by Jane Heller
Tried calling her? Oh, he tried calling her all right, but he got me instead. And judging by the fact that he was about to marry me, he liked what he got! At least, that was my impression before I stumbled on this bombshell.
I read on.
“Anyhow,” Bill wrote, “since I arrived in New York, my life has taken a turn, and I—”
He what?
I’d never know, because the soy sauce obliterated the rest of the letter.
I flung it onto the floor and stared at it, as if it were alive, as if she were alive.
Had Bill actually asked Nancy out even after supposedly falling for me? More to the point, had he always known I was an impostor and not said anything?
I needed this, right? The week before my wedding?
When Bill walked into my apartment that night, I pounced. Before he could get out a “Hello” I handed him the letter.
“What’s this?” he said.
“What does it look like?” I said.
“A letter somebody spilled something on. A letter from Denham and Villier, as a matter of fact,” he said after noticing the letterhead.
“Good. Good. And who do we know at Denham and Villier?” I said. I was using my preschool teacher voice. I couldn’t help it.
He took another look. It all seemed to be coming back to him. “I wrote this, didn’t I?”
“That’s right. You wrote it. And now I’d like it if you’d explain why you wrote it.” I stood there, hands on hips, waiting.
“You mean I never told you?”
“Bill.”
“I’m serious. I thought I did.”
“You thought wrong.”
He shrugged, put his hands up in surrender mode. “Could I sit down? It’s been a long day.”
“For me too.” We both sat down.
“I’m sorry, honey. I honestly thought I told you. But then we haven’t exactly had a routine courtship. Little details were bound to fall through the cracks, given all the other stuff going on.”
“Right. Now how about those little details?”
He smiled. “Here’s number one: I knew you weren’t who you said you were, almost from day one. In other words, I let you pretend to be the other Nancy Stern. I played along.”
“Let me pretend? Played along?”
“Yes.”
“But I don’t understand. It wasn’t until after our third date, after Nancy’s murder, that you figured out what I’d been up to.”
“’Fraid not. I knew you were assuming her identity after our first date. I used to be a cop, remember? I checked you out.”
“Checked me out?”
“Ran a check on you. Habit, I guess.”
I couldn’t believe this.
“I found out that you were a preschool teacher at Small Blessings who was posing as the Nancy Stern who wrote magazine articles about celebrities, the woman Joan Geisinger had intended to set me up with. But I didn’t say anything because I thought what you were doing was adorable. I thought you were adorable. And I was flattered that you would go to so much trouble to impress me.”
“You were flattered?”
“Wouldn’t you be?”
“Well, yes, maybe. But if you knew all along what I was doing and you had no problem with it, why did you storm out of my apartment that night I broke up with you? Why did you blast me for deceiving you?”
“Because you did deceive me. You told me you didn’t want to see me anymore, and that wasn’t true. You didn’t trust me enough to admit who you really were. I was hurt and disappointed.”
“Hurt and disappointed enough not to call me again? If I hadn’t shown up at Denham with the brooch, Bill, we wouldn’t have gotten back together.”
He shook his head. “I would have called you. I was just taking a while to lick my wounds. Cops are tough characters, Nancy, that’s all.”
“So you knew,” I said, still dumbfounded.
“I knew,” he confirmed.
I tried to absorb this new information, tried to make it compute. “Okay, what about this? If you knew I wasn’t the woman Joan wanted you to go out with and you thought I was so adorable, why did you write the other Nancy Stern the letter, asking her out?”
“I didn’t ask her out. If you hadn’t gotten whatever on the letter—”
“Soy sauce.”
“Soy sauce, you would have read that I was backing out of asking her out. See, right before I moved here, Joan had dropped her a note telling her I’d be calling when I got to New York. But then I met you and fell madly in love and had no interest in calling her or any other woman. Still, I wanted to do the polite thing and write her a letter, since Joan had gone to the trouble of making the introduction. So I explained that someone special had come into my life after I settled in town and that I wasn’t free after all.”
“That was very gentlemanly of you. I’ve never heard of a man getting in touch with a woman to tell her he wasn’t going to be getting in touch with her. Wait until I tell Janice.”
“Do you feel better now? It was all very innocent on my part.”
“Except that you let me think you bought my act.” I had to laugh. So much for my Jimmy Carter story.
“I not only bought your act, I loved your act,” said Bill, pulling me closer to him on the sofa. “I was crazy about you. Am crazy about you.”
I sucked up his compliments like a sponge, particularly since he was fondling me as he was complimenting me.
“Any other little details you want to clue me in on?” I said, entwining my legs with his.
“None at the moment.” He began to kiss me, starting at my mouth and moving down my neck.
“I suppose there is one little detail I should clue you in on, in the interest of full disclosure.”
“Hmm?”
“You may have written to the other Nancy Stern telling her you wouldn’t be getting together, but you did meet her.”
“No, I didn’t, honey. I already—”
“You did. In the elevator in my building. The night you picked me up for our second date. We were going to that hamburger place, remember?”
He stopped the kissing. The fondling too. He was trying to remember. “Vaguely.”
“Do you remember the woman who was in the elevator with us? The blonde who said she was an interviewer?”
“Actually, now that you mention it, I do remember her. The one you said wrote a newsletter for psoriasis sufferers.”
I nodded. “That was Nancy Stern. The other Nancy Stern.”
“No kidding. She was better-looking in person than she was in all those newspaper photos. A lot better-looking. What a body.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “They were implants.”
He laughed. “Come here.” He kissed me again. “Will you marry me, Nancy Stern?”
“Too late to back out now,” I said, holding his face in my hands, the face I planned to wake up next to for the rest of my life.
“Will you change your name to mine?”
“You don’t like the name Nancy?”
“I meant, will you be Nancy Harris now?”
“Yes. And not a moment too soon.”
Everybody says September is the best month to visit Block Island, because the August fog gives way to crisp, clear skies and the crowds thin out. But while the skies were crisp and clear when we arrived for the Labor Day weekend, the crowds were very much in evidence. It was the last big holiday weekend on the Block, the weather was glorious, and everybody wanted in. I couldn’t blame them.
My parents were the first among our guests to check in at the Spring House, followed by Bill’s parents, his two brothers and their wives and children, and Bill’s sons. It was Joan Geisinger who had driven down to Virginia to pick up the boys. Bill and I had both wanted her to come to the wedding—we wouldn’t have met if it hadn’t been for her, after all—and she had offered to bring Peter and Michael with her. When Janice showed up an hour later, the party was complete.
That night, we had a
festive dinner out on the deck at Dead Eye Dick’s, a Block Island eatery overlooking the Great Salt Pond. We ate lobsters and dunked the meat in melted butter and dribbled the whole mess on our bibs. Bill’s parents told stories about him when he was a child, and my parents told stories about me when I was a child, and there were toasts, lots of toasts.
We spent the next morning showing everybody the Block, then shared a picnic lunch together on the island’s most dramatic beach—a long stretch of sand that lies 150 feet below the Mohegan Bluffs. You can see the coasts of Connecticut and Long Island from the rugged cliffs on a clear day, which our wedding day was.
But it wasn’t merely clear, in the sense of being fair-weathered; it was clear in that it was free of the problems, the snafus, the petty slights that often plague wedding days. Everyone got along. Everyone was happy for us. Bill and I were happy for us.
The ceremony, too, went without a hitch. The justice of the peace who married us was a man who had been born and raised on Block Island and had the New England accent to prove it. As we all stood together on the Spring House’s impossibly green lawn that sloped down to the equally impossibly blue sea, he spoke simply and unsentimentally about marriage in a way that moved me more than if he had trotted out the fussy old phrases. What I found most interesting was his discussion of the symmetry of marriage.
“Webster’s defines ‘symmetry’ as the beauty of the form arising from balanced proportions,” he said. “A good marriage has symmetry. A good marriage is where one isn’t doing the giving of love and the other the taking. A good marriage is where the proportions are balanced.”
He looked up at me, as if he sensed his words held special meaning for me, as if he knew that this union, unlike my last, would be one where the proportions would be balanced.
And then he asked me the Big Question: Did I, Nancy Stern, take Bill Harris to be my lawfully wedded husband, etc. I said I did. When it was Bill’s turn to answer, he said he did. When it was time for the groom to kiss the bride, we reached for each other at precisely the same instant, neither of us hesitating even for a second, neither of us the initiator, neither of us the receiver. The kiss was the very essence of symmetry, which wasn’t a bad way to begin a marriage.
Epilogue
The first invitation arrived in the middle of November, around the time that Janice and I were rehearsing the children for the Thanksgiving play.
“Bill! Come look!” I said excitedly, waving him over to the newly reupholstered sofa in the living room, where I was sorting through the mail that evening. Now that his apartment was officially our apartment, I was starting to do a bit of redecorating.
“What?” he said, sliding his arm around my waist and peeking over my shoulder.
“You’re not going to believe this,” I said. “The mayor is hosting a cocktail party at Gracie Mansion and I’ve been invited! It’s some sort of celebration of the arts.”
“Let’s see.” Bill grabbed the embossed, elegantly scripted invitation out of my hand and read it for himself. “Very impressive,” he said, nodding. “How do you think you got on their guest list?”
“Beats me,” I said, “although it’s possible that Madison Copley’s mother got me on it. She’s big in the arts, is on a special task force or something, and she’s been very appreciative of the extra attention I’ve given Madison during their family crisis.” Madison Copley was one of the seventeen children in my class. Her father had recently left her mother for the woman who had faux-finished the walls of their fifteen-room apartment. “I’ll call her and ask.”
As it was too late that night to call anybody, I waited until the next night. Mrs. Copley was delighted to hear from me but embarrassed that she’d had nothing to do with my receiving the invitation.
“I wish I had gotten you on the guest list, Mrs. Harris,” she said apologetically. “You and Miss Mason. You’re both wonderful teachers, and I’m grateful for all you’ve done for Madison, but the mayor’s party is rather exclusive. I’m surprised that I got an invitation.”
The following morning, I asked Janice if she, too, had been invited to the soirée. She hadn’t.
“Strange,” I said.
“No kidding,” Janice concurred.
I would love to have gone to the party, but I wouldn’t have known anybody, wouldn’t have fit in, so I RSVPed that I couldn’t make it—and promptly forgot about it.
Besides, there were other, more immediate issues on my plate. While Janice and I had a good group of kids at Small Blessings, we did have one problem child—not a problem child on the scale of Fischer Levin (no murderer for a parent, in other words), but a problem child nonetheless. Her name was Moonbeam Elkins, and she was the daughter of a best-selling author of science fiction novels. She was a sweet girl but a loner, who regularly chatted with an imaginary friend during snack instead of interacting with the other children. When I discussed her behavior with her father, the best-selling author, he insisted that Moonbeam’s imaginary friend was an entity from a distant solar system and that I would be placing the universe in grave jeopardy if I broke their connection. O-kay.
Penelope was no help with the situation, what a shock. Mr. Elkins was a wealthy man and, therefore, a potentially big contributor to the school—to the library—and she didn’t want me to alienate (excuse the pun) him.
What I’m getting at is that, despite my marital bliss, life went on almost as before.
Then, a week after the first invitation arrived in the mail, a second showed up. This one was requesting my presence at the Kennedy Center in Washington at a gala event honoring a veritable who’s who of artists and actors and musicians.
“Maybe someone you knew in Washington put us on the guest list,” I suggested to Bill, as the two of us stood there scratching our heads.
“Us on the guest list?” he said. “The envelope’s addressed to Ms. Nancy Harris, not Mr. and Mrs. William Harris.”
“True. Obviously, there’s been a mix-up.”
“Obviously. Your name must have gotten on a mailing list intended for people who give a lot of money to the arts.”
“I guess. But I’ll tell you something, Bill. I would certainly skip a day of school to fly down for this shindig.”
“It does sound pretty glamorous.”
“Yeah. A lot more glamorous than playing with Space Mud. Janice and I made a batch of it today, by the way. I thought of you.”
“That’s sweet. Someone stole a diamond brooch from the store today. I thought of you too.”
The week before Christmas, I received a delivery of flowers—a dozen long-stemmed red roses for Nancy Harris. When Bill got home, I flew into his arms to thank him for the early present.
“You’re such a romantic,” I said, nuzzling him. “You and your roses. I remember the last time you gave them to me. They were sort of a peace offering, remember?”
“I remember, but these aren’t from me, honey. Sorry.”
“Not from you?” I pulled away, then went over to re-examine the flowers, lifted out the card. “But it says: ‘To Nancy, my dearest girl. I love you madly.’”
“Is it signed?”
“No, just a lot of XXXs and OOOs.”
“I didn’t write the card, Nancy.”
“Are you sure?”
He laughed. “Have I ever called you ‘my dearest girl’?”
“No, now that you mention it.”
I was mildly disappointed that the flowers weren’t mine, that Bill hadn’t bought them for me, but I got over it. I didn’t need roses from him in order to feel loved. He demonstrated his love every day, by how he looked at me, how he touched me, how he spoke to me. Our relationship continued to be a revelation to me.
“Want me to take those down to the doorman?” he asked, referring to the vase of flowers.
“Not necessary. I’ll take them.”
I trudged down to the lobby carrying the vase.
“Here,” I said, handing the roses to the doorman. “These weren’t for me
.”
“Ah,” he said. “They’re probably for the other Nancy Harris.”
“The other Nancy Harris?”
“The one in 4B. She moved in a month ago.”
“A month ago?” I was so stunned by this turn of events that I was reduced to repeating everything the doorman said. I mean, seriously. What were the odds that I would be living under the same roof with another woman with my name—even after changing my name?
“A month ago, maybe two,” he said.
“A month ago, maybe two,” I said, still processing.
“What must have happened,” the doorman went on, “is that the florist delivered these to the wrong Nancy Harris.”
The wrong Nancy Harris. Oh, no you don’t, I thought. Not again. Not this time. Other Nancy Harris maybe, but not wrong.
Suddenly, the whole thing—the coincidence, the irony, the symmetry—struck me as hilariously funny and I broke out laughing, couldn’t stop laughing. “What is the other Nancy Harris?” I said, trying to catch my breath. “A celebrity journalist?”
“She’s a ballerina,” said the doorman, taken aback by my reaction. “A famous ballerina. She dances with the New York City Ballet.”
“While I’m making Space Mud with Moonbeam Elkins.” I launched into a new round of laughter. The joke was that I liked making Space Mud with Moonbeam. I also liked teaching with Janice and I liked making love to Bill and I liked getting up in the morning and living my life, not somebody else’s.
“Are you all right?” asked the doorman, who was much more attentive than the ones at my old building but just as unaware of the complexities inherent in having two tenants with the same name.
“What did you say?” I asked, my guffaws drowning him out.
“I said, ‘Are you all right?’”
“Oh, yes,” I said, patting his arm. “Yes, I am.”
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