“It’s disturbing,” the woman in the next bed said, “but you’d be surprised how fast you get used to it.”
In fact, it was so disturbing that I’d failed to register the room’s second occupant, a smartly dressed blonde holding an open copy of Architectural Digest. Her bed was cranked to the angle of a chaise longue, poolside.
“Hello!” she said in a stage whisper, then smiled. She was wearing lipstick. She looked so familiar I wondered if she was an actress. We have an ability to spot one another.
“How is he?” I whispered back, not entirely sure I wanted to know. Uncle Wallace was a smaller man in a hospital bed, in a Wolverines helmet. He looked old.
“I don’t know,” she said. “No one around here can tell me much more than he isn’t dead.” The steady beeping of the heart monitor confirmed this.
“Why the helmet?”
She nodded as if to say, Oh, that. “As best as I can understand it, the tube coming out of his mouth is connected to a balloon inside him that’s keeping his esophagus from bleeding. They have to tie the red tube to the face mask of the helmet to keep everything in place.”
I nodded, putting my hand on his wrist. I didn’t like to think about tubes and where they went. No one does.
“Were you at the play last night?” she asked.
I nodded again.
“Turns out one of the doctors from this hospital was in the audience. He said it was a mess. Poor Albert. I’m Elyse, by the way.” She gave a little wave. “Second wife.”
Uncle Wallace had a wife, two wives? “I didn’t know he was married,” I said.
She reviewed me then with an entirely new level of seriousness. “The two of you? What are you, fourteen?”
I held up my hands. “No, no! I’m Emily in the play. We work together, that’s all.”
She closed her magazine and then, for a moment, closed her eyes. “I’m sorry. He doesn’t always make the best choices.” She looked at me again. “Which isn’t to say you wouldn’t have been a delightful choice. It’s just—-”
“I understand,” I said. I didn’t understand, but I was tired.
“He’s got a young wife now, or she’s younger than me but she’s nowhere near as young as you.”
“Is she coming?” The second and third wives in one hospital room, that would be something. For all I knew the first one would be showing up as well.
“They’re in the process of disentangling, Albert and his third wife, which, I’m guessing, is why he put me down as his personal contact. Or maybe Tom Lake just never updates their intake forms. Anyway, I got the call and so here I am.”
“Do you think the other wife knows what happened?”
She shrugged as if to say that wasn’t her problem, which I suppose it wasn’t. “My plan is to get him out of here as soon as I can, take him back to Chicago and get him into a grown--up hospital. No disrespect to Tiny Town here but I think he may need something more advanced than a football helmet.”
“That’s so nice of you.” All I knew about divorce was what I’d seen in movies or read in novels. I couldn’t remember any cases where the second ex--wife steps in to take her former husband home from the hospital.
Elyse turned on her side to watch his labored respiration. “We’ve got kids,” she said. “They’re in their twenties now but they’re still kids, you know? They love him. They grew up watching Uncle Wallace. They think he’s a fantastic father because he played one on TV.” Why should I know this? Why should I know anything? Because we’d spent six weeks standing so close together, saying the exact same words day after day? I knew how naive it made me look to be shocked by everything. Uncle Wallace didn’t have kids. He had his sister’s orphans, and the Stage Manager, well, the Stage Manager didn’t have anyone because he was essentially God. I asked her if I could do anything to help.
“Maybe you could pack up his room for him. That would be helpful.”
“Sure, I can do that.”
She stretched out her legs and yawned. She must have driven through the night. “I’ll tell him you came when he wakes up. I’ll tell him the sweet girl from the play came to see him. What did you say your name was?”
I told her it was Emily.
“When did he die?” Emily asks me. There is so much tenderness in her voice. Had we told this story earlier in life, Emily might have grown up convinced that Uncle Wallace was her father, though really, that might have been worse.
I look at Joe. “Fall? Winter maybe? I can’t remember.”
Maisie takes out her phone and taps in his name. “July twenty--eighth, 1988.” She reads the names of his three wives, his two children, his major roles. “The actor will be remembered as the beloved Uncle Wallace. The second wife was Elyse Adler. She played his girlfriend on the show for two seasons.”
I looked at her tiny picture on the phone. “Oh my god.”
Nell and Emily lean in to see her pretty face.
“So he died just a couple of weeks after I saw him.” So much had happened that summer, and in the confusion, I had forgotten him. “How old was he?”
Maisie takes a moment to scroll, stopping to admire the other two wives. “Born January twentieth, 1931, died July twenty--eighth, 1988. Fifty--six.”
“What?”
She holds up the screen to show me. There he is. No picture of his own children, just those little orphan actors in his arms.
“He was my age,” I say.
Emily shakes her head. “You’re fifty--seven.”
14
I am fifty--seven. I am twenty--four. After dinner the girls head out with Hazel, some blankets, and a six--pack of beer. They have plans to sit in a field far away from their friends and watch The Promised Man just as the last of the fireflies flickering in the tall grass turn out their lights. The movie is a cause for merriment, not because it’s happy—-in fact, I remember it as soul--crushing—-but because activities unrelated to work are few and far between these days. Benny will meet them there. On this windless night, the Otts have strung a king--sized sheet between two trees and pulled it taut. They have a video projector. They call to ask if Joe and I would like to come, but I decline. They have no idea we’re living our own version of the Peter Duke film festival over here.
“That one?” Joe stacks the dishes in the sink once the girls have gone.
“I don’t even like to think about it.” I open the back door and shake out the placemats, wipe off the table.
“It’s a beautiful piece of work, though. Certainly Duke’s best.”
My husband’s sleeves are rolled and the hot water steams his glasses. It’s so easy to forget what Joe is capable of, so easy to remember. “Were you ever sorry?”
He laughs. “We could be living in Los Angeles now.”
“You could be on your third wife.”
“Come dry.” He holds out a towel to me.
It’s not as if I don’t understand. It’s exactly what the girls have been saying to me: Are you sorry? Don’t you wish? But Joe was better than I was. Sometimes I wonder what he would have done had he stayed. “You were so good.”