Four Wives

by Wendy Walker

  She’d gone over it again and again, rationalizing her work to herself, her friends, the mothers across the table who looked at her with the worst kind of disdain. That it gave her the income she needed to keep the firm afloat, to contribute to the family, and still be home when her girls got off the bus’that she had made a name for herself’all of it weighed in. On most days, she could live with it.

  What, she wondered, could it possibly hold for the young man sitting beside her?

  Then he spoke. “There’s something about the stories of the people, what’s happened to them.”

  Marie raised an eyebrow. “People stories?”

  “Is that OK?” Randy asked, suddenly self-conscious.

  “Sure. Fine. But I have to ask’will you be needing time off in the afternoons to catch your soap?”

  Randy smiled and let out a slight laugh. “If you don’t mind. And a subscription to The National Enquirer would be great.”

  Marie made a few mental notes. Funny. Quick. Sarcastic. “Well, in any event, I’m lucky to have you. Your resume is very impressive and I could use the help.”

  “Thanks.”

  Marie got up from her desk and headed for the conference room, her sole purpose to remove herself from the office.

  “I’ll let you get started.”

  Randy opened the first book, pencil in hand, determination in his eyes. Marie closed the door between the office and the conference room, then took a seat out of view from the glass partition. She had prepared herself for the approaching months’the Farrell case heating up, golf season trying her patience, the girls home from school, and that ridiculous benefit. She knew what to do with all of that, largely because she had those things figured. Hunting Ridge, the men and women in it, the local judges and lawyers’every social dynamic at play in her insular world. Knowing what was wrong with the things around her kept her sane. She had constructed categories, stereotypes for cookie-cutout suburban dwellers, and Randy Matthews was not fitting into any one of them. Now there was no question she would have to dig until she sorted him out. That she was looking forward to the task more than she should did not escape her, nor did it stop her from returning to the office.

  NINE

  THE MOMMY

  THE MORNING DRAGGED ITSELF along until it was noon and the train was in full motion. Henry Harrison was glued to Nick Jr. on the TV, while his little sister stood on a stool watching the cheese melt between slices of bread.

  “Guess what, Mommy,” she demanded.

  With Baby Will on her left hip and a spatula in her right hand, Love stood at the stove next to her daughter. “What, sweets?”

  “When I’m as old as you, I can make the sandwiches all by myself.” Jessica wanted to do everything her mother did, and the thought of it was frightening. Between Henry, Baby Will, and the general chaos of her life, somehow there would have to be time to make sure Jessica did not end up like her mother.

  “Yes. You will be able to make the sandwiches and do a lot of grown-up things.”

  Love scooped up the grilled cheese, helped Jessica off the stool with her free arm, then delivered the food to the table. Henry got a plate, though he wouldn’t eat. He had nothing but TV for lunch. Jessica pulled the cheese out with her fingers, then used her shirt as a napkin.

  “Mommy?”

  “Yes, sweets?”

  “Can I do that thing to Baby Will?”

  Love smiled as she scooted her chair closer to Jessica and moved Will to her other knee. Jessica leaned her head over her baby brother, letting his hair just brush her cheek. She watched everything her mother did, especially with the new baby, and feeling the soft, feathery hair on her face had seemed irresistible. Now, it was a ritual of sorts between the siblings. It was such a small thing, and on many occasions would be followed by a slap on his head or some other transgression. But for Love it was a sign that Jessica was recovering from the loss of her status as the baby of the house’ evidence that somehow, in spite of all Love’s failings, something was going the way it was meant to.

  The sound of her husband on the stairs pulled her back from the moment. He was on rotation for rounds, which meant he’d enjoyed a morning off but would now be at the hospital through the night. He emerged from the front hall dressed and ready for the day. Bill Harrison was a big man, tall and broad in the shoulders, with a full head of sandy hair that was just showing signs of silver. His face was kind and handsome, his manner steady. As he stood before her now, in his neat clothes, cleanly shaved, Love could recognize everything she’d been attracted to on the night he helped save her life. But, like so many things lately, she just couldn’t feel it anymore.

  “Good afternoon, everyone,” he said, and Love felt her neck tighten.

  With Henry in TV land and the baby oblivious to anyone but his mother, Jessica was the only one to respond. “Hi, Daddy.”

  Bill made his way around the table, kissing his family on their heads.

  “Any coffee?” he asked Love, looking at the empty pot as he planted his lips on her forehead.

  Love shook her head. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll stop at Starbucks.” Love read disappointment between the lines. It was so much easier when she could be mad at him. And lately, anything would do. A look, a sigh, even an act of overt kindness that was just a bit too contrived. Love would grab hold, convince herself that he was harboring silent criticisms of her. Is it too much to ask that coffee be made? As he worked his way through the cluttered kitchen, searching for something to eat, she infused his every action with hidden meaning. Is it too much to expect that the house be picked up, organised a little?

  Watching him dig through the fridge for the bread, jars of mayonnaise and jam clanking together as he moved them around, searching, Love felt the pain in her neck sharpen and run down her back. Soon she found herself standing beside him, baby on hip, reaching behind the orange juice on the top shelf for the bread. Without a word, she pushed past her husband and set the loaf on the counter next to the peanut butter he’d pulled from the cabinet. Then she returned to the table where Jessica was waiting for a book to be read.

  “Are you all right?” Bill asked his wife. And she stuck to the script. Husband asks what’s wrong … wife answers, “I’m fine.” It wasn’t fair. She couldn’t expect him to know. Bill Harrison was the best of husbands. Home by six, helpful with the dinner-bath-bed routine. Always there for the school assemblies, the soccer games and weekend ballet classes. He went for take-out when she was too tired to cook, rubbed her feet when she was tense. And he did his best to understand why the wife who once adored him now rolled over at night, curled up in a corner on her side of the bed.

  Are you all right? They were just a few words, everyday, nothing kind of words. Still, she needed him to see her’to look past the mother, housekeeper, grocery shopper, cook, laundress, accountant, janitor’past his housewife to the woman he used to live and breathe. Maybe then he would know the answer she was not giving him.

  There was a time when he could see nothing but her. Love Welsh, renowned child genius of the late 1970s. Not the first one to capture the interest of the public, but her lineage had given the story unusually long legs. Her father was Alexander Rice, a famous modern-day philosopher whose works were still on the reading lists at the world’s greatest universities. She had earned her high school diploma at the age of twelve through a course of expensive private tutoring. She spent her childhood in an adult world, surrounded by New York intellectuals and immersed in their cynical view of the public at large. Over time, she came to accept her father’s low opinion of her own peers, seeking the approval of the grown-ups who had taken her in. Rice brought her to lectures and to parties at Studio 54, where she rubbed elbows with Andy Warhol, Woody Allen, and the like. He pressed her agent for media coverage, and eventually wrote a book about his experience educating a brilliant child. And then, in the fall of her thirteenth year, she began a college curriculum under the instruction of Pierre Ver-sande, a fo
rmer professor of philosophy from the Sorbonne. It was that year that her life was so shockingly interrupted.

  Her mother had quickly moved her to L.A., and that was where Bill found her years later’the fallen prodigy in need of another road, a road where she could start over, reinvent herself. The humble doctor from Connecticut completing his residency with an ER rotation. She had come in close to death, the immediate result of an overdose and the culmination of years of self-destruction. He had given her an escape. Only somewhere on the road that had transformed her from derelict intellectual to housewife, she had begun to vanish and Bill didn’t seem to notice. He looked at her with expectations and dismay at her restlessness. It was, Love knew in her head, understandable. He had saved her from herself once. It was done, over. Problem solved. But in her heart, she needed him to magically see that there was something more to the story’the things she had never told him and that she couldn’t bear to tell him now for fear that it would blow their lives apart. The black hole in her past was charging back into her life and Bill was wanting the coffee made. Never had she felt so alone.

  “Mommy!” Jessica’s screaming brought Love’s attention back to the table. “I spilled!”

  Jessica’s cup was on its side, floating in a pool of juice that was quickly spreading out across the table. The first stream fell on Henry’s side, dripping onto his leg.

  “Mom!” Henry was yelling now. Love stood up to avoid getting hit by the sticky mess. She watched the juice run off the table in four directions, her two oldest both crying as though the juice were hot lava turning them into ash. From his bird’s-eye seat on Love’s hip, Baby Will looked calmly from his siblings to his mother, then back again. What should we do here? Even he seemed to know that standing and watching was not helping matters. Still, Love could not move. The pain was in charge now, holding her hostage.

  “Here …” Bill was beside her with a dish towel. He dropped it on the table by Henry where the spill was moving fastest. Then he looked at his wife. “I’m sorry, honey … I’m already late.” And I have to go to Starbucks because you didn ’t make the coffee.

  Love did not take her eyes off the hot lava. “I’ve got it,” she said, waiting for the pain to pass and hoping Bill wouldn’t ask why she was so slow to respond. She took a breath to swallow it down. The crest had come and gone. She could feel it receding.

  In a moment she would issue the decree to stave off the catastrophe. Wet clothes would be removed and placed on the table. She would get another towel, clean the table first, then the floor. They would use soap and water and scrub brushes. It would kill the hour before Henry’s soccer practice, teach them to be useful. She knew how to do this. Still, each day since receiving her father’s letter, being the mommy was taking more and more out of her.

  She considered the tasks that still lay ahead. Drive to activities, home for dinner. Eat, play, cry, clean up. All of it would require her attention. Mommy! The call would be made again and again. She would pull from her memory the things she’d read on handling sibling disputes and Will’s separation anxiety. She would try to remember not to let Jessica, the easy middle child, fall through the cracks. She would do things wrong, lose her patience at some point’maybe from Henry talking and talking about Legos or Will grabbing her hair one too many times’either way, it would happen. Then there would be baths, pj’s, teeth brushing, stories. Their resistance would solidify like drying cement until, finally, they would relent and fall asleep.

  That’s when she would feel it the most’the pain that was growing as strong as her attempts to ignore it. After the kids and Bill and the churning inside her gut from that damned letter, she had nothing left to hold the weight of the worry that something might be wrong with her body.

  With Bill walking toward the door and the juice still flowing off the table to the floor, she took one more breath and went on with the day.

  TEN

  FAKING IT

  “YOU COMING, HONEY?”

  At the foot of the front stairs, Janie Kirk groaned softly beneath her breath. Her hand was on the rail, her body leaning toward the incline as it would have had she actually begun the ascent to the second floor. But her feet were not moving.

  “Be right there.” She lifted her right leg and planted her foot on the first step.

  Was it always this hard? she wondered. Having just closed a deal two days prior, Daniel had been coming home early, going in late. Standard practice for the partners at Weinberg Investments. Deals came in, work picked up. Deals closed, work wound down. And when the work wound down, and Daniel actually came home for the family dinner’when he greeted his long-lost children at the door, doling out high fives and promises of carpet wrestling matches after their homework was done’rewards would be expected. She knew in the morning when he planted that kiss that it was coming, and she had resigned herself that the weekly performance had been scheduled in his mind for later that evening. Still, now that it was here, she felt like a horse being pulled from the plush green fields to the confines of the stable, and her left foot was cemented to the floor.

  What the hell is wrong with you?

  Daniel Kirk was an attractive man. The same features that had lured her into his fraternity room their senior year were still prominent, though, perhaps, weathered by the passing of time. And despite the twenty years, he was, essentially, the same man she’d fallen in love with. He was easy to understand. Deals, money, sports, sex. She’d married him right out of college, and her faithful adherence to their implied contract had brought her everything. And having everything was worth the sacrifice. That was what she told herself, even as the truth began to emerge’slowly at first, then falling upon her like an imploding highrise, crumbling to the ground and taking her with it. She had analyzed it to death, reading self-help books, listening to Dr. Phil. But in the end, she saw it for what it was. Bad luck.

  Standing on the brink of intimacy with her husband, there was no doubt that the truth had arrived. Janie Kirk, the woman with everything, no longer loved her husband. She had loved Daniel Kirk in college. Loved him on their wedding day, and through their childless years in New York. She’d loved him after their first was born, and maybe after the second. She couldn’t remember exactly when it happened, or how, only that it did. Somewhere along the line, she stopped loving him.

  The children had been a wonderful distraction. The high of each birth, the relentless work of caring for them through the infant years’all of it had kept at bay the longing that had finally broken through. But now the youngest was three. The sleepless nights were gone, the constant demands for attention waning. An afternoon nap was no longer the object of her fantasies. She’d done everything she could think of to shut it down, the disquiet within her that felt as primal as drawing breath.

  That she couldn’t be the sexual being she once was had seemed an obvious dilemma, and in the many years she had lived in this world, nothing had surfaced to prove her wrong. Husbands and wives lived in houses together, raised children together, did the same bedroom dance over and over’all the while pretending to be satisfied. She was not the only woman with bad luck. She had thought she could live with it by adhering to the carefully constructed roles, each a unique piece of the puzzle that made up the family unit. But, in the end, she had underestimated her own need.

  “Janie … I’m waiting …” His voice was playful.

  Fuck it. She unglued the left foot and propelled herself up the stairs. One, then another, then another. She tried to console herself. Thirty minutes. On the outside.

  Their house was a modern colonial, with five bedrooms sprawled along a wide second-floor hallway. The master suite was the last on the right, a private enclave comprised of five separate chambers’bedroom, bath, sitting room, and two walk-in closets. Making her way there, she passed the children’s rooms, listening for sounds. His voice had been loud as he called for her from under the covers. Perhaps he’d woken one of them? No such luck. She passed the last door without incident.


  “Where’ve you been?”

  Propped up on his side of their bed, arms laced behind his head’and naked beneath a sheet that was looking like a little pop-up tent at the moment’was her husband. His side-table drawer was open slightly, the drawer where he kept his magazines, and Janie wondered which one he’d used to get himself going.

  “I had a few things to straighten up,” she lied. “I’ll be right there.”

  She walked across the soft carpet to the bathroom. Moving quickly now before the resignation subsided, she brushed her teeth, flossed, gargled. Then she dimmed the light and pulled the door close to shut, but not completely shut. Daniel was a “visual” man, whatever the hell that meant, and in any case, the bottom line was that he liked to see her naked. Still clothed, Janie walked past their bed, and the husband who was growing impatient, to her closet. She pulled off her cotton workout jersey, unhooked the support bra and let it fall from her shoulders. She slid off her stretch pants, then the cotton thong, the last article of clothing. And the last excuse. She turned off the light.

  His eyes were upon her as she made the walk from her closet to the bed. It was inescapable.

  “You look good. The exercise is really paying off.” Made-to-order Janie managed a smile as she stood on the carpet next to the bed. Slowly, she pulled back the covers and moved her body beneath them.