My Husband's Sweethearts (8 page)

I pull jaggedly into the driveway, rip the key
from the ignition, and stride across the
lawn. My mother's car is gone. She must
have headed out to tend to some of the endless details. I
unlock the door and let it swing open behind me. Maybe
this is the way grief will arrive—through anger.

"Elspa!" I shout. The house is quiet except for my
voice ringing through it.

There's a fresh vase of flowers on the lowboy. I despise
the flowers, the vase, every manipulative impulse Artie's
ever had. I look into the living room, jog to the kitchen,
the dining room.

"Elspa!"

I circle back to the stairs and run up them. My mind is
flashing back to the accountant's office, Reyer's folded
hands, his cough. I know the looks that accountants give
their clients when they're trying to avoid the truth. I'm
supposed to decide how much money to give John
Bessom? I'm supposed to feel fucking
comfortable
? Artie
has been supporting Rita Bessom and Elspa? Elspa lied
to me?

I turn down the hallway and barge into the bedroom.

"What?" Artie shouts out. "What's wrong?"

The nurse is in the chair by the window, hunched over
a handheld video game. He startles, but tries to pretend
he hasn't been startled.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

Artie sits back. "You talked to Reyer. I'm assuming
he didn't break it to you with the necessary finesse. He
lacks—"

"You should have told me to wait until after you were
dead," I shout. "Then killing you wouldn't be an option!
The E.L.S.P.A. Fund? I have to decide what your son is
worth?"

The nurse quickly shuts down the game and shoves it
into his backpack, trying to pack up and sneak out.

"Now that you've met her, you can see she's deserving,"
Artie says.

"Yes, I hear that she's quite a sculptor! We really
should support the arts in just this way!"

"Okay, okay, I see why you're mad about Elspa. But
you can see that my son, John, deserves something,
doesn't he? What kind of a bastard doesn't leave something
to his own son?"

"A completely different kind of bastard, I suppose."

"I'm a very specific form of bastard," he reminds me.

I walk to his bed and lean in. My mind flashes on one
of my mother's never-cross-stitched sayings:
When dealing
with a belligerent hairstylist, you must embrace your inner
bitch.
"You know, I could smother you with a pillow in the
middle of the night and who would think I'd done it?"

"He might," Artie says, pointing to the frightened
nurse zipping his backpack.

"Maybe I'll let Eleanor help. She'd appreciate that. For
that matter, I wonder how many of your other goddamn
girlfriends wouldn't mind taking their turn offing you!"

"I really don't think you should threaten me in front of
witnesses," he says, glancing sidelong at the nurse.

"And don't buy me any more fucking flowers!" I
scream.

I walk to the bathroom, where I recall Elspa drawing
Artie's bath. Empty. And that's when it hits me.

"Elspa," I say. A jolt of panic shoots through me—has
Elspa felt too much, is she bleeding somewhere in the
house, is she already gone? For some reason, this only
makes me angrier, although the anger is tinged with fear.

"What is it?" Artie asks from bed.

The nurse freezes, his backpack tucked under his arm.

I race downstairs, calling her name even more loudly
than before. "Elspa! Elspa!" I turn the corner at the lowboy
so wildly that I tip the vase, which thunks to the floor,
cracking wide open so that the water soaks the rug and
the stems are exposed. On its tipping way, it chips a
lamp—a lamp that I bought, finery that my mother would
have suggested that I hide. I run through the kitchen
again, where my mother has stacked the chocolate-slathered
biscuits. I open the French doors and clatter
across the patio. I stare into the corners of the yard and
then into the pool.

There at the bottom, I see a blurred shape in the deep
end—the slow underwater billow of a shirt, the glistening
of a wet head. Elspa. No. I take a deep breath, a running
start, and dive in—fully dressed, shoes and all. The water
is cold. I swim to the bottom of the deep end, my clothes
heavy each time I glide forward. My strokes seem too
slow, the water too thick. I worry that I will never get to
the bottom.

But then, finally, Elspa is right in front of me. Her startled
face, her eyes a little wild, her cheeks puffed. I wrap
one arm around her ribs and yank her toward the surface.
She twists in my grip as if she's trying to pull me down
with her, but I tug her back sharply. Soon we are both
paddling upward.

We break the surface at the same moment, each gasping.
I still have Elspa by the ribs.

"What?" she says, sputtering, trying to catch her breath.

"What?" I ask, completely confused.

"What are you doing?"

I loosen my grip and she swims to the wall. "I thought
I was saving your life," I tell her. Elspa is alive and well. I
should feel relieved, happy, but instead the anger returns.

I feel like I might choke on it.

"I was meditating," she says.

"In the deep end?" I ask, swimming to the other side
of the pool. "With all of your clothes on?"

"I was sitting in the lotus position," she says, swimming
to a ladder and sitting on the top rung. "Counting
seconds. Being mindful. I learned it from this roommate I
once had."

"At the bottom of the deep end?" I smack the surface
of the water angrily. "What were you thinking? You
scared the hell out of me!"

"I'm sorry," Elspa says. "You scared me, too."

I hoist myself out of the pool, my shirt and pants clinging
to me. I sit on the edge, take off my soaked shoes. I
don't look at Elspa. I can't. "And were you ever going to
tell me the truth?"

"What truth?" Elspa asks—as if there are so many
truths and untruths to choose from.

"That you had an affair with Artie while he was already
married to me? That he stills pays for your life? You
lied to me and just kept lying in all of those little ways—
the whole waitress thing, the whole thing about never having
had
that
kind of relationship with him, the sculpture
from your imagination."

Elspa is quiet for a moment. Her beautiful pale wet
face is still. "He's dying. I didn't think it was, I don't
know, appropriate."

"Appropriate?"
I shout, incredulously.

She wipes the water from her face, hugs herself. I can
see one hand gripping the wreath tattoo on her upper
arm.

"Look, I can handle it from here," I say. "Your turn at
his deathbed is over. So you can go. Thanks for everything."
I pause, something occurring to me. "One question:
do you love elevators?"

"Elevators?" she asks.

"Never mind." That must have been yet another one
of Artie's sweethearts. How many are there? And each of
them comes with how many lies?

When Elspa stands and starts to walk to the patio
doors, I look up at her. She's shaking. "Why did you
marry him in the first place?" She stops and then turns.
"Didn't you ever see the good in him?"

I stare at her. This is a completely unacceptable question
to ask. I don't owe her an explanation of my love
for Artie, and I'm about to tell her this, but then it's
back—that fissure inside me, a breaking open. I find myself
thinking of Artie and me, a very particular hilarious
moment, and I start to talk in a very quiet voice. "When
Artie and I were on our honeymoon, it was mating season
for stingrays. We were walking out in the surf, holding
hands, and this guy told us the stingrays were harmless
unless we stepped on one. 'Then what?' we asked each
other. 'Certain death?' We walked back toward shore. I
screamed first, thinking I'd brushed one with my foot,
and then Artie screamed because I'd screamed. And then
I screamed because Artie screamed. And then it was just
funny and we kept screaming back and forth all the way to
the shore, just because."

I'm gazing into the pool. I've said it all so quietly that
I'm not sure if Elspa heard me. I'm not even sure she's still
there. But when I look up, I see her, across the pool, her
eyes brimming. She doesn't say a word.

I keep going. "Once a punk kid from the neighborhood
tried to steal Artie's old Corvette out of the garage
and Artie heard him from bed and ran naked down the
street after him, swinging a golf club."

Elspa laughs. I do, too, a soft flutter in my throat.

I can't stop now. "His favorite place to think and make
big plans is a junky diner called Manilla's. He speaks a
great butchered French. He always messes up the words
to songs but still sings them loudly. He always has trouble
hanging up on telemarketers. I once caught him sort of
counseling a telemarketer hawking a lower mortgage rate.
The kid—a woman of course—was just out of college and
deep in debt and confused about whether or not she
should get engaged to a pilot. Artie was on the phone for
an hour—just handing over good advice." Strange how I
simply rattle these off. I suppose these are my responses to
Artie's numbered inscriptions from the flowers he kept
sending me. I suppose I've been compiling a history of my
own, without really knowing it, and here they all are,
spilling out of me.

"When his dog Midas died, the upstairs bathroom
sprung a leak right at that same time and he tore up the
house looking for the leak, where it was coming from,
how it was moving along beams and pooling somewhere
else. But it was really about the dog. He loved that dog . . .
And he wanted me to get pregnant. He wanted that desperately.
He used to put his head on my stomach in bed
and pretend he was designing my womb so that the baby
would have a plush pad to live in for nine months. Things
like: maybe if we move the sofa over here and get one of
those fluffy white throw rugs . . ." I stop myself. I can hear
Artie's voice so clearly in my head that I don't want to go
on. I shout across the yard, "You fucking bastard!"

"I'm sorry," Elspa says.

I blink at her. "About what?"

"You loved him, and you still love him. I wasn't sure
before."

I know that I'm about to start crying. I don't want to.

I'm afraid that if I start, I won't be able to stop. I look up
at Elspa. "Why did you try to kill yourself?" I ask.

Her eyes skitter across the tree line. She glances up at
the sky, and then back to me. "I was a drug addict when I
met Artie."

This confession terrifies me. And in a moment when I
shouldn't be selfish at all, a very selfish thought comes to
mind. Artie had an affair with a drug addict?

She quickly reads my expression and assures me. "I
wasn't a needle user. I wasn't whoring for drugs. I'm
not . . . sick. We were safe and he only said the sweetest
things about you, these beautiful stories. He raised you up
and worshipped you. He still worships you."

I'm not sure how to take this. "He has a strange way of
showing it. I mean, worshipping me like an idol, sacrificing
virgins? That's not the way I'd like to be worshipped."

"Honestly," she tells me, "it was different—a different
kind of intimacy."

"I think we have different definitions of the term
honestly,
"
I say. "I still don't understand how you lied to me
so convincingly."

"I'm an addict. One thing addicts know how to do
well is lie," she says, a dark regret in her voice that I
haven't heard before. "I'm trying to tell you the truth now,
and my relationship with Artie wasn't like that. You
know?"

"No, I don't know."

She says flatly, "I was very fragile most of the time. I
could barely stand to be touched. I was a mess."

"Go on," I say.

"A week before I met Artie, I gave my daughter, Rose,
to my mother to raise."

"You have a daughter?"

She nods.

"And, forgive me for being a little suspicious at this
point, but do you want to go over the time frame of your
relationship with Artie and her birth?" I ask this question
though I know that Artie is at a point in his life when he's
claiming his children, not denying them.

"She isn't Artie's kid. She was one year old when I met
Artie and when I gave her up. Now she's three. It almost
killed me to give her up. Literally. I've been clean ever
since Artie saved my life."

"Why aren't you raising her now?"

"I visit as often as I can. My parents think it's too confusing
for her. Who's the mommy and all of that. But I
weasel my way in as often as I can." She shakes her head
roughly. "My parents made it clear that I had to give her
to them. They were right. I wasn't in any shape to be a
mother. They've taken on that role. And it wasn't easy for
them. They're older now. And I don't know. It's not my
right to ask them to give up that role now. They wouldn't,
anyway. They'd never trust me with her."

"But do you want to be her mother?" I ask.

"More than anything," she says.

"Your parents took up that role valiantly, but maybe
they'd give her back to you if they knew how much you've
changed."

"Oh, no," she says. "They never trusted me, not even
before. I was never good enough, never worth anything in
their eyes. I explain to them how I'm taking college classes
again, but they always think that if they give me any
money, it's just going to go to drugs."

"In any case," I say, "it is your right to be her mother,
isn't it? I mean legally speaking. Did you sign over your
rights?"

She shakes her head. "No."

"Then it is your right, not only legally, but maybe ethically,
too," I tell her.

"I want to go and get her. That's what I want more
than anything. But I can't."

"Maybe you would be a good mother now, Elspa.
Maybe you're ready."