The Pretend Wife

by Bridget Asher

  “Nothing … It’s just …”

  “Just what? Do you think I’m unmarriable or something?”

  “You’re just not married.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “No, you aren’t.”

  “I’m Gwen Stevens now.” I lifted up my hand, showing the ring as proof.

  He was stunned. “You’re really … married?”

  “That sounded like an accusation,” I said. “I’m an innocent woman. An innocent wife.”

  “It’s just that I didn’t think people really got married anymore. Marriage is so barbaric. It’s like a blood sport.”

  “See, that’s the kind of insulting thing you say that makes people slap you,” I told him.

  He raised his eyebrows and kicked his head back a little. “You didn’t really slap me,” he said. “You just grabbed my face. Very hard. It didn’t do any good anyway,” he said, his arms outstretched like he was some proof of a failed face-grabbing.

  “Weren’t you engaged to that girl, Ellen something?” I asked. Her name was Ellen Maddox. I could still see her face. “I thought you two got back together …”

  “She left me right after college for a flight attendant, a male flight attendant.” He said male flight attendant as if it was worse than a female flight attendant. “Anyway, I stick by what I said to you that made you grab my face. I stick by it, because it was the truth.”

  I must have looked at him questioningly. I couldn’t remember what he’d said exactly, but I didn’t have time to ask. One of the scoopers handed him his gargantuan cone and he was fumbling through his wallet just as Peter surfaced. “Hello!” he said, looking at Elliot in a very well-mannered way. Peter can turn on these impeccable manners—like a boy who went to boarding school in the 1950s and is now trying to compensate for a lack of parental love by asserting a chin-uppedness about life. This humility was an act. Peter was raised to be confident in all things—perhaps most of all in love.

  I handed him his cone. “This is Elliot Hull. He once bought a cookie from me in college to help raise money for sea otters.”

  “Ah, poor sea otters!” Peter said, extending his hand. “I’m Peter.”

  Elliot shook it and shot me a look that seemed to say: Look at this guy! You are married! And he’s tall! And then he said, “Gwen just invited me to the party tonight. I’m new to town.”

  “Great idea!” Peter said, and before I had a chance to clarify, he was giving Elliot directions. I was still stunned that Elliot Hull was back in my life, and that it had happened so quickly. See, it was simple. That’s what I mean: I hadn’t done anything to start it. I was just standing in line at an ice-cream shop one minute and then suddenly I was watching Peter make some gestures that might indicate that Elliot would have to make a turn out of a rotary, and then he pointed to his left, his arm straight out at his side, and I thought of the word wingspan again. Peter is tall. He has an excellent wingspan.

  But there was Elliot Hull, standing next to him, and he was not tall and he was not at all impeccably mannered and he was barely paying attention. He was being Elliot Hull, thinking his brooding thoughts, no doubt. Had we kind of thought we were in love with each other a decade ago?

  When Peter was finished, he said, “Got it?”

  “I’ve got it,” Elliot said, and then he looked at me. I was about to wave a noncommital good-bye, but then Elliot said, “Gwen Merchant, huh, after all these years.” And suddenly it was as if I were the rare bird. I felt a little self-conscious. I might have even blushed and I couldn’t remember the last time I blushed. “See you tonight!” he said, then took a bite of his abundant ice cream and walked out of the shop, one hand in his baggy shorts.

  THERE’S A THEORY ABOUT why people don’t remember their infancy and young childhood. It goes like this: memory cannot exist without something to refer to. You remember something because it hooks to some earlier experience. Memories start to form not because that quadrant of the brain has finally developed, but because our lives have layers. In this sense, memory isn’t a layer formed on top of experience—like a cap of ice—as much as it is formed underneath it—the way rivers can run underground.

  And my relationship with Elliot Hull is like this too. For me to truly understand that tide of joy when I first saw him in the ice-cream shop and how everything else that happened followed, I need Peter. Elliot doesn’t really exist without Peter—not fully. And Peter wouldn’t have really existed in my life without my father—a man shaped by loss, and defined by it. And his loss doesn’t exist, of course, without my mother’s untimely death.

  Let me dig at just one layer at a time.

  I met Peter in the waiting room of an animal hospital. He’d brought in his mother’s elderly cockapoo for some incontinence issues, and I was covered in blood, reading a book about the human brain. A farm dog had darted in front of me on the road that morning. I’d been on my way to an undergraduate class in psychology, even though I wasn’t matriculated. I was twenty-five and had recently quit a job in marketing that had burned me out. I was working as a waitress again—happily so—and thinking about going to grad school for psychology.

  I was enamored with talk therapy at the time—mainly because I had just started seeing a therapist, a very sweet older woman who wore thick glasses that magnified her eyes so it seemed as if she was looking at me intently. I wasn’t used to this kind of attention, and although it made me uncomfortable, I needed her. She let me talk about my childhood for an hour every week. She let me daydream about my mother—really—and what my childhood could have been like if she’d lived. We were working through these fantasies, in hopes of getting at … some elemental truth? And what was that truth? One fall when I was just five years old, my mother died—a car accident involving a bridge and a body of water—a simple accident that shaped my life in the most complicated ways. It changed my father into someone else entirely—a cautious widower wearing Docksiders and cable-knit sweaters who devoted his life to the soniferous burblings of certain species of fish. A man who lived, for the most part, underwater. It was as if I grew up with two drowned parents—one literally and one figuratively.

  What I didn’t tell the therapist was that I’d been in the car with my mother—that this was a well-guarded family secret that I’d unearthed. An elderly auntie had let that information slip while she brushed my hair during a visit we made to her nursing home on a trip to Cape Cod. When we got back in the car after the visit, my father told me that Aunt Irene was fading. “She doesn’t have any of the facts straight anymore.” I think the therapist knew that I’d been in the car, if she was paying attention at all. But I could have gone on in therapy with her for years and never told her. I didn’t care, really. She let me talk about what I wanted to. She listened. Wasn’t that all anyone needed? Couldn’t I help other people the same way?

  On the road that morning I was gliding in and out of a thick fog. I’d just inherited my father’s old Volvo and was listening to tapes I hadn’t played much since high school—this particular morning, the Smiths. The Volvo had an exhaust problem that made the car smell strongly of fumes. So the fog, the Smiths, and the fumes gave the morning a surreal dreaminess.

  The dog was a yellow lab, the kind that makes you think of an old gym teacher—stout but still athletic. He appeared out of nowhere. I braked hard but clipped his hind leg. His body bounced off the grille and spun, tumbling down a sloping bank.

  I left the car on the empty road and scrambled down the embankment. There was no one around. The dog’s eyes were glassy, his chest jerking. He wore a red frayed collar with silver tags. I’d never really liked dogs. I didn’t have one growing up—though, with all the lonesomeness, I should have. It might have helped. But it always struck me as odd to have a dog in the house—the notion that a beast could come lumbering through the living room at any moment.

  I was afraid that he might bite me, so I introduced myself and patted the fur on his neck. Then I reached under him and hefted him up. He was heavie
r than I expected. But I lifted him, his tags jingling like bells, and made my way up the embankment, struggling under his weight. I put him in the backseat, laying my coat over him, and turned the car around, back the way I’d come.

  Secretly, and even though I was the cause of this one, I think I’d always wanted to help in some emergency, to be a witness who helped a victim survive. I’d always wondered if anyone had seen my mother’s car skid off the road into the bridge’s pilings and into the lake—maybe someone driving home from a dinner party? Someone who’d just gotten off a late shift? And, of course, why was my mother out so late with me in the car?

  The receptionist had gotten the dog owner’s phone number off of its tags and had left a message. The dog’s name was Ripken, likely after the Orioles star. I imagined Ripken’s owners—two old baseball fans who’d stride in at some point wearing matching ball caps. I was already missing class, so I decided to stay with the dog to see if he would make it out of surgery. I think I already loved him. He’d looked up at me when I laid him in the backseat like he understood that I was saving him.

  The surgery was taking a long time, and I tried to distract myself with some assigned reading. Lost in descriptions of the synaptic firings of the human brain, I didn’t see or hear Peter walk in, so it was as if he suddenly appeared—a tall man in a crisp shirt and pleated pants, with a cockapoo in his lap.

  I caught him looking at me and he glanced quickly away. We were the only two in the waiting room—aside from an aquarium and a large cage of four kittens. I looked up at the receptionist’s desk to see if I could catch her eye, get an update, but she was on the phone.

  Then Peter asked, “Can I help you with something? Are you okay?”

  “What?” I said.

  “I don’t mean to pry or anything. You just look like you’ve been through a lot today.”

  I considered for the first time what I must look like—windblown, disheveled, bloody. “Oh, yes, it’s been a strange day.”

  “And is your pet in surgery?”

  “Yes, the dog’s in surgery, but he’s not my dog,” I said.

  “Oh.”

  “I hit the dog. I’m just waiting for the owners to show up. Technically, I’m the bad guy, I guess.”

  “But you brought the dog in … that’s noble, and you stayed.” And this struck me as a very noble thing to say. He smiled then and it was this glorious smile that revealed dimples just under the mouth.

  “At least I’ll have something new to talk about in therapy.” I blurted this out. I was still partially in the fog, I think. I already knew that the dog would have to represent my dead mother somehow, and that this would spur a lot of discussion.

  “Are you always looking for new material for your therapist?” he asked.

  “I try to be entertaining. It’s the least I can do.”

  He said jokingly, “I prefer to bury my problems. Polish the ulcer.”

  “That’s very Hemingway of you,” I said.

  “Very big-game hunter,” he said.

  “Very running with the bulls in Pamplona.”

  And then the woman behind the desk called out, “Lillipoo Stevens?”

  He looked at the receptionist. “Coming!” he said, and then he turned to me. “It’s my mother’s dog,” he said apologetically.

  “Sure it is,” I said.

  And then he asked me out for a drink.

  “Ah, to polish the ulcer?” I asked. “You know, you shouldn’t ask out women who are covered in blood. I might be a murderer, depending how things go …”

  “Well, I’ve never gone on a date with a murderer before …”

  And this was old-fashioned. A date being called a date. “I’ll go but only if you bring Lillipoo,” I said.

  I gave him my number, which entailed fumbling through my pocketbook for a pen and a receipt for something other than Rolaids or tampons—a humiliating little ritual. And then he said sincerely, “I hope it all goes okay in there.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He walked away then, Lillipoo tucked under his arm, her swishy tail swishing.

  Peter and I dated for a year before we moved in together—and Ripken joined us. The surgery had been expensive. The owners—whom I never did meet but who still exist in my mind with their matching baseball hats—had inherited the dog from an elderly aunt who’d gone into assisted living, and they’d been letting him roam because he was flatulent. They didn’t want to pay for the surgery and didn’t really want him back. So I inherited Ripken—my very own old flatulent gym teacher, my first dog—minus one leg.

  Peter and I got engaged a year after that, then got married. Everything was so perfectly doled out, like an automated cat-food dispenser. Instead of loving gazes, he glanced at me lovingly. There was a lazy satisfaction to it all—something that we could afford because of Peter’s overriding confidence. He’d been raised by two exceptionally confident people, the kind who are usually brought down a peg or two by statistical probability—you can only live so long without encountering tragedy. And yet his parents avoided tragedy—Gail and Hal Stevens were exempt. They’d somehow found a loophole. Their own parents died with some small warning—enough to say their good-byes but not enough time to suffer. Trees fell on their neighbors’ houses, metaphorically, time and again. They were churchgoers—though not deeply religious—and had gotten it in their heads that God preferred them and showed his favoritism by a lack of retardation, car accidents, cancer, suicide, drug addiction … They decided they weren’t lucky as much as en titled, and they passed this firm belief on to Peter. And I loved this loophole, which was extended to me by marriage. I loved the air bag of entitlement, how it promised to cushion us throughout our lives. Life with Peter was as safe as a brand-new Volvo.

  Our period of dating and newlywed year were good. We ate bagels and drank gourmet coffee shipped from Seattle. I got a job in marketing again, because I needed to grow up. Why get a degree in psychology—all of that talk hadn’t really fixed anything, had it? No. Peter had—Peter and the loophole. My elderly therapist with the magnified eyes retired, and I didn’t replace her. I was relieved to get away from her gaze. People living in the loophole don’t need a therapist. Plus, Peter was an anesthesiologist. So I learned to take a small happy pill, and the remainder of my restless sadness was numbed by consumerism. We got into nice tile—travertine and marble accents—and sofas and end tables and lowboys and espresso machines. We had a long-standing addiction to stemware. I learned how to make Bananas Foster, and when we had people over for dinner, I lit the dessert on fire—this beautiful blue flame.

  During this time, did I ever think of Elliot Hull—how he looked at me, in the fluorescent lights of the library, lying down on the campus lawn propped on one elbow, even in the low lighting of that dank bar? I did. I indulged those memories when a certain song came on the radio, when my mind drifted to the disheveled arrangements of my past. He wasn’t some airy memory, not some vague face. He was a solid presence—a figure to hang your hat on. And I remembered that he hadn’t given me those love-in-glances that Peter had mastered. Not even just the magnified eyes of my therapist. No. He looked at me with his whole body. He didn’t look at me so much as into me. He’d been too intense—impolitely intense. He would never have been able to comprehend how to divvy up love and dispense it in the correct dosages. He would have poured it on, if I’d let him—too much, too much, too much.

  THE NIGHT OF THE party, I was in the bathroom putting on mascara, wearing only a lavender bra and underwear, which made my skin look even paler. I’m not much good in the sun. I look boiled after a day at the beach and then freckled like certain kinds of trout. Better to be pale. The bright lighting in the bathroom wasn’t helping. Peter and I were living in Canton, a yuppie neighborhood in the southeastern section of Baltimore, in an older apartment building that had been renovated into upscale condos. The upgrades weren’t supposed to detract from the old-fashioned charm—wood floors, heavy doors—but still did. The ligh
ting was one such example. It was too bright. I missed the dull glow of low wattage. Ripken was laying on the bath mat. He could sense when I was anxious and tended to stay close by. I looked down at him, and he looked up at me. Then he cocked his head and jiggled his stump in a phantom-limb attempt to scratch his ear. I bent down and rubbed his ear for him. I was worried about seeing Elliot again. Would I flirt obnoxiously in front of Peter? Would I become my old self again, my current self unraveling like mummy tape until I was coiled in a pile on the floor? I didn’t want to have to be Elliot Hull’s personal handler or get mired in some endlessly obnoxious conversation. Would Peter know to come and rescue me? “We need some sort of code,” I called to Peter.

  “Code for what?” Peter asked. He was getting dressed in the bedroom. I heard the jingle of his belt.

  “Code for something like: Let’s not give this stranger directions to the party.”

  “He isn’t a stranger. You two were friends in college, weren’t you?”

  “Not really.” And I meant that we’d been less than friends and more than friends too, and there should be some name for this.

  “Well, it’s not my fault, Gwen,” he said with a great sigh.

  I stuck my head out the door. “Thank you, Saint Peter of the Excruciating Sighs.” Peter, with his impeccable manners, knew how to sigh disappointment better than anyone I’ve ever known. His sighs were elaborate, extravagant even. He knew how to sigh whole paragraphs on how exhausting I could be. He knew how to sigh the story of our entire relationship and how we had made it to this very moment of my colossal tiresomeness. He could sigh three-part harmony or an entire Italian opera. In fact, sometimes after such a grand sigh, I would call him the Great Sighing Tenor or, simply, Pavarotti.

  “Fine. But the fact is you invited him.”

  My face looked blotted out in the mirror. I’d put on too much cover-up. I do this sometimes. It’s part of a disappearing instinct that kicks into overdrive when I’m nervous. I’m a nervous person in general, so I often look blotted out. “I specifically did not invite him. He was lying.”