The Ninth Wife (18 page)

“Nothing,” says Bess, “you’re right, nothing’s so bad for
either
of us, Gramp.”

Suddenly, a loud male voice squawks from the entryway. “Hi, Mrs. Steinbloom, it’s Gerald!” For his fortieth birthday last year, Millie and Irv gave Gerald—the middle-aged son of their best friends—a key to their house. He uses it on average once a week. “Mrs. Steinbloom, are you home?”

“We’re in the kitchen, Gerald,” Millie answers.

Gerald continues to yell from the hall. “Mrs. Steinbloom, I ran here in 7.28 minutes from my house! It’s my fastest time. I think it’s because I didn’t clench my teeth. Is Mr. Steinbloom home? Mr. Steinbloom, are you home? It’s Gerald.”

“Gerald, slow down,” Irv calls out. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

Gerald is all movement as he zips into the kitchen and over to the sink to help himself to water. He is a small man about six inches taller than Millie and Irv, with knobby knees and scrunched shoulders and a slight paunch. He has on running shoes, shorts, and a white T-shirt soaked through with sweat. His dark hair looks like a layer of fur on his head, arms, legs, and back of his neck. He gulps his drink and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He reaches behind and pinches his underwear out from the crack of his buttocks.

“Hello, Gerald,” says Bess.

Gerald whips around. “Oh, hi, Bess. I didn’t see you.” He is still yelling. He has only one volume of speech and that’s as if the person he’s conversing with is down the street. “Did you come to say good-bye to Mr. and Mrs. Steinbloom?”

“Well, they’re not leaving just yet, Gerald. I came to visit and help them pack.”

Gerald’s fingers are splayed and moving about like bugs’ antennae. “They’re flying on an American Airlines jet in nineteen days.”

“That’s right,” says Millie, removing her apron. “We’re flying out to Tucson.”

Gerald holds his face in a constant look of confusion or pain. His eyebrows are angled down and his mouth is spread wide so that his cheeks jut up and form a resting barrier for his thick black glasses. “Bess, do you think they should fly?” he yells, rocking back and forth. “I don’t think they should fly. There could be a terrorist attack or a crash or e-quip-ment mal-func-tion, but also diseases like air-borne in-fec-tions from re-. . . re-circ-u-la-ted air and exposure to cosmic ra-diation and prolonged in-act-i-vi-ty which can lead to—” and here he stops for a moment, looking at the ceiling. “It can lead to deep vein throm-throm-bo-sis.”

“Gerald, really,” says Millie, removing her apron. “I know you don’t want us to go, but that’s not nice, all that talk about bad things.”

“Gramp, you all right?” asks Bess. Irv’s face looks pained suddenly. He eases into a seat, lost in thought. These conversations must be hard for him, thinks Bess. “I’m sure Gerald is just sad like I am that you two are leaving, isn’t that right, Gerald? Are you sad?”

“I’m sad they’re leaving, yes.” He nods vigorously.

“Oh, but you’ll come visit us, won’t you?” Millie takes a paper towel from a kitchen closet and hands it to Gerald. “Dry your face dear, you’re dripping onto the tile.”

He wipes under his chin first, slowly, craning his neck. “Maybe Bess and I will come visit together,” he says.

Rory comes back from the bathroom at that moment and stands in the doorway of the kitchen. “Well, hello,” he says to Gerald.

“Gerald,” says Bess, eyeing Rory, though she isn’t sure just what she means to communicate. “This is my friend, Rory.”

Gerald’s movements get smaller, slower, closer in. “You’re Bess’s friend?” he asks, still with a raised voice but slightly softer than before. “I’m Bess’s friend, too.”

“Nice to meet you,” says Rory. He keeps his hands in his pockets and bows.

“We were just talking about—”

“How long have you been Bess’s friend?” Gerald interrupts. “I’ve been Bess’s friend for thirty-five years and in less than five years we can get mar-ried.”

“Oh, really,” says Rory. He looks at Bess, amused.

“You have to know someone for forty years before you can get married.”

“Who told you that, Gerald?” says Millie. She has taken a seat at the table with Irv and is picking dead leaves from the table’s centerpiece.

“I think it’s a good idea,” says Irv, half to himself.

Bess sighs. “I’m sure I told him that at one point as a joke,” she says to the side, as if everyone but Gerald could hear her at a lower frequency. “But Gerald,” she now says openly, “you know I took that back. Didn’t I? What did I say?”

Gerald looks down at his knees. “That you’re never going to get married.”

“Now this is getting interesting,” says Rory.

“Yes,” says Bess, “I’m sure I said that at some point, too, but
after
that. What did I say after that and have stuck to ever since?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know, Gerald. I told you that I’m not the girl for you because there’s another girl for you somewhere and she’s going to find you someday. She’ll be a very
lucky
girl.”

Gerald isn’t listening. He is looking at Rory through his thick glasses. “Bess, is your friend Jewish?”

Bess looks at her grandparents, for this question has caught her off-guard and has garnered their attention.

“No, he’s not, Gerald.”

Rory is leaning against the wall, keeping quiet.

“Because,” says Gerald, “I’m Jewish. You have to marry someone Jewish.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” says Bess.

“Bess,” says Millie as a warning. In her look is a reminder that Gerald’s mother, Vivian, is strict on interfaith marriages and has taught him what he believes to be true. Millie attempts to change the subject. “Bess, have you heard that Philip Perilman’s daughter just got married last week? Big ceremony, the whole
chazerai
. I heard it was expensive.”

“Did she keep her name?” asks Bess.

“Would you change your name if you got married?” asks Rory.

Now why would he ask me that?
“I think I’d keep my own name,” she says. “I’ve gotten used to being Gray.”

Gerald raises his hand as if to be called upon. “You don’t have to be gray,” he says. This time everyone in the room looks his way, for there is something different in his voice, something gentle. “You could be any color, any color in the whole rainbow, Bess.”

All in the kitchen are silent. Gerald is rocking back and forth.

“That’s lovely,” says Rory, looking at Gerald and then at Bess.

“Yes, it is,” says Bess. She is overwhelmed with emotion. “Thank you, Gerald.”

“Gerald, you’re quite the romantic,” says Irv. “I gotta give you credit.”

“Yes, I’m a romantic,” says Gerald, pushing up his glasses, “a ro-man-tic.”

T
here is a warm afternoon thunderstorm that keeps Gerald inside the Steinblooms’ house where they task him with putting a completed jigsaw puzzle back in its box. He is content and very careful to break apart every piece. Millie tells him he’s such a big help he should stay for dinner.

Irv sets up camp in the corner of the kitchen to pack one box, looking around the house for each object that would fit perfectly shape-wise into the box’s particular spaces. He wraps each item carefully and stands it up, lays it down, angles it, stands it up again until he puts it aside to start the next box where it will have a greater chance for a perfect fit. Soon there are more items on the table and on the floor than in the boxes.

Once he comes to Bess and Rory who are working in the family room and says, “This isn’t right,” and then moves back to the kitchen. Bess follows after him. “Gramp?” she says.

“I’m okay,” he answers. “It’s just difficult, leaving this house after twenty-two years.”

This house, thinks Bess. Over the years a house becomes a vault for the most intimate thoughts and acts. Its floors know the secrets of Irv’s sleepless nights when he shuffles to the kitchen in his wool socks. Its basement holds the key to his ballroom dances of salvation. The walls hear his prayers each night by the side of his bed before he tosses his yarmulke (used just for prayers) into his nightstand, pulls the chain on his table lamp to darkness, and slips his withered feet between the sheets next to Millie’s, the house standing guard, protecting them while they are dreaming and most vulnerable.

And for Bess, too—who was thirteen when they moved in—this house represents so much. There in the driveway is the first time she got behind the wheel of a car and ran over a flower pot. There in the guest room is where she fell asleep crying over a botched clarinet performance and woke with a teddy bear next to her. How many times she did laundry here, ate home-cooked meals, thought of it as her home base when she had loud fights with her mother as a stubborn teenager or during school breaks after her mother passed away. A house long lived in represents a lifetime of achieving, accumulating, defining who its occupants are by what they choose to surround themselves with inside that house. All this only to be reduced to the essentials that favor pill bottles and handrails and alarm clocks with four-inch numbers over the delicate and decorative and hard to see. “I love this house, too, Gramp,” she says, and sits with him a moment before he heads to his study.

Bess and Rory fill giveaway boxes with books and board games Bess played as a child,
Sorry!
being one of her favorites. Millie comes to them with old photographs Bess might want of her mother as a child, standing by a tricycle, frosting a cake, sitting curbside by their old synagogue. In all of them her mother looks reserved and posed, not a dark hair out of place in her pixie cut or a wrinkle in her dress, no abandon in her stare. “Who’s this?” she asks Millie, pointing to an older photo of a man next to a young Irv.

Millie glances at it and swipes it away. “How did that get there?” She looks behind her as if looking for Gerald. “His name is Samuel, an old friend of your grandfather’s.” She frowns. “Not a very nice man.”

“Why not?”

“Never mind,” she says, and departs abruptly.

Bess looks at Rory. “There’s a story there,” he says.

W
hen Bess and Rory finish what they can in the family room, they go searching for Millie or Irv. They find Irv curled into his armchair, sleeping and snoring with his mouth open, a book in his lap. Bess closes the door and leads Rory to a guest room where Millie is showing Gerald her hatboxes. Bess holds her finger to her mouth, backs up, and whispers, “Let’s go downstairs. I want to show you something.”

Down in the dank basement, Bess flicks a switch and illuminates for Rory the room of mannequins. It is at first glance a sweeping shock of hard flesh under piercing fluorescent bulbs like a modern art museum’s installation. On second look it is more the parts, the sheer number of breasts and asses and smooth, hairless crotches, the slender ankles and waists, the smooth one-colored skin tone, their perfectly positioned and sustained postures, the way models stand for photographs. They are women, they are naked, and they are eerily still: Bess can tell that’s how Rory sees them by the way he moves around them, reaching out to touch one after the other, moving their parts, running his fingers over their private parts and smiling like a little boy. “Wow,” is all he can say.

“Careful,” says Bess. “These mean a lot to my grandfather.”

“Ah, right. I remember you telling me. ’Tis a little strange though, no?” He asks this while mischievously tickling one’s crotch.

“It is, yeah,” says Bess, ignoring his gesture. In many ways Irv’s mannequins have ceased to feel human to her, or represent anything female. There is no slouching among them, no furrowed brows or crossed arms, no blemishes or bulges or scars. They don’t exist in relation to one another the way a woman would if she found herself in a room with twenty-odd other women. Either consciously or unconsciously, Bess knows women react to the vibes or energy from others, but these ladies have the energy of coatracks. And it would almost feel like a room full of coatracks by now, Bess thinks, if it weren’t for one thing: their eyes. Their vacant, no-blinking stares are the eyes of dolls and clowns and windup toys in horror films that come to life with a bloody vengeance.

“What’s your grandfather going to do with them all?” says Rory.

“I don’t know.” Bess moves one to make it more visible. “I like this one, though. Her name is Peace. He has a particular fondness for her.”

“She’s very attractive. And she has hair. I always like hair on a woman.”

He doesn’t say anything more and the ensuing silence feels uncomfortable to Bess. “You’ve been kind of quiet today,” she says.

He joins her in the corner and kisses her. “I’m just enjoying learning more about you. I love watching you with your grandparents, you’re very patient. And I love watching your face when you get nostalgic. It’s nice to be with a woman who values her family.”

She relaxes into his embrace. “My grandparents aren’t arguing, at least. That’s good. Must be because you’re here.”

“Well, they seem to like Gerald.”

“He’s good for them, too. They’re good for each other.”

“We’re good for each other.” His hands are cupped around the curve of her waist.

She pulls away from him a bit and looks down. “Rory, I’m sorry you lost your wife. That must have been very difficult.”

Rory gently caresses her arm.

“But you don’t have to tell me about it until you’re ready. Really. It’s okay.”

“Thank you for understanding.”

That’s it?
“You know I have a million questions.”

“Bess, I have a million things to share with you. I don’t want there to be secrets between us. But it’s difficult.” He pauses before he says
difficult
and she can see it is. “I’ll tell you what, let’s go away for a weekend.”

He’s making a future plan!
Hallelujah!
“Okay,” she says quickly. She is about to say something else but loses her train of thought amid the zing of endorphins now that he’s nibbling her ear and squeezing her ass and pressing in close. “Someplace romantic?” she asks in breathy syllables.

“Absolutely,” he says between kisses. “A cabin by a lake where we can skinny-dip and walk around nude, like our friends here. I think these girls have the right idea.”