The Ninth Wife (3 page)

But Maggie? She hit the ground running. Everything was exciting, everything was
absolutely ahmazin’, Rory, truly ahmazin’
. She lived in a constant state of awe, her lovely little mouth and her green eyes wide open, that’s how I picture her.
Over here, Rory
, she’d say, pulling my arm toward a store window or a street performer or a boys’ fight. We were in love still and had grand moments of passion in this mesmerizing new world, but she couldn’t relate to my periods of melancholy, or didn’t want to, I suppose. And she didn’t want to spend time with other Irish people, neither. She didn’t see the point when there were so many more interesting people to meet. She’d say if she wanted to be with Irish people she wouldn’t have left home.

Believe me, I saw her point. I did. And I didn’t want to lose her. I felt like she was drifting away from me and I wanted this to work with Maggie, I really did. We were husband and wife and I loved her, but there was just too much working against us, I guess. It wasn’t long before she said she was leaving me. We were sitting in a diner sharing French fries, and I felt like I was going to die of loneliness right then and there. But what she said next by way of an explanation was not what I expected. She held my hand and said, “Rory, I love you. I will always love you. But we have to be practical.” Then she said that she loved America so much she wanted to stay, that she couldn’t see herself going back to Ireland, not after what happened. And for that reason, she needed an immediate divorce from me to marry another man, an American man, who would help her stay and thrive in the country. She said she had found someone, a Jew, a lawyer, who loved her and wanted to marry her and would even bring her to New York and help her start an acting career and that I should know she did not love him the way she loved me, but it was the right course of action. That’s what she said:
course of action
.

And off she went. A year and three months to the day. I saw her after that, kept up with her for a while, and then we lost touch. I called her once years ago, and it was a nice conversation. She got married again, but I didn’t hold it against her, especially since I then went off and did the same thing. In a way.

Chapter Three

B
ess enjoys a steady stream of visitors at work—Ukrainian wood carvers, Ghanaian drummers, Cherokee potters, Khmer court dancers, Cajun guitarists. During the folk festivals she helps organize, they come in and out of her office, these talented makers of masks and beadwork, players of xylophones and dulcimers and accordions. They leave her with gifts that fill her walls and sing from her speakers.

For six years she’s coordinated national multiethnic events for a large nonprofit. She landed this dream job shortly after she received her Ph.D. in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania. It allows her to be part researcher, part community organizer, part curator, but mostly an advocate for the traditional arts, many of which were once across the seas, but because their practitioners were kicked out or escaped or were enslaved by foreigners, or left in search of a better life or maybe just a different life, have traveled to America and—for one reason or another—decided to stay.

For this, Bess loves America. She doesn’t buy American products just because they’re American. She’s never stepped foot in a McDonald’s. She doesn’t know all the words to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” or the “Star-Spangled Banner” or, if you get right down to it, the Pledge of Allegiance, except for the reference to God, which she wouldn’t say out loud anyway as a matter of principle, preferring the phrase
one nation, under Canada
. Rather, the America Bess loves is a beautiful quilt of cultures and art forms, sewn together with the threads of rich histories, and a new sense of place, of home. She’s seen a Japanese calligrapher clap to the rhythms of gospel, a mariachi vocalist marvel at Tibetan sand paintings, a Greek bouzouki player fall in love with a Midwestern decoy carver. Things like that stir her heart, giving her some of her greatest pleasures in life.

And so after karate, she went to her office to pick up a plate for her party, but she knows deep down that was an excuse, one of many she’s used to come back to her office during off hours to feel grounded. She needs this grounding today especially. Thirty-five years seems insignificant in the midst of such ancient traditions; in her office, her own story is dwarfed by the quills and feathers, the trills and echoes of other people’s ancestors who, she imagines, stand regally on the tops of mountains, along riverbanks, in sexy sweaty jook joints at the edge of wide open fields.

Bess knows too little about her own ancestry to feel connected to a past. Her father—an amateur folksinger and folklorist in his own right—died in a car accident when she was eight. He was a troubled teenager who ran away from a broken home to unlisted numbers and a new identity. Why he chose the name Gray, Bess couldn’t say. Weeks of research turned up little about his original name or past history, other than he was three-quarters Polish, one-quarter German. By the time Bess located her paternal grandparents, one was gone and the other was mean with Alzheimer’s, living in a nursing home in Georgia with white walls and rented furniture.

Carol, her mother, who was taken by cancer when Bess was in college, was adopted. She was darker in complexion and ethnic-looking, and, despite Bess’s questioning on the facts of her adoption and her biological makeup, Carol repeatedly said she cared not a bit about the people who gave her up and to leave it alone. Ethnic-looking, therefore, was as far as one got in description, hypotheses running the gamut from Mexican to Middle Eastern. The only hope Bess has of attaching herself to a culture is her grandparents on her mother’s side, who adopted Carol and raised her Jewish, encouraging her to do the same with Bess.

Millie and Irv Steinbloom—the most important people in Bess’s life—are a feisty, shrunken couple married sixty-five years. Though they are intensely private about their marriage and how or why they adopted a baby girl, they love telling stories about their own childhoods and how they met, which Bess captured one time on tape for a high school project. She asked them what their families were like in the Old Country. Their answers astounded her. There were brothers who were bootleggers, cousins who were escape artists, wealthy uncles and aunts who were robbed blind by the system but sure to have hidden away treasures, don’t you worry.

Bess told it all to her mother. “It’s unbelievable what they’re saying, Mom. Did you know Gram’s father was a spy?”

“Nonsense,” she had answered. “My grandfather was a night watchman with a couple of daytime mistresses.”

Bess gave up. If only she was half this, half that, quartered, portioned, and percentaged neatly to give the census takers a run for their money. Instead she was blended into something so vague as to be called, finally, a Caucasian-American female with a history best fictionalized to be interesting. So she turned to the stories and crafts of others.

Bess gets the most interview assignments at her organization because her boss claims she can open doors with her warm eyes and sweet smile. Maybe, Bess had said, but she’s always thought her subjects open up to her because they can sense her sincerity. Though the world has its share of assholes (Exhibit A: Certain Ex-Boyfriends from Bess Gray’s Past), Bess believes people are inherently good and by sheer endurance through life have interesting, or at the very least different and therefore edifying stories to tell. This is particularly true when they’re from other cultures. And they’re telling the truth.

So turning to the stories of others has always been easy. Turning to the crafts of others proved more difficult. Her fingers bled learning the mandolin; the mound of clay in her pottery class had a habit of spinning bits of itself off the wheel and into the ponytail of the very angry, very large bearded biker in front of her; and no amount of lighting could help her thread a needle. But she didn’t give up, for a good way to truly understand the traditions of other cultures—and, if she was being honest with herself, to maybe find her own place in the world—is to experience them. Thus another reason that she loves karate. Part of her study of karate, of Tae Kwon Do in particular, is to learn Korean words and the historical basis for the movements, about the villagers who were forbidden to carry actual weapons and thus developed their bodies as weapons to protect against marauders.

And in turning to the histories of others, she finds herself attracted to certain types of men: foreign ones, or if not foreign then first-generation Americans with ties to their parents’ homelands, their accents, their foods and fairy tales. And if not once removed, then halved and quartered in curious ways, like Sonny the Asian-American Southerner.

But most of the dozen or so relationships she’s had since college sadly fizzled after a few months. Before she was thirty, she could usually pinpoint the reasons—the South African was an insatiable flirt; the Panamanian had a gorgeous, perfect mother with whom no woman could compete; and the adjunct physics professor from grad school couldn’t handle the distraction from his research, which he assured her would one day win him a Nobel. But in the last five years, it seems fear of commitment was the refrain, as with Sonny. Either that or they simply ended it with an acceptance of blame and an inarticulate apology, and then they were gone. When it came to dating, she used to feel too young and naïve until this morning, when she suddenly felt awfully old.

T
he party is a few hours away. Bess zips up her knapsack and locks the door to her office. On her way home she drops off a handful of bilingual books at a nearby health clinic, offering a friendly hello to the security guard.

“Hot out today,” he says, holding the door for her. “Spring’s finally come ’round.”

“Yeah, it has. My allergies are already kicking in.”

“Gotta stock up on them tissues and pills.”

“Done and done. Bring it on!” She waves good-bye and for the rest of the walk home, weighs the pros and cons of taking her allergy meds. Big Pro: No itchy runny nose. Big Con: She can’t drink. The one time she mixed her allergy pills with alcohol she fell asleep under a bench at a dog park and woke to a giant schnauzer peeing on her thigh. The con in this case seemed like a bigger deal, as making it through this whole evening without a drink was not appealing.

When Bess’s assistant, who was new to the area, first posed the idea of a singles party, Bess said absolutely not.
But your apartment is centrally located
. Nope.
It’s roomy
. Not a chance.
You know people
. NEIN!
C’mon, Bess, don’t be boring.
Boring? she thought.
Boring?
Okay, she had said, thinking of her upcoming birthday, why not? It would be on her own turf, she reasoned, and she could take the focus off herself and adopt the altruistic role of the city’s matchmaker. Her assistant clapped with the top half of her fingers and talked of heart-shaped name tags and party games. Bess looked at her and thought maybe she would take matters into her own hands.

That night she spent hours drafting an invitation and by midnight had one wholly unlike her in tone, but perhaps breezy enough to attract single men who might need extra nudging:

So you’re temporarily unattached, between relationships, living the carpe diem life. You’re painting towns red and peeing on mountains. You’re shedding the exes, asking the big whys. You’re slated to win the gold for emotional independence.

But suddenly you realize you’re tired. You go back to staring at abbreviated technogadgets—TVs, PCs, DVDs. When you come home after a long day at the office and yell, “Hi honey, I’m home,” into the echoing silence, your Chihuahua gets excited and poops on your shoe. Your tropical fish with whom you’ve shared intimate thoughts about who should win
Survivor
is now floating sideways at the top of your tank. You’ve metamorphosed, Kafka-style, into a freakish loner.

Two words, folks: It’s time.

She added the where and when (purposely not mentioning that it’s her birthday), explained the rules—you had to bring someone of the opposite gender with whom you’ve had no dating history—ran the whole thing by a friend, and the next night pressed “send” and waited while it sprayed to e-mail in-boxes across D.C. Then she felt nauseated. There was something unnerving about the silence of such an act, like watching a horrific death scene in a movie with the sound off. Worse was the ensuing silence, which she filled with temple-throbbing self-doubt. What if the invite is too off-putting? What if only ten people respond, all of whom already know each other? She typed the word
crap
and e-mailed it to herself.

It didn’t help that her longtime friend from middle school had just lost her job and wrote back that she didn’t want to come. Gabrielle Puryear—a fickle, outspoken black rights activist—said that at a party like this, people are always asking,
So what do you do?
and as a new member of the unemployed she didn’t think she could hear a question like that without exploding.
On this interview I had yesterday
, she e-mailed Bess,
they asked me where I see myself in five years
. They still ask that?
Yeah
, she wrote,
as if I was a twenty-something white chick with the luxury of career planning.
Give me a break, you went to Yale.
On a scholarship, and I’m talking about the principle of it.
Why can’t I say I want to be right where I got to before I got laid off, you sons of bitches?
As an only child in a quiet home without so much as a pet or an imaginary friend, Bess would jump at any opportunity to spend time at Gabrielle’s house with her siblings, all of whom shared a passion for justice. An evening with her family was almost like being in a TV studio audience at one of those reality vent fests.