They lay in bed recovering from the trauma of exhilaration. Then, finally, he reached onto the night table and drew his watch back from the surface, clicking the silver clasp into place on his long wrist. “Well. Time to go,” he said.
“Where? It must be two in the morning.” Faith looked around for the peachy, illuminated face of the Timex clock.
“Home.”
There was a long, dreadful silence, and then she said, “You’re married.” Another silence, just as dreadful, and Faith prepared to say something angry. But she wasn’t angry, just sad in a grave way, for she understood that, despite the absence of a wedding ring, she’d already intuited that he was married, and so she’d deliberately not asked him this question before going to bed with him. Had she known the answer for certain, she wouldn’t have been able to do it.
She had possibly even met his wife, she realized, back in the casino years earlier. She recalled Emmett’s hand on the small of a woman’s back. The proprietary way they were with each other. But even more than that, she also knew he was the father of a child—at least one. That was what had subconsciously registered in the Cookery tonight when Emmett lifted the little paper umbrella from his drink, then shook off the spatters and dropped it into his jacket pocket.
Who else does that but a father who plans to bring it home to give to his child—probably a daughter—as a gift? Faith couldn’t be furious at Emmett, because she had known it all and had ignored her own knowledge.
She sat up in her bed and watched as he dressed himself, as he turned each shirt button into its little slit with exactness even in the dark room. At one point he looked up from the buttoning. “You know, I didn’t lie to you,” he pointed out. “Had you asked, I would’ve told you.”
“I suppose.”
“My wife and I aren’t close that way. That’s not what we’re like. You and I could have something completely different. Something spectacular, based on tonight. I mean, what we did together, what we felt—I wasn’t making it up. We could have more of that. We could be that.”
“I don’t do that,” Faith said, cold now. “At least not knowingly. Not to my sisters.”
“Sisters?” he asked, confused. “What are you talking about? Oh. Like all women are sisters, you mean; a women’s lib thing. Believe me, my wife is not your sister.”
“But you get my point. I don’t betray other women.”
“You mean you’re moral.”
“Something like that,” she said.
“Duly noted. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Please don’t.”
“About the ads only,” Emmett said. “Let me talk to the people in the office, and I think with a little persuading we can buy some space in your magazine.”
“Sure,” she said flatly.
He did call her the next morning; she was still at home when the call came. “Look, I need to tell you something,” Emmett said, and his voice seemed calm but strained, different. “My wife knows about you.” Faith just listened, shocked. “She confronted me when I got home last night, and she said, ‘Don’t lie to me,’ and I really couldn’t. She wanted me to tell her your name, to tell her everything, and so I did.”
“God, Emmett, why did you do that?” Faith said.
“She’s right here and she wants to talk to you,” he continued. “Can I put her on?”
“Are you insane?”
“No,” he said, and he sounded sad then, or maybe it was just the distortion of the connection, but for some reason Faith hung on, and then there was the sound of the phone being handed over, and a woman came on the line.
“Faith Frank, this is Madeline Shrader,” she said, her voice soft and bland. Faith didn’t say anything. “I wanted to say that my husband is not yours for the taking. You may think he is, because he acts that way. But you have to remember that he stood beside me during our wedding ceremony and promised to love and honor me as long as we both shall live. And you know what, Faith Frank? I am not dead yet.”
Faith couldn’t take another second of this, and she quietly hung up. She pictured Emmett with his wife. She saw the triad of husband, wife, and child—a little girl who was perhaps five years old, and who sat fiddling contentedly with something in her hand: a paper umbrella that had been in her daddy’s drink.
Faith hated herself ferociously, and then remembered the way the women had spoken to one another at that first women’s gathering. Why are we so hard on ourselves? they’d asked one another.
Sometimes, she thought now, being hard on yourself was appropriate.
“There isn’t going to be any ad money from Nabisco,” she told Shirley Pepper at work on Monday, after climbing the stairs because the elevator was broken yet again. She was out of breath, and leaned against a wall.
“Oh no? Why is that?” Shirley asked. She looked up from where she sat clacking away at an IBM typewriter that was as heavy as a tractor.
“It’s complicated,” said Faith.
“All right,” Shirley said evenly. “Look, it’s not a tragedy, Faith. Anyway, I think we have a lead with Dr. Scholl’s. We’ll live to fight another day.”
The magazine got some attention and lasted, in some modest version or another, for over thirty more years. In the first years of Bloomer the three earliest members of the editorial staff went on occasional talk shows and spoke earnestly and passionately, and did what they had to do. The talk-show hosts were often louts in wide, silvery ties who made jokes at the women’s expense about hairy, angry feminists no one would ever want to date. Shirley, Faith, and Evelyn never laughed along with them, but kept appearing on the shows to say what they felt was important, even if they were ridiculed.
At some point, Faith separated from the pack. She was so much better at speaking than the others. It wasn’t that she was an ideas person—that was never the case, exactly—and it wasn’t even that she was much more articulate, but it was something else. People had to want to hear you. They had to want to be around you, even when you were saying things that they didn’t really want to hear. This quality was on display in 1975, when Faith appeared on a late-night talk show opposite the novelist Holt Rayburn, who had become very famous with his Vietnam novel Cloud Cover. Rayburn, in a jacket with wide lapels and a paisley tie, his mutton-chop sideburns fencing in a face that always looked like it was itching for a fight, was smoking incessantly, and the set of the TV show had its own low-hanging cloud cover.
“The thing about women,” he began, and the host, Benedict Loring, leaned in.
“Yes, yes?” said Loring. “The thing about women? Oh, I love sentences that begin this way, don’t you?” He made a lascivious face, and the audience laughed and clapped.
“The thing about women,” Holt Rayburn repeated, “is that they want you to do all kinds of things for them—‘Open this jar, I’m helpless. Go to bed with me, I’m incredibly horny. Pay for dinner, I’m saving my money for a rainy day’—but then they go out there on TV and they’ve suddenly turned into these angry women’s libbers who say, ‘We want to do things for ourselves.’ I mean, give me a break. You can’t have it both ways, ladies. Either you’re little girls who need us to take care of you, or you’re steamrolling bitches who can do everything on your own. And if that’s the case, the second version, then fine, go to bed with one another like some of you are already doing, because clearly you don’t need men. And while you’re at it, try to have babies without us too. And pay the rent. Let me know how it works out for you.”