My Husband's Sweethearts (21 page)

Eleanor, my mother, John, and I are sitting at a table
with Rose, who's drawing with crayons that John rounded
up from the waitress. Elspa isn't here. When we arrived,
she said, "I forgot something. I have to get it. Can you all
watch Rose?"

"Is everything okay?" Eleanor asked.

"Fine, fine. I just forgot something important. I didn't
know the day was going to take this kind of turn." She
smiled.

We told her to take her time, that Rose would be fine
with us. And she was out the door like a shot. I watched
her through the window, running down the street to her
car. I have no idea what she's forgotten, but she's right.
The day has taken this dogleg turn. Artie's funeral is becoming
something else.

"This feels more like it," John says. He's taken off his
suit jacket, loosened his tie. He looks tired—these weeks
have been hard on all of us—and rumpled—not unlike
the first time I met him. I find myself drawing on one of
Rose's sheets of paper, borrowing her crayons. I'm nervous.
This feels more like it.
I haven't been inside this bar
since the first time I met Artie. It's exactly how I remember
it: Irish and pub-ish. I remember how it felt, watching
Artie here that night, all those years ago, as he told the
story of catching the bunny in that suburban neighborhood,
and later, how it felt just to be next to him. He was
put on this earth so fully charged.

John has gotten us a round of drinks. Rose has a
Shirley Temple with its bobbing cherry. She takes a sip.
"The bubbles are in my nose!" she says, rubbing her
cheeks. I'm not sure why, but everything is resonating
deeply now. Rose with the bubbles in her nose seems like
it's some grand comment on life—something optimistic
and poignant and simple.

"How do you start a wake?" I ask John.

"I don't know," he says. "I guess someone starts
talking."

I look at my mother.

"What?" she asks.

"You always have something to say," I tell her. "Why
don't you start?"

"Talk about Artie?" she asks. "Something
nice
?"

"Something
true,
" Eleanor says.

"Anything," I say, "just to get things going."

My mother stands up, walks to the middle of the bar,
and then whistles through her teeth like a longshoreman.
She holds up her hands and everyone turns and stares.

"This is a wake. I have to say that I'm opposed to these
kinds of honest displays of emotion, as a rule. I like a
generic funeral myself. But I've been asked to begin the
wake with a few words about our Artie." She smiles at me
as if to say: So far so good! "Now I like feminism except,
of course, when it asks me not to wear a support bra. My
question to you all is this: Why did we love him? Will his
kind persist? In our current society, is he the kind of big
lovable ornery beast who will become extinct? Will the
next generation put up with such nonsense of the masculine
variety?" She pauses here as if she's actually waiting
for an answer—from whom? Rose? Is she the next generation?
After a brief pause, my mother goes on. "I'm not
sure that it matters. We love who we love—even when we
hate them. The heart does what it pleases. And we all
loved Artie, in our own ways."

The truth is Artie would have loved this speech. It's
filled with sayings that my mother never cross-stitched
into a pillow—gem after gem.

I find myself crying in a way that seems wholly new
to me.

John raises his glass. "To Artie!" he shouts.

Everyone raises their glasses and drinks, and this is
how it begins. The sweethearts tell stories about Artie—
one of him sitting through a dog birthday party wearing a
fur-trimmed pointed birthday hat (Artie would have
hated a dog birthday party); one of him skinny-dipping in
a community pool at night; and one—from Eleanor—of
him dancing with her for the first time in her life. I'm surprised
she's told this story, but I know it's even more important
for her to tell than for everyone to hear. And
maybe that's the way it is with wakes—everyone hauling
in their stories and unloading them.

John gets up and says, "Artie Shoreman became my
father on his deathbed. But no one was more alive, even
while dying." He looks beautiful, choked up, but smiling.
His eyes are teary, but he doesn't cry. "I loved him with all
my heart."

Elspa reappears while one of the sweethearts is talking
about Artie pretending he knew how to play the piano by
clanging atonally, claiming a deep admiration for a new
composer named Bleckstein. She hands me a tall cardboard
box that still has shipping labels stuck to it.

"What's this?" I whisper. Now I've had a few rounds.
My cheeks are flushed and sore from laughing. I'm a little
drunk myself.

"Open it," she says.

The thing inside is covered in newspaper. I dig a little
and then pull out a strange blue object. It's a sculpture—
rounded at the bottom and then boxy, cylindrical, slightly
veering up top. It takes me a minute to figure it out.

"It's Artie," she says. "Part of him. You said once that
you wanted to see it. I had to call a few people to track it
down and have it sent."

I start to laugh. The sculpture of Artie's penis. Here it
is. "It
is
abstract," I say. "But I think you've captured
something of Artie here. Some essence." And this word,
essence,
strikes me as even funnier than the sculpture.

Elspa starts laughing, too. "Some essence all right."

Eleanor, my mother, and John all look over. "What is
it?" they ask.

I hold the sculpture up for them to see—hold it like
it's an Oscar. "Artie," I say. "It's Artie, abstract. Maybe
that's his best look."

I grab Elspa and give her a hug. We've come a long
way together. This sculpture seems to report just how far.

Rose is holding up her drawing. "Look, look!" she says.

Elspa takes it in her hands and says, "Is this abstract,
too?"

I look down at my own drawing. Here are my simplistic
renditions of Elspa and Rose and my mother and
Eleanor. I've drawn Artie, in his bellhop uniform again—
the way John depicted him on the restaurant's paper
tablecloth—with epaulettes and a suitcase. I've drawn
John and me.

He's listening to the woman in the middle of the bar.
She's a little drunk, too—maybe just about all of us are a
little drunk now. She's slurring through something about
Artie and that wakes are really for the living. I fold my
drawing in half and then in half again and fit it into
my pocket.

I look at John. He senses it and turns to look at me. I
move my chair close to his. I only say, "Hi," and slip my
hand into his, which is warm and soft.

He smiles and squeezes my hand. "Hi," he says.

This seems like a beginning instead of an end. I know
I'll hand him the drawing at some point in the future—a
new version of what the future might be. I look around
the table—at John, my mother, Eleanor, Elspa, and Rose.
And it looks like a family to me—close enough.

I don't know what I'll say when my turn comes. I have
so many stories to tell. But I don't know that it matters,
really, which one I choose, in the end. We each say what
we have to say, and we will spend this long afternoon crying
and laughing at the same time, so much so that I can
no longer tell which one is the truest form of grief.

If you enjoyed
My Husband's Sweethearts
,
read on for a taste of Bridget's upcoming novel . . .

The tale of a happily married woman, an ex, and the little
white lie that changed everything . . .

For Gwen Merchant, love has always been doled out in
little packets – from her widower father to her safe
husband Peter. But when an old boyfriend, the irrepressible
Elliot Hull, invites himself back into Gwen's life, she
starts to remember a time when love knew no limits.

What does Elliot want? He wants Gwen to become his
pretend wife for a weekend. He wants her to accompany
him to his family's lake house so that he can pretend to
fulfill his dying mother's last wish.

Reluctantly, Gwen agrees. It's just one weekend – what
harm could come of it? But as Gwen is drawn into Elliot's
quirky family – his astonishingly wise mother, his warm
and welcoming sister, and his adorable, precocious niece
– she starts questioning everything she's ever expected
from love. And suddenly it looks like a pretend
relationship might just turn out to be the most real thing
she's ever known . . .

Available now

T
HAT SUMMER WHEN I
first became Elliot Hull's
pretend wife, I understood only vaguely that
complicated things often prefer to masquerade
as simple things at first. This is why they're so hard to
avoid, or at least brace for. I should have known this—it
was built into my childhood. But I didn't see the complications
of Elliot Hull coming, perhaps because I didn't
want to. So I didn't avoid them or even brace for them,
and as a result, I eventually found myself looking out of a
broken window in winter watching two grown men—my
pretend husband and my real husband—wrestle on a
front lawn amid a spray of golf clubs in the snow—such a
blur of motion in the dim porch light that I couldn't distinguish
one man from the other. This would become one
of the most vaudevillian and poignant moments of my life,
when things took the sharpest turn in a long and twisted
line of smaller, seemingly simple turns.

Here is the simple beginning: I was standing in line in
a crowded ice-cream shop—the whir of a blender, the
fogged glass counter, the humidity pouring in from the
door with its jangling bell. It was late summer, one of
the last hot days of the season. The air-conditioning was
rolling down from overhead and I'd paused under one of
the cool currents, causing a small hiccup in the line. Peter
was off talking to someone from work: Gary, a fellow
anesthesiologist—a man in a pink-striped polo shirt, surrounded
by his squat children holding ice-cream cones
melting into softened napkins. The kids were small enough
not to care that they were eating bits of their napkins
along with the ice cream. And Gary was too distracted to
notice. He was clapping Peter on the back and laughing
loudly, which is what people do to Peter. I've never understood
why, exactly, except that people genuinely like him.
He's disarming, affable. There's something about him,
the air of someone who's in the club—what club, I don't
know, but he seemed to be the laid-back president of this
club, and when you were talking with him, you were in the
club too. But my mind was on the kids in that moment—
I felt sorry for them, and I decided that one day I'd be the
kind of mother not to let her children eat bits of soggy
napkin. (I don't remember what kind of mother mine
was—distracted or hovering or, most likely, both? She
died when I was five years old. In some pictures, she's doting
on me—cutting a birthday cake outside, her hair flipping
up in the breeze. But in group photos, she's always
the one looking off to the side, down in her own lap, or
to some distant point beyond the photographer—like
an avid bird-watcher. And my father was not a reliable
source of information. It pained him, so he rarely talked
about her.

I was watching the scene, intently—Peter specifically,
because instead of becoming more comfortable with having
a husband, after three years I was becoming more surprised
by it. Or maybe I was more surprised that I was his
wife, that I was
anybody's
wife, really. The word
wife
was
so wifey that it made me squeamish—it made me think of
aprons and meat loaf and household cleansers. You'd
think the word would have evolved for me by that point—
or perhaps it
had
evolved for most people into cell phones
and aftercare and therapy, but I was the one who was
stuck—like some gilled species unable to breathe up on
the mudflats.

Although Peter and I had been together for a total of
five years, I felt like I didn't know him at all sometimes.
Like at that very moment, as he was being back-clapped
and jostled by the guy in the pink-striped polo shirt, I felt
as if I'd spotted some rare species called
husband
in its
natural habitat. I was wondering what its habits were—
eating, chirping, wing span, mating, life expectancy. It's
difficult to explain, but more and more often I'd begun
to rear back like this, to witness my life as a
National
Geographic
reporter, someone with a British accent who
found my life not so much exciting as
curious.

The ice-cream shop was packed, and the two high
school girls on staff were stressed, their faces damp and
pinched, bangs sticking to their foreheads, their matching
eyeliner gone smeary. I'd finally made my way to the
curved counter and placed my order. Soon enough I was
holding a cone of pistachio for Peter and waiting for a cup
of vanilla frozen yogurt for myself.

That's when the more beleaguered of the two scoopers
finished someone else's order and shouted to a customer
behind me. "What do you want?"

A man answered. "I'll have two scoops of Gwen
Merchant, please."

I spun around, sure I'd misheard, because I am Gwen
Merchant—or I was before I got married. But there in the
line behind me stood a ghost from my past—Elliot Hull. I
was instantly overwhelmed by the sight of him—Elliot
Hull with his thick dark hair and his beautiful eyebrows,
standing there with his hands in his pockets looking tender
and boyish. I don't know why, but I felt like I'd been waiting
for him, without knowing I'd been waiting for him.
And I wasn't so much happy as I was relieved that he'd finally
shown up again. Some strange but significant part of
me felt like throwing my arms around him, as if he'd come
to save me, and saying, "Thank God, you finally showed
up! What took you so long? Let's get out of here."

But I couldn't really have been thinking this. Not way
back then. I must be projecting—backwards—and there
must be a term for this: projecting backwards, but I don't
know what it is. I couldn't have been thinking that Elliot
Hull had come to save me because I didn't even know I
needed saving. (And, of course, Ed have to save myself in
the end.) The only conclusion I can draw is that maybe he
represented some lost part of myself. And I must have realized
on some level that it wasn't that Ed been missing
only Elliot Hull. I must have been missing the person Ed
been when Ed known him—
that
Gwen Merchant—the
somewhat goofy, irreverent, seriously un-wifey part—two
scoops of
her.

Plus, did I really even know Elliot all that well? We'd
met at a freshman orientation icebreaker—a dismal event
really—at Loyola College, the one in Baltimore and then,
in the spring of our senior year we had an intense, messy,
short-lived relationship—three weeks of inseparableness
that ended when Ed slapped him in a bar. I hadn't seen
Elliot Hull since a cookies-and-punch reception after the
English Department's awards ceremony at graduation ten
years earlier.

Regardless, I found myself feeling emotional—a welling
in my throat and my eyes stinging with tears. The airconditioning
was pressing my hair flat. I stepped out of
the gust and pretended that I wasn't sure it was him at all.
"Elliot Hull?" I asked. I did this, I think, because I was
terrified by the tide of joy in my chest. Also, I remembered
enough about our relationship that I didn't want to give
him the satisfaction of immediate recognition. He was the
type to notice something like that and be a little smug
about it.

He looked older, but not much. In fact, he had the
lean body of a man who would age well—who, in his seventies,
might be described by the word
spry.
His jaw was
more set. He wasn't clean shaven. He was wearing a faded
pale blue T-shirt that was fraying at the neck, a Red Sox
ball cap, and shorts that were way too baggy. "Gwen," he
said, his voice tinged with sadness. "It's been a long time."

"What are you doing here? " I asked.
This is only Elliot
Hull,
I tried to remind myself. I didn't remember why I'd
slapped him, but I did remember that he'd deserved it.
We'd been at a bar in Towson, just a few miles from this
ice-cream shop, in fact.

"That sounded like an accusation," he said. "I'm an
innocent man. I'm ordering ice cream."

The girl behind the counter said, "Urn, sir, we really
don't have that flavor? Do you want to pick a real flavor or
something?" Kids today can be very earnest.

"Double chocolate with marshmallows and peanuts
and hot fudge and some caramel." He leaned toward the
chalkboard mounted on the wall and squinted. "And
whipped cream and three cherries."

"Three?" the girl asked, disgusted by the gratuitous
demands of humanity, I assume—a professional hazard.

"Three." He turned back to me.

"Really," I said. "Three cherries."

"I like cherries," he said.

"So, are you a rapper now?" I asked, pointing to his
baggy shorts. This was an obnoxious thing to say. But I
suddenly felt obnoxious. I'd once been an obnoxious flirt,
who'd turned into a more refined flirt, but Elliot was causing
me to regress—or return to some more elemental part
of myself.

"I could bust a rhyme," he said. "Do you want me to?"

"No, no," I said, knowing he just might. "Please
don't."

There was a lull then, and I let it lull there, lullingly.
Why further engage Elliot Hull? I was married now. Was
I going to become friends with him? Married women
don't suddenly befriend men with whom they once ended
a relationship by slapping them in a bar. But he carried on
the conversation. "I'm a philosopher, actually," he said. "I
philosophize. And I'm a professor, so I sometimes also
profess."

"Ah, well, that fits," I said. "You're
the brooder.
That's
what my friends called you in college. So now you brood,
you know, professionally. Don't philosophers brood?" My
father was a professor—a marine biologist—so I knew
how professors could be the brooding type. As a child, I
was hauled to numerous potluck faculty dinners—the air
stiff with all of the brooding and professing.

"I wasn't a brooder. Did I brood?"

"By the end of college, you'd really honed the art."

"Brooding hasn't really taken off the way I'd hoped—
as a national trend."

"I think contentment is all the rage," I said. "Blind
contentment."

"Well, there's an Annual Brooder's Convention coming
up, though, and I'm keynoting so... What are you
doing these days?"

"Me? Well, I just started something new. Sales. Interior
design, kind of. It's a mishmash," I said. I had a history
of swapping one job for another, something I wasn't
proud of. My resume was buckshot. I'd just quit a job in
admissions at a boarding school. I claimed that I was tired
of the elitism, but then I took a somewhat soft part-time
job working for more rich people as an assistant to an interior
designer who mainly staged upscale homes for sale.
I was the one who talked to prospective clients about the
nuts and bolts—quoting possible profits from staging a
house before selling, using charts—while my boss, an
ethereal, wispy woman in billowy outfits, would walk
around the house feigning artistic inspiration. Her name
was Eila, but a few days into the job, she told me that her
name used to be Sheila before she dropped the Sh. "Who
would trust an
artiste
named Sheila? You have to do what
you have to do." Then she sniffed her scarf. "Did that last
place smell like Doberman or what?"

"Interior design?" Elliot said, intrigued. "I don't remember
your dorm room being overly feng shui. Didn't
you bolt a hammock to the walls in the minikitchen?"

"What can I say? I've always had an eye."

In the distance, I heard one of the scoopers say,
"Ma'am, ma'am?" Of course, I didn't really register it, because
I'm not old enough to be a ma'am. But then Elliot
said, "Urn,
ma' am,"
and he pointed to the scooper. "Your
ice cream."

"Here," the scooper said, handing me my cup of
vanilla frozen yogurt.

"Thanks," I said. "A lot." I shuffled down to the
register, preparing to slink away. "Well, it was nice to see
you, Elliot," I said in my summarizing voice.

"Wait," he said. "We should get together. I just moved
to town. You could show me around."

"I think you'll get a feel for it," I said, paying the
cashier. "You're a clever boy."

He smiled at me then, his clever smile—it was always
so much a part of him that I assumed he was born smiling
cleverly. "How about tonight?" he asked, nudging past
people so that we were side by side now. "I could take you
to dinner and then you could take me sightseeing."

"I've got plans tonight," I said. "Sorry."

"What plans?"

I hesitated. "A party."

"You could take me. Introduce me to people. Pawn
me off on them, having done a good deed. You were always
the good-deed type. Didn't you do a cookie drive
once? I remember buying cookies from you with some
poster board involved."

He looked so hopeful that I was suddenly afraid he
was going to ask me out. "Look, I'm married," I told him
finally.

He laughed. "Funny."

"What's funny about that?"

"Nothing... It's just..."

"Just what? Do you think I'm unmarriable or something?"

"You're just not married."

"Yes, I am."

"No, you aren't."

"I'm Gwen Stevens now." I lifted up my hand, showing
the ring as proof.

He was stunned. "You're really... married?"

"That sounded like an accusation," I said. "I'm an innocent
woman. An innocent wife."

"It's just that I didn't think people really got married
anymore. Marriage is so barbaric. It's like a blood sport."

"See, that's the kind of insulting thing you say that
makes people slap you," I told him.

He raised his eyebrows and kicked his head back a little.
"You didn't really slap me," he said. "You just
grabbed my face. Very hard. It didn't do any good anyway,"
he said, his arms outstretched like he was some
proof of a failed face-grabbing.

"Weren't you engaged to that girl, Ellen something?" I
asked. Her name was Ellen Maddox. I could still see her
face. "I thought you two got back together..."