Wicked Women (31 page)

But Bob was in a bad mood: he knew he was being unreasonable: his black bow tie dictated a certain shirt, and the collar was uncomfortable. The tie was the old-fashioned kind, which fastened not with a Velcro strip but with a proper ribbon. Lily had made him buy it, years and years ago when she was only twenty-three, but already ambitious socially, longing to count for something in the world of parties and charity events. He knew at the time the tie would turn out to be an enduring penance. And now here was Eleanor, Lily’s daughter, so like her mother it disturbed Bob to see her, wearing on her not quite lovely, slightly podgy, pale face just the same expression of discontent and disappointment that Lily wore. Only on Eleanor the look was not quite yet set: it flickered in and out and round a kind of charming eagerness, a vulnerability which Bob had always loved in her.

Her father supposed that herein lay the progress of the generations: the mother longed to go to the Ball, the daughter hosted the Ball, albeit in an official capacity.

Eleanor was wearing layers of what looked to Bob to be black underwear lace: Bob had given her two thousand dollars to spend on an outfit for this special occasion. He had done this on the instructions of Sorrel, his second and true wife. Eleanor’s salary at the Guild, said Sorrel, would hardly run to anything suitable.

“Don’t be shy, Daddy. You have to meet her,” said Eleanor, and she dragged her father across the room past palely tall flower arrangements in elongated, fluted Grecian urns as once, as a child, she had dragged Bob to meet new friends, new toys, new pet animals, living or dead. Share my experience, Daddy.

Julie raised pale, hooded, slightly protuberant eyes to Bob’s. She was younger than he had thought, perhaps in her late thirties. She was colourless. She kept her face neutral, impassive. She seldom blinked. She thinks she’s looking wise, thought Bob, but actually she makes herself look merely dull. “This is Daddy,” said Eleanor.

“Don’t say it,” said Bob lightly. “You’ve heard so much about me!” Julie didn’t smile, but merely nodded.

Then Eleanor was summoned and left them together, father and therapist, while the daughter welcomed, organised, panicked and chivvied guests into a reception line which kept breaking as ceremony collapsed into the pleasures of old friends, newly met; fresh friends, instantly made.

The silence between Bob and the therapist became awkward. He raised his glass to her, pleasantly. She made no effort: just stood and waited. She was drinking water. “So you’re the Pardoner,” Bob said.

“Excuse me?” Her voice was soft and slow. “The Pardoner,” he said. “The one who forgives sins in exchange for money. The Pardoner of the Medieval Church: very fashionable for a time, until the abuses were such the Church backed off and cleaned up its act.” Julie looked puzzled.

“The Pardoner,” said Bob, “was empowered by the Pope to accept money for the remission of sins. Since Jesus had died on the cross for us, the reasoning went, the eventual heaven of perfect content was assured. In the meantime, the more money you handed over, the sooner you’d get out of Purgatory and into Heaven. Purgatory was the kind of cleansing station you had to go to after death.”

“I don’t see the connection,” she said. “What are you trying to say to me?”

Bob could see the imprudence of trying to press his point. He did not want the woman as an enemy. Eleanor trusted her, for some reason, with life, thought, soul. He looked around for Sorrel, his ally in this new world, but he could not see her. She was still in the powder room, no doubt.

“We both have Eleanor’s interests at heart,” said the Pardoner.

Bob had a powerful memory of Eleanor’s little face frowning over the edge of her cot, when she was too young for speech, first helplessly pointing at a doll she’d dropped on the floor, then dancing up and down with rage: furious at her father for picking the toy up, handing it over, outraged at her own dependence: out of control, in a tantrum, biting his helpful, paternal hand: tiny, sharp little teeth. Could you cure a nature born to be what it was? Should you try?

The Popes of the New Age, intermediaries between God and man, be they Freud, Jung, Janov, the Bagwhan, Eric Berne or whatever, empowered their minions to try, enabled them to make a fine living offering confession, remission of suffering, paths out of purgatory into heaven. The more the sinner paid, was the promise, the more sessions they suffered, the nearer heaven would come. The gullible, as ever, believed that heaven was possible, happiness theirs by right, and paid up. They saw the human condition as perfectible; it was obvious to Bob that it was not.

As if little Eleanor, scowling over the edge of her cot, biting the hand that fed her, only sporadically endearing, loveable only in spite of herself, would ever be capable of living in, let alone creating, heaven! Poor Eleanor. When Lily left Bob, walked out on him with her lover, Eleanor had been only five, and Bob’s anxiety had been all for her, not for her little sister Kate, aged only two, or her even littler brother Edmond. Not his baby, this last one, he was sure of it, though he was still seeing the boy through college.

“My heart always went out to Eleanor,” Bob thought, clarifying the notion in his head, but he did not say it aloud. Perhaps he’d given his daughter too much of it? Sometimes his heart beat strangely. He could feel it pounding now. He smiled at the therapist. Still she did not smile back. “Don’t we?” she persisted.

“Of course,” Bob said, as lightly as he could for the hammering of his heart. “And I do hope you’ll forgive my bow tie. Pardon it, like the Pardoner you are. It’s hopelessly out of fashion; nearly thirty years old, like Eleanor. Not a Velcro tie, mind you: I have that to say for myself, at least I don’t wear a Velcro tie; I offer my neck for strangling.”

The Pardoner looked puzzled. Such an expression seemed to sit naturally on her face. She’d look puzzled: her interlocutor would offer further explanation. Bob felt himself fall into the trap.

“Isn’t that the function of the tie?” he asked. “To announce to the world that the soul had been satisfactorily separated from the body? Look at me, says the tie, look at me, you guys, I’m in command of my animal urges! No need, ladies, to worry in case I rape or attack. These two ends are my peace offering. If I step out of line, all you have to do is seize the ends and strangle me.”

The Pardoner studied him curiously, seriously. Was there no making this woman laugh? How did Eleanor stand it? Did he pay thousands of dollars a month for this? His heart was beating regularly now. He relaxed.

“I always feel uneasy at formal gatherings,” Bob confessed, and Miss Julie liked that and she smiled, just a little. An Hispanic waitress with sores around her mouth offered Bob more wine from a silver tray. Something had gone wrong. Was this Eleanor’s responsibility? Perhaps his daughter had no idea of how
not
to employ a servant with sores around her mouth? It was perfectly possible that she still hadn’t learned that life was tough, and that you couldn’t stay a warm, kind person without damaging your own interests. Perhaps that was the Pardoner’s role—to preserve Eleanor’s good opinion of herself.

Over at the reception line photographers became overintrusive; Eleanor drifted away, leaving the problem to others. The Pardoner excused herself and turned her back.

Bob looked round for someone to talk to, and found no one. Some of the older, grander publishers had turned up: he recognised a few faces from the old literary days; but mostly the guests were new young blood, who’d come along to pay their dues to culture, much good might it do them. And of course no one wanted to talk to Bob. The coast-to-coast chain of record shops he owned, which brought him a satisfactory enough income, scarcely edged his status with the glamour others liked to brush up against on such occasions. Lily had always longed for glamour: Bob had failed to provide it. Lily had hoped for column inches, not just income, when she married him, but had failed to tell him so.

Wasn’t that Ivana Trump over there? Certainly it was. Arthur Miller? Even the Pardoner was gawping. The waitress with the pustules moved amongst them. Amazing! Bob was glad, when it came to it, that Eleanor had failed in ruthlessness. She might get married yet. At the thought, Bob could almost feel the sharp baby teeth digging into his hand. Eleanor’s sister Kate had never bitten: not because she was any nicer but because she’d always been too wary, too hard, too proud ever to lose control. Kate had been born more conventionally pretty than Eleanor: blonde curls, blue eyes, hard-hearted; forever dimpling and charming, though seldom meaning it. She’d put Eleanor out of countenance and enjoyed it. He imagined that Kate made a self-righteous mother, rather than a warm one. Kate had taken her mother Lily to extremes, and done it all, Bob sometimes thought, just to annoy Eleanor: messy, uncertain Eleanor, Daddy’s little girl who sometimes tried to be what Bob wanted, and sometimes the opposite, and got it all wrong anyway.

But how, in God’s name, was this Julie, this rather drab and cowlike creature, so censorious, so unopen to any ideas but her own and those of whichever Pope of whatever God had given her permission to practice—how was this creature to pardon Eleanor, to understand more than a flickering of what went on in Eleanor’s head? Since this Miss Julie would only have Eleanor’s account of it, in any case, in Eleanor’s rather limited vocabulary, Miss Julie would be on Eleanor’s side, never Kate’s, never Lily’s, never Bob’s, let alone poor Sorrel’s, the wicked stepmother. Eleanor would have it easy, would never learn to be self-critical, would always stay a victim.

And if in two years, twice a week, Eleanor was still not “cured” of insomnia, or anxiety, or bulimia, or whatever symptom of neurosis had originally afflicted her, what could the Pardoner offer her client next, by way of analysis and cure?

Bob felt the Pardoner’s suspicious eyes still following him. Supposing she had taken offence? He wished the conversation had not taken place. He had been hopelessly imprudent. The woman was dangerous: she had entered his life unasked, and now had unreasonable power in it, through the daughter he loved.

At last he caught sight of Sorrel, in her familiar deep blue velvet dress. He hurried over to her. She stroked his tuxedoed arm to soothe him. She knew the pattern of his agitations. “What’s the matter?”

“I so hate this kind of event,” Bob said. “We’re in uniform. I’m always suspicious of crowds of men in uniform. They’re sinister, always in the act of justifying the unjustifiable. They smack of cabal. At least my bow tie is out of fashion. That’s some comfort.”

“You look very handsome,” said Sorrel, and it was true. Bob had caught sight of himself, framed in a brass column as he’d entered the hall, and been almost pleased with what he saw. Still broad-shouldered, patrician-nosed, clean-chinned, a good figure of a man, in upright and energetic condition: just never good enough for Lily—“Such a fool Lily was,” Sorrel said, “to let you go. But I’m glad she did, because then I got you.” Sorrel always knew when he was thinking about Lily. Knowing he loved her, she felt safe in balancing his pain with the announcement of her pleasure. The second wife understood how he still suffered from the divorce of the first, though the event was now more than twenty years behind them. He had never quite recovered from the insult, not just the loss of a wife he loved, in spite of himself, but from Lily’s behaviour afterwards.

All the things that Lily had done, she’d blamed Bob for—from infidelity to desertion—and though she had to flick the whole world quite upside down to do it, she had for a time managed to persuade the children of their father’s overwhelming depravity: his meanness, his lasciviousness, his callousness with others’ feelings, and the rest of it. The more lavishly he had supported Lily, the more she took his generosity as evidence of his guilt. Lily had remarried: a plastic surgeon. She seemed happier now; she had the column inches she felt she’d always deserved, the woman at the party for whom the flashes pop, if only by double-proxy. Wife of surgeon-to-the-stars.

Eleanor came across to kiss Sorrel on the cheek. A Judas kiss; the thought came to Bob and made him uneasy. “You should keep your husband in order,” Eleanor said to her stepmother, and he remembered the little spiteful pre-tantrum eyes she’d had as a child. “He’s really upset Julie.”

“Who’s Julie?” asked Sorrel, mildly. She always spoke mildly, kindly to Eleanor, avoiding danger. “And why should your father have upset her?” The familiar joke. Who’s at fault? Your husband. No, your father!

“Julie’s my therapist,” said Eleanor. “And Daddy was being really aggressive towards her! Julie didn’t want me to ask you two here tonight. I ought to be more independent, Julie says, more like Kate. And it’s such a wonderful thing we’re doing here tonight, and here you are trying to spoil it. I know it was stupid of me to think you and she would get along, Daddy, but you could at least have made the effort. You know how I blame myself for the separation, how difficult it is for me, how painful.”

“Sweetheart,” said Bob, “shouldn’t you be paying attention to the function, not worrying about this kind of thing? We’ve been standing around too long. Shouldn’t we all be going in to dinner?”

“If I’m in such a mess,” said Eleanor, “it’s because you find fault all the time. And now you start on poor Julie!” Eleanor’s cheeks were pink; she would flush so like this before she bit. Did children never give up?

“Eleanor,” said Bob, “if you don’t stop this at once, I’m not paying for any more therapy. It’s not doing you any good.”

“Bob,” said Sorrel, warningly, “let’s give ourselves time to think about this.”

“That’s definite, Ellie,” said Bob. “You want therapy, you pay for it yourself from now on. This evening has cost me twelve thousand dollars to date, just so a bunch of chicken-shit writers can sit down to eat with a bunch of A-list performers, who’d rather, like me, be home watching TV, and all you can do is insult me for it. You could have bought that outfit for five dollars in a thrift shop and turned out looking more decent, and saved enough for three months of Miss Julie.”

Eleanor’s face crumpled and fell. There were tears glistening in her eyes.