The Pretend Wife (15 page)

A
FTER PORCUPINE AND BIB
were both in bed, I found myself sitting on an Adirondack chair on the deck overlooking the lake. There was a cool breeze and the rippling water caught the moonlight. By the dock, Bib's white buckets seemed to glow. Elliot was inside. He'd taken over my watch of Vivian though she was sleeping soundly. Part of me hoped he'd fall asleep in the recliner and we could avoid being alone, avoid any more conversation. The day had been strangely wonderful—the grocery store trip, the steaming kitchen, the feeling of family, even if it was family brought together by this sadness. I didn't want to dismantle it, but at the same time, I wanted to be alone with him, of course, more than anything, back out on the rowboat, spinning slow circles on the lake. Jennifer appeared with a bottle of red wine. She filled two glasses, handed me one, and sat down on the chair beside mine. “I know that you're leaving things behind to be here,” she said. “I hope that's okay with everyone.”

I assumed she was talking about my marriage. “I think
it's fine,” I said. “My husband was cranking the AC/DC last I checked, pretending he's twenty again.”

“I think men can regress pretty easily. It doesn't take much.” She smiled. “It must be a pretty good relationship if he's letting you disguise yourself as someone else's wife. I don't think Sonny would go for it, even if it was for a good cause. And drummers are supposed to be really laid back.”

“Peter doesn't seem to mind,” I said, not indicating a good relationship or a bad one. I could tell she was fishing, maybe for Elliot's sake? I wasn't sure. “Your mother mistook me for Giselle,” I said, changing the subject.

“Was she talking about Giselle again? She always gravitates to her when she's in her dream states. It's her younger sister. They were very close as children and didn't get along well as adults. She died thirteen years ago.”

“And your father,” I asked, “where is he these days?”

“Arizona. She won't let him come. She doesn't want him to see her like this.”

“Did she really love him, you know, deeply?”

“I don't know.” Jennifer stared into her wineglass. “After the divorce, he stayed away mainly, I think, because she made him feel so ashamed. She has that power. Her rightness and how sure she is of it, how
convinced.
It's her worst trait.”

I listened to the chirruping frogs. “She still believes in love, though,” I said.

“Very much so, but not for her. Not men. She took the loss so hard. Maybe that's what's made her a true romantic. She hates to see love go to waste.”

“She's made me promise to tell the truth,” I said, smiling. “What truth? I don't know. It was a general promise.”

Jennifer squinted across the lake. There was a dock, strung with lights. “I don't know if there is a truth.” She looked at me then. “Do you think that there are truths when it comes to matters of the heart? Absolute truths?”

I shrugged.

“You love someone or you don't, but do you think life dictates the rest or can love dictate life?”

I wasn't sure whose life she was talking about now, mine or her mother's. “I don't know,” I said.

She sat back in her chair, swirled her wine. “Well, now you know how Elliot felt.”

“In what way?”

“When he told her he was married. He had to. She has a way of making you say what she wants to hear.” She pulled her legs up to her chest. “Did you play along?”

“I guess I did.”

“When she asked you to promise to tell the truth, you did promise, didn't you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I did.”

“And are you?” she asked, looking at me very frankly.

“Am I what?” I said, pretending to be more confused than I was, hoping she would let the question evaporate.

“Are you going to tell him the truth?”

“Which him? Which truth?”

“Any him,” she said. “Any truth.”

Did she want me to tell my husband that I was in love with another man? Did she want me to confess to a kiss on a lake? Did she want me to tell Elliot how deep this ran and risk the perfectly good life that I had? I thought about Helen in the restaurant making us close our eyes and be thankful for just one minute for what we had. I had a good life and Peter was a good man, and who was I to want more? Did I feel like I deserved more than that? I didn't
believe in being entitled to the good life. Life was life. It handed out its sorrows randomly. You took what you got and you found something in it to be thankful for—that was your job as a human being.

Jennifer must have sensed that I was riled. In fact, I felt a little goaded.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm overstepping.”

“It's okay,” I said and I meant it. We were just two women talking by a lake, drinking wine. These kinds of conversations have always made me uncomfortable—like a foreigner who speaks only a pidgin version of the language of women. But things happen between women in quiet conversations like these, important things. And, honestly, I knew that she was right to goad me. I needed it. I wasn't one to goad myself. “You're right. I think I have to tell the truth to someone,” I said. “A promise is a promise.”

 

Some time passed—I don't know how much. Jennifer grace fully redirected the conversation toward safer subjects—Bib's experiments, the baby's toes, which seemed to overlap strangely, the singer-guitarist whom hospice was sending over in the next few days to make a house call. “My mother's never liked those people who just suddenly whip out a guitar and start a singalong. She claims that they've ruined church, and she said, and I quote, ‘It's one of the reasons the seventies fell flat.'”

I talked too, about work, trying to describe Eila and our clients in their überposh, stuffy, dismal homes, a greedy bunch, and how they always ended up clinging to Eila's artistic gauziness. “It's like they know what's lacking in their lives and she knows how to lend it to them.” She
asked me some decorating questions and I did my best to think of what Eila would suggest.

After a lull, she asked me what song I would crank to pretend that I'm twenty again. That's when Elliot arrived.

“I have no idea,” I said.

“No idea about what?” he asked.

“I'd crank up some Van Morrison,” Jennifer said. “I was kind of nouveau hippie in my twenties.”

“What would you crank up to remind you of being twenty?” I asked Elliot.

“Is that the question you can't answer?” he asked me.

“I just can't think,” I said.

“You liked Smashing Pumpkins and I liked Pearl Jam, and you had a crush on Howard Jones and loved all of those theme songs to John Hughes films. And INXS, you were hooked at a young age.”

I blushed, not just heat in my cheeks but down my neck and across my chest. “Right,” I said. “Howard Jones. He was elegant.”

“How's Mom?” Jennifer asked.

“She's sleeping soundly.”

“And no peeps from upstairs?”

“None,” he said.

“I'll go in, check on everyone.” She picked up the empty bottle of wine. “Good night!” she said over her shoulder.

“Good night,” I said.

And she disappeared into the house.

Elliot walked to the deck railing and said, “You liked The Pretenders' ‘I'll Stand by You,' and Pat Benatar, and although you'd never confess to it in public, you had the radio in your car—the little sputtery Toyota—set to the easy-listening station. And you had a clichéd side. When
you were really pissed, you'd turn up Alanis Morissette, like every twenty-year-old girl back then. And Johnny Cash—you knew all of Johnny Cash and you blamed that on your father. And you also liked Rickie Lee Jones and you loved Carole King. You knew all the words. I assumed that your mother had those albums.”

“How do you remember all of that?”

“Each time I hear one of the songs I associate them with you. It all comes back. Every time.” He sighed. “From
‘I feel the earth move under my feet,'
to
‘No one is to blame.'
When I hear ‘Pretty in Pink' on the radio, I have to listen to the whole thing—out of respect for you.”

“I'm so sorry,” I said. “You've been brutalized all these years.”

“I'm chivalrous. What can I say?”

“You know,” I said, walking to the deck railing and standing next to him. “I'm curious. People ask you what you do, and you have to tell them you're a philosophy professor. What do they say to that? I mean, it must be kind of …”

“Embarrassing?”

“No, it's just that … I guess you could say you're a philosopher. But then …”

“They'd imagine me wearing white robes and eating grapes.”

“Or you'd just be dead.”

“Right, and I'm not dead yet.”

“So, what do you do?”

“Most philosophers usually lie about this. On a plane or something, I tell them I sell life insurance or Amway. I ask them if they've ever considered how Amway might improve their life.”

“Can Amway improve my life?”

“Absolutely.” The wind had made his eyes water and they were shining in the porch lights. “Look at me!”

And I did look at him. I knew that I was going to have to go home at some point. This wouldn't last, and I'd have to remember little moments like this—his bare feet, the frayed hems of his jeans, his shining eyes. My hand was an inch from his. He stretched his pinky and touched my pinky with his—like a sixth-grader.

“I like you,” he said.

“Really?” I said. “I had no idea.”

“Actually,” he said, leaning in to whisper. “I don't like you. I like-you like-you. This is serious.”

“You liked Otis Redding,” I said. I remembered a mix tape he had and how he listened to it in his Walkman.

“Shout Bamalama!” he said. “Otis, my man.”

“You were right about Carole King and Rickie Lee Jones. My mother didn't have a lot of albums, but I knew that those were her favorites, and I went through a phase in middle school, playing them over and over and over. My father must have known what was going on, that I wanted some kind of connection to her, and he never complained. They became our background music.” I thought about that for a moment. “It must have been hard for him. I never looked at it from his perspective before, but he let me do what I needed to.”

“I wonder what the fish are talking about tonight,” he said.

“If only my father were here to translate,” I said.

“He's still talking to fish?”

“Everybody's got to have someone to talk to.”

He turned and looked at me and I loved the way he looked at me, drinking me in, running his eyes over all
of my features, lingering on my lips. “I don't know what to do.”

“I didn't think you did.”

“I just thought I'd be honest. Just in case you thought I had a master plan that I was working out here. I don't.”

I said, “Your mother knows that it's me.”

“You?”

“She knows that I'm Gwen Merchant, not Elizabeth.”

“She told you that?”

I turned away from the lake and crossed my arms on my chest. “I've had this fear since childhood that since my mother died when I was so young she wouldn't know me in heaven because I'd changed so much, and we'd never find each other. It was a stupid fear,” I said. “But your mother said to me:
I'd recognize you anywhere …
” I started to cry—a quick gasp and then a sob. I covered my face with my hands. “That's what I've been wanting to hear—for as long as I can remember—from my own mother.” Elliot reached over and stroked my hair. “It wasn't my fault,” I said.

“Of course it wasn't your fault, Gwen. Of course it wasn't,” he said. “Guilt doesn't have to make any sense.”

I wiped the tears from my face and looked at him sharply. “But this guilt does make sense. Our guilt, being here together.”

He didn't have a response for this.

“Don't you think I'd like to be like you?” I said. “Don't you think I'd prefer to be able to tell people the way I really feel and take in, you know, really accept the way they feel about me? Don't you think that I'd love to be that way?”

“You can be that way,” he said.

I shook my head. “I am who I am.”

“Does that mean I can't tell you that I love you still?”

“You can shout it, if you want to, but I just can't take it, not the way you want me to. Don't you know that about me by now?”

He laughed and pounded a fist on the railing. “That's the sad part,” he said. “I even love that about you too.”

Across the lake, there was a pop—like champagne being uncorked—and then a chorus of voices rose. “Someone's having a party,” I said.

He put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me to his chest. He smelled good, like aftershave and the food that we'd cooked that day. He said, “Let's pretend it's a party for us, and we've wandered away to be alone.”

A woman's laugh rippled across the lake. Drunken men started singing some kind of college fight song. A dog barked. Another champagne bottle popped open. He held me like that on the dock while the voices kept echoing.