The Pretend Wife Page 10

  “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.”

  ELLIOT 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 s
ame 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.”

  ELLIOT PULLED DOWN A long gravel driveway lined by a white split-rail fence. There was a stand of trees that opened onto a field and at the edge of the field stood the house. It was tall and lean with weathered cedar shingles and blue shutters. One of the upstairs windows was open and there was a gauzy white curtain rippling like a veil as if there were a real bride somewhere in the house.

  As Elliot parked at the side of the house, I looked down a sloping lawn that led to the lake. It was a beautiful body of water that made me think of the word body—curving and stretching as it did from the Hulls’ tall grass bank to the far side where other houses were nestled in the woods.

  The Hulls had a dock wedged into the bank with orange rowboats on either side. There were two Adirondack chairs situated on the dock, facing out. Bird feeders made from gourds painted a bright yellow bobbed in nearby trees. There was an old wooden shed off to the right with a sway-back roof. A fishing net hung from a hook on its front door. In the distance, motorboats were revving their engines.

  I got out and stood there on the lawn for a moment, until Elliot walked up behind me. “So this is it. The famous lake house,” I said.

  He loo
ked at me, surprised. “Did I talk about it a lot?”

  I nodded.

  “Did I overhype it?”

  “No,” I said. I used to imagine a young Elliot Hull mucking around on the muddy bank—one of those kids who talk to themselves while playing, acting out all the various parts. It was, in fact, a dreamy place—the expansive blue sky and blue water, the dragonflies, the yard, the grand house. “What kind of sickness did you have as a kid?”

  “Asthmatic,” he said. “They brought me here to air out. I used to pee off the dock.”

  “Everything seems so alive.”

  “You’re surrounded by a lot of little heartbeats out here,” he said. “Everything’s got a pulse.”

  “I’ve been in cities for too long,” I said, looking at the rippling lake. I felt serene, like I could say anything. “I imagine you took Ellen Maddox out here.”

  “Ellen Maddox. It’s been a long time since I heard that name. My mother didn’t like her. She didn’t like Claire either.”

  “Did she throw any engagement parties for you out here?” I pictured a few big white tents, caterers, white balloons tied to chair backs.

  “Claire and I both kept putting off an engagement party, and then it was over.” He shrugged. “And with Ellen, it wasn’t a serious proposal. We were twenty-two. And then there was that trip she took to her grandfather’s funeral out west. And the flight attendant.”

  “What if her grandfather hadn’t died?” I asked.

  “He was very sick,” Elliot said, “and old. He was like ninety. He’d have died of something else by now.”

  “What if she hadn’t met the flight attendant? That’s what I mean.”

  “There’d have been some other flight attendant,” he said. “Figuratively speaking.”

  “Figuratively speaking,” I said. “I’m living a figurative existence right now. Everything I say is figurative. I’m figurative.” I realized that this was one of the reasons I felt so calm and liberated. Nothing was quite real.

  But Elliot was agitated. He said, “I have a story for you.”