Elizabeth the First Wife

by Lian Dolan

  “Tell me the story of this home,” Pierce demanded, his manicured hands performing some sort of interior designer sun salutation. He nodded in my direction, summoning speech.

  It was a lecture I’d given many times since moving in three years ago, the house inspiring that question from most guests. But I gave him the short version, because doubtless he’d walked into countless other gems in the area. My house had the same back story as scores of homes in the area: Easterners moved to sunny Pasadena in the 1920s; they started a business and it flourished; the money flowed; lovely house was built; life was good until the about late ’70s, when smog and crowds took over; original homeowners died and history was up for grabs; some homes survived yuppie remodels with character intact, and others got the popcorn-ceiling treatment.

  Luckily, my casita hadn’t really changed hands. “The house was built in 1926 by my great-grandparents on my mother’s side. According to my grandmother, her parents wanted to build the most California house they could, to let in sun and clean air. That’s why they used a hacienda layout. Very little has been done to this house since 1926.”

  “Very little,” Bumble concurred, clearly working up to her rant on my inferior counter space.

  I shut her down, “My grandmother Gigi lived in it her whole life. She was the only Bosworth child, married young, had my mother, but then was widowed in World War II and moved back in with her parents. She never remarried and stayed here until her death a few years ago.”

  “Some days, that sounds like a good life to me,” Bumble interjected. “Alone but in charge.”

  I carried on, “Our grandmother was a great entertainer and patron of the arts. The house was always in use for fundraisers or musicales. People loved coming here. Gigi was legally blind in the last decade of her life, so we literally couldn’t change anything about the house for her sake. When she died, she left the house to me.”

  “Not that the rest of us minded,” Bumble added, repeating her standard beef about the will’s inequity. The truth is, Bumble really didn’t mind. She and the Congressman lived in a massive center-hall Colonial in the upstanding Madison Heights neighborhood. But Bumble liked to give the impression that we were the Most Interesting Family in Town, so she carried on for the sake of a controversy. “Elizabeth here was our grandmother’s favorite. She lived in the guesthouse for years during grad school. The two of them loved books and plays. She even suffered through the musicales, because who doesn’t love the lute? And God knows, when my grandmother lost her sight and her friends started to die off, Elizabeth would sit with her for hours and describe what all the actresses were wearing on All My Children. She earned this house in the end.”

  “I feel the spirit of your grandmother in this home. And your light shines through as well, Elizabeth. You are a nurturer and an emotional sponge. You soak up the needs of others. So let’s take care of your needs now.” Pierce ran his hands over the adobe walls, caressing each dip. “I hope you know how special this house is. It’s like a virgin, touched for the very first time.”

  Bumble muffled a laugh and shot a look in my direction. Yes, Bumble, I get the virgin analogy. I‘m like the house.

  I turned to face Pierce again, his personal luster diminished slightly with the Madonna quote. But I had to admit that he seemed to really care about my hacienda, so much humbler than the cavernous old Pasadena houses he usually gutted and retiled in white. I started with my modest list. “I don’t want to change too much. But the kitchen needs a little work.”

  “A little work?” Bumble snorted. “I’d tear the whole thing out, blow out a wall and make this one gigantic entertaining space. Wouldn’t you, Pierce?”

  Pierce’s glass-blue eyes turned cold for an instant. If Bumble hadn’t been the wife of a member of the House Ways & Means Committee, she would have been toast. But then his face softened. “You, my dear Bumble, need your home to be a showpiece, because you and your handsome husband thrive at the highest level. You create the noise of life. You’re noise creators. But this home is quieter and needs a careful touch. Listen to the silence.” He gestured again, signifying the end of his pontification, and then closed his eyes, presumably to commune with the silence.

  As commanded, we listened to the silence, but really, all I could hear was the freeway in the distance, a fact of life in Southern California. I kept my mouth shut for a moment to honor his meditation, then carried on. “Yes, I want to preserve the peacefulness, but I’d really like a dishwasher. And maybe a stove that doesn’t have to be lit by hand. And I’d love a prep sink. And if I could get a window over the sink to look out at my garden, that would be enough for me.”

  Pierce remained still with his eyes shut, and then they flew open, scaring me a tiny bit. Was he possessed?

  “I’ll do it.”

  Bumble squealed again and gave the Shiny One a hug. “Oh, Pierce, thank you. I know this isn’t your usual high-profile project, but I know you’re ab-so-lute-ly the only one who can do justice to this house.”

  Wait, what had just happened? I thought I got to choose the designer, not vice versa. Once again, I was reminded that my world and Bumble’s rarely coincided, even though we lived only one zip code apart. “Um, thank you?”

  Pierce DeVine reached for both my hands, “No, thank you. This is a journey we take together.”

  I never should have opened the box. Honestly, I should have thrown that box out a long time ago, finally admitting defeat, like I did with my extensive wardrobe of DKNY blazers with shoulder pads. They were never coming back in style and I had to face facts. But I’d gone ahead and opened my Big Box of FX Memories, and now no amount of Meritage was going to wash away the pain.

  Inside were flyers from dorm parties, two Eurail passes from our junior year in London, Playbills from productions we had seen together, Soundgarden ticket stubs, coasters from our favorite bars, a mixed CD of quirky love songs by quirky singer-songwriters, actual letters and love poems written by FX, a dried rose from my twenty-first birthday, and Mardi Gras beads. Nothing out of the ordinary, but everything brought back vivid images and intense feelings.

  There, too, was the hand-lettered flyer from the production of The Taming of the Shrew we performed in the Shakespeare class we took together second semester sophomore year. Elizabeth Lancaster as Kate. Francis Fahey as Petruchio. After so many months of staying up all night writing his history papers while he played Nerf basketball in the hall. After so many months of searching for him every time I walked into the library or a party. After so many months of watching him be the center of attention and go home with other women. All it took was one scene (I say it is the moon…) and Francis Fahey finally fell for me. The night after we performed in front of the class, he pulled a Say Anything outside my room, complete with raincoat and Peter Gabriel. (He was from Seattle, after all.) It wasn’t original, but I didn’t care. I was already in love with him.

  If I was the scrapbooking type, I might have stuck all the items in an album entitled: College Kids Fall in Love. But I’m more of the unmarked-box-in-the-closet type, and maybe that’s why the FX sighting today had me so unnerved.

  I studied the photo of us leaving the courthouse in Lower Manhattan the day we got married. Our friend Margot had captured the event in a series of Polaroids, but the other photos had long since disappeared. (Or maybe I cut them up violently the night FX told me he needed to “experience more to really be an actor.” And by “more” he meant more sex with more women who weren’t me.) But on that spectacular New York City October day in 1998, I was deliriously happy. The joy showed on my face in the fading image. I was wearing a long white crocheted dress and pink silk scarf, holding a bouquet of daisies. FX was in a tweed jacket and a purple striped shirt. The skyline in the background, the future in front of us. God, we looked so young.

  Why wait, we’d thought. We’re in love, and this is forever.

  Seventeen months and twenty-six days later, we were divorced. My heart was cleaved in two.

  Th
en the Lancaster clan stepped up. Bumble came to collect my remains from New York and move me home. Sarah practically wrote my grad school applications during all her spare time in med school. My grandmother cleaned out her guesthouse, gave me her old BMW, and signed me up for water aerobics. My father showed up every Friday afternoon, racket in hand, to smack around the tennis ball. Even my mother recognized the fragility of my state; she never once said, “I told you so.”

  I wish I could say the first year or two post-FX was a blur, but it wasn’t. It was excruciating. Every day took me back to him, to his laugh, to the feel of his skin. It was like full-body plantar fasciitis: Every step felt like I was walking on a million knives. I didn’t know heartbreak could hurt everywhere. I had multiple copies of Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville and Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill for car, home, and office use. But even a daily dozen playings of “You Oughta Know” couldn’t quicken the healing.

  Then one Friday morning I opened the L.A. Times and there it was: the first big article about FX, splashed across the front of the Calendar section on the day of the release of Icarus: The Beginning. The writer described FX as “single.” Not “divorced” or even “on the rebound,” just “single.” I didn’t even get the ultimate Hollywood Reporter–style insult: “Ex-wife is non-pro.” There was no mention of me at all, no mention of us. Like we never happened. I stayed in bed for the weekend, with my grandmother’s blessing. On Monday morning, I packed up the stuff and shoved it in a closet and went to work on finishing my PhD in record time.

  Eventually, the pain dulled and the embarrassment faded. At some point, I realized I could look at the giant billboards on Sunset with FX’s image without retching. I could flip through US Weekly at the nail salon and breeze right past the shot of FX and his latest model. Finally, I watched the entire Icarus trilogy in a single day, like ripping off a Band-Aid, fast-forwarding through the inevitable scenes where he got the girl.

  The first and only time I ran into him after the split was in a completely generic chain restaurant near UCLA, after the third Icarus film had made $100 million on its opening weekend. He was getting four carne asada tacos, and I happened to walk in for a chicken bowl. We talked for two hours, until the manager asked us to buy another meal or leave. As we said goodbye, he gave me the patented FX Fahey eyes and said, “I’m sorry, Elizabeth.”

  I said, “I forgive you.” And by then, I had.

  He called five years ago when his father died of a sudden heart attack. Jack Fahey spent forty-five years at Boeing, working his way up from janitor to supply chain executive. He dropped dead two weeks after his retirement party. FX called and asked if I would go to the funeral with him. He was a wreck. “You knew him, Liz. People in Hollywood, the people I work with, they don’t really get normal families. If you’re not in the business, you don’t really exist. My dad was just my dad. I’m not sure I can handle normal anymore. If you’re there, I can do it.”

  I almost said yes, but then I came to my senses. I could imagine the look on his mother’s face if I returned home with the prodigal son at her darkest hour. It would have been the same look she gave me the one Christmas I spent with the Fahey family in Seattle during that tiny window between our wedding and our divorce. May Fahey loathed me. She cornered me in the pantry of their warm and lovely home after dinner on Christmas Eve and hissed, “How could you? How could you marry my only son and not invite me, his mother, to the wedding?”

  I’ve never felt worse in my entire life. Never. It was as if the folly of the entire marriage was summed up in that one thought. Of course it wouldn’t last; his mother wasn’t at the wedding.

  So I told FX that he had to do the funeral alone. “You know I can’t go with you, but you’ll be fine, FX. You’ll see. You’ll get home and you’ll be you again.” I meant it. His vulnerability had touched me deeply.

  He sent me an e-mail a week later. All it said was: You were right. I could do it. Thanks. Love, Francis.

  I still had the e-mail in my inbox.

  I pushed the walk down FX Memory Lane aside and worked on dinner. Focus on the present, Elizabeth. I chopped my kale with determination, shredding it for a marinated salad. I tossed the greens into a bowl with avocados, mushrooms, sesame oil, and lemon juice, left it to sit for a half hour, and poured myself another half a glass of wine.

  FX was back with another request. Maybe Bumble was right. Why should his lack of confidence be my problem?

  As much as I wanted to go for the work, the experience, and the clean Oregon air, letting FX back into my life was not productive. One trip into the past confirmed what I already knew: FX knew how to push all the buttons, good and bad. Especially the good.

  I didn’t want to risk…well, anything. I had a life, a small and well-ordered life. It suited me. That was enough. I couldn’t go to Ashland. No way.

  My phone beeped and a text came in from my father: See you for lunch? For a guy who could barely change a lightbulb, his delight in texting amused me. Maybe he loved the efficiency and immediacy, because he was never a big fan of small talk.

  I responded: Usual spot. Usual time.

  I would let FX twist for a couple of days, then call his agent and decline. There, decision made.

  Portia

  FROM THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

  WHO SHE IS: A rich, intelligent heiress who is forced to auction off her hand in marriage in a bizarre lottery as stipulated by her father’s will. She’s also a total babe. Lauded as a free spirit who must abide by rigid rules when it comes to finding a husband, and one of the Bard’s most complex female characters. In the end, she gets her man, has her day in court, and enjoys the respect of society.

  WHAT TO STEAL

  FROM PORTIA:

  Gracious, quick-witted, and sets high standards for her romantic partners.

  Epitomizes independence in her life choices, as much as a girl could in Elizabethan England.

  Cross-dresses for good! She impersonates a lawyer’s apprentice and saves the life of her beloved’s BFF. Both guys owe her big time.

  Awesome name.

  WHAT TO SKIP: Scholars think she represents the blunt, barbaric Christian Primitivism of the play.

  HISTORICAL NOTE: Shakespeare created Portia in homage to Queen Elizabeth herself. Also, in letters to his beloved wife, John Adams calls Abigail “Portia.” (In turn, she calls him “Lysander” after the young swain in Midsummer, which is kinda creepy.)

  BEST QUOTE ON RELATIONSHIPS: “I am glad this parcel of wooers are so reasonable; for there is not one among them but I dote on his very absence, and I pray God grant them a fair departure.”

  WHAT SHE MEANS: There are tons of fish in the sea. Unfortunately, I don’t really care for any of them. I’ll wait until the right guy comes along.

  PORTIAS OF TODAY: Arianna Huffington, Ivanka Trump, Martha Stewart, Alicia in The Good Wife.

  CHAPTER 3

  The campus of the California Institute of Technology, known as Caltech to the world, wasn’t beautiful, but it had its highlights. It was a hodgepodge of history, gravitas, and some unfortunate expansion during the ’70s. A recent building-and-renovation spate had improved the balance of the campus somewhat, but very few of the three thousand–plus students, grad students, and professors really cared about the aesthetic of the institution. For them it was about the work, plain and simple. The quirky design, the jumbled labs that remained unchanged for decades, and the lecture rooms that still reverberated with the teachings of more than thirty Nobel Prize recipients, dozens of National Medal of Science honorees, and the occasional MacArthur Fellow better served the work than some picture-perfect campus.

  As my mother always said, “All these Techies need is a slide rule and three meals a day, and they’re happy. The rest is meaningless to them.” I laughed thinking about my mother’s assessment as I watched my father approach our table for our weekly lunch at the Athenaeum. The “Ath” was the private dining club on the Caltech campus that catered to the faculty and admini
stration of the school, as well as a select list of community leaders from Pasadena at large. As opposed to my little office at Pasadena City College, the Athenaeum actually was Southern California meets Oxford, the building being a fine example of grand Mediterranean architecture filled with the handsomely worn appointments of a well-endowed club. It was built in 1930, with money cashed out of the stock market just before the crash, to serve as a social, ethical, and intellectual center for the city. The first event held in the club was a dinner in honor of Albert Einstein, newly arrived for a stint at Caltech. Many more illustrious dinners had been held over the decades, including, but not limited to, my sister Bumble’s wedding.

  My father, Dr. Richard Lancaster, fit in perfectly, thanks to my mother’s refusal to allow him to descend into that scruffy academic look of short-sleeved, buttoned-down shirts and Birkenstocks favored by too many on campus. Instead, my father wore a daily uniform of a tweed jacket, white polo shirt, pressed khakis, and clean pair of Jack Purcell sneakers. He nodded in greeting to his fellow faculty members at their coveted “round tables” in the center of the large room—the engineers, the biologists, the applied mathematicians. The seating in the dining room was a neatly organized universe of hierarchical lunch buddies with some of the world’s highest IQs.

  Normally, my father sat with his fellow physicists to talk shop about string theory or nucleosynthesis or gravitational wave detection. But every Wednesday for the last five years, we shared a table for two and talked about movies, the news, academic politics, and tennis. Tennis was the only sport he played and the one sport he followed religiously. Now, we played and talked tennis together. I wish I could say it was something we’d done since my childhood, but honestly, it wasn’t.

  I had no interest in my father’s life when I was growing up, except that it would occasionally take us to fantastic European destinations during summers, thanks to conferences and guest lectures. I would answer questions about him with vague statements like, “He’s a science teacher” and “He works in a lab.” Unlike my older sister Sarah, herself a scientist, researcher, and doctor, I couldn’t understand my father’s work, and unlike Bumble, a spinner of reality, I didn’t appreciate its magnitude until I was in college. When I was in real grade trouble in Physics for Non-Science Majors, I managed to pass simply by dropping my father’s name.