Nine Women (16 page)

“I suppose,” Angela went on ruminatively to her martini, “your Hart-inclined customers see you there and think you are one of them. And your Reagan customers aren’t there to see that you are not one of
them
.”

“What?” Vicky frowned slightly. “We are going to a Reagan lunch, I forget the exact date, but it’s in the book.”

“Behold the devious mind of a retailer.” The alcohol was filtering into her blood now. A pleasant warmth began in the pit of her stomach and spread upward, washing over her ears like some soft tropical sea. She sat down and kicked off her shoes.

Vicky went on thumbing through the mail, opening and sorting quickly. For a fraction of a second she hesitated over one letter, then with an impatient gesture tossed all remaining ones aside.

Oh, oh … Angela watched the quick flip of the small hand, the flash of rings … what’s this? That letter annoyed her very much. What do we have here?

“Angela, I asked you about the curtains.”

“Open them if you like,” Angela said, wiggling her toes.

“I was asking if
you
wanted them. I don’t. I don’t like this time of day at all. The way the light hits the windows and they shine back like blank eyes, like eyes with cataracts. You know that.”

“No, I didn’t know that. I don’t think you ever said that before.”

“I hate this time of day.”

“A martini?” Angela suggested again.

“I’ll get it,” Vicky said. “You put in too much vermouth.”

“Ah well.” Angela lifted her glass and toasted the ceiling. Things were going to be very difficult, but at least Vicky was talking. Once last year she had not said a word for three days. The absolute silence had eaten into Angela’s nerves, though she’d managed to maintain her calm indifferent exterior. She’d even considered some kind of record keeping, some sort of cryptic numbers on a calendar. But Vicky might have found it, might have guessed. And that would have hurt her—she thought of herself as even-tempered and easygoing.

Angela whistled at the ceiling, a bit of the Colonel Bogie march. I wonder if I could stand another one of those, she thought, another record-breaking tantrum.

Vicky tossed herself into the opposite chair. She’d made her drink carelessly. Her lavender dress showed a broad pattern of splash marks.

Angela waited for the liquor to soften her mood. Patient, unmoving, almost not breathing …

Vicky drank very fast, and at the end gave a little sigh, a tiny sound like an echo.

Angela said, “I had one fantastic sale today. The old Boudreaux place.”

Vicky stared directly at her, round blue eyes registering no comprehension, no acknowledgment.

“Just about everybody in the office had tried with it and no luck. Then I remembered that couple from Clarksdale—we met them somewhere about a year ago—they talked about wanting to move to town, and they said they wanted a big old house to do over. A period piece, I remember them saying. So I called them and because they have far more money than sense, they bought that ghastly monster.”

Vicky’s eyes didn’t change.

This is going to be quite an evening, Angela thought. And then, aloud, “We have tickets for that experimental theater tonight. Do you want to go?”

Vicky’s eyes snapped suddenly into focus. “No.”

“It probably isn’t very good.” Angela kept her voice even and toneless. “Let’s have dinner downstairs at Paul’s and then come home.”

“I have been to Paul’s so often I know that menu by heart. I know how every single thing is going to taste before I taste it.”

“When you live in a building, you tend to eat downstairs fairly often because it is so convenient.”

“I hate it.”

“Well now”—the smallest trace of anger appeared in Angela’s voice—“I certainly don’t feel like fixing supper here. I think I’ll go to dinner and then have a look at that foolish play or multimedia presentation or whatever they call it.”

Vicky’s eyes glittered and changed, sparkles like tinsel appeared in the blue irises.

Her eyes were so damned expressive, Angela thought. They showed hurt too clearly, you could see the blood of invisible wounds. Faced by their pain, Angela retreated to the pantry for another drink. Deliberately, measuring carefully, she fixed the martini, tossed both lemon and olive on top the ice. Still elaborately casual, she sauntered back, stopping to pick up the mail Vicky had tossed aside. On top, with its clear printing, its elaborately scrolled capitals, was a letter from Angela’s daughter, Louise. Why had that upset Vicky?

The paper crackled loudly in the silence as she smoothed the folded sheets. “Your glass is empty, Vicky. Why don’t you have another drink while I read this.”

Angela was not sure how she felt about her daughter, that beautiful young woman who seemed capable of endless understanding without a hint of malice or anger. She’d adjusted to her parents’ divorce, had lived happily with her father, had grown to love her stepmother. With Vicky, she’d been quietly friendly, relaxed, and quite free of embarrassment. Cool, disciplined, well organized, a model student in college, now working on an MFA, she was married to an associate professor of economics who looked like a young John Wayne.

Perfection, Angela thought. How could I have produced anything so damn perfect … And where was Vicky?

She was standing at the refrigerator, one finger rubbing a small circle on the door. Carefully Angela put her arms around her. In the softness of that body and the muskiness of that hair, Angela felt again the familiar rush of pain and love and tenderness. And something else, something darker and stronger. Something she could not name, something she refused to think about, a force that gave a restless desperation to her life.

Wearily, for the uncounted thousandth time, Angela pushed back the thing that crouched waiting in the shadows. She heard the crackling of its voice and the swishing of its tail. Not yet, she told it, not yet. Not this time.

And softly into Vicky’s ear, pink curves under wisps of black hair, “We’re both tired, honey. Come on, let’s finish our drinks now. I saw some kind of dip in the refrigerator. And after a while we’ll go and have dinner at Paul’s, but we won’t try the theater. Not tonight, when we’re both so tired.”

Vicky nodded silently, eyes closed, anger lines fading from her small face—the wistful, heart-shaped face that had haunted Angela ever since they first met, years ago, when Vicky was a college student, Angela a young matron with a husband and child.

Now again, as always, seeing Vicky’s face close up, seeing the perfect porcelain skin, the lash-fringed eyes, naturally shadowed as some Irish eyes are, the thin-lipped and very small mouth—the face of a mannequin—Angela was reminded again of the toys of her childhood, the dolls whose china heads she had smashed open against rocks just to see the glass eyes spring out and roll away.

Dinner was pleasant. They knew a dozen people in the restaurant, they waved to them. The Bartons, their neighbors down the hall, joined them in the bar for an after-dinner brandy. It was the sort of evening Angela liked best—lively, amusing, time filled with people who were not close to you. Nice people, people you liked, people who were gone before they became tiresome.

Vicky’s moodiness vanished. She talked gaily with the Bartons, laughing at their long stories of misfortune and confusion during a trip to Hong Kong.

By eleven they were home. “Huuuu.” Angela closed the door and leaned against it. “I am tired!” She stretched, rubbed her eyes. “Bed is going to feel so good.”

They had separate bedrooms now that the first frenzy of love had passed and they no longer required a presence within arm’s reach all night. Angela shook her head, still puzzled by the lust of those early years, the rhythmic beating of blood that silenced everything else. They had been, she thought, more than a little crazy.

Eventually balance and control had come back. Or was it weariness? Angela yawned. Age and habit finally muffled everything, that was sure.

She ran her bath, poured in oil, and eased herself into the slippery tub, sighing with comfort. These pleasures were becoming more and more important to her—the perfumed hot tub, the wide bed all to herself, the smooth cool sheets with their embroidered edges.

She soaked, half asleep, remembering the first time she met Vicky, fifteen years ago. It seemed even longer than that, all the figures were fuzzy and out of focus, softened by time and distance.

It was a Thursday. Angela and Neal always went out to dinner on Thursday. Their ten-year-old daughter stayed with the housekeeper, Felicia, a thin pious spinster who left the house only for early Sunday mass, who never touched the television, and who turned on the radio only for the evening rosary in Spanish. All her salary went into a savings account. One day she would return to Guatemala and start a shop, a fabric shop that also sold candies and baked goods, she told Angela. But years passed and Felicia did not go home. She seemed to have forgotten her plans. After the divorce she stayed with Neal and the child. When they moved, she went with them. She was still there; Louise’s letters mentioned her occasionally: “Felicia, dour as ever.”

On that Thursday night fifteen years ago, the night her life changed, Angela and her husband had dinner early and went to the University Theater for a production of
The Glass Menagerie,
directed by Neal’s sister. Angela was bored: the actors were painfully amateur, the staging was awkward. Still, remembering Neal’s sister, she applauded dutifully and smiled and tried very hard to be encouraging. Afterwards they went to the cast party in the student center, where they hugged and kissed everybody and laughed loudly and made silly toasts in beer. And Angela met Vicky.

She remembered the exact moment she first saw her—a jolt, a shock. Too violent to be pleasant. (Vicky remembered it differently: “I didn’t notice you until you spoke to me, Angela. And then I thought you had a lovely voice.”)

Angela remembered it all—the way the room smelled: beer, dust, sweat, the sourish odor of makeup, the sweet smell of cold cream. Somebody broke a confetti egg against the roof and bits of colored paper whirled in the air like bright midges. Neal and his sister were at the bar filling their mugs, laughing and talking as they worked their way through the crowd. A group of student stagehands in T-shirts and blue jeans gathered in one corner, fifteen or twenty of them, stretched on the dusty floor, perched on the windowsills. Vicky was there. She was standing in the bewildered way that was so characteristic of her, hands limply at her sides, a small frail figure in large overalls, dark hair cut short in fashionable imitation of Mia Farrow. She seemed utterly alone in the midst of the crowd.

Angela walked briskly across the room and touched Vicky’s sleeve. “I feel that I know you,” she said. “Isn’t your name Vicky?”

“No,” Vicky said.

“It should be. Vicky Prescott.”

“It’s not.”

“It is now,” Angela said. “I just gave you a new name.”

Three months later they moved into a small apartment near the campus. Angela took four suitcases of clothes—nothing else—with her.

When she told Neal, he said nothing, absolutely nothing. His face froze, then gradually drained of color until the bones showed as dark shadows. His lips turned white and then a clear pale blue. Without a word he went upstairs into the bedroom and locked the door.

Felicia said he stayed in the room all that day, and there hadn’t been a sound. The morning of the second day he appeared at breakfast, he read the paper and talked with his daughter; he asked Felicia formally to stay on as housekeeper, and he drove the child to school. She was delighted; usually she took the bus.

A year later, to the day, Neal sued for divorce. Angela did not contest child custody, finding that weekend afternoons with her daughter were quite enough. She and Neal met occasionally at lunch to agree on the details of the dissolution of their marriage. “You know I have quite enough income of my own,” she told him. “I do not think I should ask you for anything.”

He nodded gravely. (He seemed to have become very ponderous and solemn, she thought.) “When will you come to the house to select the things you want to keep?”

She shook her head.

“Things of sentimental value? Things from your family?”

“There is nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all.”

Three years later Neal moved to the West Coast, to begin his own consulting firm. Angela supervised the packing and the moving. And declined again the offer of furniture. Neal kissed her good-bye on one cheek, her daughter on the other. (Vicky had not come, she had always refused to meet Neal.) Then they were gone, astonished at how very simple and easy it all had been.

Six months later there was a formal announcement of Neal’s marriage. After that, from a distance, Angela saw her daughter through the rituals of growing up—birthday presents, summer visits, graduation presents, wedding presents. All conducted quietly and factually and coolly, like the business transactions they really were.

Drowsy and comforted by the warm perfumed waters, Angela left the tub, toweled carelessly, reached for a nightgown without looking at it. She patted the heavy embroidery on the edge of the sheet once or twice and fell into a deep black sleep.

When Vicky slipped into her bed next to her, she scarcely stirred. “Tomorrow.” She pulled away. “Vicky, it’s late and I’m tired.”

“I don’t want to make love,” Vicky whispered so close to her ear that her breath tickled unpleasantly.

“You can’t be this spoiled,” Angela muttered. “Go away.”

“I have to talk to you.” There was that rasping note of decision in the soft voice.

Oh, oh, oh, Angela thought in her comfortable sleepy haze, I hope this isn’t going to be one of Vicky’s long rambling middle-of-the-night talks. “I’m dead tired, Vicky. You can’t be this selfish.”

“I have to talk to you now.” The small voice was cool and steady.

Well, Angela thought, maybe it won’t be such a long talk … She rolled over, reaching for the lamp switch. Vicky’s hand closed over hers, stopping it.

“No. I want to talk in the dark,” Vicky said. “I always talk better in the dark.”