The Pretend Wife (21 page)

I took a deep breath and spoke as quickly as possible. “Look, I know that you're seeing someone right now and that you've moved on, just like last time, with Ellen Maddox, or backwards, in that case.”

He immediately started saying, “Wait, wait. Slow down a minute.” But I didn't even pause. I talked over his protests.

“You know, you moved back to Ellen Maddox, really. But what I'm saying is that I told him that I'm in love with you, but not because I want to be with you. No. No. That's not what I meant. But only because I don't want se
crets. There are too many secrets in the world. People are hoarding them everywhere. And I had to tell him. That's all. This is about me and him. Not you. I'm so sorry. I'm hanging up. I'm not giving you a chance to talk. I'm just hanging up now because this is my problem with Peter, not yours, and not about you and me. So I'm hanging up. I'm coming over to collect Peter, but that's it. I won't bother you. I'm hanging up.”

He was protesting more loudly now. “Wait, wait. Don't hang up!” But I did anyway. I had to.

 

I would learn later, much later, a sketchy version of what happened in between the time of Elliot's call and when I arrived at his house. Peter started yelling obscenities. He sliced a ball and it popped off one of the neighbor's shutters. The neighbor called Elliot on the phone and told him that he was going to call the cops if he didn't get the maniac to settle down.

Elliot went out to talk some sense into Peter. When he reached for the club in Peter's hand, Peter threw a punch, and soon they were wrestling in the snow.

That's where I found them.

The fight was vicious. Peter was drunk, but more athletic than Elliot, but Elliot was taking advantage of Peter's sloppiness. Both were getting in some quick punches. Their bodies were rolling and pitching in a blur of motion, the fog of their breath bursting up from their mouths into the cold night air. Peter's golf bag had tipped over. The golf clubs were splayed on the white lawn. A box of balls had tipped too, and the balls had rolled to the sidewalk where they sat like lost eggs. The angry neighbor was on his front stoop now, glowering at them in a sweatsuit with
the hood's drawstrings tightened up around his meaty face. A few other neighbors were peering out of lit-up windows. The snow was coming down faster now, the flakes bigger and wetter.

I got out of my car and just stood there on the sidewalk, watching in stunned silence. Did I want Elliot to beat Peter up? I did, I think, for sleeping with Helen. But I didn't mind Peter getting in a few jabs of his own—on Elliot who'd moved on to someone else so swiftly. Was that why I was frozen there? It was possible, but also I'd absorbed so much in one day. I was no longer living in the world I'd woken up in. I didn't know what was expected of me here, how to act, what to say.

Elliot finally got Peter's button-down pulled up and over his head so that his arms were trapped and his chest bare. His skin was pale but reddened with spots that looked like they'd form bruises overnight. Elliot then pulled Peter in close to his body, his shoes slipping in the snow, and put him in a headlock.

“You need to go home!” Elliot said breathlessly. “Just stop and go home!”

“No truce!” Peter was shouting, reverting to the language of a sixth-grader. “No truce! I do not give up!”

“Someone's going to call the cops!” Elliot said, and he scanned the street, as if wondering if someone already had, and that's when he saw me. Elliot loosened his grip and Peter jerked free and stood up. He tugged his shirt down violently, as if he were fighting himself now. They both stared at me. Elliot already had a puffed eye that was sealing shut. Peter had a little blood trickling from his nose.

“Gwen,” Elliot said.

“Tell him you love me!” Peter shouted.

“Gwen,” Elliot said, walking toward me. “I'm not seeing anyone else. I don't know what you were talking about on the phone.” I wasn't sure I could trust him or anyone. Nothing made any sense.

Peter caught up to him before he could get too close and shoved him. “Get your own goddamn wife!” he said. “You lousy fucker!”

“Hey,” Elliot said, putting his finger in Peter's face. “Don't start again.”

“You slept with Helen,” I said to Peter. This was a simple sentence, all that I could manage. He was about ten feet away and I was speaking softly.

“What?” he said. “Helen?”

“You slept with her,” I said.

“Did she just say that?” He laughed and spun around.

“It's true,” I said. “Admit it.”

“I'm not admitting to that!” he said. “That's horse-shit.” He started to pick up his golf clubs then, but lacked balance and fell to one knee. He staggered quickly back up.

“Just tell her the truth,” Elliot said, staring at the ground, his arms folded on his chest.

I looked at Elliot sharply. “Why don't you sound surprised?” I asked him.

He looked up and then back down at the ground. “Because he told me,” he said.

“You knew? For how long?”

“He doesn't know anything!” Peter said, holding a club by its foot and pointing its handle at Elliot. “You don't know anything, do you?”

“He told me that day in the golf cart,” Elliot said.

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“How could I?” he said. “I would have just been the
old boyfriend who was trying to break you two up. He'd have denied it. It would have been his word against mine. It was a trap. Plus,” he said, “it wasn't my secret to tell.”

“You should have told me,” I said, wiping the wet snow angrily from my face. “I feel like an idiot.”

“It isn't true anyway,” Peter said, walking toward me, his golf bag on one shoulder. I noticed he was wearing his father's spikes again. Had he put them on for this occasion? “I didn't sleep with Helen. I don't even like Helen. I love you.” He started walking toward me. “Tell Elliot you love me,” he said in a slurred whisper. “C'mon, sweetie. Tell him now and we can all go home.”

I stared at the two of them.

“Gwen,” Elliot said. “I wanted to tell you, but I couldn't.”

“You should have thrown yourself into the trap!” I shouted. “You should have told me! What's the matter with a little honesty?”

I jogged to my car and got in. My hands were shaking as I shoved the key into the ignition. Finally, I managed to get the car in gear and drove off, leaving them standing there. In my rearview mirror, I saw Peter listing to one side under the weight of his golf bag, and Elliot, who turned around and punched him, one last time, in the stomach. Peter folded at the waist. And Elliot stuffed his hands in his pockets and walked toward his front door in the steady snow.

I
DROVE TO MY FATHER'S
house. It was late. The house was dark. I had no key and so had to knock on the front door, like a stranger, and maybe that was fitting. I suddenly felt like I was surrounded by strangers and that I was a stranger to myself. I saw my father's bedroom light turn on and then the porch lamp. He opened the door with the old-fashioned chain still in place. When he saw it was me, he quickly shut the door to unlock it, and then opened it wide.

“Come in, come in!” he said, peeking out at the snowy yard at my back. He was wearing a blue flannel bathrobe that looked ancient. It struck me as a widower's bathrobe. Wasn't that something that wives bought husbands when they'd worn out the old one? No one had told my father it was time to retire this one. It seemed intimate to see him like this—his skinny legs and bare feet sticking out from beneath the robe. I thought about saying that I shouldn't have disturbed him, excusing myself, and leaving. But where would I have gone?

I walked into the living room. It was just the way I'd left it—the boxes with their popped-open lids, the stack
of knitting books, the blanket on the floor. I didn't explain why I was there, and my father didn't ask. Instead he said, “Do you need to spend the night?”

I nodded.

“Do you want something warm to drink? I can make hot cocoa. I have some packets somewhere. Are you hungry?”

“No,” I said. “I just want to lie down. I'll just sleep on the sofa.”

“Why not in your old room?” he asked. “Let me strip the bed and get fresh sheets on it for you.”

“No,” I said, sitting down on the couch. “Here's fine. It's all I can manage.” I lay down and curled up.

My father stood there not sure what to do. Finally, he bent down and picked up my mother's blanket and draped it over me.

“Will you be warm enough? I'll turn up the thermostat.”

“I'm fine,” I said, pulling the blanket's tassels up to my chin. “I'll be okay.”

 

I called Eila in the morning. “I'm so sorry to leave you in the lurch. I'm sick,” I said.

“Don't bullshit me,” Eila said and I knew she was alone. This was her Sheila voice. It was too early in the morning to be Eila. And I was relieved. I wanted a real person. I was tired of fakes.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “Everything's gone to shit. How about that for not bullshitting you? I left my husband and then found out he's been having an affair with my best friend.” I wasn't crying, and it seemed strange to be able to say all of this so coldly. I could tell, though, that I would
probably start to cry at some point and I might not be able to stop once I did.

“Ah, hell,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

“You told me that lives don't come apart, but I have to say that this certainly feels like things have come apart.”

“Oh, you can't listen to me when I'm trying to be philosophical. I have no idea how the world works. I live with a Pekinese. That's all I can muster.” She sighed. “Is there anything I can do?”

I sighed. “Yeah,” I said. “I'd like to know something about you. Something that's true. Not this Eila stuff. Some thing about you.”

“Something true. About me.” She thought about it a minute. “My father was a son of a bitch. My mother worked as a secretary at a dentist's office. I was an ugly kid and people used to mistake me for a boy. That's three things. Does that help?”

“Weirdly, yes,” I said, and it did.

“How much time do you need?”

“I can't afford too much.”

“Take a week,” she said. “Okay?”

“Yes, thanks.”

After I hung up with her, I dialed Faith at work. I needed help. I asked her to get a few of my things from the apartment.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked in a hushed voice.

“No.”

I refused to talk to anyone. I put on one of my father's T-shirts and a pair of his sweatpants. Peter left messages. He figured I was at my father's and called the house phone there too, but I'd already told my father that I didn't want to talk to anyone. I heard him on the phone in the kitchen,
telling Peter exactly this. “She'll call you,” he said, “when she's ready.” I wondered when that would be. It felt years away. I had nothing to say to him. I spent much of my time replaying our relationship, but now casting everything in doubt and suspicion. I wondered if Helen was his only affair, if he'd ever expected to be committed to me even as we were taking our vows, if he'd ever really loved me. I was no closer to my definition of marriage, and looking at my life as a scientist, that little experiment seemed to have failed. Nothing was clearer.

The voicemail on my cell phone was cluttered. There were multiple messages from Peter, Helen, and Faith. I deleted their messages as soon as I heard their voices kick in. It was a reflex.
No,
I said aloud to no one,
don't talk to me. Don't try to explain.

There was only one message that I listened to.

It was from Elliot.

He said, “I'm not going to hound you with phone calls like I did the last time. I'm only calling this once. Nothing has changed for me. I'm in love with you. I have been for a very long time. It's the kind of love that won't stop, although I've tried to make it stop.” He sighed. “I don't know why you think I'm seeing someone else. I'm not. But you were right. I should have thrown myself into the trap. I should have told you even if I thought it was going to doom any chance we might have had. I should have opted for the truth. But I was too scared of losing you.” He paused again. “There's more. There's a lifetime's worth more to say. But that's all for now. That's all I'll bother you with.”

And then he hung up.

That's when I started crying. Something seemed to tear open inside of me and I couldn't shut it. I didn't think
about Elliot or Peter or Helen or anyone specifically. I just cried, breathlessly and raggedly, with no end in sight. Even when I caught my breath, the tears kept coming.

My father canceled his classes for the day so that he could stock up and keep an eye on me. While he was at the grocery store, I picked up a pair of my mother's knitting needles. I opened the box that was packed with yarn. I'd knit that one blanket in college. I wasn't sure I'd remember how, but my hands remembered, kinesthetically, the way to make the stitches. The tears kept rolling down my cheeks, beaded on the yarn, dotted the sweatpants.

My father came home and, carrying grocery bags to the kitchen, he saw me knitting. He paused for a moment, as if he was going to say something—and what would that be? Would this image scare him? Would he want to warn me? I didn't look up, and he moved on.

I was mourning, but what I was mourning, exactly, wasn't clear to me. At first at least, it didn't need to be clear. Mourning felt restless and the knitting relieved that restlessness in some small measure. I thought that I was mourning my marriage, and I was in a way, but I wasn't sure that it was mine to mourn. Had it ever been a marriage that I existed in completely as myself? I knew that the painful answer to that question was no. It had come to define me, though, and although I'd never become completely comfortable with being a wife, I walked through life as a known quantity. I had a safe and insular title. I was a wife. I had to let that go.

And letting that go, I had to let Peter go too. I'd been practicing this, I know, in many various ways. My decision to become Elliot Hull's pretend wife, the kiss in the rowboat, and then, upon my arrival back into my own world, my decision to observe my marriage as a scientist
was a decision to disconnect, to step outside of it. Hadn't I known that I was putting off the lessons that Vivian had taught me even then? That I was trying to postpone living my life with courage and honesty? Although that was the first time I'd done it so purposefully, I was beginning to understand that I'd been standing back, just a bit, for some time. I'd been doing it in the ice-cream shop, even, when I ran into Elliot. I knew, equally well, that Peter's affair wasn't entirely his fault. I'm not saying that I should have worked harder to keep him interested. To hell with that! It isn't any one person's job in a marriage to hold the other's attention to keep him from straying. I've never bought that old saw. But, in a broader way, his affair grew out of a marriage that I'd chosen, that I helped create, one that I'd never really ever fully demanded enough of, one that I found comfortable instead of engaging, one that I'd never allowed myself to jump into with full vulnerability.

Even though he'd wanted me to be Elliot's pretend wife and said he was okay with it, he may have known there was something deeper. This didn't make his affair with Helen forgivable, but I wasn't innocent myself. I remembered, too, his intimate, drunken voice—“Did you get my messages?”—on Helen's cell phone. Peter wanted to keep the affair going. Even as he was building to a drunken, jealous rage, he had the wherewithal to speak to Helen in a seductive voice. And, too, I knew that he thought he'd been hung up on by Helen, and maybe that, too, fueled his anger that snowy night.

And let's not forget Helen in all of this. For some strange reason, I felt more betrayed by her than by Peter. Part of this is because I don't think of men as being as strong as women, and so I could allow myself to chalk a tiny bit of Peter's actions up to something particularly
male. But Helen? I couldn't give her this infinitesimal leeway. This was old-fashioned, outdated thinking, and I knew it. I wish I were a better feminist. For this reason, though, her betrayal seemed more calculated, more personal, more vindictive. I kept going back to the way she'd explained the affair. “I've shut it down. For good. It's over.” She was saying that if it were up to Peter, the affair would have gone on and on. Was she trying to make herself look good—some hero! Or was she really getting in another jab? Either way, it seemed cruel. My friendship with Helen was over. I could imagine a time years from now—maybe decades—when we might be able to have a conversation that seemed normal, almost like great friends, but the trust was gone, permanently. I was the lucky one, though, because I knew that Helen was suffering, that she'd continue to suffer because she couldn't really trust herself on a very basic human level.

On all of the intellectual levels, I knew that my marriage was over, that I couldn't ever really go back to Peter, that I would have to relinquish this role that I'd come to use as a passage through the world.

And I didn't have Elliot as an excuse.

This was my own doing and undoing.

This should have been emotional on its own terms, in a clear way, but it wasn't. Every time I thought of Peter, I felt a loss that was more deeply rooted in my life. Every time I thought of Peter, I thought of my mother, her death, my lonesome childhood,
that
loss. I couldn't understand why except that you don't get to choose the time when mourning hits you. Some people mourn before a loss—knowing that it's coming. Some people mourn suddenly, in public, as if the reality of their loss is only brought into sharp focus when confronted with a group.
Some people mourn for years, decades—the loss keeps coming, like a leaking faucet that stains a spot of rust into the tub. I was mourning my marriage, Peter, these years of my life, but they were dredging up the past. I was mourning something that I couldn't have mourned as a five-year-old girl, something I couldn't have understood or had the language to come to terms with or the context.

How do you mourn what you might have had?

And that brought me to Elliot, always Elliot. I blamed him for not telling me about Peter cheating on me. It wasn't his place, no. But he should have told me anyway. Could I trust him now? Was he really not seeing anyone? Who was the pretty woman in his car?

I wasn't sure that it was at all possible to find my way back to him. Could we start again—at the beginning or the middle? Was everything too impossibly muddy? I was in love with him. That's all I knew. I was in love with him, and I had to mourn the possible end of that too.

What did the mourning feel like? Imagine flying, the landscape changing beneath you—shifting between deserts, jagged mountains, gorges, and long, twisting bodies of water. I was unprepared for this kind of grieving, how quickly it turned to anger then love then an embattled pride. I felt foolish, wounded, and then unbearably tough. Then for a stretch, without warning, I would feel empty, but soon it would start up all over again.

 

That evening, Faith knocked at the front door. I looked at her through the window. She was holding a container of homemade cookies and, propped next to her, was my rolling suitcase. Something about her stoic figure made
me feel steely and rigid, which I knew wasn't fair. She'd come to help. She was being a good friend.

My father walked into the living room. “Should I get it?” he asked.

“You can let her in,” I said.

He looked hugely relieved, and I realized how much he'd hated his role as gatekeeper. He must have despised the conflict and having to disappoint people.

I was still knitting, though I had no idea what I was knitting, exactly. A scarf? A shawl? A blanket? I was just practicing, small stitches, large stitches, making rows. I'd gotten faster—the knitting needles slid over each other, the yarn slipped up and over, on and back off, the needles making pleasing little clicks like claws.

I listened to Faith and my father exchange pleasantries then whispers—talking about me and my possible mental state, no doubt—and then she walked in and parked the suitcase. I didn't look at her. I glanced at her and saw that she was looking at the room, which was still piled with my mother's knitting and the empty boxes. I couldn't bring myself to repack them, and I could tell now that this might look like another sign of my instability. Did I look like a crazy person? Knitting amid all of this knitting?