We were meeting at Jezebel’s, a West Side restaurant that serves soul food and southern cooking. Jezebel has draped antique laces and linens everywhere in her restaurant—over the piano, over standing screens and sofas, on the walls. When you enter the room, you feel you are entering the boudoir of a grande dame who lives in some extraordinary nineteenth-century Spanish-moss-hung mansion in a place like Sea Island, where everyone is lolling about, leisurely sipping mint juleps and listening to jazz piano.
Everyone but Mary was already there when I arrived, sitting at a round table in the back, and several of them waved as I walked in. Like all women’s groups, it was voluble and explosive with laughter, and hearing them, I smiled. I was just seated when Mary came in. Mary is tall and slender, with extraordinary hair: it is stark white, and has been since she was in her early twenties. With her young face and white hair, she is a striking-looking woman, and men stop her in the streets, or in stores or restaurants, just to tell her how beautiful she is. I once asked her how she expected to achieve anonymity, given the way she looks.
As she neared our table, everyone cried, “Happy birthday!” and Mary paused and preened, showing off a new satin patchwork-quilt jacket with black lapels. She looked gorgeous as she took her place at the head—well, of course it was a round table—at the symbolic head of our table.
There was busy conversation, ordering, sipping of drinks, and much laughter. Flanked by my friends, I caught up on Babette’s news, then turned to Mary and got hers, then talked past Mary (who was talking past me to Babette) to Naomi. Socially practiced as I am, I was able to smile and laugh, despite my raw heart, which I tried to ease by ordering southern fried chicken with collard greens and mashed potatoes—the kind of food that is Jezebel’s specialty. Mary ordered pork chops, another southern specialty, but most of the women stuck with fish and vegetables. I declare, it is no fun to go out to dinner with healthful eaters.
Dotty had a part in a new play that she felt had some chance of surviving for a few months on Broadway, a good part, she said, one that gave her a chance to show off.
“I play a real bitch, a seductress with a heart of lead.” She laughed.
“Have you ever met anybody like that?” Babette asked. “In real life?”
“A seductress. You mean a whore?” Hazel interrupted.
Dotty admitted she would indeed play a prostitute.
“Are there any other parts for women these days?” Hazel asked the table at large.
“No, I want her to answer Babette’s question,” Mary urged.
Dotty thought. “Actually, no. Come to think of it.”
“So how can you play it? What do you use for a model?”
Dotty shrugged. “All the other cold bitches you’ve ever seen in the movies, the theater…”
“I know a few you could use,” Hazel said bitterly.
“Speaking of unbelievable characters”—Dotty laughed again—“what about all Hermione’s heroines? Have you ever met women like them in real life?”
The table roared, “Oh, God! Oh, yes!”
“We’re
all
Hermione’s heroines,” Mary cried. “Tenderhearted, innocent, trusting…”
“Easy prey for the passionate, gorgeous, aggressive, masculine hero…”
“Or villain…”
“Who wants only to get us in bed!”
“Nonsense,” Enid said. “Once he’s past thirty, he doesn’t give a fig for bed. Or if he does, he just wants you to give him head. He doesn’t want to fuck you! He may not even be able to! What he wants is for you to take care of him. Fix his dinner and do his laundry and tell him he’s a good boy. Just like mommy did. The sex is secondary.”
“Do his translating for him…” Hazel grinned at Enid.
“But don’t ask to have your name on the title page,” Naomi said grimly.
Enid’s eyes welled with tears.
I did not want to sit through the latest Julian story, and Enid always had one. They could not seem to get divorced, those two: year after year they were in the courts, still fighting about one thing or another. Enid was in a constant state of outrage. I decided to change the subject. But the conversation was too thick and the laughter too loud for me to get everyone’s attention, so I just spoke in a normal voice to whoever could hear me. “I met a man.”
The entire table stopped dead. Seven pairs of eyes stared at me. “You did?” Mary asked sweetly.
“Does he have a job?” Hazel muttered.
“How is he in bed?” Naomi wanted to know.
“Is he married?” Enid said anxiously.
“Yes. Yes, I don’t know, and no,” I answered.
“You don’t know?”
“We haven’t made it to bed. It’s a new relationship.”
“How new?” asked Leni.
“How’s five days?”
“That’s new.”
“And you still haven’t gotten to bed? What’s wrong?” Babette barked.
“Well, that’s the problem. He acts eager to see me, he’s asked to see me every day this week, but then he runs off after an hour. Or he invites other people along! Or he cancels!”
At this, the table exploded with talk. Everyone had had a similar experience and was recounting it to whomever she could get to listen. I put my head in my hands. Mary stroked my back.
“Patience, sweetie,” she said. “So what’s his name?”
In relief, I turned to her and poured out every detail of the sorry romance, including its effect on my bodily processes. She listened intently, laughing ruefully, stroking me, lavishing affectionate phrases on me. “Poor baby,” she concluded.
Dotty had been listening too. “Yes. Poor baby,” she said caressingly.
“And now,” I moaned, “his conference is over, and he’s going to go back to Louisville, probably, and I don’t know if he’ll come back north or if he’ll ever call me again or not, and I don’t know what this week was all about! I don’t know what to expect, I’m sick with it, my stomach’s in a knot, my heart feels like it’s in a vise…”
“Ambivalence, ambivalence,” Hazel said angrily. “I’m sick to death of ambivalent men. All the while we lived together, Terry insisted he couldn’t commit, said he didn’t want to disappoint me the way he had his wife. Of course, that didn’t keep him from mooching, living on me like a parasite. Jesus, I even bought his beer! Five years he spends writing the Great American Novel! I’m subsidizing him, he says; when it’s published he’ll pay me back. So what does he do? How does he shaft me? He doesn’t finish it! Abandons the great American crock of shit and gets a job. And as soon as he gets a job, he walks out on me! So I say get rid of this creep, fast,
f-a-s-t,
ASAP! That’s my advice.”
There was a smattering of applause, and Babette opened her mouth. When Babette spoke, there was no possibility that anyone else could get a word in, so everyone fell silent.
“I don’t agree. You really have it for this guy, don’t you, Hermione?”
I nodded.
“Well, how often does that happen? I mean, there’s sex as fun and games, and then there’s passion, and passion is rare. It’s certainly been rare in
my
life.”
“What’s rare?” Mary asked. “Once every five years? Ten?”
“Once. That’s it. Once. But it was forever.”
Every head turned to her in silence. Everyone gazed at her in awe.
“Well, that’s you, Babette. That’s Bob. You think that’s not what we all want?”
“Yeah. How many times have I told myself, This is it! I’m in love and it’s forever, like Babette and Bob.”
“Come on! It can’t be that unusual. You have to work at it.”
“And how do you work at it, Babette? By going off to campaign, by spending half your life in airplanes, by spending the rest reading legislation, drafting legislation…”
Babette did them the honor of considering their argument.
Dotty giggled. “Well, I don’t know about anybody else, but I’ve felt real passion at least half a dozen times.”
Mary groaned, echoing her: “Half a dozen.”
“Passion, shmassion—give me a guy who’s good company, buys his own beer, and helps support the household, and I’ll be content,” Hazel muttered.
“You and most other women,” said Enid.
“Speaking of other women…” Naomi held up her hand. “I want to tell you a true story. It happened to my friend Roz.” She turned to me. “You know her, don’t you, Hermione? Roz Walker, an editor at Saint Swithin’s?”
“Yes,” I said, and Enid piped up, “Oh yes, very slender dark woman? Didn’t she have cancer?”
“Yes. She had breast cancer. The whole time she was sick, her husband treated her horribly—he blamed her for getting cancer, and he expected her to do everything in the house even during her chemotherapy, although she was sick as a dog. So she left him and stayed in a little sublet on Sullivan Street, just one room. So then he said they were separated, and he refused to have his health insurance pay for her treatment. Anyway, she was in bad shape, financially, psychologically, physically, you name it, even after the cancer went into remission. So to help her recover, she went to a cancer therapy group. And she met this guy Allan Luykens, who was recovering from prostate cancer and whose wife had been treating
him
horribly during his sickness—well, I guess she’d always treated him horribly. They started by being sympathetic to each other and ended by falling in love. They decided to get married.
“So they initiate divorce proceedings, and Roz goes apartment hunting. They need a bigger apartment because Allan is staying with his mother on Staten Island and Roz is living in one room. She finds a real estate agent who knows the whole market, East Side, West Side, downtown, and who takes her all over. She asks Roz why she needs a new apartment. So Roz says she’s getting married. So this woman is surprised, thrilled—you know: ‘Oh, you’re getting married again, how wonderful! How lucky!’ Stuff like that. ’Cause she knows Roz has two grown children, knows she’s been married before. The real estate agent has grown kids too, she’s also divorced. It’s one of their grounds of connection.
“But she keeps asking Roz about the guy she’s marrying. How did she meet him, where did she meet him, what’s he like? Of course, Roz parries the question. She doesn’t feel like telling a complete stranger that both she and Allan had cancer. But the woman refuses to let up, so Roz finally confesses she met him at group therapy.
“‘Oh!’ says the woman, standing stock-still. ‘Group therapy! What kind of therapy?’
“‘Well,’ Roz says slowly, ‘cancer therapy.’
“‘Really!’ says the woman. ‘Where does it meet? What day? What time?’” Naomi looked around at the silent table. Mary had her head in her hands; Enid was staring at a teaspoon.
“So,” Hazel challenged her.
“Women are really desperate. I think if Hermione has strong feelings for this guy, she should hang in there.”
“‘A good man nowadays is hard to find,’” Dotty sang. “Or, as the immortal Mae West put it, ‘A hard man nowadays is good to find!’”
Naomi was not amused. “Hell, I’m not talking about
good. Any
man is hard to find.”
“You think the good ones are all dead?” Mary asked sadly.
“Or never born,” Enid said.
“Or gay,” Hazel snapped.
Aha, I thought. So that was the story with the last guy, Thomas. I’d guessed as much.
“Or married, I suppose,” Dotty said. We all knew her last lover had been married and had promised to leave his wife for the whole six years they were together. He did, too, finally. For a twenty-two-year-old dancer.
“Who’s married? Hardly anybody’s married,” Naomi said.
“The only married couples I know are gay,” said Dotty.
“Well, you’re in the theater,” Hazel explained.
Mary stretched languidly. “I think Hermione should stick it out for a while too, but not because she’s desperate. You’re not desperate, are you, sweetie?”
I considered. “I thought I had a happy life until I met him. I thought I had a great life, the life I’d always wanted. It’s just that meeting him triggered something. You know—the happily-ever-after button? And what is so upsetting is discovering how powerful it is. After all these years. After all those husbands and even more lovers…I never had this fantasy before. I don’t recall having it before…”
Moans arose from various spots at the table.
“I thought I wasn’t subject to such an absurdity. I thought that if I ever
had
been, I was past it now. If I did have it in the past, I didn’t know it. I’ve certainly never had these feelings so powerfully, so irresistibly. I tell myself it’s because I’m old. You know, when you’re twenty or thirty or forty, it’s really hard to imagine you can love someone for the rest of your life. But at sixty, you can, because when you’re sixty, ‘as long as you both shall live’ doesn’t seem all that long. It’s thinkable! ‘As long as you live’ may be only five years—”
Shouts of “No, not you!” and “Twenty-five at least!” rose in the air.
I laughed and held up my hand. “Thank you, my friends, but you know what I mean. At this point in my life, I can conceive of loving just one person for the rest of my life. And I find myself fitting George into the rest of my life as comfortably as a bunioned foot in a nice broken-in running shoe. I have daydreams about us puttering around together like a couple of old folks, sitting in front of the TV or on the swing on my porch at Sag Harbor…” I dropped my head in my hands, mock-weeping.
Laughter fragmented the group.
“I wonder if I still have that fantasy,” Leni said softly.
“You have Grant.”
“Oh, I know. But you never have these fantasies about the man you have a relationship with, the one you live with. They’re always about someone new and unattainable, don’t you think? The man sitting at the table across the room. Once you attain it, the fantasy gives way to something else, something far less romantic. Contentment, maybe, but not romance. Maybe just habit. There has to be a reason why I’m on Prozac.”
I swung my head to look at her. Prozac? The happiest woman I know? I didn’t feel I could ask about it just then…
“I mean, maybe the fairy tale is intended just to help us get through the days,” Leni concluded sadly.
“You’re supposed to be my friends,” I protested. “You’re supposed to help me!”
“Yes, but you’re giving us all nightmares,” Dotty argued. “If it could happen to you, the Sophisticated Lady of this group, if you could fall into this…what is it?—myth? fantasy? delusion?—then what hope have we? Maybe one of these days we’ll all discover that deep down we are waiting for Prince Charming and believing that when we find him, he’ll make us happy forever after.”