“What I want to know is how you became a writer,” Leslie said, tactfully steering the conversation away from the bad to the good.
“I wrote my way out of misery,” Ellie said. “At least that’s what my therapist, Jeanne, said. This is her house, by the way. She’s helped me to see what—”
Halting, Ellie drew in a deep breath. “Are you sure you want to hear all this?”
“Every word in chronological order,” Madison said with a smile.
For a moment Ellie looked out the window over the sink. No, she wasn’t ready to tell anyone the “whole” story. Not yet.
She looked back at the other two women.
“Why don’t I make us some coffee?” Leslie said. “Or would anyone like some strong tea?”
“I’ll have tea,” Ellie said, while Madison wanted coffee. And while Leslie waited on them, Ellie said, “Would anyone believe me if I said that I was working so hard that I didn’t notice what was going on in my marriage? I got up at four A.M. and hit the floor running.”
Neither woman answered Ellie’s question, and she was glad of that. Here in this house with these women who were at once strangers and her oldest friends, she knew that she didn’t have to make excuses, didn’t have to apologize.
“Anyway,” Ellie said, “Martin, that was—is—my ex’s name, Martin Gilmore, was brilliantly talented as a musician. He played a guitar, and he could make you weep at the sound. Or laugh. Whatever emotion he wanted from his audience, he could get.” Ellie’s head came up. “Anyway, I thought I was going to be the person who gave the world the opportunity to hear him; then, after he was internationally successful—”
“It was going to be your turn,” Leslie said. “There’s always the promise that the woman is going to get ‘her turn.’”
“Right,” Ellie said with a grimace. “When he asked me to leave New York and go live in a small town outside L.A., I agreed readily. Martin said that only in L.A. would he have a chance to become known. So I—” Ellie took a deep breath. “I sold my art supplies and all the work I’d done, and flew out to L.A. with him.
“And at first
it was great. He got some wonderful jobs with some excellent bands and it was all so exciting. I was working as a receptionist in a used car office and I was bored out of my mind, but at night there was Martin with his fascinating stories about who he’d seen and what he’d done that day.”
Ellie looked down at her hands. “But slowly, things began to go wrong. He quit one job after another, and with every job he quit, he seemed to pull back within himself more. At first he was making good money, but as the years went by, earning money didn’t seem to be something that he thought he needed to do. He said that life wasn’t giving anything to him, so he didn’t feel he needed to give anything back.”
Smiling, Ellie looked up at the other women. “So I decided to help him. I decided to make him into a success. I began to make appointments for him with the biggest names in L.A. I must say that I had no pride at all. I begged and I cried. I made up outrageous stories to get people to listen to Martin, either on tape or in person. But—” Ellie threw up her hands in frustration. “He wouldn’t pursue the opportunities I got for him,” she said, then had to unclench her hand, as her nails were cutting into her palm. Leslie handed her a cup of tea, and for a moment Ellie sipped the tea while she worked to calm herself.
She put the cup down. “I’ve learned that talent alone isn’t enough to make a person successful. You can write a great software program, but unless you make an effort to market it, it might as well lie in your desk unseen. That’s what happened with my ex. I don’t think he could have stood the competition or the criticism that goes with trying to make it to the top of any field, so he sabotaged himself at every opportunity. I’d get him an appointment with a DJ to hear his tape or for him to meet someone who could give him a start. Martin would be wildly excited about the opportunity, and he’d make mad, passionate love to me the night before, telling me how grateful he was and what a great wife I was, et cetera.”
“Let me guess,” Madison said. “Then he wouldn’t show up for the appointment.”
“Exactly!” Ellie answered. “But he always had these heavenly excuses. And I mean that literally: heavenly. Always, he didn’t take an opportunity because he was helping someone.”
“So you couldn’t get angry with him,” Leslie said. “Not with a saint like him.”
“Of course not. He’d say, ‘What could I do? Joe needed me. Could I have said, “Sorry, Joe, but I have to leave you in pain because I have to go play music to some rich dude who cares about nobody on earth”?’” Ellie said.
“So how long before you gave up living for him and rediscovered your own talents?” Madison asked as she drank of her strong black coffee. So far this morning, Ellie hadn’t seen her smoke one cigarette, but now she opened a new pack and took one out. Leslie got up to open the window over the kitchen sink.
“I don’t think that I did, actually,” Ellie said. “I think it just sort of happened. No preplanning; it just happened. Martin was away visiting one of his many friends and . . .” For a moment Ellie didn’t say anything.
“Woman?” Madison asked.
“I know I’m going to sound naive, but back then it never crossed my mind that his many trips to ‘help’ some old friend or play music with some guys were actually rendezvous with about a dozen . . . mistresses, I guess you’d call them.”
“So you were alone,” Leslie said, encouraging her to continue. She’d put a bowl of strawberries in front of Ellie, but when she didn’t eat them, Leslie did. “Did you start painting again?”
“No,” Ellie said. “I know that this is one of those stupid women-things, but I think that because I knew that the man I was married to was more talented than I was, I gave up art. After I met Martin and heard his music, I never so much as did a watercolor again.”
Ellie’s head came up. “Jeanne, my therapist, thinks that I didn’t paint, not because of who had the most talent, but because I was deeply unhappy and I was suppressing it. I really had no life, either when Martin was home or when he was gone. When he was home, we lived in . . . How can I say this?” She looked at Madison. “You said that your marriage was hell, but mine was . . . I guess you would call it sadness. We lived in sadness because Martin was sooooo brilliantly talented, but no one would give him a chance.”
“Does this include the people he stood up?” Madison asked as she drew on her cigarette.
“Oh, yes,” Ellie said, smiling. “Them most of all.”