Wicked Women (32 page)

“You’re such a mercenary bastard,” she said. “I don’t know why I bother trying to please you.”

And then Eleanor had gone, on her heel; over to where the Pardoner stood, gently tapping her foot, smiling vaguely. Bob wondered for a moment whether Eleanor and Julie had some kind of sexual liaison but dismissed the thought. Guests started to drift in to dinner without benefit of announcement.

Sorrel kept hold of Bob’s hand, calming him down. His heart had started struggling again. By the time they reached the table, ornate with white napkins in flutes and folds, Bob’s equanimity had returned. I told her, he thought to himself. I finally told her! He thought if he looked at his hand he’d see the two little red marks left by baby teeth, so he didn’t look.

Sorrel sat next to Bob, leaning into him so far as decorousness would allow.

“I love your tie,” Sorrel murmured, “it’s the lean, sleek part of you. I don’t care if you did buy it with Lily. I don’t care if it’s old-fashioned. It’s part of you as your children are: I accept them.” Thus she spoke her familiar litany and Bob smiled and felt better.

But the sense of something ominous in the air remained. Eleanor was sitting a table or so away, next to the Pardoner; she had her back to him; he could not see the expression on her face and was glad he could not.

Bob had asked as his guests old Eisenstein and his wife: and Lara the ex-opera singer and her music-producer husband Pierre, who’d just sold eight million rock reissues, quite an achievement, the music business being in the state it was. Lara seemed to be doing her best to disconcert the old dog Eisenstein, to make the ancient frog eyes of Mrs. Eisenstein blink. The pair of them had their heyday back in the fifties: Eisenstein the pianist, Sara Eisenstein the composer, into New York out of the Holocaust. They’d been to see
Schindler’s List
and liked it. It had brought memories back. Any memory would do, it seemed, so long as it was of youth.

Tonight old Eisenstein was wearing one of the new bow ties; floppy, large, lush, the black gold-threaded through. The fabric cut off a weary head from a withered body, but the aplomb remained. Lara was speaking in her loud throaty voice about a current law case, a famous father, a rock star, accused of ritual child abuse: the equally famous model wife, now suing for alimony, his accuser: the child’s remembrance of events, ten years back, the stuff of fantasy and horror films; multiple rape, sexual torture, bondage, snakes, toads, flies, all the nasty things of the outside world internalised, introduced into the body.

“The child has sexual fantasies but understands nothing,” Lara said, in a voice which could be heard on at least four other tables. “The child is hopelessly vague about orifices, objects of penetration, has heard cries in the night suggesting pain, knows something exciting is going on but not what, is furiously jealous anyway, angry at being left out: works out what she can, inadvertently brings herself to orgasm. What pleasure, what horror! How can I be so disgusting, thinks the girl child! Did these visions really come from out of my head? I don’t believe it! Along comes the therapist in later years: quite right. ‘Sweetheart,’ she says, ‘you didn’t invent those nasty things, you’re much too nice, much too sweet. They were real. Daddy did them.’ And thus everything is explained and the childhood guilt absolved. The world returns to its natural order. If the universe is to be good, the father must be bad.”

Sorrel was staring at Lara, upset. Orgasm was still not part of dinner talk, not in her book. “No smoke without fire,” said Sorrel.

Oh, Sorrel, Sorrel. You, too? Bob begins to see the future. His heart starts to beat its promise-of-death tattoo. Pietre says, “Lara’s right. There always has to be a scapegoat, so God can be understood as good. Once we had witches, but now women are the ones who condemn, so it’s the fathers’ turn.”

“Once it was us,” old Eisenstein says. He has chicken soup on his bow tie. His chin has shrunk so the fabric collects the drips, not the flesh. “The finger of blame moves on, thank God.” The table falls silent.

After dinner, it was much as Bob expected. Julie came up to him, followed by Eleanor. Eleanor was crying.

“Now see what you’ve done,” said the Pardoner.”

“I’ve lost my job,” Eleanor wept. “You upset me so much, Daddy, I didn’t know how to handle it. I was only on trial here, you know. It was a temporary post. They said I had no eye for detail, and I tried so hard.”

“Face your father,” said Julie the Pardoner to Bob’s daughter. “Tell him. Face the past, face yourself, finally face what happened to you. It’s going to cost us all a lot of pain and money, Bob, if we’re going to help Eleanor. I need a cheque for five hundred thousand dollars, and I need it here and now: it’s essential that your daughter, still in her heart that poor bullied and abused little girl of long ago, witnesses this act of contrition and apology from you. The money will go to the best cause of all: what Eleanor’s treatment will cost, if she is ever to recover from the trauma.”

“Trauma?” asked Bob. “What trauma?”

“We worked so hard, Eleanor and I,” said the Pardoner. “You’ve no idea how painful it is, achieving flashback memory. Your daughter ran a fever, she had pains in her joints. But she did it! And this evening, finally, it all made sense. All the memories are there, available.”

“Came to her between soup and fish, I expect,” said Bob. “The soup was cold, the fish was sour.”

The Pardoner stared at him, at last showing signs of emotion. “You fathers are unbelievable,” she said. “Still so callous! The night-time visits, the foul intruding member, the threats, the bribes, the terror! And then your wife Lily became aware of what was going on,” said the Pardoner. “Lily left you in order to rescue her little girl. Of course your wife hated you: you were hateful. An abusing father.”

“This way everything is explained, Daddy,” said Eleanor, piteously. “Please understand. Everything is explained.”

So Bob took out his cheque book and signed a cheque for five hundred thousand dollars on the spot and Sorrel came hurrying up and said, “What is going on here?”

Bob said, “I am just paying for the remission of uncommitted sins, so that I can go to heaven,” at which Sorrel hit the Pardoner and Eleanor actually spat at Sorrel.

Bob took off his bow tie, elaborately untying the long silk ends, feeling the ache in his shoulders, still broad, still strong in spite of it all, and said, “This thing is strangling me.”

I
AM COMING TO
see you, Miss Jacobs, because my father fears I am anorexic. I know I am not. I am simply a dancer, so the less weight I carry the better, the less strain on muscles and joints. I am not self-destructive: I mean to live a long time and in good health. But I love my father very much, and if it relieves any anxiety he may have, I am happy to go through the motions of seeing a psychoanalyst, even in relation to eating problems I do not have.

Yes, I know you are not the analyst I will eventually see: that you act as a kind of clearing house for your co-professionals. It is your function to recommend me to someone you believe will be sympathetic, someone who will like me and whom I like. Though I am not convinced that in this field “liking” is essential: some kind of intellectual rapport, yes. “Liking” just somehow sounds kind of sloppy. But do what you see fit.

Yes, I am eighteen. Yes, people do say I am mature for my age, and composed. Dancing is discipline; and to discipline the body is, albeit inadvertently, to discipline the mind. And since my mother died when I was thirteen I have been very much in charge of my own life, and made my own decisions in most things, and on the whole have done it well.

No, I have no boyfriend in the sense you mean, though I have suitors enough. Yes, I am satisfied with my appearance: ballet-dancerish; large-eyed, long-necked, long-backed, long-legged, a trifle boyish I suppose. If you stretch enough you don’t get lumpy or over-muscled. A translucent look, true—but that comes from having a naturally pale skin, not I think from any nutritional deficiency. In this I resemble my mother. She died in a car accident, not from illness. I do not, you must understand, suffer from the self-doubt, the obsessional fears and the suicidal impulses which characterise the anorexic. But try telling that to my father.

Do I sleep well? It’s strange you should ask me that. Actually, I don’t. I used to, like a log, but since last summer I’ve tended to wake suddenly, and very early, and not be able to get back to sleep at all. I hate it. It makes me feel I am not properly in charge of my own self-improvement. Lack of sleep is bad for concentration, what is bad for concentration is bad for dancing.

What happened last summer? Let me put it like this. I took a decision on my father’s behalf and carried it through in a way that quite shook me. I discovered a ruthlessness in myself which I fear I may inherit from my mother. What I did certainly smacked of the impetuous. Impetuously, my lovely mother ran across a road, and that was the end of her.

My family background? It was stable and ordinary enough to begin with. I lived with my mother for my first thirteen years. So far as I knew I had no father. We lived in a small house in a mean suburb; my mother worked as a secretary; all her earnings went on our subsistence and to see me through ballet school. She was not a typical stage mother, not the kind who vulgarly forces forward a talentless child; on the contrary. My talent had been obvious to everyone from my seventh year: my mother merely did her best for me. I suppose, in retrospect, that she had a tendency to the threadbare, to dramatic self-denial, to martyrdom. If we could make do with an old brussels sprout rather than a fresh and more expensive green pea, we did. My dancing tights were darned, not instantly replaced, as were those of the other children in my class at the Royal Ballet School. Yes, the Royal Ballet School. I am as good as they come, I am told. If we could save money by walking, and not taking the bus, we did. Of course I was curious about my father, but he was absent to the point of non-existence. I assumed he’d walked out on us. I knew my mother didn’t want him mentioned: I knew it would be risky. I always felt she and I were in a boat together, in dangerous and mysterious seas, and that if ever I rocked the boat, both of us were lost.

But when my mother died her sister was able to get in touch with my father readily enough. He turned up on the doorstep within days of the funeral. It turned out that my mother had quite coldly and ruthlessly kept my father away: she would let him have nothing to do with us. She had accumulated large sums in a dollar account; hundreds of thousands of pounds, which he had sent for my maintenance over the years, and which she had kept but refused to touch. These sums I inherited, but, incidentally, in time lent back to my father. Yes, his income fluctuates wildly; he is a theatre producer working out of San Francisco; his great love is The Dance, as he refers to it, though I wish he wouldn’t. It sounds pretentious. But my father is very particular; he loves beauty, he loves perfection: for him The Dance exists as some kind of Platonic ideal. My father is no sort of dancer himself; that is the strange thing: my mother showed not the slightest aptitude. It is as if my father’s absorbing interest has been inherited in physical form by me. It is enough to make one a Lysenkoist, a Lamarckian, and believe in the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

I don’t think it is that I am miraculously well-informed, Miss Jacobs, I think it is rather that the rest of my generation is so badly informed. My mother and I had no television set; we borrowed books from the library. I daresay that helped.

Yes, of course I was upset by my mother’s death. It was so sudden. Five years later, and I still dream about her. Whenever I buy new dancing tights I think of her, and feel guilty because I have no intention of taking up my needle and darning. I may be composed but I promise you I am not without proper feeling. Yes, I think I have properly grieved, and properly incorporated her into my being. I am grateful to her for giving me birth, and no, I do not resent her because she hid my father from me. She lived in one world, and he so very much lived in another. She wanted to protect me; she never could understand how little protection I needed.

The sudden appearance of my father on the doorstep? No shock or trauma there. Fortunately he is a very good-looking man so it was easy to accept him as a father. Good looks help in most situations, I find. He’d called from Heathrow first, to explain himself. I’d thanked him for his interest, and for his trouble in coming all the way from the States. I asked him if he was married, if he was bringing anyone with him, and my father replied he was not married, since the law did not allow it, but he was bringing his lover. They went everywhere together. I tried to envisage her, but since I could not envisage him either, I failed, and perhaps just as well.

Two men turned up on my doorstep, hand in hand, not the man and woman I had expected. It was disconcerting for a moment, that was all. Many of the boys on my course are gay, or claim to be, or pass their adolescence as such. The acknowledgement of bisexuality, in my circles, is more and more common. I should not have been taken aback, but I was and it showed in my face; Bo said to my father, distressed, “You should have warned her first: I begged you to but you wouldn’t listen. You never listen!” and I could tell they were as good as married, and relaxed. Bo was in his mid-twenties, African-American, gentle, kind, smooth-skinned, and a dancer too; I could tell that at once, simply from the way he stood: a body at rest, but with all the waiting energy of a coiled spring, and only at rest the better to prepare for that spring. I liked him at once; well, I am like my father; I adore beauty, and Bo is so beautiful. Besides, if he loved my father and my father loved him, that was enough for me. I could hardly claim exclusive rights to a father so recently acquired, could I? It might have been much worse; he might have turned up with some blonde bimbo on his arm, or a dowdy wife; he could have had six boring children: I’d still have accepted it. As it was I was elated. If I was perforce to do without a mother, obliged to have a new life, by all means let it be with a gay couple from San Francisco. My father was one of those guys with a bald head, a good moustache, and sad, humorous, intelligent eyes. Okay, so Bo was a young and beautiful show-biz boyfriend, so what. Well, yes, a few eyebrows were raised amongst the neighbours; they may have been an ordinary enough couple in California, but they came over as exotic up and down my very suburban street.