Five Women (22 page)

She was overwhelmed by his apartment, a small penthouse in the sky, with the glittering city spread out below them, and a view of three bridges, strung with lights. Then when they went to bed she was even more stunned by what a good lover he was. Nothing in her experience had prepared her for this. He started at her perfectly pedicured toes and worked up slowly, slowly, teasing her until he gave her the best oral sex she had ever had. He didn't even let her do anything to him. He was hugely endowed, the biggest she had ever seen, filling up the emptiness of her body, her heart, her life, replacing it with pleasure. When he had finished with her she was besotted and lost. Older men are the best, she thought, the best. I want to marry him and live with him forever.

She chased him for a year, happy and serene when she was with him, anxious and miserable when she was not. She attended sports events with him and pretended to be as enthusiastic as he was; on the weekends that he was in the city she cooked wonderful meals for him in his apartment and helped entertain his friends; she played wife, she became, at least, good friend and confidante. He finally told her he was falling in love with her.

After that first night in bed together he had begun to let her do to him whatever he did to her, which made her feel more equal, but then later on he became the passive one, letting her do most of the work. But Felicity didn't mind; she loved him, she wanted him, and she didn't want him to get tired of her. She knew he was still seeing other women and she wanted to be better at sex than they were—better at everything. She wanted him to love her more and more, until he had to have her in the way she wanted—as his wife.

By then Russell was calling her Baby and she was calling him Slugger. Her nickname for him had a kind of sports reference, although Felicity was not unaware that in their choice of nicknames she was the little mild one and he was the big tough one. He was only her height, but he outweighed her by fifty pounds. He was as muscular and chunky as a bull; if he had wanted to he could have thrown her across the room, but he was Ferdinand the Bull who smelled the flowers. Secretly she named their unconceived children.

In June of their first year together he took her on their first trip, a ten-day cruise to the Greek islands and Italy. They flew to Nice, took the boat to Catania and drove to Taormina, looking down on the gorgeous Mediterranean seascape below. The tiny ancient town was hanging off the side of a cliff, with lemon trees and olive trees and flowers everywhere, the air redolent of their mixed perfumes. Their hotel was a twelfth-century monastery, where they made love, laughing at the incongruity of tourists like themselves indulging in carnal pleasures in the former dwelling place of the celibate. The narrow, cobbled main street of the town was full of restaurants and trattorias, and shops with chic, expensive designer clothes and leathers. Russell bought her almost anything she admired.

There were a great many unfinished houses. He told her that when a girl child was born the family began to build a home for her, as her dowry, but since they had seventeen or eighteen years to finish it the men of the family worked on it only on weekends or whenever they felt like it. He liked to plan trips, and did extensive research on everything; he knew as much as a tour guide. Every day she was with him Felicity became more convinced that he was the most exciting man she could ever hope to meet, and she wanted his life, she wanted him, and she couldn't tell the difference.

“Are you happy?” she asked him.

“I've never been so happy, Baby.”

“I'm happy too. Do you know what I wish for most in the world?”

“What do you wish for? I'll get it for you.”

“That you and I get married.”

The happy smile disappeared from his face in an instant and was replaced by a look of cold and superior amusement as if he had shut a door. It made her feel stupid, and it hurt.

“Don't you think there's a reason why I've never been married?” he said.

“Is there? What is it?”

“I'm used to a lot of women,” Russell said. “I don't know if I could be satisfied with only one.”

“I know you've been seeing other women,” she said carefully. “That's why I hate dating so much. You tell me you love me but I still have to share you.”

“If it makes you feel better, Baby, you're the only woman in my life right now.” She didn't believe it, but she nodded and pretended she did. “Marriage, though,” he continued, “is very serious business. Marriage means committing to an emotional and sexual connection of years and years.”

“Why don't you give me a chance?” Felicity said. “I know how to really work on making it exciting. You'll see.”

“You used the word ‘work'. That's the trouble with marriage. Why should it be work?”

“Because it is. But so is even one date. You and I try to please each other. Is that so difficult?”

“It's easy. Right now.”

“It would be easy too if we got married,” Felicity said. “Then maybe we could have a baby. I'd love that.”

“A pretty little baby who looks like you,” he said, smiling.

“I've always wanted children. Couldn't we just live together and see how it works?” Felicity asked. It made her feel humiliated to have to beg him like that, but she couldn't help trying.

“Oh, look there! Isn't that beautiful?” he said, grabbing her arm, pointing, changing the subject. Felicity did not pursue it because she didn't want to spoil their vacation.

At the end of their first year together, as if she had passed a test, or perhaps because he finally loved her enough, Russell finally let her move in with him.

“This is not a prelude to marriage,” he warned her.

“Oh, I understand.” But of course she paid no attention to his protest because she felt enormously encouraged. Time was not her enemy yet; she was still young and he was not.

The following year when she took her vacation they went to London and Paris for two weeks because she had never been there. He wined and dined her, he showed her the sights, he paraded her through museums, and one night, walking hand and hand with him along the Seine, high on champagne and melting with love, she proposed again—and again he said no. Felicity was beginning to realize that living with him didn't make her feel any safer than dating him had, although she'd thought it would. She knew he was still seeing other women—how else could he explain the weekend absences for “business” when he could easily have let her come along? They had been together for a long time, for him, and she wondered when he would finally decide to abandon her. If he married her it would be harder for him to leave.

She was still trying to get her mother to love her, even though she was an adult now, living in a distant city, with an independent life of her own. In spite of everything that had happened between them she wanted her mother to be her friend and confidante, the good, wise mother who had always popped up briefly to tantalize her but then suddenly turned on her, the stable mother who existed only in her dreams. At Christmas when she went home to Detroit to visit for a few days, Felicity asked her mother what to do about Russell.

“Cater to him in every way,” her mother said. “Make his life so convenient he won't be able to live without you.”

“I'm trying,” Felicity said in despair.

“Try harder.”

“I can't think of anything else to do.”

“You just have to know how to play the game right,” her mother said. “It's your fault if you can't get him.”

Why is everything always my fault? Felicity wondered. The pain in her heart was overwhelming. She shouldn't have gone home at all.

Chapter Nineteen

I
T IS SAID THAT FOUR O'CLOCK
in the morning is the time when most suicides occur. At four in the morning in that black night that was only day on the clock and certainly not in her life, Billie stumbled half-drunkenly around Toad's apartment looking for something to help her die. Pills were of course her first choice, but whatever he had collected he had taken with him on the road, and whatever she had collected she had already consumed over the last weeks of her deep depression. She was in no condition to go out anywhere tonight to score more.

She had grown up with guns around and was comfortable with them, but she didn't have one or it would have been easy. Knives made her sick. She could cut her food, but a knife slicing into living flesh in a movie made her turn away her eyes and shudder, and the thought of it happening in real life was more horrifying. She could much more easily have put a bullet through her heart than open an artery. She was not even confident that she could do a good job with a razor and a vein, and besides, Toad had taken his razor and hers was electric.

She thought of jumping off the top of his building. He lived in an apartment in a four-story brownstone in the Village, on a street of similar small houses, and if she missed the fire escapes and the trees that could break her fall she supposed she could do it. She had not been out of the apartment in two weeks. The liquor store and pizza parlor delivered, no matter how bad you looked, as long as you had the money. Somehow the thought of going out now, even if it was to meet her welcome death, was off-putting. She wanted to burrow into her hole and disappear. Fatal accidents happened to people all the time at home. The kitchen and bathroom were dangerous places. But the stove was electric, like her razor, and she didn't know how to drown herself. She was afraid some last moment of survival instinct, or perhaps just the agony of exploding lungs, would make her rise and gulp the air.

If you read the newspapers or watched television it seemed it was easy to be mugged, to die in a drive-by shooting, to be pushed onto the subway tracks by a lunatic, to be run over by a car, but when you wanted to commit suicide peacefully at home it was harder than she had thought.

Toad had cartons and cartons of old LP records, every one he had ever owned, tied up with rough, scraggly rope, pushed into closets, into corners. Billie blinked blearily and realized she had found what she had been looking for. Hanging would do just fine.

She went into the bathroom and pulled several times on the shower rod to be sure it would support her weight. Then she got the kitchen shears and sawed through the packing rope from several of the boxes and fashioned herself a nice noose. It was more like twine, but it would do. People hung themselves with neckties, with shoelaces. That was why when you were in jail and were suicidal, or even if you weren't, they took such things away.

She thought for a moment or two about leaving a note, but she had nothing to say to anyone anymore. Her songs would speak for her. She just wanted to be dead, to be out of this pain and humiliation, and finding her body would make that perfectly clear to anyone who had a question.

Billie stood barefoot on the cool bathtub ledge, the rope around her neck. She was taller then than the rod she would hang from, but she would leap. Unconsciousness would come quickly. She tried to think of an appropriate last thought, but the only one that came to her was inappropriate: it was of her parents, who had loved her and been good to her, and how sad they would be. I can't help it, Mama and Daddy, Billie thought. You couldn't protect me from this.

She flew out into the air to become an angel, and that was all she knew.

* * *

When she woke up she was on the tile floor in a pool of blood, and it was still dark. She didn't even know where the blood was coming from, although she knew she was bleeding, and she knew she was alive. Her head hurt so much from where she had hit it that she didn't even notice her neck. She slept there, on the bathroom floor, until wan light came in through the edges of the drawn blinds, and then she got to her feet and managed to get to the sink and the mirror.

She almost didn't recognize the woman she saw there. Her hair was dark and matted with blood, she had a black eye, and her neck was so swollen it went down from her jaw to her shoulders in a straight line like the enormous necks she had seen on some wrestlers. There was a ragged tear on the skin of her throat where the rope had wrenched it before everything came down, and she was afraid to touch it. It was scabby now and turning purple. Stupid bitch, she told herself. You couldn't even get that right. She leaned over the sink and threw up.

She didn't know if she should wash off the blood or try to get to a hospital. St. Vincent's was not far away. Now that she was alive, hung over, and sober, the attempted suicide and any thoughts of trying again seemed behind her. Maybe having survived was a sign. At least, having tried was a gesture of great drama and importance, a catharsis of a kind. She looked and felt so battered that her feelings about Harry and the agent and the music world that had betrayed her were numbed.

She put on her shoes and coat and went out into the street to get a cab. It was not until the driver turned around and asked, “Where to?” that Billie realized she could not answer him. She tried to speak and no sound came out at all.

The driver took her to the hospital anyway, she looked that bad. In terror and with no command of sign language and no inclination to write, she was not able to answer any of the questions they put to her in the emergency room of St. Vincent's, so they let her show them her identification and fixed up her wounds. It was too late, the resident said, to stitch her neck. There would be a scar. A cut like that had to be stitched right away, he said, or not at all. She was unable to talk because she had fractured her larynx. It would heal, and she would be able to speak again, although he wasn't sure if she would sound the same.

“Just don't try to sing,” he said, with a pleasant laugh, and Billie realized he didn't recognize her.

Just don't try to sing. . . .

She stayed in Toad's apartment and healed, being good to herself. She cut down the drinking to a normal amount, although for a while she didn't feel like drinking at all, and the only drugs she took were aspirin and a little grass. She hadn't been this healthy since she was that kid who had just come to New York, before it all started—the bad times and the good times and the bad. She had the shower rod repaired. She cleaned the apartment and kept the refrigerator stocked with nourishing food. She took walks around the city the way she had when she was twenty, but this time she couldn't think of any lyrics for her songs. Instead, she thought about her life, what she had done to herself and what she would do now. She waited for her speaking voice to come back and it finally did, but it was unrecognizable. She knew she would never sing again.

When you've reached the depths and paid your dues, Billie thought to herself, it's as if God had given you a second chance. If I give in to despair again I'll only be that foolish woman who was in love with Harry Lawless and lent him her life. At least I had my career when I could. That's something I'll always have: the experience and the glory and the memories. I destroyed any hope of having a singing career again when I killed my voice instead of myself, so all the worst things I could have imagined have already happened to me. Now I'm going to be happy. Now I'm going to be brave.

She thought about ways to make money that she might enjoy at the same time, and always her thoughts came back to what she had learned at her father's roadhouse. He had taught her well. She could open a small bar and restaurant here in New York City, and she would attract interesting people, maybe people in the music business, and when she was working there she wouldn't ever be alone or lonely. So now when she took her walks she looked for available spaces to open her place. She would call it Yellowbird, because that sounded hopeful, and it would be a monument to her mentor, Janis Joplin, because she didn't want it to be a mausoleum to her own past; that would be too morbid, and besides, most people hadn't ever known who she was, and she was sure that of those who had, plenty had forgotten.

She would need a loan, and for that she would need her father's advice. She was not ready yet to face her parents in her condition and have to make up lies. She would do that when she was better.

Toad came back between his road tours and she practiced her first lie on him. Her swollen neck had gone back to normal and she put on a turtleneck sweater to cover what she knew was going to remain an ugly scar. “The worst laryngitis,” Billie told him. “Shit, was I sick! I was in bed for a week.”

“It's going around,” he said. “You sound like hell.”

And I'm going to continue to sound like hell, Billie thought, and for the first time her throat hurt from choked-back tears, not injury, and she had to fight the wave of emotion that almost overwhelmed her because she had not been ready for it. I have a right to grieve, she told herself. It isn't weakness, it's natural. When Toad went out to the clubs with the rest of the band she pleaded illness so she wouldn't have to go with them, and when she was alone and safe she sobbed all night, deep, hurting sobs that left her well again. Even the timbre of the sobs sounded strange, but she was just going to have to get used to it.

A few steps forward, a few steps back, Billie thought. From now on I'm going to be nice to myself.

When she found the location she wanted for Yellowbird she flew back to Texas to see her parents. Her second lie was ready. “I had nodes on my vocal cords,” she told them. “The surgeon took them off. I'm still healing, but I won't be what I was. I don't want to be mediocre, I'd rather retire and do something else.” She told them her plans. “Daddy, the one thing you didn't teach me was how to get a loan.”

He took her to the bank where he had gotten his own financing, where he had done business all his years, and they trusted her. She knew it had been a good move to get the money here, not back in New York, not that she would have been turned down in New York, but here she was still a star.

“Aren't you hot, honey?” her mother said when Billie kept wearing her turtleneck.

“No,” Billie said. Of course she was hot, Plano was hot, but she never wanted her parents to know how she had betrayed them and their love by trying to kill herself instead of asking them for help. She was still their daughter and they would have thought they could have done something, but the truth was there was nothing they could have done. If she had been sane enough to take her grief home to the place where she was still cherished, she would have been too sane to get up on the rim of that tub with a shredded piece of packing rope around her neck.

“Well, I sure am,” her mother said, fanning herself.

Billie flew back to New York, rented herself her own cheap apartment, and got to work on her new career. When Yellowbird opened, her parents came to New York—their first trip to this city—to celebrate with her. Billie was wearing a black chiffon dress with a matching scarf wound around her neck, which was fine because it was autumn. Her speaking voice, of course, was still the same.

“You ought to sue that surgeon,” her father said. “He should have done a better job.”

“I'm sort of grateful to him,” Billie said. “I'm going to like my new life.”

“That is true,” her father said. “You can take it from me, that is so true.”

Yellowbird did well from the beginning, and Billie didn't know why any more than she had known why about the ups and downs of her music career. She was still dealing with the fickle public, but they liked her. People dropped in because it was a neighborhood place and was different, and then they told their friends. Out-of-towners came in, and a lot of men. They liked to talk to Billie and get occasional free drinks. Sometimes celebrities dropped by. They liked that it was hard to find. Night birds came because they liked the ambiance. The restaurant critics, when they got around to reviewing Yellowbird, gave her mediocre reviews for the food, but that was okay because one star for a convenient neighborhood restaurant really meant two because people were lazy. Besides, Billie had grown up on that food and she didn't know what they were talking about. Obviously her regulars agreed with her.

Yellowbird was everything she wanted. It was small and manageable and income-producing, and she was able to rent a nicer apartment in a new high rise around the corner so she could be close to work. After a while Billie felt confident enough about herself to have her first affair, with a man she met at the bar, and when that was over she had another. She realized she could still pick and choose. She doubted very much that she would ever fall in love again—she was too wounded and too independent—but sex and romance were fine, too. She felt she had lived an entire lifetime in the decade that had just passed, and she could hardly wait to see what the next decade would bring her.