The Ninth Wife (25 page)

“So what did you do?”

“I should have said something then, but I didn’t. I picked up some woman in a bar and took her back to Gretchen’s place so she’d catch us in the act. Then I did the same to Rory. I mean, I let him catch me with a woman in our apartment. It was time for him to know the truth. I thought he might have suspected by then, but I could tell he didn’t by the look on his face.”

“Wow.” Bess remembers this part of Rory’s story. “But then once Rory knew, it got better, didn’t it? At least, that’s what he said.”

“It did. We became good friends, in fact. He helped keep my mind off Gretchen, and I did the same by keeping his mind off Maggie.”

“Maggie, his first wife?”

“He pined away for her all throughout our marriage. He would stake out her apartment before she moved to New York, follow her to work, dial her drunk from bars.”

“And she never wanted to get back together?”

“I don’t think so, no. My memory of Maggie isn’t all that clear. I never met her, just heard a lot about her from Rory. When she finally did move, he calmed down, but I wasn’t ever convinced he got over her. She was his first love.”

Bess hadn’t thought of this. Is it possible he has been searching (and failing) all this time to find a likeness of his first love? Bess experienced her first and only love in college and, though it was intense and sincere, they went their separate ways after graduation and grew up and out of what they had together. Each passing year she thought less about him until she thought about him hardly at all, except to wonder if he was married with children. But she could think of two single friends who had never gotten over the pain of a first love’s breakup. It can take its toll. Is this what she’s facing with Rory?

As if on cue, Carol says: “It was a long time ago and I’m sure he hasn’t thought much about her in all these years.”

“Will you excuse me?” says Bess, placing her cloth napkin alongside her plate. “I have to use the restroom.”

“Upstairs. Second door on the right.”

Bess climbs the stairs and peeks into rooms. In one of them, Delia is lying sideways on her bed, reading a book. She doesn’t look up, so Bess quietly heads to the bathroom. On her way she notices an empty bag of chips by the top of the stairs. Was this evidence that Delia had been listening in on their conversation? Bess thought she had heard occasional noises from the stairway, like the creaking of wood.

Once out of the bathroom, Bess decides to be friendly. “Hi,” she says, standing just outside Delia’s bedroom.

“Hi,” Delia says back.

Bess glances at the hardback Delia has open in her hand. On the cover is a pair of legs in jeans swinging on a tire. “Good book?”

“It’s okay,” says Delia. “Harry Potter’s better.” She seems neither rude nor overly friendly, but sleepy and guarded.

Bess smiles politely. Not knowing what else to say, she starts to make her exit when Delia speaks up.

“If it were me,” she says, “I’d dump his ass.” She waits a few seconds to gauge Bess’s reaction, sees Bess is stumped for words, then goes back to reading her book.

Bess returns to the kitchen, amused. “Your daughter seems like a smart kid.”

Carol is washing the lunch dishes and loading the dishwasher. “Top of her class, but you’d never know it by her one-word answers. Would you like some coffee?”

“Thank you, but I should probably head out.”

Carol wipes her hands. “Let me run upstairs and then I’ll take you to the subway.”

Bess retrieves her bag and wanders toward the foyer, coming upon the dining room. It’s more ornate than the other rooms: bloodred walls, crystal chandelier, maple wood china cabinet. On a hutch is a row of framed photos. Bess enters the room to get a better look at what appears to be a posed wedding shot amid the full colors of autumn. Carol is facing the photographer in a white suit, holding hands with a petite woman in a wedding dress who is looking lovingly at her. In the photo, Delia is behind them, frowning.

“That’s Ina,” says Carol, catching Bess leaning into the photo.

So Carol is married to Ina? Why didn’t she mention that? “You’re married?”

“We got married eight months ago, though we’ve been together for seven years.”

“Six years, eight months!” a voice calls out from the doorway. Bess turns to see a short, thin woman with a broad smile and dark hair swept up in a clip. She is artily dressed in a flowing, Aztec-patterned halter dress. “Hi, I’m Ina,” she says, placing her portfolio on the table. Her wide silver bracelets look like handcuffs. She smells like vanilla.

“Nice to meet you,” says Bess, accepting her handshake.

“Don’t let her fool you,” says Carol, looking at Ina. “She’s not punctilious, she’s superstitious. She thinks the seventh year will bring on some sort of apocalypse.”

“Let’s hope I’m wrong. It’s happened once or twice. Are you having a nice blast from the past, my dear?” she says, bumping hips with Carol.

“I’ve enjoyed our lunch, yes.”

Ina’s gaze leaves Carol slowly. “Rory is well?” she asks Bess.

“He is. Did you know him?”

Ina flashes a quick, intimate glance at Carol. “Just heard stories.”

“Bess wants to know if she should marry Rory,” says Carol.

“Do you love him?”

“Yes, I think so,” says Bess.

“Then what’s the problem?” says Ina, with her hands in the air.

Carol turns to Bess. Her eyebrows leap, as if to say,
See?
“He’s already been married eight times, that’s the problem.”

Ina claps with delight. “How delicious! I love an optimist.”

“I knew you’d say that,” says Carol. “You love drama. Never mind all the broken hearts along the way.”

“Yes,” she says, teasingly. “All those risky hearts that for moments on this earth burst with love and joy. No, I applaud him. He sounds romantic.”

Carol shakes her head. “Well, then,” she says to Bess. “What’s the problem?”

Ina leans in and pulls a stray hair off Carol’s shirt. “What’s this?” she says, flirtatiously. “Have you been cheating on me?” Her body sways as if she’s slow-dancing to music in her head.

“I have,” says Carol. “He’s big and hairy and does all sorts of nasty things with his tongue.” Ina laughs. Perhaps this is how Carol flirts, thinks Bess—straight-faced and still as if to balance out Ina’s dramatic ebb and flow. They are oddly paired, these two—one black-haired, short, thin, bohemian, the other blond, big-boned, preppy—but there is a warm chemistry between them. Their collective energy feels deep and intimate.

“Carol’s in love with our neighbor’s Lab,” Ina explains.

“Ina thinks he’s a walking stink bomb,” says Carol. She turns back to Ina. “Kyle asked me to take Cooper to the vet this morning. Poor thing was scared to death, so I let him stomp in the puddles.”

So that explains the car smell, concludes Bess.

“I see. Well, I just came back to pick something up. If you’ll excuse me,” says Ina, exiting the dining room. They hear her singsong voice upstairs in what must be a conversation with Delia.

“Can I ask,” says Bess, “how you and Ina decided to get married after all that time?”

Carol looks at the wedding photo. “It was important to Ina.”

“Okay, I’m off,” Ina cries out, flying back down the stairs.

“That was fast,” says Carol.

“I’ve got to get back to the studio. It was nice to meet you, Bess.” She glides out the door with a wave and a bow like a fairy godmother.

Bess wishes she could have talked more with Ina and Carol together. “Are you glad you got married?” she asks.

“I suppose.” Carol yells up to Delia that she’ll be right back, then resumes her thought. “I didn’t want to at first. It wasn’t about my commitment to Ina; I just didn’t need a legal license or public announcement. I already knew Ina loved me. I knew she wouldn’t run at the first argument, that she’d do the work to make it last.”

Maybe, it dawns on Bess, after all her heartache, after all those times guys have broken off relationships, she has come to believe that the only way she can trust a man to commit and do the work it takes to make a relationship last is if he marries her. And maybe—she is formulating this theory on the spot, reeling from its implications—maybe meeting a serial spouse like Rory renders that theory useless, and now what? What trust test can she use anymore? “How did you know you could trust Ina?” says Bess. “I mean, how did you know she would try hard to make it last if you didn’t get married?”

“I just knew.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I can’t explain it. I just . . . knew.”

Bess suddenly feels emotional. “Then why did you agree to get married?”

Carol motions toward the front door. Bess follows Carol to the car. “When it became legal in Massachusetts, Ina felt it was important—especially since we lived here—to make a statement. To say we should have the choice. I’ve always been antiestablishment. It just so happens that in my world, getting married is antiestablishment.”

“So is getting married eight times,” says Bess, offhandedly.

“Very true.”

The rain has cleared, but the air is still damp and the gutters still pocked with puddles and mud. Delia’s silhouette appears in an upstairs window as they pull out to the street. “When I went upstairs, I spoke to your daughter. She told me I should dump him.”

Carol laughs. “Sounds like Delia.”

“Do you think that’s good advice?”

“Well, she’s told me at various times to dump Ina. But she loves Ina. My daughter has abandonment issues.”

Bess wants to ask why, but there isn’t time. Instead, there is the receding landscape of this Massachusetts town she may never see again. She sums up the stone buildings and old willow trees and trolley tracks curving along the street into a melancholy feeling.

“I know you came here hoping for answers,” says Carol. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I’m glad I came. I think Rory described you well, and that’s something. At least his stories aren’t all far-fetched.”

“Most of them, though, no? He was quite the raconteur.”

Carol pulls up in front of the station. A small, faint rainbow arches up from a row of buildings. “Rory proposed to his last wife at the sight of a rainbow,” says Bess.

Carol turns off the engine. “May I ask if you told Rory about coming to see me?”

“No, not yet.”

They sit in silence for a few moments.

“I read recently,” says Carol, “that in Sub-Saharan Africa, girls are used as currency and forced to marry as young as eleven or twelve, before puberty, to men who already have several wives and are three or four decades older.”

Bess looks down. She knows of cultures like this, of polygamy and arranged marriages and laws that allow husbands to beat their wives. She has met women from some of these countries whose politeness is eerie and impenetrable. “I should be thankful I have choices,” she says, softly.

“Oh, but it can be a curse, too . . . having too many choices.” A car pulls up to their side and discharges a gray-haired gentleman with a briefcase. He waves to the woman inside and says he’ll be home late, so . . . He ends it there, on
so
.

“Sometimes I wonder why I need a man in my life,” says Bess. “It feels weak and embarrassing.”

“Don’t go there,” says Carol, pointing her finger at Bess. “Some of my friends stopped being my friends after I married Rory. They thought I sold out. And now look, decades later and women are still defensive.” Carol’s cell phone rings. She reaches into her bag in the backseat, looks to see who’s calling, then shuts it off. “The easy thing to do, I should think, would be to end it with Rory. But you’re not doing that. You’re facing your choices. Maybe you’re doing that not just for you and Rory, but for reasons you’re not even aware of. This is making you face your demons, whatever they are.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“It’s an interesting idea to try and find Rory’s ex-wives. Is that your plan?”

“At the moment, yeah. I’m leaving next week to drive my grandparents across the country to their new home. I thought I’d look along the way for whomever I can find.”

Carol helps Bess retrieve her carry-on bag from the trunk. “Well, just be careful to keep your expectations in check.”

“I will,” Bess says. “Thank you for meeting with me today.”

“You’re quite welcome.”

Bess slings her bag diagonally over her shoulder.

“He’s a good guy,” Carol says. “I want to say that. Deep down, you know, from what I know . . . he’s a good man.”

“I know,” says Bess. She steps down to the tracks to wait for the train.

An hour later, Bess settles in to a busy woodworking shop not far from the neighborhood known as Little Armenia, a shop well known among Greek, Armenian, and Middle Eastern musicians. She is there to interview an oud maker for a magazine piece on traditional folk music. He is an older man who offers her tea and sweet tahini breads. She presents him with a little gift bag from the Smithsonian museum and while he finishes up with a customer, she asks if she can borrow his computer to check her e-mail. It is an old model, and slow. When her in-box appears, she scans the list of messages and stops at the reply from Dao, Rory’s seventh wife. Bess had sent an e-mail days ago to an address she found on an oil pollution site.

dear bess gray,

i believe we were meant to be introduced. in past incarnations, we might have passed as concubines in the curtained halls of some sheik’s pleasure palace and locked eyes under our veils, knowing each other intimately in that moment like mirrored images. can you imagine? i am not surprised you found me. i bow before you and say welcome to my sphere.

yes, i live in saigon with my husband and two stepsons, giang and sy. i am sorry we cannot meet. i travel sometimes back to california for work, but i don’t like to fly, so i am thankful for the internet. such a toy, isn’t it? i love the terms “virtual reality” and “cyberspace.” i love their floating, infinite possibilities. we will need possibilities when we complete the destruction of mother earth.

i am glad to hear rory is well. he is a genuine old soul. you may ask me anything about him or about us or anything you want and i will answer with honesty. that was not an easy time. it is never an easy time. as you are and as i was, so shall we come to understand.