Five Women Read online

  Felicity turned all the possibilities of abandonment over and over in her mind and tried to dismiss each one methodically, logically, as if she were laying out a case. Jason would never find sex with another woman that was as hot and good as what he had with her. He had told her that many times. And yes, she believed he did love her and that she had finally gotten to him. His face had seemed so pure, so clear, so sweet when he admitted it. She knew his marriage was not much better than hers, so she had never worried that he would give her up for his wife. But what would she do if he kept avoiding her and never came back? How could she survive her own arid marriage without him? The concept of being alone with Russell forever, of having him be the only man she leaned on, the only friend, was inconceivable. She felt so lonely when she was with him, and she had no idea why.

  Kathryn snapped her fingers. “Wake up, Felicity, you’re in dreamland. Here come the two cute guys I met at the bar.”

  Felicity looked up at the two white men approaching, not knowing what to expect because Kathryn was so friendly that she liked everybody. One of the men had a nice, craggy face and was well dressed, but he was way too old; and the other was wearing baggy clothes from J. Crew and looked like a nerd, but when he got closer she saw that he was quite attractive and looked about her own age. In a way his very casual clothes were charming; he seemed almost boyish, or perhaps it was the way he carried himself.

  “The older one’s in oil,” Kathryn whispered cheerfully. “He’s from Texas. He’s the one I want.” She gave them both a big smile.

  Felicity glanced at Gara. She had her arms crossed over her chest as if she were protecting herself. Eve’s hot eyes were bulging, and steam was practically coming out of her nostrils. She was probably psyching herself up with her power, sending them her magical vibes. As for herself, she sat back quietly and watched.

  “Pull up chairs, you two,” Kathryn said. “This is Stanley Stapleton, from Texas, and Eben Mars. Gara Whiteman, Felicity Johnson, Eve Bader, and you know me.” Everyone said hello and the men got chairs from an empty table.

  “What are you ladies drinking?” the oil man asked. He looked at the label on their empty wine bottle. “Another of those all right?”

  “It’s just fine,” Kathryn said. He waved at the waiter.

  “We’ve met before,” Eve said to the younger one, leaning forward. “Do you remember? At a poetry reading at the Y last September. You were there alone. We talked. Do you remember?”

  “I think so,” he said.

  “You’d just had your book of poems published,” Eve said.

  “Who published it?” Felicity asked, getting interested.

  “Merlin Press. It’s very small, and so was my advance.”

  “I’ve heard of them,” she said. “I’m a literary lawyer, among other things.”

  “Are you! Well, then you know I have to do something else to survive, so I make my real living as a potato farmer.” He smiled at her, and although meeting another man was not on her mind, she couldn’t help noticing he had a very appealing smile.

  “A potato farmer!” Kathryn said. “In Idaho or Maine?”

  “In East Hampton.”

  “I can’t believe you’ve never heard of Eben Mars,” Eve said. She already had her hand on his arm, laying her claim to him. “He was very famous in mergers and acquisitions in the eighties, made a killing and got out when he was forty.”

  “Forty-two,” Eben said. Felicity was surprised; he looked much younger.

  “He was legendary. Now he’s a gentleman farmer and a poet.”

  “Not exactly a gentleman farmer,” he said. “Sometimes I actually get down in the earth and dig. But you might say I am: I do make a living in potatoes, but I don’t need to.”

  “That’s what I like,” Kathryn said. She laughed happily, and turned to her oil man. “Now, Stanley, tell us about your life.”

  And he was telling them, total strangers. He’d been divorced twice, he had two grown daughters, a third had killed herself in a mental hospital when she was sixteen, back in the seventies, drugs. The four women gasped, but he went right on with his story, obviously used to gasps. He had been seeing a woman in Dallas, he said, but they had broken up recently, because she had wanted him to marry her but he realized she was not the one. It was not that he would never remarry, he said, but he didn’t want a woman who wanted to have a baby with him. He didn’t want to go through all that again, it was too late, he wanted peace. All this private information came pouring out of him, and Felicity realized that it was Kathryn he was telling, that this was his donation, his courtship.

  “I never want peace,” Eve said. “I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

  “Do you have children?”

  “One,” Eve said. “A daughter.”

  “Me too,” Eben said. His face softened at the thought.

  Oh, how I crave a daughter, Felicity thought. A little me. I’d be a good mother, not like mine was. It would be like making up, somehow. And she should have a father whose face gets all soft when he thinks about her.

  “So who else at this table is divorced?” Kathryn asked. “I am, Stanley is, Eve is, Gara is . . .”

  “I am,” Eben said.

  “I’m the only one who’s not,” Felicity said brightly, “but I wish I was.”

  They all laughed.

  “Marriage is a great institution,” Kathryn said. “That’s why we keep trying. It’s the people we marry who aren’t so great.”

  Gara looked at her watch. “I have to go home,” she said. She signaled the waiter for the check. She seemed depressed.

  “Why are you going?” Eve asked. “It’s early.”

  “I have patients tomorrow morning.”

  “Well, I’m not leaving,” Kathryn said. “I’m going to finish this nice wine with Stanley.”

  “That’s what it’s here for,” he said, looking pleased. He poured her another glass and smiled at her.

  Eve tugged at Eben’s arm. “I want to go dancing.”

  “I don’t dance,” he said.

  “I’ll teach you.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Come on.”

  “No.”

  “Then let’s listen to music. You can sit. We’ll go to the Café Carlyle.”

  He thought for a moment. “I guess I could do that,” he said, finally. “Anybody else want to come? Felicity?”

  “I have to go home to my husband,” Felicity said.

  The waiter came with two checks, one for the table and one for Eve. “What’s this?” Eve asked. “My own check?”

  “Well, you came late,” Felicity lied. Eve shrugged. They all slapped their credit cards down as if they were in a card game, and Eve told the waiter she wanted to take the rest of her chicken with her, and to throw in a couple of biscuits while he was at it. It didn’t matter if she was going to a nightclub or going to get laid, she never forgot her leftovers.

  “Felicity, we can share a cab and I’ll drop you off,” Gara said.

  They stopped at the bar on the way out to say goodnight to Billie. “Thanks for coming,” she said in her strange, hoarse voice, and gave a little wave. If she seemed to notice Eve’s fast work she didn’t show it. Nothing ever surprised Billie.

  “So do you think she’s going to tie him up tonight?” Gara asked in the cab. They shrieked with laughter.

  “They’re not going to let him in the Carlyle in those clothes,” Felicity said.

  “She knows that.”

  “They won’t even be able to get in without a reservation.”

  “She knows that, too.”

  “So I guess they have to go to her apartment to hear music.”

  “Or his.”

  “If he’s that rich he must have a place in New York; he wouldn’t commute to the potatoes.” She wondered what his apar
tment was like.

  “How did she nail him that fast?” Gara said. “I didn’t even notice what he looked like and she was already pulling him out.”

  “Because you’re not looking for a man.”

  Gara sighed. “I guess not.”

  “When you want one you’ll get one,” Felicity said. “But you’re lucky you don’t care. You have no idea how difficult it is to need a man like I do. You don’t know the half of it. You should be thankful every day that you’re not me.”

  Chapter Five

  THE AMERICAN SUBURBS in the early 1960s . . . the dream. Tree-lined streets, happy children playing in safety, good public schools, a private house with enough room for the kids and the dog, a yard for barbecues in the summer, where you might even eat tomatoes you had grown yourself in your garden, good neighbors, good friends. A place so dark at night, so fresh and clear, that children could lie in their beds and see the stars and the constellations. In the fall there was the smell of wood smoke, and in winter Santa Claus came down a real chimney the way he was supposed to, the way it said in the stories. It was for this dream of a happy, comfortable family life that Felicity Johnson’s parents had moved to the white suburbs outside Detroit when she was five and her younger sister, Theodora, was three.

  They had a lovely house. It had been decorated by a professional designer in cheerful, contemporary colors, and each girl had her own room. There was a game room in the finished basement, with a television set in front of a comfortable couch, a ping pong table, and shelves of books and toys. It was hoped that the girls would entertain their friends there, but as they grew older it turned out there weren’t many friends, and the friends’ parents didn’t want them to come to a black person’s home. There was only one other black girl in Felicity’s class, and although there were three in Theodora’s, her sister was overweight and shy, and preferred to have her nose in a book to making an effort. Felicity was the sociable one. Her friends were white, which was fine with her. They were all she knew.

  There were two kinds of white people, she had discovered early. There were the kids who liked her and she liked them, just as if there were no real difference between them at all; and then there were the other ones, who called her Nigger and Burnt Toast at school, who made her cry and want to disappear. Her mother told her to ignore the mean ones. She told Felicity every day how lucky she was to be living in such a nice neighborhood, with all the advantages that were her right in this country no matter what vile and ignorant people said to her. Her father was a doctor, commuting to the black part of the city, where his patients were. He was successful and respected, and they had enough money. She would go to college someday. She had piano lessons, and ballet lessons and riding lessons, and since her father was always working and hardly ever around, her mother took care of the rest of her education as well.

  Carolee, their mother, was a beautiful woman. Felicity was in awe of her. She was tall and slim, as Felicity was, her skin was a creamy light chocolate, and she loved fashionable clothes. She had chosen to be a housewife, because that was an upwardly mobile middle-class thing to be, but Felicity knew she was brilliant and could have done something else if she had wanted to. On Saturday afternoons Carolee took Felicity and Theodora to the sales—dragged them, rather, because they found shopping incredibly boring. Felicity would have rather been with her friends, and Theodora was too roly-poly to look good in anything. At the department stores, Carolee hunted bargains, and showed her two daughters the difference between good clothes and bad ones. It was as much a part of their education as the piano and riding and ballet, as using the right fork and arranging flowers to cheer up a room.

  “It’s better to have one good designer dress than a closet full of junk,” she always said.

  Felicity admired her mother’s closet. She didn’t have a lot of clothes, but they were all elegant, arranged neatly with their matching accessories nearby. This wardrobe signified “grownup” to her, the kind of grownup she was destined to be—someone who looked right on the outside, no matter what else was secretly going on.

  Their happy home in the tranquil suburbs was not what people thought it was, and Felicity wondered if the Johnson family was the only one in the neighborhood with frightened children in it. She thought they might be. How would she know? People knew things and minded their own business.

  She was eleven now, and she and Theodora were walking home from school for lunch, as they always did. The neighborhood was a sea of children. Kids were hurrying down the block, the boys pummeling each other, the girls holding arms and whispering.

  The trees on their street were so large that they arched over the sidewalk, making shadows. As they came closer she saw the big white Bombagaster Office Supplies truck, parked a block away from her house as if that could fool anybody. They had seen it for three years, almost every day, and lately every time Felicity saw it her face heated up with embarrassment. Her mother’s friend, Jake, was there again for lunch with her mother, and right at the start of their friendship, as soon as Carolee had told them his presence had to be a secret from their father, Felicity had known he wasn’t supposed to be there at all. Even Theodora knew he wasn’t supposed to be there, although she was still too young to figure out what was going on.

  Felicity felt helpless, knowing there was nothing she could do about the situation anyway. She never wanted her father to find out. Her poor father, a victim—working so hard, loving her mother, trying to give them everything he could—she only wanted to protect him and save him from learning about something that would make him miserable and humiliated. In a way, keeping the secret made her feel less helpless, knowing she was helping to keep peace in their home.

  Peace was important, and you had to get it where you could find it. She already knew that. If her father didn’t know about Jake he wouldn’t be angry at her mother. When Jake was there her mother wasn’t angry at them. She was loving, kissy and happy.

  “Hello, cherubs!” her mother trilled. She had her hair tied back and she looked radiant. She was making steak and potatoes and green salad for Jake—he always got a real meal—and there were peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on the kitchen counter for Felicity and Theodora, as usual. The two girls licked their lips like two little cats and exchanged glances, resenting Jake’s delicious-smelling lunch and their mother’s attention to him.

  “Hello, Mom. Hello, Jake.”

  “Hello, young ladies.”

  Jake smiled at them. He was the most gorgeous black man Felicity had ever seen in her life. He looked like a movie star. He always wore a suit and a tie when he came to their house, because he sold office supplies to people in companies. But in their kitchen it also made him look as if he had come over all dressed up for a date with her mother; which this was. There was an open bottle of red wine on the kitchen table, and he had the bottle opener in his hand.

  Carolee poured milk for her daughters, smoothed their hair while they ate, and kissed them when they were finished, smiling at them and at Jake as if they were one big cheerful family. Felicity loved it when her mother was so nice to her, but deep inside she was also slightly nauseated because her father was being left out and deceived. She felt so sorry for him. She knew it was a terrible thing to be trapped in an unhappy marriage—her mother had told her so often enough—but although she understood her mother, she didn’t have to approve of the way she was supposedly solving her problem.

  “Let’s go,” Felicity said to her sister as soon as they had eaten.

  “It’s still early,” Theodora whined, but she knew it was hopeless and let Felicity drag her away. She liked these moments with her mother and wished they would never end.

  School let out at three o’clock. There were extracurricular activities for another hour and a half for those who wanted them, or you could stay in the school library and study, which Theodora always did, gnawing on her stash of candy bars. Felicity usually went to a friend’s h
ouse nearby or played in the street with the few other kids who would have her, and then she picked up her sister and they went home. Neither snow nor wind nor early darkness stopped them from staying away from home as long as they could in those afternoons, because they knew what their mother would be like when they came back.

  Jake would have left. He had a job and, equally important, he had a wife. The remains of lunch would be cleaned up, and the bottle of wine finished. Another bottle would be open on the kitchen table, and their mother would be drunk and morose.

  “If it weren’t for you two kids I could leave this marriage and be happy,” Carolee would often say. “But your father would get this house and custody of you, and then I’d have nothing.”

  It confused Felicity when her mother said that. Were her children really that important? Sometimes she thought her mother hated them, like on these days when Jake had gone home to his wife.

  Felicity and Theodora walked into the house and went directly to their rooms to do their homework before supper. Felicity heard her mother go into her sister’s room.

  “Is that chocolate on your dress?” her mother said angrily. “You’ve been sneaking candy again. I’m going to cut off your allowance! Who’s ever going to look at you? Good thing you got all A’s again this month. At least you’ll be able to get a job when you’re grown up.”

  Felicity hunched over her math. She was terrible at math; her mind went in hopeless circles and she wanted to cry. At least she was thin. Her mother came into her room then, and her heart sank. When she pulled a chair over to the desk to help Felicity with her homework, or grill her, rather, Felicity was already trembling.

  “All right,” Carolee said, tapping her pencil on the first problem, “show me the answer.”

  Felicity pointed wordlessly at the figuring she had done, praying it wasn’t wrong. When she grew up, if she was too ugly for any man to marry, she would be a lawyer like Perry Mason. There was no math needed in the law.