A Bigamist's Daughter (31 page)

She thought of lovely Sarah with the single red rose.

They took the train to Sixty-third Drive where his car was parked, and then he drove her to Flushing. She didn’t turn on the lights when they came in, but there was enough pink light from the window for them to see their way to the bed and for her to watch him as he undressed.

She told him she loved him. Not because she was drunk enough to be excused for it in the morning but because he was rough and his beard was harsh and he bit into her in a way that made her feel her flesh would snap. Because the pain somehow jarred the phrase from her.

She woke when he leaned over to kiss her good-by. He was fully dressed, with his shirt unbuttoned and his unknotted tie
draped around his neck like a priest’s scapular. Her room was just getting light and she was somewhat disappointed, even offended, that he was dressed and ready to leave; as if she’d thought that once she brought him home, he’d stay forever, like a stray cat.

“Sarah,” he whispered, “gets home at seven.”

He kissed her again. His face was drawn, tired, darkened by his beard. “I’ll see you at lunch.”

So she’d gotten what she’d wanted, what she’d dreamed of. After he left, she lay in bed, repeating the phrase to herself. She had wanted something and she’d gotten it. There. Finished. But even as she thought this, she imagined him driving down the road, onto the Parkway. The sun would just be rising. There would be little traffic. When he got home he would let himself into their apartment, shower, get into their bed, rubbing his arms and legs against the sheets to quickly make them warm. An hour later he would raise his head from his pillow, wearing a smile she had not yet seen, and welcome beautiful Sarah back to their home. All of her time with him shaken off like a dream. Not finished. Not ever really begun.

She slept no more that morning but took a shower and dressed carefully. She rode the subway to work with more pleasure, expectancy, than she’d ever known and as she climbed the steps to the street, she felt an ache, a tightness in her groin and her thighs and low in her back, as if, she thought, she already had some part of him held inside her; bound by muscles and tendons, by her own tissue; as if there was something her body was learning to accommodate, straining to hold.

“You truly loved him?” Tupper whispers, his voice almost reverent.

She nods. “Yes. I loved him very much.” She could be Ingrid Bergman.

They are silent for a while, their heads bowed. Her tale has done this to them.

“Do you know the story from mythology?” he asks. “About how man and woman were created as one being, joined, androgynous, but that Zeus, seeing that they were arrogant, split them in two. And ever since the two halves have searched to find each other, to be joined again?”

She watches the fire. “I’ve never heard it.”

“It almost seems that’s how it was, with you two.”

She nods. Between the logs, the embers are red hot, glowing. She thinks of all the stories that have been told around fires: stories of hunts and battles and ancient ancestors, stories of undying love. She thinks of all the facts that have burned while the stories were getting told. “Yes,” she says again. “It was almost like that.”

“And when did you go to Buffalo together?”

She licks her lips and tastes the residue of brandy. “That winter. He was transferred and asked me to come along. He’d left Sarah by then.”

“And you lived together?”

“Nearly two years.”

“It was unhappy?”

She looks at him. Even in the light of the flames, he looks pale. Or maybe just pale in comparison. “We were very happy,” she says, as if he has missed some essential point. “I loved him.”

He leans closer to her, looking both curious and sly, like a detective, not quite sure, but, yes, perhaps, coming across some clue. A critic slowly recognizing some false turn in the plot. “Then what happened?” he asks.

She looks at her glass. “It didn’t work out.”

“Why not?” He moves closer to her, hot on the trail. “It
all sounds so perfect. And you say you loved him. You lived together, so I presume he loved you. What went wrong?”

She raises her glass again, feels the warm path the brandy makes through her. The flaw would be to say she left him. Despite his beauty, despite her love, despite the fact that he alone was her mythical other half, she left him. It is a contradiction that the story cannot bear.

“It was just one of those things,” she says, knowing he’ll want her to do better.

“Another woman?” he whispers. “Did he meet someone else?”

She looks at the fire, hears the wood snap and hiss. To say that she left him denies all the rest; but to say that he left her, he was wonderful and he left her, implies no contradiction.

“Was it Sarah?” Tupper whispers. “Did Sarah come back?”

She raises her head and nods once: Anne Boleyn signaling to the executioner, crying “God Save the King!” “Yes,” she whispers. “Sarah.”

He touches her arm. “I’m sorry,” he says and his voice is filled with pity and love and, although she suspects not for her, a certain respect. “He was no bigamist then,” he says, leaning back. He seems relieved. “He was too loyal. A bigamist would have known how to keep you both. He would have made both of you his wife and kept you both.” He smiles and leans to kiss her thigh. “His loss.”

She looks down at him and then suddenly lies back, the room tangibly cool behind her, the rag hearth rug beneath her somewhat damp. Her story will not do. It is, for him, without significance, without nobility. Tupper stretches out at her side. She closes her eyes. Listens for some other sound, something from the house, the barn, the road outside, even the ocean. But there is only the sound of the fire, like a slow, faraway
wind. The sound of his breath. For the past hour their two small voices had been all there was to hear, and now, she thinks, it’s as if they’d never spoken. Now there’s nothing. Now she could tell the story again, tell it differently, change the names and the places and the outcome (What happened? We married and he thrived. What happened? I grew tired of hard winters. What happened? He died in Wisconsin) and there would be nothing left in the air to contradict her. Nothing of the first story that could bend or shape the second or the third. Only he could point out that certain details had been changed. And it would be his word against hers. The air could not testify, and no evidence could be found. They are, after all, two strangers, in a stranger’s home, in a town where no one knows them.

She could tell him, for instance, that there was no loss involved. She had made
herself
his wife. It was a private ceremony, she could say, attended only by the bride. She had bought the ring in a Buffalo jewelry store and outside in the parking lot, alone in the car, she had taken off her glove and slipped it on. She closed her eyes and spoke words to herself about loving him for the rest of her life. Everything will change but this, in me. Although the steering wheel was cold, she left the hand bare. She watched it moving to the window or the horn, saw it choose boxes and bags from the supermarket shelves, open her purse, accept change. She noticed it each time it flashed like a beacon through the cold dull fog of housekeeping and job-hunting and all the hours she waited for him to come home.

She could say she had made herself his wife and so she became not the precarious live-in, second choice, but the eternal, duty-bound mate. Became not one of those timid lovers who sleeps with a packed bag at her side, one shod foot on the floor, or one of those cautious, passionless woman who refuses
to say forever (as if her life will never end, never consist of more than those tiny stepping-stones of the present), but one who has claimed, for the rest of my life, all but this, but me.

She made herself his wife and so could smile at the innocent indifference of busy husbands, smile when she found herself, like a wife, feeling neglected. And at night, while they sat together watching television or while he slept heavily beside her, she could finger the ring and feel like a woman with a double life, or a spy from another planet: If only you knew what this ring means, where it has come from. Like an assassin gone underground: If only you knew what I am capable of.

She could say she had made herself his wife, forever, and so there was no loss involved.

Or, she could tell him: Sarah was always there; he was, indeed, loyal. She could tell him of a rainy afternoon in summer when she was looking through his bookcase (she would say for something to read) and among the hardcover textbooks from his business courses and a few paperback thrillers, she had found a slightly oversized book that he had slipped sideways into the back of the shelves. A photography book called
Nurses,
that showed nurses at various times, in various places: caring for men during World War II, walking together through a slum at the turn of the century, graduating, picketing, laughing together over a patient’s birthday cake, embracing each other, assisting at operations, crying. Nurses who were nuns and nurses who were men; nurses who looked like grandmothers or sex symbols or harbingers of death.

In the front of the book there was written, in black ink, in a long, graceful hand, “Gaze at this and think of me. I love you, Sarah.” It was dated three years before.

She could tell him how she sat and looked at the book for a long time. Of course, it was not the first trace of Sarah she had seen. When they moved in, Bill had not hesitated to point
out what pots and pans and coffee mugs and bath towels he had taken from Sarah. And he proudly showed her a pen she had once given him and a small sculpture they had bought together and he had “gotten away from her” when he left. But the book, she’d say, somehow touched her. Made her breath come short. Maybe it was the “I love you,” so simple and assured. The date, three years ago, before she had ever seen either of them. Or maybe it was the nurses themselves. Since Christmas, Elizabeth had been working in a large department store, in an alcove called “Enchanted Evenings,” where she sold bright gowns to what seemed to her like the same four Polish woman about to take a cruise to Bermuda, and with the summer she had gone from full-time to part-time because, as she’d told Bill, she needed to think about what she wanted to do with her life, although all she’d really done was think about him. But here before her were all those photos of all those women with a profession, a most important profession. Here was Sarah (and—she’d never thought of it before—how lovely she must look in her white dress and white stockings and soft white shoes, her hair braided and twirled into a thick gold bun!) showing him the range of her expertise, her emotions, her long history. Showing him that she was a professional woman who necessarily must have more on her mind than love but who would manage to love him still.

She sat on the couch, the day low and heavy against the sliding glass doors behind her and thought how dull her own love, which was all her life, had made her.

She could tell him: She had asked Bill once if he ever thought of Sarah and he was silent for a moment and then said, “No, I don’t think I ever do.” It was the hesitation, of course, that convinced her and she brought her ring to her mouth.

She asked him once, after an elaborate lead-in: What was
Sarah’s birth sign? and he pretended not to remember the month or day she was born.

He answered once that he thought she was Swedish. Or Scots.

He said he vaguely remembered bringing her a rose when he came to visit, but he was sure he didn’t bring one every time.

She was afraid of deep water, he said. Or is that you?

Thinking of Sarah one night as they held each other, she began to cry. He was startled; he may have been asleep. When he asked what was wrong she said, “You’ll never love me enough.” Stroking her, laughing a little, he said, “No, I probably never will.”

She could tell him that gradually she came to think of them both as victims of the same disaster. The unwilling survivors of a tragedy that had deprived them both of all but their lives. He longed for Sarah, she for him. She came to think that if he was not her lover he was, at least in love, her brother.

She could say that she began to measure their love-making, which, from the very beginning, had veered and swayed unpredictably, according to what she imagined were his thoughts of Sarah. When he was rough and passionate and impulsive, he was trying to forget her. When he was gentle, inquiring, loving, he had decided he never could. When he pulled away and laughed at her enthusiasm, he was feeling both guilty and ashamed and, perhaps, a little repulsed by her dark hair, her hips which were growing a little too fleshy, her legs that were not quite long enough, not Sarah’s.

She could tell him of their last evening together when he had come home from work, his tie off, his shirt sleeves rolled up, his brief case under his arm and his jacket over his shoulder and she’d said, as he came into the kitchen to kiss her, “Sarah called.”

How he’d grimaced and said, “She probably thinks I owe her money for something,” and, in the same breath, “Are you making potato salad?”

How he had refused to call her back, claimed he no longer remembered her number. How she had started out being understanding, “Call her, I don’t mind. It doesn’t bother me.” (Planning to say, when he called and found Sarah had never called him, “Well, it sounded like Sarah.”) How she had grown sarcastic, “Why are you so afraid to talk to her? Can she still affect you so much?” and had finally cried, “I won’t live with her ghost any longer!”

How he had watched her, first startled by her outburst, then amused, and finally, when she threatened to leave him, angry.

How he had leaned across the table, one fist clenched, saying, “Look, I love you. I once loved Sarah, I won’t deny it, but I don’t anymore. I love you now, okay? All right? I love you. I don’t know how many ways to say it. You want me to marry you? Christ, I’ll marry you, if that will make you believe me. Anything so you’ll believe me and we can drop the subject and get on with our lives.”

She could tell him that at that moment she believed it. He loved her, not Sarah. He had loved Sarah once but now he loved her. At that moment, she believed it. And she also understood that to say she believed it would mean the subject could be dropped, ended; and the subject, she understood at that moment, was all her life.