The Ninth Wife (48 page)

“Sounds like you should apologize to Bess, too, Sonny,” says Gaia.

Sonny picks his head up. “I apologize for making you kick me in the balls.”

“Apology accepted.” Bess smiles.

“Yeah, yeah,” says Sonny, waving her away. “Good thing you don’t know karate.”

Bess follows Gaia inside.

The house is baby blue. The walls are blue, the counters are blue, the rug and couch and ceramic figurines on the shelves in the living room are all shades of pale blue and old-fashioned. Gaia has Bess take off her shoes.

“Sonny’s uncle is hardly ever here,” says Gaia, picking up bottles and stuffed animals as she walks Bess through the house, her breasts swinging freely beneath her oversized T-shirt. “Since Sonny’s aunt died, his uncle doesn’t like to be in this house, he likes his other one in Florida better, which is good for us.” She brings Bess to the kitchen. “Would you like some tea?”

“I’d love some.”

“How’s the trip been?”

“Okay, I guess. Glad it’s almost over. How’s Pearl?”

Gaia takes dirty cups from the counter and places them in the sink. She tells Bess about Pearl and Bess elaborates on some of the details of her journey, especially about Cricket and his ex-wife, since Gaia had met him. She doesn’t talk about Rory; she couldn’t remember if she even told Gaia about him. Nevertheless, Bess thought maybe Gaia would take one look at her and understand her emotional turmoil as she used to be able to do, but the luminescence that once surrounded Gaia has faded with fatigue. Bess can see the way her shoulders slope and her feet drag, but she is still beautiful. Her skin is smooth, her red hair long and lush.

Sonny comes inside and announces he’s exhausted, that he’s going off to sleep. He kisses Gaia on the forehead, tells her he fixed the latch on the garbage so the critters shouldn’t get in anymore. “Bess,” he says, “you’re welcome in our home anytime. I look forward to catching up in the morning.” He sounds sincere.

“Thanks, Sonny.”

“Hey,” says Gaia, waiting until Sonny is out of sight. “Do you have the box I gave you?”

“It’s in the van. You never told me what’s in it.”

“I’ll show you.” They retrieve the box and Bess’s overnight bag and place them in the living room. Gaia runs a knife along the box top and cracks open the four cardboard folds. She opens the box with such excitement that she temporarily seems to regain her old fiery aura.

“Clothes?” says Bess, watching her take out pants and shirts. “I don’t understand.”

“Not just clothes,” Gaia says, making a pile at her feet. “This.” She pulls from a box within the box a white wedding dress. It is one of the most elaborate wedding dresses Bess has ever seen, with little buttons and beads and lace and embroidery. “It was my grandmother’s. I didn’t want Sonny to get nosy about it. You think he’ll like it?”

“You’re getting married?”

“Yes,” Gaia says from the kitchen, attending to the kettle. “Didn’t I tell you?”

Of course you are
, thinks Bess.
Of course I drove your wedding dress across the country
. She asks Gaia questions about the wedding to be polite and when they finish sipping their tea, Bess announces she is exhausted and, not to be rude, but she’d like to get to bed after a quick peek in on Pearl. Gaia gives her sheets for the couch and a towel. She guides Bess to Pearl’s room where healthy green plants surround a rocking chair and a crib on a yellow shag throw rug. Over the crib is a mobile of exotic animals, and in the crib, sleeping soundly, is Pearl, as wondrous as her name implies. Standing there alone with Pearl, Bess is overcome with a strange, calm feeling, a sort of love for all the innocent people of the world. She blows Pearl a kiss. She closes her eyes and makes a wish:
May you be happy, little one, in your family of three.
May your mommy and daddy stay alive, may they stay happily married into old age
. Bess opens her eyes. “And if they don’t,” she whispers, “call me.”

B
ess is nearly ready for bed. Gaia has said good night and has slipped into what Bess assumes is their bedroom. Does Sonny still snore? She doesn’t hear anything. She wants to ask him what got into him, leaving Gaia at the hospital, but she won’t. It’s not her business. Sonny was never really her business even when they were dating, he had made that clear. Anyway, it’s all better this way. She rubs lotion into her hands and as she is about to turn off the light in the bathroom she stops abruptly in front of a shelf of photos. She had noticed the photos before—the bathroom seemed an odd place for them—but she hadn’t looked closely. Most of them are of Pearl, and of Sonny and Gaia with Pearl, but some are of Sonny or Gaia with people she doesn’t recognize. One of them, taken on a city block somewhere, is of Gaia and a group of six others laughing and making faces. This one shows a guy on the end holding a bottle of beer, staring flirtatiously at the photographer, a guy whom Bess recognizes without a doubt—now that she has it in her hand and is studying it up close—is Rory.

She moves to bring the photo closer to the light, but bumps her elbow and accidentally drops it, shattering the glass in the frame. She bends to pick it up and bangs her forehead on the shelf and two more photos crash onto the tile floor. Gaia rushes into the bathroom. “You okay?”

“I’m so sorry,” breathes Bess. “Don’t come in, you have bare feet.”

“So do you. Don’t move, I’ll be right back.” Gaia returns with slippers, a plastic bag, and a brush and dustbin.

“I hope I didn’t wake up Pearl.”

“When she’s asleep, she sleeps through everything. Like her daddy. Listen, I shouldn’t have put photos there. Sonny told me they were in the way.”

“No, no, it’s my fault,” says Bess, picking up the larger pieces of glass. “I’m so clumsy.” She searches the floor for glass shards and holds the bag open for Gaia as she empties the dustbin. They concentrate on cleaning up and being quiet until they survey the bathroom and conclude they got all they could get. For those few minutes Bess is shaking from nerves and theories. She hands Gaia the photos from the broken frames and points to Rory. “Can I ask you . . . do you know him?”

Gaia takes the photo. She looks at it, then at Bess, and smiles. “I forgot that photo was there. I do know him. That’s Rory McMillan.”

Bess is breathing quickly. “How do you know him?”

Gaia is looking at her intently. “We were married.”

Bess feels attacked for the second time tonight. She braces herself against the wall, trying to make sense of Gaia’s declaration. Did Rory not tell her about Gaia? Were there nine wives? That doesn’t make sense. “When were you married? Like, how long ago?”

“Right after 9/11. Didn’t last very long, and I haven’t seen him for a couple of years.”

Bess’s mind is spinning. “
You’re
Gloria?”

“I
was
Gloria.”

There are too many questions, too many facts she’s trying to conjure up about Gloria that Rory told her, too many leaps she’s trying to make from the Gloria she heard of to the woman standing in front of her. “When did you change your name?”

“About two years ago, on the anniversary of my brother’s death.” Gaia points to a photo on the shelf of her and her brother as teenagers. “I don’t know why, it was kind of a whim that stuck. My brother’s name was Ray so I combined our names into one, to keep him close. Gaia’s the goddess of the earth, and I kind of dug that.”

“So wait . . . did you see Rory at my party, the night we met?”

“Rory was there? No, I didn’t. I was sort of busy.”

Bess slides down the wall of the hallway until she is sitting with her knees bent and her head in her hands. She is thinking about her singles party. She is thinking about talking to Rory then, about Gaia and Sonny’s arrival, about taking Gaia through the party into her bedroom, about coming out to her main room to find Rory had left.
Did he see her?
Is that why he left the party?

“Bess?” Gaia whispers, squatting next to her.

Bess slides her fingers down her face and sighs. “I told you I was dating this guy, but I didn’t tell you much about him. Well . . . it’s Rory I’m dating.”

Gaia sits and hugs her legs. Bess notices Gaia is now looking at her the way she used to do, as if she is seeing into the depths of Bess’s soul.

“Isn’t that a really bizarre coincidence?” says Bess, trying to coax a reaction.

“I don’t believe in coincidences.”

There’s the Gaia I know.
“So let me ask you, did it bother you how many times he’d been married?”

“Of course.”

“But you married him anyway.”

“I did.”

“And it was inevitable that it would end, right?”

“I don’t think so.”

“GOD!” says Bess too loudly and then apologizes, looking over toward Pearl’s room. “This is so frustrating. I wish someone would just give me a straight answer. Tell me eight marriages doesn’t mean shit. Tell me eight marriages is sick and I should stay away. Tell me Rory is a psychopath and I’ll be dead in a year if I stay with him. Or . . . or tell me he’s the greatest guy on the planet and how lucky I am that eight women like you let him slip through their fingers and I’d be the biggest idiot to let him go. Just please tell me
something
.”

Gaia rests her chin on her knees and watches Bess.

“Oh, don’t do that,” says Bess. “I hate that, that silent stuff therapists do. Okay, fine. At least tell me why you and Rory split up. Tell me why you think you have a better chance with Sonny, and don’t say it’s because of Pearl because I don’t believe that.”

Gaia stretches her toes. “I think marriage is what you make of it and what I made of it with Rory I didn’t much care for. With Sonny, I think I can make something beautiful.”

Bess is getting a headache. “Why couldn’t you make something beautiful with Rory?”

“It wasn’t beauty I was after. I wanted our marriage to help me survive, to take my pain away, and fear, and loneliness when I lost Ray. And it didn’t in the end. I think for either of us. It’s not that I don’t feel all that at times with Sonny, it’s just that I don’t expect him to save me.”

“But couldn’t you have changed your expectations of Rory? Couldn’t you have realized he wasn’t going to save you and made it work? Isn’t that how marriages last?”

“I could have. But I didn’t want to. We were both meant for someone else.”

In the middle of the night it is quiet enough for Bess to hear herself swallow. In the quiet middle of the night in this stranger’s house on the other side of the country, Bess feels thousands of miles off course from where she should be, from where she knows herself.

“He asked me to marry him, too, but I’m not even sure he still wants that,” Bess says softly. “I haven’t been able to reach him, and he hasn’t called me in five days.”

“Maybe that’s because he’s coming to get you.”

Bess looks into Gaia’s eyes. The empty rings to his home number, the calls from strange area codes.
Could it be?
Oh, strange, clairvoyant Gaia, she thinks,
I hope you’re right
.

Chapter Thirty-eight

T
here he is, waiting for her atop the roof of the Griffith Park Observatory on Mount Hollywood, where she had asked that he be. She studies him before she comes into his view, trying to memorize the very details of him—his attire (steel-colored cargo shorts, white button-down shirt, leather sandals, black sunglasses), his body (lean, muscular legs, not too hairy, slightly sunburned; broad shoulders; hair cut short since she’s seen him last), the casual way he’s leaning on the ledge (one leg taut, the other slack; the weight on his elbows; his hands clasped, a small bag at his feet). He’s perfect, she thinks, he’s handsome, he’s
mine
. She wants to soak in this image until it lives inside her.

He has come for her, all this way.

My husband
, she whispers.
Please let it be until death do us part.

It was Gabrielle who orchestrated their coming together, in the beginning and now today. When Bess left Gaia and Sonny’s house the next morning, she headed to UCLA to visit her grad school friend. There she called Gabrielle and cajoled her into revealing what she knew, that Rory had just missed her in Chicago, that he went to visit Cici, that he was on his way to California. Rory wanted his arrival to be a surprise and was relying on Gabrielle to find someplace he could meet Bess and figure out how to get her there.

But once Bess knew, she wanted to choose the place. The real proposal was coming, she could feel it: the one she had been dreaming about since she was a little girl. Hell if she wasn’t going to get her Hollywood ending.
Tell him to go to the observatory at noon
, she told Gabrielle.
I’ll be there
.

And now here she is, there he is, on a cloudless day with a small breeze and a beautiful view out beyond the lawn of the observatory, to the hills and the famous Hollywood sign. She hurries toward him, imagining what the two of them could look like from the outside: a woman calling out to her lover, jumping into his arms, he smiling and laughing and swinging her around while they kiss.

“Rory!” she calls out.

Rory turns and suddenly looks alarmed. “Bess! What? What happened?” She arrives in front of him with open arms. He grips her shoulders. “Are you all right?”

She doesn’t understand. “Yes. Of course I’m all right. What—.”

“Oh, thank God. The way you were running, I don’t know. I thought someone was chasing you.”

Bess loosens herself from him, curls a lone bit of hair behind her ear, smooths out her sundress. “No, sorry. I just . . . saw you there and . . .” She clears her throat. “It’s good to see you.”

Rory leans in slightly, perhaps to kiss her, she thinks, but then pulls back. “It’s good to see you, too.” He wipes away a drip of sweat from his temple.

“How are your grandparents?” he says.

Bess feels something inside her start to unhinge. She doesn’t know what to do with her hands. Her heart rate is accelerating too fast. She clings to small talk as if she were holding sight of the horizon on rough seas. “They’re okay. Thanks. I mean, I think they’ll be okay.”