Four Wives (20 page)

M
ARIE WAS ALONE IN
the office, and she could no longer resist the urge. She logged onto Yahoo! and typed in the words
laser vaginal rejuvenation.
The Hunting Ridge doctors had the top listing, apparently being the first practice in the nation to actually specialize in the tightening of vaginas.

With a tense jaw, Marie read through the flowery prose meant to sell the procedures to women who, until now, had most likely never given the appearance of their vaginas much thought. There was designer laser vaginoplasty to aesthetically enhance the vulvar structures through creative treatments. Or laser reduction labioplasty, in case your inner lips projected out beyond the outer. Of course, if you just wanted the look of a youthful vagina, then laser perineoplasty would be the way to go. You could even have your hymen reconstructed and actually become a virgin again.
Yippee!
There were package deals for all the treatments, and if you wanted head-to-toe rejuvenating, you might consider combining your vaginal procedures with a breast implant, liposuction, and facelift.

“Unfuckingbelievable. Now I have to get a designer vagina to live in Hunting Ridge.” Marie was in mid-sentence when she heard Randy come through the door.

“What?” he said, setting the bag with their takeout on his desk.

Marie started to close down the page. “Nothing.”

She was too late.

“Is that a Georgia O’Keefe?”

Marie looked at the abstract flower in the right-hand corner of the Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation Web site and shook her head. “No. It’s just a flower. Got it?! A flower.”

Randy smiled, his eyebrows raised, as he watched the page disappear from Marie’s screen. “Sorry. I just thought I saw the word … you know.”

“What? Vagina? You did see it. But it wasn’t Georgia O’Keefe.” Marie was now standing and beginning to pace. “Georgia O’Keefe would be appalled by that Web site.”

“So, what was it?”

He was teasing her now, baiting her to divulge the source of her more than apparent irritation.

“No. I will not corrupt you further. Did you get plates?”

Randy shook his head. “Sorry.”

“I’ll get something.” Marie walked the few steps to the bathroom. When she returned with the roll of paper towels, Randy was standing over her computer.

“You sneak! Get away from there!”

Marie shoved him back to his desk, then closed her screen again. When she looked at him, he was holding back a smile.

“OK, fine. It seems the local obstetricians have opened a clinic to rejuvenate vaginas’and that is all I plan on saying.”

Randy laughed. “Are you serious? Is that what it sounds like?”

“Yes. It’s exactly what it sounds like. I told you’this town should be renamed Stepford.”

“That is unbelievable. Is that something’I don’t know’that women do?”

“Apparently,” Marie said, shaking her head as she sat down. “I’m sorry, Randy.”

Without a hint of the embarrassment that, by any accounting, should have been present, Randy pulled the containers from the bag and handed one to Marie.

“What for?”

“What for?! Christ, Randy, the things you’ve seen. I feel like I’m stealing your youth. After this summer, you’re either going to be the most popular man at Yale Law, or’I don’t know’joining the priesthood.”

Randy laughed again, harder this time. “I’ll let you know how that turns out.”

“I’m serious. How will you ever get married after seeing this parade of crap?

“I don’t believe in marriage.” He said it matter-of-factly in mid-bite, as though it didn’t call into question the bedrock of nearly every society across the globe.

“You don’t believe in marriage?” She tried to look at him in brief increments as she ate, maybe catch some expression on his face that might temper the impact of his statement. But there was nothing. He was dead serious.

“No. Have you ever studied it? Marriage?”

Marie sighed. From the tone of his voice, she knew’he was off again, in that overanalytical head of his. Aside from exercising one’s intellect, what was the point of studying something that had been around forever’ that was embraced as sacrosanct in every modern culture, from the West to the East, to the most primitive Third World societies. Marie was more concerned with figuring out how to make the damned thing work.

“The Evolution of Marriage, I think it was called.”

“I bet you were the only guy in the class.”

“There were two of us. Me and the professor.”

“And what did this professor teach you that made you stop believing in marriage?”

“Just that the concept behind marriage’the lifelong monogamous union of a man and a woman’is contrary to the most basic aspects of human nature. Did you know there are only a handful of animal species that are monogamous? And scientists aren’t even sure they truly are.”

“But we’re different from other animals. The most advanced species.”

Randy let out a sarcastic laugh. “Supposedly.”

With exacting conviction, he laid out his professor’s theory on the origins of marriage. “Look, from everything we know about human existence, marriage in one form or another has been present since the beginning of recorded history. Before that time, we were cave dwellers, functioning like the small communes that can still be found on the fringe of some societies. The men were the hunters, leaving in packs for long stretches of time to find meat. The women were the gatherers, tending to the children and to each other, gathering plant-based foods to eat and to store for the months when the land was barren. Procreation was random, spreading genes throughout the clan, ensuring a wide cross-section of human offspring. It was Darwinism at its best.

“But over time, man began to herd animals, developing skills that enabled the clan to remain in one location indefinitely. This bred the desire to own property, and men began to carve out the land. Then they started to have desires about that land, putting so much work into the harvests and herding. They wanted to leave it to
their
children. That’s where marriage came in. In order to leave property to
their
children, it became necessary to know whose offspring were whose. So, after thousands of years procreating at the whim of their desires, men found it necessary to have dominion over a woman, or several women as the case may be. They had to know that the children were by their seed, and no one else’s. Henceforth, marriage was born’and now continues on as an artificial construct to facilitate property ownership.”

Marie was quiet for a moment. What the hell could she say to
that?
She hadn’t done much thinking about the history of mankind, or anything existential for that matter, since having children. There was simply no time, not when she had enough to analyze right outside her door. Still, her brain was far from atrophied.

“OK. Assuming all that is true, it seems to me that marriage also stems from the evolution of human intelligence, every bit as much as our sophisticated economies and understanding of the world. It’s the evolution of love.”

“Love is love. Marriage is about possession. Think about it. Think about everything you’ve said about Hunting Ridge housewives.” Randy’s face was serious, and it scared Marie that she had helped foster such cynicism in a man so young. “The complete division of labor where men work and women serve them, the submission of woman to man as the head of the household. With the exception of monogamy’which is really a myth when you look at the statistics’marriage has done very little to change the basic social structures of our ancestors. Yet people, as individuals, have evolved greatly. Hence’the persistent discontentment of the masses who subject themselves to marriage.”

Marie put her fork down and popped open a Diet Coke. She looked at Randy, so casually eating away and spewing forth his theories as though they had no bearing on his life. And she’d actually started to believe she had him figured out.

“So you’re saying that marriage is antithetical to evolution.”

“Right.”

“That people who get married will be forever stuck in the cave-man days.”

“Right, only worse. Stuck in the cave with one cave man, one cave woman.”

“Then how can you explain the fact that every movie, every love song, every school daydream is based on finding a spouse? Don’t you believe in lifelong love?”

Randy was quiet for a moment, but only a brief moment. And in his response, Marie detected a sad resolve. “I don’t know about love. But the rest of it is straight, unadulterated socialization. We’re told to crave monogamous love from the day we’re born. Of course it preoccupies us. Then we move on to money, religion, finding redemption before we die.”

“I’m sorry,” Marie said when he was finished.

He looked at her with a puzzled expression. “What for?”

Marie smiled. “I can’t imagine life without the dream of love. Even when it’s hard. Even when my ass of a husband is out playing golf. There’s a reason I fight to get back to that place with him.”

“I don’t get that. You’re one of the smartest people I know.”

“You’re young. Believe me, there are a lot of people smarter than I am.

Randy shrugged.

“Didn’t your parents believe in love?”

“I think they did when they got married. But my mother needed her career. She was a professor, and there was a position at Stanford.” Randy stopped himself, and Marie could see a piece of him now, clearly, through the small window her question had pried open.

“My mother left when I was four.”

Marie drew a breath and, with everything inside her, held back from reaching over and taking his hand. In an instant, with that one statement, the things she had wondered about Randy Matthews dissolved into understanding. His obsession with marriage, his views on life and love. The reason he was pursuing a career in father custody law.

Feeling her pity, Randy looked at her squarely, the nonchalance returning to his face’the window closing. “I’m not who you think I am. Some poor, motherless kid.”

“I don’t think that.”

“Yes, you do. But that’s not who I am. I faced those demons a long time ago. I’m at peace with it. I have great respect for my mother. She made the only choice she could. She was miserable being a housewife, and my father refused to alter his career to accommodate hers. It was an impossible situation, manufactured by the institution of marriage. I can’t help it that I see things for what they are. It’s not something I can turn off so I can fit in with the rest of the world.”

Marie smiled, nodding her head in a show of respect for his wishes. He did not want to be pitied, or judged, or stamped with a label, though she was not at all convinced he had escaped his childhood unscarred.

“OK,” she said. “Is there anything else you’d like to share this afternoon?”

“No. Not unless you want to talk some more about vaginal rejuvenation.” He was smiling now, his lighthearted spirit having taken over the room once again.

Marie crumbled up a paper towel and threw it at him, catching him squarely between his eyes.

They were still laughing when the phone rang.

J
ANIE DROVE THE CAR,
unable to comprehend the thoughts that were in her mind.
Can he smell the smoke? What did I do with the key card?
Now beside her, his seat fully reclined to keep the blood flowing and a hospital band still attached to his wrist, was her husband.

Her fears had been put to rest the moment she arrived. It was a mild anxiety attack, one that was quickly resolved with medication. There was no imminent threat to his health. They had placed him on a monitor, prescribed a mild sedative. Then they’d released him into the care of his wife.

Listening to the doctor’s explanation, his instructions for the next few days, and the longer-term plan to stave off compounding stress’never had she felt so disconnected from herself. She was the woman standing
beside
Mrs. Daniel Kirk’the other woman, the cheater, the liar, the ungrateful woman. Not to mention the closet smoker. There were so many secrets it seemed unbelievable that no one saw through the doting wife to the woman walking her husband to the car, helping him inside.

And now she was worried about getting caught.

“Are you OK?” she kept asking him again and again, as if acting the part might somehow transform her.

“Yes! I’m fine. Please, stop worrying,” Daniel said. He was more embarrassed than worried, the attack having occurred at the office where explanations would now be required. Once he was certain that he was out of the woods, he had asked the doctor twice:
Are you sure there’s nothing else wrong with me?
And his disappointment at the answer had surprised everyone but her.

“We’ll think of something to tell them. Your medical records are private. They’ll never know,” she said, thinking she’d found a way to help.

“I can’t let them think I’m weak, Janie. I’ll be put out to pasture.”

“What about a blood clot? In your leg, maybe. It cut the blood flow, made you dizzy. They can fix blood clots.”

Daniel was watching her now, a strange look on his face. “I forgot how good you were at that.”

Janie smiled, looking back at him for a second as she wound her way through the back roads of Hunting Ridge. “At what, Dan?”

“Lying.”

The word stopped her cold. Still, she held the smile and managed a laugh. He was talking about her teenage years, the stories she’d shared with him about sneaking around her parents. She had been a wild child, and there was a time when he’d found that irresistible. He was referring to those years now, making an off-color joke to add some levity to a day that had terrified them both. That had to be it. That, and the sedatives’maybe.

Still, as good as she had been in covering her tracks, there were some things that could not be manufactured, subtle distinctions between those in love and those faking it that he might have picked up on. The weakness of her arms as she wrapped them around him to return a hug, the shortness of her looks when their eyes met across a romantic restaurant table. Her recoil at his touch in the bedroom. They were signs that were often spotted in retrospect, after a break-up, small details that in hindsight were glaring. It was possible Daniel had made an early detection.

Her throat felt constricted as she turned her eyes back to the road. How odd it was, this sense of utter panic at the negligible possibility of his knowing. Every time she’d been with the other man, from that explosive first encounter, to the things they’d done in that motel room, she had wondered if she wouldn’t embrace her freedom if it were thrown her way. Yes, it would be complicated. Yes, the children would suffer. But she would not be human if the thought never came to pass.
JVhat if he knows?
And now the answer stood before her, so clearly that it felt unshakable. She did not want him to know. Not because newfound love had magically washed over her. No’looking at him next to her, she could feel the same dearth of emotion that had driven her to abandon her own conscience. But the answer was there just the same. For whatever reason, she could not let go of her marriage.