The Pretend Wife (10 page)

T
HE TRAIN WAS NEARLY
empty. I pressed my head against the window. The seats still smelled like too many people, though—the eggy stench of commuters. I wondered whether or not I was lucky, like Helen said. I didn't believe in luck, really. I lost my mother as a five-year-old. That wasn't lucky—even if I survived the accident. If you believe that some people are lucky, you have to believe that others are doomed. That didn't seem like a fair trade.

I watched the trees until they became nothing but blurred greenery that only represented trees. What is a marriage, anyway? I wondered. It's a representation of love, but it isn't love itself. I thought of the mini bride and groom that I'd insisted on having on top of my wedding cake. I couldn't begin to remember where they might be now. Had they been a prop used by the caterer? Had Peter and I bought them? Were they packed away in storage somewhere, fitted into the box that held my gown and veil? What became of those two little representations of marriage? Surely it was a bad thing to have lost them so completely. One day, would I find them rattling around in
the bottom of a dusty silverfish-infested box, having been broken into shards—a little porcelain face, a shoe, a pair of clasped hands?

The train made brake-hissing stops. People came and went. They met each other on the platforms—hugged each other perfunctorily, little gestures, representations of love—and rolled their suitcases to escalators. This made me anxious. I decided to distract myself. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed. I started with my father. I'd neglected to tell him that I wouldn't be making our Sunday brunch.

I told him, “I'm going away for the weekend with an old friend.”

“The old college friend? The thinker?” he asked. It was unusual for him to have recalled a detail like that and return to it.

“He's actually worse than a thinker,” I said. “He broods.”

“That's what you get from the humanities,” he said. “Oh, the humanities!” It was an academic's joke. My father had an arsenal of these—none of them funny.

I was wondering if he'd ask if Peter was coming along. He didn't.

“Call me next week,” he said. This too was unusual. I wondered if this had to do with him having opened up to me or if it had to do with the brooder. I wasn't sure. I promised that I'd call.

I tried Faith next to see how Edward was faring.

“He's fine. Sleeping, and so is Jason. We're exhausted and on high alert. Who will fall next?” she said, ominously. “And then there were two …”

“I'm sure you'll be fine,” I said. “Don't you get some superpowers as parents?”

“I wish. Well, you know, Jason was great last night, though. He was really together and nurturing. I feel bad about calling him a shit-head.”

“He has a certain artsiness,” I said.

“And what is his art, exactly?”

I wasn't sure. “The art of life?” I said weakly.

“Well, then,” she said, “he's an abstract impressionist in the art of life, I guess. I wish I knew how to market that. Who would be the paying customer?”

And as quickly as that the compliment turned into an insult. I almost said, “I think you are the paying customer, Faith,” but I held back.

“Wait,” she said. “Where are you? Isn't it Saturday? Are you going?”

“I'm on the train.”

“And so you opted for
interesting
?”

“I could get off the train and go home. It would be that easy,” I said, one hand rummaging idly in the bottom of my pocketbook, playing a game of identifying objects by touch. My fingers found a cherry-flavored Chap Stick, the lone key to my father's front door.

“Do what you want to do,” Faith said. “I mean, barf isn't the only way to get a rise out of your husband and find something you've been looking for in him.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Nothing. I'm delirious,” she said. “Don't listen to me.”

“Are you saying that I'm doing this to get a rise out of Peter?”

“No, no. Forget it! I was—what's that word?
Transferring.
I was transferring my relationship issues onto you. Seriously, don't listen to me.”

“I'm not doing that, Faith. I'm not doing that at all.”

“I think the baby's waking up,” she said. “I gotta go. Please, ignore what I said. Seriously.” And then she hung up.

My fingers fiddling with a half-eaten roll of Tums and a lipliner, I wondered if I wanted Peter to be jealous. I did. I truly did. Who wouldn't? But was that the purpose of this whole thing? To get a rise out of him? To find something that I've been looking for in him? I worried about this for a little while, and then slowly but surely, I worried that it wasn't true. That it was worse than that. What if I wasn't doing this to get a rise out of Peter? What if I wasn't looking for something in him? What if I was beyond all of that kind of wanting from him or knew that it was useless to try? He gave what he could. I knew his limitations. What if I was doing this for myself?

I called up Helen next. Whenever my psyche ferreted its way to some guilty sore spot, Helen was the best person to call. She loved assuaging guilt, because I think she liked to assuage her own in the process.

She was getting a manipedi as part of a bachelorette day for a work friend. “It's better than trying to pretend you're titillated by a male stripper dressed like a cowboy.”

I laughed. We'd been to this humiliating event together about ten years earlier—faux leather chaps, a pretty but frightened guy with a lasso and a room full of women trying to pretend he wasn't gay. “I'm glad that brand of feminism is dying.”

“The kind where we have to pretend we're men? Good riddance.” There was a momentary pause while she talked to the manicurist, picking colors. “And so you're going, aren't you? Are you already there?”

“I'm on the train and just got into a tiff with Faith.”

“Oh, well. Faith. She doesn't get it. Sometimes I think there are two kinds of people. Those who want to live life and those who just want to survive.”

“She used to want to live life. Didn't she? I mean, she was pretty wild in her day. Remember when she got kicked out of that club for overly aggressive dancing and that pot dealer she dated …”

Helen sighed. “I think babies bring out the survival instinct. I don't blame her.”

“It might strike us one day, I guess.”

“What did you fight about?”

I told her the part of the conversation when she said I was doing this just to make Peter jealous or to find something in him. “That's condescending. Don't you think?”

“It's bullshit.”

An elderly woman had shuffled into my car and was sitting across the aisle. She was otherworldy—from that more distinguished era when people dressed up for train rides. I lowered my voice respectfully. “It
is
bullshit. I mean, she'd said something nice about Jason and then immediately undercut it, which she always does, and this time only because I tried to tell her that he's artistic.”

“Oh, that. Well …”

“What do you mean ‘Oh, that, well'?”

“You do that.”

“I do what?”

“You use Jason by trying to tell us the best parts of Jason, but, well …”

“Well, what?”

“You're really talking about yourself. It's subconscious.”

“I am not using Jason to talk about myself.”

“Jason isn't artistic.”

“Yes, he is. He practices the art of living.” As soon as I said it, I felt ridiculous.

“Jason owns and operates a taco hut. He's smart and funny. But he owns and operates a taco hut, quite happily. You like to see him as something more because you like to see yourself …”

“As something more? Are you saying I'm not enough?” Why had I counted on Helen to lift me up? She was unpredictable at best. Sometimes she could sense weakness and would only make things worse. I felt stupid for having forgotten that she had an elaborate assortment of traps; this one would surely go under the category of
just being honest
—one of my least favorite.

“I think you're more than enough!”

“Excuse me?”

“You know what I mean,” Helen said, not as ruffled by the conversation as I'd have liked her to be. “I think you're fantastic!
You
sometimes don't think you're fantastic enough.”

I thought about driving Eila from house to overpriced house, carrying the briefcase she'd given me stuffed with its charts and data and contracts, how she would sometimes ask me to crank the oldies station while she sang off key harmony to Carole King. Was I really just a chauffeur for someone who was too batty to drive?

“I've got to go. My stop's coming up.”

“Don't be mad at me,” Helen said.

“I'm not mad,” I said.

I heard someone in the background squeal. “The bride,” she whispered, “has just consented to a Brazilian wax. Oh, joy.”

We hung up then, and soon the train came to my stop. Through the smeary window, I could see Elliot standing
on the platform, his arms crossed. He was staring at the ground, his face knotted in thought. The train kicked up a breeze that ruffled his hair. I got up, grabbed my bag, shuffled out of my seat, down the aisle. I paused there, knowing I could pay the conductor to let me stay on until the next stop then turn around and get a ticket home. I looked at my cell phone. No messages. I could go home to Peter and feel lucky and be thankful.

But then I realized I was thankful—for this, for running into Elliot again in the ice-cream shop, for choking on the kabob, for making the agreement on the balcony.

I walked down the train's mighty steps and onto the platform, but Elliot was gone. Was he having second thoughts of his own? Had he left me there? I turned a small circle and almost headed back onto the train, but then I saw him, walking toward me, picking up speed once he caught my eye. And I was afraid for a brief moment that he was going to pick me up and spin me around like Ellen Maddox at the icebreaker. I wasn't ready for that, was I? I stiffened up. He stopped abruptly, stuck out his hand as if we'd never met before.

I shook it.

He said, “I like your shoes.”

E
LLIOT DROVE ME FROM
the train station in his mother's Audi convertible, a gift she'd gotten for herself when she retired from real estate. “She worried she'd started puttering around the house in a way she found too elderly,” Elliot told me. It was a sporty coupe with five gears and a lot of kick. Elliot apologized for driving it like a teenager. His own car was a sad four-door sedan that he bought off of a friend who was trying to raise money to get to the West Coast and make millions flipping houses. “You hit the gas and about forty-five minutes later it decides whether or not it feels like going. I feel like an asshole loving this car so much. But I do. I just love it. That's all.”

My hair blew wildly around my head, but I was happy to be windswept. I felt like a teenager too, though I hadn't had any convertible rides in my high school years. There's something about cars, isn't there? Something about a man and a woman confined in a small space, rocketing along a road—it feels powerful and intimate at the same time, like sex. I couldn't get it out of my head that Elliot and I had been lovers—rambunctious young lovers, as desperate as
we were clumsy. Images of the two of us amid laundry and library books, wrestling through sex, flashed in my mind.

We talked about the smell of commuters, and the old-fashioned loveliness of trains, and when he noticed my laptop in the footwell, he told me that the lake house didn't have any Internet hookup and that they lived in the Bermuda Triangle as far as cell phones went.

“I'll check in with Peter on the landline,” I said, and it felt good to say his name as some sort of clear reminder. “But I won't miss the Internet,” I said and then blurted, “If I get one more piece of spam telling me that my penis is too small, I might need to go to a support group.” I immediately wanted to reel the comment back in.

But Elliot laughed. “It's the Russian Internet brides that get me,” he said.

“Why didn't you get one of those for this weekend?” I asked.

“The postage was way too expensive,” he said. “Plus, the Russian accent is cluttered with too many rolling
y
's. I prefer speaking uncluttered English with you.” This made my stomach flip like I was a kid sitting in the backseat of a car cresting a hill at top speed.

But we were driving along a flat tree-lined country road, plastic mailboxes flashing by.

“You know, I didn't tell my mother I married
you,
” Elliot said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You came along after the fact. I'd already told her that I married someone named Elizabeth.”

“Elizabeth?”

“Yes.”

“And what does Elizabeth do?”

“We didn't get that far.”

“But I met your mother once. What if she remembers me? Well, I guess it was a long time ago …”

“I'm hoping she'll be foggy on the details—though you haven't changed—not at all.”

“That's nice of you to say,” I said flatly. Of course I'd changed, especially in the last year. I'd noticed more wrinkles, freckles on my chest, and the faint blue webbing of some kind of varicose map just above one knee that I'd decided to ignore.

“It's true!” he said.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Also, I should mention that there are a few wedding gifts to open. Apparently my mother was excited to share the news. They look like toasters and coffeemakers, mostly. But Jennifer knows I'm not really married to you. She knows the real story. I've filled her in.”

“Jennifer? Your sister?” I'd only seen her in a series of pictures taken on a fishing trip. She'd been a sunny kid in a life preserver, about three or four years younger than Elliot.

“Her husband is on a business trip and so she's here with the kids.” He'd hesitated before the words
business trip
as if this weren't quite right.

“She has kids?”

“Oh, right, that happened after I graduated. She got pregnant her freshman year of college, transferred to a school close to home. She had the baby, lived with my mother for a few years, and kept going to school. She graduated on time. She's really amazing. Her daughter is eight now. Her name is Bib. Jennifer got married two years ago to Sonny. They had a baby boy six months ago. They call him Porcupine.”

“I never met your sister.”

“You'll love her.”

“And I'll meet Porcupine and Bib?”

“Those aren't their baptismal names,” he said.

“And I'm Elizabeth.”

“Right.”

“And we
didn't
meet in college.”

“We didn't.”

“Does this mean I never slapped you in that bar?”

“You never
grabbed my face
in that bar,” he corrected.

“Where did we meet?”

“We met at a monthly book club.”

“Do you go to a monthly book club?”

“No,” he said, “but I should. Do you?”

I shook my head.

“But now you do!” he said. “I said that I fell in love with you at the book group because of the way you fought for Nabokov.”

“Well, I
would
fight for him,” I said, imagining Elliot Hull falling in love with me as I gave a fiery speech to spinsters about why
Lolita
should never have been banned. “What if we get caught lying? Are you good at lying?”

“No,” he said.

“I'm not either.”

“I get flustered. Speaking of which, your last name is Calendar.”

“Elizabeth
Calendar
?”

“There was a calendar sitting on a table nearby. I once had a music teacher named Mrs. Calendar. It's a real name.”

“As long as it's someone's real name … I mean, I'd hate to have a fake name that also sounded fake.” I stuck
my hand out the window and pushed against the rush of air. “Shouldn't we have worked all this out earlier?”

“We should have. Wait,” he said. He slowed down and pulled over on the dusty shoulder. The air suddenly fell still. Everything was quiet. “I'm sorry,” he said. “See, I knew this wasn't a good idea. What do you want to do? I'll do anything. Do you really want to go through with this?”

I
did
want to go through with it, especially now that I was with Elliot again—alone. I didn't remember the specifics of his childhood, but I had a strong impression. He'd been a sickly kid with an absentee father, a strong, almost glamorous mother, a younger sister he doted on, some family money. Mostly it was a kind of solitary childhood, almost as lonesome as mine—a boy poking around a lake house during the long slow summer days. He'd talked about the lake house like it was an entire universe and it had lodged in my memory too as a wistful, dreamy place, bittersweet. So I wanted to see the lake house, sure. I wanted to know this part of Elliot's past. I wanted to see his mother again—always fascinated by mothers. I wanted to meet the beloved sister and her brood. But was I able to admit that I also wanted to see the life that I could have been a part of? Doesn't everyone want to believe that their lives had alternate possibilities? I must have known this on some level, because part of me hoped that the lake house would be just as billed—wistful and dreamy—but another part of me hoped that it wouldn't live up to its lasting impression. The pragmatist in me—with her boxy worldview and prim manners, hair pinned up in a tight little bun—wanted to have a look around for curiosity's sake and then, with a manageable ache of disappointment, go
home to my husband—very happily, content with my life decisions. It wouldn't be this simple, of course. Nothing is. “Our intentions are good,” I said. “If we get caught lying, we can always say that.”

Elliot put his hand on the gear shift and jiggled it in neutral. “I'm glad you're here,” he said. “It's strange that we're lying, because it seems like we aren't.”