Five Women (34 page)

“Well, can we have lunch at least? There's a cute little place down the street that I've fallen in love with. I'll take you there.”

“Sure,” he said. “But I need to talk to you now. I don't want to say this in a restaurant.”

Anxiety prickled. Maybe he was going to go away forever, and the flowers were a goodbye. Maybe, despite how healthy he looked, he had some terrible disease and wanted to tell her he might die.

Kathryn picked up the phone. “No calls until I tell you,” she said to the receptionist. Then she turned to her son. “All right, tell me,” she said, and tried to seem calm.

“I owe you an explanation,” Jim Daniel said. “I know I've been difficult in recent years, but I couldn't help it. There was a reason. I've wanted to tell you for a long time, but I just couldn't. When I went into detox I started therapy, as you know, and then I continued it afterward from time to time. I started to face things. Now I've turned the corner, I think. At least now I finally need to tell you so you'll understand why I'm the way I am.”

“If you're gay I don't care,” Kathryn said.

“I'm not gay,” Jim Daniel said with an ironic little smile.

“Then what is it?”

“I know you've been wondering why I hate Rod so much. I hate him more than you could even know. Well, you remember the accident, when I plowed his car into a tree.”

“Of course I do.”

“I wasn't driving,” Jim Daniel said. “Rod was. He was drunk.”

“He was
what
?” Kathryn said, stunned.

“No one knew. He begged me not to tell, he said he'd go to jail. He made me feel guilty because it was me that had wanted to go driving in the first place. Then he ran away, to get help he said, but he didn't come back. Remember, somebody in the street called the ambulance? Rod had been drinking at a business lunch and then he decided to let me take the car out with him because I kept pestering him. He was going to drive to a place where there was no traffic and let me practice.”

“Oh, my God,” Kathryn whispered.

From the very moment he had told her, she knew it was true. Jim Daniel, no matter how troubled he had been, had kept one good quality: He didn't lie. He only covered up. He had covered up for Alastair, too. . . . She felt the scream rising and choked it back. “Why didn't you tell anybody later?” she said. “Why did you let us blame you and be angry at you?”

“Rod never wanted us,” Jim Daniel said. “I knew that. We were too expensive. I guess I just wanted a father so badly, wanted him to care about me, that I didn't want to lose him. I didn't realize how angry I would feel when he let me get away with it.”

Kathryn thought about how hard she had fought to give her children that normal, happy home, and she was overwhelmed with rage and pain. She had not been able to protect her child after all. She had betrayed him. She had abandoned him to a careless, selfish, cowardly adult whom she had thought was good. What kind of a mother was she?

“Oh, Jim Daniel,” she said over the enormous lump in her throat, tears beginning to run down her face. “I'm so sorry, I wish you had told me.”

He shook his head.

“Didn't you trust me?” As soon as she asked that she knew it was a stupid question. Trust had nothing to do with it. He had needed something she could not give him.

“So now you know why I preferred not to tell you in a restaurant,” Jim Daniel said, turning the subject away from his feelings to hers. He handed her a tissue from the box on her desk. “I was just a kid and he took advantage of me and my need to have him approve of me. I thought I loved him, but then I started to hate him and I guess I always will.”

“Of course you hate him,” Kathryn said. In one devastating instant, she hated Rod too.

“Are you going to tell Rod?” Jim Daniel asked.

“Of course. I want to see how he tries to defend himself.”

“But you believe me?”

“Of course I do,” Kathryn said.

After she had composed herself enough to go out in public they left for lunch. He was hungry and she was too shattered to think of what else to do. She took him to her new favorite place and asked for a quiet table in the back, so that no one would greet her and force her to pretend that she was all right. She was aware that Jim Daniel was relieved that he had finally told her. In that small way she had taken some of his pain.

She had a stiff martini. He had a Coke. Kathryn was glad to see he was dry again and hoped it would last. She couldn't eat. While Jim Daniel ate she tried to catch up on his life since she had seen him a year ago.

“Where are you staying while you're in Boston?” she asked.

“At a motel.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Yes, but we're having some problems, so I came here alone. I got here last night. I wanted to see you and then I'll go home.”

“Where is ‘home'?”

“I'm back in Minnesota, but I don't think I'll stay. I'd like to try Alaska. It's supposed to be peaceful there.”

“Lots more men than women, though,” Kathryn said.

“She'll come with me if I want her to,” Jim Daniel said.

“Your therapist is in Minnesota?” she asked carefully.

“Yes. Do you remember how when I was growing up we didn't know anybody in therapy? It was for weaklings and crazy people. I had to get arrested to go. But it helped.”

“Maybe you should continue,” Kathryn said, although she had never had any use for therapy either until now.

“We'll see.”

“I'm going to divorce Rod,” Kathryn said. “I can't live with him another day now that I know what he did.”

“I always knew you stayed with him for us,” Jim Daniel said.

“How did you perceive that?”

“I just did.”

They stayed in the restaurant a long time. She called her office and said she was going to the showrooms and wouldn't be back that afternoon. After their lunch Jim Daniel drove to the airport. This time he gave her his phone number and address, but she felt a deeper ache at their parting than she ever had before.

“Don't wait so long to see me next time,” she said.

“I won't.”

When they hugged each other goodbye, she felt his prosthesis hard against her back.

She went to the house and waited for Rod to come home from the office, sitting in their den in front of the fireplace, next to the wall of books, the shelves of her children's school awards, their framed high school and college diplomas (except for Jim Daniel's, who had none), the family photos of holidays and happy occasions, in her perfect suburban home. She drank some wine and smoked half a pack of cigarettes. Then she heard Rod's key in the door.

“Hi, honey,” he said, coming into the den and turning on the TV. She picked up the remote control and snapped it off. He looked annoyed. “What's the matter with you?” he asked.

“I saw Jim Daniel today,” Kathryn said.

“Oh? He's back?”

“Yes. We had a long talk. He told me what really happened the day of the accident.”

Rod didn't say anything.

“You aren't going to deny it?” Kathryn said, surprised.

He just looked at her, his face pale, his shoulders a little hunched as if guarding himself from a blow.

“What did he say?” he asked finally.

“That you were driving. That you were drunk. That you made him take the blame and you ran away. You left him alone! He could have died. You made him lie. He was just a
kid
!”

“Would you believe me if I said that didn't happen?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

He poured himself a scotch with shaking hands and drank it. “You'd believe him, the bad seed, before you'd believe me?”

“You haven't said anything to convince me,” Kathryn said. “And now a lot of things make sense that didn't before.” Their glances locked.

“I knew someone would call an ambulance,” he said finally.

“Well, whoop-de-do. What a hero.”

He drank another shot of scotch and seemed calmer now, almost relieved. When he lit a cigarette his hands were very still. Kathryn looked at those large hands with their neatly manicured nails, imagined them on the wheel, thought of Jim Daniel's mangled body in the crushed car, and wanted to kill.

“You weren't afraid you'd go to jail,” she screamed. “You were afraid you'd lose your insurance, you cheap bastard.”

“Believe what you like,” he said.

She realized then that he had been waiting for years for her to find out, and now whatever he'd had to fear was going to happen . . . or not. He knew she wouldn't tell the police about something that had happened over ten years ago; she wouldn't kill him. He thought she might not even leave him, although if she did leave him he wouldn't care. He didn't love her the way he had seemed to in the early years of their marriage, and she had never loved him at all.

“I want a divorce,” Kathryn said.

“All right,” he said, and he sounded relieved.

What he meant, she realized, was: Is this all? Am I free from any further punishment? She didn't want to let him off so easily, but she didn't know how to hurt him enough to make up for the way he had hurt her son, and her. “I want you to go,” she said.

That night Rod went to a hotel, and the next day Kathryn hired a divorce lawyer.

She told Chip and Stephanie and Gaby what Rod had done and they were surprised. She thought they would turn on him, but they continued to like him, and see him, and she wondered what she had done to raise such desperate children who insisted on protecting whatever father figure came into their lives.

Jim Daniel quit therapy before he was finished and moved to Alaska with a different girlfriend. After a while Kathryn got a call from him, and he was drunk again. She was angry at him for backsliding, but, more strongly, she felt anger and pain over the cause. No matter what she tried to tell herself, she still felt it was her fault, that she hadn't been enough for him. The feeling never left her.

Finally she sought out a therapist for herself. The doctor, a youngish woman about her age, asked her about her own childhood, and Kathryn told her. As she did, unaccustomed feelings of rage and sorrow flooded her, and she began to choke. The therapist
wanted
her to feel sorry for herself! She never went back.

That was the end of therapy for her, as far as she was concerned. She was convinced that if she dwelled on the past she would be miserable. She had known too many people who did, and it never did them any good. She would pull herself together on her own.

In fact, she remembered less and less about her childhood, except for the good parts. There were whole gaps in her recollections these days, and she was glad. The one memory that never stopped haunting her, though, was one she had only gotten second-hand. Whenever she thought about how Rod had betrayed her son's love she still blamed herself, although she had no real reason to do so. A mother should not fail her children, Kathryn believed; what use is she on this earth if not to keep them safe?

After a while, she stopped thinking about that day when Jim Daniel had told her. If she did not put it out of her mind, at least she pushed it aside. She lived in the present. There were so many things in life to enjoy—friends, people she met, her work, a fine day, a strong game of tennis, a good meal, a long walk, a show. Anyone who met her would only think that she was an extraordinarily happy person.

But every time Kathryn smelled marigolds, her eyes filled with tears.

Chapter Twenty-nine

E
VE SAT
at her daughter Nicole's high school graduation ceremony and looked around at the other parents. They were mostly in twos, like the animals in Noah's Ark, and she wondered if they were divorced couples who had reunited for this one day with the child they shared, or if they were still together after all these years. She did not like that she was alone. She knew it was her own fault, that she had never had any interest in finding another husband, but she didn't like that the men she had been involved with for a year or two or three had all gone away, thus leaving her uncomfortable and exposed on important occasions like this one.

Then she remembered that having brought Nicole up by herself was something to be proud of, so why should she even think of sharing this day of glory with any guy who had just come along for the ride? She was a single mother, she had worked hard, she was a feminist, if only by accident. She had been an independent woman long before it had a name or a cause.

Eve had not been able to talk Nicole out of inviting her grandmother to come to New York for her graduation. The truth was that Eve was ashamed to be seen with her mother now that she looked so flashy. So now her mother was sitting next to her, resplendent in a white beaded dress, her pink hair piled high, and a new, disgusting addition: her pink painted nails so long they curved under at the ends. Eve pretended she didn't know her.

Eve looked at the graduating class on the stage. Her daughter was definitely the cutest one, with Eve's small, even features, large eyes, and abundant hair, but not her heat or anger. She had no idea where Nicole had gotten her sweetness. Certainly not from anyone on her side of the family. Medusa's daughter had grown up to be a Pre-Raphaelite maiden.

Nicole had determined she really did want to be an actress, so now she was going to chase her dream full time. That meant Eve wouldn't have to pay for college, which was a great relief. She wanted acting classes, and Eve had told her she would have to get a job and pay for them herself. Eve didn't know why Nicole wanted them anyway, when she herself had done very well without any. Nicole had enrolled in the Lee Strasberg Institute, and hoped later on someday to get into the Actors Studio. Eve wished her luck. Her daughter had always had two sides to her; the winsome extrovert and the serious part, and Eve knew if Nicole took after her she would get what she wanted.

Not that she herself had really gotten what she wanted, or what she felt she deserved. After they had written her out of
Brilliant Days
she'd had to face the fact that she had been fired. No one had ever liked her there, not for a moment of the five years she had been on it. She was never able to get another soap opera role, and eventually even she heard the gossip. Eve Bader is too difficult. Eve Bader is a pain in the ass.

Of course she told everyone that she had left by choice to pursue more serious work in the movies and even, although she was better than that, in television. She said it so often that eventually people accepted it. They may have thought it was a stupid career move to leave
Brilliant Days
, but they understood her need. Actors had themselves written out of TV all the time to try to get into films. When Eve told people the story she wanted them to believe she actually believed it herself. Life was a kind of acting. And then, as it always did, the public forgot her, forgot Xenia, her character, who had died somewhere in the South American jungle, the venue of the soap-opera writer's last resort.

After the graduation Eve had offered to take Nicole to dinner with her grandmother, and after dinner Nicole's friends were having a party and she was going to go there and stay over with a friend. She had a lot of friends, far more than Eve had ever had. Nicole already had a job as a waitress, starting tomorrow night. She was going to continue to live with Eve until she could afford to get her own apartment.

“You can stay with me and pay rent,” Eve had offered.

“No,” Nicole said. She gave Eve a peculiar look. “Most parents would be glad to have their children live with them.”

“Which means what?”

“Which means if I have to pay rent I'd rather live by myself.”

Eve was annoyed at this ingratitude. “I never had it easy and why should you?” she snapped.

“I don't want it easy,” Nicole said.

“That's not what it sounds like.”

“No,” Nicole said. “I just want to know I'm loved.”

“Since when does freeloading mean being loved?” Eve asked.

“See, that's the way you are all the time. You never say you love me.”

“I'd like to love you with a machete,” Eve said.

“Thanks, Mom.”

“I love you,” Eve said reluctantly, because she didn't mean it.

“I love you too,” Nicole said, “but the only reason I can think of why is because you're my mother.”

How extraordinary, Eve thought. Being a mother put you into an exclusive club in which you were loved just because you were there. “What about all the sacrifices I've made for you all your life?” Eve said.

“I know. You're always reminding me.”

“I have to.”

“I can't win with you,” Nicole said. “If I try to tell you I respect you, you turn it into a fight.”

“Nobody wins with me,” Eve said, “and don't you forget it.”

Who wanted children, anyway? She regretted the day Nicole was born, but sometimes, despite her resentment, she felt her unexpected love for her daughter coming through her defenses, a kind of leakage of the heart, and it made her feel so weak, so vulnerable, so frightened that she had to breathe deeply and meditate it away. What if something happened to Nicole? What if she died? If you let yourself become a victim of your feelings, loved someone too much, that person had too much power over you, and you could be devastated by a betrayal, by a loss.

I have the power
, Eve thought. It was almost her mantra. Sometimes when she meditated, which was an activity she had begun a few years ago, she actually used the words.
I have the power.
It was infinitely reassuring.

She considered herself lucky that her own waitressing days were behind her. She had always saved her money carefully, even during the time that it was flowing in, and now when she went for an audition Eve knew there was no hint of desperation about her, only talent and ambition. She hadn't made it to Broadway yet, although she had done off-Broadway, and she had done quite a few small one-shots on various TV series, which she preferred to refer to as guest star roles. She supposed if someone offered her a recurring part she would take it, even though her mind was still set on her movie break, and she went to every audition her agent set up. Sometimes the agent sent her under protest but gave in because Eve wouldn't stop calling her.

“If they said I'm wrong for the part let them see me anyway,” Eve would insist. “If they have their minds set on some stereotype then let them think of another part in the future that
is
right for me.” Eve never thought she was wrong for any part. She knew she could do whatever they wanted, if they would only tell her what it was. Stay in there. Fight.

She was thirty-five now, too old to be considered young anymore in her world, but not old enough to have to complain the way the older actresses did that there was nothing for them. When she had to tell people that she had a daughter who had already graduated from high school she always added quickly that she had been younger than Nicole was now when Nicole was born.

“I was twelve,” Eve would say, and laugh. She never told anyone how old she was, and thought how age discrimination was another burden women had to bear, and how unfair it was.

After Nicole had been studying acting for a year she got an agent, and quickly ended up with a small role in a Broadway play. Eve went to the opening night and to the party afterward, where she spent her time introducing herself to theater people she thought might help her own career. When the
New York Times
review came in, Nicole was singled out for her “luminous presence.” Eve was proud of her, but she also couldn't help feeling jealous. It had happened so fast, and had been so easy for her!

Nicole had a boyfriend now, Eddie, and moved into her own apartment with him. Eve remembered her own early, struggling days in Hollywood, with the specter of her financially dependent baby always looming in the background, and although she felt she was above self-pity she nevertheless couldn't help feeling sorry for herself. When Nicole's show put up its closing notice after only five months she called Eve to tell her. Eve was concerned, but she also felt a little bit of vindictiveness sneaking into her heart. An actress was supposed to have disappointments.

“I told you not to take on the burden of your own apartment,” Eve said. “Now what are you going to do? I hope Eddie has enough money to support you.”

“I thought you were going to invite me back,” Nicole said, and laughed in a phony way.

“Not with him. You're an adult now. I'm not running a hotel, unless you both want to pay rent.”

“Oh Mom, you're so full of love.”

“Well, what
are
you going to do?”

“I'll get another part somewhere,” Nicole said. “In the meantime I'm a terrific waitress.”

“You have a good attitude,” Eve said.

“I got it from you.”

“Oh?” She was flattered.

“I've always wondered why I'm so well adjusted with you for a mother,” Nicole said. “You never brought me up; I had to invent it. But I always knew to take the good from you and learn from the bad. Grandma taught me that.”

“About me?” Eve said, insulted. “She said that about me?”

“She said that about life.”

“She never told me anything about life,” Eve said. “All she did was plunk me in front of a television set.”

“And widen your horizons.”

“You are greatly mistaken if you think TV ever widened anybody's horizons,” Eve said.

“You told me it did all the time,” Nicole said. “When you had me watch.”

Why did she and her daughter always have to get into these arguments? “‘How sharper than a serpent's tooth is a thankless child,'” Eve said. “I gave up my career for you.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Do you think I wanted to be in a soap? I did it for the money, for you. I was never lucky enough to have just myself to think about, the way you are.”

“I can't continue this discussion,” Nicole said. “I only called to tell you the news about my show before you read it in the newspaper.” She hung up.

The next day she called again, of course. Nicole kept coming back like a yo-yo with a very short string. They argued and hung up on each other more often than not, but afterward Nicole was always there, full of news, wanting to share her life, never apologizing for being irritating the day before. No matter how often Eve told her to get lost, Nicole was convinced that they had an unbreakable bond, and Eve began to wonder if it wasn't true, even though she wasn't glad about it.

Only a month after her show closed Nicole's agent got her a part in a movie. Just another thing, Eve thought, to make me feel how hard my life has been. Eddie didn't go to Hollywood with Nicole, because he was in graduate school at NYU, but when she came back to him after the shooting was over she was the same unaffected person she had ever been. Of course, Eve thought, the movie isn't out yet. Just wait.

It was a nice little movie, about four young friends, and although after it opened it didn't stay around very long, Nicole got excellent reviews. They called her “a refreshing newcomer.” By then she was already in another play. Nicole was one of those lucky actresses who would always work, Eve decided. Even if she never became a star, which more than likely she wouldn't, she wouldn't have to worry either.

She stayed with Eddie for a long time. “I want it to work,” Nicole told Eve. “It's very important to me that I have a relationship that lasts.”

“Not if it's bad you don't,” Eve said.

“There are problems, sure, there always are, but overall it's very good. We're both working on it. Neither of us had a normal home life growing up, so we have no example to follow, but we're making it up as we go and learning a lot.”

“What do you mean you didn't have a normal home life?” Eve said. “What did you want?
Leave It To Beaver? Father Knows Best?
You watched too many reruns. Those were only normal lives in people's dreams.”

“You know what I mean,” Nicole said.

Nicole stayed in her play for a year, and then her agent got her another part in a movie. This time the publicity mills started to grind. There were glamorous pictures of Nicole, whose hair was now red, and interviews in magazines. They mentioned Eddie, who was working for a publisher, and the sheepdog named Melvin the young couple now had, and they mentioned Eve, and referred to her years as Xenia in
Brilliant Days.
Eve was thrilled to see her name in print.

“This will do it!” Eve told her when she called.

“That's what my press agent says, if I can believe him.”

“I mean for me,” Eve said. “People are going to see that. Didn't you think it was a nice plug for me?”

“Sure, Mom. That's why I put it in.”

“We should get parts in a movie as mother and daughter,” Eve said, excited. The adrenaline was beginning to flow, as it always did when she made plans. “I used to take you to the set and try to get you written into
Brilliant Days
, and it would be a great publicity gimmick if we worked together now that you're grown up.”

“It would,” Nicole said, but she didn't sound excited about it—more neutral, as if it had little chance of happening.

“Who do we talk to?”

“I'm not that famous,” Nicole said. “I just play the parts and I'm lucky to get them. I don't tell people what to do.”