose children had already died under suspicious circumstances, was telling the courts that they considered themselves excellent parents and that they intended to keep having children until God decided otherwise. Jill folded the paper in disgust, tossing it to the low table in front of her. She had no interest in the classified section today. Companions Wanted didn't interest her.
Her husband was sleeping with another woman.
She had felt him crawling into bed beside her the night before, accepting her feigned sleep as if it were real, not bothering to try to rouse her, to snuggle against her, to warm his body against hers. She felt him moving restlessly, trying to find a comfortable position, finding it after several minutes and drifting quickly off to sleep. She heard his breathing become slow and deep.
Sitting up, she looked over at the clock. It was almost 1 a.m. She'd heard his key turn in the door not more than ten minutes before. He'd come straight into the bedroom, undressed quickly and gotten into bed. And yet he smelled so clean, so absolutely odorless that she knew with certainty he had taken great pains to rid himself of any unwanted body smells. Like the smells of lovemaking, she had thought, lying back down beside him, remembering that the last time he had smelled this nondescript, this sanitary, was the night several weeks ago when he had called her at night from” his office and asked her so lovingly to pick him up. She remembered her nervousness the following morning, running around trying to ple
ase him, to disguise the smell of his deceit with the odor of scrambled eggs and toast, hiding from her conscious self the knowledge that he had been with Nicole.
And so the last few week’s bad all been a lie. The little scene she had witnessed the two of them play out in his office the day before—("Is there something that you needed to discuss now or can it wait until tomorrow? Unless, you'll be around later..." "No, I'm going home now. I'm tired and this can wait.")—had been played strictly for her benefit and all in code.
He was working late the same way he had done with Elaine. The work was the same. Only the names had been changed, she thought idly, surprised by how unsurprised she felt.
She yawned and stood lip, walking over to the phone at the far end of the staff room. She dialed slowly and waited as it rang. It was picked up on the third ring.
"Hello."
"Mom”
"Jill? Is everything okay?"
She smiled. “Come on. Mom. You can't tell me you knew something was wrong just from the way I said Mom.”
“Of course I could. A mother knows. Tell me. Where are you?"
“At school. In the staff room."
"Now I know something's wrong. You never call me from work. What is it? Something with David?"
"Maybe I should just let you tell me," Jill sighed.
"No, you tell me. What is it, darling?"
Jill looked around the room, trying not to cry. "I'm just a little depressed, Mom, that's all. I don't know why."
"You want to talk about it?"
"I don't know."
"Why don't you come for dinner tonight? Your father is going to play duplicate over at the club and I'll be alone. I'd appreciate the company. I take it David's working late again."
"Yes," Jill whispered.
"Good. Then you'll come?"
"What time?"
"Six-thirty?"
"Fine."
"See you later, darling."
"Thanks."
"'Bye, sweetie."
Jill hung up the phone and wondered what precisely she was going to tell her mother. That she'd been right all along? That David, having had no trouble cheating on one woman, was having no more trouble cheating on another? That everything was happening exactly as her mother had predicted it would so many years ago? God, were men really so predictable? Had someone taken out a patent on the situation? Were they all reacting in accordance with some divine plan, like the man who said Christ had directed him to murder his family? Was the whole world nuts? Jill looked around the room, seeking out the strange in each familiar face. Or is it just me? She wondered, leaving the staff room and walking toward her next class.
"Did you hear what happened to Sarah Welles?" her mother asked as she opened the front door and ushered Jill inside.
“No, what happened to Sarah Welles?" Jill asked, conjuring up the image of the young movie queen, Hollywood's latest attempt to duplicate the magic that was Marilyn Monroe.
"She's dead! Weren't you listening to the radio? They've been talking about nothing else."
"I didn't have it on. What happened? Suicide? Murder?"
"Neither. A stupid accident. She was washing her hair in her sink and apparently she lifted her head and hit it against one of her solid gold faucets and it knocked her unconscious."
"And she died?"
"Not from that. She drowned! Can you imagine? In her own sink! Her face fell into the sink full of water and she drowned! Only twenty-six years old! I don't know! You'd think that with solid gold faucets, she could afford to go to the hairdresser's."
"That's awful," Jill said, following her mother into the kitchen, slowly organizing her thoughts. "The implications are so scary," she began. "It means that we don't have any control at all over what happens to us. Here's this young woman with everything going for her, and one minute she's washing her hair and the next minute she's dead. Like Janet Leigh in the shower in Psycho,''
Her mother looked closely at Jill. "Except that if Janet Leigh hadn't stolen that money to begin with, she'd have never ended up in the cheap motel. So—we do have some control over our lives, my darling. Accidents happen, sure. Tragic accidents. But that's all part of life. End of motherly lecture. You hungry?"
"Yes." Jill smiled.
''Good. I have a nice stew ready. Sit down."
Jill sat down at the round table in the comfortably wide kitchen of her childhood. ''Are you ever going to change this wallpaper?" she asked, looking at the green and brown print of clocks and country flowers that covered the room. It had been there as long as she could remember. It was still in remarkable condition.
"We did change it," her mother said, putting a plateful of steaming stew in front of her. "Last year."
"You got the same paper?" Jill asked, incredulously.
"Can you imagine? They still had it in stock! I guess it's a classic." Her mother laughed, sitting next to Jill, with her own plate of stew. "Take some bread," she said, pointing to the bread basket in the middle of the table.
"How come you got the same one?" Jill asked, amazed.
"Your father likes it," her mother answered simply.
"And that's why?"
"It's a good reason," her mother said.
Jill sighed, putting down her fork and looking at her mother. "You've been married how long?" she asked.
'Thirty-eight years this January," her mother answered.
"It's all relative," her mother said. "It goes by so fast."
"You're happy?" Jill asked, knowing her question was simplistic, not knowing how else to ask it.
Her mother shrugged. "Well, they say that the first twenty-five years are the hardest." Both women smiled. "How can I answer you? You know what else they say—that one couple's perfect marriage is something no one else in his right mind would want. You know—you pick what peculiarities you're going to put up with, and you learn to live with them. Sometimes you're happy; sometimes you're not so happy. In fact, sometimes you're miserable. But what usually keeps you going during those miserable times is the knowledge that it was good before, it'll be good again.
Everything goes in cycles. Some years are better than others. But you have to have faith in your instincts—you say to yourself, there must have been some reason why I married him!—and usually you can remember what it was, even if it takes a little doing. You say to yourself, I loved the man enough to marry him. Surely, there's some of that love still around. You look hard enough, you can usually find it.”
"And love is all you need?" Jill asked with the proper amount of musical irony.
"Of course not," her mother answered. "You've been around long enough to know that besides love, you also need a high degree of tolerance, and respect and acceptance. And luck," her mother added. "Look at your brother. He married Emily when he was twenty and she was seventeen. They've been married for sixteen years and they still can't keep their hands off each other. They're planning a ski trip to Aspen this winter. I don't know," she said, shaking her head, "they go where it's hot in the summer and where it's cold in the winter. Beats me. What was I saying?"
"How Stephen and Emily can't keep their hands off each other," Jill reminded her.
"That's right. It's embarrassing sometimes." She looked directly at Jill. "But physical attraction isn't the main thing. It may be part of the reason two people get married, but it shouldn't be the whole reason. There has to be more. So what if a man is good-looking? There are lots of good-looking men around. So what if he's good in bed? A lot of men are good in bed. Don't tell your father I said that." She smiled. "A good marriage is made up of so many things. And even good marriages are made up of a lot of very bad times. You have to decide what's most important to you, what you're willing to give to keep it going, what you're willing to give up. Sometimes people ask too much." She paused, almost reluctant to ask the next question. "Is David asking too much, Jill?" she said, taking Jill's head in her arms and pressing it against her breasts.
"I don't know," Jill moaned against the war
mth of her mother's body. "I don't know."
Jill called Beth Weatherby from her mother's house and asked if she could drive up and speak to her. Beth readily agreed and at nine o'clock, Jill found herself in front of the now familiar gray-brick exterior. She sat inside her car, her head swimming with words her mother had spoken. ("Stop talking like you're some little nobody who miraculously landed herself such a prize! You're bright; you're beautiful; you can do anything. You're the prize! Don't laugh. This is not just a mother speaking. Take a good look at this prize you've got. It might look good and it probably moves well, but what else has it done for you? I'll use your words— are you happy?") Jill closed her eyes and was immediately surrounded by images of her husband and Nicole Clark dancing around her head, their legs catching in her hair yet not tripping, still dancing, pulling her hair out by the roots with their careless feet, unaware or unfeeling of the pain they were inflicting.
Jill opened her eyes and pushed open the car door, sitting with her feet touching the sidewalk for several long seconds. How had everything gotten so turned around? She wasn't stupid. She wasn't weak. She wasn't some blithering little bubblehead whose happiness depended on having a man in her life. Or at least, she hadn't started out that way. She had begun life as a bright, secure little girl who had grown into a bright, secure young woman, independent, talented, full of natural resources. She had married at a time when she was supposedly very much her own person, someone who certainly knew the ropes and was not about to fall into all the familiar traps. And yet that's precisely where she had ended up—in the most familiar trap of all.
What was it about women that made them so eager to put themselves in this kind of position? Or worse, she thought, looking over at Beth Weatherby's house, thinking of all that Beth had endured over the years. Why are we such willing victims? Was Beth Weatherby right—did everything stem from man's superior physical strength? Did the socialization process start in the cradle? "Damn," she said, shaking the weight of rational thought off her shoulders. She could sit and intellectualize till dawn; she could rationalize and analyze and theorize and it would still boil down to one thing— she wanted David. She would do anything to keep him. She would make herself over, even turn herself inside out to keep him. She could outwit Nicole Clark, and if that proved impossible she could simply outwait her. And any others who came along. If David was unhappy at home, then she was at least partly responsible. She would change.