The Ninth Wife (23 page)

Which is why I said yes when Gloria asked me to marry her. God’s honest truth, she asked me. Not that day when we saw the rainbow, but three weeks later in a barn on a friend’s farm, surrounded by deer and rabbits. We got married, Gloria quit her job, we moved out of the city after one too many “code orange” terror-alert days, rented a cabin in Virginia, and mostly lived in isolation. She did some freelance work on the Internet and I taught a computer class or two at Shepherdstown College, played my fiddle some evenings, and was a substitute teacher at the local high school. Gloria painted and had her garden.

It was nice at the beginning, but then after six months we found we didn’t have much to say to each other. We started to fight. She hung Ray’s things all around the cabin and started getting into this new age stuff: astrology, tarot cards, crystals. When one day she said she was thinking of making a pilgrimage to India, I had visions of the downfall with Dao and I knew I had once again made a terrible mistake.

I didn’t leave her; she left me. She met up with Ray’s best friend and called me from a pueblo in New Mexico. The only time I heard from Gloria after that was on September eleventh the following year. She touched base, talked of rainbows and Ray and fear and death, and then she was gone, almost as if she hadn’t ever been there to begin with.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m not telling any of this the way I should. Maybe I shouldn’t be telling it to you at all. I’m leaving things out, but it’s been a long night already.

I’m tired. I so desperately want to stop fucking up, do you see? I want it all to stop. I want the bloody story to end.

People say I don’t have to rush into marriage. But the way I see it, why prolong? Dao and I waited more than three years and she still left me. And it’s true, Gloria left me after a short marriage, but there were reasons I’m aware of now that I should have been aware of then, even from the first moment. I still imagine myself with a woman I can grow old with. I want to be able to look back on my life and see how much we shared. It’s what my parents had and I think I’ve always been searching for that. But already more than half my life is over. That’s a sobering thought. You understand, don’t you? If I meet the right woman I don’t want to wait. I want to start the rest of my life now.

I’m not the type to be with one woman and go on to the next. I hope you can see that. I’m the type of person who means well and knows only what he thinks is right and finds out later it was all terribly wrong. But that all has to change. It has to. I dream of everlasting love. I dream of that with you.

Part II

Chapter Seventeen

Place: a big, flat, empty parking lot. Temperature: sizzling hot. A plastic bag rolls by, a hawk squawks in the distance. A line of black dots snakes toward her, crystallizes into hearses and, behind them, a Toyota Corolla. The vehicles approach, peel off left and right, continue on. The Corolla stops, makes her move aside, parks neatly between white lines. She approaches tentatively. A window rolls down. She sees bodies stuffed in every which way like a clown car.

Hi, says a sideways head.

Ow! yells another head from somewhere near the dashboard. There is unintelligible chatter, occasional whoops of laughter, sighs. A forearm pops out of the window and dangles its fingers toward the ground. Limbs shoved into corners look unnaturally bent and absent of ownership. She stretches to see in the car.

Are you all women? she asks.

All women, says the first head.

She tries to count the different sets of hair: straight blond, curly red, pulled-back black. Eight? Nine? This is ludicrous, she says. How can you breathe?

Easy, I’ll show you: give me your hand.

She extends her hand.

No, GIVE it to me.

Oh, she says, and with her other hand she breaks her arm at the wrist like a loaf of bread. Here, she says, handing her hand to the head.

Down there, says the head, pointing with her eyes to another hand ready to grip and shove. She sees her hand disappear into the bodies. Now give me your leg.

She detaches her leg, and two right hands slide it onto the floor.

Now your arm.

She breaks off her arm and with her remaining leg pushes her torso into the backseat. Flesh against sticky flesh. I can’t breathe, she says.

Don’t panic, we’re going to the mall.

Her head is elbowed off her torso and wedged into the neck of the driver. She recognizes this neck.

Hi, says Rory, looking ahead, two hands on the steering wheel.

The car is now weaving between recreational vehicles. She can see his face in the mirror. She can kiss his neck. She can whisper in his ear and he could hear. It’s a good position to be in, she thinks.

I’m glad you came, he says, leaning on her a bit.

Where are we going?

It’s a secret.

Oh please, says a mouth under the dashboard.

Stop pussyfooting around and tell her the truth, two say together.

He pulls up and parks in front of a suburban mall. I’ll be right back, he says.

Sure you will, says a head from the backseat.

Rory? Rory? she yells.

What’s the matter, honey? Tell us and we’ll help. They are suddenly giggling.

I . . . she says, but her mouth is dry, feels full of pebbles. She can’t find her hands to empty her mouth. She can’t breathe. She tries to spit out the pebbles. Rory! she hears someone call. Rory, stop that! Stop that right now!

“Sit DOWN!”

The freckled face of a little boy comes into focus above the seatback in front of Bess. He has a baggie of sunflower seeds and a few in his poised right hand that he tries to hide when she opens her eyes and she makes the connection: woman falls asleep with mouth open, makes good target for fidgety kid on long train ride to Boston. She spits two seeds out of her mouth, shakes them from her shirt, untangles them from her hair. She hears what must be his mother in the next seat scold him.

“I’m sorry he bothered you,” she says to Bess, leaning around her seat.

Bess wakes up her tired body in sequence, stretching her fingers, rolling her neck and shoulders, yawning. She takes out her journal to record this dream, as strange as the others she’s been having.

Her ass itches. Thirty-six hours after she sat in poison ivy, she dropped her drawers in front of a mirror and saw a pink rash spread across her cheeks like dabs of strawberry jam on a split biscuit. The itch was agonizing. She tried to sleep on her stomach with her ass covered in medicated cream and when that wasn’t enough, she secured ice packs to her skin and for hours watched the glamorous Eva Gabor act the hillbilly on cable TV. Now two weeks later, the rash is mostly gone, though she’ll get an occasional itch so potent she has devised ways to get at it in public: the seat squirm or the hand in the back pocket.

“Your son’s name is Rory?” Bess asks the woman, her voice deflated.

She nods. “Lord knows I call him something else when I’m at the end of my rope.”

Bess looks at her watch and surmises her train from New York must be a half hour away from South Boston, where she will transfer to the subway and head out to the suburb of Newton. Carol had said she’d be there to pick her up. When Bess had Googled her and the other ex-wives, Carol Pendleton—the second one, who kept Rory in the country—was the easiest to find as she had kept her maiden name, stayed in roughly the same place. There were three Carol Pendletons in the Boston area. Bess got her on the second try and though she had rehearsed, she fumbled for words when she heard the voice.

“Hi. Hello. You don’t know me but. Well, I mean. Forgive me. I have an odd question that you’ll probably . . .”

“Start again, why don’t you.” The voice was firm but not unpleasant.

“Sorry. My name is Bess Gray. Does the name Rory McMillan mean anything to you? I’m a friend of his.”

There was a pause. “A friend,” she said. It wasn’t a question so much as an utterance one might make if one’s mind were off accessing long-buried recollections.

“Well, more than a friend I guess you could say. He asked me to marry him, but I don’t know if I should say yes. I thought maybe you could help. I’m sorry I bothered you.”

Carol seemed amused. “You shouldn’t be sorry. How is he after all these years? I thought he got married again after we parted.” It was that last word—
pahted
—that betrayed her stoic New England grooming. She sounded like a young Katharine Hepburn.

“He did get married again,” said Bess.

“And divorced
again
? Now I think I know why you’re calling. A man’s been married three times, it would set my fingers dialing, too.”

Bess had played out this conversation in her mind time and again—married, yes; more than once; more than twice;
eight
times!—always building to a crescendo of their shock, her despair. Why had she never imagined she would simply say it matter-of-factly?
Not three times, eight times.
I’d be the ninth.

After the weekend with Rory she had told no one. In the space of her phone silences and vague responses about her weekend away, her grandparents told her that she didn’t sound well and should go to a doctor. Gabrielle couldn’t understand why she was screening her calls and left irritable ultimatums on her voice mail. Cricket baked her mint brownies and monitored her from afar because he assumed—when he saw she had skipped work on that following Monday and stood unshowered and zombielike in front of her mailbox—that Rory must have ended things.
He’s a louse
, he wrote in green icing on the brownies and left them at her door. Bess had smeared the icing in an attempt to spell
spouse
instead, then clawed out a chunk from the middle and ate out of her cupped hand.

To Rory she didn’t have much to say, either. She stayed at his place a few times to remain connected, but they watched TV until they slipped into bed and each rolled to his or her own side. She found herself looking at his apartment anew, searching for signs of his ex-wives, but she couldn’t detect much. Was the coffee grinder in his otherwise poorly equipped kitchen a gift? Was the mountain landscape photo above his computer taken with one of his ex-wives at his side? She didn’t feel like asking. What she stared at instead was the photo of Cici on his dresser. It showed a young woman who knew she was being watched. She sits upright, regally, with her legs crossed and her chin high. She is long and lean, with short brown hair, full lips, a long pointed nose, and dark eyes slightly close set under prominent eyebrows. She is resplendent and exotic-looking, a silhouette to be captured in oil-paint portraits. Her hair is held off her tanned face with a blue bandana. She must command any room she enters, Bess thought, feeling a pang of jealousy at remembering how Rory described Olive Ann when he first saw her.

Bess was heartened to know Rory has been there for her all these years, through all her bouts of depression and aggression during the Alaskan winters and teenage years, and the ongoing saga of her mother in and out of psych wards, as he had described. It says he has the capacity to endure with someone, doesn’t it?

In truth, neither Bess nor Rory knew how to bridge the divide left from their private earthquake. Bess was still hovering precariously over the fault line, bracing for aftershocks, and she made that fact known, saying,
Let’s not talk about it for a while, okay?
That night he had told her the story of his marriages was one of the longest nights of her life. She had shivered under the covers and listened with a quiet intensity, gripping the edge of her pillow until her fingers cramped. She asked questions for clarification and skipped-over details, but the more significant questions loomed large as storm clouds over the rickety shack of her held-back emotions. A feeble
why?
slipped out once and he gave her answers that she didn’t remember in the way answers that don’t satisfy don’t stick. Too shocked to speak, she had lain still and let the wives in, one by one, until they inhabited the room in the light of dawn with a feminine feng shui that made Rory seem outnumbered and out of place.

They had driven home the next morning amid the deafening sounds of deep sighs and turn signals and tapped knuckles on glass. She had felt heavier than wet sand. He helped her lift her bag out of the trunk and she kissed him quickly, hoping it seemed less like a parting gift than a preoccupied habit in a hurry. She needed to be alone to think.

But thinking gave her vertigo. How does one wrap one’s mind around eight wives?
It could have been worse, he could have murdered someone
, her interior voice whispered. If he were a murderer, she answered, she certainly wouldn’t be sticking around. But isn’t that the response she should have to a serial spouse? To run fast in the other direction? How bad is that in the realm of a lover’s baggage? Or maybe she was making a bigger deal out of it than she should. Maybe she could just be with Rory and not get married and then it wouldn’t be a problem.
But you want to get married, you’ve always dreamed of one day being married
. So what, life gives you lemons. And anyway, just because their relationships failed doesn’t mean ours would.
I bet they all said that
.