Other Women (34 page)

Caroline glared at her and unleashed a diatribe about world hunger, spouting statistics like bubbles from a hooked fish: was … twentychildren somewhere in the world are starving to death

every minute…”

Hannah observed her own irritation flaring like coals on a banked fire. My dear young woman, she said silently, you appear to assume I’ve never left my own backyard. Can you even conceive of a life that spans three continents and close to six decades? Do you think I’m not aware of what you’re saying?

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She reminded herself if she engaged on this level, she was done for. The real issue was that Caroline, like Simon parading Estelle the other night, needed distance from her own feelings of dependency. And a focus for the accumulated rage of a lifetime. Her cosmic routine was her number-one defense, an extremely effective one because everything she was saying was undeniably true.

Caroline was now educating Hannah on torture.

She felt a driving need to convey to this smug woman in her polyester pants suit that reality was not as she saw it from the window of her cozy ranch house: “Hannah, your life of comfort and affluence is built on the bowed backs of millions of suffering people. Here we sit in a fascist nation that’s looting the world, congratulating each other on being nice people. It’s obscene. You’re nothing but a suburban sellout!”

Hannah allowed herself only to raise her eyebrows. You didn’t lash out at the injured, however provocative their behavior. Anyhow, this harangue sounded like the death rattle of this particular tape. It was about to be erased, which was why it was putting up such a furious struggle.

was … ninety percent of violent crimes are committed by men,” Caroline was saying. “All day long I bandage up women and children whom men have raped, knifed, beaten, shot, strangled. And you yourself live with one of those fuckers, Hannah. You say you love him. You repose under the tent of benefits his white American male privilege provides-at the expense of the rest of us. You try getting through life without a man to protect you from the violence of other men. Then see if you can talk to me about joy!”

Hannah had to stop herself from calling, “Bravo!” Caroline thought she was locking horns with Hannah. But she knew almost nothing about Hannah.

She was actually doing battle with the part of herself that longed for Brian Stone’s dubious protection.

“My hour’s up.” Caroline stood up abruptly and slapped a check on Hannah’s desk. As she stalked to the door, she realized it was all over.

She’d just added Hannah’s corpse to the pile.

Never again would she sit in this cluttered office and study those sharp blue eyes for clues on how to live in such a vile world. She felt a raging mix of pain, loss, nausea-and relief.

“See you next week,” said Hannah.

OTHER

Caroline did a double take. Hannah stifled a smile. There was hostility in the pleasure she took in thwarting clients’ expectations. It allowed her not to retaliate in other ways. Besides, every job needed fringe benefits. She wrote out an appointment card and handed it to a stunned Caroline, who glanced at it and shoved it wordlessly into her jeans pocket.

Hannah lit a cigarette and exhaled with a deep sigh of relief to have Caroline gone. Leaning back in her chair, she used her skills from her drugstore perusal of mystery novels to try to predict what Caroline would do next. Chip continued a similar dispute for several tedious sessions. Other clients were too embarrassed after such scenes to come back for a while. But Caroline’s presenting symptom was depression. She responded to her parents at Christmas with depresProbably she’d plunge into depression. Try to become acceptable to Mummy again by erasing all those nasty emotions, by hanging still and silent in the jump seat.

And then what? She might try to kill herself. She said she had once before. The hostility had to go somewhere.

She’d be appalled at having turned it on Mummy. She’d turn it on herself. But maybe Caroline trusted her enough by now to ask for reassurance?

Hannah flicked her cigarette ash into Nigel’s stone and took andrag. Speaking of suicide, she was killing herself with these damn things. When would she summon enough strength of character to give them up?

She wondered if she’d be able to withstand this junk with Caroline if people hadn’t done the same for her. With great dignity her grandendured Hannah’s endless ways of expressing fury toward her parents for deserting her. Hannah roved the narrow winding streets of Hampstead doing her best to wreak havoc. And Arthur endured her fury toward the universe over Mona’s and Nigel’s deaths.

For years afterwards she raged at him-over his choice of furnaces, his being away that night, his failure to get home in time to save the antiques. But mostly she raged about how he mowed the lawn, or the fact that she always put new rolls of toilet paper on the bathroom holder. Arthur somehow managed never to descend to Hannah’s level of rancor. Sometimes he walked away. Other times he inquired coolly, “Are you

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finished yet?” A few times he pinned her arms to her sides to prevent her clobbering him. Eventually he suggested she find something useto do for someone else in trouble, rather than sitting around a messy darkened house all day feeling sorry for herself. Which she did, returning to school for her degrees.

During which she met Maggie, who sat in her wing chair on the wine and blue Oriental carpet by the potted bay tree poking and prodding at Hannah’s infected wounds until they broke open again and bled some more. Maggie eventually convinced her to get out photos of all four children and give them to a portrait painter in town. She left the four finished portraits in the trunk of her car without even unwrapping them for several months. When Maggie finally persuaded her to hang them on the wall in her bedroom, she wept and threw the hammer across the room and beat her head against the wall. Then she gathered up the wrapping paper and burned it in the Franklin stove, fixed a martini, and discussed with Arthur when he got home what good likenesses the portraits were.

And now here she herself sat, drawing on cigarettes and absorbing from unhappy people like Caroline exactly what she dished out to her grandmother, Arthur, and Maggie. It was probably the only way to repay that kind of debt.

In the next office Mary Beth yelled, “Goddam it to hell, Nathan, just pull yourself together or get out!”

Hannah felt a flicker of alarm. Outside her office Mary Beth was so sedate, pinched almost, in her high-necked ruffled blouses. Hannah never shouted at clients, as much as she might want to.

They shouted at her. But Mary Beth was fresh out of graduate school. Maybe it was a new technique-Confrontation Therapy or something.

Hannah remembered her first outburst at Maggie, over Maggie’s announcement that she was taking a vacation. Hannah amputated her adoration for the woman in an instant, slamming shut the dungeon door of her heart. She told Maggie she was finished with therapy anyway and wouldn’t be needing any more appointments. Maggie smiled sourly, put on her glasses, and said, “My dear Hannah, I’m afraid you’ve scarcely begun.”

“I’ve done all I’m doing.”

By the end of that session Hannah had sobbed, shouted, begged Maggie not to go-and begun to gain some clues about her own agony aver desertion by loved ones.

Hannah gathered together some books and papers, put on her

Berber cape, and left her office. The fiery sun was setting over the

lake, the thick blanket of new snow blood red.

Big deal. In a few

minutes it would all be pitch dark. Goddam fly-by-night sunsets.

Tucked under the windshield wiper of her Mercury like a parking

ticket was a folded note that read, “Hannah, please meet me for a

drink at Dooley’s after work. I’ll wait there for you until it closes. 1

have to talk to you about our relationship. Love, Harold (mortimer).

P .s. I like your new car.” Clenching the muscles in her jaw, Hannah

wadded the note into a ball and thrust it into the litter bag on the floor

of the car. Relationship? What relationship?

After a supper of Chicken Kiev

a

la Arthur, Hannah and he sat on the leather couch with coffee and cognac watching the news, an ordeal Hannah put herself through only a couple of times a week. Walter Cronkite was reporting that some Argentine peasants had kidnapped a

thirteen-year-old girl, gang-raped her, cut her open, and sewn a human head inside her.

Setting her coffee on the coffee table next to a stack of dog-eared gothic romances, Hannah covered her eyes with one hand and felt her stomach churn. Was Caroline right? Was she a Pollyanna who refused to face the horrors?

With distaste she glanced at Arthur, who sat frowning at the TV. It must be embarrassing to be a man, she decided. All the ghastly deeds your sex performed. Whenever an atrocity was announced on the evening news, Maggie used to close her eyes and murmur, “Pray God he’s not a Jew.” But men rarely had the luxury of discovering the perpetrator of some horror wasn’t a man.

Ninety percent of violent crimes are committed by men … .

A commercial for Silhouette Romances came on, featuring a dark attractive man carrying a woman in a skimpy bathing suit out of ocean waves and into a thatched cabana. Hannah glanced at the stack of romances on the table beside her coffee cup. The cover on top featured a woman in a clinging gown on the deck of a burning ship. Her soldier rescuer in plumes and gold braid parried the sword thrust of a pirate WOMEN

in an eyepatch, bandanna, and gold hoop earring.

It was obscene, she realized. Brainwashing women into viewing their rapists and murderers as protectors. You

try getting through life without a man to protect you from the violence of other men.

She jumped up, grabbed the books, and threw them into the fire. The flames nibbled greedily at the pages.

“What are you doing?” asked Arthur.

Whirling around, she glared at him as he sipped his cognac. “Darling,” she said acidly, “would you please explain to me why rape is a man’s idea of a good time?”

He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips.

“Maybe we need to feel in command in order to entrust our precious organs to dangerous places like vaginas.”

“Lovely,” she snapped, plopping down on the couch. “You only run the damn world. What more do you want?” An earnest young man on TV was explaining why he would never use anything but Preparation H on his hemorrhoids. Hannah tried to remind herself Arthur hadn’t raped anyone.

As far as she knew. Being with a man you had built-in distance. They were a different species. What would life be like with another woman, a replica of yourself? Far a moment she envied Caroline the chance to find out.

She glanced at Arthur, somber in the lamplight.

“The nice thing about war is that it keeps you men off the streets.”

Arthur smiled grimly and sipped his coffee.

“What can I say, Hannah? I’m afraid most men are morally retarded.”

Hannah nodded. “I’m afraid you’re right.”

Resolutely she erased

the image of the mutilated girl from her mind. If those morons undermined the efficiency of the well-meaning people who heard about them, they’d won. Learn to behave from those who cannot, her grandmother used to intone in the drawing room overlooking the Heath, hands folded beneath her enormous corseted bosom.

Hannah took a sip of cognac, and swirled it around her mouth like Lavoris, feeling the vapors fumigate her sinuses. Studying the snifter with the dark golden liquid in the bottom, she tried to decide if she drank too much. She certainly relished the feeling of oblivion alcohol induced each evening. It cauterized her nerve endings, frayed from a day of listening to such atrocities, and to the despair they engendered.

What about her own despair? It didn’t seem to be around much anymore. And when it was, it broke camp pretty quickly, as it had just done.

The older she got, the less anything could upset her for very long. Maybe the only real cure for her clients was the aging process. But that could take years.

“I’ve just done something awful,” Caroline told Diana as they sat on Diana’s couch drinking wine and listening to Jackie and Jason play the Incredible Hulk downstairs. Heroes were spinning their autos across the melting snow on Lake Glass in the crimson light of late afternoon. Diana was knitting an Icelandic sweater for Suzanne.

“Are you going to make her matching booties?”

Caroline asked when Diana first beToday was the first time they’d spoken since Diana told her to leave.

Caroline felt numb.

“What, for God’s sake?”

“I just told off Hannah.” Caroline’s muscles were so tight she could scarcely move her shoulders.

“What about?”

“Who knows? She started talking about joy, and I let her have it.”

Diana smiled. “Not your favorite word. What did she say?”

“See you next week.”

“So maybe you weren’t as obnoxious as you think.”

She was counting stitches.

“I’m pretty sure I was. She’s been so kind to me. I can’t believe it. I marched in there and wrecked everything.”

“Well, apparently she’s willing to drop it. So why don’t you?”

“I wish I’d been struck mute when I walked in her door today.”

“Don’t be so melodramatic,” said Diana, getting up and walking to her kitchen counter. “She’s your shrink. She’s used to clients acting out. That’s what you’re paying her for. Call her. She’ll congratulate you.”

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“You don’t understand.” Caroline tossed down half her wine in one swallow. Diana sounded amused.

Probably she was pleased.

“Maybe not,” said Diana, tossing the chef salad she’d invited Caroline to share, a gustatory peace pipe.

Caroline decided next week she’d be calm and pleasant. She’d apologize. She’d

say she’d thought about a diamond on black velvet and decided Hannah was right. She began shivering and wrapped her arms across her flannel shirt. What if, in the meantime, Hannah became fed up? Nobody had to put up with that kind of behavior from another person. What if Hannah called to cancel their appointment? She took the appointment card from her jeans pocket and studied it.