The Ninth Wife (19 page)

And now she can feel the heat of him on her skin. His hands are roaming under her shirt with more determination, one pressing in on the small of her back, the other cupping her breast and they are both breathing hard, grabbing at hair and unbuttoning buttons, loosening a belt, unsnapping a bra, pushing into each other until a plastic body tumbles over and they both look and laugh. He pushes her up against the wall and when her shirt falls to the floor and their skin is hot and moist and their breathing has almost turned to moaning, his tongue wanders down to her nipple and she thinks she could explode right then and there.
Wait
, she mouths, unsure if she has said it aloud, and for a brief moment while she speaks, she opens her eyes and looks around at the eerie eyes of the women, witnesses to her exploits. She reaches out for his erection but for now he wards her off, whispering into her ear, “I love you, Bess Gray.” It sounds far away in a rush of wind, like a shout from an open airplane, but it registers and with a high-pitched yelp she grabs on to his shoulders when suddenly someone yells her name from the top of the stairs. “Shit,” she says, catching her breath. She identifies the voice as Gerald’s and can tell it is one of alarm.

“I’m here, Gerald!” she yells, “I’m coming up.” She knows neither Gerald nor Millie will come down among the mannequins, but she wonders if Gerald heard anything. She quickly zips up her pants and buttons her shirt. “Sorry,” is all she can think to say, eyeing his erection. “To be continued?”

“Absolutely,” he says, placing a kiss in her palm. “You better go see what it is. Give me a minute and I’ll be right behind you.”

Gerald is at the top of the stairs to the basement. He is rocking back and forth, clearly agitated.

“Mr. Steinbloom, he can’t breathe, he’s having trouble breathing,” he yells.

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.”

With Gerald in tow, Bess runs up the stairs and into the study where Irv is sitting on the floor, curled into himself. His breathing is erratic.

“Irving, what’s wrong with you?” Millie is bent over him with a towel over her shoulder and her hands on her knees, yelling into his ear. “Irving, you’re scaring me.”

Bess rushes to him on the floor, afraid he is having a heart attack. “Gramp, what’s the matter, can you talk? Can you breathe?” She tries to see his face. He is clenching something in his left hand. He won’t look at her. She looks up at Millie and then over at Gerald standing in the corner. “What happened to him?”

Gerald doesn’t say anything, so Millie speaks up. “I came in here and like you, I see him on the floor like this, I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Gram, call 911,” Bess says loudly. “Now! Please!”

“Yes, okay. I’m calling.” Millie turns quickly and hustles over to the oak desk.

“No,” Irv responds between labored breaths. He tries to hold up his hand, but he is too weak. His shoulders move up and down. His brow is damp.

Bess is starting to hyperventilate herself as Rory enters the room. “He can’t breathe,” she tells him. “I think he’s having a heart attack.” She looks back at Millie and tries to discern what her grandmother is saying into the phone. “Gram?” she calls out. “Tell them he can’t breathe.”

Rory kneels beside Irv. “Mr. Steinbloom,” he says, trying to make eye contact. “Do you think you’re having a heart attack?”

Irv shakes his head.

Bess is annoyed. “What kind of a question is that? Look at him.”

“I
am
looking at him,” says Rory, squeezing her shoulder, trying to keep her calm. “I’m just wondering if he’s, in fact, having a panic attack.”

“What are you talking about? How do you know?”

“Cici used to get them. Mr. Steinbloom,” he says steadily, “look at me. That’s right, now do just as I do, we’re going to breathe in slowly through the nose, hold our breath, then let it out through the mouth.” He shows Irv what he means. Irv’s first few attempts are futile.

“This is ludicrous,” says Bess. “Gram? Are they sending an ambulance?”

But Rory doesn’t give up and after a few tries Irv is able to keep better time with Rory’s breathing and soon he’s no longer hyperventilating.

“Gramp?” Bess can see by his rising chest and upturned face that he is taking in big expanses of air and feeling calmer. She keeps her hand on his forearm.

“Okay,” Millie calls out, no longer on the phone. “They’re sending an ambulance.” She joins them again and looks down at Irv with her hand on her heart. “Irving! You’re breathing normal. You’re not having a heart attack?”

“I’m all right,” Irv says, holding his hand up. “Thank you, young man.”

“Not a problem,” says Rory. “I’m glad it wasn’t more serious.”

Millie hands Irv the towel from her shoulder. “Irving, you’re going to be the death of me, you know that? Scaring us half to oblivion. Why do you do this to me?”

“Criminy, Mildred,” says Irv with slightly more spunk, “it’s a wonder I’m still breathing around all your hot air.”

Each of them says
feh
and waves the other away with a back sweep of the hand.

“I think he’s feeling better,” Rory says quietly to Bess.

“Are you feeling better, Mr. Steinbloom?” yells Gerald.

“I’m fine, Gerald. You’ve been a very big help. Good boy. Now can someone please help me up? I need to use the toilet.”

Bess supports his elbow as he rises and makes his way out toward the hall.

“So can anyone explain to me what just happened?” says Bess. “Gram? Why did Gramp just have a panic attack?”

Millie sits by the bay window and looks out at the drizzle dripping down the glass. She looks scared and worn out. “I know what it is. He doesn’t want to go.”

Bess looks down at something crumpled on the floor. She recognizes it as the item Irv was clutching in his hand during his attack. “What’s that?”

Rory picks it up and inspects it. “It’s just a bag.” He hands it to Bess.

At the top she reads, “For motion sickness and refuse.” “It’s a barf bag. Maybe he found this in a book or something?” Suddenly she understands. “Gram, when was the last time Gramp flew in an airplane?”

Millie rubs her neck. “I don’t know. He likes road trips better, you know we go up to Newport or Cape Cod to visit Gertie and Sid.”

“Think, Gram. Did anything happen the last time he flew?”

“I’m thinking. It must have been five years ago, for Samuel’s funeral in Toronto.”

“Samuel. Is that the guy in the photo, the one you don’t like?”

“That’s him. I didn’t go, just your grandfather. But I remember him saying it was a miserable trip. Flight was delayed, bad turbulence, you name it. He was sick for a week.”

So he doesn’t like to fly. How come she didn’t know this? “Gram, you didn’t know Gramp has a fear of flying?” says Bess, taking a seat by the window next to Millie.

“How would I know? I just know he doesn’t like to do it, so we don’t do it.”

The room takes on a library’s silence in the darkening of a day coming to an end. Bess turns on a lamp. Shouldn’t married people know these things about their partners? Especially two people who have been married for sixty-five years? Isn’t that what marriage is, Bess wonders, that you know everything about your spouse, almost to the point of being able to read his or her mind? Isn’t that what you look forward to in a relationship? Isn’t that how you know you’re not alone? Or is it that you don’t want to know a person like that so you tune out? Maybe it’s a way to make sure there will always be surprises. Maybe if there are no surprises left, all you have to look forward to is death.

“What are we going to do if we can’t fly to Tucson?” says Millie.

“There are other options,” Bess answers. “Train, bus, car, we’ll figure something out.” Bess looks at Rory. She’s not at all sure she likes the idea of surprises in a relationship, but looking at him in the glow of the soft lamplight, she is moved. She remembers what he whispered to her downstairs and knows that she loves him, too.

“Enough already,” says Millie, standing up. “I’m going down to the kitchen. Dinner should be ready soon.”

Thirty seconds later they hear the commotion of the ambulance. Irv agrees to let the paramedics check him over, but he tells them he won’t leave the house. It is the last time he will say that resolutely, the last time anyone will listen and let him be.

Chapter Fourteen

I
met Dao Jones at an oil spill off the Oregon coast in the summer of 1995. That was her name, Dao Jones, and I know how it sounds. Believe me, she lived with the jokes her whole life. Her mother was from Saigon, her dad an American soldier. Dao was one of those children brought to the States during the war and taken to an orphanage when her mother passed away. She was lucky, adopted by a nice middle-class family in Sacramento who thought she should keep her name as a reminder of her dual identity.

Dao was twenty-eight when we met, eight years younger than me, but she was already successful in her career as an oil spill expert. She was a freelance consultant on everything from preventing big spills to cleaning them up, but her specialty was protecting wildlife. That’s what she was doing in Oregon, washing crude oil off gulls in a sink full of dishwater detergent when I wandered up to see if I could help. I was on vacation from my job at Microsoft in Seattle (after two promotions in five years, I could finally call myself a full-time software development engineer, no more of these consulting or temp gigs). I was working hard and needed a break, but I didn’t exactly have anyone to travel with so I got in my car and drove down the coast and there I found myself, walking along the beach when I saw all the commotion. Dao tied me in an apron and showed me what to do.

One week later, the intoxication of our flirting gave me the courage to kiss her, and that kept both of us in Oregon longer than either of us had planned. She lived in San Francisco. We managed a long-distance love affair until something had to budge one way or another, so I moved down there. My job had me just sitting in front of a computer, so my boss at Microsoft let me stay on at the company and work from home.

This was the kind of love I’d been searching for all those years. We cozied in to domestic life. When I say
domestic
I mean the kind of bliss they talk about in the mundane. We’d read the newspaper in bed. We’d take long walks to the local farmers’ market on weekends and carry home organic produce so that we could cook these delicious vegetarian dinners together. We got a cat.

Dao was petite and had long black hair like Maggie, but while Maggie was quick-witted and energetic, Dao was calm and contemplative. She tended toward the spiritual side, so she meditated each morning. I’d pretend to meditate, but usually I’d keep one eye open and watch her. Dao was hard to read sometimes. She kept her facial expressions to a minimum so it became a hobby of mine, you could say, to figure out what she was thinking.

On our two-year anniversary, I remember thinking I could spend the rest of my life with this woman, listening to her sing in the shower, touching toes with her when we’d curl up in the corners of the couch to read. And the funny thing is, up until then we never talked about the two of us getting married. Dao knew about my past, and never pushed it. Me, I thought about it because I still say it feels right to call the woman I love my wife. But it had gone wrong so often I thought better of it.

Until, that is, Dao turned thirty and said she wanted a baby. I thought of Olive Ann and Cici and knew that was wrong and this was right and so we started trying. Well, in the midst of trying, that’s when we started talking about getting married. We’d been together long enough that her mother started buying her bridal magazines. But understandably we were both ambivalent, so Dao found a marriage counselor. We saw him once a week for five months and got to talking about our fears of failure and what marriage meant to us. Now I know that’s a hard question and I can tell you I’m still trying to figure it out, but sitting there in therapy all I can tell you is that I wanted to stand up and vow to the world that I would commit to this woman for the rest of my life, that I loved her that deeply and completely. Dao hadn’t been married before and didn’t see it quite the same way. Her birth parents never got married and her adopted parents had recently separated, so she was sorting out her feelings on that. What convinced her, I think, was the role marriage played in having a family. I don’t think either one of us thought it was necessary. I’m as open as the next guy when it comes to family combinations, but for me and Dao it felt right. It felt like it was a way that our love could conquer our fears, that this marriage would be true and long-lasting and would show up my past marriages as discarded attempts in the process of trial and error.

And then also, Dao got pregnant. We were unbelievably excited and so, caught up in that excitement, we eloped to a beach in Baja and spent some of the best days of our relationship swimming and lying about. Dao taught me how to kayak, and I remember the warmth of the sun on my back as we glided along the coast, thinking it didn’t get any better than this.

But then three weeks after we got back, Dao had a miscarriage. That’s when I learned how painful miscarriages can be, physically and emotionally. I say miscarriages because—I might as well just say this all at once—Dao, over the course of the following year and a half, had three. I don’t think she ever fully recovered.

It was rough going after that: Dao didn’t want to do much away from home. She became even quieter than usual, more withdrawn. When she stopped meditating and started eating fast food, I knew it was serious, and in our counseling sessions I started to bring up the issue of adopting a baby.

It took Dao a while to sort out her feelings on that issue, too, seeing as she was adopted herself, but we made slow progress and Dao eventually came around to the idea. I was glad to see her getting back to her old self, humming as she watered her potted herbs, that sort of thing. But there was something different, too. She became interested in her Vietnamese heritage in a way she’d never been before. Maybe it was all that thinking of adopting and about her own childhood, I don’t know, but
interested
isn’t the right word:
obsessed
, I would say. She spent hours at the library, poring through books and old documentaries on the American war there. She found Vietnamese refugees in the city and interviewed them. She learned to cook Vietnamese food and took classes in the language. All that and then one day she announced she wanted to adopt a Vietnamese baby. Her mother loved the idea, said she’d even pay for us to go there and get our family started.