The Ninth Wife Read Online Free Page B

upcoming birthday, why not? It would be on her own turf, she reasoned, and she could take the focus off herself and adopt the altruistic role of the city’s matchmaker. Her assistant clapped with the top half of her fingers and talked of heart-shaped name tags and party games. Bess looked at her and thought maybe she would take matters into her own hands.
    That night she spent hours drafting an invitation and by midnight had one wholly unlike her in tone, but perhaps breezy enough to attract single men who might need extra nudging:
So you’re temporarily unattached, between relationships, living the carpe diem life. You’re painting towns red and peeing on mountains. You’re shedding the exes, asking the big whys. You’re slated to win the gold for emotional independence.
But suddenly you realize you’re tired. You go back to staring at abbreviated technogadgets—TVs, PCs, DVDs. When you come home after a long day at the office and yell, “Hi honey, I’m home,” into the echoing silence, your Chihuahua gets excited and poops on your shoe. Your tropical fish with whom you’ve shared intimate thoughts about who should win Survivor is now floating sideways at the top of your tank. You’ve metamorphosed, Kafka-style, into a freakish loner.
Two words, folks: It’s time.
    She added the where and when (purposely not mentioning that it’s her birthday), explained the rules—you had to bring someone of the opposite gender with whom you’ve had no dating history—ran the whole thing by a friend, and the next night pressed “send” and waited while it sprayed to e-mail in-boxes across D.C. Then she felt nauseated. There was something unnerving about the silence of such an act, like watching a horrific death scene in a movie with the sound off. Worse was the ensuing silence, which she filled with temple-throbbing self-doubt. What if the invite is too off-putting? What if only ten people respond, all of whom already know each other? She typed the word crap and e-mailed it to herself.
    It didn’t help that her longtime friend from middle school had just lost her job and wrote back that she didn’t want to come. Gabrielle Puryear—a fickle, outspoken black rights activist—said that at a party like this, people are always asking, So what do you do? and as a new member of the unemployed she didn’t think she could hear a question like that without exploding. On this interview I had yesterday , she e-mailed Bess, they asked me where I see myself in five years . They still ask that? Yeah , she wrote, as if I was a twenty-something white chick with the luxury of career planning. Give me a break, you went to Yale. On a scholarship, and I’m talking about the principle of it. Why can’t I say I want to be right where I got to before I got laid off, you sons of bitches? As an only child in a quiet home without so much as a pet or an imaginary friend, Bess would jump at any opportunity to spend time at Gabrielle’s house with her siblings, all of whom shared a passion for justice. An evening with her family was almost like being in a TV studio audience at one of those reality vent fests.
    In the end, Gabrielle decided to come and initiate among their friends a citywide search for single men to bring to the party in honor of Bess’s birthday. Gabrielle, in fact, found one quickly—a guy at a bar ordering a drink with a sexy accent. She found out he was a fiddler, which she knew Bess would love, then told him about the party, and Voilà , she had said, he thinks it’s a great idea and wants to come . It was then that Bess allowed herself to get excited. She remained excited until one A.M. this morning, when she woke with her stomach in knots from a party-gone-terribly-wrong nightmare.
    To calm her nerves, she got out of bed and made pies, one for her party and one for her grandparents. A pie was Bess’s signature dish, as it was for her mom, who taught herself how to make them well and then taught Bess. It wasn’t a