The Pretend Wife

by Bridget Asher

  Elliot reached up and touched one of his ears. “I was built for speed,” he said.

  Then Helen pressed her fingertips together and got very serious. “What happened?” she asked Elliot. “What went wrong with you and your fiancée?”

  “After two years or so, I realized that I was in the middle of a conversation that wouldn’t last,” Elliot said.

  “What does that mean?” the blonde asked.

  “A marriage is a conversation that’s supposed to last a lifetime. We didn’t have enough to say to each other,” he explained.

  “That’s a beautiful definition of marriage,” Helen said. “Write that down,” she said to me as if I were her secretary. I ignored her. “I want that read at my wedding or funeral or something.”

  “A lifetime’s worth of material is a lot of material,” I said.

  “What’s wrong with just being quiet together?” Peter added, and I liked when we appeared to be a united front like this. “A lot of couples are comfortable enough with each other not to talk all the time.”

  Jason said, “I like not talking.” He wasn’t as effervescent as he had been earlier. In fact, there was an eye-cutting paranoia about him now. He knew that there was a lot of talking in his near future and it was going to be unpleasant. The blonde’s interest had waned too. She was holding a tissue to her nose, no longer reading his mind.

  “My mother wanted me to go through with it anyway, I think. She wants me married,” Elliot said.

  “I despise my mother,” Helen said, and she had reason to. Her mother was an alcoholic who’d been married a number of times to unlikable men. I’d always kind of wondered if Helen didn’t really want to get married and have kids because she feared becoming her mother—so her relationships were always self-sabotaged. This is the kind of thing that my therapist would have said. She talked to me a good bit about self-sabotage.

  “Well,” Elliot said, “I love mine.” And I could tell that he must be very drunk, going soft for his mother like that in front of everyone. “My mother and father had a conversation that didn’t hold up, but it’s worth shooting for.”

  I don’t know why this hit me so hard, but it did. It seemed as if he was saying that the perfect relationship was out there and he, in his cockiness, was going to find it. It seemed naive and boastful, though it probably wasn’t meant that way. I was going to say something in reply. I can’t remember what exactly, but it was going to be vehement. Something about divorce statistics and the reality of relationships or the importance of each person in a married couple to maintain … what? Some privacy? Some sense of self? Some conversation that was theirs alone? (By which I meant: some lonesomeness?) I don’t know. What happened instead was that I took a deep breath, and the meat—was it lamb?—in my mouth shot down my throat and lodged there. At first, I didn’t do anything. The conversation went on.

  Helen started in with some questions, “What was she like, your fiancée? Do you miss her?”

  “I was engaged twice,” the blonde said.

  But then I heard Elliot saying, “Are you okay? Gwen?”

  I stood up and my plate fell to the floor. I turned and could see myself in the long mirror hung behind the sofa, my eyes filling with tears and my hand at my throat—just like everyone is taught. I thought: This is what it’s like not to be able to breathe. This is what it’s like to have your lungs stall. This is what it’s like to drown. Like my mother did. When she was a young woman, a young mother, younger than I am now. This is what it must have been like before someone pulled me out of the car. I’d always wanted to know, to remember, but never could, and here it was.

  And then I felt arms reaching around me, a thumb knuckle digging into my stomach, then the tug of those arms—too gentle. The meat stayed put. The next tug, though, was a sharp jolt. The meat dislodged into my mouth and I spit it onto the floor. Just like that. I started gasping and coughing. I reached up, holding on to what I assumed was Peter’s sleeve. I grabbed it hard. Everyone else backed away—the blonde in her platforms, Jason … Helen was flapping the gauzy sleeves of her dress. “Get her some water or something! Jesus!”

  I turned around and there was Elliot. “You’re okay,” he said.

  Then Peter was standing next to me on the other side, his arm around my waist. “You saved her life,” he said to Elliot. Peter Stevens of the loophole Stevenses—the man who, despite statistical probability, had sidestepped all tragedy—was thrilled by this near-tragedy. He clapped Elliot on the back so hard that Elliot almost lost his balance. “That was amazing. I owe you,” Peter said. “I owe you!”

  And this struck me as an odd thing to say. Elliot saved my life. Why did Peter owe him? But no one had to owe Elliot, really. Wasn’t he happy enough to have saved me? Wouldn’t anyone in the room have saved me, if he could have?

  At that moment the door flew open, and there stood Faith. Her hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail, and she was wearing sweatpants and an oversized T-shirt. She was holding Edward, who was wide awake and red cheeked as if he’d just gotten off of a crying jag. She was so startlingly real that everyone froze.

  Jason was the first one to move. He looked as if he was going to try to distract her. He opened his mouth and went so far as to point at me, as I was still bent over trying to catch my breath. But he must have known this would only make matters worse. He simply stood up, gave a little bow, hunched over like my corsage, and walked toward the door. Faith glared at the rest of us—with good reason. None of us had called her. None of us had sent him home. We were guilty too.

  She didn’t say a word. She handed Edward off to Jason. He walked out, and she gave the room one more punishing look and slammed the door.

  WHAT DO I REMEMBER about what followed? It started with just the three of us—Elliot, Peter, and me—on Helen’s balcony amid the candles that had melted to waxy pools and been snuffed out. I see us now as if suspended by the smoky air, the balcony itself a small cage that the three of us were trapped in. This is where we made a fragile pact—in large part because of Helen, who would appear on the balcony and ignite everything. But the strange chain of events that was to follow required all of us, the intricate mechanisms of conversation, so that as a group we started at point X and traveled, windingly, to point Y. We couldn’t have predicted how it would change things, but each of us, even though drunk and blurred, must have had more than an inkling that we’d waded out into something unknown.

  Having nearly died, I’d decided to get even drunker. Elliot and Peter got drunk along with me. They were sitting on a pair of wrought-iron chairs and I was standing at the railing. The view offered a bit of the harbor, just a bit, and only if I leaned out, which made me feel like I was on the prow of a ship. I was flushed, dizzy. The breeze was something to brace against. It was steadying in a way. There were some distant lights reflecting off the surface of the water. I closed one eye and then the other, watching the lights bounce around.

  Helen was breezing around the apartment, cleaning up. There were three other guys still there. Locked in a stalemate, they were each trying to win her by simply refusing to go home. A classic move. Peter had noticed them too. “They’re squatters. Look at them. Why don’t they just pull up stakes already? Give up and go home?”

  “How are we going to get home?” I asked.

  “I can still drive,” Peter said, pinching his nose, standing up tall, and sucking in his stomach as if proving his sobriety. “I’m fine.” And for a moment I thought of Dr. Fogelman, who seemed as if he’d say something just like that at the end of a long party, and how Ginny Fogelman would have said, “Oh, please, do you want to kill someone and spend your life in jail?” before muttering, “You old turd.” Suddenly the balcony felt like a stodgy little cage.

  “I’m going to call a cab,” Elliot said, but he didn’t make a move to get out of his chair.

  “Wait,” Peter said. “We’ve got to get this sorted out.”

  “What sorted out?” Elliot asked.

  “I
owe you,” Peter said. “For saving Gwen’s life.” I hated Peter a little bit for returning to this. Sometimes he got stuck on something and he wouldn’t let it go. His parents probably praised him for it as a kid—they praised him for everything—calling it persistence, but sometimes it felt obsessive to me. And this felt like such a flailing attempt at a grand gesture.

  “I only choked on some kabob,” I said, still looking out at the harbor. “We don’t have to break into a musical comedy about it.”

  Elliot said, “I think that repaying someone for saving your life might be true in India or somewhere … but not here.”

  “I want to know what Elliot wants,” Peter said. “That’s worth some conversation, at least. What’s wrong with conversation?” His tone was a little belligerent and he wasn’t so drunk that he didn’t notice it and so he laughed, playing it off. He laughed too loudly.

  “Fine,” I said. I turned around quickly. Elliot’s body blurred and then bobbed into focus. It was just dawning on me that I might get sick later. I was sweaty. “What do you want, Hull? What do you really want?”

  Elliott looked at me and then out at the high-rises and, between them, the narrow strip of the harbor view. “I don’t want anything,” he said, shrugging.

  “Seriously,” Peter said, “you must want something.” Was Peter now baiting Elliot? “Everyone wants something. It’s a philosophical question—right up your alley.”

  “What’s your alley again?” Elliot asked. “What do you do?”

  “Anesthesiologist,” Peter said. “I knock people out. I’m Dr. Feelgood.” That’s the way he always answered the question—even if a little old lady asked.

  “Ah,” Elliot said. “Numbness.”

  “You’re walking away from the question. What do you want?” Peter asked again.

  It was getting a little too pointed. I said, “It isn’t a philosophical question. It’s a personal question. What we want, what we’re afraid of. You can’t get more personal, more intimate. Elliot doesn’t have to answer. Personal is personal.”

  “Would you answer the question if you were in my shoes?” Elliot asked me.

  “I don’t know. What do I want? Right now?” I thought about it. “I want what everyone wants.”

  “What’s that?” Peter asked.

  “To feel whole,” I said.

  Elliot looked at me, a little startled. I’d surprised him but I wasn’t sure how. He kept watching me even as Peter started talking about what everyone wanted—20 percent pay raises, to be rich and thin, to be famous.

  When Peter was finished rattling off a litany of average American desires, Elliot said, “Okay. You want an intimate answer. The truth. What do I want?” He was taking the charge seriously now. He tapped his fingers on his thighs. “You really want to know?”

  I nodded.

  “I do,” Peter said. “I really do.”

  “My mother’s sick,” Elliot said. “She has to take morphine from time to time now in a hospital bed set up in her living room at her lake house, and you can’t fix that, so …”

  “Morphine?” Peter said, glancing at me, confused that the conversation had taken a serious turn. “Wait. Who’s taking morphine?”

  “My mother’s dying,” Elliot stated more matter-of-factly, and then he rubbed his knee again. Was it an old injury? I watched him closely. I wanted to see what this kind of grief looked like from the outside. I knew it too well from the inside. “You can’t fix that,” he said, turning to me, “unless you’re a cancer researcher on the brink of a cure.”

  “I work in sales,” I said uselessly.

  “I thought you were an English major.”

  “I think English majors go into sales,” I said.

  “I thought you were an interior designer,” he said.

  “I work for an interior designer. Close enough,” I said. “I’m sorry about your mother.” I’d learned that much from my own childhood. What you want is for someone to recognize a loss—to simply say that he’s sorry. Nothing more. Just for him to say he’s sorry, to give a sincere nod. One person showing another his humanness.

  Helen walked onto the balcony then, picking up some errant punch glasses and beer bottles.

  “Helen,” Peter said. “Elliot’s mother’s dying.” He was incredulous. He’d had such a protected life that he was stunned by things like this. He knew my mother was dead, but I can honestly say that I don’t think he ever fully comprehended that she’d really once been alive—and therefore he was impatient with my father’s grief, and with mine too. He let us hide it, and we were good at hiding it. He didn’t even know that I’d been in the car during the crash, and that somehow I’d been saved. “Isn’t that terrible?” he said, and he said this like it was an actual question, as if he wasn’t sure. Wasn’t it terrible? It was, wasn’t it?

  Helen stopped. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, and she touched Elliot’s head for a moment, as if giving some kind of benediction.

  He nodded, then looked at the palms of his hands. The three squatters were idling in the apartment, chatting with each other now, like strangers at a bus stop, and for a minute or so, theirs were the only voices.

  I’ve returned to this many times—the way Elliot leaned way back in his chair then and squinted up at the sky; the way he rubbed his head with both hands, as if troubled or disgusted. Did he know where he was going with this? Was he suffering a momentary hesitation? Did he know at this moment what he was really going to ask for, what he hoped would come of it? Or was he just confessing drunkenly on a balcony while a party died down all around him? I don’t think it mattered. In the end, we would all have to play a role in the conversation to make all of the gears click to get from X to Y. He said, “This last visit with her, I told my mother that I’d, well, that I’d gotten married.”

  “Married?” Helen said disdainfully.

  “You lied to your mother on her deathbed?” Peter said. The conversation made me think of my own mother. Lucky, I thought, to have had a mother on a deathbed, to have had the opportunity to lie to her.

  “She was out of it, doped up on morphine,” Elliot said, not defensively as much as explanatorily. “She was in a state; sometimes when she’s in these states she talks to her dead sister. It was that kind of a state.”

  “But why would you tell her you’d gotten married?” I asked. “I mean, wouldn’t she be upset not to have been invited to the wedding and that you’d married someone she’d never met?”

  “Married!” Helen said. “I mean, why not tell her you’ve got gangrene and have to get a leg amputated!” And then she whispered, “Marriage can kill you limb by limb. Don’t you know that?” Helen enjoyed disparaging the institution of marriage in front of married people. It was a petty, almost charming kind of vengefulness.

  “Well, she was in this state and she started to obsess over the fact that I wasn’t married and that I’d go through life without anyone to take care of me and without anyone to take care of. She was getting more and more worked up. And so I just gave in and I lied to her. I told her I’d met someone and that it had been a quick decision—like in the old days.”

  “People used to do that kind of thing,” Peter said. “They’d meet and get married in two weeks.”

  “Because they weren’t allowed to have sex,” Helen said. “You’d have done the same thing if you’d been in that boat, but how many years did it take you two to get engaged?” Helen pointed at the two of us.

  “Three years,” Peter said. “A little slice of heaven!” This was an old joke between us. We’d been to an anniversary party for a couple who’d been married twenty years and this was how the man referred to their marriage—over and over, toast after toast, conversation after conversation. By the end of the evening, it sounded like a death knell. Peter and I started to use the phrase about everything—office meetings, gym workouts, trips to the grocery store—trying to keep its awfulness at bay. We’d never used the phrase to actually describe any part of our relationship,
though, and this seemed like a breach of the rules.

  “My mother and my father had gotten married like that,” Elliot said, “a couple weeks after they met. She respects decisions like that even though they got divorced.” Everyone was looking at him now and he was suddenly aware of our eyes on him. “I don’t know why I said it. It was some kind of weird impulse.” He shrugged. “I didn’t think she’d remember it when she calmed down, but she did.”

  “And now what?” Helen asked.

  “And now, of course, she’d like to meet her before she dies,” Elliot said, as if kind of mystified by his own predicament.

  “Oh, what a tangled web,” Helen said. “Tsk, tsk.”

  “If you met her, you’d understand,” Elliot said. “She’s a force. She’s unwieldy. She’s an unwieldy force.”

  “I understand mothers like that,” Helen said, scratching her wrist a little angrily.

  “Unwieldy like waves,” I said.

  “Like tsunami waves,” Elliot said.

  Helen turned to Elliot and looked at him squarely, taking on the stance of a lawyer. “So you need a wife,” she said, driving the point home.

  “I got a call from my sister today, telling me I’d better produce a wife or else.”

  “Or else what?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to piss my mother off on her deathbed,” Elliot said. “She’d haunt me the rest of my life.” It was meant to be a joke, but his voice held a somberness that couldn’t be ignored.

  “So you do want something,” Peter said. “A wife—at least temporarily.”

  “No, no,” Elliot said, shaking his head, laughing it off. “I don’t know what I’ll do really. But I don’t need a wife.”

  “But,” Peter said, “we asked you what you wanted and that is what you said.”

  “That’s not how it happened,” Elliot said. He turned to me. “Is it?” And then he answered the question himself. “No, no, that’s not how it went.”

  “Are you going to propose?” Peter asked, then he reached out and held Helen by her shoulders. “Helen, he’s going to propose to you!”