The Pretend Wife (3 page)

T
HE NIGHT OF THE
party, I was in the bathroom putting on mascara, wearing only a lavender bra and underwear, which made my skin look even paler. I'm not much good in the sun. I look boiled after a day at the beach and then freckled like certain kinds of trout. Better to be pale. The bright lighting in the bathroom wasn't helping. Peter and I were living in Canton, a yuppie neighborhood in the southeastern section of Baltimore, in an older apartment building that had been renovated into upscale condos. The upgrades weren't supposed to detract from the old-fashioned charm—wood floors, heavy doors—but still did. The lighting was one such example. It was too bright. I missed the dull glow of low wattage. Ripken was laying on the bath mat. He could sense when I was anxious and tended to stay close by. I looked down at him, and he looked up at me. Then he cocked his head and jiggled his stump in a phantom-limb attempt to scratch his ear. I bent down and rubbed his ear for him. I was worried about seeing Elliot again. Would I flirt obnoxiously in front of Peter? Would I become my old self again, my current self unraveling like
mummy tape until I was coiled in a pile on the floor? I didn't want to have to be Elliot Hull's personal handler or get mired in some endlessly obnoxious conversation. Would Peter know to come and rescue me? “We need some sort of code,” I called to Peter.

“Code for what?” Peter asked. He was getting dressed in the bedroom. I heard the jingle of his belt.

“Code for something like:
Let's
not
give this stranger directions to the party.
”

“He isn't a stranger. You two were friends in college, weren't you?”

“Not really.” And I meant that we'd been less than friends and more than friends too, and there should be some name for this.

“Well, it's not my fault, Gwen,” he said with a great sigh.

I stuck my head out the door. “Thank you, Saint Peter of the Excruciating Sighs.” Peter, with his impeccable manners, knew how to sigh disappointment better than anyone I've ever known. His sighs were elaborate, extravagant even. He knew how to sigh whole paragraphs on how exhausting I could be. He knew how to sigh the story of our entire relationship and how we had made it to this very moment of my colossal tiresomeness. He could sigh three-part harmony or an entire Italian opera. In fact, sometimes after such a grand sigh, I would call him the Great Sighing Tenor or, simply, Pavarotti.

“Fine. But the fact is
you
invited him.”

My face looked blotted out in the mirror. I'd put on too much cover-up. I do this sometimes. It's part of a disappearing instinct that kicks into overdrive when I'm nervous. I'm a nervous person in general, so I often look
blotted out. “I specifically did
not
invite him. He was lying.”

“Why didn't you just say,
Look, I don't want you to come to the party?
”

I didn't say this because I wanted Elliot to come to the party as much as I didn't want him to come. I was afraid of how overwhelmed I'd felt in the ice-cream shop. I thought of Elliot Hull in his baggy rapper shorts and his ball cap, with that insistently clever smile. I pictured him standing like that in a lecture hall in some fifth-rate community college, eating some insanely ridiculous ice-cream cone, while mumbling something about Heidegger, with one hand in his pocket. “I'm sure he's a fine person. He's a philosopher. I mean, do bad people go into philosophy?”

“I think bad people go into everything,” Peter said. This was a little-known secret about Peter. He believed that people were inherently bad, deep down, and that they had to strive to overcome it. He always hid this jadedness from people at large, so this small comment was an intimate one. He was confessing something about himself.

“I guess they do,” I said.

“Just avoid him,” Peter said.

Ripken farted, then turned around and snapped at it. I'd worked hard to improve his flatulence with diet, but every once in a while he rummaged through the garbage or stole a chocolate bar from my purse and he was back at it.

I gave him a dirty look and walked out of the bathroom. Peter was wearing a short-sleeved, old-man button-down—blue and white checked with one breast pocket. “That shirt reminds me of Dr. Fogelman,” I said.

“Benny Fogelman of the Fogelmans who live next door to your father?”

“Yes.” My father has lived next door to the Fogelmans for thirty-some years. Fogelman's his dentist. He isn't a good dentist, however. My father is always having to have faulty caps replaced and second root canals because the first attempts weren't wholly successful. He's suffered decades of pain just because he doesn't want to hurt Benny Fogelman's feelings. Dr. Fogelman packed his basement with canned goods and bottled water and medical supplies in preparation for Y2K, then he and his wife ate nothing but canned food for a solid year after all was well. “Sometimes you have to eat your way out of a poor investment,” he told me once. Dr. Fogelman is a pessimist with a dingy overbite, and Mrs. Fogelman is his trusty sidekick, his enabler, who calls him “the old turd” behind his back.

“Don't wear the Fogelman,” I said to Peter. “It depresses me.” I sat down on the edge of the bed, still not dressed. “It makes me feel like we're an old married couple …”

“Like Dr. and Mrs. Fogelman?”

I nodded and picked at the bedspread. Was this the bedspread of an old married couple?

“I like this shirt. It's retro.”

It was not retro. It was stodgy. This was a subtle distinction that would be lost on him. “Maybe Helen will like Elliot. Helen's pretty.”

“She's only pretty in pictures.”

“That's not possible. Pretty is pretty, isn't it?”

“I saw her in pictures, you know, when we were dating, and then I met her and she started moving around, and she laughs too loud and collapses when she laughs like one of those toys—you know, those little movable
statue toys of like Goofy or something, where you press the bottom and the whole thing flops.”

“Oh,” I said, wondering how long he'd thought this about Helen, and why he never told me, and how many other little odd observations he'd stored away—ones about me maybe. I knew Peter didn't like my friends, but I wasn't sure I liked them either. Being friends with women has always been hard for me. I've never been good at negotiating the sudden undertow of conversations, how a conversation among women can become so unwieldy, how, in such quiet tones, there's so much freight being walloped around. Women have superhero strength in refined dialogue and I always fell for the sucker punches. Sometimes I didn't even know I'd been hit until an hour or so later—
Hey, wait a minute …
But by then it was always too late. Helen in particular was a sore spot. She was still single and had recently started to take it personally. Just a few years ago, she'd doled out her sympathy for us, her wifey friends, dragging along boyfriend after boyfriend to our wedding receptions and dancing recklessly on the various dance floors. But then she'd started to question her taste in men. Now she was beginning to question their taste in her. She seemed to be taking our marriages as insults, and, having perceived an attack, she was occasionally vicious. I was an easy target. She always caught me off guard, because I didn't have a guard. I blamed this on my lack of a mother figure. Certainly mothers give elaborate lessons on how to dodge and parry, and I'd missed all of that.

“Maybe Elliot likes those collapsible toys,” I said. Peter didn't have any response to this. I tried to decake my face a little. “How about we rub our noses?” I said.

“Together? Like Eskimos? Why would we do that?”

“We would each rub our
own
noses. Like this.” I rubbed my nose. “Our code! That way you'd know to come and rescue me in case I get cornered by Elliot Hull at the party.”

“What if you have to rub your nose and not because of some dipshit alert, but because you need to rub your nose? With your allergies …” Peter was always practical.

“We could rub our chins,” I offered. “How often do I get an itchy chin?”

“How about we act like grown-ups instead and not like little kids who make up a pretend language of hand gestures? I'd rather not walk around parties looking like a third-base coach.” As I relay this I don't want Peter to come across as good or bad. There are these little charged conversations that married couples have that, when written, sound petty and ugly. And we were, from time to time, both petty and ugly, but, beneath it all, loving.

But at this moment, did he love me? I believe he did, deeply. In fact, I think his love for me surprised him sometimes and that was one of the reasons he felt he had to keep it in check. And I didn't break him of it. Perhaps I even encouraged it. Peter's parents might have been the Loophole Stevenses, but despite all of their good fortune, I don't think many people would have chosen to be them. They had a lovelessness to them. Peter was a better person—sweeter, kinder, more generous—but he still was their brand, their product. Is that his fault?

He walked up to me, sitting there on the bed, and bent down and patted my bare knee three times. He'd done this more than a few times recently, this knee patting. It was something that the likes of Benny Fogelman would do to Ginny Fogelman if she were to get all heated up on a topic—like gay marriage—and needed some restraint. It
struck me as awful. To the casual observer, it might have passed as something tender, but wasn't it really a small act of condescension? Or was it the kind of thing that I would have found funny a few years before—charmingly retro but not earnestly stodgy—but the joke had worn thin and it was now, dangerously, quickly, becoming a habit?

Peter walked out of the room and I called after him. “Are you a knee patter now? Without any sense of irony whatsoever? A nonironic knee patter?”

He shouted from the living room. “All I heard was
kneel batter now
or
feel better now
and something about irony!” And then the television clicked on and there was the sound of a soccer match—a crowd with too many horns and Spanish-speaking announcers. “If you don't get dressed, we're going to be late!”

“All I heard was breast and wait!” I shouted back. Ripken wandered out of the bathroom and laid down at my feet.

“What?” he called out.

“What, what?” I said.

The argument had officially floundered to senselessness. We abandoned it and I got up to finish dressing.

E
LLIOT HULL
.
THE BROODER
. As I mentioned, we met at a freshman orientation icebreaker. It was mandatory, because it had to be. If it weren't, only the unrepentantly extroverted would have gone, leaving the rest of us, the needy, encased in chunks of ice.

There were about a hundred people in the gym, further divvied into groups of four. Elliot and I were in the same foursome. The other two—a boy and a girl—are a blur, long since forgotten. Were they nice, shy, prissy, rueful? I don't know. Maybe they were even blurry back then. Some people are. They probably went on to have perfectly lovely icebroken lives.

I only remember one of the exercises. The instructions were that someone in the group had to tell someone else in the group what to say to someone outside of the group. It was supposed to be introductory. The example was:
Go up and shake hands with that person over there and tell him you like his shoes.
I should mention here, if it's not already obvious, that I went to a fairly lifeless college, one that seemed as if it had been perfectly preserved in lava and volcanic ash circa 1954, à la Pompeii. (Will all of my
metaphors about college entail being encased or preserved—in ice or lava—or otherwise smothered? They might. I'd intended to break from my father's house into the world at large, but I hadn't. I was still terrified—of what? The world at large? I don't know. In any case, I was still protecting myself and in fact, I spent my college and postcollege years perfecting my self-protection.)

What did Elliot look like back then? Like we all did. A slightly softer, pinker, shinier, leaner, crisper version of ourselves now—a condensation that's been diluted by time. This was the first thing he ever said to me: “This is bullshit. You know that?”

“It's complete bullshit,” I said.

“Don't make me do something stupid,” he said.

I looked at him. “I'll leave that part up to you.”

“So you're funny,” he said.

“No, I'm not funny,” I said, and I wasn't or had never thought of myself as funny because people didn't laugh at the things I said.

“What are you then?” he asked. “Are you bookish?”

“Bookish?”

“You look like you could be bookish.”

I was insulted even though I
was
bookish. I'd spent the last four years of high school pretending not to be bookish while looking forward to coming out of the bookish closet in college. “I read books, if that's what you mean.”

“I can be bookish,” Elliot said. “When I'm in the mood.” And here he brooded momentarily, but then quickly turned to face me. “Where are those other people?” he asked. “They were right here.”

“They're off shaking hands with strangers and complimenting them on their shoes.”

“That reminds me,” he said. “I like your shoes. They're okay. I mean, they aren't phenomenal or flashy, but they're stable but not boring. I like them.”

“I don't think you're supposed to
critique
the shoes, just compliment them,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, I wanted to be honest.”

There was an awkward pause and then I said, “I like your shoes too.”

“Ah, that's the way you're supposed to do it.”

“Yep.”

I liked Elliot Hull immediately—shoes and all. In the end, I would still like him even though I'd kind of hate him too—both emotions simultaneously even while slapping him in that bar. I didn't like him because he was likable. He wasn't, in fact, likable in the terms that society has mutually agreed upon. But you know how every once in a while, you'll come across someone and you feel at ease with him. A lot of the time it's someone you know you'll never see again—a person in line with you in customs, in a waiting room at an insurance office, a waitress—and in one unguarded moment, one of you admits in some way that the world is full of shit, and the other agrees. A short-lived camaraderie in the world of bullshit before you sigh and move on in your different directions—except when you don't have to move on in different directions. Elliot was like that, for me, from the get-go. He was irritating, yes, but he was sincerely irritating, sincere in general, and I liked that.

“I know what I want you to do,” I said.

“Okay. What?”

“I want you to pick up that girl over there. Pick her up off her feet and spin her around.” I pointed to a girl—a slim one, so he wouldn't have to strain. She had soft
brown hair and dark eyes. I don't know why I chose this task. I was being romantic, I think. I'd seen
An Officer and a Gentleman
too many times.

He grabbed my hand. “How about
that
girl?” he said, pointing my finger to a girl in short shorts.

“No, that one,” I said, pointing back at the first girl.

He nudged my finger in another direction. “How about
that
girl,” he said, indicating a taller girl.

“No, that one,” I said, steadfast in my original choice. “Pick her up and spin her around, like, you know, it's the end of a war or something.”

“Which war?” he asked.

“It doesn't matter. Any war.”

“It completely matters,” he said. “I mean a World War II pick up and spin around is totally different from a Vietnam pick up and spin around. I don't think they even picked up and spun girls around after Nam.”

“Fine, like after World War II.”

“Fine,” he said, and he walked toward the girl. She saw him approaching. I couldn't see his face, but I could see hers. She was smiling, anxiously, and he picked up speed. By the time he got to her, it was as if she knew what was coming. He lifted her up by her thin waist, high in the air, and then he spun around—like he was in fact a soldier who'd come home from World War II and had just spent the last few weeks doing nothing but picking up and spinning around girls.

That girl was Ellen Maddox. They started dating and kept dating. They dated steadily for three and a half years. I saw Elliot off and on. We had a class or two together. And he'd always bring up that orientation, thanking me for picking the right girl, or he'd simply compliment my shoes, which was our little code. And that was that.

Until one spring day of our last semester when Elliot saw me lying on a blanket in the middle of the green, studying for an exam. I was alone. A midterm was looming. I was thoroughly, openly bookish by then, wearing glasses, my hair pulled back in a ponytail—I may have even had a pencil in it. He walked up to my wide blanket and laid down on its edge. He propped himself up on one elbow and stared at me broodingly, and finally said, “You were wrong.”

“Wrong about what?” I asked.

“You picked the wrong girl.”

“What?”

“At orientation,” he said. “You picked the wrong girl.”

“Oh, really, did I?”

“Mm-hm.”

“And who should I have picked?”

“That's the crazy part,” he said. “
You're
the right girl. You should have picked
you.
”