by Joy Fielding
"Jill, you're exaggerating—"
"I am not exaggerating! I have just been shot down by an expert marksman while my husband stood by and passed her the ammunition. Elaine said some very vicious things to me, things one doesn't exactly expect to see one's spouse stand still for, and what does my husband say? He says 'Elaine's right.' Elaine's right," she repeated in disbelief. “I have been thoroughly humiliated and my husband was too busy being inconvenienced to notice." She paused. "I guess there's nothing more to say. I've been put in my place in no uncertain terms, and so, now that I know what that place is, I can get on with my life, and start making the master of the house his breakfast." She turned to leave.
David grabbed her arm. "Jill, you're acting like a child! No one says you're a servant here!"
"Well, what am I?" Jill shouted, as loud now as Elaine had been earlier. "I'm not a mother, step or otherwise, as I have been told very clearly this morning. I'm not even a wife anymore."
"Jill—"
"Am I? Well, am I? We don't make love anymore; we don't talk anymore. Christ, how can we be expected to make love or talk when we don't even see each other anymore?"
"It's that damn TV show," he began.
"The hell it is!" she countered angrily. "How dare you try to blame it on that?!" she demanded, suddenly self-conscious about having used Elaine's phrase. “Do you realize that you haven't once asked me how the show is progressing, if I like what I'm doing?"
"You know how I feel about this show."
“Yes, I know how you feel. What I'm asking is if you have any idea of how feel!"
David said nothing for several minutes. "I can't fake interest where none exists," he said, finally. "I hate the whole idea of this show, Jill. If you want to know the truth, I think you only agreed to do it to get back at me."
Jill stared hard into David's beautiful green eyes, their lashes fluttering nervously before her. She felt her heart sink, knowing that the moment of truth could be ignored no longer. "Get back at you for what?" she asked slowly.
The question caught David off guard, the implications of what he had said only now reaching his conscious self. He turned away.
"Is there any point in more lies, David?" she asked, trying to grab at the retreating numbness. The next few minutes seemed to happen in slow motion. Her mind spoke each word before her ears replayed them with the actual voices attached, and then again without the sound.
She watched as David sat down on the sofa, carefully avoiding her eyes. I'm sorry, Jill. I thought it would be all over by now. "I'm sorry, Jill," he said with great emotion. "I thought it would be all over by now." I'm sorry, Jill. I thought it would be all over by now.
Jill's eyes immediately filled with tears. "It's not?" she asked, knowing the answer. It's not. It's not. It's not.
"No," he said, still not looking at her. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. "God, Jill, I'm so sorry. I feel like such a bastard, but I just don't know what to do. I love you. I don't want to lose you. I'm sure that all it is with Nicki is an infatuation. She's young; she's beautiful. She makes me feel like I'm King of the Mountain—"
“I’m not interested in how she makes you feel!" Jill yelled, hurling herself at her husband and pounding him with both fists. "Goddamn you, you son-of-a-bitch!"
She struck him one carefully aimed blow across the face before he was able to restrain her hands and force her away from him, his one hand gripping tightly to both her wrists, rendering her powerless, while her tears took away her voice and reduced her to a frenzied helplessness. She felt her nose beginning to run, tried to extricate one hand from David's grasp but was unable to, feeling him suddenly surrounding her body with his own, trying to comfort her, to quiet her. To stop her.
"Jill, Jill," he whispered against her ear. "Please don't cry."
Slowly, he released her hands, leaning over her and burying his head against her breasts. She lifted her arms to strike out at his back, to pummel his flesh. Instead, her hands moved like those of a drowning woman to grasp at a life preserver just tossed out, gripping it tightly, pulling it close against her. In a minute, he had pushed up her terry-cloth robe and discarded his own, and soon they were making the kind of urgent love that only comes from desperation, where tears replace sweat, and guilt and fear take the place of genuine passion. Both recognized it for what it was. Neither had any illusions when it was over.
"What now?" she asked, as he was pulling back on his robe. "What happens now?"
"I don't know," he said truthfully.
"What do you want to happen?" she pressed. "Do you know that much?"
"I'd like things to go back to the way they were before," he said quietly, after a pause.
"Before?"
"Before all this mess started," he began. "Before Beth murdered Al. Before you took on that stupid job—"
Jill couldn't believe her ears. "Before Beth murdered Al! Before I went back to TV! David, listen to yourself. You have just absolved yourself of any and all responsibility in this matter. What about Nicole?! What about the part that each of you played in all this?"
"I'm not saying I'm not responsible. I'm just trying to explain the extenuating circumstances, what made me particularly susceptible to Nicole at this point in my life—"
"Damn it, there are always going to be extenuating circumstances! You talk about wanting to go back to the way things were before. When Al was alive, when I was still teaching. May I remind you that your whole infatuation with Nicole started when things were exactly the way they were before! When the interesting career woman you married became the boring little wife at home— "'
"No one said you were boring!"
"I bored myself to death. How could I not bore you?!"
He began pacing. "I'm sorry, Jill. I can't help but feel that it's only since you started talking about this whole television thing that our troubles started."
Jill closed her eyes. "I can't even talk about it now," she said, as if from another room.
"I didn't say that. You know that's not what I meant."
"Yes, I know," she acknowledged. "But you are saying that you want me to give it up."
David stopped. "I don't know," he said. "I don't know any more what I'm saying. I don't mind your working in television. You know I don't. It's just this show about Beth Weatherby—"
"The show is not about Beth Weatherby," she reminded him, "but that's kind of beside the point, isn't it?"
"The point being—?"
"The point being that my working in television doesn't bother you as long as you control my hours, my location, and now my content. That's the bottom line, isn't it, David? I stay in Chicago, work from nine to five and be careful to keep away from issues you find offensive or inconvenient—"
"Jill—'
"All right." Jill stared wordlessly at David for several seconds before speaking. "Okay. You win. I’ll do it. I’ll give it up. Now what? I've just agreed to the first of your demands. What else?"
"Else?" he asked, puzzled by the sudden turn of events.
"Well, I think we should know exactly where we stand, don't you? Children—what about children?"
Jill watched David's head sink. "Jill, please, you know the answer to that. You know how I feel—"
"Fine, then. Okay, no children. Settled." She stopped, biting off her next word and spitting it into the air between them. "Nicole."
Silence. "What is it that you want me to say, Jill?"
"What do you think I want you to say?"
"That I'll stop seeing her," he answered, after a pause.
"Bull's-eye." She waited.
"I can't," he said, finally.
Jill felt her feet burying into the thick, white carpeting the same way they had sunk into the grass at last summer's annual Weatherby, Ross picnic, holding her a prisoner then as they did now. "You can't," she repeated, numbly. Her eyes shot him a look of real fury. "You expect me to give up goddamn everything—my career, a family of my own, even my husband whenever he feels the overwhe
lming urge of extenuating circumstances, and while I'm at it, you also expect me to keep my mouth shut about your children although I'm still expected to help take care of them, and put up with your ex-wife and all her cockamamie demands and insults and keep paying the rent on this apartment, while you divide your time and money between your ex-wife and your current mistress. Of course she thinks you're King of the Mountain! Does she realize that the mountain is made up of a stack of unpaid bills?!"
"I don't think this is getting us anywhere," he said with infuriating calm.
"Oh, you don't?" Jill questioned. "Well, that's just too damn bad. Because I do! I think it's helping to put this relationship into its proper perspective." She thought over the past five minutes. "I have just accepted all your terms. I am willing to live with your hours, your debts, your children, even your ex-wife. I am willing to live without my chosen profession or children of my own. I'm willing to do whatever you want, to be whatever you want, to turn myself inside out if necessary to keep you. I'm asking you, in return, to give up only one thing. Nicole Clark. And you're telling me you can't do it!" She shook her head in disbelief.
"I can't lie to you, Jill," he said sadly. "Would you rather I lied?"
"Why not?" she snapped. "Why can't you lie all of a sudden? You've done it often enough before!" She started to cry. "Why the sudden pangs of conscience now?" she sobbed, desperately.
"I'm so sorry," he said, reaching for her, only to be brushed aside. "I wish I could say the things you want to hear. I wish I could tell you that she doesn't mean anything to me, that I can just walk out of her life. But I can't. All I know is that despite the fact that I love you, and I do love you, Jill, I just can't let Nicki go. Not yet."
"How long?" she asked.
"What do you mean?"
Jill choked back her tears. "Not yet implies a future. A time when you will be able to let her go. How much time?"
He shook his head. "I don't know," he said.
"You expect me to sit here and wait for you?" she asked, feeling as she imagined Sybil Burton must have felt when confronting Richard with the years of casual infidelities.
The truthfulness of his answer surprised her. "It's what I'd like," he said. "I know I have no right to expect it."
"You're damn right, you don't!" she shouted, suddenly furious again at his complacency. "I could really fix you, you know," she continued, surprising herself possibly even more than her husband. ''I could take you for everything Elaine hasn't, which I’ll admit isn't a hell of a lot, but it would sure teach little Nicole a thing or two about reality!" She stopped, amazed by the force of her own bitterness.
There was a long silence. Neither party moved.
"You have to do whatever you think is right," David whispered, at last. "It's your life. You have to live it the way you see fit. If you want a divorce, then that's what you'll get. If you want to take me for everything I've got, well, you'll do that too. I won't stop you. I'll give you whatever you want."
"I want you," she said, her voice cracking.
"No," he said, his voice resonantly clear, "the woman I just listened to wants a lot of things, but I'm not one of them." He started to leave the room.
"Oh no, David, please," she begged, running after him. "I didn't mean it about taking you for everything. You know I'd never do that. Please, David, I'm sorry." He retreated into the bathroom and closed the door behind him. Jill sank to her knees on the other side, her tears falling like drops of wet paint down the length of the door. "I'm sorry," she repeated over and over again as she heard the shower beginning to run. "I'm so sorry."
Chapter 28
“Brother, its cold out there!" Irving's voice bellowed as he came inside the small screening room and took off his coat. “How's everybody?"
The room, which Jill noticed had become quiet with expectation, was suddenly full of noise again. All the old, familiar grumbles about Chicago in November were brought forth and given new life. Jill listened for a few minutes while Irving explained to the dozen people present that the client had been delayed and so the screening would be held off until the sponsors could arrive. "Can you imagine, it's actually starting to snow out there," she heard him utter in disbelief before she allowed her eyes to drift back toward the giant, empty screen.
She heard the door opening and closing several times behind her, knew more people had arrived, and was aware that soon every seat would be filled with not just people like herself, the drones, but by the Queen Bees themselves, the people from the network, the sponsor's representatives—the people who would be deciding whether "Hour Chicago" would be allowed more than its initial sixty-minute run.
I should be nervous, she thought. Happy. Scared. Angry. Confused. Something. But she felt nothing, in the same way that she was only slightly more aware of the outdoor cold than she was of the indoor heat, only marginally more aware of sound than she was of stillness, of day as opposed to night. For the past three or four weeks, she had walked through her life as if she were occupying someone else's body, a body that, like the now extinct leaves of autumn, had been drained of all its former color, shriveled up against itself, a brittle shadow of its former vibrancy, waiting only for the wheels of traffic to crush it into obscurity or for the winds to scatter its dried-up pieces into oblivion. The dried-up pieces of her soul, she thought eerily.
"So, what did you think of that?" he was asking her.
"What?" Jill asked, looking behind her to Irving, who was leaning up against the back of her comfortable chair. "I'm sorry, were you talking to me?" she asked.
"I said," He repeated, "November hit Chicago with the force of a hard snowball against a car window. What do you think?"
"What do I think about what?" Jill asked, aware she was smiling, aware that it had been a long time since she had smiled.
"I made that up as I was walking over here, about November hitting like a snowball. I thought it was rather poetic." Jill's smile widened. "You all right?" he asked her.
"Sure," she answered.
"They giving you trouble at school?"
Jill shook her head. "No. I explained that this screening was important. That I had to be here."
"What's it like to be back there?" he asked.
"All right," she said, without inflection.
He patted her shoulder. "Well, don't let it get too all right. I have a feeling the powers-that-be are going to like what they see today and that you can dump those hallowed halls for good and get back to the world where sex and violence still have a good name. What's the matter, Jill?" he continued, without missing a beat.
“Nothing," she said. "Just tired, I guess."
"Well," he said, patting her shoulder again, "tell that good-looking husband of yours to let you get some sleep."
Jill turned back toward the empty screen and saw it filled with David's face. He occupied it easily and well, the warmth of his eyes and his smile only magnified by the increased size of her imaginary projection. Suddenly, Jill knew that no matter what changes time wrought, physical or otherwise, to their lives, that he would always have this effect on her, that just looking at him would make her feel weak-kneed and awkward, the nervous wallflower opening her front door to greet her blind date and coming face to face with the campus hero.
The image of her husband was like a magnet drawing her closer toward him. She wanted to run to it, throw herself into it, disappear inside it, yet she knew now that the slightest pressure would force the image to crack and break. That she would collapse empty-handed and bruised on the other side, that behind the screen—the face?—there was nothing.
The sudden intrusion of rational thought caught Jill off guard. In the past month, she had managed to keep all semblance of reality a good arm's length away. It was as if everything had stopped. Like the princess on her fifteenth birthday who pricks her finger on a spindle and becomes the Sleeping Beauty, Jill had simply waved her magic wand and suspended all time and emotion, choosing the blind path of the somnambulist, waiting for the
kiss of the handsome prince to wake her up. Between pricking her finger and kissing the prince, there was nothing. The Prick and the Prince, Jill thought suddenly, surprised to find herself laughing.
She pretended to be stifling a cough, taking a surreptitious look around the room and seeing all but four of the seats now filled. The room was starting to feel stuffy, especially now that cigarettes were appearing with greater frequency than before. Years ago, when she and David had first married, he would complain that the stale odor of cigarettes clung to her clothes and hair for days after these smoke-filled meetings. Now, she doubted he would notice at all.
He was rarely home these days, his time divided between herself and Nicole, and when he chose to sleep at Jill's side it was only when he was overwhelmed with fatigue. There was no passion. Even desperation had slipped away into something more abstract. She was like a buoy in the water, conveniently marking off a familiar spot. What was it he had said? I can't fake interest where none exists? Jill closed her eyes, forcing her mind to go as blank as the screen. It was all her fault, she thought, sinking down into her seat, and laying her head back. She had forced the issue, forced everything. Now she had to wait in limbo like the sleeping princess to see if David could cut his way back through the thorns to find her.
A phone rang from somewhere beside her. She opened her eyes to see Irving picking up the red receiver and saw his lips moving, although she deliberately avoided hearing any sounds and only snapped fully to attention when she realized the room was emptying of people.
"Come on," he was saying, leaning over her, "I'll buy you some dinner."
"What happened?” she asked.