Wild Orchids Read online

  I was brought out of my thoughts by Pat unzipping my pants. “And what are you doing?” I asked, smiling.

  “Going down on a millionaire,” she said.

  “Oh,” was all I could say before I closed my eyes and gave myself to her hands and lips.

  It was quite a while later that we left the bathroom, and I was ready to party. No more worries. I’d thought of half a dozen personal experiences that I could write about.

  We found Pat’s father next door in the master bedroom of the house with the swimming pool, and he was dancing so down and dirty that I stood in the doorway and gaped.

  “You should have seen him and Mom together,” Pat shouted as she slipped under my arm and went to her father. He stopped dancing, exchanged some sentences, ear to mouth, with his daughter, waved at me, then resumed dancing. She returned to me, smiling. “We’re spending the night.”

  Since it was already nearly two A.M., that seemed redundant information, but I nodded, then let Pat pull me out of the bedroom and back downstairs to the neighbor’s living room. All the kitchens of the three houses were full of catering people who were filling the dining rooms and backyards with enormous trays full of food. Since neither Pat nor I had eaten much for days, we made up for lost time. I was on my second plate when she told me she was going to say hello to some people. Nodding, I motioned that I was perfectly content to sit quietly in a corner and eat and drink.

  The second I saw her skirt disappear around the corner I was up the stairs in a flash. A suitless swimming party! I was pretty sure there was a guest bedroom upstairs where I could look down on the pool. Sure enough, there were about a dozen young adults in the backyard, all beautifully naked, jumping off the diving board and swimming in the clear blue water.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” said a voice behind me. I had my foot propped on a window seat, food in hand, and was looking out a wide window down onto the pool.

  It was Pat’s father and he’d shut the bedroom door behind him so we were in relative quiet.

  “What’s amazing?” I asked.

  “Teenagers today. See the one on the diving board? That’s little Janie Hughes. She’s only fourteen.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Didn’t I see her on a tricycle last week?”

  He chuckled. “She makes me understand why old men marry young girls. And the boys of the same age make me understand why the girls are attracted to older men.”

  He had a point. Even though several of the girls had removed their clothes, only one of the boys had. For the most part, the boys were skinny, with bad skin, and they looked scared to death of the girls, so they kept their big, baggy swim trunks on. The one boy who was naked had such a beautiful body, I figured he was probably captain of some local high school sports team. He reminded me of one of my cousins who’d been killed in a car wreck the night of the high school prom. Later, I’d thought that it was as though my cousin had known he was going to die early, because by seventeen he’d been a man, not a gangly boy, but a full-grown man.

  “He’ll probably die before the year’s out,” I said, nodding toward the nude Adonis standing at the edge of the pool. I looked at my father-in-law. “I thought you were blind, or nearly so.”

  He smiled. “I have an excellent memory.”

  Since the day I’d cried on his lap, there’d been a closeness between us. I’d never felt close to a man before and what I felt for Pat’s father made me understand “male bonding.”

  “I’m leaving Pat the house,” he said.

  I put the food down and turned away. Please don’t talk of death today, I thought. Not today. Maybe if I said nothing, he’d stop talking.

  But he didn’t stop. “I haven’t said anything to Pat and I don’t want you to, but I know I’m finished here on earth. Did you know that I tried to end my life about a month after she died?”

  “No,” I said, my head turned away, my eyes squeezed shut. And in my vanity I’d thought I was the only one who was truly and deeply grieving for Pat’s mother.

  “But Martha wouldn’t let me die. I think she knew you were to write your book about her and she wanted that. She wanted it for you, and for Pat, and for herself, too. I think she wanted her life to mean something.”

  I wanted to say all the usual things, that her life had meant something, but hadn’t I written a quarter of a million words saying just that? All I could do was nod, still unable to look him in the eyes.

  “I know I don’t need to tell you this, but I want you to take care of Pat. She pretends that not being able to have kids isn’t important to her, but it is. When she was eight, after she got out of the hospital, she gave away all her dolls—and she had a roomful of them—and today she won’t so much as touch one.”

  A lump formed in my throat, a lump of guilt. I hadn’t noticed that about my wife. The truth was I hadn’t spent much time thinking about the accident that took away Pat’s fertility. Since I had Pat, it never mattered to me whether or not we had kids. And I’d never thought to ask her how she felt about it.

  “Let her help you in this writing thing,” he said. “Don’t shut her out. Don’t ever think you’ve become such a big success that you need to get some glitzy agent with a big name. Understand me?”

  I still couldn’t look at him. Pat and I had been married for years. Why hadn’t I noticed the doll-thing? Was I that unobservant? Or had she been hiding it from me? Did she have other secrets?

  Pat’s father didn’t say any more, just put his hand on my shoulder for a moment, then quietly left the room, closing the door behind him. Minutes later a woman came out of the house downstairs by the pool and I recognized Janie Hughes’s mother. She shouted at her daughter so loudly I could hear her over two live bands and what had to be five hundred people partying.

  Dutifully, Janie wrapped a towel around her beautiful young body, but I saw her glance over her shoulder at the naked athlete as he stepped into his swim trunks.

  When the excitement was over, I sat down on the window seat. The plate beside me was still full but I couldn’t eat anymore. In essence, a man I loved had just told me he was about to die.

  There was a Raggedy Ann doll stuck in the corner of the window seat and I picked it up, looking at the ridiculous face. No matter how much money I made, how much success I had, there were some things—things I really wanted—that I’d never be able to obtain. Never again would I sit at a table with Pat and her parents. Shaking my head, I remembered how I used to think that they were Chosen People who never had bad things happen to them.

  When the bedroom door opened, I looked up. “There you are,” Pat said. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. This party is for you, you know.”

  “Can I have little Janie Hughes for my take-home gift?”

  “I’ll tell her mother you said that.”

  I put the rag doll in front of my face as though for protection. “No, no, anything but that.”

  She walked across the room to me. “Come downstairs. People are asking for your autograph.”

  “Yeah?” I said, pleased and astonished at the same time. I started to put the rag doll back where I found it, but on impulse, I put it against Pat’s chest, meaning for her to take it.

  Pat jumped back, not touching the doll, and looked as though she might be ill.

  Part of me wanted to ask questions, to make her confess. But to confess what? What I already knew? When she walked to the door, she stood there with her back to me, her shoulders heaving as though she’d been running.

  I picked the doll up off the floor, put the poor thing back in its corner, walked to my wife, and slid my arm around her shoulders. “What we need is some champagne, and you haven’t told me what you want to buy with all the money we are going to get.” I put a slight emphasis on the “we.”

  “A house,” she said without hesitation. “Near the sea. Something high up, with a wall of glass so I can look out and see the waves and watch storms at sea.”

  I drew in my breath. Years of marriage and I