The Ninth Wife (24 page)

Bess couldn’t imagine a response to the story that she hadn’t already thought up, so she didn’t want to air it, not yet. Especially given that someone would no doubt use it as fodder for gossip or jokes. And yet, she desperately wanted to talk to
someone
. She thought about calling a therapist, and started asking around for recommendations. But then there she was one day, at the supermarket, opening a carton of eggs and nudging each one to check for cracks when it came to her: a visceral desire to talk to the only other women on the planet who might know what she was going through, who could help her through this by giving her insight into a man she suddenly felt she knew little about—the ex-wives.

“I was wondering,” she said to Carol, “if you wouldn’t mind if I came to see you. I need to meet with an oud maker in Belmont, which I think isn’t far from you, right?”

“A what maker?”

“An oud maker, O-U-D. It’s a stringed instrument, like a lute.”

“I see. Come to my house, yes. We’ll go for a bike ride.”

A bike ride?
“Okay. That sounds nice.” In fact it sounded strange, but she was relieved Carol had agreed to meet. After the particulars of where and when, Bess had hung up and questioned what she had just done. But maybe Carol
would
have some helpful advice about what to do. At the very least, Bess could judge for herself if Rory was truthful in his character descriptions. It would be one more way she could know to trust him.

But should she tell him this trip isn’t all work-related? That question plagued Bess the whole week leading up to her departure. If she wanted to establish trust between them, she should set an example by keeping no secrets, she knew that. But he might ask her not to meet Carol, and then what? Doesn’t he know she’s a researcher at heart? How else could she give him an answer? And then there are the strange dreams that won’t go away of these women to whom she suddenly feels connected. Bess decided to tell Rory after her trip. It was his turn to be understanding, wasn’t it?

C
arol is standing outside the Newton station in the rain under a two-person umbrella. Rory had described her as blond and curvy, stylish and self-assured, and there she is, standing confidently on tanned legs with a steaming traveler’s mug in her free hand. She has a round, pale face with big eyes behind rimless glasses. Her hair is still blond, but it’s short like a man’s, with bangs separated into pieces like the teeth of a comb. She has on khaki shorts and an oversized denim shirt over a white T-shirt. She doesn’t look curvy so much as robust, but she carries it well, more like a day laborer than a fast-food binger.

“Hi,” says Bess under the hood of her rain jacket, “are you Carol?” The train has pulled away. They are the only ones left by the track.

“Yes.” Carol nods toward a row of stairs. “Let’s get out of the rain.”

Her Volvo smells like wet dog fur and mildew, despite the rainbow air freshener that swings from the rearview mirror. A soccer ball rolls around the backseat as they turn onto the main road.

“Not exactly the best day for a bike ride,” says Bess.

Carol steals a quick glance at Bess. “You’re younger than I expected.”

“I’m thirty-five. Rory’s ten years older than me.”

Carol offers a lightning-quick smile, then turns back to the road.

The car turns left and right onto neighborhood streets that dip down and up again past dead ends and fenced-in yards. The car’s windshield wipers sound like the short gasps of an asthmatic. They pull into the driveway of a light brown brick house. Carol points to the front door in a bold shade of pink. “My partner, Ina, chose this color scheme. My daughter says it looks like a baboon’s ass.”

The house is warm and fragrant—of jasmine maybe, or lilacs. To the left is the living room where a wide ceiling fan circulates slowly over high-backed wicker chairs and wall-to-wall bookshelves. In the hallway past the living room is a Cubist collage of a naked woman sliced into odd-angled pieces. “Ina did that,” says Carol, noticing that Bess has stopped to stare. “She’s the artist in the family.”

“It’s weird,” says Bess. “I mean, it’s a lot like these dreams I’ve been having.”

“Ina would insist that you elaborate,” says Carol, continuing down the hallway. “Me?” she adds over her shoulder, “I think there’s nothing more banal than listening to other people’s dreams. No offense.”

Whereas the living room feels Southern genteel, the kitchen is urban modern. Copper pots hang over a wide granite island crowded on one side with blocks of expensive-looking knives and clear canisters of flour and sugar. The sleek appliances look state-of-the-art. The white-tiled floor extends out toward two sliding glass doors that open to a teakwood deck with a cushioned lounge chair and a small Zen garden.

Carol dumps her wallet and keys on the table, places her travel mug in the sink, and walks to a floor-standing wine rack filled with twenty-odd bottles. “Glass of wine?”

“Sure,” says Bess, settling herself onto a stool. “Nice house.”

“Thanks.” Carol pours two glasses from a bottle already uncorked. “I should warn you, there’s a teenager in our midst. My daughter, Delia, is upstairs in her room. I doubt if she’ll come down; she hates people. Fourteen’s a tough age, so I forgive her.”

Now that Bess is conversing with Carol up close, she notices Carol’s lazy eye. She remembers Rory had mentioned that. But Carol’s left eye is only slightly off from her right, so that her line of vision seems not split so much as defocused and bulging a bit to incorporate more of the scene.

“Don’t you have a dog, too?” Bess asks. “I thought Rory told me that.”

“That was a while ago. Ina’s allergic. To cats, too, and I had several of those, as well. The sacrifices we make for love, may they be ever so minor.” Carol holds up her glass to toast. They clink and drink. Bess wonders why her car smelled like wet dog fur.

“Is that Delia?” Bess nods toward a photo attached to the fridge.

Carol turns around to look. “That’s her. You have children?”

“No.”

“Does Rory?”

“Not that I know of.” It is the way Carol’s head tilts that makes Bess aware of how much information that must have imparted.
Trust issues galore
, it screams.

“From what I recall, Rory always wanted kids. A wife and lots of kids to make up for the family he left behind.”

The issue of children had come up the night of the telling. Hard as it was to believe Rory had eight wives, it was equally difficult to believe none of these women had had his children. Or rather, it was one more piece of the story that seemed far-fetched but somehow explained. He had wanted kids all along, yes, but there was Olive Ann’s fake pregnancy and Dao’s miscarriages and a long period in between when he was drinking too much to want to be anyone’s father. “Bad luck, I guess,” Bess says.

“I see.”

Bess watches Carol at the counter now tossing a salad.
What am I doing here?

“So tell me,” says Carol, “how did you . . .”

“Rory’s had eight wives,” Bess blurts out like a loud belch.

Carol turns slowly from the counter. “What was that?”

“You were his second wife,” says Bess more slowly. “There were more, six more to be exact. There was Lorraine in Ohio—Toledo, I think; Fawn in Las Vegas, which was a total mistake—it lasted only a day; Olive Ann in Denver; Pam in Seattle—she died; Dao in California—his longest one; and Gloria in D.C. right after 9/11.”

Carol barks out a laugh. “Wow.”

Bess leans back in her seat and crosses her arms. “You’re the first person I’ve told.”

“Did you just find this out?”

“Two weeks ago, when he was trying to propose.”

“My Lord! The man has to work on his timing.”

Bess sips her wine.

Carol looks pensively out toward the garden.

“Can I ask what you’re thinking?” Bess says quietly.

Carol comes back to sit on her stool. “I don’t know what to think, really. It’s shocking. Well of course it’s shocking. Who in his right mind gets married eight times? But then people in their right minds have always bored me. It’s why I was partly drawn to Rory. I’m guessing that’s why you were drawn to him, too, no?”

What does that mean,
in his right mind
? “I’m not sure,” says Bess. Above the wine rack Bess notices a framed poster of two flapper girls in all their 1920s splendor—the bobbed black hair, the hanging pearl necklaces, the martini glasses, the heads tilted back in hard laughter. Bess feels emboldened looking at the poster, as if the flapper girls themselves—the original sassy singles, saviors from the spinster labels—were giving her advice.
This is life, darling.
This is what it’s all about.
Enjoy every minute.

“Do you love him?” Carol asks. She is poised on her stool, studying Bess.

“Yes, I love him,” Bess says resolutely. This question she had been prepared for. Whether it would be true in future moments or change from moment to moment because love continually unleashes new questions that turn it inside out and make it stronger or weaker or just plain tiresome, this question is not why she came to Boston. The way Bess figures it, you have to start somewhere. If A (love), then B (marriage); and if A and B, then C (happiness). Will A lead to B and will A+B lead to C? This is the formula in question. A is not up for discussion.

“Ina would say: Then what’s the problem? With love you can forgive anything.” A lawnmower revs in the distance, a screen door squeaks open and shut. “Let’s have lunch.” Carol sets the table and serves gazpacho and spinach salad and whole wheat bread. They talk about Washington politics and the Middle East, about feminism and books they’ve read recently. Carol asks for more details on Rory’s wives and Bess shares what she knows. They finish a bottle of sauvignon blanc.

“I’m curious,” asks Bess, “what was your first impression of Rory?”

“I didn’t like him.”

“Really?”

“Not at all. If I remember correctly, he showed up to the restaurant late. And drunk. Not sloppy, but slow and overly anxious to impress. His jokes were vulgar. He smelled of cigarettes. Some of his stories were amusing in an Old World sort of way, I’ll give him that, but naïve, too, I thought, in the way he told them.”

“So what happened? To make you like him, I mean?”

“He ordered chocolate milk.” Carol wipes her lips with her napkin. “There we were at a French restaurant with chandeliers and an exquisite wine list. The chef came out to deliver our entrees and say bon apetit and when he asked if we’d like anything else, Rory, in a luscious moment of pure childlike sincerity, said,
Yes please, I’d love some chocolate milk
. I tell you it was the first time I saw him for who he really was—a poor Irish boy out of his element, working so hard to keep up with all these strange foreigners. The chef smiled wickedly and said,
I’m sorry, monsieur, I cannot serve zuch zings with duck à l’orange
. Poor Rory, his cheeks turned bright red with shame. I couldn’t stand it.
Of course you can
, I said to the chef.
If you want our money and our good recommendations
.”

“And did he?”

“Of course he did. He wasn’t happy about it, but he did and it was delicious. Rory and I laughed through the rest of dinner. That’s all it took.”

“You mean, to know you could get married?”

“To know I could deal with this man for the next few years. I saw it like picking a roommate: you don’t want to be best friends, but you want to be compatible.”

Bess tries to recall the way Rory described his first date with Carol. Wasn’t he eating lobster? Wasn’t he intimidated and scared? She still sees this quality in Rory, his childlike innocence, or awkwardness almost. It’s one of the things she loves most about him.

“I’m glad to say,” says Carol, “Rory grew more confident as I got to know him, and more politically minded, that’s for sure. He held his picket signs higher than most.”

“Rory? I got the impression he didn’t really get involved in all that.”

“Oh, he did, believe me. He was the one to get the crowds going.” Carol rises and opens the door to the deck. “It stopped raining. Do you mind if we continue this outside?”

“Sure,” says Bess. She takes her wineglass and follows Carol to the lounge chairs that had been tipped over to avoid getting wet. Carol wipes them with a towel and invites Bess to sit. She lifts a small rake from a corner and begins gliding it over her Zen garden, a four-by-four-foot patch of wet sand surrounded by bamboo stalks and purple lupine.

“This is a ritual for me. I tried various diets over the years and didn’t notice much of a difference until I started to rake after each meal. So I don’t ask why, I just do it. Ina got me into bike riding, which I try to get excited about, but she’s not here. I’d rather rake.”

It’s interesting, thinks Bess, that Carol had mentioned going for a bike ride, though it was something she didn’t really want to do.

“Rory said you married him to hide the truth from your parents, that they had caught you with another woman and had threatened to stop paying for college.”

“True,” says Carol, putting down her rake. She reclines in the chair next to Bess. “I’ll tell you something Rory never knew. I fell in love for the first time that year. Her name was Gretchen. She was a cop at the immigration office. She loved lemon lollipops and swing sets, yet she could disarm hoodlums faster than anyone on the force, slamming them against walls like she was five times their size.”

Bess notices movement in the kitchen. She turns to see Delia taking a juice carton from the fridge. Should she say something? She opts not to. Delia must have come down because she heard them go outside. “She didn’t turn you in?”

“No.” Carol sips her wine. “She cheated on me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“With Rory.”

“Rory?”

“To this day I don’t think I fully understand it all, but yes. I saw them in the backseat of her patrol car. I kept thinking:
There’s my girlfriend fooling around with my husband
.” Carol chuckles. “I was so angry. At both of them. But mostly Gretchen. She knew what she was doing. But I was angry with Rory, too, in some odd way, even though he didn’t know about me and Gretchen. I still felt he betrayed me.”