The Pretend Wife (4 page)

H
ELEN THREW GREAT PARTIES
. There was always some odd concoction to drink, exotic finger foods, music that was edgy but never morose (someone you'd never heard of but should have—music that scolded you for your provincialism). She had a knack for inviting a bizarre mix of people, and because most of the guests were single, her parties had an overt sexuality. She had a dominatrix friend named Vivica—a pro who worked in the city. Vivica had put Peter and me on her mailing list so we'd occasionally get those Gothic whip-wielding postcards in the mail announcing her shows with little handwritten notes on them:
Please come! XOXO Vivica.
I always thought of Richard, our postman, handling the postcards in his Jeep, reevaluating us. Richard was a hunter who was fond of Ripken. “Too bad about that leg,” he always said. “That boy could have really been a good hunting dog.” What did Richard think of us? Did he go home and tell his wife about the people with the three-legged dog and the porno postcards? Were we the perverts of his route? I kind of hoped to be someone's pervert.

At Helen's party, I was clearly no one's pervert. I was never dressed right, for one thing. When I tried to wear an ironic fifties-style dress a few parties back—the kind that Helen wore with so much vamp: sharp bangs and dark red lipstick and cleavage—I ended up looking like a 1950s housewife. The pearl necklace that was so full of innuendo on Helen, stated flatly on me: pearl necklace, nothing else.

These parties put Peter in a different mood too. He toned down his manners. He drank way too much. He occasionally wanted to feed me the finger foods, which in some way he thought was sexy, but that made me uncomfortable. We became unmoored from each other. In fact, we made a pact to divide and conquer the guests. Once at the party, we'd glide in opposite directions to gather as much oddness as we could, bumping into each other only now and again to check in, and then later, on the ride home and in bed, we'd share all of our information. This way, we'd decided, we were basically living the party twice—once through our own experience, and again through the other's. Now, in retrospect, I can see that this was a good plan in theory, especially if we'd been the type of couple who were true confidants, who knew each other intimately in every way. But we weren't. Love-in-glances only allows so much intimacy. Peter and I were perhaps looking for opportunities to become unmoored because we were both looking for something more.

So I was already out of my element, already nervous about social failure. This time, there was even more at stake. I remembered those British drawing room novels in which a missed cue surrounding the etiquette of tea could ruin your standing and mean you might be sent off to a
convent. In this case, I had some inkling that Elliot Hull could unfasten my life—in a way that was a threat to my current consumerism, my bagel-breakfast contentment—and this terrified me. But what terrified me more was how much I wanted to see him again.

When we got to the party, I scanned the apartment quickly for Elliot. He was nowhere in sight.

“See,” Peter said, having scanned the party himself. “He's not here. He probably won't show. It's harder than you think to come to a party alone. Luckily we can barely remember being single.” This was part of our banter—how sorry we felt for single people. It was comforting.

I said, “I'm so relieved.” But I wasn't. I was anxious—deflated yet still on edge.

A young woman put beers in our hands. She seemed like she'd been assigned the task. Peter drifted to the balcony, packed with idle smokers and glowing candles, and I headed for the food.

That's where I ran into Jason. He'd gotten married a year and a half earlier to a friend of mine named Faith. I'd been friends with Faith since college. In fact, she was one of the friends who'd called Elliot Hull “the brooder.” She'd gotten pregnant immediately after their wedding, which was their plan, and now had a nine-month-old. It was always a little embarrassing to meet up with our married friends at Helen's parties. Our married-friends' dinner parties—including mine of the low blue flame Bananas Foster variety—stood in such stark contrast to Helen's that it was strange that we could adapt to an environment so unstifled, sexually speaking. At our dinner parties, we tried to be funny and charming and smart in front of the other couples. We tried to woo them with our good
taste in imported rugs. But this was all under the radar. There was nothing that could have been called actual flirting, so all of the married-friends parties had a clamped-down suffocation—as if we were all being muffled by expensive decorator throw pillows, of which we all had way too many.

“Hi,” I said. “How are you doing?”

His mouth was full. He stuck up one finger. Jason was a beefy guy who often looked baffled. I checked the front door again to see if Elliot had wandered in. He hadn't. But I spotted a new ornate mirror, a real monster, at the other end of the room. I supposed it was meant to be vertical, but Helen had it running the length of her sleek white sofa. Peter and I had recently bought a sleeper sofa in dark stripes. I'd thought it was a little overly masculine, but he pointed out how practical it was for guests to sleep on and, being dark and striped, it was also stain-proof. We could one day throw it in the kids' playroom.
The kids.
We referred to them often—our future offspring. “That'll be good for the kids.” “We should bring the kids to this place one day.” “I wouldn't want the kids to hear a story like that.” They had a growing presence, the kids did, especially for people who didn't yet exist.

Jason finally said, “Hi.” He swallowed down the last bit of the hors d'oeuvre, then added hurriedly, “Don't tell Faith I was here.”

“What do you mean? Where's Faith?” I asked, looking around.

“She didn't want me to come. She said she didn't appreciate my behavior at these galas. She wanted me to stay home with Edward.” They'd named their baby Edward. This was a point of discussion behind their backs for some
time, but we'd slowly worn it out, and now the kid seemed like an Edward or else Edward had changed, in our collective mind, to include him. He was cute, so that helped. “And she was going to come instead.”

“But she didn't.”

“No. I'm here, but she doesn't know it.”

I was confused. “But why didn't you two just bring Edward like you did last time?”

“Oh, to that party Helen threw for the slutty magazine? That was weird. I mean the S-and-M girls and those two transvestites, they were all over the baby. Cooing like crazy. And then Faith didn't know where to nurse him. She said it was confusing—all of that T and A spread out on the coffee table, it felt like nursing was a perversion of the breast.”

“Is that what she said?”

“Yes.
A perversion of the breast.
” He loved Faith—was proud of her odd way of putting things, her articulation. She was the one who had the white-collar job, high-level bank management, bringing in the big bucks. He lost a lacrosse scholarship and dropped out of college. He and I had a certain bond, actually, being the lesser wage-earners, the lesser-achieving of our respective couples. I stuck up for him around Faith—“He's still looking for his passion, his calling” and “We're not all on the same time clock” and “He's got a different approach to the world; why judge him so harshly?” Faith would find a way back to the specific problem at hand and away from the land mines of undiscovered passions in life, slow time clocks, and different world approaches.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“We had a fight. I was smart enough to storm out.” He
smiled then, a little proud of himself. “When you have kids you'll learn. When you get into a fight, be the first one to grab the keys and storm out, or you're stuck with the baby all night.” I could hear Peter sticking up for our parenting.
Hey, leave the kids out of it. You can't even comprehend how great Gwen and I will be as parents when the kids get here.
I was letting it go. I wasn't convinced of our superior parenting abilities. What did I know about parenting anyway? A dead mother, a grief-stricken father. I wasn't sure that the Stevenses loophole was multigenerational.

“Aren't you supposed to be out storming around?” I thought I saw Elliot then, just the back of his head out on the balcony. My stomach did a small nervous flip. The man turned. It wasn't him.

“I was hungry. Helen has the best food.” This wasn't the reason and we both knew it. Jason had been the one holding the baby during all the cooing at the last party. I recalled a comment Faith had made about Jason using the baby as a prop. Now that I looked at Jason I could tell he wasn't dressed for the party. He was wearing Saturday afternoon yard-work clothes, and he clearly hadn't taken a shower. His hair was sticking up from the front of his head as if he'd driven over with his head out the window.

“Faith will find out. You know that,” I told him.

“I figure I can buy some thinking time between now and then.” He took a big swig from a glass of the night's exotic drink and made a twisted face. There was a giant punch bowl with a crystal dipper. The concoction was milk-based, creamy looking, and smelled like coconut. Jason would likely get drunk, and he wouldn't buy any thinking time, and Faith would be rightfully pissed tomorrow. This would be chalked up to Jason's infantilism, as
Faith called it. His overactive id. He had a long history of squandering thinking time. He owned a take-out taco hut. “You've got to try this drink,” he said. “It tastes like edible panties—tropical flavored.”

I clapped him on the shoulder. “Good luck,” I said. “But I have to tell you, things don't look good for you.”

His mouth was full of food again, and he smiled sadly and gave a weak shrug as if to say,
Too late now.
And it was.

There were vases of fat purple lilacs on the table. They teetered lewdly over the food platters. I negotiated around them, got a plate, and filled it with all of these Middle Eastern–inspired foods—various kabobs, feta-something, tahini-something else, cheese-filled pancake-like somethings. I wondered for a moment if Helen was dating someone Middle Eastern. She was always in the process of swearing off men and then swearing them on again. Could she fall for Elliot? I wondered.

I dipped up a glass of the coconut concoction, took a sip, and thought briefly about edible panties. Would they taste like the fruit leather that was sold at the checkout of the health food store I went to every time I got hopped up on some article I read in a women's magazine about a healthier lifestyle? Would this make for edgy conversation? Could I make that funny?

That's when I saw Elliot. I was surprised to see him even though I'd been looking for him. He was so fully himself—had I been expecting only a portion?—and I loved his details. He was wearing khakis, a nice belt with a silver buckle dipping forward, some kind of black concert T-shirt, and as if just to further confuse things: a blazer. His hair was still damp from a shower. He was talking to an artistic-looking blonde wearing oversized earrings. She
was gesticulating wildly, her earrings bobbing. Despite her near-hysteria, Elliot was calm. He was nodding along empathetically. He lowered his head and closed his eyes and nodded some more. Then she must have said something funny, because he smiled. He was holding a small black box that reminded me of a box I'd once used as a kid to bury a hamster. It was wrapped in a thin purple ribbon. Had he brought a present? Sitting on the small table next to him was a box like the one in his hands, except it had been opened and the lavender tissue paper had been rifled through. The gift, whatever it had been, was now gone.

I wasn't sure what to do. How long had he been here? Had he looked for me and Peter? Evidently, walking into a party alone wasn't as hard as we remembered it being. I wished that Peter was here with me now, that we were chatting vivaciously about tropical-flavored panties and laughing. I looked for him out on the balcony, but the figures gathered there were oddly lit and impossible to distinguish. I decided to busy myself looking for Helen, but Elliot caught my eye and gave a big wave. I waved back, just a propped-up hand folding twice, then looked away. But, in an instant, he was there, standing in front of me.

“Thank you,” he said. “You saved me. She was a conversational vampire. Nice and all, but I think I'm now undead.” Before I had a chance to say anything, he handed me the box. I remembered now that he'd once given me a sandwich in a plastic box bought off of his dining card as a gift. I didn't want to own up to the memory though. “Here, this is for you.”

“Is it a small dead animal?”

“Um, no,” he said. “Did you want a small dead animal? I could run out and get one.”

“No, it just looks like a …”

“Oh, a little casket. Right. I see that now. No. But it is a dead something. But nice dead. Open it!” He smelled like aftershave and shampoo, and I had a sudden memory of having sex with him. I remembered, fleetingly, being under a sheet, and how he was shucking his jeans, the weight and warmth of his chest on mine. Standing there in Helen's apartment, the memory made me blush.

I lifted the lid, a little hesitantly, placed it under the box, fiddled with the lavender tissue paper, and uncovered a rose corsage in a spray of white baby's breath. “You got me a corsage,” I said.

“One for you and one for the hostess,” he said.

“Does that mean you have two prom dates?”

“Is that not okay with you?” he said.

“So, you met Helen,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Did she like her corsage?”

“It made her laugh really loudly.”

“She sometimes laughs loudly. But she's pretty, isn't she?”

“She's not my type.” He picked up the corsage and its little faux-pearl-tipped pin. “You mind?”