The Pretend Wife

by Bridget Asher

  And, later, as I was learning that it was insufficient, I knew that I was asking too much of him. I’d signed on for his love in packets. And, the truth was, we’d have passed any marital test—from a psychologist to a Cosmo quiz. We made each other laugh. We had enough good sex and regularly so. We liked the same foods and complimented each other’s haircuts and flirted enough to keep things going. We never intentionally put each other down—not with real malicious intent. We looked compatible on paper too. We had our degrees, and though I’d flopped around a good bit job-wise, he was supportive. We finished each other’s sentences some, but we took turns so it was fair. We didn’t squabble in public, and we barely ever squabbled at all. And we never had real fights; we aren’t screamers. We both liked a tidy enough house. Neither of us were especially good dancers. We liked each other’s friends, more or less. We shopped well together. He was still an inch and a half taller than I was when I wore my highest heels. Old couples smiled at us in restaurants as if we reminded them of the happy, younger versions of themselves. We were, by all accounts, lovely to be with, a sweet couple that looked nice together walking into a room.

  I knew that there were many women out there who would have said: It’s enough already. Be happy with what you have. They were right—and wrong.

  THE DAY AFTER THE party, Peter got up early to round out a foursome in golf. There was a note posted on the fridge that read:

  G—

  I’m going golfing with three guys from work. I’m a last-minute fill-in for the wounded. I’ll be back—in golf years—just in time for your thirty-fifth birthday.

  XO

  P.S. Pretending to be someone else’s wife? What were we thinking?

  Golf years is a long-standing joke. Golf years are longer than dog years and Monday Night Football years combined. I’ve never played so I don’t understand how golf—a supposed sport—can move so slowly, take so long, and still call itself a sport. Supposedly Peter’s a very good golfer, which would lead one to believe he could do it faster than other golfers. But that’s not how it works. If I knew Peter at all—and I did, in my way—I knew that he was using the inside golf joke to offset two things: 1. that he’d be gone for the bulk of the day and 2. that he wanted to get out of the agreement we’d made on the balcony. He’d woken up that morning and decided it was drunken foolishness, no longer a good idea, and he wanted to make sure I felt the same. I spent the morning nursing my hangover, and wondering just how Peter—with his impeccable manners—was going to suggest I get out of pretending to be Elliot’s wife. And I realized that I didn’t want to be talked out of it.

  It was a Sunday and, in keeping with my usual Sunday plans, I headed to my father’s around lunchtime to check in. Sometimes Peter came with me on these quick visits, but usually he opted to stay at home. My father always asked about him when he wasn’t there. Not that he took it personally that Peter didn’t come; he really just preferred to have Peter along to break the unsettling tension between him and me—our long history of the unsaid.

  The street where I grew up lonesomely was overgrown with thick hulking oaks, bushy hedges, and tough green lawns of hearty Bermuda grass. The houses were large but tired, worn. They almost all wore the old asbestos shingles, having been built in the late sixties. Aged basketball hoops with rusting bolts were attached to their garages. The Fogelmans had a gardener who kept their yard tidy, and in addition, they worked on the yard themselves, as hobbyists. My father’s house looked dejected by comparison. The roof was pale and the shingles warped. The paint on the garage doors was peeling. One shutter of an upstairs window had come unhitched and now it tilted like an errant eyebrow. It was the kind of yard that Eila would have cursed at—“This house has the curb appeal of a puckered cat’s ass”—just before ringing the bell and putting on her slightly British, faux artistic accent for the prospective clients.

  I was standing in the front yard, stalled there, when Lucy-Jane, the Fogelmans’ cocker spaniel, trotted up to sniff my shoes. I bent down to pet her head. “Little Lu,” I said, “what are you doing so far from home?” She was an older dog with sad, wet eyes. The Fogelmans hadn’t bobbed her tail so it fanned out behind her somewhat majestically.

  “Lucy-Jane!” I heard Mrs. Fogelman calling out and then she appeared through a stand of trees. She was wearing flowered gardening gloves and had a rubber kneeling pad tucked under one arm.

  “Oh, Gwen!” she said and then yelled over her shoulder, “Benny! Come here and say hello! It’s Gwen!”

  “Gwen!” Dr. Fogelman shouted, and then he too was there amid the branches. He was wearing a shirt so similar to the one Peter had worn the night before that I wanted to take a picture to have some proof of the stodginess.

  I hadn’t seen the two of them in a few months, but they looked much older, which can happen with older people as well as with little kids—a change that takes you by surprise. Dr. Fogelman’s chest looked like it had shrunk a bit, and his paunch looked more affected by gravity, and Mrs. Fogelman was hale but a little more hunched in her shoulders—like an aging wrestler. I loved the Fogelmans wholeheartedly, maybe because they treated my appearances with some of the spectacle of a celebrity spotting.

  “Hi,” I said, “your yard looks great!”

  “Extra hours,” Dr. Fogelman said. “Don’t commit the crime if you can’t do the time!”

  Mrs. Fogelman gave him an angry glance as if this were some reference to their marriage, then she smiled at me. “You look lovely, as always!” she said.

  “Per usual!” Dr. Fogelman added.

  I picked up Lucy-Jane and carried her to them. “How’s the old man been these days?” I asked. They kept tabs on my father, and we talked this way about him from time to time and he knew it. He called us conspirators, in a joking way.

  “Well, you won’t believe that I invited him over to the same dinner as a single friend of mine from church. Her name is Louise. She’s lovely.”

  “She’s fine,” Dr. Fogelman amended.

  “She’s quite lovely,” Mrs. Fogelman corrected him.

  “And?” I said.

  “That’s the end of the story,” Dr. Fogelman said. “I told her not to meddle.”

  “I wasn’t meddling. I invited two people to dinner. Is that meddling, Gwen?”

  “No, I think that’s nice. Is Louise interested in fish? That’s the question,” I said.

  “No one’s interested in fish like your dad’s interested in fish,” Mrs. Fogelman said.

  “Fishes!” Dr. Fogelman added. “If I’ve learned anything living next to a marine biologist all these years, it’s that it’s correct to say fishes!”

  I handed Lucy-Jane over to Mrs. Fogelman. “Well, thanks for keeping an eye on my dad,” I said.

  “Oh, please,” Mrs. Fogelman said. “It’s nothing. If I make too much soup, I bring it over. That’s all.” I’ve always wondered if Mrs. Fogelman didn’t love my father a little—or was it that she saw him as a compelling tragic figure? A sad romantic leading man?

  “Soup’s good for him,” Dr. Fogelman said. “I heard a statistic on the radio that married men live longer, but I don’t see how in hell that could be true!”

  Mrs. Fogelman hit him with her rubber kneeling pad.

  “Talk to you later,” I said.

  They waved good-bye identically.

  As I made my way across my father’s haggard lawn, I wondered if Dr. Fogelman would outlive my father. Did wives really just feed their husbands well or did they know how to ease their hearts in some way elemental to longevity?

  I knocked on the door while walking in. The house was as depressing inside as it was out. The window sills were littered with the dust of dead moths. The battered couches were arranged stiffly—not organically shifted because of actual use, but under the direction of a widower who had few guests. The dining room table had been sacrificed for my father’s recording equipment so that he could listen to tracks of soniferous fishes, studying them, making notations. His current pro
ject involved working with a network of marine biologists interested in creating a National Archive of Fish Sounds in the Library of Natural Sounds at Cornell. If my father were a prospective client, Eila would have pushed for a complete move-out with 100 percent furniture rentals, plus a handyman and cleaning crew. “The entire package! Without it, my hands would be tied! And how can an artiste make art with her hands tied?” she’d say with a feverish lilt to her voice.

  It’s not lost on me that I’ve wandered into this job—staging homes for sale. I love the idea that you can take a ramshackle house that’s been sorely ignored and nurture it back to health. “This is all about psychology,” Eila had told me time and again. “We want to make a home that says: ‘Here, you’ll love your family. Here, you’ll be love.’ It isn’t about art as much as it is about the definition of love.”

  I wondered what the house was like when my mother brought me home from the hospital. The trees were small and scrawny then—I’ve seen the saplings in photos. When I was younger, I asked Mrs. Fogelman if she saw my mother pushing a stroller, gardening in the yard, putting up new curtains. What did she do? Mrs. Fogelman told me, time and again, “She knit. You had hats and sweaters and blankets. She knit and knit. She could have knit that whole house, I think. She was serious about it.” But I’ve never seen anything that looks like homemade knitting in the house—not a throw, not a scarf, not a Christmas stocking. Nothing.

  Did my mother nurture this house? Was it a place that said, Here, you’ll love your family. Here, you’ll be loved? Or did it already have this air about it—this stubborn air of grief? “Sadness is palpable,” Eila has said to me. “I’ve seen houses so sad that I think the only cure would be to burn them down.”

  The smell of fried bologna hung in the air. “I’m cooking!” my father called out from the kitchen. “In here!”

  He always cooked for our Sunday lunches—tuna-fish casseroles, grilled cheeses, watery tomato soup, fish sticks, mashed potatoes from the boxed flakes, and bologna. On special occasions, around one of our birthdays, he’d make small, eggy fried salmon cakes from the can. That was the sum of his repertoire.

  He was standing in front of the stove, cutting pleats into the fried bologna. It was an elderly gas stove with only one burner that still lit automatically. The others had to be lit with a match. He was a little stooped, aging by way of a winnowing of his shoulders and sinking in of his chest. When he saw me, he looked up from his cooking and in a moment of self-awareness, he combed the wispy hair on his head as if making an attempt to gussy up. I walked over and kissed his cheek. “How are you doing?” I said, putting my purse on the table.

  “I’m fine. I spent the morning listening to a colleague’s Ophidion marginatum.” He still used Latin names for things in the hopes that I’d learn them.

  “Speak English please,” I said.

  “The striped cusk-eel. Great work being done in Cape Cod and New Bedford, and he’s got an undergrad collecting eel vocalizations in Manhattan, right in the Hudson.”

  “Eels in Manhattan,” I said. “Sounds like an off-off-off-Broadway thing.”

  “It’s way-off-Broadway. I’m lending my ear, helping with identifications.” He put two circles of bologna on Wonder bread for me. The mustard and mayonnaise were already on the table. We shuffled around each other, preparing our sandwiches. Then we sat down, right there, our plates set on the rubber place mats. As side dishes, he’d set out jars of pickles and olives and a bar of jalapeño cheese.

  “You look a little peaked,” he said.

  “Peter and I ran into an old friend of mine from college. We drank too much.”

  “Oh, college friends,” he said. “My students drink too much. They really do. I had to go to some meeting recently about binge drinking on campus—as if I can do anything about that.” My father’s students were good for him. They gave him a small tether to the outside world. Because of them, he’d sometimes know that a certain band had come to town, that people were wearing their pants very low on their hips, and he understood cultural concepts like date rape and beer pong.

  I thought about how to bring up Elliot. I wanted to talk about him, to confide something—maybe about the way he confused me. If I had a mother, would this have been the kind of thing we’d have talked about in hushed tones while pretending to take a little tour of her new garden out back?

  I knew that I couldn’t say anything that intimate to my father. If I were to say that I was considering pretending to be Elliot’s wife for the sake of his dying mother, my father would have taken a big bite of his bologna, nodded, and then licked one finger, using it to pick up bread crumbs on his plate. Eventually, he might say something like, “Oh, I wouldn’t know anything about that.” But he’d have said it so late that it would have seemed like he was bringing it back up, which would be more awkward than if he’d said nothing at all.

  But Elliot was an academic and I knew that academia was safe. I said, “The old college friend is named Hull, Elliot Hull. He’s a professor at Hopkins now.”

  “What department?” my father asked.

  “Philosophy,” I said.

  “Ah, one of the thinkers,” he said, by which he meant that Elliot wasn’t one of the doers. My father had divided all of academia into two parts—thinkers and doers. My father considered himself a doer.

  Lunch was brief. My father didn’t believe in lingering over meals—there was too much to do as a doer. But he asked me, as he often did, if I wanted to listen to some talking fish. Sometimes I could do this, and sometimes I couldn’t bear to—the constant shushing of water, the chirrups and croaks and coos, all sounded like laments to me. Sometimes it was just too hard because I would allow myself the hideous indulgence of the imagination—my mother underwater.

  But today I didn’t want to rush back to the apartment, to Peter and his golf bags, and his ideas on how to get out of our pact with Elliot Hull. I said, “Let’s listen to some eels.”

  My father concentrated on fishes on the East Coast, where 150 species can vocalize. I’ve listened to the bumps and ticks of haddock calls, the guttural detonations of their spawning, the creaking of toad fish, the sounds of whales creating walls of bubbles to trap fish and feed. I’ve listened to fish all my life—buzzing, groaning, grunting, purring, honking, cooing like pigeons. My father insists that they’re exchanging information about predators, that they’re being aggressive sometimes and other times courtly and wooing. He believes that they throw angry fits and scold and that they even grieve. Once he told me that they talk about all the things that we talk about. I was probably ten, and I already knew that we didn’t seem to talk about all of the things he claimed fishes did.

  My father clamped the oversized headphones onto my head. At first, everything was muffled, and then the ocean rolled in, the movement of waves—and finally eels. Their chirrups came in rapid succession, not unlike squirrels. I looked up at my father, who was standing and pacing.

  “What do you think?” he asked. “Don’t they sound good? Clear? Don’t they sound like they’re here, right in the room with you?”

  For some reason, this made me want to cry. I took off the headphones and set them on the table. “They sound happy,” I said. “They sound like happy squirrels.”

  “I’ll write that down,” he said. “That’s nicely descriptive.”

  I watched him jot in his notepad, then I turned and looked out of the old aluminum sliding door that led to the deck with its gray boards. “I want you to tell me,” I said.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I want you to tell me something,” I said.

  “What is it?” he said, concerned now.

  “Anything. Tell me anything about her.”

  He stopped then, knowing that I was talking about my mother. “I’ve told you a lot,” he said.

  “Let me tell you something,” I said, still looking out the door. “I had this childhood fear that because she’d died when I was young that she wouldn’t recognize me in heaven
and that we’d never meet.”

  “I didn’t know you believed in heaven.”

  “I know, I know. You didn’t teach me to believe in things like that, but still I was afraid of that for a long time.”

  “You should have told me.”

  “No, I shouldn’t have because you’d have only given me some scientist’s denunciation of heaven.”

  He thought about this for a moment. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re probably right.”

  “You tell me something now.” I was thinking about Elliot, what it had been like to meet him at the icebreaker, his critique of my shoes, how he picked up Ellen Maddox and swung her around, what it had been like when he laid down on my blanket on the green that spring. What was my parents’ story? I didn’t know anything, really. I’d come back to Elliot’s phrase that marriage was a conversation that should last a lifetime. Had my mother and father had a conversation that could have lasted if it hadn’t been stopped short? Did the conversation end unfinished? I didn’t even know how the conversation had begun. “How did you meet?” I asked.

  “We met at a dance,” my father said. “People often meet at dances. I told you all that, though.”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” I said. “What song was playing when you asked her to dance?”

  “I didn’t ask your mother to dance,” he said. “I don’t know how to dance.”

  “Then what did you do?” I turned around to face him.

  He picked up the headphones from the table. I worried for a moment that he was going to sit down and put them on. He didn’t. He just held them. “I asked her to leave the dance,” he said, “with me.”

  I sat down at the head of the table. “That’s romantic,” I said.

  “Your mother was romantic,” he said. “She fell for it.”

  “She fell for you,” I said.