Five Women Read online

  “They’re looking for an ingenue type.”

  “What do you think I am? I’m not even twenty yet! Did you think I was old?”

  “You have a . . . strong quality. Fiery.”

  “You never saw me read an ingenue.”

  “Well, as long as you’re a friend of his,” Beverly said, “I’ll get you put on the list.”

  The Sophocles Birnbaum movie was casting in a small building on the Fox lot. This was not just a go-see but an actual reading. The part was small but interesting: a teenage hooker who freaks out on LSD. Eve was excited and nervous. She wore a plain blouse and miniskirt and had tied her hair back, but when she got there the girls in the waiting room were dressed all sorts of ways, so she didn’t know why she’d bothered to disguise her real quality. She pulled the ribbon out of her hair and shook it free. She knew she could do the part and be great at it.

  There were two other men, older than he, in the audition room with Sophocles. When he looked up and saw her he seemed startled. Each actress had to read at a table, sitting down, which was difficult because Eve wanted to move around and express herself. What was worse, they let her act only one page. They seemed to be in a great hurry. “Thank you,” they said gravely when she was finished. “We’ll let your agent know. Next . . .” She couldn’t tell if they had liked her or not.

  He came in to the restaurant a few days later, after she had been reinstated. “Why aren’t you at one of my tables?” she asked him. “Don’t you like me anymore?”

  “One of those things,” he said.

  “Should I have your table changed?”

  “No, no, this is perfect.”

  “So how did you like my brilliant portrayal?”

  “It was fine,” he said noncommittally. He picked up his menu and looked at it.

  “Does that mean I got the part?”

  “Your agent will call you.”

  “When?”

  “She should have called already.”

  “Does that mean I got it or not? Don’t torture me.”

  “Not,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why not?” Eve asked.

  “You weren’t right for it. Do you know where my waitress is?”

  Eve sat on the edge of the banquette opposite him in the booth and leaned forward. “If you tell me why I wasn’t right, next time I can be right,” she said.

  He sighed. “Do you know how many people read for that part? Only one of them was right for it and it wasn’t you. It’s a matter of personal taste, of choices, of a vision. Okay?”

  “Then the next time you should make it clearer what you want,” Eve said. “I could have done it differently.”

  “All right,” he said. “Waitress!” He waved at another waitress. “Could you find my waitress, please?”

  “Isn’t she your waitress?” the girl asked, nodding at Eve.

  “No.”

  “I’m sure I could take care of this table if you like,” Eve said, standing up.

  “Eve . . . does nothing ever stop you?” Sophocles said.

  Eve looked at him, confused. “Why should it?” she said.

  The next day the manager fired her for harassing the customers. Eve thought that was outrageous. She insisted he tell her who had made such an unfair claim and he said, “Everybody.”

  It made her very angry for about an hour, and then she decided to get on with her life. She got another waitress job right away at the Great Earth, a block up the Strip from where she had worked before, which also had its share of movie business clientele. She realized it was just as well she’d had to move on. She had milked the Confident Onion of whatever contacts it had to give her, and now she had new ones to make. An ambitious person should never stay in a rut.

  Chapter Nine

  WHEN GARA WAS in graduate school studying to be a clinical psychologist, one of the prerequisites was that she be analyzed herself. She had wanted to go into therapy for a long time, and it seemed sublime irony that her mother, whom she considered the root of her problems, was also going to be instrumental in the cure, since her parents would be paying for her therapy. It was 1961. In the fifties it had been suspect to be in therapy—you were thought to be either crazy or self-indulgent—but now it was a little more mainstream. At any rate, everyone she knew at school was being shrunk, which made her feel like part of a group instead of an eccentric outcast, and it also made her parents feel less guilty and suspicious.

  Her doctor was a middle-aged woman named Dr. Ragozin, a Freudian therapist, who had been very well recommended. Gara thought that with her long face and dewlaps she looked like a Walt Disney dog. She called Gara Miss Bernstein, and Gara called her Dr. Ragozin. The office had an uncomfortable foam rubber couch with a sheet of paper over the pillow, an oriental rug, several pre-Columbian statues, dim lighting, a framed photograph of Freud on the wall, a cluttered desk with two chairs, and a chair behind the couch where Dr. Ragozin sat while Gara free-associated. Gara went there three times a week, and wondered if what she revealed about her feelings was shocking, or just boring. There was never any indication since Dr. Ragozin seldom spoke.

  One afternoon, when she was just getting up enough courage to tell the Tampax story, Gara heard a soft thud on the floor. It sounded like a pencil. Then she heard another, more audible thud. This sounded like the therapist’s pad. Then she heard a snore.

  She turned around to see Dr. Ragozin’s head bent forward on her chest, her mouth open, her eyes shut, and realized she was asleep. With her facial muscles relaxed she looked as if she had melted. And she had: she had melted away and left her patient embarrassed and at a loss what to do. If I put my therapist to sleep, Gara thought—someone who is paid to listen—what hope is there? It was imperative that she sneak out immediately without waking the doctor. She would leave this office with her trivial stories untold, and henceforth keep her selfish life to herself. Her face felt hot with the pain of how boring she felt. She got up quietly, but just as she did, Dr. Ragozin woke up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I thought I’d let you sleep,” Gara murmured, wringing her hands. “I’m so sorry. I was tired. You’re the last appointment of the day.”

  “Oh.”

  “I never do this.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Would you like to lie down again and go on?”

  Should she? Could she? How could she trust Dr. Ragozin not to fall asleep again?

  “I want to sit opposite you at the desk,” Gara said. “That way I can see you.”

  “All right. We’ll do that next time.”

  So now her therapist sat behind the cluttered desk, and Gara sat in the straight chair facing her. It encouraged conversation instead of monologue and the way of therapy changed. They investigated Gara’s dependency upon her parents, the love-hate relationship she had with them, the kind of men she liked (ones her mother couldn’t dominate), and the men she didn’t like (ones her mother could). She wanted the man she married to represent her, to command respect, to protect her and at the same time nurture her independence.

  It was a given that she would have children, and Gara was afraid to admit she didn’t want to. What she really wanted was to marry a man who had children already, so she could be kind to them, like a good friend, and so they would never blame her for the traumas of their childhood. Let them blame their own mother for those. Dr. Ragozin never indicated that Gara’s own mother had actually meant her ill, so Gara took that to mean it was so easy to hurt a sensitive child even when you meant well that being in charge of an innocent soul was just too dangerous. She could not believe her mother didn’t really love her—she preferred to think her mother had loved her too much, as her mother often claimed—but sometimes she wondered how you could love someone and try to destroy that person so you could own her, without a thought about the other person’s feeling
s. She knew there was a great deal she had to learn if she was going to be a good therapist.

  * * *

  Five years passed. Gara was still in therapy and working as a case worker for the city now, knocking on doors of families who didn’t want to see her, who pretended they weren’t home. She could pay her own bills at last. She had her own apartment, and thus was able to date the kind of men she liked. But there was always something withheld in these tightrope relationships, either from her or from them. She had been brought up with the morality of the fifties, and then the mid-sixties’ morality changed everything, and she was caught in the middle. She despaired of ever being truly in love, or of being entirely able to trust a man. She also despaired of her therapy, since she had read that a Freudian analysis should work in five years, and there was no indication she was any closer to being “normal.” She felt she was not pretty, that she had too many faults, and she knew that socially she was shy unless she had some drinks. She was still fighting with her mother and avoided her as much as possible. She dreaded her duty phone calls.

  Then, that spring, a friend who had been going to another therapist, a jolly man named Dr. Gold, suggested Gara try him. She did, and then she started going to both of them. She told him, but she didn’t tell Dr. Ragozin.

  “You can’t go to two therapists at the same time,” he told her. “You have to choose.”

  “Then I’ll go to you,” Gara said. Five years was enough.

  She didn’t have the heart to tell Dr. Ragozin she was giving up and going elsewhere, so she simply said she felt she was ready to leave therapy and be on her own. A few days later a letter from Dr. Ragozin arrived in her mailbox. Gara was afraid to open it at first. She remembered that how you feel when you look at the envelope is how you feel about the person. In that case, Dr. Ragozin represented bad news.

  “Dear Miss Bernstein,” the letter said. “I agree with you that you are successfully finished with therapy. I wish you luck with your new life.”

  Gara reread it, amazed. She has no idea I’m not cured, she thought. And she’s so well known!

  She thought about her own abilities. She had gotten all A’s at college and graduate school, the people who finally unlocked their apartment doors usually responded to her, and at last she was going to be given some mildly disturbed patients of her own in an office setting. People trusted her. Maybe she was better than she believed. . . .

  She continued with the new therapist for another two years, sitting across from him at his desk. She told him how she had put Dr. Ragozin to sleep, and he asked her why she hadn’t felt angry. That emotion had never occurred to her. When she relived the experience now she felt angry and cheated for the first time, and began to realize that she had often delayed or repressed her normal reactions as a way of protecting herself from the no-win situation of her childhood home. Making a good impression was always more important than how you felt. But didn’t everybody believe that? Her mother wasn’t the only one; she was just more extreme.

  Gara looked around her at what the world had become in such a short time. There were the hippies, the flower children, the young runaways, the people in communes. They had overthrown the rules of the fifties, but now they were conforming to something just as stringent in its own way. They all wore the same clothes, had the same hair, were bone-thin, smoked pot the way their parents had consumed martinis, slept around because you were supposed to. She thought the drugs were what made all this sexual freedom possible. How could you enjoy sex with someone you had no feelings for without some kind of chemical reinforcement? She rejoiced at the end of the hypocrisy that had governed her social life, but wondered what would become of her.

  As for herself and her friends, their feelings against the war in Vietnam and the series of assassinations of men they had admired and relied on to bring them into a brighter future had made them all grow up. They felt betrayed and cynical. She was almost twenty-eight. By now her friends from school had gotten married and had children. More and more lately she felt that perhaps her self-doubt came from the daily struggle to exist all alone. She sometimes felt exhausted from it. It was abnormal to have to date forever, to be charming to strangers, to hide your neediness so they wouldn’t run away, to pretend over and over to be perfect until they knew you well enough not to care. She needed a sounding board, a real lover, someone who would share her dreams and be on her side.

  She never knew if she found Carl Whiteman because she was ready, or because he was the right man at last. On a spring evening a woman friend invited her to the opening of an art show in a downtown gallery, where she said they might meet men, and at the very least would get free wine and cheese. As soon as Gara got there a mousy-looking man of ambiguous sexuality whom her mother would have loved fastened himself to her and kept asking her personal questions, trying to strike up a friendship. She answered him absently, looking around the room. Give him a chance, her mother’s voice said in her head, he’ll grow on you. Like a cyst, she answered back. In all of her life her mother never knew if someone was gay or straight, and if you told her he wasn’t available she refused to believe it. He could walk into the house in a dress and her mother would probably think he was in a play. Gara moved away and the man followed her. That was when she first saw Carl Whiteman.

  She was immediately attracted to his strong heterosexuality and his looks. He was tall and well built, with long, thick, light hair, and a glow about him that she had seen in the photos of certain astronauts. He looked about ten years older than she was—a grownup. He was standing in the corner surrounded by shorter men and he was making all of them laugh.

  “Excuse me,” she said to the man at her side and went over to the man she wanted to meet. She stopped in front of Carl and, made brave by desire, she smiled. He smiled back.

  “I know you,” Gara said.

  “Do you? I’m Carl Whiteman. Who are you?”

  “Gara Bernstein.”

  “We’ve never met,” he said, but not as if he were dismissing her. His glance still lingered on her face with a kind of anticipation, and he was still smiling.

  “I know,” Gara said. “I just said that because I wanted to meet you.”

  She had never done that before. She couldn’t believe she was doing it now.

  “My card,” he said, and handed it to her. He was an art dealer here in New York, and the card was expensive.

  “Mine,” she said, and handed it to him. She had just had it made.

  He introduced her to the other men, who had foreign names that she forgot immediately. Her rejected admirer, who had trailed along, not knowing he had been rejected, introduced himself. “Would you like me to get you more wine?” Carl offered.

  “Yes, please,” Gara said, and went to the bar with him.

  “So you’re a therapist.”

  “Yes, and I love it.”

  “I went to a therapist for a while with my ex-wife,” Carl said. “But nothing could help that marriage.”

  “Oh, you’re divorced?”

  “Yes, last year.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, although she wasn’t.

  “Don’t be,” he said cheerfully.

  “Do you have children?”

  “Two boys, six and eight.”

  You’re just what I want, Gara thought. “That part must be hard,” she said.

  “My ex-wife and I fight all the time, but I get along great with the kids. I’m the nice one they get to visit.”

  “Of course.”

  He’s glad about it, she thought; he’s not in pain anymore. Good timing. She was afraid to ask him if he had already found another woman to be in love with. She knew from experience that if he were taken he would eventually mention his girlfriend, if only out of guilt. Maybe he hadn’t been ready for anything serious; maybe he was ready now. She smiled sunnily at him and prayed that he was available.

  They sipp
ed their wine, looking at each other. “You do look familiar,” she said. “I just figured out why. You look like a lion.”

  “King of the beasts?”

  “King of the jungle.”

  He looked a little embarrassed at the compliment but also pleased. Her male therapist had told her that you could say anything flattering to a man, no matter how outrageous, and he would believe it, but the fact was that Carl Whiteman had a leonine look. No wonder she thought he could save her.

  Save me? Gara thought. Yes, he could.

  “Are you here with anyone?” he asked.

  “No, are you?”

  “I have those Dutch art dealers you met, who I promised to have dinner with,” he said. “We have a reservation in fifteen minutes. But would you have dinner with me tomorrow night?”

  “I’d love to.”

  “Can I call you at the number on the card?”

  She wrote down her home number. You just know, she thought. After all the looking and all the disappointments, when someone comes along with the right spark, you know.

  He leaned down and kissed her lightly on the mouth. “I want to spend time with you,” he said. “Eight o’clock. I’ll think of a place you’d like and call to tell you where.”

  “Paris would be just fine,” she said, and he laughed.

  When Carl had left she went over to her friend Linda, who had invited her, and who was eating the free cheese and crackers and grapes. “Let’s go to dinner,” Gara said.

  “Why? Are you finished with this party already?”

  “I found what I wanted,” Gara said.

  “I noticed,” Linda said.

  “Dinner?”

  “I ate all this. I’m full.”

  “Then I think I’ll go home. I’m tired. Long day.”

  “Okay. I’ll stay a while and keep looking.”

  Gara didn’t tell her that she wanted to go home and think about him.