The Ninth Wife (6 page)
Authors: Amy Stolls
“Yes,” says Gaia, as if an answer to an unsaid question. “We’ll be just fine.”
We?
Why
we
? We, as if they were in this together, as if they’ve known each other all their lives and can feel each other’s pain. Bess backs out of the room, picks up the phone in her living room and dials 911.
“Metropolitan Police Department, your name please?”
“Bess Gray,” she says. “We . . .”—that word channeling through her as if coming from some ancient place, flying through the ages from long-ago war widows and cocooned queens and poor orphaned girls to all the women now who know, too, the pain of loneliness. “We,” she repeats, “we need help.”
M
aggie had made sense with all that talk of immigration. I’d been listening to the boys at the construction site where I was picking up some quick cash off the books, so I knew I had to do something if I wanted to stay, and doing it through part-time jobs was proving difficult. I stayed in bed with my head-splitting pity for the next week until my landlord came crashing in and knocked me up some sense. I thought about going back to Ireland, I’ll admit, but I didn’t want to go back without Maggie. I was ashamed, but I also wanted to stay closer to her in case she took me back. So I married Carol Pendleton and at the same time worked my way through college.
Apparently there was a whole underground network for this sort of thing, American girls willing to marry immigrant boys like me and all I had to do was know the right people, which turned out to be a friend of the bartender’s sister where I played fiddle once in a while. He slipped me her number and said here, call her, she likes Irish boys. I didn’t know what to make of it all, I really didn’t, but I called. We met out at a candlelit restaurant in Cambridge that she suggested where she ordered lobster and a bottle of French wine and then cappuccino and crêpes suzette and I tell you all these things specifically because I had never had lobster or French wine or cappuccino or crêpes suzette and my knees were shaking under the table the whole time with both excitement and utter terror. Carol was a bold woman, like Maggie, but bigger with curves in all the right places and short blond hair that curled into her chin. She had a lazy eye that took to roving independently every now and again, and that was disconcerting, but she also had the most perfectly straight, shiniest white teeth I’d ever seen and that’s what I kept staring at mostly. And she was sexy, too, in her designer jeans and flarey blouse that showed ample cleavage. She was smart and self-assured, that’s for sure. She talked about her classes at Harvard and her volunteering for Jimmy Carter, but mostly about the hatred she felt for her ill-informed, narrow-minded, bourgeois parents—that’s what she called them,
bourgeois
—and all I was trying to figure out the whole time, sitting there like an idiot in my bib, was how to get the meat out of a claw without flinging it across the room. That’s what it came down to really: I was trying to pull meat from a claw and she was sniffing the cork, deciding whether to send the wine back or drink it, have her fun and throw the bottle away; that’s what I was thinking and feeling like by the end of the night and I was going to walk right out of that restaurant and say forget it, I can’t do this, when she up and paid the check and asked me if I wanted to marry her. Just like that.
She said she was a history major and knew all about Northern Ireland’s fight against the British imperialists and the way she was talking, I thought she might know more than I ever did. She said she would have stayed and helped had it been her cause, but she understood my need for a better life and immigration laws being what they were, she wanted to do her part. I didn’t tell her I wasn’t from the North; I just let her talk until what she was saying sounded fishy to me and I told her as much, to which she admitted that, additionally, her parents had been trying to marry her off to their neighbor’s son and she wanted them off her back once and for all. Still, you’re only in your second year of study, says I to her, wouldn’t they wait until you graduate? Let them get used to it, she says. Won’t they be mad? They’ll get over it, she says. She had an answer like that for everything and a way of making you feel like she was fully in control and you needn’t worry your not-so-clever brain about it any further. And anyway, she said if we were married she could move out of the dorm and we could split the rent on an apartment.
So really, it was all sounding good, but even so I said I had to think about it and she reminded me that I didn’t have a lot of time, and what time we did have we should spend getting to know each other, taking photographs by way of documenting our courtship so as not to raise any eyebrows at the immigration offices. She approached our impending marriage like a class, asking me questions, taking notes, studying and memorizing. I tried to keep up, but she liked to smoke dope while we studied and it just always made me forgetful and sleepy. But not Carol, she could multitask. I can picture her even now, leaning against her big red satin pillows on the floor blowing smoke, repeating back to me the names of my teachers.
And yet we pulled it off, the whole thing. We got married by a local justice of the peace and she told her parents over the phone. I didn’t hear their initial reaction, but weeks later they came for dinner at our new empty, echoing apartment in Somerville and they were actually pleasant to me. That Carol invited them in the first place was a surprise given how much she said she hated them. They were uptight and snooty, that was all true—you couldn’t get more awkward-looking than they did sitting on the floor eating stir-fry with chopsticks—but they never complained and when they left they hugged me and said welcome to the family, we’re glad to have you. I asked Carol about it later, but she dismissed me, saying it was my charm that won them over, but I’ll tell you the truth, I hadn’t developed any charm yet, not at all.
Anyway, I let it be and Carol and I slipped into a routine. She had the bedroom because she paid more of the rent. I slept in the living room on the sofa. She continued her classes and even went away for some volunteer job in South America much of the summer. I took out a loan with her help and enrolled in classes at a community college, though I continued to work construction and play at the bar for cash. Given our schedules that first year, we hardly saw each other, and if I did see her at home she was with her friends who were a motley group, I’ll tell you. Nice people, if eccentric. Seemed like the guys wore the girls’ clothes and vice versa, her girlfriends all in baggy pants and tweed jackets and ties. But her friends didn’t bother me and I didn’t bother them.
Now I know you’re wondering: Did we ever sleep together? I tell you no, we didn’t. Carol didn’t flirt with me. She teased me like I was her little brother, and in the way of teenage siblings she was careful never to let me see her nude. So you’re wondering again: Did I sleep with other girls during my marriage to Carol? Yes. Can you blame me? I didn’t do it all the time and I didn’t flaunt it. I can say it was the age and place for sexual freedom and see if you know what I mean, but it wasn’t that. I was lonely. Carol and I hardly ever touched, not even a hug or a pat on the back, and I missed Maggie. I didn’t even want just sex from these girls, I wanted to stay and talk and do things but they always found out I was married and I couldn’t tell them it was a sham marriage for fear they’d go to the authorities.
But then there was a thawing between me and Carol, sometime after the first Christmas we spent with her family, playacting like a married couple. I suppose we had gotten so good at playacting it started to feel natural. We actually became good friends. We liked to do schoolwork together at the café down the street or stay at home and get stoned and watch
M*A*S*H
on TV. Her friends weren’t coming around as much and I thought maybe she had been seeing some guy discreetly and they split up or something. Whatever the reason, I liked it. I liked that Carol was beginning to trust me. She and I hopped in her Ford Pinto and went to rally after rally and I tell you, it was invigorating. I got to thinking how much I enjoyed being with her and I wasn’t missing Maggie so much and I was trying to make sense of my situation, I guess, being married and Carol being my wife and I don’t know . . . I wanted her. Can you imagine? Nervous as a schoolboy, I made my first pass at this woman I’d been married to for nine months and she flat-out rejected me. Rory, she said, what are you doing? I started stammering,
I thought, I thought
, but all she did was shake her head, look at me with real pity.
Two weeks later I came home and found her naked on the couch—where I slept, mind you—her body entwined with another woman’s naked body. I ran out and got drunk, but when I started to think about it, it made sense. Carol and I talked about it soon after. She apologized for not telling me, for letting me find out that way that she was a lesbian. She was concerned that my Catholic upbringing would play a part, if I’d even marry her knowing the truth or run out and tell the world once I did find out. Her parents did want to marry her off to their neighbor’s son, but that’s because they had discovered her kissing a girl in the laundry room of their house and threatened to cut her off financially if she ever behaved like that again. She didn’t want to leave Harvard, so she married me and her parents were relieved. She figured if I didn’t know the truth it would be easier to convince her parents that everything was fine. And then after a while she just assumed I had figured it out.
Frankly, I was relieved, too. I’m not sure why. I guess because I wasn’t really in love with her and I didn’t have to take it personally and now that I knew the truth, I could focus on my schoolwork and a brighter future. We stayed married until we both graduated, until we could get divorced at a point when it wouldn’t hamper my staying in the country (three years, I think, was what it was) and then we went our separate ways, much to her parents’ disappointment. I kept in touch with Carol for much longer than I did with Maggie. Carol was good about reaching out, until her efforts dwindled years ago to just a holiday card at the end of each year. The last one, if I remember, had a photo of her and her partner with their little girl and three dogs. She always had a thing for dogs, which also happened to be the case with Lorraine. Lorraine Doyle, she was my wife after Carol. Now there was a poor girl. What I did to her I haven’t yet forgiven myself for, let alone what I did to her dogs.
T
he night moved at a feverish pitch—a fusion of blinking lights and a screaming siren; the parting of cars; the bumps in the road; the speed of immediacy all the way to the white coats and the shouted commands—
easy now
,
get her in
,
watch it
—the rolling, clanking metal stretcher pushed through the sliding doors; everything, it seems, parting to make way, for she who is scared and sweating and breathing with exaggerated gasps and who finds herself down the hospital’s hallway, past a plastic water pitcher on a tray, a lit red exit sign, an empty white room, a patient on his side facing the wall with a light blue gown having slipped from his body showing a sliver of skin from his hairy ass to his neck, down another brightly lit hallway with an overpowering smell of rubbing alcohol, into a white and shiny silver room where everything is right-angled and mechanical and beeping and now turning blurry as they try to move her, point her where she has to go, tell her she doesn’t look so good, ask if she’s okay, tell her
careful now
, hold her up with their hands scooped under her armpits when she looks faint but lose their grip, watch her as she falls, slams her head into the edge of a table and knocks herself out.
Gaia, on the other hand, cool as a cucumber, delivered drug-free her nine-pound baby girl in twenty-eight minutes flat from the time she entered the delivery room, then slid into maternal meditation, pink-cheeked and smiling, holding Pearl to her breast and knowing life can be as sweet as the scent of powder. That, according to the nurse who is standing over Bess and feeling her forehead. “I’m telling you, honey, you sorry you missed the whole thing, she was a doll. An absolute doll, both of them, mother and daughter. She your girlfriend? That’s cool. We got another couple of mamas last night, too. Something in the air, gots to be. La-dy
love
.” The nurse opens the blinds and untucks the ends of the bedsheets at Bess’s feet. She moves and breathes like a grizzly bear.
Bess turns her face to the window to feel the warmth of the morning sunlight. She takes a moment to realize where she is. “What happened to me exactly?”
“You’re fine, just fine, sugar. We thought you might’ve given yourself a concussion, but I think you’ll just have a nasty ol’ bump on your head. How do you feel?”
“Headachy, like I have a nasty ol’ bump on my head,” says Bess, feeling the spot above her right eye.
“Why don’t you see if you can sit up and I’ll get you some aspirin. We’ll need to change the sheets and get the room tidied, so when you’re ready. Take your time.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.” Bess sits up and feels the night before flood her skull and punch at her temples. Too much wine, too much weirdness. She tries to stand. Her knees feel weak, her eyes sting from the brightness of the white room, her mouth is dry. She takes the aspirin and walks slowly in the direction the nurse points, reaching her palm out to the wall until she rounds the corner. In the hallway she is hit with a memory of the last time she was in a hospital during her freshman year of college, when her mother was dying of cancer. Bess had taken off a semester to take care of her. It had been a slow, unpredictable dying with surges of energy and appearances of normalcy. Bess would sit by her bedside and get angry when her mother laid out facts of a grim future.
I’m dying
, she’d say.
Find someone to take care of you
. I can take care of myself.
I know you can, but it’s better.
Don’t be alone
. Her mother was neither the weeping nor the joking type. Nor was she talkative like the other Jewish mothers they knew. Her love wasn’t stated as much as it was understood in the details—a blanket lain over stolen naps, a claim to the smaller of the apartment’s two bedrooms. That was true until her mother knew it was her time to go and said,
I love you very much
. A part of Bess lifted to enormous heights, then died, too, when her mother finally took her last breath.