The Pretend Wife

by Bridget Asher

  “Why didn’t you just say, Look, I don’t want you to come to the party?”

  I didn’t say this because I wanted Elliot to come to the party as much as I didn’t want him to come. I was afraid of how overwhelmed I’d felt in the ice-cream shop. I thought of Elliot Hull in his baggy rapper shorts and his ball cap, with that insistently clever smile. I pictured him standing like that in a lecture hall in some fifth-rate community college, eating some insanely ridiculous ice-cream cone, while mumbling something about Heidegger, with one hand in his pocket. “I’m sure he’s a fine person. He’s a philosopher. I mean, do bad people go into philosophy?”

  “I think bad people go into everything,” Peter said. This was a little-known secret about Peter. He believed that people were inherently bad, deep down, and that they had to strive to overcome it. He always hid this jadedness from people at large, so this small comment was an intimate one. He was confessing something about himself.

  “I guess they do,” I said.

  “Just avoid him,” Peter said.

  Ripken farted, then turned around and snapped at it. I’d worked hard to improve his flatulence with diet, but every once in a while he rummaged through the garbage or stole a chocolate bar from my purse and he was back at it.

  I gave him a dirty look and walked out of the bathroom. Peter was wearing a short-sleeved, old-man button-down—blue and white checked with one breast pocket. “That shirt reminds me of Dr. Fogelman,” I said.

  “Benny Fogelman of the Fogelmans who live next door to your father?”

  “Yes.” My father has lived next door to the Fogelmans for thirty-some years. Fogelman’s his dentist. He isn’t a good dentist, however. My father is always having to have faulty caps replaced and second root canals because the first attempts weren’t wholly successful. He’s suffered decades of pain just because he doesn’t want to hurt Benny Fogelman’s feelings. Dr. Fogelman packed his basement with canned goods and bottled water and medical supplies in preparation for Y2K, then he and his wife ate nothing but canned food for a solid year after all was well. “Sometimes you have to eat your way out of a poor investment,” he told me once. Dr. Fogelman is a pessimist with a dingy overbite, and Mrs. Fogelman is his trusty sidekick, his enabler, who calls him “the old turd” behind his back.

  “Don’t wear the Fogelman,” I said to Peter. “It depresses me.” I sat down on the edge of the bed, still not dressed. “It makes me feel like we’re an old married couple …”

  “Like Dr. and Mrs. Fogelman?”

  I nodded and picked at the bedspread. Was this the bedspread of an old married couple?

  “I like this shirt. It’s retro.”

  It was not retro. It was stodgy. This was a subtle distinction that would be lost on him. “Maybe Helen will like Elliot. Helen’s pretty.”

  “She’s only pretty in pictures.”

  “That’s not possible. Pretty is pretty, isn’t it?”

  “I saw her in pictures, you know, when we were dating, and then I met her and she started moving around, and she laughs too loud and collapses when she laughs like one of those toys—you know, those little movable statue toys of like Goofy or something, where you press the bottom and the whole thing flops.”

  “Oh,” I said, wondering how long he’d thought this about Helen, and why he never told me, and how many other little odd observations he’d stored away—ones about me maybe. I knew Peter didn’t like my friends, but I wasn’t sure I liked them either. Being friends with women has always been hard for me. I’ve never been good at negotiating the sudden undertow of conversations, how a conversation among women can become so unwieldy, how, in such quiet tones, there’s so much freight being walloped around. Women have superhero strength in refined dialogue and I always fell for the sucker punches. Sometimes I didn’t even know I’d been hit until an hour or so later—Hey, wait a minute … But by then it was always too late. Helen in particular was a sore spot. She was still single and had recently started to take it personally. Just a few years ago, she’d doled out her sympathy for us, her wifey friends, dragging along boyfriend after boyfriend to our wedding receptions and dancing recklessly on the various dance floors. But then she’d started to question her taste in men. Now she was beginning to question their taste in her. She seemed to be taking our marriages as insults, and, having perceived an attack, she was occasionally vicious. I was an easy target. She always caught me off guard, because I didn’t have a guard. I blamed this on my lack of a mother figure. Certainly mothers give elaborate lessons on how to dodge and parry, and I’d missed all of that.

  “Maybe Elliot likes those collapsible toys,” I said. Peter didn’t have any response to this. I tried to decake my face a little. “How about we rub our noses?” I said.

  “Together? Like Eskimos? Why would we do that?”

  “We would each rub our own noses. Like this.” I rubbed my nose. “Our code! That way you’d know to come and rescue me in case I get cornered by Elliot Hull at the party.”

  “What if you have to rub your nose and not because of some dipshit alert, but because you need to rub your nose? With your allergies …” Peter was always practical.

  “We could rub our chins,” I offered. “How often do I get an itchy chin?”

  “How about we act like grown-ups instead and not like little kids who make up a pretend language of hand gestures? I’d rather not walk around parties looking like a third-base coach.” As I relay this I don’t want Peter to come across as good or bad. There are these little charged conversations that married couples have that, when written, sound petty and ugly. And we were, from time to time, both petty and ugly, but, beneath it all, loving.

  But at this moment, did he love me? I believe he did, deeply. In fact, I think his love for me surprised him sometimes and that was one of the reasons he felt he had to keep it in check. And I didn’t break him of it. Perhaps I even encouraged it. Peter’s parents might have been the Loophole Stevenses, but despite all of their good fortune, I don’t think many people would have chosen to be them. They had a lovelessness to them. Peter was a better person—sweeter, kinder, more generous—but he still was their brand, their product. Is that his fault?

  He walked up to me, sitting there on the bed, and bent down and patted my bare knee three times. He’d done this more than a few times recently, this knee patting. It was something that the likes of Benny Fogelman would do to Ginny Fogelman if she were to get all heated up on a topic—like gay marriage—and needed some restraint. It struck me as awful. To the casual observer, it might have passed as something tender, but wasn’t it really a small act of condescension? Or was it the kind of thing that I would have found funny a few years before—charmingly retro but not earnestly stodgy—but the joke had worn thin and it was now, dangerously, quickly, becoming a habit?

  Peter walked out of the room and I called after him. “Are you a knee patter now? Without any sense of irony whatsoever? A nonironic knee patter?”

  He shouted from the living room. “All I heard was kneel batter now or feel better now and something about irony!” And then the television clicked on and there was the sound of a soccer match—a crowd with too many horns and Spanish-speaking announcers. “If you don’t get dressed, we’re going to be late!”

  “All I heard was breast and wait!” I shouted back. Ripken wandered out of the bathroom and laid down at my feet.

  “What?” he called out.

  “What, what?” I said.

  The argument had officially floundered to senselessness. We abandoned it and I got up to finish dressing.

  ELLIOT HULL. THE BROODER. As I mentioned, we met at a freshman orientation icebreaker. It was mandatory, because it had to be. If it weren’t, only the unrepentantly extroverted would have gone, leaving the rest of us, the needy, encased in chunks of ice.

  There were about a hundred people in the gym, further divvied into groups of four. Elliot and I were in the same foursome. The other two—a boy and a girl—are a blur, long since f
orgotten. Were they nice, shy, prissy, rueful? I don’t know. Maybe they were even blurry back then. Some people are. They probably went on to have perfectly lovely icebroken lives.

  I only remember one of the exercises. The instructions were that someone in the group had to tell someone else in the group what to say to someone outside of the group. It was supposed to be introductory. The example was: Go up and shake hands with that person over there and tell him you like his shoes. I should mention here, if it’s not already obvious, that I went to a fairly lifeless college, one that seemed as if it had been perfectly preserved in lava and volcanic ash circa 1954, à la Pompeii. (Will all of my metaphors about college entail being encased or preserved—in ice or lava—or otherwise smothered? They might. I’d intended to break from my father’s house into the world at large, but I hadn’t. I was still terrified—of what? The world at large? I don’t know. In any case, I was still protecting myself and in fact, I spent my college and postcollege years perfecting my self-protection.)

  What did Elliot look like back then? Like we all did. A slightly softer, pinker, shinier, leaner, crisper version of ourselves now—a condensation that’s been diluted by time. This was the first thing he ever said to me: “This is bullshit. You know that?”

  “It’s complete bullshit,” I said.

  “Don’t make me do something stupid,” he said.

  I looked at him. “I’ll leave that part up to you.”

  “So you’re funny,” he said.

  “No, I’m not funny,” I said, and I wasn’t or had never thought of myself as funny because people didn’t laugh at the things I said.

  “What are you then?” he asked. “Are you bookish?”

  “Bookish?”

  “You look like you could be bookish.”

  I was insulted even though I was bookish. I’d spent the last four years of high school pretending not to be bookish while looking forward to coming out of the bookish closet in college. “I read books, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I can be bookish,” Elliot said. “When I’m in the mood.” And here he brooded momentarily, but then quickly turned to face me. “Where are those other people?” he asked. “They were right here.”

  “They’re off shaking hands with strangers and complimenting them on their shoes.”

  “That reminds me,” he said. “I like your shoes. They’re okay. I mean, they aren’t phenomenal or flashy, but they’re stable but not boring. I like them.”

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to critique the shoes, just compliment them,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, I wanted to be honest.”

  There was an awkward pause and then I said, “I like your shoes too.”

  “Ah, that’s the way you’re supposed to do it.”

  “Yep.”

  I liked Elliot Hull immediately—shoes and all. In the end, I would still like him even though I’d kind of hate him too—both emotions simultaneously even while slapping him in that bar. I didn’t like him because he was likable. He wasn’t, in fact, likable in the terms that society has mutually agreed upon. But you know how every once in a while, you’ll come across someone and you feel at ease with him. A lot of the time it’s someone you know you’ll never see again—a person in line with you in customs, in a waiting room at an insurance office, a waitress—and in one unguarded moment, one of you admits in some way that the world is full of shit, and the other agrees. A short-lived camaraderie in the world of bullshit before you sigh and move on in your different directions—except when you don’t have to move on in different directions. Elliot was like that, for me, from the get-go. He was irritating, yes, but he was sincerely irritating, sincere in general, and I liked that.

  “I know what I want you to do,” I said.

  “Okay. What?”

  “I want you to pick up that girl over there. Pick her up off her feet and spin her around.” I pointed to a girl—a slim one, so he wouldn’t have to strain. She had soft brown hair and dark eyes. I don’t know why I chose this task. I was being romantic, I think. I’d seen An Officer and a Gentleman too many times.

  He grabbed my hand. “How about that girl?” he said, pointing my finger to a girl in short shorts.

  “No, that one,” I said, pointing back at the first girl.

  He nudged my finger in another direction. “How about that girl,” he said, indicating a taller girl.

  “No, that one,” I said, steadfast in my original choice. “Pick her up and spin her around, like, you know, it’s the end of a war or something.”

  “Which war?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t matter. Any war.”

  “It completely matters,” he said. “I mean a World War II pick up and spin around is totally different from a Vietnam pick up and spin around. I don’t think they even picked up and spun girls around after Nam.”

  “Fine, like after World War II.”

  “Fine,” he said, and he walked toward the girl. She saw him approaching. I couldn’t see his face, but I could see hers. She was smiling, anxiously, and he picked up speed. By the time he got to her, it was as if she knew what was coming. He lifted her up by her thin waist, high in the air, and then he spun around—like he was in fact a soldier who’d come home from World War II and had just spent the last few weeks doing nothing but picking up and spinning around girls.

  That girl was Ellen Maddox. They started dating and kept dating. They dated steadily for three and a half years. I saw Elliot off and on. We had a class or two together. And he’d always bring up that orientation, thanking me for picking the right girl, or he’d simply compliment my shoes, which was our little code. And that was that.

  Until one spring day of our last semester when Elliot saw me lying on a blanket in the middle of the green, studying for an exam. I was alone. A midterm was looming. I was thoroughly, openly bookish by then, wearing glasses, my hair pulled back in a ponytail—I may have even had a pencil in it. He walked up to my wide blanket and laid down on its edge. He propped himself up on one elbow and stared at me broodingly, and finally said, “You were wrong.”

  “Wrong about what?” I asked.

  “You picked the wrong girl.”

  “What?”

  “At orientation,” he said. “You picked the wrong girl.”

  “Oh, really, did I?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “And who should I have picked?”

  “That’s the crazy part,” he said. “You’re the right girl. You should have picked you.”

  HELEN THREW GREAT PARTIES. There was always some odd concoction to drink, exotic finger foods, music that was edgy but never morose (someone you’d never heard of but should have—music that scolded you for your provincialism). She had a knack for inviting a bizarre mix of people, and because most of the guests were single, her parties had an overt sexuality. She had a dominatrix friend named Vivica—a pro who worked in the city. Vivica had put Peter and me on her mailing list so we’d occasionally get those Gothic whip-wielding postcards in the mail announcing her shows with little handwritten notes on them: Please come! XOXO Vivica. I always thought of Richard, our postman, handling the postcards in his Jeep, reevaluating us. Richard was a hunter who was fond of Ripken. “Too bad about that leg,” he always said. “That boy could have really been a good hunting dog.” What did Richard think of us? Did he go home and tell his wife about the people with the three-legged dog and the porno postcards? Were we the perverts of his route? I kind of hoped to be someone’s pervert.

  At Helen’s party, I was clearly no one’s pervert. I was never dressed right, for one thing. When I tried to wear an ironic fifties-style dress a few parties back—the kind that Helen wore with so much vamp: sharp bangs and dark red lipstick and cleavage—I ended up looking like a 1950s housewife. The pearl necklace that was so full of innuendo on Helen, stated flatly on me: pearl necklace, nothing else.

  These parties put Peter in a different mood too. He toned down his manners. He drank way too much. He
occasionally wanted to feed me the finger foods, which in some way he thought was sexy, but that made me uncomfortable. We became unmoored from each other. In fact, we made a pact to divide and conquer the guests. Once at the party, we’d glide in opposite directions to gather as much oddness as we could, bumping into each other only now and again to check in, and then later, on the ride home and in bed, we’d share all of our information. This way, we’d decided, we were basically living the party twice—once through our own experience, and again through the other’s. Now, in retrospect, I can see that this was a good plan in theory, especially if we’d been the type of couple who were true confidants, who knew each other intimately in every way. But we weren’t. Love-in-glances only allows so much intimacy. Peter and I were perhaps looking for opportunities to become unmoored because we were both looking for something more.

  So I was already out of my element, already nervous about social failure. This time, there was even more at stake. I remembered those British drawing room novels in which a missed cue surrounding the etiquette of tea could ruin your standing and mean you might be sent off to a convent. In this case, I had some inkling that Elliot Hull could unfasten my life—in a way that was a threat to my current consumerism, my bagel-breakfast contentment—and this terrified me. But what terrified me more was how much I wanted to see him again.

  When we got to the party, I scanned the apartment quickly for Elliot. He was nowhere in sight.

  “See,” Peter said, having scanned the party himself. “He’s not here. He probably won’t show. It’s harder than you think to come to a party alone. Luckily we can barely remember being single.” This was part of our banter—how sorry we felt for single people. It was comforting.

  I said, “I’m so relieved.” But I wasn’t. I was anxious—deflated yet still on edge.

  A young woman put beers in our hands. She seemed like she’d been assigned the task. Peter drifted to the balcony, packed with idle smokers and glowing candles, and I headed for the food.