“Catherine,” Jay said my name softly and sat up. He reached for my shoulders, rubbing them gently.
“Just drinking and talking, hmmm?” I said. I most certainly remembered that’s what we’d agreed to, before we’d downed too much liquor and somehow ended up… here.
“Drinking and talking,” Jay repeated. His hand traced back down my spine slowly and I shivered a little. He leaned his face in close to my hair, kissed the nape of my neck. “And this, too,” he whispered. “It doesn’t have to mean anything,” he repeated. “We could just… get together from time to time.”
“Get together?” I laughed a little. “Is that what people are calling it these days?”
“I enjoyed your company last night,” he said, ignoring my sarcasm. “I’ve been alone for months now, and it’s hard to be alone all the time.”
His hand felt kind of nice on my back, and I almost understood what he was saying. What it was he wanted. That finding pleasure with another person was fine and even good, and maybe I wanted it too?
“All right,” I finally said softly, which somehow felt like saying too much, and not enough, all at the same time. But then I added, “Do you mind leaving through the fire escape? I don’t want to have to explain you to my roommate.”
* * *
MYRTLE LIKED TO call me Saint Catherine, due to my very dull (her word) love life.
Oh to be young and single in the city, she would say, her voice exuding the kind of longing that came with being married to a man you didn’t quite love for so many years. That came with wondering how other men might treat her better or believing that, at the very least, I should be able to find one of those so-called good men and she could live vicariously through me. She looked at me and saw so much wasted possibility. I looked at her and saw what I never wanted to become: a woman who was trapped.
But Myrtle was wrong. I was no saint. I was never a saint. There had been men since I’d moved to New York that I’d never dream of telling her about. Not men I’d ever marry. But other men I’d snuck out through the fire escape. Three of them, in fact, in the past three years. One named Jack my first year living here who I’d even dated for a little while until we both lost interest and stopped telephoning each other. Two others I’d met, brought back here for only a night, and then had discarded, just like that. I could not imagine the look on Myrtle’s face if she were to know about these men, these illicit and enjoyable things I’d done with them. But why was it wrong for a woman to want pleasure, with nothing else attached to it? Why did sex have to mean anything more for a woman than it did for a man?
“I’ll call you,” Jay said with an easy smile, as he disappeared out my bedroom window, down the three flights of steps to the alleyway below.
And I thought it was fifty-fifty whether he actually would telephone or not. Either way, I felt okay about it.
Daisy 1920
LOUISVILLE
MOTHER ALWAYS USED TO TELL Rose and me this story when we were little girls, about when I was a baby. I came into this world in December of 1899, just weeks before Governor Goebel was shot and the whole entire state of Kentucky went crazy. We were on the brink of a civil war. Violence erupted in the streets of Louisville, and there Mother was, with a newborn baby girl. Daddy was terrified and wouldn’t let her leave the house, even to take me on a walk down the street in my carriage. Mother said she stayed at home, shut entirely inside the house for the first six months of my life. It wasn’t until summer that she dared to let sunlight touch my skin.
I never knew what I was meant to do in this life, Mother would tell us, until I had this tiny little baby. My tiny little Daisy Fay. And then my whole life was certain. My only job was to keep you safe. My only job was to protect you from this world.
Rose loved this story. She would always say she couldn’t wait to grow up to be a mother. She wanted five babies, preferably all girls, and whenever she said that, Mother would laugh and kiss her head and say, Oh my Rosie, I hope they’re all as sweet as you.
But I would always stay quiet. I didn’t dream of babies, of being a mother. I’d never much relished the idea of taking care of anyone else aside from myself. And I’d never quite thought past marrying a man, becoming a wife, to what might inevitably come next.
I’d never quite thought about it at all, until I found myself on that hard tile floor of the Santa Barbara Hotel, vomiting into the toilet.
In that exact moment, I’d tried to count back to the last time I’d seen my monthly visitor and I couldn’t remember, precisely. But it had been… months, sometime before my wedding.
And then I’d leaned my cheek against the cool porcelain of the hotel toilet and I’d cried.
* * *
TOM AND I left Santa Barbara almost immediately after his accident. We went to Boston first, where his family owned an estate. He wanted to go on to Europe from there, but I wanted to return to Louisville instead, at least until the baby was born.
“I need my mother,” I insisted, like I was still a pouty little girl, and not this grown-up married woman about to be a mother in her own right.
Tom finally, reluctantly agreed, and by the first of 1920, we were back in Louisville, staying in Mother’s house. I retreated to my old bedroom and made Tom go down the hall to Rose’s. I told him the baby and I needed our space in bed. But as my stomach swelled, my nausea grew. And even if I might have wanted Tom to touch me, my body wouldn’t stand for it.
We never discussed the accident, about what had happened with the chambermaid in Santa Barbara or why Tom had been driving in the middle of the night in a car with her. Tom had come back to our suite later that afternoon, a goose egg on his forehead, and had simply said, “What would you like for supper tonight, Daisy?” As if my entire world hadn’t just burst into spontaneous flames, with one telephone call and one realization stretched across the cool bathroom floor.
I’d answered him by saying: “I think I might be pregnant.”
Tom had opened his mouth, then closed it. He didn’t say anything at all for a few moments. When he finally spoke he said: “A baby?” It was more a question than a reaction, good or bad.
We’d stared at each other, the ocean breeze wafting in through the window I’d opened to try and ease my nausea earlier. It gave me a chill; I shivered a little, but neither one of us moved to shut the window.
There were so many things left unsaid in that moment, but neither one of us said them to the other, either.
* * *