Five Women (15 page)

“Neither did I, but there's always a first time,” he said. “Besides, it's a small record company.”

“Well, I knew that.”

“They're the best kind,” he said. “I can sign harder edged artists.”

“Anybody I know?”

“Pig Man and the Wanderers?”

She laughed. “What did they do, ‘Oink'?”

He smiled. “Are you always this obnoxious to men who are trying to make you famous?”

“Is that what you're doing? Or just trying to make me?”

“A little of both. Seriously, Billie, you are very talented, and your voice is much too big for a room like this. I'd like to see you on a big stage, in an arena, strutting around, letting loose.”

“Me too,” she said.

She wanted to touch him but she didn't. She could sense he felt the same. She had liked him right away, and now that she had seen him up close and listened to his voice and smelled his pheromones she liked him more. She felt safe with him, which did not reduce his physical attractiveness but made it stronger. She was so used to the courting antics of horny men that she could almost write the script for them, and the thing that had always been most apparent was that their attraction to her was impersonal. They didn't know who she was, only how she seemed. They didn't care to know. But she knew them very well. What she could sense about Harry Lawless, unless she was mistaken for the first time in her life, was that he and she were capable of digging into each other, right down to the vulnerable, trembling heart.

Her friends showed up then, and she introduced everybody. They were going to a club and she invited him to come along. While everybody else danced downstairs she and Harry sat at a little table in the corner of the upstairs bar and talked about music and their dreams, while the sound of the band downstairs came pumping through the floor.

“Every little independent record label wants to become another Motown,” he said. “Motown proved it could be done. A little label doesn't have to be swallowed up as soon as it has a couple of hits.”

“I thought that was what they wanted.”

“No. And not me. For fifty thousand dollars I can finance a record. It costs ten cents to press a single that I sell to a distributor for fifty cents, and he sells it for a dollar, so I make forty cents a record. If I have a gold record that sells a million copies, I make four hundred thousand dollars.”

“Whew,” Billie said, impressed. “That's money all right.”

“It could happen to us.”

“Who is ‘us'?”

“You and me. I'm in the process of putting together a band. It's going to be called Bandit. I want you to be the singer.”

“Yes!” Billie said immediately. “Not to sound too eager.”

They smiled at each other. “I'll put together a good mix of your songs and other people's, and we'll cut a record,” he said. “Some of the band members have written some very promising stuff.”

“Other people's songs?” Billie said.

“And yours.”

“That's fine.” Janis often sang other people's songs.

“I'll get you on the road. It's time for you to tour.”

Billie thought about that, too. “If I'm going to do all this I guess I need an agent now.”

“You can use a lawyer for the contracts. Why pay all those commissions?”

“You're going to be my manager and my agent and my record company?”

“You don't think I'll be fair to you?”

“I don't know.”

“That's what you have your lawyer for.”

“Then I'm getting my own lawyer,” Billie said. “Not some friend of yours.”

He laughed. “I insist on it.”

The whole thing was very tempting. She couldn't keep on struggling forever the way she had been doing the past few years. She was impatient and itchy to make her mark, and besides, she had that feeling about him. She was an unknown and he was offering her a chance. Just for once in her life she might try letting someone else share the control.

“You'll be the artist and I'll be the businessman,” Harry said. “I'll take care of everything.”

It sounded familiar. It was what her father had done, and she liked it. Teach me what you do, Daddy, but don't make me do it. An artist should be free to soar.

“How much is this managing going to cost me?” she asked.

“Twenty-five percent of everything, but don't worry about it because I'll make you rich. I promise.”

“I want to be famous,” Billie said.

“You don't have a choice,” he said. “They go together.”

They fell silent.

“Are you going on the road with me?” she asked finally.

“Of course, whenever I can. You'll never feel deserted.”

“Good.”

“Any other questions you forgot to ask?”

“Yes.” She paused, afraid of the answer. “Do you have a wife?”

“Not that I know of.”

She was infinitely relieved.

“Do you have a husband?” he asked.

She smiled. “Not that I know of.”

“A boyfriend?”

She shrugged. “Nobody special. And you?”

He shook his head. “Not at the moment.”

“It's always good to know these things,” Billie said.

“That's your next song,” he said. “I want you to go home and write it.”

“Now?”

“Not just this minute.”

She started to hum and then to play with ideas and phrases as they came to her. “Do you need me now, do you want me now, do you have somebody else and will you want me anyway? Did someone find you first, is she waiting there for you? It's always good to know these things . . . not that it would have mattered.”

“Not that it would have mattered,” Harry said. They looked at each other and her heart began to pound.

“It's not a sweet song,” she said.

“It doesn't have to be. It just has to be real.”

“It's real,” Billie said.

“For me too,” he said very quietly.

Their legs met under the table, and then their hands flew at each other and clutched, and then they kissed. They clung to each other and she ended up on his lap with her arms around his neck, necking wildly, thinking it was good the place was so dark and the clientele so stoned that no one noticed or cared.

“Come home with me,” he said. “I want to make love to you all night.”

If he can do that, Billie thought, I'm his.

He lived in an apartment that was clearly much more appealing than hers, although she didn't notice that until the next day. They did indeed make love to each other all night, a luxury she had seldom had, and finally fell asleep for two hours from sheer exhaustion. When they woke up he made very good coffee, and she drank it wearing his bathrobe. He had a bedroom and living room and full kitchen, and nice-looking funky furniture. He even had an upright piano. There were framed memorabilia on the walls of various groups, none of whom she had heard of, but that was normal because groups that didn't make it came and went like trains and changed their names all the time.

When she came out of the shower he was already on the phone. “Goodbye,” she said when he finally hung up. “I'm going to go home and write that song.”

“Good. And try to take a nap. I'll catch your show. Afterward we'll run over to your place and get some of your things so you can keep them here.”

He was managing her already. She didn't mind; she sort of liked it. They lingered at the door, kissing. “If you don't go now I won't let you go,” he said. “So go. See you tonight.”

Billie hummed all the way home. They were a couple already. Neither of them had said they loved the other, but it was all right—they didn't have to, they knew. That would come next.

Chapter Thirteen

F
ELICITY'S MOTHER
and her mother's lover, Jake, had been seeing each other for five years. They had a little anniversary celebration in Carolee's kitchen, and Felicity and her sister, who knew how long they had been together, suspected what it was because there was a bottle of champagne instead of the usual wine. Then, in their domestic world that had long ago ceased to make sense to them, they knew it to be true because their mother told them, bubbly and happy, that she and Jake were celebrating their “long and special friendship,” while warning them for the thousandth time that it was a secret.

Felicity thought it was disgusting of her mother and Jake to make an issue of their illicit anniversary in her father's house. Her mother was so open about it that Felicity wondered why her father was the only person in the world who didn't know. But there seemed to be one other person who didn't know: Jake's wife.

His wife's ignorance finally ended when she had Jake followed by a detective. After the detective told her all the particulars, Jake's wife called Carolee's husband, whom she had never met in her life, and told him. Thus it was that on a sharply cold and sunny winter afternoon Dr. Johnson, who had always been the most mild-mannered of men, came home unexpectedly from work with a gun in his hand and confronted his wife and her lover in his kitchen as Jake was finishing his usual delicious lunch.

It all happened so fast. Her father burst into the kitchen, her mother screamed, Felicity and Theodora screamed, and Jake stood up and knocked over his chair. Felicity could not believe that this angry man brandishing a huge blue-black gun was her father, the same man who had never had the guts to protect her from her mother's beatings. His face was so distorted with anger and pain that she could not bear to look at it, but she couldn't look at the gun either. She and Theodora fled to their rooms in fear and locked their doors. But the yelling and screaming floated upstairs and through the walls.

Felicity's heart was pounding. She wanted to listen and she didn't; she wanted to know everything and she was afraid to hear her mother die. If Jake died she wouldn't care. She hated him and always had. But she didn't want her father to commit murder. My father is going to kill my mother, she thought, and he'll go to jail, and I'll be an orphan. The thought of being totally abandoned made her begin to sob.

“I ought to kill you both,” her father's voice roared. “His
wife
had to tell me. That's how much I trusted you. You slut.”

“Oh please . . . no,” her mother was wailing.

“I'm sorry, I'm so sorry,” Jake was saying. “Please forgive me. I'm so sorry.”

“You were carrying on this disgusting affair for years, behind my back, while I was working so you could have a decent life . . .”

“I'm so sorry . . .”

“Get out of this house, you son of a bitch—now!” her father yelled. “And never come back!”

“Go!” her mother screamed. “Go!”

Felicity waited trembling for the sound of gunfire, which never came. What she did hear was the sound of the front door slamming, and when she went to her bedroom window she saw Jake running down the street through the snow, his suit jacket flapping. He had been in too much of a hurry to stop to take his coat. Felicity wondered if this was the end of it. She wished with all her heart that it was.

But of course it was not over. She could never underestimate her mother, and life was neither logical nor fair. The very next day her mother was on the phone with Jake, whispering and cooing and acting just as much in love as ever, making plans for a safer place to meet.

“I've made an arrangement with my friend Jeffrey,” she was saying. “He's going to let us have his apartment in the afternoons. No, he's not an old boyfriend, he's a friend. He's totally gay. No one will think anything of it if I go to his place. Oh you're so sweet, but no you don't have to pay him. It's all taken care of. That's what friends do.”

What friends did Felicity discovered a few days later. “You're coming with me today,” her mother told her. She was in a decent mood—not happy, not angry, just matter of fact, almost resigned.

“Where?”

“To my friend Jeffrey's apartment.”

“Is Theodora coming?” Felicity murmured.

“No, just you. She's fat and hopeless. You know you're my favorite. You're the one I love the best. You're getting to look like me already. You're going to be a beautiful woman. Come along now, cherub. We'll have a mother-daughter time.”

Felicity didn't know what to think. She knew she was her mother's favorite daughter and she liked that even though she felt guilty about her sister. But she also knew that being the favorite, the one who resembled her beautiful mother (which she could still hardly believe because she knew she could never be as beautiful as her mother), was why her mother picked on her all the time. She didn't know whether Carolee wanted her to be perfect or whether she was jealous of her daughter.

Jeffrey's apartment was in a small building that had been divided up into six apartments. It wasn't near where they lived and it seemed private. The apartment was very cluttered but obviously carefully put together, with dozens of little knickknacks arranged in groups everywhere, fake flower arrangements on the end tables, and a beaded curtain at the entrance to the bedroom, as if a woman lived there instead of a man. A woman with no taste. Her mother had the key.

“Why are we here?” Felicity asked.

“I have to clean Jeffrey's apartment in return for him letting me borrow it. You're going to help me.”

Felicity felt like crying. It was bad enough that her mother was cheating, but now she had to help her mother clean up the love nest. It wasn't fair; it was sadistic.

“Pick up a rag and that can of Pledge and make yourself useful,” her mother said, nudging her.

Her mother vacuumed and put clean sheets on the large bed, did a big pile of laundry in the washer-dryer, and then she washed the dishes and scrubbed the bathroom. Felicity had her own little chores: she had to dust the tables and all those stupid fussy things on them, one by one, and wipe off the counter tops, and finally clean the greasy stove with Comet. She supposed her mother made Jake's lunch here the way she had done at home, and she hated them both more than ever.

Why do I always have to be a part of this, Felicity cried out silently to her mother. Why do I have to be a witness, an accessory to what you're doing to my father? It's a crime to do that to your own child. If I was your lawyer I wouldn't even defend you. I'd have the judge make you stop.

But no one made her mother stop, so for two more years Felicity had to help her mother clean Jeffrey's apartment so she could carry on her affair with Jake. Felicity felt like Cinderella with the wicked stepmother. But she didn't want the prince to come and rescue her. She was afraid of men.

* * *

Felicity was fifteen and looked like a young woman now, not a little girl anymore. She was tall and pretty, with her mother's slim, sexy body. The years of ballet lessons had given her slender, curvy legs and arms, a tiny waist, and perfect posture. But her sister Theodora still was so overweight that it was unhealthy, and she was getting bigger by the day, no matter what Carolee did to try to control her. They had thought that when she reached puberty she might lose weight, but that obviously was not to be. Whereas Felicity dealt with the tensions at home by becoming emotional, her sister sedated herself with food. Felicity cried when she was depressed, when she was afraid, when something or someone hurt her. The only time Theodora ever came near tears was when she was forbidden dessert. To her that was deprivation, pain, and ridicule, and something that Felicity didn't understand. If she had been fat like Theodora, Felicity thought, she would have been glad to have people help her stay on her diet.

Their father seemed to think that he had scared off Jake for good. A few times in the beginning he had come home unexpectedly just to check up, but when no one was there he was lulled back into his fantasy world where work took precedence over the needs of his family. He helped people who were sick or injured physically, whom he was not close to, whom he sometimes didn't even know, and for this he was treated with respect. Whatever happened at home he was able to ignore.

Then that spring, when the trees were just beginning to show their fresh new leaves at last, when the air was soft and the days were lengthening into mellow evenings, her mother fell apart. Carolee took to her bed for fourteen hours at a time and grieved and wept, she stopped leaving the house, she couldn't eat, and she refused to dress or comb her hair. She was a pathetic sight.

“Jake left me,” she told her daughters. “It's over.”

“Why?” Felicity asked.

“He found another woman who's single. She's single, so he can leave his wife for her. That's what he wanted. I couldn't leave your father. I would have lost you and this house.”

You've told us that guilt-producing excuse often enough, Felicity thought. She was glad it was over, but still she couldn't help feeling sorry for her mother who was obviously suffering so much.

“I loved Jake,” her mother said, in tears. “I never loved your father. I've refused to have sex with him for years.”

“Why did you marry him?” Theodora ventured to ask in a whisper.

“I was young and stupid. I didn't know what I was doing. It was all a mistake.”

That summer their mother became gaunt. Her cheeks were hollow, her eyes swollen, her hair hung in her eyes like a witch's hair. She told them she had lost twenty-five pounds. The weather was hot but she was always cold, putting on her bathrobe over the nightgown she wore all day, pulling it close, shivering. Her sharp elbows and knees protruded, her forearms and calves were just bone and ligament.

What power men have over women, Felicity thought. Having a man makes you happy, and not having one makes you miserable. Her mother, who had been a frightening figure, was now reduced to this wreck, too weak to chase her daughter around the house and hit her. Imagine losing twenty-five pounds from grief over a lover, Felicity thought. I hope she doesn't die. . . .

But Carolee did not die, and when fall came she started fixing herself up and going out of the house again, and then she started to look better, and finally she was humming.

“I found someone new,” she told Felicity. “He knows all kinds of celebrities. He's much more cosmopolitan and sophisticated than Jake was. I'll take you along to meet him. We'll have tea.”

“You'll get caught,” Felicity murmured, not wanting to go.

“Not if you're there,” her mother said, smiling.

“How did you meet him anyway?”

“Through Jeffrey.”

“Jeffrey?” Felicity said. “Is this one gay?”

“Of course not. I should know.”

“You're not going to see him at Jeffrey's apartment, are you?” Felicity asked, dreading having to clean again.

“He has a place of his own,” her mother said happily. “He's single. He belongs just to me.”

So now began Carolee's elegant period, and every week Felicity had to join her mother and her mother's new lover, Ben, at Le Petit Grand tea room, where they pretended to be cultivated and English among the chink of china and the subdued conversation of old rich white people with nothing better to do. People stared at them and then looked away, pretending they weren't. Felicity had to keep reminding herself that they were staring because the three of them were black, and not because they knew her mother was having an affair.

Ben was very light-skinned, and he dressed as well as Jake had. Felicity had to admit that Ben was almost as good-looking as Jake, but she didn't like it when he pretended that her mother was his wife and that she was his daughter. Why don't you have a daughter of your own, she thought, annoyed and resentful. He told her he had never been married. He was obviously bad news, in any one of a number of ways. She hadn't decided which way, because she hardly knew him, but she was sure it would reveal itself in time.

She was so on edge and tired of her life. She couldn't wait to go away to college, to law school, to get started being a lawyer, to get away from her mother and these domestic dramas. When she was accepted at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, she knew that at last she was on her way.

It was the time of rebellion in America, and nowhere more than on the college campuses. It was also the time of emerging Black Pride. Students, more than anybody, hated Nixon, because they felt he was a tyrant; because he was against liberals, blacks, Jews, and students; and mainly because of the war, which they were convinced was immoral and wrong. They were against the pig government, and the pig cops. When the National Guard killed four unarmed students during an antiwar demonstration at Kent State in Ohio the other students all over the country thought, “It could have been us.”

Felicity's school was very politically active, with a large black student union. Now, for the first time, she began to look for her own racial identity. She went to meetings every week, to lectures on unity and Black Pride, read books to raise her consciousness, complained with the others about the lack of books on black history, and felt free to resent and speak against the white oppressor, the Man, instead of trying to be like him so he would accept her.

When she left home Felicity was still being forced to dress like her mother's little clone: matching bag and shoes, white gloves, pearls, every hair in place. As soon as she got to college, all that changed. She wore nothing but beat-up jeans and sexy little tops, and bought a few dashikis so she could dress like her African brothers and sisters. She tried in vain to grow a suitable afro. It was just soft curls, when she wanted impressive ethnic topiary, but no one seemed to mind. For the first time in her life she was popular, she had started to fit in somewhere at last.