The Ninth Wife (22 page)

She lies down on the bed in a fetal position, slides a pillow under her head, and holds her stomach. “You’re a storyteller. Tell me the story of your married life.”

“Are you sure you want to hear?” He touches her leg. She doesn’t recoil.

“Yes, I want to hear.”

“Okay,” he says, and sits next to her. And he begins.

Chapter Sixteen

I
moved out of the flat I shared with Dao because I couldn’t afford the rent. Then I couldn’t afford to stay in San Francisco, either, and besides, the city held too many memories. I liked my job, but I was ready for a new adventure. I thought maybe it was time to focus on my music for a change. I packed up my old banger and drove back East and I tell you it was only at the last minute that I decided to go to Washington. It was literally a sudden turn off a highway. I was on my way north to Boston, but I was thinking a lot about Dublin, and it being the capital of my country, I thought it was high time I saw the capital of yours.

I leased a room in Mount Pleasant for two months with money I’d saved up. Then I got a map of the city and did a little sightseeing, spending the better part of my afternoons sitting in Dupont Circle playing for handouts.

One morning, a few weeks after I arrived, I noticed that everything seemed to be off somehow, like the sun was shining a little too brightly and the pedestrians were moving more quickly than usual. I walked over to the circle with my fiddle case in one hand and coffee in the other when a skateboarder ran right into me and knocked my coffee all down my shirt. This is a kid I’d seen several times there, and he was good, the best skateboarder among the whole tattooed lot of them weaving in and out of the people and up and down curbs. It was hard to believe he’d suddenly become so clumsy.
Sorry
, he said, as if he, too, was surprised he knocked into me.
It’s all right
, I said,
just be careful
, and that, too, was surprising because usually I’d be royally pissed off at something like that but I rather felt fatherly at that moment, I don’t know why. The kid picked up his skateboard and took a seat by the fountain. His friends skated past, coaxed him to get up, but he just sat there, slumped over his knees, rolling the wheels of his upturned board.

I took a seat on a bench and watched the people walking past. They all seemed to be in such a hurry. I know, it’s a city and people are always late for work or wherever it is they’ve got to be, but I mean that morning everyone seemed to be rushing somewhere, the suits and the students and the dogwalkers.
Something’s not right
, I heard a soft voice say. I’d been in a daze and hadn’t noticed this woman sit down at the other end of the bench. She wore a smart beige pantsuit and sat poised and still on the edge of the bench. I remember she had a silk green scarf around her neck that billowed in the breeze. She was maybe twenty-five, I guessed, a young professional with beautiful red hair to her shoulders and curled in at the ends like single quotes around her lovely round face. She had notes to herself in ink on her palm and carried a leather satchel.

Excuse me?
I said, and she said it again in an eerie lowness:
Something’s not right
, like she was picking up some extrasensory static.
I’m thinking the very same thing
, I said back, finding it uncanny that this young woman said exactly what I was thinking.

And that’s how I met Gloria. Her name was Gloria K. Jones and I can tell you it was no small discomfort that she had the same last name as Dao, even if it was common. But she didn’t look like a Jones, though that’s hard to explain, and she didn’t look like a Gloria, either, so maybe names sometimes have a way of misleading us.

But anyway, I moved closer to her on the bench and we started talking. She was late for work at an architectural firm downtown, but on her way to the Metro she had noticed that none of the dogs in the circle were barking. The Jack Russell always barked at her, she said.
Do you have a cell phone?
I remember she asked me.
No, why?
I said.
I have to call my brother
, she said. It was her twin brother she had to call and you know how they say twins are psychically connected somehow? Well maybe I’ve got the sequencing of events all wrong, but the way I remember it, she asked about her brother before we found out the news, before a guy in a janitor’s uniform stopped right in front of us and started shouting into the phone and then, when pressed to tell us what was the matter, told us to get out of town as fast as we could. He said two planes had just crashed into the Twin Towers in New York and another plane had hit the Pentagon and still another one was headed for the White House or the Capitol and who knows what else and then the panic on people’s faces and in their quickened strides in the circle were no longer subtle signs of a day gone strange but hints of Armageddon. That’s how it felt to me initially, like here we were in the nation’s capital and under attack and this was it, the end of the road. I was panicked, more panicked than I had ever been in my life I’d say, at least for those initial minutes.

We should get away from here
, I said to Gloria.
My brother
, she said. I said:
We should hurry, find a TV or radio to let us know what’s going on
. Again she said:
My brother
. It was so sad the way she said it with her head bowed and her eyes closed. Her twin brother, Ray, see, was a musician who worked part-time as a coffee vendor in one of the Towers. For the life of her, Gloria couldn’t remember which days he worked and that haunted her. She borrowed the janitor’s phone and tried to call her brother but there was no answer.

So I gently urged her to walk with me and the two of us walked silently up Connecticut Avenue, watching police cars whiz by with their sirens blaring. We must have walked a mile or two until we were tired and stopped in some restaurant’s bar. Gloria was dazed. I feared something was really wrong with her, and I wasn’t about to leave her in her time of need. And really, it was my time of need, too, it was for all of us.

The bar had a few patrons on stools and a television high up in the corner and for the first time we saw the crashing down of those Towers. What a horrific sight, all those people covered in white, panicked themselves, and my God, the thought of those people jumping . . . well, you know. You lived through it, too, so I don’t have to tell you. I was choked up but it was Gloria who was shedding the tears and shivering and I put my arm around her and we watched the TV together for hours. She tried to call her brother throughout the day but couldn’t get through. Her mother lived out in the suburbs—had moved there a few years back from Kansas, where Gloria and her brother grew up—but she was on vacation in Hawaii, so Gloria couldn’t get through to her, either. I tried to get her to eat, but she had no appetite and when the sun eventually went down she looked exhausted.
You should rest
, I said. She said she didn’t want to be alone, that she had just moved to the city from Maine—on a whim, like me—and was crashing temporarily at her mother’s place an hour away and that she didn’t know anyone else in town except for the architects she worked for, answering their phones and filing their paperwork, and she didn’t really like their shallow ways, truth be told.
Can I stay with you?
she asked.

I took her back to my room and laid her down, covering her with a blanket and as I turned to go she said,
No don’t
. So I stayed until she fell asleep and then lay down on the floor myself to get some shut-eye.

Well sometime in the middle of the night, I woke to find Gloria beside me on the floor. She was facing me in a fetal position and I just looked at her. She was beautiful, even in pain. She wasn’t the professional D.C. woman anymore, she was an innocent little girl with pink cheeks and long eyelashes and freckles just over the bridge of her nose. I knew she was seeing me that night as her guardian angel, but I tell you it felt like the other way around, like she had floated down from the heavens to calm my wandering soul in the chaos. I didn’t know anything about her except for what I was feeling, but it was the feeling I had about America the first time I went back to Ireland, that indescribable nearness to truth, a powerful sense of what it must feel like to be home. Believe me, I was missing Ireland at that moment.

I stirred and she opened her eyes.
What time is it?
she whispered.
Two
A.M.
, I said. She looked out the window and a tear rolled down her soft cheek.
My brother is dead
, she said.
Shh
, I said,
you don’t know that
. I hugged her and then she asked if anyone close to me had ever died. I told her about my own brother, Eamonn, and about Pam. She told me her father had died when she was a baby, that her mother was always traveling around looking for her fountain of youth and how she had always been closest with her brother, Ray, that he was a good musician and how she felt she wanted to make money to support him any way she could.

We talked about feeling vulnerable, how we could never be sure that we were really safe, that it was a miracle that we hadn’t died already, like in a car accident or from disease. We talked about the meaninglessness of our lives and clung to each other like frightened children in the creaking dark. We nodded off again and by morning the one prevailing sentiment that stayed with us for the rest of the day and into the year we spent together was that whatever we wanted to do we had to do it quickly for we had precious little time left.

And I’ll tell you before I say anything else that Gloria’s brother, Ray, did die that day in the second Tower. Her mother wailed at his funeral into her black velvet gloves, dripping big tears down her face, her surgically lifted face (a mother-in-law to beat all mothers-in-law, I’ll tell you), but Gloria was silent during the ceremony and into the dark days following.

I accompanied her to the funeral and stayed by her side as she walked the streets of downtown New York. I held her hand when she had to stop packing up Ray’s apartment and sit down on his bed, taking a moment to study some photo she found on his desk or keepsake he had from their childhood. And when we finally drove back to D.C. with a trunk full of Ray’s things, Gloria in one sudden moment put her hand on her heart and looked at me strangely.
Rory.
Ray.
Rory.
Ray
, she said, bouncing the words with her chin.
Do you see?
I didn’t see, I told her, and she explained that we shared the same first initial, Ray and me, and that I came into her life at the exact moment Ray passed away (how she figured that I couldn’t tell you) and what’s more, we were both musicians.

Now I know what you’re thinking. If there was ever a red flag flapping in the wind this was surely one of the biggest. She was looking at me with such love and longing, I should have known not to trust it. I should have known that a romance formed in the passionate wake of a disaster had nowhere to go but to subside when the uneventful days of real life inevitably surfaced. True enough.

Or maybe you’re saying:
Rory, how could you?
Taking advantage of a poor, vulnerable girl like that in her time of need, someone so much younger than you.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
True enough again.

I suppose if you are on one side or the other, you’d be right either way, but what you need to know before you hand in your verdict is that I was mad about Gloria from the moment I laid eyes on her, and whatever spell she was under, I was under, too. When she cried it seemed like she was crying for the whole human race. She would lean into me and I’d hold her in my arms, smelling the green apple of her hair, feeling the soft flesh of her upper back beneath her fleece. Strange details to share, maybe, but that’s what being with Gloria was like, you were hyper aware of her, of your own senses and the presence of unexplainable forces. When Gloria said it was no coincidence that we met, that it was fate, part of a divine plan, she there and I there on that bench, I believed her. And when she said there’s no telling how much time we have left on this earth, I believed her, too.

Maybe you’re saying I was too quick to believe, but let me complete the picture here and you’ll understand the power of all I’m telling you: there was a rainbow. What I mean is, we were in the car coming back from New York when it rained for a bit, then stopped and Gloria said pull over and I did, and we got out, and there over the trees was the most vibrant rainbow I’d ever seen, full from end to end.
My God, it’s glorious
, I said. That was the word I used,
glorious
, I swear it just came to me, and when I said it, Gloria looked at me as if I had called her name. And what did she say back to me?
It’s Ray
. I thought she was referencing the initials again, Rory, Ray, rainbow. No, she said. She said Ray loved rainbows, that he used to call them raybows and when they were little, Ray used to tell her he could make raybows anytime he wanted.
It’s from Ray
, she said again.
It’s for us
.

Now you tell me, if you were me looking at that rainbow and that sad, beautiful woman beside you and thinking of people jumping from buildings, I mean, wouldn’t you have believed? Can’t you imagine that you might have been swept up in that moment and convinced that you two were meant to be with each other, that the past was nothing more than a prelude to this moment and this moment was a prelude to an uncertain future? Mightn’t you have cried a little and taken her hand in yours and told her you loved her with all your heart and asked if she would marry you?

Well, I didn’t. Of course I didn’t. I’m aware of who I am.

But the fact is, I still want to be married. Always have. I like the version of me as someone’s husband better than the version of me alone and single. Plain and simple.