The Pretend Wife Read online

  That’s where I ran into Jason. He’d gotten married a year and a half earlier to a friend of mine named Faith. I’d been friends with Faith since college. In fact, she was one of the friends who’d called Elliot Hull “the brooder.” She’d gotten pregnant immediately after their wedding, which was their plan, and now had a nine-month-old. It was always a little embarrassing to meet up with our married friends at Helen’s parties. Our married-friends’ dinner parties—including mine of the low blue flame Bananas Foster variety—stood in such stark contrast to Helen’s that it was strange that we could adapt to an environment so unstifled, sexually speaking. At our dinner parties, we tried to be funny and charming and smart in front of the other couples. We tried to woo them with our good taste in imported rugs. But this was all under the radar. There was nothing that could have been called actual flirting, so all of the married-friends parties had a clamped-down suffocation—as if we were all being muffled by expensive decorator throw pillows, of which we all had way too many.

  “Hi,” I said. “How are you doing?”

  His mouth was full. He stuck up one finger. Jason was a beefy guy who often looked baffled. I checked the front door again to see if Elliot had wandered in. He hadn’t. But I spotted a new ornate mirror, a real monster, at the other end of the room. I supposed it was meant to be vertical, but Helen had it running the length of her sleek white sofa. Peter and I had recently bought a sleeper sofa in dark stripes. I’d thought it was a little overly masculine, but he pointed out how practical it was for guests to sleep on and, being dark and striped, it was also stain-proof. We could one day throw it in the kids’ playroom. The kids. We referred to them often—our future offspring. “That’ll be good for the kids.” “We should bring the kids to this place one day.” “I wouldn’t want the kids to hear a story like that.” They had a growing presence, the kids did, especially for people who didn’t yet exist.

  Jason finally said, “Hi.” He swallowed down the last bit of the hors d’oeuvre, then added hurriedly, “Don’t tell Faith I was here.”

  “What do you mean? Where’s Faith?” I asked, looking around.

  “She didn’t want me to come. She said she didn’t appreciate my behavior at these galas. She wanted me to stay home with Edward.” They’d named their baby Edward. This was a point of discussion behind their backs for some time, but we’d slowly worn it out, and now the kid seemed like an Edward or else Edward had changed, in our collective mind, to include him. He was cute, so that helped. “And she was going to come instead.”

  “But she didn’t.”

  “No. I’m here, but she doesn’t know it.”

  I was confused. “But why didn’t you two just bring Edward like you did last time?”

  “Oh, to that party Helen threw for the slutty magazine? That was weird. I mean the S-and-M girls and those two transvestites, they were all over the baby. Cooing like crazy. And then Faith didn’t know where to nurse him. She said it was confusing—all of that T and A spread out on the coffee table, it felt like nursing was a perversion of the breast.”

  “Is that what she said?”

  “Yes. A perversion of the breast.” He loved Faith—was proud of her odd way of putting things, her articulation. She was the one who had the white-collar job, high-level bank management, bringing in the big bucks. He lost a lacrosse scholarship and dropped out of college. He and I had a certain bond, actually, being the lesser wage-earners, the lesser-achieving of our respective couples. I stuck up for him around Faith—“He’s still looking for his passion, his calling” and “We’re not all on the same time clock” and “He’s got a different approach to the world; why judge him so harshly?” Faith would find a way back to the specific problem at hand and away from the land mines of undiscovered passions in life, slow time clocks, and different world approaches.

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  “We had a fight. I was smart enough to storm out.” He smiled then, a little proud of himself. “When you have kids you’ll learn. When you get into a fight, be the first one to grab the keys and storm out, or you’re stuck with the baby all night.” I could hear Peter sticking up for our parenting. Hey, leave the kids out of it. You can’t even comprehend how great Gwen and I will be as parents when the kids get here. I was letting it go. I wasn’t convinced of our superior parenting abilities. What did I know about parenting anyway? A dead mother, a grief-stricken father. I wasn’t sure that the Stevenses loophole was multigenerational.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be out storming around?” I thought I saw Elliot then, just the back of his head out on the balcony. My stomach did a small nervous flip. The man turned. It wasn’t him.

  “I was hungry. Helen has the best food.” This wasn’t the reason and we both knew it. Jason had been the one holding the baby during all the cooing at the last party. I recalled a comment Faith had made about Jason using the baby as a prop. Now that I looked at Jason I could tell he wasn’t dressed for the party. He was wearing Saturday afternoon yard-work clothes, and he clearly hadn’t taken a shower. His hair was sticking up from the front of his head as if he’d driven over with his head out the window.

  “Faith will find out. You know that,” I told him.

  “I figure I can buy some thinking time between now and then.” He took a big swig from a glass of the night’s exotic drink and made a twisted face. There was a giant punch bowl with a crystal dipper. The concoction was milk-based, creamy looking, and smelled like coconut. Jason would likely get drunk, and he wouldn’t buy any thinking time, and Faith would be rightfully pissed tomorrow. This would be chalked up to Jason’s infantilism, as Faith called it. His overactive id. He had a long history of squandering thinking time. He owned a take-out taco hut. “You’ve got to try this drink,” he said. “It tastes like edible panties—tropical flavored.”

  I clapped him on the shoulder. “Good luck,” I said. “But I have to tell you, things don’t look good for you.”

  His mouth was full of food again, and he smiled sadly and gave a weak shrug as if to say, Too late now. And it was.

  There were vases of fat purple lilacs on the table. They teetered lewdly over the food platters. I negotiated around them, got a plate, and filled it with all of these Middle Eastern–inspired foods—various kabobs, feta-something, tahini-something else, cheese-filled pancake-like somethings. I wondered for a moment if Helen was dating someone Middle Eastern. She was always in the process of swearing off men and then swearing them on again. Could she fall for Elliot? I wondered.

  I dipped up a glass of the coconut concoction, took a sip, and thought briefly about edible panties. Would they taste like the fruit leather that was sold at the checkout of the health food store I went to every time I got hopped up on some article I read in a women’s magazine about a healthier lifestyle? Would this make for edgy conversation? Could I make that funny?

  That’s when I saw Elliot. I was surprised to see him even though I’d been looking for him. He was so fully himself—had I been expecting only a portion?—and I loved his details. He was wearing khakis, a nice belt with a silver buckle dipping forward, some kind of black concert T-shirt, and as if just to further confuse things: a blazer. His hair was still damp from a shower. He was talking to an artistic-looking blonde wearing oversized earrings. She was gesticulating wildly, her earrings bobbing. Despite her near-hysteria, Elliot was calm. He was nodding along empathetically. He lowered his head and closed his eyes and nodded some more. Then she must have said something funny, because he smiled. He was holding a small black box that reminded me of a box I’d once used as a kid to bury a hamster. It was wrapped in a thin purple ribbon. Had he brought a present? Sitting on the small table next to him was a box like the one in his hands, except it had been opened and the lavender tissue paper had been rifled through. The gift, whatever it had been, was now gone.

  I wasn’t sure what to do. How long had he been here? Had he looked for me and Peter? Evidently, walking into a party alone wasn’t as hard as we
remembered it being. I wished that Peter was here with me now, that we were chatting vivaciously about tropical-flavored panties and laughing. I looked for him out on the balcony, but the figures gathered there were oddly lit and impossible to distinguish. I decided to busy myself looking for Helen, but Elliot caught my eye and gave a big wave. I waved back, just a propped-up hand folding twice, then looked away. But, in an instant, he was there, standing in front of me.

  “Thank you,” he said. “You saved me. She was a conversational vampire. Nice and all, but I think I’m now undead.” Before I had a chance to say anything, he handed me the box. I remembered now that he’d once given me a sandwich in a plastic box bought off of his dining card as a gift. I didn’t want to own up to the memory though. “Here, this is for you.”

  “Is it a small dead animal?”

  “Um, no,” he said. “Did you want a small dead animal? I could run out and get one.”

  “No, it just looks like a …”

  “Oh, a little casket. Right. I see that now. No. But it is a dead something. But nice dead. Open it!” He smelled like aftershave and shampoo, and I had a sudden memory of having sex with him. I remembered, fleetingly, being under a sheet, and how he was shucking his jeans, the weight and warmth of his chest on mine. Standing there in Helen’s apartment, the memory made me blush.

  I lifted the lid, a little hesitantly, placed it under the box, fiddled with the lavender tissue paper, and uncovered a rose corsage in a spray of white baby’s breath. “You got me a corsage,” I said.

  “One for you and one for the hostess,” he said.

  “Does that mean you have two prom dates?”

  “Is that not okay with you?” he said.

  “So, you met Helen,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Did she like her corsage?”

  “It made her laugh really loudly.”

  “She sometimes laughs loudly. But she’s pretty, isn’t she?”

  “She’s not my type.” He picked up the corsage and its little faux-pearl-tipped pin. “You mind?”

  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 decided 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 fl
ight 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.