The Ninth Wife (7 page)

The bathroom is next to Gaia’s room and after she washes, Bess enters quietly when she sees Gaia is asleep, spread out upon the bed. Her thick, long, wavy orange hair lays about her pillow. Bess moves in close and thinks of holding her hand, but can’t muster the nerve. She stands over Gaia and takes inventory: the freckle above her upper lip, the holes at the tops of her ears where earrings once were, the red eyelashes, the blotchy skin a clear giveaway of Scottish ancestry.

She understands what Sonny sees in her. Gaia is that perfect skimming stone one searches for at the edge of a lake, smooth and shapely, unadorned and peaceful among the other stones but capable of soaring out across the surface as if defying the laws of nature. She is beautiful, but then maybe all new mothers are beautiful, or all onlookers in the immediate aftermath of birth see a kind of beauty they didn’t see before.

Giggles erupt from behind the curtain on the other side of the room. Bess peeks around the bend and sees two women, one sitting up in bed, one at her side, gently brushing her partner’s hair.

“Where is she?” Gaia says, suddenly awake.

Bess is startled. “The baby? I’m sure she’s fine. They probably wanted to let you sleep and brought her to the nursery.”

Gaia blinks the sleep from her eyes. She sighs deeply and props herself up on her elbows with great effort. “How are you feeling?”

“How are
you
, is the question,” says Bess. “I’m so sorry I caused such a commotion last night. Just what you needed, I’m sure. How is the baby? I mean, how did it go?”

Gaia presses a button and the bed buzzes and angles its top end upward. She settles in, takes a sip of water, closes her eyes. “Mm,” she purrs, “yes.” Then she opens her eyes and smiles at Bess. “My baby girl, Pearl. She’s perfect. Have you seen her?”

“No,” says Bess, wondering what that
yes
was for. “I will. I heard it went smoothly, though. She’s a big girl. Nine pounds! Wow.”

Gaia nods. “I was that big, too, my mother tells me.”

“Where is your mother? Do you want me to call her?”

“No, she should be on her way.”

The couple next to them laughs. Bess and Gaia turn their heads toward the curtain, then Bess looks down at her hands. Should she mention Sonny? What would she say? That she’s sorry? That he’s really a good guy and don’t be mad? That men are—
Stop.
Just stop.

“You’re thinking of Sonny,” says Gaia. “But you shouldn’t think bad thoughts. He’ll come back when he’s ready.”

Bess’s mind is a big blowout party of bad thoughts. “Aren’t you mad?”

“No,” says Gaia, as if followed by
silly
.
No silly, silly Bess, silly girl
.

“You seem so sure he’ll come back. How do you know that?”

“I just do.”

“Is it faith? Is that it?”

Gaia stretches her neck from side to side, front to back. “It’s not faith for me, exactly. More like I can sense it.”

“You’re psychic or something? Or what do they call it . . . clairvoyant?”

“Something like that. I can’t read people’s minds, but I can sense things. It’s easier to do with plants, they’re less complex.”

“Plants? Like, you touch a plant and you know what it’s thinking?”

“Bess, plants don’t think.”
Stay with me here
, she seems to communicate with a slow blink and the downward tilt of her head. She looks exhausted. “It’s more that I can sense what’s wrong, what they need.”

Bess rubs her temples. This is like an Alice in Wonderland conversation with its slippery, stealth logic. “Still,” she says, “you can’t change the fact that Sonny took off at a crucial moment. I can’t believe you’re not pissed off about that.”

Gaia squirts a dollop of lotion into her hands and rubs her palms together. “Think of it this way,” she explains in a soft, tired voice. “You have a child who is so upset he won’t stop crying, but he’s not able to communicate why. His crying is so loud you want it to stop, but you don’t know what to do. You can try all sorts of things you’ve tried before which may or may not work, or you can go on doing what you do, be there for him if he needs you, not with anger but with compassion. He will stop crying. You know that. You know the outcome so you can have more control over the means. I think Sonny left your party so he can have himself a good cry.”

How can a person be so calm
, thinks Bess. “But what about you? Sonny’s not a child. What about your needs?”

Gaia closes her eyes. “I need him to go away every now and again.”

A cheery nurse enters and claps in sync with the syllables of “Good morning.” She claps three more times when she says, “How. Are. We?” Bess watches her move around the room. What is it with these nurses that they’re so happy in the morning? Are they this happy in the proctology ward?

“I’m sorry, mommies, but I’m going to have to ask your visitors to step out of the room for just a few minutes, okay? We just want to clean up a bit, okay? Okay.”

“Okay,” says Bess, with a quick smile to Gaia. She is actually thankful for the interruption.

“Can I see my baby?” Gaia asks the nurse.

“In a few minutes, okay?”

“I’ll go check on her, wish her a happy birthday,” says Bess. “I’m glad you’re doing well. I’ll call you later.”

Gaia reaches for Bess’s hand. “Bess, thank you. Thank you for being here.”

Bess holds on to Gaia’s hand with both of hers, feeling a sudden powerful mix of emotion take hold and rise into her throat, as if she were holding her mother’s hand. “My pleasure,” she says, and exits the room.

Just outside the door, Bess hears Gaia ask the nurse once again to see Pearl, this time in a more forceful, less controlled voice.
Now
, says Gaia,
I want to see my baby now
.
Please don’t tell me I can’t
.

So she’s human after all, thinks Bess.

T
he newborns are behind a window decorated with cranberry and peach flower decals. There the hair brusher is standing, staring, making little breath marks on the glass. Bess stands next to this tall woman and looks for Pearl. It occurs to her that she doesn’t know Gaia’s last name and though she searches among the infants, she can’t tell one from another. More intriguing is the whole group of them, where they were just twenty-four hours ago, where they will scatter to, and what they will become as they age.

“That one’s mine,” says the woman, pointing to one corner of the room.

Bess is suddenly overcome with a visceral sadness that she may never be able to say those words herself. She’s thought at times of being a single parent, but knows it’s ultimately not for her. Being a single woman is hard enough. “Very cute,” is all she can think to say.

Her cell phone rings from inside her knapsack. She answers it as she walks to the front exit of the hospital.

“Hey. Where are you?” says Gabrielle.

“Still at the hospital.”

“That woman had her baby? She’s okay?”

“She’s fine. Baby’s fine. Me, I need two Valium and a six-hour nap. Did you get everyone out of my place after I left?”

“When the wine ran out. I ended up talking to the guy in the football jersey all night—Paul. Totally hot. And smart. Did you see him?”

“I think so. Did you get his number?”

“Home, work, cell, e-mail, oh yeah. Major chemistry. Think I’ll quit looking for a job and get married after all.” Gabrielle has told Bess many times she has little interest in marriage, monogamous relationships, or children of her own. She gushes love and energy toward her five nieces and nephews who live nearby and that’s enough. Though she listens with attempted empathy, she doesn’t understand Bess’s needs for those things, so Bess doesn’t burden her with those particular longings. Rather, Bess harbors a secret jealousy of Gabrielle’s aloofness, which, coupled with her voluptuous physique and dimpled smile, seem to attract droves of eligible bachelors, the way Gabrielle used to attract so many of the boys in high school. “That was a joke,” Gabrielle says. “What’s with the pregnant pause? Ha, get it?”

Now that Bess is out of the hospital, she finds she can think more clearly and her mind turns to Rory. What’s his story? she wonders. What would have happened between them had the whole night continued on as it was? “Gabrielle, remind me . . . how did you meet Rory again?”

“The Irish guy? At a bar last week. I told you.”

“I know, but
how
. Did he buy you a drink? Did he come on to you?”

“Okay, stop. Honey, I’m not his type, he’s not my type, you know that. I invited him for you.”

Bess steps into a cab. She feels like closing her eyes and sleeping right there on the seat. “Sorry. I’m just upset he left. I kind of liked him.”

“I know. He’ll call. I got the feeling he liked you, too. Let me know if you want help cleaning up, okay? I’m around.”

Bess hadn’t thought of that, how messy and smelly her apartment would be, post-party. “Right there,” she says to the cabdriver, pointing down the block, “where that man is with the dog.” Cricket is standing out front of their building in the colorful kitenge shirt Bess had bought him last year from a Kenyan colleague. Stella is on a leash, lying by his side, her head and front paws draped over his right sandal. When Bess steps out of the cab, Cricket peers at her above his sunglasses, then with an exaggerated twist of his neck, looks the other way down the street.

“Morning,” says Bess, leaning down to scratch under Stella’s chin. Stella sits up and sniffs her wrist. “Are you ignoring me? What did I do this time?”

“Who are you? I don’t know you. Stella, bite her ferociously.” Stella is distracted by a fly buzzing around her head. Her flabby chins swing as she pants and follows the fly’s flight pattern. Her drool drips down onto Cricket’s big toe.

“She’s a monster,” says Bess. “Listen, are you going to tell me what’s eating you or do I have to shake it out of you with my dirty germ-ridden hands?”

“What should you have done very first thing this morning?”

“Called you.”

“I can’t hear you.”

“Called you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re a nosy son of a bitch.”

“Because I helped you plan that party to the very last Kalamata olive, because I caught numerous nasty infections from you sniveling on my shoulder, because you know I’d be waiting by the phone to hear every last detail, but what do you do? You forget me. You stay out all night with some Casanova—whoever he is I don’t like him—and you fall out of the cab in the same clothes, in a cab, I say . . . where does he live, in the suburbs? Oh, can this get any worse.”

“Are you through, oh Queen for a Day?”

A large yellow bus pulls up beside them and opens its doors. On the side of the bus is a picture of two dogs relaxing on lounge chairs by a pool wearing sunglasses, bikinis, and wide-brimmed hats. A waiter is serving them bones wrapped in red ribbons on a silver tray. Above the picture it reads, “Dogaritaville.” Cricket leads Stella onboard, disappears for a moment, then steps back off the bus. Stella’s head appears in the last window in the back. Cricket blows her a kiss from below her window. “Bye-bye, beautiful baby girl. Play nicely with your friends. Daddy loves you.” Cricket waves to Stella as the bus pulls away.

“Why is Stella going to a kennel?”

“Camp, you philistine. Canine camp, the very best.”

Bess is about to say that she would have looked after Stella, but she realizes (and she knows Cricket is thinking this, too) that she was not home this morning for him to ask that of her. “Where are you going that you couldn’t bring her with you?”

His voice drops. “Nowhere. Out.”

“Now who’s the cagey one?”

“I prefer a cloud of mystery about me, it’s part of my charm. And don’t turn the telescope on me, we were talking about your whereabouts.”

“I just came from the hospital. Didn’t you hear the ambulance last night?”

Cricket gasps, pressing one hand to his mouth, the other to his chest. He is in and out of his persona so quickly it’s hard sometimes for Bess to keep up. He never seemed to be that dramatic when Darren was alive. Darren was clearly the queen in their relationship. “Ambulance? I took an Ambien, I must have slept right through it. What did those single beasts do to you? Germinators, every one of them! Here, sit down, you look feverish. Can I get you a sprig of mint? It’s very refreshing. Opens the passages.” Cricket is following his own advice, fanning himself and breathing deeply.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re a liar. What is
that
?” With a dainty finger, Cricket points to the swelling above her eye.

“Nothing. I hit my head. Some woman—” she begins, but stops. It’s too much to get into now. “Listen, I have to go. I’ll stop by tonight and catch you up on everything you’ve missed.”

“I won’t be there.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ll be somewhere else.”

Bess can’t remember the last time Cricket went away overnight. She knows he doesn’t like to sleep anywhere other than on his own extra-firm, dust-free mattress, special-ordered from New York’s Lower East Side, approved by nine out of ten doctors and twelve rabbis according to the label Cricket won’t cut off because it says not to. “Why can’t you tell me where you’re going?”

“Oh, now suddenly you care about my well-being.”

Bess steps up to the front door. “Cricket, I hope it’s nothing serious and that you’re okay, but I really have to go. I’m supposed to be at my grandparents in half an hour. Call me from the road if you need me and let me know when you’re back, okay? I’ll be thinking of you.”

“Go away then. You’re dismissed. But write everything down that you must tell me. You have a terrible memory.”

Her apartment smells as musty and fermented as a frat house basement. She opens a window and double checks that her stereo is turned off. Her friends had been kind. They stripped her bed, rinsed and lined up the wine bottles for recycling, and wrapped the cheese in the fridge. There are still crushed chips in her rug and half-full plastic cups abandoned on shelves. She finds someone’s black sweater bunched in a corner, and on her pillow a business card that reads: “Harry Selwick, patent attorney.” She has to think about this for a minute. Harry Selwick? Oh, right, the divorcé who, toward the end of the night, interrupted a story she was telling to let her know he could see her nipples were hard. On the back of the card, Harry had written, “Call me.” Bess calls him several things as she tosses the card into the trash.