Three Women: A Novel

By August Franza

THREE WOMEN is about Eleanor, Helen, and Rana-- their ambitions, their indignities, and their fates.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9781669874478

August Franza

August Franza has published 27 novels and is planning to make them an even 30.

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Also By The Author

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Etc…

THREE WOMEN

A novel

AUGUST FRANZA

Copyright © 2023 by August Franza.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 04/21/2023

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

852907

CONTENTS

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

l0

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

…they just want and want and stretch their yearning arms…

Dominique Lowell

1

THE CLICK

Tall? No. Handsome? No. Blue-eyed. No. Baffled? Yes. When you’re waiting for it. The Click.

Even Tate Reeves, the governor of Mississippi with the GWTW tone and manner, even as the water systems of Jackson, Mississippi collapsed as a result of his impudence and indifference—even Tate Reeves (he was frightened to think this could be possible) would have approved of Tal… when the click came. But in this desert time Talbot Schneider knew he couldn’t even make a thing out of that.

He was Tal to all who knew him and longed to know him. Desired, beloved. Like a charmed character out of Tennessee Williams: drug-ridden. Baffled.

Tal Schneider was the adored’s name when he had the click. But it had fled—again. And he went under.

When he engaged his friends, he led. But he was moody and liked to be alone when he didn’t have it. That was his tragic flaw. It was also his organizing principle. But it left Helen, Rana, and Eleanor, when they got in touch, brooding, along with other friends who would not cease to claim him.

They knew what his burdens were. And he didn’t look particularly appealing; he had no god-given physical beauty. But he was going to get what he needed no matter who he thought he was.

What is it? Rana asked. We know something of what it is, but what is it to you?

It’s nothing, he said.

Nothing? You’re deluding yourself.

Rana challenged, always challenged, her way of confronting. It was imperative that she had to fling open closed doors.

Nothing at all, Tal repeated, deluding himself.

You don’t believe that, Rana said. You can’t believe that. Stand up like a man even if you don’t have it.

He was in denial, a tactic in the deep bog he found for himself at such times.

Rana brooded. Helen seemed preoccupied. Each, all three, Eleanor the more distant, had their reasons.

How can we help? Rana asked out of twisted sympathy and mad anger.

No one can help, I’m helpless, Tal said, not defiantly, not bitterly, just as a matter of fact. Help-less.

Do you mean now? Rana asked. or then?

Now is in my face, he said, because of the failure. It’s not coming.

It always comes, Tal. You know that. We all know it. You’ve said it a hundred times. It always comes. You depend on it. We depend on it; we depend on your having it.

I know it but I can’t feel it, Tal said. I know it’s not here. I know it in my bones and my bones say it’s far away. There was a moment or two when I heard a vague, a limp ‘cl…’ but that ended, in vain. It’s gone.

Stop pitying yourself, goddamn it! Rana said when she’d had enough.

Helen, ambitious as she was, waited. Self-composed Eleanor, deliberated from a distance. Rana, always brooding, trying to fight off bad memories.

They were devoted to Tal. They had their own vexations. The three women; his most intimate.

Until he got it, there would be nothing. Rana was the most searching, fascinated by the strangeness.

Some men in that condition are sick forever, turn into heavy drinkers. The sickness spreads itself over all. The need is great but, at bottom, determined yet undetermined. Or not determinable in its seedy recklessness. Not willing to be examined. The damage done and they, the ones who get it, come back with souvenirs. And then the souvenirs start exploding: drunkenness, drug habits, beatings, divorce, shootings, car crashes, suicides—all blamed on the essential male character when the thing lapsed.

The three women came to him. What were their motives? Why hadn’t they collapsed? Rana read about what troubled her voraciously. This was a kind of war she knew about. One book called The Warriors—Reflections of Men in Battle was the spectacle of war as something that drew the men: delight in comradeship, delight in destruction, delight in being macho, the need to exult. Rana wanted to get hold of it herself, some time, some where, wanted to expose its rottenness.

2

Eleanor became the distant one, the correspondent. She corresponded for a living but she always got lost, ending up carelessly in the wrong city, country, and continent. She wrote marvelous copy in the wrong city, country, and continent. She delighted readers with her stories (about resourceless people from a resourceless writer), stories that came out of wrong cities, wrong countries, and wrong continents. And yet, despite being lost, out of a tender mind.

Eleanor never cared to know where she was. Her readers felt she gave the human race credit at a time of worldwide mort a credit, as the Frenchman said. Eleanor’s people didn’t have any credit at all, either in the present or credit to be paid in the future. But Eleanor’s people were free. They had no credit history. They were free of history in whatever city, country, continent Eleanor found them in, which she was wrongly and intimately reporting from. Readers respected and loved Eleanor’s stories. For those people, her writing was loved, for they were the creditless— The Free People, or The Freeple, as they became known. Eleanor’s people.

Because she was always lost and lost always, her skeptical editors—those who tracked her—provided her with a Street Finder, a handy brochure which showed her how to find the nearest cross street to any city address in any country worldwide. Since her pay was regular and generous and since she had no credit, the editors had to know where she was at any time to deliver her generous earnings. But Eleanor never cared for anything except the people she wrote about, no matter where she was. They knew. They adopted her stories as well as her sensibility.

She liked it that way and so did the people she met and wrote about. In any city, country, or continent where she happened to be lost, there were always her readers and her earnings waiting for her.

The street finder was guaranteed to help but she had no idea where she put it half the time. The other half—well, it lost her, try as she might to comply with its instructions. It appears that Eleanor never wanted to be found, or never wanted to find where she was because she knew something that didn’t require geography.

If the Street Finder was designed to help travelers, it got indistinct and foggy to Eleanor. It was called Arithmetic of the Avenues. That was an immediate problem for Eleanor. She was very poor in math and numbers. She had always been irritated at precision. Numbers confused her, boxed her in. Like her friends in lost places, she wanted to be free. If she found connections, they were random with no names, no addresses, not to mention their cities, states, or countries of which, in her random encounters, there is no need to mention. Random encounters were few by design. Eleanor did not want to be ensnared.

When the brochure of Arithmetic of the Avenues was in her hands, her fingers were lumpy. The brochure tried to speak to her but Eleanor resisted.

Here’s a simple way to locate the cross street of an address, it advised. Take the number of the building you are heading for, cancel the last digit, divide by two and add or subtract the number below. If you are searching for number 75 Avenue C, from the chart below add 200 to locate the cross street: Bogdan Road, and there you are.

Where was that? The street finder was also very concrete if you paid strict attention. Eleanor’s mind wandered even during strict attention. The normal world paid strict attention but Eleanor didn’t. She let it all go. She had abandoned her identity as she had abandoned occasional connections. She had abandoned the fixed predetermined meanings of words and signs in favor openness. It was sufficient for words to be her words and no one else’s. When someone tried to ensnare her in permanence, that was the signal to depart. She did not care where she was as long as she had The Freeple to listen to her. She knew the way she wanted to be. Her career enjoined her way of living. She tore the Street Finder into many pieces, threw it away and returned to her desirable and comfortable—and free— lostness in creativity in any city, any country, any continent.

But the brochures kept showing up, compliments of her editors.

*

What were Eleanor’s stories like? Like her, they were impromptu, unattached, off the shelf of her mind just as she stocked it. They had great variety and came out with ease because she listened to people from those cities, countries, and continents. She was a writer; she took it all from their lips into her literary grip. The words and stories flowed into the minds of The Freeple.

Here is an example of one of her stories:

HANDSOME MAN

John Shay was the handsomest man I ever met or ever knew. Not movie-star handsome but in-the-flesh handsome.

Yes. Yes. He broke my heart many times but I am grateful to have felt something tremendous.

John Shay was my cousin, more’s the pity.

They say—whoever ‘they’ are—not to trust the surface of the world, and they are right. Appearances can be deceptive and if you are not careful you will be hurt and, worse, you may lose your soul. Beneath appearances, they say, is always a darker truth. That is easy to say if you are beyond the reach of temptation; easier if you are not in its environs. But what can you do with John Shay’s beauty in your face, as the slang has it, taunting you.

I am a plain jane and that is the truth. But the handsome ones, the beautiful ones, are the Chosen. They walk above the Earth. They stun. They need no more than to be in your presence to astonish you with their grace. They are among the brilliant surfaces of the world, they are somehow greater than the mere world. They torment me.

I have made a study of faces, a study of beauty. How mysterious it is.

I collect faces. I cut them out of magazines and newspapers, even books, and examine them, intimately. All but a few are ordinary. Of course, I mean our kind of beauty. It may be relative as the world goes, but in my place, it is absolute. We know. Here, in this spot of Earth, we know beauty as instantaneously as we know pain. And hunger. Or envy. Or love.

The faces that I’ve collected are generally plain, sometimes homely. Then one appears like a thunderbolt. Thrown off my balance and beguiled, I stop. I examine, I consider. What are the differences between plainness and glory? There are infinitesimal differences but the whole world changes as a result. The whole world collapses at the feet of beauty. The beautiful cannot be overlooked. They invade people’s spaces. They invade our fantasies. I am sure I have never been a part of anyone’s fantasies. How then would I know, you ask?

I know.

No conversation with John Shay was ever real or authentic. How could it be? When we talked, I was grateful to be able to stare at him with his being so close to me. I never knew what I was saying. I was an adoring idiot. Just babbling. I was tongue-tied in his presence. Oh, how he must have made fun of me as he bantered with the happy few who are equal to him.

John married a beautiful woman. Of course. She was supremely lovely. I could not take my eyes from her sculpted face. I had to wrench my eyes away in order to putter emptily and meaninglessly in the ordinary world of the plain and homely mortals we are.

I did not take any pleasure in the fact that the marriage went wrong; in the fact that John drank too much; and gambled his wealth away; and took advantage of his erotic appeal.

John indulged himself in many ways. The handsome and the beautiful have every right to indulge themselves. They are so desirable and loved they can’t avoid indulgence.

I don’t know exactly what happened between John and Elizabeth. Their friends and the fawning media always protected them. But after their troubles and divorce, John came home. It was on