“Excuse me a minute,” Renee was saying, rising and walking toward her secretary, a young brunette who had just stuck her elaborately coiffed head through the open
door. “I’ll be back in a minute,” Renee said after conferring with the young woman, and then shut the door behind her as she excused herself from the room.
Lynn looked around the small office, the windows of which looked south onto the inner courtyard of Atlantic Plaza, a relatively new, bright pink shopping mall located on the city’s main thoroughfare, Atlantic Avenue, between Seventh and Eighth streets. She found herself staring at the immense ficus tree which dominated the open central courtyard, its branches hovering over the empty benches that dotted the pink brick patio. As far as Lynn could see, there was no one in the mall at all except those who were paid to be, the weary sales help in the empty stores and the bored waiters in the small, dark restaurants. It was summer in Delray Beach.
Summer in Delray was a quiet time of year. Like most beachside resort communities, Delray really came alive only in the winter months, when the “snowbirds,” as the seasonal residents were called by those who lived here year-round, and the “snowflakes,” short-term tourists only, flocked to the beaches and filled up the shops. In the “season,” Atlantic Avenue was a different street entirely. Then the cars stretched bumper to bumper from turnpike to ocean at all hours and the city vibrated from the hum of their motors.
Now the silence, combined with the stillness, was almost frightening in its intensity. Lynn had always been especially wary of summer in Florida. The temperature often climbed as high as one hundred windless degrees, and for those not fortunate enough to work in air-conditioned premises and live in air-conditioned homes, it was unbearable. Fuses were short and tempers
long. Lynn had too often seen the results of the summer heat on the battered faces of already battered psyches. Too often people stood in front of her desk with their broken bones and broken dreams and she was supposed to fix them up with a few well-chosen phrases. (“Please don’t beat your wife again, Mr. Smith, or we’ll be forced to take action.”) Lynn hated the summer.
The only place to be in these months was at the ocean, where there was usually a breeze. Normally, Lynn would be there now. It was her lunch hour, and she usually headed straight for the sprawling, cabana-lined public beach, parking her car along the empty ocean highway, removing her panty hose and sandals, and walking barefoot along the ocean, watching the teenagers with their surfboards waiting for the perfect wave, as oblivious to her presence as they were to their own mortality.
Megan and Nicholas were happily ensconced in day camp. The bus picked them up every weekday morning at eight o’clock and deposited them back home at five. In between they played tennis, enjoyed arts and crafts, and swam in one of three Olympic-size pools. Lynn always made sure to take them to the ocean on weekends. Before the separation, she had occasionally been able to corral Gary away from his work and the family would have a Saturday-afternoon picnic at the beach. Now Gary picked the kids up on Saturday morning and disappeared with them for most of the day. He rarely took them to the beach. The ocean had never meant the same thing to Gary as it did to Lynn, something she had never really thought about till now.
In the summer, the ocean was as warm as bath water, and the breeze that blew off it was welcome and soothing.
“Whenever you’re feeling like the world has got you by the tail,” her father had once advised as they walked hand in hand by the water’s edge, not long after her mother’s death, “take a look at this.” And his hand had swept across the stunning, brilliant blue panorama of surf and sky. That had been nine years ago, she realized with a start, snapping back into the present and casually absorbing what she knew would be described in one of her reports as a “well-appointed” room.
The walls of Renee’s office were pale gray trimmed with a white high-gloss border, and the furniture was shades of delicate peach. The only thing that provided a discordant note was the mess of papers that looked as if it had been heaved across the top of Renee’s desk. Somewhere in that mess, Lynn thought, are the remains of my marriage.
Lynn closed her eyes and buried her face in her hands. What was she doing here? Why hadn’t she simply told Marc Cameron to take his good intentions and go to hell, where such intentions invariably led? Why had she agreed to meet with him in the first place?
She wasn’t used to behaving in such a reckless, ill-conceived fashion. Throughout those first few months after her husband had walked out, Lynn Schuster had done nothing rash, conducting herself in a thoroughly professional, levelheaded manner, her composure never breaking. Her colleagues at work had all expressed admiration for the superb way in which she was dealing with everything, and she had missed not a single appointment on her busy schedule. Similarly, she went about the business of being a working mother with her usual calm, making the final arrangements for the
children’s day camp and disbursing the necessary checks, not bothering to ask Gary for the money. When Gary called to discuss their children, when he came by to see them or take them out on Saturdays, she was unfailingly pleasant. Only once, when she first learned that the woman her husband had left her for was not some mindless twenty-two-year-old but a married woman almost her own age, had she come close to collapsing.
Were these the kinds of details Marc Cameron had been after? “Tell me all about it,” he had said. “Tell me exactly what Gary said to you, when you found out, how you felt. Details, details. Grist for the writer’s mill.”
How could I possibly tell you what I felt? she wondered now, sitting on the wrong side of the untidy desk, the side where pain was more than something to listen to, when I was feeling so many things, when the cumulative effect of all those emotions was to make me feel numb. And why had she not cried until someone—she couldn’t remember who, she must have blocked it out—had told her that she’d seen the two of them together—her husband and this woman he’d left her for—in some little art gallery on Worth Avenue, and that they were kissing, kissing in public beside a piece of overgrown modern sculpture, and that the woman was neither particularly attractive nor scandalously young? Why had it taken this knowledge to bring forth the rush of sudden bitter tears, shed only in the privacy of her own home, locked inside her bathroom, her angry sobs muffled (so that her children wouldn’t hear) by a large yellow beach towel?
It was this fact that puzzled her the most, although she was loath to admit it, and she would certainly never have discussed it with anyone, not even her lawyer. Somehow
she felt that the whole situation would be easier to digest—that she would be somehow less to blame—if the woman her husband, a quiet, thoughtful, attractive man of forty, had left her for had been a big-bosomed, empty-headed Lolita. Youth and stupidity she could understand, even tolerate. There was something very attractive about both these qualities at the end of a busy day. To come home to someone who was as uncomplicated as she was unlined, this was an aphrodisiac she could sympathize with, if not condone. She had seen examples of it often enough: a man divorced his wife of many years for a woman who looked exactly like his wife’s old photographs. Often even the names of the women were similar. Caroline became a Carol; Joanne was replaced by a Joanna. And if that was what Gary wanted, then there was nothing she could have done differently to prevent him from leaving. But this woman, this Suzette (whose name was nothing like her own name), was reportedly no great beauty—even the woman’s own husband had told Lynn that she was the prettier of the two—and was, at age thirty-seven, only two years younger than herself. Why then had Gary left her?
They had shared fourteen (fifteen, if you counted their courtship) relatively strife-free years, years that had produced two children and two successful careers. For fourteen years, Lynn and Gary had shared similar tastes and interests, and had made a point of being mutually supportive of the other’s work and needs. Their marriage had been markedly free of serious problems. Both were healthy and well-paid professionals, although his income easily outdistanced her own. Still, they never argued about money. Nor had they ever argued about politics,
religion, in-laws, or sex. In fact, they almost never argued about anything. As far as the outside world was concerned—as far as Lynn herself was concerned—theirs had been as close to perfection as most modern-day marriages come. Lynn and Gary, Gary and Lynn. They fit together as easily as their names. Lynn had thought that there was nothing about her marriage that she would change. Gary had obviously disagreed. Why hadn’t he told her his feelings before their differences became what the law defined as irreconcilable? Why had he waited until the words that came out of his mouth were “I’ve fallen in love with someone else. I’m leaving you”?
In the beginning, she thought he would come back. In a few days, she thought, then, in a few weeks. Her lawyer advised no sudden moves, which was fine with Lynn, who rarely moved suddenly. A typical mid-life crisis, she decided, straight out of the textbooks. If she were advising a client, she would say to forgive and forget when the affair ran its course, as affairs of this kind usually did. But after the first week became a month, and then two, then three, and now six, with no signs of abating, in fact signs quite to the contrary, Lynn was forced to conclude that her husband might, in fact, be serious in his newly stated intention to actually get a divorce so that he might marry this other woman.
He was proposing a fair settlement. She could have their tidy bungalow on Crestwood Drive, he offered through their respective lawyers, and all the furnishings, with the exception of a Queen Anne chair which had always been in his family and which, in truth, she had never particularly liked. He wanted half the art they had collected over their years together and all of his vast
collection of vintage rock-and-roll records. He offered no alimony but generous child support, and he agreed to continue paying the mortgage for another five years. Renee Bower had told Lynn that she thought she could persuade him to extend this period for another few years, and she quibbled with a few of the minor points, but it was generally agreed that Lynn and Gary Schuster were on the path toward a fair, amicable dissolution of their marriage. She was to be congratulated. She was behaving in the manner of a mature, responsible adult. “Consider yourself lucky,” Renee had told her when the first offer of settlement reached her desk. “He’s obviously marrying money.”
Somehow that knowledge provided scant comfort. Gary had never been a man to let the almighty dollar govern either his life or his libido. He was a busy lawyer with a thriving, well-respected firm, and had recently been made a partner. He made a good living. He liked what he did. He had never aspired to the heights of the Social Register. Lynn understood that the fact that this woman had money was only incidental to whatever other qualities had attracted Gary to her in the first place. Whenever Lynn tried to picture what those qualities might be, her eyes filled with tears and her breath became uncomfortably short, and so she had willed herself to stop thinking, concentrating instead on her job and her children. And then Marc Cameron had phoned and come over and upset her with his unexpected words and his interesting face and his overgrown, teddy-bear body, and now she was thinking about these things again, all these things she didn’t want to think about.
“So, you still haven’t told me,” Renee Bower was saying, and Lynn realized her lawyer had reentered the
room, “why on earth you’d want to see Marc Cameron again.”
“I’m curious,” Lynn heard herself say, the same word Marc had used the night before.
“About what? About how far you can go to really mess up your life?”
Lynn said nothing for several seconds, staring down into the deep rose color of her pleated skirt. “About his wife,” she said softly. “I guess if I’m being honest, I’d have to admit that I’m as curious about her as Marc Cameron was about me.”
“And you think he’ll tell you what you want to know?”
“I think he’s eager to.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. To get it off his chest maybe.”
“No, not why does
he
want to talk about
her
, why do
you
want to know?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
Lynn saw a look of indecision flicker across Renee’s soft brown eyes. “I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t think so. No,” Renee pronounced finally. “What good would it do?”
Lynn shrugged. “It might clear up some things for me.”
“More likely it’ll just confuse the hell out of you. What else? You’re not telling me everything.”
Lynn looked around the room, pretending to study the delicate painting of two ballerinas to the left of Renee’s head. “I find him very attractive,” she said finally, in a voice so soft it was barely audible.
Renee lowered her hands into her lap and sat back in her chair. “Finally,” she said, “a reason that makes sense.”
Lynn’s eyes shot directly to those of her attorney.
“What exactly happened last night, Lynn?” Renee asked carefully.
“Nothing,” Lynn told her quickly. “Honestly. Absolutely nothing. But there was this … chemistry, if you will …”
“You won’t.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You won’t,” Renee repeated. “This chemistry. You won’t start … experimenting.”
“Isn’t that what chemistry’s for?” Lynn tried to smile but she could see how serious Renee was. “Why not? What would be so wrong?”
“What would be right? For God’s sake, Lynn, you know what would be wrong or you wouldn’t be here. You don’t need my permission to have an affair. You’re a big girl. You came here, you called me at home—
twice
, I might add—because you know that getting involved with this man would be a big mistake and you wanted confirmation. So I’m giving it to you, and it’s costing you over two hundred dollars an hour to get it, so here it is again, as clear as I can say it: don’t go out with this man; don’t sleep with him; don’t talk to him; don’t even think about him.”