It was all too confusing, although it was simple enough once you broke it down. Her husband had left her for another woman. A married woman. That woman’s husband had called her on the phone approximately one hour ago and asked if he might come over; there were some things he thought she should know.
The hour between his phone call and his arrival had passed in something of a blur. Lynn recalled lingering by the telephone for several minutes before suddenly throwing herself into action, scurrying down the long hall to her bedroom, past the bedrooms of her son and her daughter. Seven-year-old Nicholas had already fallen asleep. Lynn had walked to the side of his bed, pulled the covers he had kicked off back up to his shoulders, gently pushed some stray yellow hairs away from his round little face, and kissed his forehead. He hadn’t moved. Lynn had stood for a minute and studied her younger child, surprised to find him so still. Even in sleep, Nicholas was usually one of those children who never stopped moving. Lynn found herself bending forward until her face was only inches from his lips so that she could feel the
warmth of his breath and reassure herself that he was still breathing, something she hadn’t done since he was an infant. He’d suddenly sighed and turned onto his side, almost hitting Lynn’s nose with his curled fist. Lynn smiled, kissed him again, and left the room.
Ten-year-old Megan was sitting on her bedroom floor, completely wrapped up in the latest Nancy Drew novel, which Lynn had found strangely comforting. It provided her with a sense of continuity, something lately missing from her life. She had read Nancy Drew herself as a girl and she enjoyed the fact that she had at least one thing in common with her older child, who, in every other respect, resembled her father. Like Gary, his daughter was quiet and intense. She had her father’s mouth and his same head for figures. (If Lynn has one apple, she’d found herself thinking as she continued down the hall to her room, and Suzette takes that apple, how many apples does Lynn have left?)
She’d reluctantly confronted her image in the mirror across from her unmade queen-size bed, and run a careless brush through her naturally curly shoulder-length brown hair. Then she’d applied a quick smudge of rose-colored lipstick across her full mouth and just a hint of blush to her pale cheeks. Despite her lifelong Florida residency, Lynn was one of those people who were incapable of tanning. She burned bright tomato red within a few minutes of exposure to the sun, unlike Gary and both their children, whose complexions were naturally golden brown. (If Lynn has one tomato and Suzette takes that tomato …) The sun isn’t good for you anyway, she’d thought, applying a small amount of navy mascara to her eyelashes, remembering her mother’s
advice that mascara was all the makeup a woman really needed, and wondering why she was going to all this effort for someone she was fully prepared to hate on sight.
“Are you going out?” Megan had asked, suddenly appearing in the doorway, her subtle Southern drawl masking the fear behind the seemingly simple question.
“No, sweetheart,” Lynn said to the child, who was, at five feet two, only three inches shorter than herself. “But someone’s coming over here.”
“Who?”
“A client,” Lynn lied, and felt her cheeks flush.
“A man?” Megan pressed, her soft voice hardening, her shoulders stiffening.
“Yes,” Lynn replied, trying to keep her voice steady. “He sounded pretty upset on the phone, so if he gets here before you’ve gone to bed, I’d appreciate it if you’d stay in your room.”
“Why can’t he come to your office?”
“Because … he just can’t. Are you ready for bed?”
“Do I look ready?” Megan asked incredulously, her child’s body beneath her cotton jumpsuit threatening to burst into full bloom at any moment.
“I suggest you get ready,” her mother said, as pleasantly as possible.
Megan, slender, with her blonde hair, tawny skin, and gold-flecked brown eyes, fixed her mother with the guilt-inducing stare she had lately turned into something of an art form. Was it Lynn’s imagination or did puberty seem to be happening earlier these days?
“Are you wearing perfume?” the child asked accusingly. Then before Lynn could reply: “Are you going to change your clothes?”
Lynn looked down at the white jeans and red-striped jersey she had changed into when she got home from work. “I’m not wearing perfume,” she answered steadily, “and what’s wrong with what I have on?”
“It’s not very businesslike,” Megan said succinctly.
“It’ll have to do. Have you changed yet?” Lynn asked pointedly.
Again the look that reduced cities to rubble. Lynn felt suddenly lost. Why had she agreed to meet this man? Wasn’t it bad enough that her husband had left her for another woman? Wasn’t it humiliation enough in a small town like Delray Beach that the woman he’d abandoned her for was, from all accounts, neither especially young nor particularly pretty? Did she really have to suffer through the woman’s husband as well? Did the fact that their respective spouses had left them for each other mean they were, in some perverse way, related?
She’d made her bed with painstaking care—there were few things she hated more than climbing into an unmade bed—straightened up the living room, and finally tucked a strangely clingy Megan into her four-poster brass bed, completing all these tasks only moments before she heard the front doorbell ring.
“There’s someone at the door,” Megan called out, chillingly wide awake.
“I know, sweetheart,” Lynn said as she passed her room, lowering her voice to emphasize that it was time for the child to be asleep, then proceeded to the front hall, making minor adjustments to her hair along the way and trying to maneuver her lips into a smile. Taking three quick deep breaths, she’d thrown open the front door.
“Lynn Schuster?” the man on the other side had asked.
It wasn’t that peculiar, she told herself now, leading him back into her living room, that she should feel such a strong physical attraction for this man. She and Suzette (the name stuck in her throat) obviously shared the same taste in men. Was Marc Cameron a lawyer as well?
“Are you a lawyer?” she asked, resuming her position on the sofa, thinking that by being the one to ask the questions, she retained at least a semblance of control.
Marc Cameron walked to the large front window of the comfortable, predominantly green living room and stared out into the starless night. “You can almost hear the ocean,” he said, more to himself than to her, then: “No, I’m a writer.”
“Really? What do you write?” She bit down on her lower lip. She had sounded too curious, too interested. Now he would go into a long explanation of the sort of things he wrote and she would be powerless to stop him.
“Books,” he said simply, then: “Don’t ask me their titles because you won’t have read them and my ego’s at a low enough ebb as it is.” He tried to smile but quickly abandoned the attempt. “I also write the occasional short story for various artsy New York magazines, and lots of silly articles for local publications, profiles of visiting celebrities, that sort of thing. Are you really interested?”
“Well, I …” She realized she was, but didn’t want to say so.
“I understand you’re a social worker.”
Lynn nodded. “For twelve years.”
“Do you enjoy it?”
“What’s not to enjoy? Poverty, violence, neglect, abuse. I’ve got it all.”
“I would think that it might get depressing as a steady diet.”
“Well, to be honest”—why was she being honest?—“I’d been thinking about making a switch before all this happened. Now, well … I guess one major change at a time is enough.” She cleared her throat although she didn’t have to, surprised to hear herself continue. “The trick is not to allow yourself to get emotionally involved. You have to divorce yourself … Sorry, that was a rather unfortunate choice of words.”
“This picture was taken a few years ago,” Marc Cameron remarked, changing the subject, as he lifted the small, silver-framed photograph of Lynn’s once happy family into his large hands.
“Yes, it was. Three, to be exact. Have I aged so noticeably?” Why had she asked that?
“Not you,” he said, returning the picture to its place on the windowsill. “Gary.” He pronounced the word carefully, giving it an exaggerated fullness that made it sound vaguely obscene.
“Oh yes,” she said, picking at the already chipped white polish of her nails. “I’d forgotten that you’ve met.”
“Met? Why, I introduced them. ‘Gary Schuster, I’d like you to meet my wife, Suzette. Suzette, I’d like you to meet Gary Schuster. He’s the lawyer who’ll be finalizing the deal on our new house.’” He laughed. “A writer’s supposed to appreciate irony.” He took a long sip of his beer, then looked back out the window. “It’s nice to live so close to the ocean,” he added incongruously.
“I love to walk along the beach,” she confided, finding this a safer topic, momentarily relaxing her guard. “It helps me keep things in perspective.”
“Just how
do
you keep this in perspective?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Well, your husband comes home from the office one day and tells you that he’s leaving you for another woman. How do you deal with that?”
“Privately,” she said, her defenses back on full alert.
He smiled, the creases around his blue eyes deepening. “Sorry. A writer’s natural curiosity.”
“Sounded more like the curiosity of a spurned husband,” Lynn said, then immediately wished she hadn’t. What was the point in being cruel? The man had obviously been hurt enough. His question wasn’t unnatural or even unexpected. But how could she tell him that even now, almost six full months after her husband had announced that he was leaving her for another woman, had, in fact, packed his bags and his law books—she had known he was serious when he packed his law books—and moved out, the whole thing had a distinct air of unreality? When he told her, straight out, “I’ve fallen in love with someone else; I’m leaving you,” she had experienced the peculiarly insular sensation that none of it was really happening, that she had fallen asleep while reading, comfortably curled up on the living-room sofa, and that this was merely an unpleasant dream. It was only when she spoke, and she had spoken only because he was obviously expecting her to, that she realized she was functioning in all three dimensions, and that her husband of fourteen years, father of her two young children, was actually planning to leave her.
“You’re not serious,” she had said at the time, although it was perfectly obvious that he was. He had that hangdog look he always got when he thought he was saying
something important, and his normally sweet mouth was twitching expectantly, as if he had been formulating his rebuttal even before she spoke.
“I am,” he told her slowly, “very serious. You know that we haven’t been really happy together in some time …”
“What are you talking about?” she broke in, aware that he hated to be interrupted. “I didn’t know that we haven’t been happy. I’ve been happy. What are you talking about?”
It was at this point, as he began his painstaking explanation, that she had begun feeling that this was not happening to her, but to someone else. It was as though she were behind her desk at the Delray Department of Social Services, listening to someone else relate this story secondhand. She saw herself sitting where she always sat when sad stories were being related, on the side of the desk that was free of such woes, the professional side, the
safe
side, where she could be moved, sometimes to tears (especially in the early years), but never actually
touched
, and certainly never bruised. She regularly gave ear to stories of severed households, of marriages that had been ripped apart in a flurry of fists, of neglected and beaten children, of emotional blackmail, of souls lost and only occasionally found. It was part of her job to listen, to sympathize, to analyze, to find solutions if possible. And when she was through listening and finding possible solutions, she would write up her reports, trying to force some sense into the madness she had heard. Pain was part of her job as a social worker in the Department of Social Services in Delray Beach, Florida, but it was not part of her life.
And so it was only after her husband of fourteen years had packed his bags and his law books and moved out that
the bitter truth began to sink in, and she realized that, like thousands of other women across the country, she had been unceremoniously dumped for another woman. And now that woman’s husband was standing in her living room. Why? He still hadn’t told her.
“Could we get to the point of your visit, Mr. Cameron?” Lynn heard the impatience in her voice and realized from the way his shoulders slumped that Marc Cameron had heard it too. “Is there one?”
“I’m not sure,” he admitted, dropping his large frame back into the green-and-white-striped chair, for which he suddenly seemed too big. “I thought there was when I phoned.” He paused, his smile slowly spreading across his face. “My intentions were good. At least I thought they were.”
“You said there were things I should know.”
He shrugged. “There are things I could tell you, things that might help you with the settlement you’re trying to work out with Gary, things, I don’t know, just things. But I realized as soon as I walked through the door that none of them would be the truth of why I’m really here.” He paused, a flair for the dramatic in the pacing of his words. “The truth is that I was just curious. That word again. The spurned husband was curious,” he clarified, “to see what you looked like. You’re prettier than she is, you know.”
“Am I supposed to say something?” Lynn asked after a long pause during which she desperately tried to think of a witty response.
“I guess I was hoping you’d be as angry as I am, that you’d want to tell me all about it. All the sordid little details—when you found out, what exactly Gary said to you, what
you
said, how you felt, if Gary told you
anything about Suzette, if he said anything about
me.
If he said that
she
said anything about me. If I was a lousy husband, a lousy father, God forbid, the worst cut of all—a lousy lover. Details, details. Grist for the writer’s mill.”