The Wife. short story

The television studio lights were hotter than he had expected, far hotter.  He was glad he had declined when that nice young lady asked if he had wanted her to add some colour to his cheeks: right now he felt they must be flaming.

The talk show hostess was introducing him and he was listening to her words but it was frightening.  It was as if she were describing someone else, a stranger, offering him the part.  He supposed he would have to accept it. It was a bit late to get up and say it was all a mistake and he was going home.

"So, George, tell us," she invited a reply, "how you, for fifteen years, were two personalities, both your wife and yourself."

George knew she would ask this and he was prepared to answer confidently, clearly, without making a fool of himself.  So he proceeded to do so.  It would never do, though, to take himself at his word so, while his voice was describing HOW he had done it, his mind was telling himself WHY he had done it.  

He supposed it had started early on in life, maybe even before his first impersonation of his sister, but this is what he remembered and it sort of set a tone.  He'd been eleven or so, his sister a year older.  He was a reader.  She was not.  The local library only allowed children to take out one book at a time and, for some silly reason, only one a day.  Well, he was bored that summer and craved to read.  His sister, being over twelve could take out limitless number of books, but she hadn't used her library card in months.  

So one day, in some fit of pique, George had dressed himself in her clothes and used her card and checked out seven books.  The experience exhilarated him

and gave him enough reading material for the next three satisfying days in the tree house someone had built in the maple in the backyard. It was freedom and power, his achievement, not to be taken lightly by one eleven years of age.

It wasn't as bizarre an experience as it sounded, this taking on his sister's identity.  It only involved shorts and t-shirt and he maybe could have worn his own clothing but hers were more of a believable shade of Ruth Henderson (his faded blues were definitely of the George gender).  It was the detail that really counted, the sandals he dug out of his book bag and put on before checking out the books (he switched footwear in the reading books section while pretending to look terribly interested in one of the toddlers as if he were babysitting) and which he as quickly replaced with his beat up sneakers once out of the library.  And the dowdy hat, not at all like his baseball cap, but sort of floppy and – yeah, well – girlish, but what the heck it was in a good cause.

And it worked!  The librarian hardly glanced at him.  The card said Ruth Henderson. It wasn't as if Ruth hung out and was known in the library.  After the second time he borrowed her card he didn't even bother sneaking it back into her room and she didn't even miss it.

The second time it was easier – and he didn't even worry about the sandals.  Actually  one of the librarians was beginning to know him and actually said, "Well Ruth, you're quite a reader."  George didn't exactly avoid her after that but he tried to even out his check-outs amongst the staff so he wouldn't get too well known by any one.

George checked in to make sure he was still giving credible answers to the talk show hostess about how he had done all this. He was. She let him talk and then asked a sensible question that set him off again.  Off he went.

There were some small instances during his high school years of being somebody else for some good reason.  He'd forgotten the details but these incidents were laying a foundation.

When he got to college he took an entire course for his roommate, went to classes, made the notes, wrote the essays, passed the exams.  He got a B+. The why of this was quite simple – he needed the money Andrew paid him to do it. It had started out as a joke, "Hey, smart ass, wish I could step inside your skin and take this Philosophy course next term – it's a bugger and I need the damned thing for some reason," Andrew had said, sprawled on George's bed.  Andrew slept in his own bed, which he never made in the whole two years of residence living, but used George's bed as a chair, chesterfield, exercise mat, whatever he needed.  George's bed was occasionally made.

"I'll step in your skin for a price," George kidded back.

"I'd pay a lot not to have to take the course," Andrew said seriously and named a sum that made George, digging through the clothes on the floor of the closet, jerk his head up and say, "Really?"          

"Really, my man," answered Andrew. 

"I'll do it, " said George.  And he did.

The talk show hostess was taking a commercial break and didn't seem to mind that she didn't have to make small talk with him.

He drew both parts of himself together to deal with the memory of Andrew wanting him to take a Maths course for him the next term.  George then had not the time nor inclination and neither did he need the money having discovered he was good at selling large appliances in a downtown department store.  He told people the most outrageous things about the stoves and air conditioners and they believed him.  Or pretended to – and George suspected this was his gift; they knew he was having them on and he knew they knew so they were all taking part in this wonderful game.  And hey, if you had to buy a fridge you might as well have some fun doing it.

Andrew had gotten nasty, threatened to report George to the authorities for impersonating him the year before.  George had reasonably pointed out they both would suffer; Andrew seemed desperate and past caring.  George had slugged him and knocked him cold, the first and last time he ever was moved to violence. And when Andrew came to, George had apologized.  Things were never right between them again but there were no more threats.

The commercial break was over and the talk show hostess was asking him WHY he had done it.  So George switched his attention and began to tell her.  He locked eyes with a woman of perhaps his own age in the front row of the audience and for a moment both his voices, internal 

and external, were stilled. The woman looked so damned interested, like she was taking him seriously and believing in him. He couldn't cope with this.  The hostess sensed a stall and gently tapped him on the arm, "As you were saying, it was a necessity at a very impressionable age that made you steal your sister's library card…" 

Oh shit, he thought, but he let her lead him and started to talk again.  Both voices. He did not again look at the earnest woman in the front row.

HOW had he begun to impersonate his wife?  Well actually he wasn't so much impersonating her as creating her.  He  didn't have a wife.  He had had one, once.  It had been a mistake for both of them, the marriage, and they had gotten out of it fairly reasonably.

It was years later when he was moving across country that it had just, well, happened.  The store where he was selling furniture (large appliances had lost their appeal with their sameness; there was a challenge in things that changed colour and style and almost function – a water bed, for example)  had opened a new branch and offered him a senior position.  He took it. He had little if anything to keep him in the place where he was.      

The audience was laughing; he'd made some kind of joke and it had gone over well, had he, oh – no, it was the face he'd pulled to illustrate himself in his first sister enactment to the librarian who was appreciative of his reading habits.

He'd moved across the country, bought a house in a quiet neighbourhood, and one day, while taking in some dry cleaning the clerk had asked, "Will you pick this up or will your wife?"

Did he look like a man who had a wife.  Instead of replying to this he had been struck with mischief and said, "My wife will. She doesn't get out much.  The errand will do her good."

Of course he didn't have to follow through on this – he could have joked his way out of it when he went to pick up his clothes, charm the plain lady with his bachelor status.  But no.  He'd gone through with it.  He invented a wife.  And became her.

It gave him an interest, something to do after work, in the new town where everything was both unfamiliar and impersonal.  In his old place it had been impersonal but not at all strange.  This was a whole new experience.

And it wasn't hard.  He got a really good wig – drove to the nearest large city for this.  Bought a book on make-up in that same city and experimented.  Padded his cheeks, got some glasses, flared his nostrils when he talked so it gave his voice a different flavour and kept him in character. He also added an irritating little throat clear to Sybil's conversation and coupled with  'her shyness' he got out of talking a lot.

He was heartily sick of the name Sybil before the first year was out.  What had possessed him to choose it.  It made him wonder if the good lord had seen fit not to give him children when he really did have a wife because he would have named them one thing and regretted it when it was too late to change it. Names were so permanent.  Sybil's went on and on.   

What was this, another commercial break.  It was just as well, the hostess had been asking him about cross dressing and he had parroted some rehearsed feelings he had about whether or not this applied to him but it was a script – he kept forgetting what cross dressing and all it implied meant so it made no sense to talk about it for real.

After this break they would be coming down to the ending, the nitty gritty part, WHY he had stopped.  It was rather traumatic and he thought he'd best have the second voice in the wings, if not on stage, so he put the HOW conversation with himself into fast forward.

The neighbours had expressed astonishment when they found out he was both his wife and himself; this was to be expected.  He had not expected the hostility of some of them; it was as if they were mad at him for tricking them.

He had no idea why it went on for so long.  It got to be a habit, he supposed.  Sybil (he actually called her Marion, to himself, for the last eight years) was not a difficult wife.  She was retiring and spent a great deal of time indoors ("thought she was bloody agoraphobic by things he let on to us over the years," one of his neighbours had told the newspaper).  And she had a sister back east she visited quite regularly.

"Didn't the neighbours, the townspeople, think it strange that they never saw the two of you together?" the talk show hostess was asking him now.

"Yes," George said and would not be drawn further by her questioning look.

The neighbours, when asked that same question by reporters, the police, had looked confused, irritated, foolish.  

And now the hostess was asking him to explain WHY he'd ended it and what had happened.  George was glad the hot lights would account for his redness and no one would suspect he was blushing.

"I sent her on a permanent visit to her sister and people began to think I'd killed her."

There was almost a gasp from the audience.  What was the matter with these people.  Surely they had read the newspapers and knew what had happened.  Were there stage hands holding up cards that said "Gasp!"  "Act surprised" as they might cue, "Applause"?  George looked to his right and left to see if this might be the case but he didn't see anyone prompting the audience.  The hostess looked to see what he was looking at as well and then she blinked rapidly, trying to get back on track.

"So you were forced to end the charade by admitting all in order to escape serious consequences…"  she invited.

He wanted to say the gallows might have been preferable to what he had gone through, what he was going through still, but this sounded a bit much even for his love of drama.  Besides, she might take it as a slight on his appearing on her show.  Once more he was doing something for the money.  His court costs were astronomical!  And he'd heard his first wife was threatening to sue him for deframation of character or some such damned thing. 

  "Yes," he answered and smiled at her charmingly.  She was not moved.  Gregory Peck had smiled at her once.

She rushed easily through events and the final acceptance of his innocence, "…although I understand there are those who still say there were definitely two people and you have somehow gotten rid of your wife…" she said it archly, inviting him to halt on a rebuttal and perhaps add fuel to the doubts.  He did not.  So she smoothly went on, "What do you intend to do next?"

The question surprised him.  He was not prepared for it.  His second voice rushed out onstage but it too was unable to answer.

For a moment he looked at her, really looked at her with his entire self, and she had the most eerie feeling pass through her.  She had interviewed many people in her long career, famous, notorious, the highs and the lows of humanity.  She had some weird feeling that this nondescript little man bordered on the truly great.  What a silly idea.  But she did not fill in the silence, she ignored the hand signals from the director, she simply waited on this man's answer.

Finally he spoke, "I guess I'll have to find another distraction."  He sounded a bit puzzled, but definite.  Oh yes, very definite.

She let out her breath as if breaking a trance.  What an extraordinary interview.  And Ernest would give her holy hell for that long pause.  With practised ease she thanked her guest, announced the next one, led into the commercial, all the while wondering if this guy George was okay.  He looked so withdrawn.

He was withdrawn.  Both voices had come together in a realization that might have silenced the need for them to exist in this tandem manner.  He had been called to a role and he had played it.  He had played it well.  

Maybe he could let the curtain fall now, for once and for all.  And if he didn't – well, his next appearance was going to be a whopper!