The Ninth Wife (5 page)

“Say you don’t want to know,” says Bess.

“No,” says Rory with a grin. “And I absolutely don’t want to know.”

Bess sneezes loudly into her hands, hyper aware that every box of tissue she owns is on the other side of her apartment. “Will you excuse me?” she says.

She collects herself and drinks, and now that she and Rory are both mixed in with the crowd in her living room, she watches him from afar.

“He’s got a great ass, doesn’t he?” whispers Gabrielle behind her. She must have seen Bess looking. “Go talk to him.” She slaps Bess’s ass and saunters off.

Rory is talking to three women who are pressing their hands to their chests, laughing a little too widely, keeping their eyes on him when they sip from their drinks. She can’t walk into that. But he sees her looking and smiles and motions for her to come over. He makes room for her in their circle.

“That’s funny,” he says to her, pointing to a framed cartoon on her shelf. “I like your sense of humor.” It shows two frogs on lily pads in a scenic pond beneath a pedestrian bridge. One of the frogs is looking straight ahead, smiling, posing seductively; the other one is looking at the poser with tired, bored eyes. “You’re wasting your time,” the caption reads. “Monet only paints the lilies.”

“My dad gave me that,” Bess says. “He used to leave me funny cartoons on my pillow before I went to sleep so I’d have good dreams.” The frog cartoon was one of the last things he gave her before he died.

“So,” says one of the more inebriated women among them. “Rory was just telling us about his grandmother who saw the Virgin Mary in a bowl of her own gazpacho.”

“Really,” says Bess, turning to Rory. Her voice sounds sprightly now that it’s emanating from a smile. “Gazpacho? That’s not Irish.”

“Which is why no one in the history of Ireland had ever discovered the Virgin before. They’d been so focused on potatoes.”

“So potatoes don’t excite virgins, I take it?”

“ ’Tis a known fact.”

She’s doing it! She’s engaging in repartee with a handsome straight man and she isn’t terrified of what to say next. In fact, she feels elated, buoyant even. She takes a quick calculation of how much she has had to drink and suspects that has something to do with it.

“Lights,” she hears someone yell from the kitchen. The lights go off and a candlelit cake floats toward her while voices in surround sound sing “Happy Birthday.”

“May I?” Rory whispers, pointing to a short-necked banjo hanging on the wall.

Bess nods, and he has them sing to her again with his flowery accompaniment. Her father’s old banjo is somewhat out of tune, but it sounds appropriate for the occasion and the less-than-virtuoso party singers.

She thanks everyone and blows out the flames. They clap and joke about what she might wish for.

“So what have you gotten for your birthday, Bess?” one of her friends asks.

“Well,” she says, wiping her nose with a tissue. “This necklace.” She holds it out from her neck.

“It’s nice,” says another friend. “Knowing you it means something.”

“It doesn’t mean anything.”

“C’mon, Bess. Everything has history and meaning, that’s your mantra, isn’t it?”

“Okay, okay. It can mean a journey.”

Rory, who has been listening to the conversation behind them while strumming soft background tunes on the banjo, suddenly plucks a one-note-at-a-time version of “Don’t Stop Believing.” Bess laughs.

“What is that?” someone asks.

“It’s Journey, the band Journey,” says Bess.

“White people’s music,” says Gabrielle.

“Stop, please stop,” says a guest. “You can’t do justice to Journey on the banjo. That’s like Ethel Merman singing ‘Amazing Grace.’ ”

Rory shifts to a bluegrass rendition of “Amazing Grace.” There is laughter and booing and someone throws a balled-up napkin at him.

Bess smiles along with her guests, all the while thinking:
This is bad
. He’s the center of attention, and the attention centers rarely notice her in the end. But then, it
is
her party and he’s looking at her every now and again, even when he plays. Would he want to go out sometime? How would she ask? Maybe she should wait for him to ask. Maybe she should relax, there’s still time, the party is in full force. Most of the guests have stayed and she gets busy again distributing pieces of the cake and her apple pie.

“Great party,” says a passerby.

“Thanks,” she says, beaming.

And then a cool breeze rustles the leaves outside the front window.

“Bess, can you come here please?” her assistant calls out from the entranceway.

Bess makes her way through the L-shaped hallway and as she is saying, “What is it?” she stops abruptly. There in the doorway are Sonny and Gaia.

“I told them they probably had the wrong place,” she says, motioning with her eyes to Gaia’s belly, “but they said they knew you.”

“Sonny, what are you doing here?”

Sonny is fidgety. He is bopping and tapping his chest with his pinkies and thumbs to the beat of something he’s humming. “Bessie, hey.” He slow-punches the air off her shoulder. “Gaia here felt so bad that you were gonna be alone on your birthday. She insisted on keeping you comp’ny.” He smiles and stretches to see past Bess. “But you always knew how to par-
tay
, girl. Didn’t I tell you, Geisha baby?”

“Did you just call her Geisha?” says Bess’s assistant with her hand on her hip.

“It’s Gaia,” says Gaia pleasantly as if she were saying,
There there
to a crying child. She’s wearing a tie-dyed sundress that accents the leafy tattoo above her left breast. Her eyelids sparkle, her long orange wavy hair is tangled in the sunglasses atop her head, her wrists are covered with dozens of green rubber bands. She holds out a potted plant wrapped in red ribbon. “Happy birthday, Bess.”

“Thank you.” Bess rotates the pot as if by turning it she can figure out if it’s anything more than what it looks like: a tiny tree.

“It’s a fir tree,” says Gaia. “Fir trees have powerful restorative qualities, but this . . . this one’s just a baby.” She reaches out and tickles the pines with her fingers. “It needs your help to grow now and when you’re ready, you can choose its home outside and plant it in the ground.”

Didn’t she mean when
it’s
ready? Like when it grows out of its pot or something? Should she mention that if it weren’t for Cricket, her green plants would be crackly brown and poking out of garbage bags?

There is something about Gaia that makes it difficult for Bess to break eye contact with her, something mesmerizing and calming, but now that the plant is no longer blocking her belly, her pregnancy is in full view. “This is very nice of you and I’m sorry for the miscommunication about my birthday. I just didn’t want to make it a big deal, you know?”

“It’s okay,” says Gaia. Her slow breathing makes her breasts and shoulders rise and fall as gently as the undulating waves of an ocean’s cove, her skin as smooth and white as fine sand.

“
Way
-ell, as long as we’re here,” says Sonny, slipping past Bess.

“Wait,” says Bess, trying to grab his arm, “you can’t.” But it’s too late, as the last flap of his bowling shirt disappears into her apartment. Her assistant shakes her head, takes Bess’s tree for her, and follows him to the kitchen. Bess is now alone with Gaia, who is rubbing her belly and leaning against the door frame. Bess contemplates telling Gaia it’s a singles party, but she’s not sure she has the nerve. A pregnant woman at a singles party, that’s a good one. The pregnant girlfriend of her ex-boyfriend at her singles party, even better.

“You know it’s funny,” begins Bess, “this is kind of a—”

“Ow,” yelps Gaia, cringing and reaching out for Bess’s shoulder.

“What? What is it? Are you okay?”

“Wow.” Gaia sounds like she’s under water. “That was heavy.”

Bess doesn’t want to know what
heavy
means. “Listen, forget it. Here,” she says to Gaia, cupping her elbow, “why don’t you come in and lie down.”

Gaia nods and takes her hand. Bess hadn’t offered her hand, but Gaia takes it anyway and Bess thinks, as she leads Gaia to her bedroom, what an odd feeling it is to hold a woman’s hand. She doesn’t think she’s ever done that before, other than holding her mom’s hand to cross streets. She’s seen little girls hold hands, and young twins, and women from Europe and South America, and every time she sees it she is wistful that such affection and intimacy were not part of her American upbringing. Her female friends hug, that’s what they do. Weak hugs with a few generic pats on the back as thank-yous after a dinner party. They don’t really touch. It’s one of the things Bess misses most being single, that sense of touch. She helps Gaia onto her bed and props her up with extra pillows.

“Thank you,” says Gaia. She settles in and begins to survey her surroundings, which makes Bess nervous.

“I’ll get you a glass of water,” says Bess. In the living room the music is still playing, people are still drinking and talking. Sonny is in a corner talking to two women and Bess has half a mind to pull him away by the ear and thrust him into her bedroom to be with Gaia. But then there are memories of Sonny in that bedroom, and better not add to the weirdness of the circumstances. So she takes her filtered water from the fridge and as she pours a glass she looks around for Rory.
Where is he?
“Gabrielle,” she calls out. “Where’s Rory?”

Gabrielle sees Bess’s disappointment and puts on a serious face. “I’m sorry, sweetie. I think he left.”

Bess feels irritated. “He didn’t even say good-bye.” As she carries the glass of water toward her bedroom, she thinks:
Who cares, it doesn’t matter.
He’s too old anyway, too flirty, too cocky, too . . . unibrowed.
Bess’s buzz is wearing off and her toe is throbbing again. She wants the night to end, to get everyone out of her apartment; for God’s sake, this has gone on too long.
Good night, people, good night, get out.
You get my hopes up and you crush them like ants underfoot.
This night couldn’t have ended any worse.

“Oh God, um . . . Bess?” she hears from her bedroom. A guy with a scared look on his face beckons her from the bedroom doorway. She rushes into the room to see Gaia sitting up on the side of her bed, wringing out the bottom edge of her sundress. Water has spread out from Gaia to darken Bess’s baby alpaca blanket and her Egyptian cotton weave sheets and is now dripping down Gaia’s pale legs toward Bess’s antique Turkish rug. “Oh God,” the guy repeats, pacing back and forth from the bed to the door. “Is there a
doctor here
?” he yells into the living room. People are now coming into the bedroom to see what’s going on.

Bess chides herself for thinking of her personal belongings and tries to think straight. The glass of water she poured for Gaia feels ridiculous in her hand, as if she could just as well dump it onto her bed as watch someone drink it. “I’ll get a towel,” she announces. She hides for a moment in her bathroom, checking herself out in the mirror. Sometimes people think she’s Italian—the near olive skin, the dark eyes, the dark hair that falls just below her neckline. Her nose is slightly hooked, but not too bad. She’d trade in her large ears if she could, but not her long eyelashes nor, if truth be told, her B-cup boobs. She fixes her bra straps, which frequently slip down over her narrow shoulders. Then she takes an allergy pill.

So Gaia’s water broke, that’s no big deal, right? It doesn’t mean she’s going to have the baby right then and there. But then there have been stories. She read about that woman on the subway in Boston whose water broke and out popped a baby a minute later. That seems like a Monty Python skit but it can happen, other women go through forty-two hours of labor and some drop in minutes and what if Gaia had to give birth right there in her own bed? She can just see it: the blood, the head, the fingers, the tiny feet, the writhing, crying kidney bean of life right there in her own bed on the very spot where some mornings she stays under the covers and presses the snooze alarm seven times because she is dreaming of a day when she doesn’t have dreams of the things she wants because the things she wants she has, tiny fingers and feet to call her own.

In her bedroom she sees towels everywhere, strangers leaning on her dresser, and a woman she just met a few hours ago in her bed with her legs spread open.

“What are we going to do?” says a guy in a high puppet voice, his hand maneuvering one of Bess’s sock monkey slippers that she must have forgotten to hide.

Bess looks around for Sonny. He’s not in the bedroom. He’s not in the living room or the kitchen or the hallway or outside the building. She can’t believe he’s gone. “You’ve got to be shitting me!” she cries out to the street.
Is there some sort of black hole in my place?
She doesn’t know what to do or what to tell Gaia. The girlfriend of her ex-boyfriend (a label she keeps repeating in her head) is about to give birth, and the only people around to help are a bunch of drunken singles. She needs to call an ambulance.

Everyone in her bedroom, it seems, is offering opinions from
Relax
to
Do something!
The ones in the
relax
camp are amused, have found reasons to pour more drinks. “Hey Bess, looks like someone else is going to have the same birthday as you,” calls out a man over the din.

Others are bouncing around words like
doctor
and
breathe
and
ambulance
and Bess finds she is more in this camp, but she can’t get a read on Gaia. Gaia is sitting quietly, watching, until she sees Bess and motions for her to approach. Bess kneels at her side.

“It’s okay, Bess,” Gaia almost whispers, so that only Bess can hear. Her hand is on Bess’s shoulder. “He’ll be back.”

Bess nearly jumps back as if avoiding a punch.
How did she know?
Did someone see her walk in with Sonny and tell her?
And why is it all right?
Sonny should be here.
He should fucking be here.
But Gaia is calm, almost smiling reassuringly. It makes Bess wonder if she’s talking about Rory, too.