The Pretend Wife Read online

  “Let’s go in,” I said.

  As if she’d heard us, Vivian opened her eyes and looked at us. She raised her hand, just a bit above the sheet, and waved us forward.

  We both walked to her bedside. She pushed a button on the guardrails and the bed buzzed into a seated position.

  “Mom,” Elliot said. “This is Elizabeth. And this is my mother, Vivian.”

  She was weary but there was still brightness in her eyes, and she had the most elegant nose and long neck. She held out both of her hands, palms up. I put my hands in hers and in that small gesture, I felt like I was handing over some essential part of myself. It was so intimate and quiet. I trusted her immediately.

  She squinted at me, as if reading my face, not unlike Bib. In fact, there was a brief moment in which I could see Bib in her distinctly. And then she took in my face and said, with strong conviction, “Oh, look! He found you.” For a moment, I wondered if she recognized me—Gwen Merchant—from the cookies-and-punch reception over ten years earlier. I felt a whirl of panic in my chest, realizing that maybe it was already all over, that we’d been caught. I looked at Elliot. His eyes darted to me too, and he pursed his lips, poised to correct her, but then she almost sang, “Elizabeth. Elizabeth. I’ve been waiting for you to arrive.” She turned to Elliot. “Get my glasses off the side table. I want to see the ring.”

  Of course she would want to see the ring, but for some reason I hadn’t thought of it. She put on her glasses, tilted her chin up, and gazed down at my hand through her bifocals. “Oh, it’s beautiful. You picked this out? My stripes-and-plaid son?” she said to Elliot. “I’ve never thought of you as having fine taste in jewels.”

  “I have some taste though,” he said.

  “I helped pick it out,” I said, and I had, this was true. It was unromantic, but Peter had been practical about it. You’re going to have to wear this for the rest of your life, he’d said. So let’s make sure it’s something you actually like.

  “And nicely done,” Vivian said, and then she took off her glasses, folded them up, and laid them on her frail chest. “I’d like to get down to brass tacks,” she said. “I’m no longer interested in the breezy conversations of the healthy, wasting their time with idle banter that plods and piddles, amounting to nothing but vague weather reports.” Elliot was right. No one quite spoke the way she did—not just what she said but how she said it. She’d emphasize this word and that, in ways that honed the meaning, but there was also some lingering speech impediment that I couldn’t put my finger on. It could have been that the meds she was on—morphine for one—were causing her muscles to go a little slack, but it also seemed like her mouth had been trained to work around some difficult s’s or r’s. But the old problem would sometimes creep in and make a consonant sound thicker, fuller than it should. She spoke succinctly and elegantly. I assumed that she spoke this way because maybe the books were all hers and she’d read them. The living room too was lined with bookshelves. There were armchairs and standing lamps—all of which seemed to invite someone to sit and read.

  And almost every surface was covered with flowers. There was a fireplace in the living room and its brick front was blocked by tall vases. Arrangements with notes sticking out of them on plastic stalks were sitting everywhere except the bedside tables, which were devoted to medical essentials—pill bottles, ointments, tissues.

  “I don’t think we need brass tacks just yet,” Elliot said. “How about icebreakers?”

  “That’s what I don’t have time for, Elliot. You know that.”

  “Brass tacks,” I said. “That’s fine. What do you want to talk about?”

  “You,” she said.

  “What do you want to know?” I glanced at Elliot nervously.

  “Do you want to have kids?” she asked.

  “See, now that seems kind of personal,” Elliot interrupted.

  She looked at Elliot sharply. “I want to know if I’ll have more heirs one day. I don’t think that’s too personal!” And then she turned to me and said, “Is that too personal?”

  “I do want to have kids,” I said. I’d always wanted kids, even though I hadn’t really liked being one. I was afraid of them, from the anxious way infants seemed to crave their parents, if only by scent, to the way Helen, for example, talked about her own mother, the disappointment of a maternal failure. But I wanted kids nonetheless—babies to wash in sinks and kids who poked things with sticks. “Maybe two or three,” I said.

  “Children are our worthwhile murderers, and I mean that in the best way, Elliot.”

  “I already know this speech,” he said to me. “I almost have it memorized. The ‘Worthwhile Murderers’ speech.”

  “But it’s true,” his mother said. “And should be devoid of guilt on either side. We pour all of our energies into our children in hopes of raising our own replacements. Elliot is better than I am. Jennifer too. So I’ve done my job.”

  Something about this struck me as so candidly loving, I was afraid for a moment that I might cry. I thought of my mother. She hadn’t had the opportunity to pour all of her energies into me. Would she have said I was a good replacement? “My mother died,” I said quickly. It was the kind of thing I’d only ever admitted when it was impossible not to and so I surprised myself by volunteering this. “When I was young. I don’t really remember her.”

  It didn’t seem to surprise Vivian, though. She said, “I’m sorry, dear. I’m very sorry to hear that. How old were you?”

  “Five,” I said.

  “Do you love your father or at least respect him?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And do you forgive your parents?” she said.

  I wasn’t sure what she meant. “For what?”

  “Everything,” she said.

  “I think I have forgiven my father,” I said. “I think so.” But I really wasn’t sure. Didn’t some part of me hate him and his talking fishes and our awful Sunday lunches and the barren house and the dead moths? “No,” I corrected myself. “Maybe I haven’t.”

  “Every child has to go through some reconciliation with their parents. I think that your mother’s death doesn’t make her exempt from needing forgiveness, does it?” She glanced at Elliot. “That’s a perfectly fine question. Don’t even start.”

  “Maybe Elizabeth doesn’t want to talk about these kinds of things,” Elliot said, gently urging his mother to stop. “She might not want to.”

  But I stuck to the conversation. “I’ve never really thought about whether or not I forgive my mother,” I said. “Forgive her for dying? I don’t think I’ve even blamed her yet.”

  “It isn’t really necessary,” she said. “There’s time for all of this. It will make things easier, though, once you’ve forgiven your parents for their flawed humanity, their lack of fortitude and virtues, their warped egos.” She looked at Elliot. “Have you forgiven me yet?”

  “For your flawed humanity or your warped ego?” he asked.

  She shook her finger at him in a mock scolding.

  “I’m trying,” he said. “I might need some therapy down the line.”

  She whispered to me, “He adores me actually. A little therapy would do him good. But don’t let him get lost in the couch. Some people get lost in the couch and can’t find their way out.”

  “I’m not going to get lost in the couch,” Elliot said.

  “Your father did,” Vivian said. “You have a genetic tendency to want to go over your own flawed humanity with a fine-tooth comb.”

  “My father got caught up in therapy in the seventies,” Elliot explained to me. “But that was the thing to do back then. A fad—like Valium.”

  “I preferred Valium,” Vivian said to me, smiling, and then she asked, “Do you believe in God?”

  “Can we at least warm up to religion and politics?” Elliot said. “This shouldn’t feel like the Spanish Inquisition.” He sighed and looked at me apologetically.

  “What’s a little talk of God?” Vivian said.
“Do you find God offensive, Elizabeth?”

  “No, I don’t mind,” I said. “I believe that there’s something beyond us that’s a greater force,” I said. “A force for good. I can’t believe that this is all that there is. But I was raised by a man of science so I do my best.” I felt like I was revealing too much of my own life now. Should I lie a little more to play Elizabeth more convincingly?

  “Then do you believe that this force enters into our existence? Does this force meddle? Will it get you a good parking space when you’re late for an appointment at the bank? Do you believe in miracles, for example?”

  I wanted to say yes. It seemed like the right answer to give to someone who would live only by a miracle, but there was something so frank about the way she asked the question, so frank about the way she said everything, that even though my presence in the house was based on one enormous lie, I was sure she’d have no tolerance for anything but the truth. “I’m afraid of miracles,” I said.

  “Ah,” she said, nodding, as if this were the first interesting answer I’d given. “That’s good. Fear. But you can’t let it steer you.” She closed her eyes. “I believe in miracles, but that’s only because I have no choice in the matter.” She fell silent and, with her eyes closed and her nearly instantaneous calm, I wondered if she had dozed off. But then she opened her eyes. “Do you have a working definition of love?”

  I looked at Elliot and then back at her. “Um …” I was stumped. “I think … that true love should be a conversation that lasts a lifetime.”

  She squinted at this answer. “Elliot,” she said, in a scolding tone, “are you using my material?”

  “I learned from the best,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “For what?” she asked.

  “Recycling good lines,” I said.

  “I consider it a compliment,” she said. “Where were you born?”

  “Ohio.” Couldn’t almost anyone be from Ohio? This was a bland lie, and that’s what I was going for.

  “What do you do for a living?”

  I didn’t want to say interior design. I didn’t want to say something that involved the sciences like my father. I thought of my mother next. What did I know about her? Not much. “I knit,” I said. “I design things to be knitted. I’m a designer.” And because that sounded too vague, I said, “I knit hats mostly.”

  “Hats,” Vivian said a little dreamily. “I like hats. Is Jennifer making sweet potatoes? I can smell them.”

  “She is,” Elliot said. “You promise to eat some?”

  “I don’t make promises anymore,” she said, and then started. “Oh!” she said. “We almost forgot!” She reached for a glass on her bedside table. “Hand me that spoon,” she said to Elliot. She then clinked the spoon against the glass. “I missed the wedding and the reception!”

  “We didn’t have a reception,” Elliot said nervously.

  “Ah, but I like this tradition. Old people can tap their glasses and young people kiss. It makes no sense, but I like it because it seems primitive.”

  Elliot looked at me, and I looked at him. We were husband and wife—we had to kiss. I gave a small shrug and he dipped in quickly and pressed his warm lips to mine. My cheeks flushed and I felt heat flood my chest.

  “Love,” Vivian said, “is unmistakable.” She set the glass down on the table, lay back, and closed her eyes.

  “Should we let you rest?” I asked.

  “Pull up a chair. Read to me while I close my eyes.”

  I looked at Elliot. I pointed to myself and mouthed Me?

  He nodded.

  “What do you want me to read?” I asked.

  She waved her hand as if to say, It doesn’t matter. “I don’t care whether it’s highbrow or lowbrow. Pick at random.”

  Elliot handed me a book from the bedside table that had a bookmark in it. It was a novel by Elizabeth Graver, Unravelling. I’d never heard of it. I opened it to the marked page and I started in. “A girl showed me how to do the drawing-in, her hands as quick as barn swallows darting in and out of the walls of thread that hung from a giant spool in the ceiling …” I sat and read a good chunk of the novel, which was lyrical and captivating. And while I read, the kiss would sometimes return—the soft give of Elliot’s lips on mine—and I would blush all over again. It was just a little kiss, I told myself, but still it kept returning, a sensation of soft skin.

  This house wasn’t at all what I expected. I was surprised to realize that I’d had expectations, that I’d been steadying myself for a dying mother without knowing I was doing it. Had I been preparing myself to enter a house filled with the sad songs of humpback whales? To find a man in a cable-knit sweater trapped in a pair of headphones? Had I been expecting the blunt contraction of grief that I always feared when I walked into my father’s house—the conversation that always loomed but never arrived?

  I wasn’t unnerved by Vivian’s questions, not as much as Elliot was, not at all. I felt relieved. I’ve never been very good at breezy conversation or idle banter, as Vivian put it. Breezy conversation has more traps and mines than the big stuff.

  At some point, I heard Bib talking to Jennifer in the kitchen, the clatter of pans, and Porcupine’s occasional grunt, and I lifted my head from the book. Elliot was sitting in one of the armchairs, his head propped by one hand. He was gazing at me in the way that I remembered from college, a kind of steady gaze that used to make me look at my shoes. But there was more complexity to the gaze now—an unrelenting sadness riding below the surface. Something about that sadness resonated with my own—the sadness that seemed to have been built into my foundation. The sun was still dousing the room with light. His mother’s breaths had settled into the deep rhythm of sleep.

  He said, “You’re really here.”

  And with that I felt as if my heart were pitching forward, toward Elliot. I looked back at his mother, the slight inward curl of her thin hand. I thought of my father. He didn’t hide his sadness as much as he’d created a fog from it and had learned to hide within it. People might not know why he seemed so distant—his very voice was tinny and hollow, in a way, as if speaking through tin cans from very far away. He was far away. “You’re really here too,” I said, and I meant that this household was occupied by people who were foreign to me and this home wasn’t anything like the place I’d called home, or even the home I’d made with Peter, because everyone was so present, so close, so here.

  It was like returning to myself—as if I’d been lost so long I forgot I was lost, gone so long I forgot I had a home once, but then found myself walking around a familiar corner, saying to myself, I remember this place—my heart picking up speed in my chest. Like pausing to put my hand on the trunk of a familiar tree, walking to the next corner with my eyes closed, picturing what I thought might be there, and then opening my eyes and finding it—my home, my yard, my fruit-heavy orchard trees, as if it had all just risen out of the ground to meet me.

  Does this sound too outlandish? Too far-fetched? Was I crazy for letting Elliot make me feel this way? All I can say is that at that time I didn’t question it. For the moment, it was too simple to question: Elliot Hull—home, yard, orchard.

  IT’S HARD TO SAY if I fell in love with Elliot first or his family or both at the same time. I loved the way his mother turned conversations into something that rose up and out of the everyday into something charged—or strangely holy. I loved the way Elliot and Jennifer bickered in the kitchen and drank from whatever wineglass was sitting on the table and picked off each other’s plates; the way they pointed at each other and laughed when one of them said something funny, and how they listened to Bib when she told long stories about things she’d poked with her sticks. I loved the way Porcupine was passed from one person to the next—including Bib, who held him in his tubby middle, his legs dangling the way a cat’s would if held like that—and how he was passed without comment even to me, how he’d land in my arms and stare at me, his toothless mouth open, eyes wide.r />
  Elliot spooned his mother sweet potatoes while Jennifer and I stood in the kitchen boiling shrimp, their dark gray bodies pinking and rising to the boiling surface. Jennifer told me about her wedding to Sonny in a park. Bib had worn a blue dress that she and her grandmother had made together with the sewing machine in the attic.

  Elliot walked in and found his place in the conversation. “And they made my tie out of the same material. It was crooked, but perfectly crooked.”

  “The tie was Bib’s idea,” Jennifer said.

  “We were matchers! Weren’t we, Bib?” Bib was walking by with her pellet box.

  “Yes,” she said, a little shyly. “And we danced a lot. We got really sweaty. It was a sweaty wedding.”

  “It was. Wasn’t it?” Jennifer said.

  “Too bad we didn’t know Elizabeth back then. She’d have made us matching knit hats!” Elliot said.

  “I panicked,” I said. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  “It was fine,” Elliot said. “Turns out, my mother has always loved hats.”

  I asked Jennifer more questions about Sonny. He was a drummer who was on tour with a band that had a small cult following in the folk world. Jennifer said, “I found him in a lost and found, literally. He’d lost a wallet, and Bib had lost a journal at a concert. Neither thing showed up so we got married as a consolation prize.”

  “You found what you were supposed to find,” I said, thinking of Elliot ordering two scoops of Gwen Merchant and getting more than he’d asked for.

  Sometimes the only thing that would make Porcupine stop crying was if someone took him outside to pace. Jennifer had to help her mother to the bathroom, and Elliot was fixing a salad, so I was in charge of Porcupine and Bib, who was already out on the deck wearing latex gloves and a face mask. Tweezers and the owl pellet were sitting on a flattened paper bag in front of her. I was holding Porcupine and pacing, as instructed.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.