Five Women Read online

  But Russell didn’t want her to have a baby. She was his baby, and he didn’t want to share her with anyone. How could she have been so stupid to have chased him all those years, to be so thrilled when she finally got him, never realizing that she didn’t know him at all? She was probably lucky she had never become pregnant. He would have been as domineering a father as he was a husband. She would have been stuck in her unhappy marriage forever.

  Who was she kidding? She was stuck in this marriage anyway. Jason, her lover, was never going to get a divorce, and she wouldn’t marry him if she could. She couldn’t trust him not to cheat on her, too. She was a fool for love, but not that big a fool. And Russell might have been a wonderful father. Babies and little kids were infinitely malleable. She, of all people, should know that. Russell could have had a child who worshipped and adored him, no matter how he behaved toward it. She certainly knew about that, too.

  She went out into the den. Russell was watching college basketball on TV. He would watch anything as long as it was a sporting event. It was a kind of meditation for him, an altered state. In the early years of their marriage she had tried to watch with him, but she got sick of it, and she had too much work from the office anyway. The pressure to churn out the firm’s mandatory individual billable hours was incredible. Russell was lucky. During the day he could deal with the hard hat guys and at night he could turn into a vegetable.

  The remains of the chicken dinner their housekeeper had prepared for him, which Felicity had heated up, was on the coffee table in front of him. “Was that good?” she asked solicitously.

  “Great. Who did you say you were meeting?”

  “I told you. Gara and Kathryn and maybe Eve.” She hoped not Eve. Maybe she could get out of the house before Eve called.

  “Call me from the restaurant,” Russell said.

  “You know I will.”

  She hated the way she had to check in all the time like a parolee. She had to carry around her cellular phone, which meant she could never have a decent evening bag unless she was out with her husband; the rest of the time she had to lug a big one.

  “You like Yellowbird so much,” Russell said, “maybe I should go with you some time.”

  “I told you that you were invited,” she said, hoping she was disguising her lack of enthusiasm. But she knew he would never join them. He wasn’t interested in being with her girlfriends, of whatever color. He didn’t even like having them around, which was why she never had guests unless they were his friends. He was jealous of her friendships, of the easy laughter women had together. He felt shut out.

  “Good night, Slugger,” Felicity said, kissing him lightly.

  “Good night, Baby.”

  She was almost to the front door when the phone rang. She knew it was Eve. Damn.

  “Will you get that, Baby?” Russell said. “Maybe it’s for me.”

  Yeah, sure. “Hello?” she said cautiously into the receiver.

  “I want to go to Yellowbird tonight,” Eve Bader said, in her abrupt, demanding voice. She never said hello, considering pleasantries a waste of time. Silence. “Are you going?”

  Felicity sighed. “Yes,” she said.

  “What time?”

  “Now.”

  Eve Bader was only a peripheral member of their little group because she kept trying to be with them and they kept trying to get away from her. An actress somewhere in her forties (she would never tell just where), Eve was a volcano of anger and pushiness, with manic energy, a dangerous quality, hot hands and hot eyes and flying hair.

  “I just had an audition for an off-Broadway play,” Eve said brightly. “I was wonderful. The director liked me. He said he’d let me know in a few days if I have a callback. I have a feeling this is going to be my year. I was really marvelous—I felt the energy. Remember I keep telling you, when I feel the energy I’m unstoppable! I could see he felt my energy, too.”

  “That’s good,” Felicity said.

  Eve was only moderately successful, but she never gave up the feeling that she was destined to become a star when she met the right people. Twenty years ago she had landed a role in a daytime soap opera that she kept for five years. During that period she was able to put away enough money to have the luxury of pursuing her career full time. On the show, Eve got the reputation of being difficult, and she never worked in a soap again, but she thought soaps were beneath her anyway and wanted to be on Broadway or in a movie, preferably a Woody Allen movie.

  “Even if I get this play, I’d still rather do Broadway,” Eve said. “I need to expand. Maybe there will be contacts for me at Yellowbird tonight. You never know.”

  “Well, then, I’ll see you there, I guess.”

  “Are Gara and Kathryn coming?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe I should call some men to join us. What do you think?”

  “I just want to be with my friends. I’m tired.”

  “Why are you tired?” Eve snapped. “It’s a state of mind.”

  Oh, Eve . . .

  Kathryn didn’t mind her, because she liked everybody, but Felicity and Gara often asked each other why they put up with Eve. They admitted that sometimes she was fun to be with, and her unremitting narcissism and ego made them view her as a creature from another planet, which they found amusing. Gara, who as a therapist knew about these things, said that it was an interesting phenomenon of female bonding that some women tended to put up with and befriend another woman whom they really didn’t much like. Felicity wondered if it was the scapegoat factor. There was something childish and nastily satisfying to have someone to complain about.

  Or maybe she herself, dissatisfied with her life, was just passive and lonely. Eve got on her nerves, but she wished she had some of Eve’s eternal optimism and confidence. “So I’ll see you there,” Felicity said.

  “Get the table I like. You know the one.”

  “Gara made the reservation.”

  “She doesn’t care where we sit. I need to see and be seen.”

  “Okay.”

  “If I don’t like the table they give us, I’ll make them change it,” Eve said.

  “I’m sure you will,” Felicity sighed. She hated it when Eve had their table changed. Eve always wanted to sit near the smoking section because she thought her important contacts would be sitting there, and then she complained when people smoked. She also hated how Eve insisted on dividing the bill up to the penny, and always managed to come out ahead. This time she was going to get there before Eve did and tell the waiter from now on Eve had to be given her own check.

  She hung up. “Was that Eve?” Russell said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I could tell from the tone of your voice. I thought you couldn’t stand her.”

  “She’s all right,” Felicity said. Russell even knew whom she was talking to. A closeness she would have happily welcomed from someone else made her feel frightened and trapped when it came from her husband. There were many reasons for that. But she wasn’t going to think about them now. Right now she just wanted to get out of the house.

  She hit the street running, hailed a cab, settled into it, gave the address of Yellowbird, and smiled.

  Chapter Two

  AMONG THE NOISY SINGLES HANGOUTS, the bars, the bagel shops, the nice little neighborhood Italian and French restaurants, the Korean all-night grocery stores, the Chinese takeout places, the pizza parlors, the coffee bars, the big supermarkets, the high rise apartment buildings, and the beat-up tenements that had been reconverted into too expensive little apartments was Yellowbird: a place like none of the others in the area. You could miss it if you walked past it too quickly. The sign was hard to read, and the windows were purposely kept inscrutable. Inside was a carefully created other world, a throwback to the past.

  Yellowbird was a monument to Janis Joplin. Dark and warm, the brick walls were comp
letely unadorned except for a huge framed black and white photograph of Janis Joplin singing—passionate, drugged-out, drunk, wild-looking, unexpectedly young, and with that great blues voice that was stilled much too early. The albums of the legendary women blues singers played, sometimes scratchily, on the sound system. From time to time, at the whim of the owner, there was someone contemporary, or even new. Interesting people came in here; you could make a friend, find love of sorts, or just not be alone. The one thing you would never have to be at Yellowbird was alone, unless you chose to be.

  Billie Redmond owned this place. Forty-eight, tall, rangy, and dramatic-looking, she prowled her domain. For a few years, in the early seventies, she was a singer in the Janis Joplin style, and had a couple of hits. So for a few incandescent years she had been a rock star. You found this out quite quickly when you came here. Sometimes she had a look about her as if she were still on stage, or was remembering it—a way she moved, or tossed her head, a glance. When Billie was around you always knew who was in control, and she was always there.

  Gara had asked Billie once why the place was called Yellowbird—was it a song she had written, was it the town in Texas she came from?

  “No,” Billie said, sounding bored. People had asked her that same question a lot over the years. “I just like it. It sounds hopeful, you know?”

  She had a strange, low, hoarse voice and a scar on her neck. Sometimes she covered the scar with a turtleneck or a scarf, and sometimes not. It seemed to Gara to be a kind of stigmata, a literal representation of the scars all of the others carried inside, but no one ever dared ask her about it. They were sure that in her brief glory days as a singer she hadn’t had the voice they heard now, it would have been impossible, but of course no one would ever ask her about that either. Gara found her fascinating.

  “I’m from Plano, Texas,” Billie said. “Ever heard of it? Probably not. You’re a New Yorker.” She still had her Texas twang. “You didn’t miss anything,” she said with a little smile. “I left real young.”

  Gara knew that Billie didn’t have a husband or any kind of permanent partner, but it was clear, if you watched carefully, that Billie was a lusty, independent woman who had an occasional lover when she wanted one. She would sit at the bar, watching over the reservation book, talking to men who were there alone, sometimes buying them a drink. Gara could see the electricity growing in their eyes, the subtle change in body language.

  She thought of Billie’s barstool as the catbird seat. They were all her guests, albeit paying guests, and there was a certain currying of favor. When Billie was bored with the bar she would wander around the room, sometimes alighting at a table or a booth, particularly later at night when she’d had a few drinks and was feeling mellow and in a mood to reminisce about interesting people she had known in the late sixties and early seventies.

  Billie had a nine-year-old son, Little Billie. You could tell he was hers—they had the same eyes—but anything more about his origin was another of her mysteries. He was a very well-behaved child, with golden curls, the face of an angel, and the matter-of-fact sophistication of a child who has always lived among adults. Billie had told Gara once that she had been taking Little Billie to Yellowbird since he was born. Everybody adored him.

  He was there tonight, as always, doing his homework at a back booth, with his little computer and his Walkman and his plastic violence doll. There was a cot in his mother’s office in case he got sleepy. Since Billie’s formal education had been minimal due to lack of interest, Little Billie was being helped with his homework by the two transvestites Gara called the Larchmont Ladies. They dressed like middle-aged suburban matrons, wearing cheap copies of Chanel suits, sensible pumps, and wigs set in the long-outdated petal look. They had become a kind of fixture here, preferring Yellowbird to the downtown clubs.

  After the initial shock of their appearance, or the discovery that they were not what they pretended to be, the Larchmont Ladies turned out to be quiet and pleasant. One of them was an accountant, and he helped Little Billie with his math. The other one was reputed to be a cop. They were not lovers, only friends, or sisters if you will, although they both claimed to be straight. No one had ever seen either of them with a woman. They didn’t mind being baby sitters. They called themselves Gladys and Lucy, but Little Billie called them Ralph and Tom.

  Gara had been the first to arrive tonight, so she nabbed the seat with the best view of the rest of the room and ordered a bottle of white wine. Janis was singing on the sound system and she hummed along. “Take another little piece of my heart now, bay-bay . . .” She liked the old songs more than the new ones; the lyrics made more sense in relation to her life. Or maybe they really had been better.

  “Hey,” Billie said by way of greeting.

  “Hi.”

  “Who’s coming tonight? Kathryn? Felicity?”

  “Yes,” Gara said.

  “Eve?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She’d better not ask to have her table changed,” Billie said ominously, and walked away. Gara laughed.

  The waiter arrived with the wine, menus, ice water, and biscuits. The food here was sort of Southern and not very good, and Billie hardly ever changed the menu, so there was something about it that Gara found reassuring. It was like the food of her childhood. Growing up in New York they’d had a black, Southern housekeeper who didn’t cook well, but Gara’s mother hadn’t cooked at all. Gara had never been able to decide if this was her mother’s one gesture toward being emancipated from the role of housewife, or if it was her way of being privileged. Gara had grown up to be an indifferent cook, but her ex-husband hadn’t minded; he liked the two of them to eat out nearly all the time anyway, as if they were on a permanent date.

  When she thought how romantic Carl had been when he wanted to be, she felt sad. She had finally gotten to the point where there were whole days when she forgot he existed, but she knew it was an act of will. She had been married to him for twenty-two years, most of her adult life. She had known him when they each had both parents. She had helped bring up his two sons from his previous marriage, on the weekends and vacation weeks that he had custody, a time that seemed so long ago. She could finish his sentences, and often he looked at her hopefully to do so. How close their bond had been—two minds with the same thought, the same references, the same memories. Perhaps that had been part of the problem. She had become too familiar. Strangers were more enticing. And at the end he had turned into a stranger, so that she was the one left yearning and enticed.

  “There you are,” Kathryn said cheerfully, emerging from the dimness with a glass in her hand. “I was at the bar. I didn’t see you come in.” Her skin was luminous, her hair glowed a soft, shiny copper, and she was smiling a white-toothed, perfect smile. Her outfit had probably cost four thousand dollars.

  “Don’t you look glamorous,” Gara said. “That suit! That handbag!”

  “Well, thank you,” Kathryn said. She sat down. “God bless Mr. Henry.”

  “Who?” Gara asked. She and Kathryn had a running joke about Kathryn’s husbands: Gara pretended never to be able to remember their names or keep them straight. Not that three were so many these days.

  “My last husband, the multi-millionaire. I finally learned how to do it right.”

  “Practice makes perfect.”

  “I only slept with three men in my life,” Kathryn said matter-of-factly. “And I married them all. I was a nice Catholic girl.”

  And a strong one, Gara thought. Of them all, she thought Kathryn had probably had the worst trauma to deal with. Or perhaps it had only been the most dramatic. Whenever she saw Kathryn, Gara saw the scene again; an event she had not been part of, which she could only imagine. So this was Kathryn’s story:

  A cold, dark winter night in Boston. The woman is hiding in the backseat of the car, lying on the floor under the heavy raincoat, the man and the other woman
in the front, the man driving. The woman in the back is trying not to tremble, hardly breathing. The man turns around. The woman in the back holds up the gun and blows his head off.

  She had never understood how Kathryn had managed to survive this event of her past and seem so well-adjusted. It was something she wondered about often. Gara asked her sometimes, but Kathryn just shrugged with her devil-may-care attitude and said she didn’t know.

  The waiter poured them glasses of wine. “Well, cheers,” Kathryn said.

  “Cheers. To health.”

  “Oh, look who’s here.”

  Gara saw Felicity heading for their table, beaming with delight at the prospect of an evening out with her friends.

  “How pretty she is,” Kathryn said. “All the guys are looking at her.” She chuckled in a motherly way, and Gara remembered that Kathryn’s oldest son was only a year or two younger than Felicity.

  “I know. She’s gorgeous.”

  “What are you saying?” Felicity asked.

  “That you’re fat and ugly,” Kathryn said. “Sit down and have a drink, we’ve started already.”

  “I’m fat and ugly?” Felicity said in horror.

  “I’m just joking, you twit. You know you’re beautiful. I don’t want to listen to any false modesty.”

  Felicity kissed them both hello and sat next to Gara. “A drink, yes! I do need a glass of wine.” She smiled at the waiter when he poured it. “Eve Bader gets her own check,” she said. He nodded.

  “I was going to pay for everybody,” Kathryn said.

  “No, you can’t,” Gara said.

  “Okay.”

  “It’s so great to be away from my husband,” Felicity said.

  “Well, you’re taken care of, but by spring Gara and I are both going to have boyfriends,” Kathryn said. “I’m going to find them for us. You’ll see.”

  “For you, maybe,” Gara said.