The Pretend Wife (24 page)

There Is Barely a Blurry Line
Between Love and Hate

With each exhale, I'm aware that I'm steaming up the shuttle van with gin fumes. I'd apologize to the driver, but I can hear my mother telling me not to apologize to those in the service industry.
It's so middle class.
The fact that we were middle class throughout my childhood never seems to matter. I decide not to apologize though because I don't want to make the driver uncomfortable. Apologizing for drunkenness is something that you shouldn't have to do while drunk—that's one of the benefits of being drunk, right? That you don't care if people know you're drunk. But the fact that I want to apologize is proof that the drunk is wearing off, sadly. I pop a few chocolate-covered cherries bought off an airport rack and make idle chatter.

“So, any hobbies?” I ask the driver. I've had drivers who were epic gamblers, brutal genocide survivors, fathers of fourteen. Sometimes I ask questions. Sometimes I don't.

“I give tennis lessons,” he says. “It didn't used to be a hobby, but I guess it is now.”

“You were good?”

“I've gone a few rounds with the best of them.” He looks at me through the rearview mirror. “But I didn't have the last little bit it takes to push you to the next level. And I didn't take it well.”

He looks like a tennis pro to me now. He's tan and his right forearm muscle is overdeveloped like Popeye's. “You didn't take it well?”

“I took to drink—as my grandmother would say.”

This is alarming—he's at the wheel.

He must read my nervousness. “I'm in recovery,” he adds quickly.

“Ah.” I feel guilty for being drunk now—like the time Artie and I brought a bottle of wine to the new neighbors only to find out he was a recovering alcoholic. I'm sure the driver can tell I've had my fair share today. I want to make excuses for myself, but I try not to. More talking just means releasing more gin fumes—this is my drunken logic at the moment. In a fit of paranoia, I wonder if I'll become a drunk. Is that the way I'll go down? Will I be the type to stick out AA? I fret about my constitution, and then I burp, and I hate the stink of it so much that I know I'll never be much of an alcoholic. I lack some essential heartiness, and I'm relieved.

“Do you play?” he asks.

I look at him, confused.

“Tennis?”

Oh, right. I shrug, give him the sign for “just a little,” by pinching my fingers together and squinting.

The van is winding through my neighborhood, past the plush lawns of the Main Line. I've never really fit in
here. There were barbecues and cocktail parties, and millions of those other little checkbook parties where women gather to drink wine, eat chocolate, and muster an unhealthy adoration for candles or wicker baskets or educational toys. There was one sex-toy party, but it's strange how, after enough stiff Main Line conversation, vibrating pearl dildos can seem as boring as vanilla-scented tea lights.

There are friends, still, but not the kind I ever wanted. In fact, when things started to go wrong, I was happy to leave before they started phoning in with their alarmed condolences. I didn't want their sincere sympathy and I certainly didn't want the fake sympathy designed to get me to hand over the inside scoop, which would then hiss around the neighborhood. I was angry at Artie. For the betrayal, but also for the wounded pride. I was the fool. I didn't appreciate having the role forced on me. I wondered what Artie told his women about me. I existed in those relationships he had, but I was absent, unable to defend myself. What version of me appeared? The obstacle, the shrew, the dimwit? There are only so many choices for the cheated-on wife to become—none of them good.

We round the corner and I know that if I look up I'll see the house. I'm not quite ready. Artie and I had gone halvsies on the house. He'd wanted to pay for it outright, but I'd insisted. It was my first house and I wanted to feel like it was really mine. My mother thought I was insane to storm off and leave Artie there. My mother has policies on how to divorce well. She told me, “When leading up to a divorce, the most important thing is to stay in the house—and it doesn't hurt to hide some of the expensive finery, either. If you can't find it, how can you divvy it up? Become a squatter. I always stay and stay until the house is mine.” I told her that I didn't want the house and I didn't want to
hide finery. But she hushed me like I was being blasphemous—“Don't say things like that! I raised you better”—as if my reluctance to be a squatter in my own house were a social flaw, like not writing thank-you letters or wearing white shoes after Labor Day.

It's been almost six months now, and I'm not sure what kind of monumental change I'm expecting, but as the airport shuttle van pulls in the driveway, I'm surprised that I recognize the house at all. Did I expect it to fall into immediate disrepair? Artie had fallen into immediate disrepair, it seemed. The heart infection was detected just a few weeks after I left. The timing was suspicious from the get-go. I'd always thought it was a prank, a plea for sympathy, but now it seems more like his sickness is my fault. I lean forward in the van to pay the driver, and, despite the fact that we're strangers, I have the overwhelming urge to tell him
Artie broke my heart. I didn't break his.
I restrain myself.

The driver/ex-tennis-champion-hopeful/recovering alcoholic hands me his card, embossed with a racquet.

“If you ever want to work on your swing …” he says, winking.

My
swing
… Is my driver/ex-tennis-champion-hopeful/recovering alcoholic hitting on me? I do believe he is. I take the card, ignoring the wink. “Thanks.” In the wake of Artie's cheating, I've been so austere, so tough, that no men have flirted with me—at all. Am I looking vulnerable? Am I losing my austerity just when I need it most? Or maybe it's the fact that I'm drunk in the afternoon … I tip, modestly. I don't want to give the wrong idea.

He offers to tote my suitcase.

“No, no. I'm fine.” I'm one of those drinkers who stiffens up to compensate for the looseness. Artie called me a stilt-walking drunk. I stilt-walk over to my suitcase and
stilt-walk up to the house, relieved to hear the van pull away without some sassy honk.

 

Someone's been keeping up the garden, weeding, trimming. I suspect my mother—she has compulsions of these sorts, always has. I make a mental note to tell her to cease and desist. I walk in the front door. It smells like my house—a mixture of sweet cleanser and Artie's aftershave and soap and garlic and the damp woodsy smell from the empty fireplace. And, for a moment, it feels good to be home.

Our wedding picture—the two of us in an old Cadillac convertible—still sits on the mantel. I poke through a pile of mail on the lowboy. I walk through the kitchen, the dining room—there I find the sofa, the one he had reupholstered for our anniversary—the bright poppies. My chest contracts with a sudden pang. I close my eyes and walk away.

I can hear a television in the den. I walk down the hall and find a young nurse wearing one of those uniform jackets with cartoon crayon drawings of kids printed on them. She's asleep in Artie's recliner. Did she have to be a young nurse? Couldn't she have been old and pruned? Did she have to be so blond? Sure, her presence was probably a random, computer-generated assignment, but still, it seems particularly, cosmically insulting.

I leave the nurse dozing and walk up the staircase, glancing at the photographs lining the wall. This is the spot you'd usually hang family photos, but these are artsy pictures I took before I met Artie, back during my artsy photographer phase: pictures of a dog with its head stuck out of a sunroof, speeding by; a girl in a frilly dress riding a pony at a fair, but crying hysterically; a Hare Krishna
talking on his cell phone. These are my quasi-art moments. And I'm relieved they aren't the standard family shots right now. I couldn't take the fakeness of Sears renditions of a happy home life. And I'm relieved that they aren't old photos of our parents and grandparents—Artie and I both hail from scoundrels of one kind or another. We couldn't have ever made the convoluted decisions of which sets of families to include. For example, which of my mother's husbands would make it in a staged photo with her? My father, who abandoned us? Husband number four, who was by far the sweetest, but, while wrestling an ancient, bulky antenna, fell off the roof and died because, as my mother put it,
His tragic flaw was that he was too cheap for cable
? Or the most recent divorce, because she got the best settlement out of him? How to choose? No, I'm happy to see my old artwork. I was numb to them when I left, but now they strike me as, well, funny and sad, as I had intended, I guess, back when I had intentions of this sort.

But at the top of the stairs there's a new framed photo—one that Artie took, not me. I know it immediately. It's a picture of me looking down at the freckles on my chest—no obscene nudity—inked out to represent Elvis, midcroon. I'm looking away, laughing, my chin tilted back. I know now that Artie has been expecting me. He's planted this framed photograph as a way of buttering me up with nostalgia, and my heart responds. I can't help it. I miss that moment in our lives together, so intimate and so bound together. But I don't let myself dwell on that. I'm in no mood for manipulation. I march up the final stairs.

I walk down the hallway, quietly, toward the nearly closed door of our bedroom. The last time I saw Artie he was standing on the other side of airport security, staring
at me, wide-eyed, his arms opened, frozen, as if in the middle of an important question. I was supposed to have taken it as a plea for forgiveness, I guess.

I place my hand on the door. I'm afraid to open it. He's been existing in my mind for so long that I can't imagine his body, his voice, his hands. I'm afraid, suddenly, that he'll look so sickly that I won't be able to bear it. I understand the
idea
of Artie's sickness. I'm not so sure I'm prepared for the
reality
of it. But I know that I have to.

I push the door open a crack and see Artie in bed. He's staring at the ceiling. He looks older. Is it just that I have this youthful image of Artie in my mind, one that some part of me refuses to update (probably because I'd have to update my own), or is it the sickness that has aged him? He's still beautiful. Have I mentioned that Artie is beautiful? Not traditionally. No. He was punched as a kid—yes, over some girl—and has an offset nose, but a gorgeous smile and a certain boyishness, a restlessness that gives him such ebullient energy, but also probably the same part of him that led him to other women. He has broad shoulders—a bulky manliness—but he's uncomfortable with them. He slouches. He has always looked best at the end of the day, loosened by a drink, when the light gives up and things fall into shadows. He has thick dark hair tinged gray and a way of pushing it roughly off his forehead, and blue eyes—soft, sexy dark eyes under heavy lids.

And now? Now. Artie's dying in our bed and it is still
our
bed, after all, and, although there is a knot of hatred in me, I want nothing more in this moment than to crawl into bed next to him, to lay my head on his chest while we take turns telling each other everything we've missed—my overly positive assistant, the lady on the plane—and in
this way saying:
it's going to be all right. Everything's going to be all right.

“What are you looking at up there?” I ask.

He turns his head and stares at me. He has a charming smile—a little cocky, but also affectionate and sweet. It's as if he predicted today was the day I'd come, and it had gotten late, but he'd remained confident, and then I actually showed up, proving him right. He smiles like he's won a gentleman's bet. “Lucy,” he says. “It's you.”

“Yep. Here I am.”

“I planned on doing this some other way, you know.”

“Doing what?”

“Winning you back,” he says, eyes crinkling. “I mean, dying wasn't really what I had in mind. It lacks charm, frankly.”

I don't know what to say. I don't want to talk about dying. “What was the other plan?” I ask.

“Reformation. Penance. I was going to make amends and become a new man,” he says, tilting his head. “I wasn't against renting a white horse.”

“I don't think I would have bought into the white horse.” Artie has always loved a grand gesture. More than once my fortune cookies at Chinese restaurants were stuffed, behind the scenes, with more intimate notes. He once had a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet write a sonnet for my birthday. In a fit of nerves, I told a garish hostess how much I admired her necklace—a gaudy, spangled, Liberace affair—and for my next birthday, there it sat in an enormous velvet box. I loved Artie's desire to surprise me, but I truly loved the quiet, unplanned moments—cooking pastries together, finding ourselves powdered with sugar or arguing about some principle of physics or the construction of aqueducts in ancient Rome—those
things neither of us know anything about. I've always loved Artie most when he wasn't trying to be lovable.