The Pretend Wife (5 page)

I shrugged. “Go ahead. Why isn't she your type? Is it because she laughs too loudly and flops over like one of those collapsible toys?”

I was wearing a black spaghetti-strapped dress that didn't leave him many corsage-pinning options. “Nope. Just not my type.”

“Do you go around buying corsages for people now? Is that your thing?”

“I saw them in a florist window surrounded by the tissue paper inside their little caskets and, I don't know,
I'd never bought a corsage for anyone. It seemed old-fashioned, gallant, but nonthreatening.” He pinched the upper edge of my dress then pulled it a modest inch away from my chest so he could pin it without jabbing me. “Maybe this is why men started buying corsages for women. A chance to touch their dresses.”

“Maybe so.”

“Maybe this could become my thing. I thought I was saving corsages from, you know, a slow death in a florist's window, doing a good deed like your sea otters. How many did you save?”

“I think we may have saved one little paw, in the end. Maybe two.”

Once secured, the corsage was a little bud-heavy. It tilted forward, as if bowing, or worse, as if it were trying to get off of me. We both looked down at it. “It's a humble corsage,” he said.

“It needs to listen to some self-help books on tape,” I said.

“But I'm predicting a great surge in confidence from here on out.”

“On my bosom?”

“Where else?”

And then Helen was upon us. She was stunning—a perfect nose, lavish eyes, curvy lips, sharp eye teeth, a stunning jaw. Her tight dress had gauzy wings and her corsage was situated in the center of a plunging neckline, as if the dress had been designed around it. She said, “Gwen! I love this boy! Where did you find him?” She grabbed Elliot's arm—which struck me as a lovely arm, nicely tan—and put her head on his shoulder. “He's charming. He's sweet and handsome! He bought us matching roses. Who does that?”

“I don't know,” I said. “He does, I guess.”

“You can eat roses,” Elliot said, and then he pointed to the flower vases on the food table. “Lilacs are also edible.”

“And he's so scientific!” Helen said. “What do you do?” she asked.

“I teach,” he said.

“He's a professor,” I said.

“Oh, where?” Helen asked.

“Johns Hopkins,” he said, and I was more than a little stunned by this. I'd assumed a community college—in fact a bad community college.

“Do you have to wear a tie to teach at Hopkins?” Helen asked. “I like a nice necktie.”

“Nope,” Elliot said. “No ties required. Only elbow patches on our jackets and tweed. But no neckties.”

“Too bad,” she said with a sexy pout. I was reminded of the fact that although Helen's relationships didn't ever lead to marriage, the men she dated all seemed to love her—overwhelmingly, painfully so. She tugged on Elliot's very nice arm. “Come on, I'm going to introduce you around. Where did your drink go? Let's do shots. You've got some catching up to do.”

Elliot gave me a helpless backward glance. Did I mention his lashes? Dark and curly, the kind wasted on men. I felt abandoned. I did a half-turn in one direction and then in the other, and finally decided to go to the bathroom to dawdle with lipstick, wasting a little time. There was a short line. When the door opened, Peter walked out. He cupped my ear. “I'm stoned. That blonde invited me to do some blow. But I declined.” He pointed into Helen's study, where Jason was talking to the blond conversational vampire, but happily so.

“Jason isn't supposed to be here.”

“Oh, I know. He's doomed. He's so fucking doomed. Look at him.” And we both did. He was effervescently joyful. He was pointing at the blonde saying, “See, you get me! You're like a
mind
reader!” Peter shook his head. “He's an idiot. He's stoned too. He's a dead man. It's like looking at a dead man. A stoned dead man. But I'm being so good. Minus the stoned stuff. But getting stoned isn't bad. It's just not, you know, part of our lives. What with the kids and all. We have to set a good example.”

“That's right,” I said.

“That's right,” he repeated quietly, and then he straightened up to his full height. “Okay! Divide and conquer!” he said, and he was off.

I talked to a man about his home brewery—a minikeg in the fridge, something about hops and whatnot. I talked to a drummer briefly, until his girlfriend got a call on her cell phone and started crying. I talked to a miniaturist—a woman who built custom-designed dollhouses for the rich and famous. She was very small. I listened to a behemoth comedian who started riffing on gas prices and skinny people and how his ex-wife feminized him by making him sleep on floral sheets. I didn't have much to say to anyone. I wondered where Elliot had gone, if he would become a staple at these parties, if I'd pawned him off on Helen never to see him again. Vivica, in her studded leather, never showed up, and I missed her.

Eventually the party quieted down, and I found myself reunited with Peter, Helen, Elliot, Jason, and the blonde—whose name I never did catch—lounging around on the white sofa. I wasn't lounging. I was tense, poised. I had a plate of kabobs balanced on my knees. Having de
cided that I wasn't really up for the party, why not eat my way through it?

Everyone was a little drunk by now, including me. Helen was telling a story of a recent breakup. “He shut down when I gave him an ultimatum. He said it put too much pressure on him. But he doesn't know real pressure. He has no ticking biological clock. That's pressure.” Unlike Peter, Helen didn't talk about kids at all—just the clock, as if having kids was some sort of time trial.

“I was engaged just two years ago,” Elliot said. He was sitting there with his shin propped on one knee, holding a beer in one hand and rubbing his knee with the other, like his knee was paining him.

“But I thought Ellen ran off with a flight attendant after college,” I said.

“I was engaged to someone else. Her name was Claire.”

“But isn't marriage barbaric?” I asked, pressing him on this point. He had, after all, kind of made fun of me for being married. “A blood sport?”

“It is, but unfortunately I'm a barbarian.”

Peter sat there puffy lidded. “A barbarian,” he said. “You? That's funny.”

Elliot didn't say anything. He simply leaned over the lilacs in the vase on the coffee table and ate one.

“That was very barbaric,” Helen said.

“Very lemony,” Elliot said, chewing.

Maybe Peter felt like he was being baited. I don't know. But suddenly he growled and slumped over onto Helen's lap and bit her rose corsage. She screamed and smacked him on the head. He reared from her, covered his head with his arms, chewing the rose.

“Did you see that?” she shrieked. “Did anyone see that?”

We all had.

I imagined telling Faith about this when she called tomorrow to commiserate about Jason's stupidity. This was the kind of “behavior at these galas” that she was talking about. Helen's rose was just a raggedy half-rose on a stem now. The baby's breath was crumpled. I felt a little envious. No one would ever have bitten my corsage in half. I had an aura that didn't invite that kind of thing—or this is what I told myself—even from my husband. “Are roses poisonous?” I asked halfheartedly.

“I never thought of Peter as a barbarian,” Elliot said to me.

“He's an anesthesiologist,” I said, nibbling on my kabob. “What's the difference?” I looked at Elliot intently. I don't know that he'd be beautiful to other people—maybe a little. But he was beautiful to me. I liked the way his wrinkles were turning out even—they creased upward as if they'd all been made from laughing. I said, “Your ears are very flat to your head.” This was a test, in a way. It's the kind of thing that I might have said to Peter a long time ago, but he'd simply look at me and say, “You're funny,” meaning odd-funny. And I learned not to say things like that anymore.

Elliot reached up and touched one of his ears. “I was built for speed,” he said.

Then Helen pressed her fingertips together and got very serious. “What happened?” she asked Elliot. “What went wrong with you and your fiancée?”

“After two years or so, I realized that I was in the middle of a conversation that wouldn't last,” Elliot said.

“What does that mean?” the blonde asked.

“A marriage is a conversation that's supposed to last a lifetime. We didn't have enough to say to each other,” he explained.

“That's a beautiful definition of marriage,” Helen said. “Write that down,” she said to me as if I were her secretary. I ignored her. “I want that read at my wedding or funeral or something.”

“A lifetime's worth of material is a lot of material,” I said.

“What's wrong with just being quiet together?” Peter added, and I liked when we appeared to be a united front like this. “A lot of couples are comfortable enough with each other not to talk all the time.”

Jason said, “I like not talking.” He wasn't as effervescent as he had been earlier. In fact, there was an eye-cutting paranoia about him now. He knew that there was a lot of talking in his near future and it was going to be unpleasant. The blonde's interest had waned too. She was holding a tissue to her nose, no longer reading his mind.

“My mother wanted me to go through with it anyway, I think. She wants me married,” Elliot said.

“I despise my mother,” Helen said, and she had reason to. Her mother was an alcoholic who'd been married a number of times to unlikable men. I'd always kind of wondered if Helen didn't really want to get married and have kids because she feared becoming her mother—so her relationships were always self-sabotaged. This is the kind of thing that my therapist would have said. She talked to me a good bit about self-sabotage.

“Well,” Elliot said, “I love mine.” And I could tell that he must be very drunk, going soft for his mother like that in front of everyone. “My mother and father had a conversation that didn't hold up, but it's worth shooting for.”

I don't know why this hit me so hard, but it did. It seemed as if he was saying that the perfect relationship was out there and he, in his cockiness, was going to find it. It seemed naive and boastful, though it probably wasn't meant that way. I was going to say something in reply. I can't remember what exactly, but it was going to be vehement. Something about divorce statistics and the reality of relationships or the importance of each person in a married couple to maintain … what? Some privacy? Some sense of self? Some conversation that was theirs alone? (By which I meant: some lonesomeness?) I don't know. What happened instead was that I took a deep breath, and the meat—was it lamb?—in my mouth shot down my throat and lodged there. At first, I didn't do anything. The conversation went on.

Helen started in with some questions, “What was she like, your fiancée? Do you miss her?”

“I was engaged twice,” the blonde said.

But then I heard Elliot saying, “Are you okay? Gwen?”

I stood up and my plate fell to the floor. I turned and could see myself in the long mirror hung behind the sofa, my eyes filling with tears and my hand at my throat—just like everyone is taught. I thought:
This is what it's like not to be able to breathe. This is what it's like to have your lungs stall. This is what it's like to drown. Like my mother did. When she was a young woman, a young mother, younger than I am now. This is what it must have been like before someone pulled me out of the car.
I'd always wanted to know, to remember, but never could, and here it was.

And then I felt arms reaching around me, a thumb knuckle digging into my stomach, then the tug of those arms—too gentle. The meat stayed put. The next tug, though, was a sharp jolt. The meat dislodged into my
mouth and I spit it onto the floor. Just like that. I started gasping and coughing. I reached up, holding on to what I assumed was Peter's sleeve. I grabbed it hard. Everyone else backed away—the blonde in her platforms, Jason … Helen was flapping the gauzy sleeves of her dress. “Get her some water or something! Jesus!”

I turned around and there was Elliot. “You're okay,” he said.

Then Peter was standing next to me on the other side, his arm around my waist. “You saved her life,” he said to Elliot. Peter Stevens of the loophole Stevenses—the man who, despite statistical probability, had sidestepped all tragedy—was thrilled by this near-tragedy. He clapped Elliot on the back so hard that Elliot almost lost his balance. “That was amazing. I owe you,” Peter said. “I owe you!”

And this struck me as an odd thing to say. Elliot saved
my
life. Why did Peter owe him? But no one had to owe Elliot, really. Wasn't he happy enough to have saved me? Wouldn't anyone in the room have saved me, if he could have?

At that moment the door flew open, and there stood Faith. Her hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail, and she was wearing sweatpants and an oversized T-shirt. She was holding Edward, who was wide awake and red cheeked as if he'd just gotten off of a crying jag. She was so startlingly real that everyone froze.

Jason was the first one to move. He looked as if he was going to try to distract her. He opened his mouth and went so far as to point at me, as I was still bent over trying to catch my breath. But he must have known this would only make matters worse. He simply stood up, gave a little bow, hunched over like my corsage, and walked toward
the door. Faith glared at the rest of us—with good reason. None of us had called her. None of us had sent him home. We were guilty too.

She didn't say a word. She handed Edward off to Jason. He walked out, and she gave the room one more punishing look and slammed the door.

W
HAT DO I REMEMBER
about what followed? It started with just the three of us—Elliot, Peter, and me—on Helen's balcony amid the candles that had melted to waxy pools and been snuffed out. I see us now as if suspended by the smoky air, the balcony itself a small cage that the three of us were trapped in. This is where we made a fragile pact—in large part because of Helen, who would appear on the balcony and ignite everything. But the strange chain of events that was to follow required all of us, the intricate mechanisms of conversation, so that as a group we started at point X and traveled, windingly, to point Y. We couldn't have predicted how it would change things, but each of us, even though drunk and blurred, must have had more than an inkling that we'd waded out into something unknown.

Having nearly died, I'd decided to get even drunker. Elliot and Peter got drunk along with me. They were sitting on a pair of wrought-iron chairs and I was standing at the railing. The view offered a bit of the harbor, just a bit, and only if I leaned out, which made me feel like I was on
the prow of a ship. I was flushed, dizzy. The breeze was something to brace against. It was steadying in a way. There were some distant lights reflecting off the surface of the water. I closed one eye and then the other, watching the lights bounce around.

Helen was breezing around the apartment, cleaning up. There were three other guys still there. Locked in a stalemate, they were each trying to win her by simply refusing to go home. A classic move. Peter had noticed them too. “They're squatters. Look at them. Why don't they just pull up stakes already? Give up and go home?”

“How are we going to get home?” I asked.

“I can still drive,” Peter said, pinching his nose, standing up tall, and sucking in his stomach as if proving his sobriety. “I'm fine.” And for a moment I thought of Dr. Fogelman, who seemed as if he'd say something just like that at the end of a long party, and how Ginny Fogelman would have said, “Oh, please, do you want to kill someone and spend your life in jail?” before muttering, “You old turd.” Suddenly the balcony felt like a stodgy little cage.

“I'm going to call a cab,” Elliot said, but he didn't make a move to get out of his chair.

“Wait,” Peter said. “We've got to get this sorted out.”

“What sorted out?” Elliot asked.

“I owe you,” Peter said. “For saving Gwen's life.” I hated Peter a little bit for returning to this. Sometimes he got stuck on something and he wouldn't let it go. His parents probably praised him for it as a kid—they praised him for everything—calling it persistence, but sometimes it felt obsessive to me. And this felt like such a flailing attempt at a grand gesture.

“I only choked on some kabob,” I said, still looking
out at the harbor. “We don't have to break into a musical comedy about it.”

Elliot said, “I think that repaying someone for saving your life might be true in India or somewhere … but not here.”

“I want to know what Elliot wants,” Peter said. “That's worth some conversation, at least. What's wrong with conversation?” His tone was a little belligerent and he wasn't so drunk that he didn't notice it and so he laughed, playing it off. He laughed too loudly.

“Fine,” I said. I turned around quickly. Elliot's body blurred and then bobbed into focus. It was just dawning on me that I might get sick later. I was sweaty. “What do you want, Hull? What do you really want?”

Elliott looked at me and then out at the high-rises and, between them, the narrow strip of the harbor view. “I don't want anything,” he said, shrugging.

“Seriously,” Peter said, “you must want something.” Was Peter now baiting Elliot? “Everyone wants
some
thing. It's a philosophical question—right up your alley.”

“What's your alley again?” Elliot asked. “What do you do?”

“Anesthesiologist,” Peter said. “I knock people out. I'm Dr. Feelgood.” That's the way he always answered the question—even if a little old lady asked.

“Ah,” Elliot said. “Numbness.”

“You're walking away from the question. What do you want?” Peter asked again.

It was getting a little too pointed. I said, “It isn't a philosophical question. It's a personal question. What we want, what we're afraid of. You can't get more personal, more intimate. Elliot doesn't have to answer. Personal is personal.”

“Would you answer the question if you were in my shoes?” Elliot asked me.

“I don't know. What do I want? Right now?” I thought about it. “I want what everyone wants.”

“What's that?” Peter asked.

“To feel whole,” I said.

Elliot looked at me, a little startled. I'd surprised him but I wasn't sure how. He kept watching me even as Peter started talking about what everyone wanted—20 percent pay raises, to be rich and thin, to be famous.

When Peter was finished rattling off a litany of average American desires, Elliot said, “Okay. You want an intimate answer. The truth. What do I want?” He was taking the charge seriously now. He tapped his fingers on his thighs. “You really want to know?”

I nodded.

“I do,” Peter said. “I really do.”

“My mother's sick,” Elliot said. “She has to take morphine from time to time now in a hospital bed set up in her living room at her lake house, and you can't fix that, so …”

“Morphine?” Peter said, glancing at me, confused that the conversation had taken a serious turn. “Wait. Who's taking morphine?”

“My mother's dying,” Elliot stated more matter-of-factly, and then he rubbed his knee again. Was it an old injury? I watched him closely. I wanted to see what this kind of grief looked like from the outside. I knew it too well from the inside. “You can't fix that,” he said, turning to me, “unless you're a cancer researcher on the brink of a cure.”

“I work in sales,” I said uselessly.

“I thought you were an English major.”

“I think English majors go into sales,” I said.

“I thought you were an interior designer,” he said.

“I
work for
an interior designer. Close enough,” I said. “I'm sorry about your mother.” I'd learned that much from my own childhood. What you want is for someone to recognize a loss—to simply say that he's sorry. Nothing more. Just for him to say he's sorry, to give a sincere nod. One person showing another his humanness.

Helen walked onto the balcony then, picking up some errant punch glasses and beer bottles.

“Helen,” Peter said. “Elliot's mother's dying.” He was incredulous. He'd had such a protected life that he was stunned by things like this. He knew my mother was dead, but I can honestly say that I don't think he ever fully comprehended that she'd really once been alive—and therefore he was impatient with my father's grief, and with mine too. He let us hide it, and we were good at hiding it. He didn't even know that I'd been in the car during the crash, and that somehow I'd been saved. “Isn't that terrible?” he said, and he said this like it was an actual question, as if he wasn't sure.
Wasn't it terrible? It was, wasn't it?

Helen stopped. “I'm sorry to hear that,” she said, and she touched Elliot's head for a moment, as if giving some kind of benediction.

He nodded, then looked at the palms of his hands. The three squatters were idling in the apartment, chatting with each other now, like strangers at a bus stop, and for a minute or so, theirs were the only voices.

I've returned to this many times—the way Elliot leaned way back in his chair then and squinted up at the sky; the way he rubbed his head with both hands, as if troubled or disgusted. Did he know where he was going
with this? Was he suffering a momentary hesitation? Did he know at this moment what he was really going to ask for, what he hoped would come of it? Or was he just confessing drunkenly on a balcony while a party died down all around him? I don't think it mattered. In the end, we would all have to play a role in the conversation to make all of the gears click to get from X to Y. He said, “This last visit with her, I told my mother that I'd, well, that I'd gotten married.”

“Married?” Helen said disdainfully.

“You lied to your mother on her deathbed?” Peter said. The conversation made me think of my own mother. Lucky, I thought, to have had a mother on a deathbed, to have had the opportunity to lie to her.

“She was out of it, doped up on morphine,” Elliot said, not defensively as much as explanatorily. “She was in a state; sometimes when she's in these states she talks to her dead sister. It was that kind of a state.”

“But why would you tell her you'd gotten married?” I asked. “I mean, wouldn't she be upset not to have been invited to the wedding and that you'd married someone she'd never met?”

“Married!” Helen said. “I mean, why not tell her you've got gangrene and have to get a leg amputated!” And then she whispered, “Marriage can kill you limb by limb. Don't you know that?” Helen enjoyed disparaging the institution of marriage in front of married people. It was a petty, almost charming kind of vengefulness.

“Well, she was in this state and she started to obsess over the fact that I wasn't married and that I'd go through life without anyone to take care of me and without anyone to take care of. She was getting more and more worked up. And so I just gave in and I lied to her. I told her I'd
met someone and that it had been a quick decision—like in the old days.”

“People used to do that kind of thing,” Peter said. “They'd meet and get married in two weeks.”

“Because they weren't allowed to have sex,” Helen said. “You'd have done the same thing if you'd been in that boat, but how many years did it take you two to get engaged?” Helen pointed at the two of us.

“Three years,” Peter said. “A little slice of heaven!” This was an old joke between us. We'd been to an anniversary party for a couple who'd been married twenty years and this was how the man referred to their marriage—over and over, toast after toast, conversation after conversation. By the end of the evening, it sounded like a death knell. Peter and I started to use the phrase about everything—office meetings, gym workouts, trips to the grocery store—trying to keep its awfulness at bay. We'd never used the phrase to actually describe any part of our relationship, though, and this seemed like a breach of the rules.

“My mother and my father had gotten married like that,” Elliot said, “a couple weeks after they met. She respects decisions like that even though they got divorced.” Everyone was looking at him now and he was suddenly aware of our eyes on him. “I don't know why I said it. It was some kind of weird impulse.” He shrugged. “I didn't think she'd remember it when she calmed down, but she did.”

“And now what?” Helen asked.

“And now, of course, she'd like to meet her before she dies,” Elliot said, as if kind of mystified by his own predicament.

“Oh, what a tangled web,” Helen said. “Tsk, tsk.”

“If you met her, you'd understand,” Elliot said. “She's a force. She's unwieldy. She's an unwieldy force.”

“I understand mothers like that,” Helen said, scratching her wrist a little angrily.

“Unwieldy like waves,” I said.

“Like tsunami waves,” Elliot said.

Helen turned to Elliot and looked at him squarely, taking on the stance of a lawyer. “So you need a wife,” she said, driving the point home.

“I got a call from my sister today, telling me I'd better produce a wife or else.”

“Or else what?” I asked.

“I don't want to piss my mother off on her deathbed,” Elliot said. “She'd haunt me the rest of my life.” It was meant to be a joke, but his voice held a somberness that couldn't be ignored.

“So you do want something,” Peter said. “A wife—at least temporarily.”

“No, no,” Elliot said, shaking his head, laughing it off. “I don't know what I'll do really. But I don't need a wife.”

“But,” Peter said, “we asked you what you wanted and that is what you said.”

“That's not how it happened,” Elliot said. He turned to me. “Is it?” And then he answered the question himself. “No, no, that's not how it went.”

“Are you going to propose?” Peter asked, then he reached out and held Helen by her shoulders. “Helen, he's going to propose to you!”

“No, no,” Elliot said, flustered and embarrassed.

“Always a bridesmaid, but now's your chance,” Peter said.

“Oh, shove it up your ass,” Helen said, shaking him off.

“Come on!” Peter said, not letting it drop. “You two would make a delightful couple! Mr. and Mrs. Hull!”

I wanted to tell Peter to leave Elliot alone, to let it go, but I kept quiet. I liked seeing Elliot in this precarious position, and I found myself willing to put up with Peter for the moment. He goaded people when he was drunk. He could be a bit of a bully.

“No extreme measures necessary,” Elliot said.

But then Helen spoke up kind of slyly. “You need a pretend wife,” she said, “for your mother's sake. It would be very gallant.” She turned to me. “Gwen, you should be Elliot's pretend wife.”

And this is where everything turned on itself. Elliot glanced at me. His face looked stricken. I imagine now, looking back, that he was terrified. I was. I felt exposed even though no one could have known that a part of me wanted to know what my life would have been like with Elliot; and no one could have accused me of that because I was actively trying to defuse things. And maybe he was also terrified because this was what he wanted too, where he'd been hoping the conversation would go all along.

“Why me?” I asked.

“Because I'm tired of pretending with men,” Helen said, and this was true. It wasn't the first time she'd said it.
Pretending
was a term she used in place of dating. “Plus, he saved
your
life, after all, not mine. Right, Peter?”