The Old Wife’s Tale
by Gillian Roberts
Copyright © 2007 by Gillian Roberts
Gillian Roberts won the Anthony Award for Best First Mystery in 1988 for her novel Caught Dead in Philadelphia, and in the years since has written a dozen more delightful, witty mysteries at novel-length. Formerly an English teacher in Philadelphia, Ms. Roberts now lives in California. Her latest book, released in January of 2007 by Ballantine, is All’s Well That Ends.
I cry at weddings. All weddings, even for people I don’t know. Even for weddings I don’t attend.
Even for weddings that haven’t happened yet.
Opening the paper and looking at the list of people applying for marriage licenses is enough to start the waterworks.
In a world this evil, with so many people doing such terrible things to each other, the idea of two people innocently and with all their hearts and souls promising to be true to one another forever, till death parts them — I mean, how can a person not weep at the pure beauty of that?
But also, how can we not weep in a different sort of way, knowing the dangers ahead, the serious difference between a wedding and a marriage?
The poor brides and grooms are like innocent and idealistic recruits being sent to battle by seasoned warriors who know the odds are stacked against them. That, in fact, they’re doomed.
George — George Edward Alexander, a man of three first names — and I made our death-do-us-part vows years ago. Even thinking about that day makes my eyes tear, but not completely with joy. George is the love of my life. He always was, he still is, and he always will be. I’ve made sure of that. Love is not the problem.
Marriage is.
The vows are strong. If only men were too. Consider yourself as modern as you like, but I say some things don’t change. I am a liberated woman, a woman of her times, but I can be any kind of woman I decide to be and George will still be a man, and there’s pretty much only one kind of that.
That’s another reason I cry.
Things were okay the first three years, when George was in law school. Maybe not entirely okay, but like they say, the wife is always the last to know, and ignorance was bliss. We were a team, both of us working hard for the sake of our future, of our marriage. I abandoned my dreams of the stage — too risky when we desperately needed funds. Instead, I taught elementary school art. I was a traveling “specialist,” which meant I drove all over the district to scrape out a living. By the end of the day, I didn’t have the energy to wonder if George actually needed to burn as much midnight oil elsewhere as he did.
Besides, classmates could help him in ways I couldn’t, so he studied with them, late into the night. It wasn’t completely his fault if some of them were attractive.
And the studying was worth it, because George became a brilliant attorney, ask anybody. Say his name and you’ll hear nothing but lavish praise for his skill. Okay, maybe you shouldn’t ask just anybody. Maybe he’s not universally adored, but who is? His specialty is one that most lawyers don’t want to touch — criminal law. And he’s so clever, his nickname is “Loop-de-loop” for all the legal holes he finds. Some people say it’s really “loup,” French for wolf, but they’re wrong.
I appreciate the idea that everybody is entitled to a fair trial even if it seems that maybe sometimes the trials aren’t all that fair. Odd things happen. People on the other side from George — that is, people on the wrong side — change their mind, forget what they said, disappear, but George says it is all in the name of justice. I say justice is sometimes really, really blind, not to mention deaf and brain-dead.
I wish he’d upgrade his criminals to the ones in corporations. George laughs when I say that. He says it’s part of my being a good housekeeper — I like things to be in order: neat, clean, and tidy. He says I like white-collar crime because it sounds as if it’s been laundered. George is famous for his sense of humor.
George says you make your living however you can, and since he isn’t murdering people, and he isn’t committing the crimes, he doesn’t get to choose what kind of person he represents. He takes whoever needs him.
And thanks to those thugs and killers (those accused thugs and killers) and George’s legal skills, I long ago stopped driving from school to school, smiling at dumb dried-noodle collages and pathetic drawings. Thanks to a lot of (alleged) murderers and rapists, we live well beyond anything I ever imagined. Our children had every advantage, and now both are in college, and I am understandably proud of the job I did in raising them. I say I raised them because, in truth, George wasn’t around much.
The last to know, that’s what they say. I believed him when he had those late meetings, even though most of his clients were behind bars, and prisons don’t keep the same hours as cocktail lounges. But, like he said, I wasn’t a lawyer and I didn’t understand.
It was a long time before I put two and two together and knew that George was usually one of the two.
The first time it dawned on me that maybe George wasn’t telling the complete truth about his whereabouts and with-whomabouts, I took it slow. I am not a lawyer, true, but I’d watched how George built up a case. I knew it would be stupid to make accusations I couldn’t back up, to appear weak or ill-informed. Instead, I observed, and I collected data, and then we had it out. Actually, it wasn’t angry like that sounds. I merely pointed out the fact that his activities were endangering the sacred vows of marriage, and he was in danger of losing me and his children.
I didn’t have to say that he was also in danger of losing half of every penny he’d ever made and everything he owned. He knew that part himself.
George cried. He said she meant nothing. He said he was weak — as if I needed to be informed of that — and he said it was over. He said he loved me now and forever. He bought me a diamond wedding band with eighteen square-cut diamonds ringing my finger.
He said it would never happen again.
It happened again.
He bought me a Jaguar convertible.
And again.
He bought me diamond earrings. Large diamond earrings.
A second home.
A bleached gold mink full-length coat.
A new, enormous house in the best neighborhood.
I wasn’t thrilled with the status quo, but the all-important thing was that the marriage remained intact, even if the particulars weren’t exactly what the wedding vows had in mind. It was obvious that those women didn’t matter to him in any big way. That didn’t mean I didn’t keep watching and making notes — and telling him about what I knew — but we’d reached something like a silent agreement. In fact, after a while, I didn’t have to tell him a thing. I’d just maybe sigh, or be in a mood, and just like that there’d be another fabulous gift, and I knew another one of them had bit the dust.
It was almost as if George wanted to play around — and wanted to be caught. Wanted to have an excuse to end the game, to toss away the woman of the hour.
That was how it was and how I thought it would be forever, or as long as George could manage it. But that was before Lili Beth Warsaw. Not that I knew her name at that point, but I knew there’d been a frightening change in George. He stopped being sloppy about his whereabouts. He stopped leaving suspicious matchbooks around, never came home late enough to start me going, didn’t have cryptic initials (R—3 P.M.) in his Palm Pilot. His clothing was never stained with lipstick, nor did it smell of another woman’s perfume. He came to the kids’ school events. In short, he behaved like an upstanding, marriage-vow-honoring, faithful man.