The Ninth Wife (8 page)

She has minutes to jump into the shower, get dressed, and get over to the lot where she reserved a Zipcar for the day, but she allows herself a moment to strum the strings of her banjo and think about Rory. Perhaps this is the time to squelch her pride and try and find him. If she is supposed to be learning anything in karate it’s to have confidence. Confidence, she says aloud, clapping to the syllables. Con. Fi. Dence.

Chapter Six

I
didn’t mean to hurt Lorraine. She was such an innocent girl and I was a real ass. But then that’s just it, isn’t it? Nice and innocent—don’t we so often use those words with a tinge of disdain? When there isn’t a whole lot of substance there to grab on to? Listen to me, still the ass. But you know what I mean, right? No edge? Maybe she had an edge, I don’t know. Maybe at the time I wasn’t looking for an edge. I was looking for someone calm and steady, that’s what I needed. They say with distance you’re supposed to get perspective, but it seems harder to do with Lorraine and the way I was then.

I met her at church. I wanted to leave Boston and get a fresh start with my green card, so I traveled west, found myself in Toledo one day and landed a job at a computer company. This was in, let’s see, 1984. I had taken classes on music and literature and even television production, but I ended up with a college degree in computers, mostly because it was a new field back then and it seemed the most practical.
Practical
. Maybe Maggie was still in my head then, I don’t know.

I was feeling kind of lost and decided to go to confession and unload some of the things I’d been thinking about my marriages, you know, to get some grounding. I haven’t exactly made religion a part of my life, but I tend to seek it out when I’m down. At least I used to.
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, it’s been five years since my last confession
, I said, and I started to tell my tale, and the priest, you know what he said at the end?
Do the right thing.
Always do the right thing
. I tell you I don’t think he heard a word I was saying, and probably he said that stock phrase to every sorry soul who came to see him, but for whatever reason, it resonated with me. I thought it was deep and I pondered its meaning and tried to abide by it however I could. And it was under those circumstances that I met Lorraine, because she was watching me from the back of the church when I went to sit in the pews for a while. Then I saw her again out in the parking lot and when I went to get into my car she waved hello and I waved back. Next thing I know I go to pull out and there she is in her Volkswagen and BAM I hit right into her. Not hard, just a tap, but I heard a definite crunching of metal and so I got out and ran over to her car to see if she was okay. I’m fine, she says, and then she fires questions at me, ignoring the fact that we just had an accident. What’s my name, where am I from, do I like dogs? Seriously, she asked me that right from the start, about dogs, and I tell you I was a little taken aback. I suppose I like dogs, I said, and then I mentioned a car repair shop around the corner. I offered to follow her there and then give her a lift home, which I did because I’m thinking it’s the right thing to do. And when we got to her apartment, a dreary gray building between a construction site and a used car dealership, I walked her to her door and when she invited me up to her place, I went because I thought it was the right thing to do after I just hit her car. Well I’ll tell you, seven months later I’m standing at the courthouse with Lorraine, saying our vows, saying those words the priest said to me over and over again like a mantra:
Do the right thing do the right thing
, but everything I ever did with Lorraine couldn’t have been more wrong.

Why did I marry her? Well, if you want to get Freudian about it, I’d say she reminded me of my mother. She was of Irish stock, and she was quiet and tidy. You’d take your last sip of coffee and before you could set your mug back down on the table she’d whisk it off to the sink. Now wait, let me explain because I don’t want you getting the wrong idea about my mother, God forbid: it wasn’t sexual at first with Lorraine. I don’t mean to say she was altogether unattractive, just plain. She had meaty thighs, reddish shoulder-length hair she wore back in a headband, and she favored plum-colored outfits with matching socks and sensible shoes. But she also had very large breasts and full lips and the softest pale skin I ever felt, though she was addicted to lip gloss and all types of hand lotion, tubes of which turned up everywhere so that I was always sitting or stepping on them, squirting the lotion onto the furniture or the carpet where her dogs would lick it up and end up vomiting into the wee hours of the night to make matters worse.

Jesus, those bloody dogs. Lorraine had four mutts that she had rescued from the local shelter, all shapes and sizes, all ludicrously named after one of the Seven Dwarfs. I say ludicrous because their dispositions had nothing to do with their names. Sleepy never stopped barking; Sneezy was aloof, almost catatonic; Happy wore a muzzle to stop him from biting people; and I couldn’t get Bashful to stop humping my leg. It got damn well crowded in that apartment of hers, and I didn’t even mention all the stuffed animals she had piled up on her couch, her bed, her shelves, her counters. You couldn’t pee without some wide-eyed, pastel-colored monkey or bear or dinosaur staring you down or threatening to fall into the toilet. Crazy, no? Now you know I’m a storyteller and you probably think I’m making this up, but I swear it’s true. She was clean, but my God she liked clutter.

Anyway, like I said, no sex. It wasn’t like that at the beginning, for me anyway, not with a big cross over her bed and all those animals—real and stuffed—and her seeming young and innocent. She
was
Snow White. When I met her she was twenty-five, a year older than me and living on her own, working as a receptionist in a dentist’s office, but she seemed in many ways just like a little girl, a
kid
really, and yet she had a maternal nature and she was kind and I was in need of a friend and that’s how we started spending time together. We’d walk her dogs in the park and go to movies and do volunteer work at the local soup kitchens through the church. She told me at the outset that she was a virgin and she intended to keep her virtue until she got married and I took that as a warning not to make a move, which was fine because I didn’t have designs on her and certainly had no intention of getting married again.

But then, as it happened, my brother Eamonn died.

I got the call from my father. He said Eamonn was sick and they didn’t think he was going to make it and maybe I should come home, that they would help me pay for it if they could. The news hit me hard. I took off for Ireland immediately. Eamonn looked so thin, so gaunt there in the hospital. Hearing him say he loved me before he let go was more than I could bear. He passed on three days after I arrived. I stayed for the funeral and a week beyond, helping out around the house and stopping in on my old haunts. It was nice to be home, to sit and have soup with my parents, catch up with my sisters, get drunk with my friends. We all dealt with our grief in our own way. But after a week there I was ready to leave. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s a powerful thing to go back after a few years to a place where you grew up, but you get to realizing it’s not going back exactly as time’s moved forward and you feel kind of stuck. Plus I missed America. And I mean just that . . . I didn’t miss anything in particular, not my job or Toledo or even Lorraine so much as I missed the whole package. America was an indescribable
feeling
, I guess you could say. I missed the feeling.

Besides, they knew about Maggie and me and that was hard to live with. I didn’t tell them about Carol, but in a moment of weakness, when my mother looked like she was on the verge of tears worrying about me so far away, I did tell her about Lorraine, about how she was a nice Irish-American girl who reminded me of her and not to worry. I didn’t say we were dating exactly, but I didn’t say we weren’t.
You goin’ t’
marry this girl then, Rory?
she asked. My mother wouldn’t stop worrying until she knew I was married and cared for, that much I knew. And the poor woman had just lost her eldest son. So I answered yes without thinking. And I went back to America.

Lorraine picked me up from the airport and there were those lips and those breasts and her soft-skin embrace . . . you get what I’m saying? She grabbed hold, hugging me the way she did with such sympathy, and I cried and she cried with me. We went home and made love.
Are you sure
, I said.
I’ve never been more sure
, she said back.

Two months later we were married. I never bothered to get my marriage to Maggie annulled—she married a Jew and Carol wasn’t religious. Lorraine wanted to get married in the Church, so I said I would try to contact Maggie to get an annulment, but I never got around to it. In the end she agreed to just saying our vows at the courthouse. I always suspected she regretted that.

See, I convinced myself Lorraine was the right kind of girl for me. I felt . . . well . . .
comforted
is maybe the word. Each morning she handed me my lunch in a brown bag decorated with a Disney sticker and a quote of inspiration. She baked apricot muffins and gave me answers I couldn’t get on my crossword puzzles. She remembered my birthday and handmade me a party hat. Our lives were ordinary lives folding one day into the next. And one of those ordinary days I just cracked.

I didn’t do anything but have an epiphany standing in the kitchen, but what happened after I ran out of the apartment is where the story is, the beginning of the end, you could say. My epiphany was this: I was wasting my life. I was in a kind of fairy-tale coma and I needed to get out. I wasn’t in love with Lorraine and my God, I had had it with her dogs.

The problem was, Lorraine wasn’t home when I got this rush of a feeling that made me grab my coat and make a fast escape. Now you’re thinking I left the door open by accident and let all those dogs loose. No, I knew better than that. Lorraine had trained me well, and locking the door behind me was habit by then. No see, Lorraine was up the whole night before baking sugar cookies for the homeless shelter’s anniversary celebration. She baked something like twelve dozen cookies. They were stacked on trays on the counter and I was to wrap them up and bring them over to the shelter while she was doing errands, but I didn’t. I left them there unwrapped. In the kitchen. While I was gone for hours. Are you getting what I’m saying here? The dogs! I forgot to feed the dogs and them being hungry and curious and typical canine food grabbers, they got ahold of those cookies like there was no tomorrow, ate every last one of them. Well, those dogs got on such a sugar high they went wild! They tore through the apartment like a tornado, chewing through every last stuffed animal so that the living room looked like a battleground in winter, little limbs and heads strewn about in a blanket of cotton. They knocked over lamps and broke her figurines, vomited up the cookies and the cotton and finally passed out on their backs in such deep slumber that when Lorraine came back to this scene—can you imagine?—she thought they were all dead.

I found out about it all the next day when I returned, because I had to come back and end it properly, that was the least I could do. The dogs turned out to be okay, but Lorraine . . . she wouldn’t speak to me. The neighbors who were there to help clean up formed a wall between her and me, saying she didn’t want to see me and I should go, just go. If I’m going to be completely honest I’ll also tell you I cheated on Lorraine that night and one of her neighbors commented on my smelling like perfume. It was just someone I picked up at the bar and I wanted to tell Lorraine it didn’t mean anything, that I was sorry, but Lorraine had had enough. She peeked at me from around the bend, looking at me with such sad sad eyes, and then she receded into the other room.

In the days and weeks that followed, I tried to call, but she wouldn’t answer. So I had no choice . . . I broke it off in a letter. I wrote her several letters as a matter of fact, but I stopped when one got returned and I found out she moved without a forwarding address. Getting a divorce after that, I can tell you, was no small task. Maggie and Carol made it easy; I had no idea where Lorraine had gone, and I had no money for an attorney. But then one day, about a year later, I received divorce papers in the mail (I hadn’t yet left Toledo). According to her attorney, she was eager to marry someone else, so I was happy to oblige.

I hope she’s happy. And the truth is, the wrong I did her came back to me tenfold. I’m saying I got what I deserved with my next two wives, who sent me spiraling downward and straight into rehab. My late twenties . . . I call them my dark years.

Chapter Seven

I
t’s karate that Bess is thinking about as she drives up Wisconsin Avenue toward the Beltway. Her school requires a paper before each test for a new belt, and the one Bess has due tomorrow is on the concepts of yin and yang. She had gerbils once named Yin and Yang, when she was eleven. True to their names, Yin was dark and passive and female, and Yang was a lighter, more aggressive male. They played well together, balanced as they were, and for a time Bess imagined having little Yin and Yang babies, but then Yang escaped the cage one afternoon and was brought back by the neighbor’s cat, a prize dropped on the front stoop. Yin wasn’t herself after Yang’s death. She shed most of her fur and wouldn’t eat. Two weeks later, she, too, took her last breath. Bess felt guilty naming them Yin and Yang, as if the labels themselves dictated Yin’s fate. Maybe Yin could have survived had she been called Wonder Woman, or Cher, or Mother Teresa.

She would write in her paper that the symbiotic relationship between yin and yang manifests itself in several ways, the artistic (choreographed and beautiful) aspects balancing out the martial (physical and more violent) aspects to create a true martial art. Karate depends on a healthy balance between offensiveness and defensiveness, physical strength and mental acuity, competitiveness and camaraderie, patience and determination, an awareness of details (heel down, elbows in, wrist straight, thumb tucked) and a sense of the fluidity of moving through a whole routine. “We are, each of us, teacher and student always,” her instructor had said.