The Pretend Wife (25 page)

“Well, the white horse might have been
my
little fantasy,” he admits. “I envisioned a desert scene, you know, a little Lawrence of Arabia. But deserts are hard to come by here. And I don't think I'd have looked so great in eyeliner. Basically, I'd planned on avoiding death.”

“Ah,
cheating
death. Now that is part of your pattern.”

“Let's not start in with that so fast, okay?” His voice is tired. He is dying, after all. The exhaustion comes on quick. It's a quiet moment. I don't have anything else to say. And then he adds, “My heart's turned on me. I thought you'd appreciate the irony of me having a bad heart.”

I don't say anything. My damn eyes well up with tears. I let them tour the bedroom like it's a gift shop. As I pick up curios and perfume bottles off the dresser, I inspect them absentmindedly. They're mine but they feel like someone else's things, someone else's life.

“You used to think I was funny,” he says.

“You used to be funny.”

“You should laugh at a dying man's jokes. It's only polite.”

“I'm not interested in polite,” I say.

“What are you interested in?”

What was I interested in? I look at the shoes I'm wearing. I paid too much for them. I can feel them fading out of fashion in this very instant. I am here, in these shoes, standing in my bedroom because my mother told me to come home. That's not all this is. I'm not simply a dutiful daughter who doesn't know what to do and so does what she's told. But I am a daughter—my father's daughter, the father who left my mother and me for another woman. I swore I'd never repeat my mother's mistakes, but hadn't
I? Artie, the older man. Artie, the cheat. How could I have known he would cheat on me? Was I drawn to him subconsciously because I knew that he would? Did my subconscious dupe me? Did it force me to marry my father? Am I just playing out some twisted Freudian scene—now I'm required to play out my father's death? Required to tend to Artie?

“Do you have a round-the-clock nurse?” I ask.

“It makes me feel better to have someone else in the house. They don't stay all night. Marie is here now and she'll give one last call—like at a bar. Insurance doesn't cover it all, but now that you're here …”

“We'll keep the nurse,” I tell him. “I'll be sleeping in the guest bedroom downstairs.”

“You could play nurse,” he says with this playfully sad expression. Irrepressible. My heart feels full, like there is a tide within me, and I steady myself with one hand on my bureau. This is Artie, the man I love, in spite of reason. I'm here because I love him—arrogant, cheating, busted-hearted Artie.

I can't quite look at him. I manage to focus on the bedside table. It's overrun with pill bottles. Artie is dying. I'm going to be the one to hand him over to the mortician, to death. Alone. Regardless of those other women in their other lives, I'm his wife, and this strikes me, suddenly, as hugely unfair.

“I'd like to know where they all are now, Artie. Where are they?”

“Who?”

“Your other women. They were there for the good times,” I say. “Where are they now?” I sit down on a chair next to the bed. I really look at Artie—our eyes meeting for the first time. His blue eyes are watery, darker because of it. “Am I supposed to go this alone?”

“Are
you going to go this?” he asks.

“All I'm saying is that it doesn't seem right that I should have to. I didn't say whether I was going to or not.”

He reaches out and tries to touch my face.
No, no, Artie Shoreman. Not so fast.
I jerk my head away, then stand up and begin to pace the room. I can feel him watch me pick up a photo of the two of us on the back of a ferry-boat to Martha's Vineyard. Suddenly I remember holding hands as we toured the gingerbread-looking houses in Oak Bluffs, gazing out over the cliffs at Gay Head, and Artie praying for our future together, blessed by abundant blubber, at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown. I look at his arms around me in the picture, and I remember that exact moment—how warm he felt against me, how cold the wind was on my arms, and the little, wizened old granny who snapped the shot for us and smiled that old patronizing smile. Now I know why she was smiling.
Just wait until he cheats on you and then dies on you.
I turn to face Artie. He's looking at the ceiling again.

“Call them,” he says. “Call them up.”

“Who?”

“My sweethearts. Call them up,” he says. “You shouldn't have to be alone in this.”

“Your
sweethearts
?” I hate this little euphemism. “Are you joking?” I ask, incredulous.

“No,” he says. “I'm not joking. Maybe it'll be good for everyone. Maybe one of them would actually be helpful.” He looks at me and smiles a little. “Maybe some of them would hate me so you don't have to.”

“And what should I say? This is Artie Shoreman's wife? He's dying? Please call to schedule your turn at his deathbed?”

“That's good. Say that. Maybe I can still go with my old plan to win you back,” he says.

“The one with the rented white horse in the desert?”

“I could still reform, do penance, make amends.” With some effort, he pushes himself up onto his elbow and roots out an address book from a drawer in his side table. He hands it to me. “This book is filled with people I should make amends with.” As I reach for it, he holds on to it for a moment, tightly, the way people sometimes stall for a bit just before handing over their shoddy accounting records for an audit. He looks worn—maybe my presence has weakened him. His face is completely serious now, pained, the lines deeper than before I left, his hair maybe a little grayer. I feel a deep ache in my chest. “I'd like to see my son, too,” he says.

“You don't have a son,” I remind him.

He lets go of the book so that it slips into my hands. “I've been meaning to tell you. I had him when I was just a kid—twenty. His mother and I never got married. He's grown now. His last name is Bessom. He's in the B's,” he says.

I'm suddenly aware of heat in the room. It's rising up inside me. I know I couldn't murder Artie Shoreman on his deathbed (though surely wives have killed husbands on deathbeds before), but I wouldn't mind beating a couple of weeks out of him after this delicious little bombshell. Couldn't he have told me in flower bundle #34?
I love you so much, you made me forget to tell you that I have a child with another woman.
I pick up the picture of us on Martha's Vineyard and, before I'm aware of the impulse, I throw it across the room. A corner of the frame catches on the wall and makes a solid dent. The glass shatters, littering the floor. I look at my empty hands.

I've never been the type to throw things. Artie gapes at me, completely surprised.

“I know that Bessom is in the B's, Artie. Jesus, you're
an ass. A son, you tell me now after all of this time? That's lovely!”

I storm out of the room and almost knock over Artie's hot little nurse, who has been listening at the door. I can't tell who's more stunned, me or her.

“You're fired,” I say. “And tell the agency only male nurses from now on. Got it? Ugly male nurses. The burlier and hairier the better.”

It's 1957 and, after the death of her husband, pianist Ilona Talivaldis and her nine-year-old daughter Zidra travel to the remote coastal town of Jingera in New South Wales. Ilona, a concentration camp survivor from Latvia, is searching for peace and the opportunity to start anew. In her beautiful vine-covered cottage on the edge of the lagoon, she has plans to set herself up as a piano teacher.

The weeks pass, and slowly mother and daughter get to know the townsfolk – including kind-hearted butcher George Cadwallader, who is forever gazing at the stars; his son, Jim, a boy wise beyond his years; Peter Vincent, former wartime pilot and prisoner-of-war; and Cherry Bates, the publican's wife who is about to make a horrifying discovery …

For Jingera is not quite the utopia Ilona imagines it to be – and at risk is the one thing Ilona holds dear …

‘A story that lingers long in the imagination' Debra Adelaide

Random House