The Pretend Wife Page 6

  “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?”

  “That’s right!” Peter said, not backing off of the whole idea at all. In fact, he looked lit up. “This makes perfect sense. It’s so, I don’t know, European.” He had this whole spiel on how Europeans were so advanced in their definitions of marriage—especially the French. I glared at him whenever he went on this jag in public—usually after some cocktails—but he always mistook my glare for something else—a sexy leer?

  “We could also just buy him a nice bottle of Cristal and call it even,” I said.

  “What?” Helen said, turning on me with a frenetic pitch that bordered on a stylized version of anger. “Don’t you have confidence in your marriage? I mean, if Peter were against it, that would be one thing. But you? Do you really think Elliot here is a threat to the institution?”

  “Hey,” Elliot said. “Be nice.” He turned to me. “I thought she liked me.”

  I was keeping a wary eye on Peter. “I have confidence in my marriage,” I said.

  “Well, then,” Peter said. “Let’s not be all bourgeois about it!” Bourgeois was one of Helen’s favorite words. I hated the sound of it coming out of his mouth—the way he squeezed a tiny bit of French accent into it. “What do you say, Gwen?”

  Everyone turned and looked at me.

  “I’m not a rental car,” I said.

  “She’s not a rental car,” Elliot repeated quickly, as if that settled things. He was letting me off the hook, but I wasn’t sure I liked being let off the hook by him so quickly.

  Helen sighed mightily.

  “It’s okay,” Peter said. “Gwen’s not the kind of person to do something like this. And that’s a compliment. She’s too …” He stopped then, weighing some options, perhaps.

  “I’m too what?” I asked. I wasn’t so sure it was going to be complimentary at all. Could you be too anything and still be complimented?

  “Yes,” Helen said. “What is she?”

  But Peter didn’t have to answer.

  Elliot said, “Look, I don’t need a wife. I need to grow up and not lie to my mother. That’s what I need.” Was this what he really wanted though—why had he brought up the subject in the first place?

  “Gwen’s a great wife,” Helen said. “She’s the greatest wife in the whole wide world. She should have a T-shirt with that written on it. Do you have a T-shirt with that written on it?”

  “No,” I said, insulted by her effusiveness.

  “She’d make the perfect pretend wife for Elliot,” Helen said. “It would probably only be for just a weekend. Right? You should do it, Gwen. You should be Elliot’s pretend wife. Don’t be so uptight about it.”

  “That’s right!” Peter said. I looked at him and he seemed far away, and it didn’t help that he wasn’t talking as much as he was shouting like he was on a beach. “Look, I’m fine with this,” Peter said, almost barking. “I’m not uptight. Gwen can do it if she wants to. It’s okay by me.” This was the only hint that Peter might have had a tiny doubt in his mind. He lived in mortal fear of being perceived to be uptight, because he was uptight—desperately so. And he was, after all, deeply convinced of us, or maybe the institution of marriage itself, and perhaps most of all his family’s legacy of imperviousness. He goaded and bullied himself too when he was drunk.

  Elliot shook his head and waved Peter off. “No, no, no.”

  I looked down over the balcony’s railing and watched a couple, hand in hand, running across the street even though there were no cars. “I think I met your mother once,” I said to Elliot. “She came to the awards ceremony for English majors. There was a little punch-and-cookies thing after.”

  “Did she come to that?” Elliot said.

  “We talked for a minute,” I said. I remembered her as a woman who looked like she played tennis. She had this arched nose and Elliot’s eyebrows. Elliot’s parents had divorced when he was ten. His father had since invested in a new family and almost ignored Elliot and his sister, Jennifer. At twenty-one, I couldn’t understand why anyone would have divorced Elliot’s mother—she was so stunning. When I introduced myself to her, she said, “Oh, so you are Gwen Merchant,” as if she’d heard a lot about me from Elliot. I remembered being complimented by that, though I wasn’t sure if it was a compliment or not. By this point Elliot and I had broken up and he was seeing Ellen Maddox again. “She looked like a Kennedy,” I said. “She was more elegant than the other mothers.” I was a watcher of mothers.

  “Gwen, you should do it,” Helen whispered urgently.

  I wanted to do it, and I was surprised by how very much I wanted to. I wanted to be alone with Elliot Hull. I wanted to listen to what had happened to him since I’d last known him. I wanted to know his intimate story, and maybe I wanted to tell him mine. I had a fantasy that he would fall in love with me abundantly even though I didn’t want to love him in return. I wanted to be the girl at the freshman icebreaker again, starting over by shaking hands and complimenting each other’s shoes, like we’d been told. I wanted his mother to say, “Oh, it’s the famous Gwen Merchant again. Returned!” I wanted to bring her back to life.

  “It’s not every day someone saves your life,” Peter said. He was aggressively chipper now. “And he said it was at a lake house. What’s wrong with getting away to a lake house?”

  “Is it at a lake house?” Helen said.

  “Yes, but this is crazy. I shouldn’t have lied. I’ll just have to confess. That’s all.”

  “It’s a lake house,” Helen reported to me. “Does it have a deer hanging on the wall and a wet bar? Does it have a boathouse?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “You should go, Gwen.”

  “You’ve been wanting to get away,” Peter added.

  “I’ve been wanting to get away with you,” I said, and this was true. I’d been pushing for a weekend somewhere, but Peter always convinced me that we should invest in some household upgrade instead.

  “You should just go and have fun. Talk to Elliot’s mother some. Take in the sun. Take out a rowboat,” Helen said, then turned to Elliot. “Are there rowboats?”

  “A fleet of them,” Elliot said matter-of-factly.

  “Horseshoe pit?” she asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Are there box turtles?” I asked.

  “They come in herds like buffalo,” he said.

  “I am a great wife,” I said, “pretend or not.”

  “You are a great wife,” Peter said.

  “It c
ould be a … what’s that word?” I asked. “That thing people used to say …”

  “What’s what word?” Helen asked.

  “You know, when people do something for the hell of it …”

  “A lark?” Elliot said.

  “Exactly,” I said. “It could be a lark.” But when he said it, I thought of the bird—all wings, the song in its throat. I glanced at Peter and Elliot—they both looked at me expectantly.

  Helen clapped her hands, tappity tappity, like a lady at an opera. “Is that a definite yes?” she asked.

  I turned my back on all of them and stared at the banks of high-rise windows, the distant harbor lights, which looked soft and edgeless. I knew that I wanted it to be more than a lark, but I was trying to pretend. The breeze welled up. My black dress billowed. The corsage bobbed. “Okay, then,” I said, quietly, “okay. I’ll do it.”

  THE JANUARY 1979 ISSUE of National Geographic included a flimsy record inserted as one of its pages. It was a recording of endangered humpback whales singing, and had been in the works for a decade. My father had been on the project in its early stages. He was an assistant professor at University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, where he’s still a professor, and was working in conjunction with scientists at the New York Zoological Society. But he quit about six months before my mother died.

  I learned early on that I wasn’t allowed to ask questions about my mother. My father would admit a few things about her: She was a good mother. She loved fruits and vegetables. She’d taken dance lessons through high school. And she’d learned to knit before I was born. When she couldn’t sleep—and she was a bad sleeper—she would knit. Those were the facts. That’s it.

  But I could ask about work, and as I grew older, I realized how much my father loved the humpback whale project, but that he’d felt that quitting it was necessary. He’d told me that it took too much time on boats. He missed his family. One time he said, “I was needed at home.”

  Mrs. Fogelman, who’d known my mother only a little bit—I get the impression that my mother was hard to know—has, over the years, given me some information. She knew nothing really about the accident itself, or refused to admit she did. She told me that when my mother died, my father was solid. He didn’t cry. He wasn’t fragile. He made his way through the funeral like an unsinkable tanker.

  But the grief hit him later.

  I was six years old in 1979 when the National Geographic record came out. It was a year after my mother’s death. My father played the record constantly—the house was filled with the acoustic moans and sighs of humpback whales. For a few months, it was like living in the ocean. And I remember that my father seemed to move around the house in slow motion during that time, as if he were swimming through his life. He was finally grieving my mother’s death.

  Mrs. Fogelman explained, “Once you were off at school, he had time to himself. He let his guard down, and it hit him. But your father is a tough man. He didn’t wallow in it for long.”

  I disagreed. He learned to wallow in a more private way, but he’d been wallowing ever since.

  My childhood was lonesome. There were lonesome brown-bag lunches, lonesome diaries, lonesome bugs in lonesome jars, lonesome Barbies. There were lonesome holes dug into lonesome beaches, lonesome braces, a lonesome cast. There were lonesome clarinet lessons, lonesome bicycles, lonesome cereal poured into lonesome bowls. That’s how I remember it. Lonesome, lonesome, lonesome.

  A lonesomeness only broken by women in the neighborhood—teachers, homeroom mothers who felt sorry for me. I let them but it wasn’t love. It only looked like love. It was pity. Other children treated me like I was a deformed saint—or, worse, a statue of a deformed saint. And I let them do that too, because I don’t think I really knew how to be with people as a kid. My father avoided people, and I did too. It felt like a pact, as if we were protecting our loss, not allowing anyone access so that we could keep it all for ourselves. My father certainly didn’t want to part with his pain.

  You’d think that at home, my father and I would have had our pain in common, if nothing else. But, in truth, he could barely look at me. He loved me and still does—I’m sure of that. But I looked like my mother—my small face, my green eyes, my dark hair cupping my face. No matter how it was pinned back, it always swept forward like hers. Always.

  And so I became used to love-in-glances, love with some love held in reserve, love with the background noise that is a fear of love.

  And how did Elliot Hull fit into this definition of love?

  Badly.

  After that day when he lay down on my blanket on the green and told me that I’d picked the wrong girl at the orientation icebreaker, that instead of Ellen Maddox, I should have picked myself for him, we spent all of our time together. We rented racquets and played racquetball on the courts with their folding metal handles and glass back walls. We walked each other to class. We met in one of the conference rooms in the library basement. The conference rooms always had notes taped to their doors, reserving them for different college-sponsored club meetings. We taped up a note of our own that read: Reserved for the Albanian Student Union of Perverse Sexuality Club, scribbled in our time slot, and had sex up against the chalkboard. We traded off nights between our small campus-housing apartments, hoping not to piss off either set of roommates too profoundly. I made all of my father’s recipes, and one that I’d invented—baked chicken breaded in crushed Cheerios. We didn’t go out much. Late at night, we studied next to each other on bunk beds, and once we took a bath together and let it overflow, creating a small flood in the downstairs apartment.

  It was too much. I felt like I was barely breathing—the way he looked at me so searchingly, the way he watched me get dressed, the way he made up songs about me. One of his favorites was about his love for me being like an ocean. I loved it but I couldn’t accept it. I covered my ears every time he started up with it. But I was absorbing it all too. I was drinking it in.

  We swam that spring in the university pool as soon as it opened, even though it was freezing. Our lips turned blue. I was a terrible swimmer—I still am. I remember he tried to teach me to float and that he gave up. “You’re too agitated a human being to float,” he said. So I stuck to my spastic swimming, whirling my arms, kicking frenetically, some sporadic breaths. “You’re working too hard,” he said. “Jesus, just relax. Why are you so scared?”

  And I told him, standing in three feet of water next to the metal ladder, no one else around except for a few hearty lap swimmers in their rubber caps, that my mother had drowned. “Or maybe she was killed on impact before she drowned,” I said. “I’m not sure.” I’d left this story at home for the most part. In my hometown everyone knew about it, so I never had to explain. If there was a newcomer, someone else would whisper it to them. And when I came to college I was so happy not to be defined by it that I’d decided not to tell it at all. The few times that it had come up, in some small way, I simply said that my mother had died when I was young. I’d add, “I don’t even remember her!” In any case, I wasn’t used to telling the story so I didn’t realize how little of it I knew.

  Elliot started asking me questions.

  “Was it because of a drunk driver?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Was it a bridge near your house?”

  “North of us. An hour or so. I’ve never seen it.”

  “You don’t know what bridge it was?”

  “No. Who cares what bridge?”

  “It’s just that, I don’t know, I’d be curious. I’d want to see it.”

  Maybe I had been curious once. But how could I have asked my father to take me to the bridge? There was no one to ask, not really, no appropriate time for such a question and so I’d let it go.

  “Was she alone in the car?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I told him.

  “But you should talk about it,” he said.

  I remember that I tried to lunge for the lad
der, but he grabbed me and pulled me in close to him.

  “Don’t tell me what I should do,” I said and I started crying.

  “Okay,” he said. “Then you can talk about it. That’s all. You can, if you want to, whenever you want to.”

  This made me cry harder, and I don’t know how long we stood there, but it seemed like a very long time. Finally, I started shaking because the water was so cold. We got out. He wrapped me in a towel. We’d only brought one.

  Our relationship lasted only three weeks. It ended abruptly in that bar. I remember only that there’d been a fight before we went out and that we both drank at the bar. We were drunk, but I didn’t accept that as an excuse. We were fighting about something that wasn’t important, and then he said something in that bar, under the string of year-round Christmas lights. He said something that reminded me of my mother and my father, something provocative, something that struck me as dangerous. And I could have forgiven him. I could have easily forgiven him, but I was afraid to. He called me the next day. He called and left messages—long rambling messages, then short angry ones, then long rambling ones again. I wanted him to stop.

  And then he did stop calling. It was a relief, in a way. I told myself that it was for the best. Elliot Hull was too much.

  Graduation rolled around. I heard he’d started seeing Ellen again, that he’d kind of proposed and she’d said yes.

  I saw his mother at the punch-and-cookies reception. She said, “So you are Gwen Merchant.”

  And then Elliot walked up, handing his mother a paper cup of some pink juice. By then we were cordial.

  We wished each other luck.

  That’s why Peter was so attractive to me. That’s why I fell in love with him. He didn’t shove love at me. He didn’t lavish it on. He wasn’t brimming with love. He doled it out in portions. Love wasn’t an ocean—it came in packets.

  And do I blame him for this?

  No.

  It was perfect for me when we met. In fact it was all I could have handled.