A House Full of Women Ch. 02

Vanessa moved into Jack's house about two weeks later.

It was an inevitable development, but for Vanessa it still represented a big step: her first time cohabiting with a man! The idea of sharing this huge house with her lover made her feel once more like a combined wife and daughter. She plunged into her spousal responsibilities--outside of the bedroom--with enthusiasm, taking up the cooking duties at once and making sure the place was neat and tidy. But Jack wasn't about to reduce Vanessa to the level of a household drudge: he had a cleaning woman come in once a month, and a gardener also came by every so often to keep the front and back yards in good shape.

As the classwork heated up in April, both Jack and Vanessa had to hit the books pretty hard, although they made abundant time for cuddling. But their life took a very strange turn one Saturday afternoon when Vanessa was in the house alone, having spread her books and papers all over the dining-room table while writing a term paper. Jack had gone out to run some errands.

There was a ringing at the door--in fact, an annoyingly insistent one. The caller wasn't content to ring just once; he or she rang multiple times.

Vanessa threw down her pen in disgust and said, "Just a minute! I'm coming!" It wasn't clear that the person outside actually heard her, but Vanessa herself was irked at being interrupted.

What she saw when she opened the front door was a middle-aged woman--probably in her mid-forties--who looked both disheveled and harried. Her auburn hair seemed uncombed, and her clothes didn't seem to fit very well. But this was no indigent person: Vanessa could tell that the clothes were designer brands that, if properly worn, would have made the wearer look sensational.

"May I help you?" Vanessa said in her usual soft, high voice. Something about this woman had caused her irritation to melt away and a burgeoning pity to emerge.

The woman seemed startled to see Vanessa. "Who are you?" she snapped.

Well, that's pretty rude, Vanessa thought. "I'm Vanessa. Who are you?"

The woman ignored that question. Peering keenly and with vague hostility at Vanessa, she said, "Does Jack Martin still live here?"

"Yes," Vanessa said. Jack had not actually introduced her to many of his friends, probably because he feared they might disapprove of his having such a young girlfriend.

"And you--you live with him?" the woman asked in a tone of disbelief.

"I do," Vanessa responded with some asperity and a hint of pride.

At these simple words, the woman did something incredible. She slumped down on the front steps, covered her face in her hands, and began to sob.

"Ma'am," Vanessa said, alarmed, "what's the matter with you? Are you a friend of Jack's? Can I help?"

Something about those words caused the woman to feel a kind of impotent rage mixed with her sorrow. "A friend of Jack's? No, I'm not a friend of Jack's. I'm his wife!" Then, swallowing hard, she was forced to correct herself: "Ex-wife."

Vanessa thought she would faint. She felt dizzy and light-headed, and might have taken a tumble if she hadn't clung to the door for support. Jack had talked so little of his former spouse that Vanessa knew next to nothing about her, nor about the reasons for their breakup. She could hardly even remember her name, but then it came to her: Joanna.

"Joanna," she said sharply, "you'd better come inside. Whatever's troubling you, maybe we can help."

Joanna didn't fail to notice that possessive "we": this was Jack and Vanessa's house now, not Jack and Joanna's. Struggling to her feet, she dragged herself into the house and flopped onto the sofa in the living room. She didn't have to be instructed where to go: she knew the house and its furnishings by heart.

As Joanna sat there, sniffling, Vanessa gave her a careful scrutiny. She would have been very attractive if she wasn't so upset. About five foot six, she was well filled out--especially in the bust and hips--without being in the least fat. She displayed a strength both of physique and of character that few women possess, and Vanessa got the impression that this was a woman who rarely cried--which meant that something truly serious must have happened to cause those tears to flow. She just hoped she herself wasn't the cause of them.

But then she noticed something else. There was a dark spot around her right eye, extending down to her cheek.

Vanessa gasped. "What happened to your face?" she blurted out.

Joanna looked up sourly. "My boyfriend happened to my face, if you want to know."

"Omigod!" Vanessa cried. "He--he hit you?"

"Got it in one, my sweet. I should have given him a swift kick to his crown jewels and made him unable to have children--but I just decided I'd get the hell out of there." Then she thundered: "No man is going to treat me like that!"

Vanessa was taken aback by Joanna's anger, although she could well understand it. Any man who does something like that to a woman is little better than human slime.

Joanna was going on, shaking her head and largely talking to herself. "What a stupid fool I was, shacking up with a guy I'd only known for a month or two. Jesus, what gets into guys when you decide to live with them? They think they own you. Well, it serves me right to link up with someone so much younger than me."

She clapped a hand over her mouth, looking up to Vanessa with some embarrassment. "Oops! Maybe I shouldn't have said that."

"That's okay," Vanessa said, although she was in fact a bit offended.

Once again Joanna gave her a squint-eyed examination. "So . . . you're his girlfriend?"

"I suppose you could call me that."

"How old are you, may I ask?"

Vanessa paused a moment before saying, "I'll be twenty-one in two months."

Joanna's jaw dropped. It took her a moment or two before she could say, "You do realize that you're a year younger than my daughter? Jack's daughter?"

"Yes, I know that."

The older woman shook her head in disbelief. "Well, all I can say is, good luck to you."

She stood up abruptly and seemed to be heading toward the front door. Vanessa said hastily, "Where are you going?"

"There's no place for me here. There probably wouldn't be even if you weren't here. I'd best be going."

"Don't go! We really would like to help! I would, anyway." Her silent addition was: We women have to stick together, don't we?

Joanna was touched by Vanessa's concern. She reached a hand out and stroked Vanessa's cheek. "That's very sweet of you, dear, but this is my problem, not yours or Jack's. I think I'd better--"

It was then that Jack came home.

He had had to go to the hardware store to get a new shower head for the upstairs bathroom and some other things along that line. Coming back exhausted, he'd dumped several plastic bags in the hallway just inside the front door, then stopped short as he saw who had come into his house. He quite literally turned white.

"What's she doing here?" he asked Vanessa accusingly.

"Jack!" Vanessa exclaimed, rushing to her lover. "Joanna's in a bit of trouble--her boyfriend hit her! Can you believe it? What a horrible person he must be!"

Jack glanced quickly at his ex-wife and noticed the bruise on her face. "I'm sorry to hear that," he muttered, not terribly sympathetically. But his unspoken thought was pretty much along the lines of what Joanna had just said: It's not my concern--not anymore.

Vanessa had already gotten to the point of being able to read Jack's mind. "Darling, we have to do something for her! We can't let her deal with this all by herself!"

"Why not?" Jack said harshly. "She's a big girl." More than twice as old as you. "Anyway, what exactly can we do?"

"Maybe she could stay here for a little while, until she can work things out." Vanessa said those words and then winced, almost as if she expected Jack to--

But Jack went even whiter and said bluntly, "She's not staying here."

"Jack, what's the matter with you?" Vanessa wailed, utterly disappointed in her man. "Don't you have any feelings for--" For the woman you were married to for two decades?

Jack finally addressed Joanna directly. "Don't you have anywhere else you can go? A friend, maybe?"

But then Jack remembered that Joanna had never developed any close friends among her female acquaintances. She seemed to regard most of her women friends as weak, submissive vessels under the collective thumb of their various mates. She did have some friends at the real estate office where she worked, but they weren't of the sort she could presume upon to put her up for any length of time.

Looking utterly defeated, Joanna said, "I'll just go, okay?"

"No!" Vanessa shouted at the top of her voice. "She's staying here, and that's final!"

Jack and Joanna looked at each other in bemusement. Jack in particular was almost stupefied by this sudden exhibition of determination on the part of his shy young sweetheart. It was almost as if a rabbit had given a tonguelashing to a coyote.

"Okay," he mumbled, looking at the floor, "she can stay a few days."

"Thank you," Joanna said directly to Vanessa. It was hard for her to accept this kind of generosity, since she put supreme value on her independence. "Thank you both."

"Look, I was about to prepare dinner," Vanessa said. "Why don't you help me?"

Joanna gave her young friend a smirk. She wasn't exactly a whiz in the kitchen, largely because she regarded cooking as one more symbol of female servitude. But she said, "Okay, I'll help you."

She actually wasn't much help, and mostly she just watched Vanessa efficiently prepare a fine meal of spaghetti with meat sauce, a salad, and garlic bread. Jack peeked into the kitchen every so often, experiencing a kind of cognitive dissonance as he watched his ex-wife and his current lover becoming fast friends--or, at least, tolerating each other.

Almost immediately after dinner was over, however, Jack abruptly got up from the table and said, "I have to do some studying," and locked himself in his den, on the other side of the hallway from the living room.

Vanessa gave Joanna a little sigh of apology on behalf of her lover. The two women quietly cleaned up after dinner, then realized that some further discussion was needed. They poured out some drinks--the very same Amaretto that Jack had served her on that memorable night of her deflowering--and sat down on the sofa.

"What did he mean by 'studying'?" Joanna said. "What does he need to study?"

Vanessa went into a very brief description of how the two of them had met at that class on Hemingway.

Joanna chortled. "Jack the college boy! That's just too funny."

"He's taking the course very seriously," Vanessa said. "He wants to get that degree."

"I'm sure he does. It's a matter of pride, I imagine. But you know, dear--"

"I know what you're going to say," Vanessa interrupted. "I'm too young, or Jack's too old. It's one of those May-December things, we'll never have a long-term relationship, and on and on and on."

"Yes, that's just what I was about to say. Maybe you'll scoff, but I do think you're a little too young to understand how these things work. Think of it: when you're forty, Jack will be sixty-five. Is that what you want?"

"That's way far in the future! I'm not thinking about that. Right now, we're doing great. He--he loves me, and I love him." Vanessa said that last sentence with a kind of mulish certainty.

Joanna knew she had to tread carefully. "That's wonderful, my dear, but it's all a matter of whether it will last. Let's hope so."

In an effort to change the subject, Vanessa said, "I still don't understand why you and Jack split up. He's said so little about it."

"I don't think I understand it either," Joanna said wearily. "Was he just tired of me? Something happened in the last few years of our marriage. We started arguing over little things--nothing at all, really. It was so frustrating! And once that kind of thing starts, you develop a lot of scar tissue that makes it really hard for you to remember how much you love each other."

"I hope it wasn't . . . something in the bedroom."

"Actually no. We were always pretty compatible in that way. In fact, Jack taught me a lot of things, and got me to like things that I didn't think I'd like."

Vanessa gave her characteristic blush. "Do you mean--rear entry?"

"That's one of them. He certainly has a taste for that." She extended a hand and placed it on Vanessa's arm. "I hope Jack didn't . . . force you in any way?"

"Good Lord, no! He'd never do that. He's always been the perfect gentleman."

"You're probably right about that." Whatever deficiencies Jack had, lack of respect for women wasn't one of them. "It's funny," she went on. "I imagine Jack has more, um, potency than even the randy boys you've no doubt had to fend off on campus. Have you found that to be the case?"

Vanessa fell into an embarrassed silence. It didn't take Joanna long to figure out why.

"Don't tell me," she said in a low, almost awed voice, "you were a virgin."

Vanessa nodded rapidly.

"Omigod," Joanna breathed. "Was it okay--that first time?"

"It was heavenly!" Vanessa cried. "I mean, of course it hurt, both front and back--I expected that. But--"

"He did it both ways that first night?" Joanna exploded, outraged on behalf of the inexperienced young woman. "That's way above and beyond the call of duty! You really oughtn't to have let him do that."

"It was fine--in fact, it was great. He's really good at, you know, making a girl happy."

"Yes, I'll give him that much credit. But still--"

Once again Vanessa wanted to change the subject. "Joanna, I have to ask you something, and I hope you don't get offended. And I also hope you can level with me."

"What is it?" Joanna said, suddenly suspicious.

"Did you come here . . . with the expectation of getting back together with him?"

Joanna looked long and hard at the other woman. For all her naïveté, she seemed to have a quick intuitive understanding of human relationships. Maybe it's just a natural instinct in women.

"Well, okay, I may have had a fleeting thought--really a fantasy--of something along those lines. But even before I knew about you, I realized that was almost certainly not going to happen. There's just too much bad blood between me and him."

"Maybe he feels differently now."

"I doubt it. He couldn't wait to get out of my sight tonight."

"Oh, he was just startled by your being here. I'm sure he'll come around."

"I don't think so, dear. And I don't expect it."

They left it at that. Some hours later, as Joanna trudged upstairs and, after a wistful glance at the master bedroom, went into the guest bedroom to settle down for the night, Vanessa came to bed herself, finding Jack there reading a book.

She wasn't going to let him off easy. Glaring at him, she snapped, "You could have been a little more civil to the woman you were married to for twenty years!"

"Jesus, Vanessa!" he pleaded. "I almost jumped out of my skin when I saw her! I literally haven't laid eyes on her for almost three years. How do you expect me to react?"

"She's hurting, Jack! Her boyfriend mistreated her, and now her ex-husband acts as if she has the plague. I hope you're a little nicer to her over the coming days."

"I'll try--but I swear to you, Vanessa, she can't stay more than a few days. I think I'll go crazy if she does."

"We'll see about that," Vanessa said sharply, flouncing into bed and giving Jack only a token kiss before turning her back to him and going to sleep.

The next morning, as the three of them were having breakfast, there was more discussion of logistical details.

"You don't have any stuff with you?" Vanessa asked. "Not even a change of clothes?"

"No," Joanna said. "I didn't think of it--I just wanted to get the hell out of there."

"I don't think my clothes will fit you, but I could lend you some clean underwear. You'll want to get your things from your boyfriend's apartment, won't you?"

Joanna sighed. "Yes, I suppose so. I dread the thought of confronting him, though."

Jack grudgingly put in a word. "I could help you, Joanna. I wouldn't feel good about letting you go back to that place if that bastard is around."

Joanna, still on edge, glared at him. "Oh, you think I'm some sort of weak, helpless female that needs a big, strong man to protect her? I can take care of myself, buster!"

"I was only trying to help," Jack muttered.

Vanessa made a pacifying gesture. "Joanna, dear, maybe he's right. Men are good for some things, you know--like being pack mules!"

The two women laughed nervously while Jack sulked. "I guess you have a point," Joanna said.

"You can put your stuff in the garage," Vanessa offered.

"Can't we just rent a storage unit?" Jack whined.

The young woman gave him an exasperated look. "Jack, darling, it'll be ever so much more convenient for her to have her things right here on the spot. There's plenty of room in the garage--you never park your car there anyway."

So that's how it went. Joanna got her no-good boyfriend to agree to vacate the premises while she gathered up her belongings. It took several trips to bring them all over to the house, and with each load Jack developed a sense of foreboding that his ex-wife was preparing for a lengthy stay, regardless of her earlier promises.

And, as the days extended to a full week with Joanna seemingly making little effort to find a new place of her own, Jack's agitation increased. He tried to give Joanna some slack, since she was obviously depressed and traumatized by what had happened to her; but with each passing hour he sensed her presence causing complications with his relationship with Vanessa.

It was on a Friday night that Jack tried to make love to Vanessa--but she came close to rebuffing him.

"Jack!" she cried as he tugged at her nightgown in a fruitless effort to get it off. "Joanna's right in the next room!"

"I know that!" he spat back in a low whisper. "But, Jesus, Vanessa, we haven't been intimate for the whole time she's been here. I can't take it anymore!"

"Well," she said, finally allowing him to strip her, "we'll have to be quiet. It'll upset her if she hears us. Can you do that?"

"I suppose," Jack said with very bad grace, since he enjoyed bellowing like an ox when he came.

When they got down to action, they weren't quite as silent as they'd hoped, and there were a fair number of moans and groans as Jack in particular worked off his week-long celibacy with several forays into Vanessa's various orifices.

The next morning, Vanessa came down to find Jack busily preparing breakfast in the kitchen, with Joanna sitting at the small kitchen table. Jack was fond of whipping up bacon, eggs, and toast on weekends--it was just about the only thing he was good at preparing, and he took an exaggerated pride in it. But as Vanessa sat down next to Joanna at the table, she noticed that the older woman was in distress: her eyes were staring right at Jack's back and a look of anguish covered her face.

"Are you all right, dear?" Vanessa asked.

Joanna looked up and gave her young friend the most pathetic grimace imaginable.

She heard us, Vanessa said to herself.

Her heart ached for Jack's ex. She tried to imagine herself in Joanna's shoes: forced to take lodging as a guest in the house she'd lived in for well over a decade, and now compelled to visualize her former spouse getting it on with the woman who had taken her place. How horrible she must be feeling!

"Joanna, come here," Vanessa ordered, practically dragging the other woman into the living room and setting her on the sofa.

"You still love him, don't you?" Vanessa said softly.