The Ninth Wife (20 page)

Now don’t get me wrong, I didn’t mind adopting a little one from Vietnam, but when I say Dao announced such a thing, I mean she didn’t ask me what I thought like she had always done. She said it like it was a fact closed to discussion. I should have recognized then the change in our marriage, that feeling of being shut out, but I was too eager to please. She said she wanted to visit the country to start the whole adoption process, and so off we went.

We flew to Saigon and Dao immediately started looking for her uncle. We never did find him, but while we were looking we saw a good cross-section of life there and it was like being with Maggie all over again in a new country. I was overwhelmed and didn’t much like the heat or the noise of the traffic or the constant throngs of people. I towered over most, my sunburned cheeks floating like balloons over a river of black hair and bobbing conical hats flowing through a stinking alleyway. That’s what it felt like in the sweltering humidity anyway. Everywhere I turned it seemed someone was trying to pickpocket me or sell me something and the exhaust fumes were just too much to bear, I thought for sure Dao would be the first to complain about the pollution. I’m sorry to sound so negative, maybe the whole experience there with Dao is clouding my memory, but I think of Vietnam and I shudder. I mean, I remember some of the food was good—some sticky rice dishes and dumplings, but I had some fish dish that had me vomiting for two days straight. And some of the people we met were quite nice, but they all looked so much like Dao—their petite frames, their skin tones, their round faces and flat noses. These people, they swallowed up my Dao. They took her away and made a red-faced stranger of me.

In my dreams, that’s how I remember it. In my waking hours I know it was all Dao’s doing. She told me she felt like she didn’t have enough sensory perceptors to take it all in. She needed three ears to hear the nuances in their speech, two tongues to taste and remember the things her birth mother used to cook, five eyes to see the place she had left behind. But she didn’t hold my hand or grab my sleeve to show me things the way Maggie used to do. She shut me out. Not meanly or maybe even consciously, she just did it, separated me from who she’d been, who she was discovering she was and wanted to be.

When it came time to speak with an adoption counselor we’d been in contact with, Dao had made up her mind. This was in Hue, a city north of Saigon. I remember we were standing at the corner of a big open lot. It had some grass but mostly dirt, and small children on their rickety bikes riding circles around piles of garbage. That’s when Dao told me she wasn’t going back. I pleaded with her, but she was adamant and I knew in the end she meant she wasn’t going back to our home, our marriage. I could have stayed, but I didn’t want to, frankly. I was angry and I didn’t think that my staying would have saved my marriage. I thought going home and waiting for her was my best chance. I assumed she’d get to missing me and get this all out of her system and she’d write and say finally that she was ready to adopt a little baby and bring that child back to our life in America.

It was a very teary good-bye, for both of us I might add, and I took that as a good sign, but I never saw her again. I waited for her for the better part of a year. I wrote her every day at the beginning, then every week, every month, and then I stopped. She wrote me, too, but her letters weren’t filled with longing as mine were, they were filled with observations and conversations she’d had and they read like letters to an editor. Then one day I got a letter that burned my palm. It said she had met someone else, a Vietnamese guy. She said, “There’s so much to clean up here, Rory,” and I didn’t know whether that referred to the environment, her past, or the debris of our marriage. She could have meant all three, I don’t know, I didn’t care. This was the marriage that was supposed to last, you see?

And yet, that was the thing. I got to thinking that Dao wouldn’t have given up on me had I not been married so many times before. I think she assumed it was never going to last. I think if I hadn’t been married before she would have seen marriage the way I had come to see it, vows for a lifetime.

I’ll tell you something: I still believe in marriage. I changed back in Seattle. I wish everyone could just believe me when I say I’m sincere.

But there is one more, it’s true. I hate to say it. I really do, because I think this is the one you’re going to have the toughest time understanding. It’s going to sound like I regressed, went back to my old mistakes after Dao, but you’ve stayed with me until now and if you’ll stay with me a little more I swear I’ll show you how it really was: two innocent and lonely people thinking the world was coming to an end.

Chapter Fifteen

A
s she squats over a pretty patch of the Shenandoah National Forest in Virginia, her shorts at her knees and her bare ass dipped into the glossy leaves of what she will later discover is poison ivy, Bess catches a glimpse of Rory standing watch and thinks about love. Sometimes she gets an image in her head of Rory sitting on her couch, fidgeting, getting ready to dump her, saying,
We have to talk
. Usually she can get rid of it with images of the couch collapsing or her living room whirling up to the sky in a tornado,
Wizard of Oz
–like. But sometimes she can’t get rid of it, as hard as she tries. She wonders if this is the reason she’s developed a nervous stomach, why this is the second time on their hike that she has asked Rory to keep an eye out for hikers as she squats in the great out-doors.

“You okay?” Rory asks when she rejoins him on the trail. He offers her his walking stick.

“I’m okay.”

Rory throws a rock. “Want to turn around? The path down below isn’t as hilly.”

“Sure.” Bess reaches out to the nearest tree to steady herself.

“It feels good to be out here in fresh air, you know?” says Rory. “I like how it’s so quiet you can hear the chipmunks scurrying around.”

With hardly a fork in the winding dirt path and Rory in front leading the way, Bess can let her mind surf more positive images in the hopes of soothing her nerves. The last several weeks have been chock full of them. Her grandparents have been upbeat on the phone for a change. Gabrielle landed freelance work she actually enjoys with a nonprofit. Cricket has been more talkative than usual about his past, and Rory has been more affectionate, more passionate than ever. In fact, something had changed in him the day they spent at her grandparents. He said he was touched by how close she was to her family, how nurturing she could be. He said he can’t believe how sexy she is and how turned on he can get thinking about doing it with her amid her grandfather’s mannequins. And he said he loved her, this time voiced, not whispered, eye to eye and unmistakable and she had responded in kind, barking it out on the subway platform like a hiccup.

“Bess, look,” Rory says. He is bent over the trail, his hands on his knees and his lovely ass raised in greeting.

“I’m looking, I’m liking,” Bess says as she reaches him, checking out his behind.

He points to the ground. “It’s a praying mantis. And there’s another one, over there. Ever see one?”

Bess leans over to look. “Not outside of a book, I don’t think. I know the female eats her mate after sex, though, right?”

“I’ve heard that.” He studies the insects patiently, allowing them to do what they do in the woods: remain immobile, rub their tiny front legs together, twitch their wings. “You don’t see these often. They blend so well with their environment. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen two together. They could be the only two here and they found each other.”

Bess feels a swift seizure of shuddering love for this man. Enough with the doubts. “I love you,” she says. “It’s a miracle we found each other.”

Y
ou said that?” Cricket says, sounding tinny on Bess’s cell phone. “You said, ‘It’s a miracle we found each other’?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s sappy.”

“People in love are sappy.” Bess is leaning against the car at a rest stop, waiting for Rory. “You know, you don’t have to be critical. You can just be psyched for me that I’m happy.”

“I
am
happy for you, you know that. I think it’s superb that he planned this whole romantic weekend away, just the two of you.”

“Thanks. I thought it was sweet, too.” Bess watches a family emerge from an SUV. “It’s just . . . I don’t know.”

“Talk to me. What’s going on?”

“I seriously don’t know. Maybe I just don’t know how to be in love.”

There is silence on Cricket’s end.

“Cricket?”

“Sorry, darling. I’m not sure I’m the one to give you advice on that.”

Bess sees Rory exit the building and walk to the vending machine for a soda.

“Listen,” says Cricket, “you don’t know what’s going to happen, so stop worrying. Concentrate on the present, that’s what I do.”

“You’re right.” In karate, Bess is reminded often to stay in the present. Any drifting to the past or future and your present face is likely to get punched. “Actually, what I really called you about is my grandparents. I’m worried about them.”

“Why? Are they okay?”

“My grandfather has a fear of flying, so he won’t fly to Tucson. My grandmother, well you know how she can be. The whole thing’s a mess.”

“Why don’t you drive them? You have enough vacation time. It would be cathartic. I’ve always wanted to take a cross-country road trip.”

“Yeah, me, too. I thought of that. I’ll run it by them, see what they think.” Bess smiles at Rory as he approaches the car. “Thanks for listening, Cricket. I’ll talk to you on Monday.”

S
eventy-five miles west of Washington, D.C., there is one of the most scenic byways in the country, so people say. Called Skyline Drive, it curves along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains and slices through fairy-tale forests with deep rocky ravines, waterfalls, and the promise of something ancient and healing. In autumn this part of Virginia is most spectacular, but spring is lush and beautiful, too. Down below Skyline Drive is the Shenandoah Valley, one of the most fought-over battlegrounds of the Civil War. Bess and Rory drive past the valley’s horse farms and apple orchards and onto the dirt road leading up to their B&B. The sun’s brilliance is stronger than its heat. Still, the breeze is welcoming.

Bess feels good. It’s lovely, this baby blue B&B with its white Adirondack chairs and potted geraniums. Rory parks and shuts off the engine. They walk toward the front porch.

“Well, hello,” says a short, older woman come to greet them, peeking out from behind the front screen door. “Welcome.”

“Hi,” says Bess.

“You have a nice place here,” says Rory, placing their bags in the foyer, which smells faintly of roses. “Pretty drive in.”

“Thanks. We think so,” she says, walking behind a desk. Gold-rimmed glasses hang from a chain around her neck. With both hands she raises them to her face and hooks them onto each ear. She leans in close to a folder. “You must be the McMillan party,” she reads, then looks up, taking her glasses off and letting them hang once again.

Rory nods. “I’m Rory. This is Bess.”

“Bess Gray,” says Bess, not sure why she feels the need to clarify that.

The woman seems to take it in stride. “You’re from D.C.? We get a lot of folks from there. My husband and I are from Baltimore. We left seventeen years ago and never went back.”

“You and your husband must be very happy,” says Bess, almost like a question.

“Yes,” is all she replies. “Here’s a key to your room. Number four, top of the stairs. It’s the one with its own bathroom. I think you’ll like it.”

“I’m sure we’ll love it,” says Rory. “We love it already.” He flashes a winning smile. “Tell me, do you have a dinner recommendation? Someplace you and your husband like to go on special occasions?”

“Of course.” The woman opens a drawer and presents a handful of menus. “Here’s the Copper Kettle, a local favorite. The Marsh is pricier, but wonderful. We like Rosie’s—we think she has the best cherry pie in the state.”

“Couldn’t be better than Bess’s homemade pies,” says Rory, winking at Bess. “One bite can make a man fall in love.”

Bess kisses Rory’s cheek, then lets the two of them charm and be charmed while she meanders out to the common room. There are quilts spread across the tops of the couches and baskets with old
Town & Country
magazines on the end tables. The bookshelves on either side of the fireplace smell like wood polish and hold interesting selections of titles about the history and geography of the valley. Bess sits down on one of the couches and notices the B&B’s guestbook on the coffee table. She flips through it. The handwriting in each entry looks almost exclusively feminine, rounded and legible. The messages are mostly generic: thanks for the hospitality, lovely weather, nice to get away, God bless. Only two of the entries make an impression. The first has this curious sentence: “It’s very white here.” There is little indication of what the
it
refers to, or what the person meant by
white
. Did it mean the interior design of the B&B? The landscape of Virginia? Was it snowing then? Or is it what Bess first thought of, that one doesn’t see many nonwhite people in this area?

The second entry is the most intriguing. It seems to be one of the only ones written by a man. It reads: “How come you don’t have a working TV with more than two channels? They get satellite dishes here, don’t they? What do you do here all day? My wife said it would be good for us to get away. I don’t see how it was going to work anyhow.”

“What’s that?” asks Rory, looking over her shoulder.

“Look at what this guy wrote.”

Rory reads and chuckles. “Fish out of water, sounds like.”

“But it’s more than that. There’s a whole story here. You can tell a lot about their relationship, even about his wife just from these few sentences.”

“Oh yeah? Like what?”

“That she’s the one trying to hold them together. That she can more easily find fulfillment in her life. That she needs to dump him.”