The Pretend Wife

by Bridget Asher

He nodded.

  “And you fell for her,” I said.

  “We fell and fell,” he said. “That’s what it was like … falling.”

  There was a twinge in his voice that intimated that the falling was both lovely and ruinous—like falling in love and falling into a dark hole. And I pushed myself to ask him, “Was that what it was like near the end, just before the accident? Like falling?”

  He looked up at me, startled, as if I’d broken some code—like the chirrups of the striped cusk-eel. I felt like the boy in that picture book who had the magic crayon and with it he could make things appear—I felt like I’d just drawn a large rectangle and it became a door between my father and me, an open door.

  “Yes,” he said finally and he nodded as if to say, again—that’s right. He tugged on the cord of the headphones then pressed tears from his eyes.

  I SWEATED IT ALL OUT, every last drop,” Peter said, then sniffed himself. “I feel like I’ve been steamed and pressed.” Sometimes Peter had a radio voice—like an announcer, loud, deep, fast, smooth, and worst of all, rehearsed. He was slouched on the couch, his face pointed at the ceiling, wearing a loud-striped polo, not unlike Gary’s, the fellow anesthesiologist we’d seen at the ice-cream shop. His golf cleats were sitting by the door. He’d already peeled off his socks.

  I walked past him and was soon banging around in the kitchen, soaking rice to put in the rice cooker, and scrubbing a pan of leftover lasagna that had burned at its edges. I was considering whether or not to tell him about my moment with my father. It was seismic really—in relation to every conversation about my mother that had preceded it, which always seemed small and brittle. I’d only seen my father cry at my high school graduation, though I saw nothing the least bit sad about it—I was so ready to leave. Even then, he’d complained about the gymnasium’s dust, excused himself, and headed to the men’s room in the lobby. I was afraid to tell Peter about my father’s crying that day in his dining room. I was afraid that Peter would say the wrong thing. And how could he say the right thing? I’d never been able to fully explain my relationship with my father, our relationship to my mother’s death— I’d never really tried. Even if Peter said something sweet, something like, “Poor guy. He misses her still,” that would be wrong, and I’d get angry. It wouldn’t be Peter’s fault, but that wouldn’t matter. Suddenly I’d find that the memory was clouded by some petty marital argument. I wanted to have it all to myself. This might seem like a small thing—like I’m thinking my way down a rabbit hole—but it wasn’t. It was part of our relationship, deeply embedded, this notion that each of us kept things hidden. We had private internal lives, and that’s fine, I suppose, but once two people start cordoning parts of their own lives off from each other, it’s hard to know where to stop.

  “Did you get my note?” Peter called. “Did you read the P.S.?”

  “I did,” I said.

  “Jesus, we were drunk. I still smell like coconuts.” He sighed.

  “There’s no gracious way out of it,” I said, using a spatula to dig at the encrusted noodles. “You know that.”

  “Well, who said you have to be gracious? Graciousness is something southerners do. Your parents were raised in Massachusetts and mine were from Connecticut. We don’t have to be gracious or drink mint juleps or admire seersucker. It’s part of our geographical rights.”

  I walked around the corner of the kitchen still holding a sudsy pot. “Baltimore is technically below the Mason-Dixon line. Plus, southern or not, I gave my word.”

  “I don’t think that’s as important as it used to be.” He rubbed his bare feet on the rug. He’d developed his golfer’s tan—the one that concentrates on the shins and calves and leaves the feet so pristinely white.

  “My word isn’t as important as it used to be?” I squinted at him.

  “You know what I mean. The whole concept of giving your word. It’s very last century. In fact, ever since Vietnam …” There was no need for him to finish this thought. We both knew his post-Vietnam speeches—how the war had made it necessary for Americans to reinvent literature and politics and a sense of ourselves. It was something he’d learned from an inspiring professor he’d had in college and trotted out gratuitously.

  I leaned against the doorway, the dishpan getting heavy and feeling awkward in my hands. There was a photograph of my mother on the table beside him. It was a picture of her as a young woman, before she met my father, dressed up for some formal, wearing a spaghetti strapped dress, holding a beaded purse. She wasn’t smiling at the camera; she was really laughing, her eyes glancing at someone or something off to the side of the photographer. Her teeth overlapped just slightly but they looked so beautiful, ivory, and she wore a choker with a little blue stone that sat right in the dip between her collarbones. I’d gotten used to the photograph and usually didn’t register it, but every once in a while, it would catch me off guard like this, and I would think of my mother as a young woman, so alive. “I don’t think that giving your word is a concept at all. It’s just giving your word. Does everything have to be a concept?”

  “But you’re not a rental car,” he said, smiling, holding up one victorious finger. “You said that!”

  “I know,” I said, turning back into the kitchen. “But I’m going.”

  “To his mother’s lake house?” There was a pause and then finally he said, “Why? Why would you go?”

  “I thought you weren’t going to be uptight about this,” I said, standing at the sink.

  “Don’t get on me with all of that uptight shit. Leave that kind of mind-game bullshit to Helen. Besides, I think she tricked you into this.”

  I squirted a bit more liquid soap into the dishpan, turned on the faucet, and let it fill up. The soap foamed. I turned off the faucet. “I said I’d go and I think I should.”

  “Oh, so people can’t have second thoughts? I thought it was a woman’s prerogative to change her mind.”

  I ignored this comment. “And, you know, second of all, let’s not forget that you wanted me to go.”

  I hoped he would walk into the kitchen, to have this argument face-to-face. I know that I could have stopped scrubbing and walked into the living room and sat down and looked at him earnestly. But he wasn’t doing anything in there except letting his pale feet breathe. I refused to stop what I was doing to sit with him and talk seriously. Plus, I was afraid it would give the conversation too much weight. Neither of us wanted that. “Okay, so you might not have changed your mind, but what if I have?”

  I lowered my hand into the silky bubbles. “Well, isn’t that a little womanly of you?” As soon as I said it, I felt bad about it. I added quickly, “There’s a boathouse and box turtles and a horseshoe pit,” I said. “I wanted to get away, you said that.”

  “You could get away with your girlfriends,” he said. “Like Faith. Now, Faith needs to get away. That would be an equally good deed, getting Faith away for a weekend.”

  “You don’t get to tell me to do something,” I said, “and then tell me not to do it. You don’t even get to tell me what to do in the first place.” I slipped dirty plates into the dishwasher slots.

  “I know that!” he said, as if this were a good-husband fundamental. “It’s just that I don’t think it’s the best idea.” There was a long pause. I suppose he was letting it all settle in. “Maybe I’m jealous.”

  I walked back into the living room, my hands glistening with soap. “Are you jealous?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” he said, putting his hands behind his head and stretching his back. It was a cocky pose. Wasn’t jealousy supposed to make you vulnerable?

  “I didn’t know you got jealous,” I said. And this was true. He seemed to be missing that genetic coding. I walked back into the kitchen. “It’s just pretend. You can only be pretend jealous over a pretend thing.”

  “You can get out of this,” he said. “Just call Elliot and tell him you can’t. You’re busy.”

  “I’ve already talked to him,” I said,
though this wasn’t true. I wasn’t even sure he had my phone number.

  “You have? Did he call?”

  “Yep, and he’s setting it up. He already told his mother.” I decided to let the dishpan soak. I wedged coffee mugs into the washer’s upper deck.

  “That fucker,” Peter said.

  “He called while you were golfing,” I said. “Golf takes a very long time.” Did I feel guilty about lying? Not really. I don’t know why exactly. Maybe because when you lie out of anger, it feels more like righting an injustice. And what was the injustice? Peter was trying to tell me what to do, while pretending not to. And more important, he didn’t think I was the kind of person to do something like this—and Helen was? Regardless, I didn’t like to be pigeonholed.

  “Did he really call—already?” he asked.

  “Yep.” I sprinkled the detergent into its compartments and shut the dishwasher’s heavy door.

  “But I still smell like coconuts,” he said, more to himself than to me. “Did you set a date?”

  “Not yet, but it’ll be soon.” I closed a few cabinet doors.

  “Why do you have to rush? There’s no rush!” he said, and I loved him at that moment—his voice didn’t sound anything like a radio announcer. It was hitched with emotion—there was a boyish whine to it, yes, but it was an honest one. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d sounded so honest.

  I paused, trying to hold on to that love, trying to let it burrow down inside of me. But I couldn’t. It was made of air. It evaporated. And then I said, “Elliot’s mother’s dying. That’s the rush.” I hit the start button on the dishwasher. The room filled with the noise of nozzles spraying water. I said, “She’s on her deathbed,” even though I knew he couldn’t hear me.

  ELLIOT AND I DID eventually talk on the phone, a number of times, and although we said a lot of words, our conversations never covered much ground. He kept asking if this whole thing was okay, if it was really okay, with me, with Peter. I assured him it was fine. He told me again and again that I didn’t have to come, that he needed to grow up, that he’d have to tell his mother the truth and that this would be good for him, like the time he was forced to eat the vegetables that he’d balled in a napkin and tried to hide in the sofa once when he was a kid. “I learned something from that. I grew as a person. I haven’t hidden vegetables in a sofa for years,” he said.

  “The question is a philosophical one, isn’t it?” I asked. “Does something that is wrong, like lying, become right if done for a good cause?”

  “I could give you a semester-long answer to that,” he said.

  “Do you have an abridged version that runs a sentence or two?”

  “I know how to philosophize abstractly, but not how to apply it to my life. Is that short enough?”

  “Very succinct,” I said. “I guess I believe that the ends can sometimes justify the means. This is important to your mother?”

  “It is,” he said, then paused. “It was irrational that I said it in the first place. And I don’t know why I then confessed it at the party. But here we are. You’ve said you’re coming out to the lake house and I’ve given you every chance to back out. And so, regardless of the ends, I like the means. Is that fair to say?”

  That was fair to say. I liked the means too, but didn’t say so. We made our arrangements quickly after that, as if we were both afraid it would fall through if we talked about it too much. He was heading out to the lake house after his Thursday-morning graduate philosophy seminar that week. We arranged that he’d meet me at the train on Saturday around noon. Even if I was a pretend wife, there was a rush, after all. His mother was real and really dying.

  I had lunch scheduled with Faith and Helen midweek. We ate salads topped with goat cheese, tart apples, dried blueberries. I complained about the graphs that Eila made me show the clients. “Can you believe I have a job that involves graphs?”

  Faith rolled her eyes. She was in banking.

  “You should be having lunch with women who make delightful references to Jane Austen,” Helen said. She was always trying to convince me to go into some other more artistic line of work, something that deserved me, as she put it. And even though this comment was part of a larger speech that was meant to be empowering, I always took it as a scolding. I lacked the something to be an artist—a specific passion? Necessary conviction? Heart? I didn’t know what I was lacking, but I wasn’t going to find it today, and definitely not this weekend. By Helen’s definition, she wasn’t lacking. Her work as a magazine editor was artistic. She said it gave her plenty of room for creativity.

  “I can make references to Mr. Darcy,” Faith said defensively. “If that’s what you’re looking for. But I’m more of a Fitzgerald girl—Daisy and her shirts, his love affair with Zelda. She burned all of his clothes in a hotel bathtub. I should try that sometime.”

  “I don’t know that Zelda should be a role model,” I said. “Let’s remember that she also went insane and did the asylum circuit.”

  “How’s Jason?” Helen asked, sipping a glass of white wine. “Have you forgiven him?”

  “He’s a shit-head,” Faith said. “It’s who he is. As much as he apologizes for something he’s done wrong, he can’t really apologize for his own nature.”

  “That’s harsh,” Helen said. “But, you know … I hate to say this, but it’s probably very wise.”

  “I’m confused,” I said. “Does that mean you’ve forgiven him or not?”

  “It means I’ve accepted him,” she said, swirling her water glass distractedly. “I’m pretty sure that that’s what marriage demands.”

  “You accept that Jason is a shit-head?” I said.

  She nodded. “I knew it going into the marriage.”

  “Does he know this?” Helen asked.

  “What? That he’s a shit-head?” Faith asked. “I think that’s self-evident. He does have a basic self-awareness.”

  “But does he know that you think he’s a shit-head?” Helen said.

  “It’s one of the fundamental underpinnings of our relationship.”

  “So you don’t have to have a conversation that lasts a lifetime to have a healthy marriage?” Helen asked, stabbing a cherry tomato with her fork. “That’s a relief!”

  “I thought you wanted me to read that at your wedding,” I said.

  “Ah, and this brings us to Elliot Hull—” Helen said.

  “Wait,” Faith interrupted, putting down her fork. “Elliot Hull? From college? The brooder?”

  Faith, in her rage, hadn’t recognized Elliot when she’d stormed into the party, so there was some information to fill in. I told some of the story, and then Helen took over, explaining what had happened on the balcony. Faith glanced back and forth between us, interrupting, making us back up, clarify. Between the two of us, we jerked the narration around, but every time we got things mixed up, she’d make us put things back in linear order. Faith could be an unbearable stickler, a miserable person to tell a story to. She was the kind of hyperbright person who, during a movie, asked idiotic questions that no one yet knew the answers to because the movie hadn’t yet revealed all of its plot.

  When we’d finally explained the story to her standards, she sat back in her chair and took a deep breath. “Are you still going to be his pretend wife?” Faith asked.

  “I said I would.”

  “It’s too strange,” Faith said. “Didn’t you two date somewhat insanely right before we graduated?”

  “Just for a couple of weeks and then he got back together with his old girlfriend.”

  “Now this I did not know. This changes everything,” Helen said, grinning with malicious delight.

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Yes, it does!” Helen said, tapping her fork on her plate like a little gavel. “I must have felt that, though. I must have known it.”

  “Does Peter know that you two dated?” Faith asked, always a bottom-liner.

  I shook my head.

  “Really?” Helen
said. “You haven’t told him? Shouldn’t you? I mean, I don’t know a thing about the rules of marriage, but isn’t this withholding evidence?”

  “I’m not saying you should tell him,” Faith said. “I just think it’s interesting that you haven’t. That’s all.”

  “You should still go,” Helen said.

  “Why do you think she should go?” Faith asked Helen. “Enlighten me.”

  “Do you think life just goes around handing out really rich life experiences like party favors? Sometimes one thing leads to another, in all of these unexpected ways. And people who shouldn’t really even know each other get tied together in one unexpected way or another and you should follow it out.”

  “Rich life experiences!” Faith said. “What’s wrong with dull? What’s wrong with normal? Ever since Edward was born, that’s all I want. I don’t want rich. I just want healthy, fine, good.”

  “Well,” Helen said, “I don’t want normal.” She looked at me very seriously. “You should do it because it’s interesting. And, if you want the bottom line, life isn’t always interesting. Later, after it’s over, you can take it apart.”

  “Once again, I’d like to say that there’s something to be said for a life that isn’t interesting,” Faith said. “I like it when there isn’t a lot to take apart—or glue back together.”

  “I’m going because I told him I would,” I said. “It’s a weekend at a lake house with his dying mother. That’s it.”

  “Well, now you’ll have two husbands,” Helen said. “And I’ve decided that I’m not going to have any. I’m done.”

  “Again?” Faith said, with an edge to her voice. It wasn’t the first time Helen had sworn off men, but still, Faith could be judgmental and not particularly adept at hiding it. Truth was, Helen and I had both confessed that we were more than a little afraid of Faith sometimes, mainly because she was usually right, and so had little experience with—or patience for—people who had to struggle toward a decision. I had the feeling that rights and wrongs presented themselves in Faith’s mind automatically.