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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?”