A Circle of Wives

by Alice LaPlante

  “That’s what we’d have to determine,” the girl says. “Your husband was a complex man. He probably died for complex reasons. When we understand why he died, we’ll have a good handle on who did it.”

  I am impressed by this. I try to look serious despite the fact that this girl, this woman in a position of authority, is again playing with the toad, pressing down on its cloth eyelids to make them close over its ominous black plastic eyes. She catches me watching her and blushes again. She puts down the toad firmly, at a distance, as if trying to avoid temptation.

  “Do you mind if I ask you some more questions?” she asks. “I’d like you to fill in some pieces of the puzzle.”

  “Not at all,” I say, with what I hope indicates my respect and willingness despite my suspicions that the interview is being modeled on those she’s seen on television. “Although at most I have twenty minutes left today. I may be able to squeeze you in tomorrow if you’re not finished.”

  She nods, picks up the recorder and points it toward me. “What was the state of your relationship with John Taylor?” she asks in a slightly louder voice, I assume for the benefit of the recording.

  “Very amicable. Very . . . harmonious,” I say. The latter word is not quite appropriate, but I want to communicate the solidity of my relationship with John. I feel surprisingly calm talking about him. I’ve been avoiding the subject, worried about flailing emotionally in public. But I feel grounded and logical speaking on the subject today—that could be because of the hospital setting, the fact that in no time I will have to go back to reviewing charts and lab results of dying children. I’ve put myself in self-protective mode.

  “When was the last time you saw John Taylor?”

  “Two weeks prior to his death,” I say. It had been a bittersweet visit, or perhaps I’m only remembering it that way because of all that has happened since. I’ll never know, now. My most precious memories, corrupted by events beyond my control.

  “He flew in Friday morning, so we had dinner at La Scala, our local Italian restaurant near our—my—condo. Then went home to bed,” I say.

  “Were you intimate that night?” the detective asks, and looks away, not making eye contact.

  “Is this really something you have to know?” I ask, and when she nods, I tell her “Yes, in fact we were.” Then shut my mouth. No one need know what went on between John and me in private. I am not being sentimental when I say I don’t believe I’ll ever see the like of those nights again.

  She goes to speak, then hesitates. “Did he . . . did he act differently in any way? Say anything unusual?”

  “No,” I say. “But if I’m not mistaken, his mood was tinged with melancholy. Mine was, too.” I remember now that was the week the Meekle boy finally died. “I had lost a patient the morning he arrived. That might account for my associations.”

  “I’m sorry,” says the detective, and she sounds like she means it.

  “It had been coming for a while,” I say. But these things tend to depress me despite my best efforts. I always analyze cases for anything I could have done differently, anything that might have changed the outcome. It’s a sobering habit, but it keeps me honest. In the Meekle case, however, the poor child wasn’t diagnosed until he was stage 4 and metastatic. Just sixteen. His father was one of the what-won’t-kill-you-makes-you-stronger types and had forced his son to keep playing football despite the dreadful pain he was having in his legs, didn’t take him to a doctor until after the season was over. “I could just kill some of these parents,” I say, and then, “Oh, don’t take me literally. Only an expression.”

  “And the rest of that visit?” she asks.

  “We had a quiet, if short, weekend,” I tell her. “Typically, John would come down on a Wednesday or Thursday. He taught a seminar that met every third Friday for a full day, and he’d stay until Sunday night. This time we only had Saturday together. He came in Friday to teach his class, and flew back to San Francisco Sunday morning. That was the last time I saw him.”

  I remember, although I don’t tell her this, the sense of anticipation, mournful anticipation, that had been building all weekend. I had a feeling he had come down specifically to see me, his seminar notwithstanding, and that he had something important to say, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do so. By Sunday morning we were both somber, the mood having taken a decided downturn for no reason I could put my finger on.

  The detective is watching me. She’s sharp, this one. I see her making a mark in her notebook.

  “Saturday we went to the Getty. Not for the art, which is wretched, but to wander around the buildings, have coffee in the café,” I say. “That night we stayed in. I cooked a chicken curry, we each had our journals to read, and we did what doctors like us rarely do—nothing.”

  She nods but doesn’t say anything.

  “I’m not being much help to your investigation,” I say, breaking the silence. Then, “I don’t believe John was murdered. Maybe I don’t want to believe it. He deserved a better end.”

  What do I want to believe? I wonder. That I wasn’t such a dupe. All of us, dupes. Each woman thinking we had a man when we only had a piece of him. If that. The most mortifying part is that having just a part of him suited me fine. I suppose I’m easily pleased.

  “You said, before, in our first telephone interview, that you hadn’t anticipated such intense emotion—I believe the word was ecstasy—when you got married,” the detective says. I cringe. Did I really say that? I must have been in a state. “Can you explain that further?” she asks.

  “You have to understand, I said that right after the . . . incident,” I say. Then more firmly, “Right after John died, I wasn’t completely sane. Not completely myself.”

  “What would you say now?”

  I think, but all I can come up with is, “Our relationship was cordial.”

  The young detective looks disappointed.

  “Would John have described your relationship that way?” She seems to be hoping for something, and I’m afraid I disappoint her again when I say. “It was mutually satisfying.” This is even worse than cordial, but I let it stand.

  “How do you reconcile your experience with the fact that Dr. Taylor had two other wives?” she asks.

  It takes me much longer to answer this one. I frankly don’t have the words. When the silence grows too long, I tell her the truth. “I can’t,” I say. “I’ll never be able to.”

  It’s my turn to reach down and pick up the toad. The trilling sounds in the quiet room until I hold it firmly to my chest with both arms like I teach my youngest children. When you hold it to your heart it stops its crying.

  The detective hesitates, then says, almost shyly, “So the hurt. It’s bad?”

  I stall for a few beats. How much of myself to reveal? The detective isn’t looking at me; she is giving me some privacy. “Almost terminal,” I say, finally, echoing words I’d spoken to a mother and father only two hours earlier. I put the toad down and the minute it is released from my arms it shrills its high wail. The children adore this; they think it signifies the power of their love. Only I know it doesn’t feed on love but pain.

  26

  Helen

  IT’S ABOUT TO STORM OUTSIDE, the wind blowing so hard against the sliding doors to the living room that I fear the glass is going to crack. The palm trees edging the property whip back and forth on their slender trunks. The clouds have yet to break, however—there’s not a drop of moisture in the air. A dry despair to the landscape.

  I’ve never thought of myself as an insomniac despite the fact that I rarely get more than four or five hours of sleep. I stay up late and wake early. Rather, I tell myself I don’t need much sleep. I’ve simply got too many things to do to waste precious time unconscious. When John was with me, we’d go to bed together, then, after he was safely snoring—he was a terrible snorer—I’d quietly leave the bedroom to read my journals or do paperwork. Whatever my marriage did to me, it didn’t change my sense of urgency
that there is work to be done, data to absorb, knowledge to acquire.

  But since John’s death I’ve been ghosting at night in a different kind of way. Not able to sleep even three hours, yet not being productive with the extra time, either. The urgency not to waste a moment completely dissipated. There are still sick children’s charts to review, journal articles to read and write, as many emails to sort through, prioritize, and answer. Only now I am realizing that all these years I’ve worked my way into exhaustion out of fear. Fear of the void that only sleep or work can fill and which stretches out in front of me now. The nighttime has turned into a deep empty vessel that I must fill drop by drop.

  I sit in the armchair, John’s favorite, the one he would drag onto the balcony. The curtains are open. Light from the window illuminates the palm trees and their contortions in the wind. Beyond them, inky blackness.

  I stand, and walk to the kitchen to make myself a cup of hot water—I don’t even bother steeping a tea bag in it, my inability to taste grows worse in times of stress. I sip it as I move to my office, sit down at my laptop, open a patient’s file, then leave it there. I go back to the armchair, calculating probabilities, couching the odds, wondering whether to get dressed and make a trip to the twenty-four-hour Rite Aid on Mulholland. Back to the kitchen for another cup of hot water. Then to the bathroom for the twentieth time this evening, staring at the white stick lying on the counter, at the pink plus sign displayed at one end of it.

  I go to my computer, and click to the manufacturer’s website again, to the FAQs, looking for the chance that the birth control pills I have been taking every day since I met John could fail. The label was very clear. Less than 1 out of 100 women will get pregnant each year if they always take the pill each day as directed. That should be reassuring, except for one word. Always. I read the next sentence. About 9 out of 100 women will get pregnant each year if they don’t always take the pill each day as directed. Don’t always. Don’t now being the operative word.

  As a physician, I understand the importance of the words, as directed. And from my own medical studies know that this means taking the pill at the same time every day. Which I always had done. Except once. One inexplicable day when I left the house without turning the wheel around and popping out the little pink pill. Thinking of John arriving that morning for his twice-monthly stint. Looking forward to seeing him in my ward, where he had agreed to consult for a child with a benign but disfiguring facial tumor. I realized about halfway through my rounds that I had forgotten. So I took the pill that evening when John and I finally got home after dinner out. Assuming that what every medical intern would recommend is good advice—take a missed medication within twelve hours and you are probably all right. Probably. Compared to always.

  I’ve seen so many test results that spelled death for a child, and now to have one that means life.

  But a surprise this isn’t. I’ve always been regular, can predict my period almost to the hour every twenty-eight days, since I was fourteen. So I’ve known for almost two months. I knew the week before John’s last visit in late April. Yet I said nothing, and put off taking the test. Deniability. Isn’t that what lawyers call it? After all, that last weekend John was here, I didn’t officially know, so I couldn’t tell him. Now I do. And the landscape has altered, is full of strange eruptions and abruptions. I may as well be on the far side of the moon for how it relates to life as I have always known it.

  27

  MJ

  DEATH. I’VE BEEN CLOSE TO it several times. My grandparents. My mother. Now John. But my first encounter with death was also my strangest. It was also my first tangle with the law.

  I was twelve, Thomas was ten. We were in and out of the woods all the time, like the other kids were. We had our secret paths and hiding spots and remnants of forts we’d been building and tearing down since we could barely walk. The Smoky Mountains weren’t the near-holy grounds that the hikers and campers and environmentalists worshipped, but one huge playground for our games. None of their dark corners held any fear for us, and we’d laugh at the hikers laden with gear who wouldn’t go near the forest without being completely provisioned with the right hiking boots, the right jackets, the latest high-tech tents. So dumb they couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with the instructions written on it.

  One day, Thomas came home terribly excited. He and his friend Andy dragged me into the woods to a homeless man’s camp. The poor old guy had died sitting half propped up against a tree. There was a rudimentary home, a shelter made of branches, the remains of a bonfire, some tattered odds and ends. My brother and Andy were absolutely entranced by the whole scene. They made a point of raiding the dead man’s provisions, looking at his dirty magazines, cooking a can of his beans in his fire pit, eating it using his utensils. Pretending they were outlaws, and that he was one of their gang who had been shot. I was disgusted. Among other things, it stank to high heaven, but they just wrapped cloths around their noses, and kept going, the dead body an incredibly exciting addition to their role-playing games. They kept this up for a week or so. Then, I don’t know whose idea it was, it could well have been Thomas’s, they decided to bring home an arm. Halloween was a few weeks away, and what they did with this arm you can imagine, two boys of a certain age with such a prize.

  I remember most trying to stand up to Thomas when he came home with that gruesome limb, urging him to take it back to the woods, to forget about the whole business. Instead, I helped fill the huge pot that my mother used to stew squirrels my father shot, put it on the outdoor fire pit, and boiled the flesh off the arm. I even dried the bones with paper towels for them.

  What does this tell me? That I was capable, even back then, of doing anything Thomas bade me do, no matter how obscene or unlawful.

  When the police came by later (it was inevitable that someone would call them with Thomas and Andy waving that grotesque thing around town) I was taken to the station for questioning with the two boys. They eventually let the matter drop, but not before scaring us with talk of the legal penalties for the desecration of bodies.

  Our parents grounded us for a month. Thomas obeyed for about half a day; then he was off, climbing out his window to run around town with Andy and his other friends. As usual, I dutifully kept to the terms of my punishment (even when my parents were at work and I could have done whatever I wanted). Despite the fuss, Thomas managed to save a finger from the hand, kept it in a jar on his desk. For all I know, he still has it, a grisly trophy from that early misadventure. And, as always, he came out on top whereas I paid the full price for his escapade.

  28

  Helen

  I’M A NATURAL BRUNETTE. I’VE always been one. You might say I pride myself on the ordinariness of it, the honesty of it. Brunettes are down-to-earth. We don’t dazzle, not like blondes or redheads. And we’re not striking, not in the way truly black-haired women are.

  When I was young I wanted black hair, real black hair. I would have cut it bluntly against my neck, with bangs, so I resembled the pictures of the ancient Egyptians in the books I got at the library. I was looking at my dull brown hair in the mirror last week when I remembered from reading those books that the Egyptians of both sexes cut off their hair to mourn. So I booked an appointment with my hairdresser this morning. The lovely, the fabulous, Simon. He’s wanted to color my hair since the first gray strands began appearing at age thirty-four. When I tell him I am ready to make a change, he claps his hands. “Streaks,” he says. “I think we’ll put in some golden-brown streaks.” Instead, I shock him by demanding that he cut it short, very short, androgynous-style. I also instruct him to bleach it blonde. I want an overhaul, a total overhaul. I want, no need, to shock myself into accepting that my life has now irrevocably changed. As the hair-dye commercials promise, I want a new me.

  Of course I’d read the literature on hair dye and pregnancy. Although a 2005 study suggests an association between hair dye and the childhood cancer neuroblastoma, a host of other studies on the use of
hair dye before and during pregnancy haven’t reached the same conclusion. Rats fed a composite of a series of commercially available hair colorings from days six to eighteen of gestation with doses of up to 97.5 mg a day exhibited no teratogenicity. Five oxidative hair dyes were administered by gavage to rats with up to 500 mg/kg daily on days six to fifteen and again no adverse fetal effects were observed. So I feel safe proceeding with my makeover.

  I make a point to avoid the mirror until Simon finishes blow-drying what is left of my hair. I watch his face instead. He has a dubious expression, like he’s being forced to eat something he doesn’t enjoy. I finally look at my reflection. I don’t recognize myself. It’s as if an ageless boy, a blond Peter Pan, is staring back at me. Someone with inner power and magical secrets. I walk out of the salon feeling considerably lighter.

  Perhaps now my mourning for John can conclude. Perhaps I can begin to celebrate my new life. Because although I’ve certainly lost my much-valued personal privacy—perhaps even the respect of the greater world—haven’t I gained something significantly more important? My new self is reflected in shop windows as I walk down Mulholland Drive, and I almost laugh out loud I am so happy.

  29

  Samantha

  I’M SITTING IN THE WAITING room of the Taylor Institute, a beautifully constructed square building, just off campus, with a façade of flesh-colored stone. Only a façade, because in California real stone buildings wouldn’t have a chance of surviving a major earthquake. I actually drove around the block three times before I understood that this building was the clinic. Oddly, there’s no sign, only the street number in small gold lettering, so discreetly placed among the ivy covering the stone that I had trouble locating it. When I finally figured out that this was my destination, I was stopped by a security guard hidden in a special booth off to the side of the entrance. I showed my badge, and he let me pass.