Unaccompanied Women Read online

  “I imagine,” I say, “that sometimes it’s not easy being the other woman.”

  “Yes.” She nods. “The other night his driver drove his wife to the opera, then came back for me and Steven, and when we got to the restaurant, Steven had to go in first and make sure nobody in the restaurant knew him. Sometimes it’s hard.” She looks directly and defiantly right at me and says, “But you know what, this is a chance made in heaven and I have decided to take it. My older son thinks it’s terrific. My seventeen-year-old daughter is not convinced, but I told her, I’ll never get a chance like this again and I’m going for it all.”

  “Good for you,” I say, and watch as she slides off the bar stool and sways a bit as she struggles to get her coat on.

  “Bye,” she says, “nice meeting you,” and totters off. I hope the cold night air will sober her up before Steven’s driver comes to collect her, before her bustier loses its grip and takes on a life of its own. Being a mistress can be dangerous.

  My own Steven, though I have been prudent and so far refused his oft-repeated entreaties, lives not far from the bar that has provided such comfort for Shelley and me. My Steven and I will have dinner, and yet again he will tell me how wonderful his wife is, how he loves and respects her, how they have not made love since their sons—now in their thirties—were born. “I wouldn’t burden her with sex,” he has explained. “But you—my god.” Then suddenly, “I have a house in Provence. Come with me next summer. Come live with me and be my love.”

  “The three of us? Your wife, you, and me?” I ask.

  “Well, not quite. There’s a house nearby I would take for you.”

  And he could skip in and out, and we could wave at each other from our windows, maybe string a wire from his bedroom to mine and send notes, billets-doux they would be called in Provence. And when his wife was doing the marketing, we could . . . Gee, I’ve always wanted to star in a French farce. “No, thank you.”

  Long ago I directed myself never to take up with a married man, not out of principle but because I knew the ending, me sitting by the phone on Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year’s, Easter, and Halloween, not to mention Veterans Day and all eight days of Hanukkah, willing the phone to ring, never accepting the reality of his marriage. Relationships, sexual relationships, get complicated enough without a saint of a wife hovering overhead. It must be that not having sex with your husband makes you holy or something; in my experience it makes her respected and honored and admired and safe; in my experience an asexual wife gets to live the life of a decent God-fearing American, which, by cracky, appeals more and more to me as I see the possibility of such a life swirling down the drain. Women who don’t have sex with their husbands and their husbands love them anyway live the kind of life I assumed, way back in the olden days, I would have, a life in which it was natural to use “we” without stammering. But I never did have that life, which doesn’t mean I still want one. Or that I don’t.

  It’s not fair, though. My mother led me to believe that if a husband were not happy at home—she would intone the word “happy” so that I understood it meant “sexually satisfied”—he would of course seek solace elsewhere, and the wife would have only herself to blame. My mother believed in doing one’s wifely duty, thereby assuring the longtime success of the marriage. She believed that if a husband strayed, the wife was to blame. One of my favorite movies is That Hamilton Woman! (1941) starring Vivien Leigh as the Other Woman and Laurence Olivier as Admiral Lord Nelson. A classic case, my mother would have argued, had she seen the movie, which she did not because in 1941 in our small Ohio town there was no movie theatre. The movie, which years later I rented from my video store, showed Nelson’s wife to be cold and undoubtedly frigid and “unwifely,” proving my mother right. Of course her husband strayed, I thought. The reason is right there on the screen. I wonder what my mother would have said about recent scholarship that pretty much proves that Nelson’s wife of many years was a kind and loving wife. Nelson would be harder to explain—and thus far more interesting. Do husbands who stray have unyielding wives to blame? Not necessarily, though it is convenient for Other Women to think so.

  As I watched this sumptuous movie sometime in the seventies, my sympathies were entirely with Emma Hamilton and her married lover. My mother would not have sided with Lady Hamilton, who was married, too, thus doubling her sin. My mother believed that women who prowled after married men were sluts who would eventually get their comeuppances, and she would have pointed to Lady Hamilton’s sad end as proof: dead in Calais at age fifty, penniless and alone. I guess we know what my mother would have said about her daughter sitting in a fancy bar in New York City encouraging a once-decent young woman in her participation in adultery and fornication.

  I keep Patricia’s letter to me close at hand. After A Round-Heeled Woman came out, lots of people wrote me. Patricia wrote all the way from London, “My current batch of paramours are all married, which I regret . . . when I want to see a film or attend the theatre, or experience a new restaurant, or show off in public with someone other than a woman friend.” I reread Patricia’s letter whenever I think, Well, why not? What’s the harm in a little affair, so what if he’s married? The truth is that there is no such thing as “a little affair.” Affairs have a way of growing into big things, like love affairs, and then, boy, you’re stuck. Because no way in hell is he going to leave his wife for you, not after all those years, and, in fact, the more you come to know and to love him, the more you don’t want him to leave his wife; how could you ever make up for what he would lose? And besides, the way he folds his clothes—like it takes thirty minutes before he’s ready for the sack, though, to be fair, there’s no room on the floor because that’s where your clothes are—sometimes makes you sigh with relief at the thought that Goody, he’ll be gone soon. Still, there is, as Patricia points out, “the loneliness factor.” And then, too, you love him. Christ, better to stick to your rule: No married men.

  All that notwithstanding, here I am in New York City applauding a woman who has let herself be swept off her feet by an irremediably married man. In the soft candlelight from the tables behind her, she looked like a painting in her Renaissance painting book—Raphael’s Madonna in a thousand-dollar suit. There is nothing lovelier than a woman newly in love. Not even The Wyndham Sisters, who live just across the street.

  CHAPTER 7

  auld lang syne

  O plunge your hands in water,

  Plunge them in up to the wrist;

  Stare, stare in the basin

  And wonder what you’ve missed.

  —from “As I Walked Out One Evening,” W. H. AUDEN

  THE PROPERTY IS for sale, my landlady tells me. Merry Christmas! Graham got married. Happy New Year!

  One dreadful day, from out of the blue, my computer announced an e-mail from Graham. It was one of those instant messages: “I will be out of the office until the first of the year due to my upcoming marriage and subsequent honeymoon. May the Year 2003 bring you joy and success.”

  There went my life. He took it plumb out of me, never even bothered to warn me in person, in bed, in a letter, that he was—What’s the expression? Seeing someone, a euphemism for having sex or, worse, making love. Watch out, he could have said, I’m going to break your heart. Oh, Christ. If I’d let myself think at all, I could have guessed that this wonderful man would not lead a celibate life in my absence. How ridiculous. Of course he ought to be married, he’s thirty-four, for crissake. He needs a normal life with a probably normal girl, not with a crone who writes him drunken love letters and hides under the covers to make love. But jesus, we had just, just—here’s what I wrote him afterward, after he had made a visit to me way out here: “After you and I made love and you hoisted my backpack, we made our way up to the little park atop Nob Hill. We ate small chicken legs and chocolate chip cookies made by me, and you said all the right things, distracted as you were by things to do with work, and so I went home.” There it was again, his distractedness
: Something was happening. I made the something be his work because of course I wanted this real-time fantasy to continue forever. I really and truly loved him, despite knowing that in doing so I was asking for another broken heart. So? If anybody had wondered, I would have said—and probably did—that of course he needed to have as close to a normal life as somebody that smart and good-looking and funny and kind is capable of. Well, maybe not kind. Even so, he deserved all the good things and good people of the world and didn’t I wish him all the best oh christ. I was dead inside, just absolutely dead. Except when I was angry—not at his marriage but at the way he told me—as if I were a business acquaintance or less. Oh, tell the truth: You were angry at both. So I sent him a wedding present. Maybe I would take up with a married man after all. Shame on me.

  GRAHAM SENT ME no warning, but I’m sending one. If you’re thinking of keeping company with a married man, keep this in mind: You can sip all the martinis in New York, you can buy suits and negligees and have delicious sex, but if you are an Other Woman, you will pay a price.

  New Year’s Eve is a time to try men’s souls, and women’s, too, and if you are an Other Woman, you’re in trouble, because you don’t have a legally bonded male (sons and pets don’t count) right there next to you, so now you’re in for it. New Year’s Eve is the day and the night when the social order exacts its revenge on you for failing to follow its rules, for being a maverick, for threatening by your very behavior the stability necessary for its survival. And it’s going to hurt because when you’re an Other Woman, holidays are when your lover stays home and behaves like the respectable person everyone thinks he is. He makes hot toddies while friends gather to trim the tree, and he goes to dinner with his wife and a few old friends, longtime married couples, and he does nice things for his children, such as drive them to the snow so they can ski. And then on New Year’s Eve maybe he sneaks off and calls you from some closet somewhere, his voice muffled by his wife’s new down jacket, which he bought her for Christmas.

  Forget what science tells us: New Year’s Eve is the longest fucking day in the year. And then comes the night. On the stroke of midnight who doesn’t get kissed? You. You sit in the darkness of your lonely room, and goddam, you want to be respectable. It’s not, Oh god, he’s going to sleep with his wife. After all, it’s probably the only time they’ll do it this year, so what do you care? It’s that afterward they will get to go to the movies or to brunch—respectable couples have brunch; people like you have coffee—or to old friends, and maybe visit some grandchildren. It’s this time of the year that punishes the hell out of you for straying, for ruffling the waters, for committing the ultimate crime—sleeping with another woman’s husband—and you’re going to feel real pain, for what would the world be if people like you won the day? Chaos is what.

  Go read Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”; it’s all there, the criminal strapped to the rack, his crime etched slowly by needles into his body. On the sixth hour of his torment comes enlightenment; the convicted man understands—or so the people who once gathered to watch are led to believe—the commandment he has failed to heed: Obey Thy Superiors—and then he dies, though not until the machine goes horribly awry and mutilates him. It is a grisly story of justice gone crazy.

  You won’t die—adultery is not yet punishable by death—but the twelve days of Christmas are long enough to do a fair bit of sticking it to you to make you understand the price one pays for living on the edge of society. What you’re supposed to do, of course, you Other Women, is see the light and break it off so that your lovers can resume their rightful places as bulwarks of the status quo, as the pillars of marriage, that institution created to keep men and women from running amok. If the people who oppose gay marriage had any brains at all, they would see their protesting for the nonsense it is; they would understand, in fact, that their arguments, if that’s what they are, run counter to the continuation of a calm and orderly society, for there’s nothing like marriage to keep guys off the streets and out of bars. Marriage civilizes, don’t you know. Of all social institutions, marriage is the one that can keep a good man down.

  And all this secrecy is so American, isn’t it? This hypocrisy, this pretense of fidelity, this rage of a wronged wife, the abject apologies of the errant husband: not in France, at least not in Paris. The existence of Other Women is acknowledged, though unspoken, by wives; it is tolerated. The funeral of France’s president, François Mitterrand, was attended by both his wife and his mistress. The photograph of both in the gathering of mourners was on the front page. Ménage à trois? French. Never in America, where the Puritan ethic mandates pretense, punishes truthfulness, and allows nothing that is not imprisoned within the cell blocks of civil and religious life.

  For me the misery of this long day’s journey into night began way back when, when I was twenty-three and hopelessly in love with Jack. I spent the holidays, at the behest of my mother, back in Ohio, leaving Jack to fend for himself in San Francisco. I was miserable the entire week and succeeded in making everyone around me miserable. He didn’t call and didn’t call, and I couldn’t call him; a girl didn’t do that in 1956, especially in front of her parents, who, if she did, either rolled their eyes or patted her on the back when he didn’t answer. It was just total humiliation to hear the phone calls be for everybody but me.

  Almost fifty years later New Year’s Eve still sucks. Now there’s supposedly this big-deal economic recovery: Who’s recovering? A little bunch of people at the top while a whole mass of folks underneath are struggling to keep from drowning. So on this particular New Year’s Eve a little bunch of people are paying two thousand dollars to get into the Rainbow Room or, if you’re strapped, one thousand for the Waldorf. The rest of us are playing Monopoly with the neighbors or sitting alone watching Walter Cronkite light up the Vienna State Opera Orchestra. Guess who still doesn’t have a date. It’s not Mrs. Cronkite.

  But let’s imagine for a minute that I had two thousand dollars to throw away on a gala event, and another two thousand for a dress with all the trimmings—okay, ten thousand. I could get all gussied up and celebrate the advent of the new year . . . where? Where is a single woman, bedecked and bedizened as she might be, welcome on this festive occasion? Not at the Rainbow Room, I’ll bet. Unlike single men, who can show up drunk, stoned, solo, or all three and still be met with open arms, single women—albeit sober and dignified—who have the bad taste to appear unescorted are taking their reputations in their hands. Besides, while the single men at these parties have each other for company, women alone are alone.

  All this grousing comes from way back, maybe as far back as 1956, when, on the eve of 1957, there I was sniffling away over Jack, until finally my parents, who never went out on New Year’s Eve, went out, leaving me with my little brother. Mortification loomed. Poor little guy, just turned ten but really still nine. Everyone loved Terry. From the day he was born he was sunny, funny, and adored by one and all. What punishment to have to spend this holiday with his old sister, whose chief claim to fame was her ability to pout for days at a time. Which she was doing now.

  “What’s wrong?” he inquired timidly.

  “Nothing.” I sure as hell wasn’t going to share my distress over having been stood up, probably for the rest of my life. I lay on the couch, arms hiding my eyes, which were red and bleary from imagining Jack in the arms of another. Terry crept away softly, probably in the hope that I had fallen asleep and he could go watch television past his bedtime.

  Time passed. Here he came, tiptoeing up to the couch. “Happy New Year,” I heard him say. I opened one eye, to see him standing next to me holding a tray. On it were baloney sandwiches—on white bread cut into little triangles and without crusts!—and two glasses of milk. “I thought we could have a party, too,” he said. And we did. Then we watched Times Square on the television as 1957 came to Ohio. Terry fell asleep leaning against my shoulder, and at the stroke of midnight I leaned over and kissed him on the top of his curly head.
/>   I believed that marriage would protect me from the shame of spending New Year’s Eve alone, but, as I would discover, there are all kinds of mortification. Ten years later, on this night of all nights, my husband, Tom, and I would celebrate the coming of the new year with his mistress. I didn’t know that then. All I knew was that months had passed since my husband and I had seen a movie or visited friends or walked along the river; all I knew was that there was a growing coldness between us; all I knew was that I was getting fat and couldn’t seem to stop eating. And so I begged him for an evening out, for a New Year’s Eve out. It didn’t matter where, just out. Having perfected my ability to pout over long periods of time, I wasn’t surprised when my husband sighed and said, “Okay, we’ll go out for a couple of beers. Mind if Lynne comes along?” Lynne was a name I knew from my husband’s talk about his job. “I don’t mind,” I said cheerily. “The more the merrier!”

  What would I wear? It was too late to buy a new dress, and besides, we didn’t have the money. I would have to wear something dark, something to hide my increasing bulk. Pulling out of the closet a dark blue cotton dress I had worn the previous summer, I hoped my husband wouldn’t notice that it was old, though I had nothing to fear, really; my husband hadn’t looked at me for a long time. Oh god, clearly this dress had shrunk, hanging there in the closet all fall and half the winter, because dammit, it was tight; still, with some difficulty I zipped it up the back, reminding myself as I did to not exhale. Off we went.

  The bar was dark; that was good. It was crowded; that was okay, too. And Lynne and I sat at a table, my husband between us, the three of us slamming down one beer after the other. My husband, having learned from me, was working his way into a sensational sulk (sulk being the masculine form of pout), but I just had another beer and admired Lynne’s new dress. As I leaned forward to smooth the velvet of her sleeve, I heard one of the world’s most humiliating noises: the sound of a zipper parting. My dress had divided itself into halves.