Guilty Wives (4 page)

HE WATCHED THEM
from the other side of the street, across from the Hôtel Métropole and the restaurant, Yoshi. Laughing and stumbling and hugging, the four lovely ladies. The four gorgeous troublemakers.

They’d spent the entire afternoon at that pool, then had gone back to the room to shower and prepare. Cocktails on the terrace, no doubt, then dinner at Yoshi at nine. A busy day for them. A day that, from the look of things, was far from over.

He stamped out his cigarette, his first in more than ten years. Excusable under the circumstances, he thought. Being nervous was natural, even for someone who prided himself on his focus during storms.

He did feel nervous, yes, but in a positive way. He felt invigorated. He felt dangerous and volatile and he liked the feeling of empowerment. Light on his feet and ready for action. And always comforted by this fact: the decision would not be his. It would be her decision. No—
their
decision, the four of them.

He was merely reacting. Eradicating a wrong. Avenging an injustice. This wouldn’t be his fault.

Also comforted by this fact: he could always pull the plug. Abort. Right now he was only thinking, preparing. He could always change his mind.

But his pulse was popping. He felt anger in the clench of his jaw, saw it in the white of his knuckles. He wasn’t going to change his mind. This was unacceptable. He could be a lot of things. He’d been called a lot of things.

“But never a fool,” he said.

“ACTING YOUR AGE
is overrated!” I shouted—forgetting that I was a mother of two and a forty-one-year-old wife who’d been married seventeen years. Not that anyone else heard me. The music’s bass line pulsated like a collective heartbeat throughout the dance floor, where about two hundred of us were gyrating and throwing ourselves around and screaming for no apparent reason, other than that it was fun. Overhead scanner lights swiveled about desperately, cutting through the darkness. Fluorescent-tube lights adorned the walls, sometimes emitting a strobe effect, which made us all look like we were moving in slow motion as we danced around at top speed and the DJ above us orchestrated the entire thing.

It was sticky-hot and we were wall-to-wall people and I kept thinking, Who concert, Who concert, but it would have dated me if I’d said anything to the vast majority of the dancers, whose average age was probably late twenties. The place was huge, the dance floor the principal focus, but there were still plenty of people crammed into the bar and seating areas, where they would have the privilege of dropping almost thirty euros for a bottle of water or a Diet Coke. Mix in some liquor and you needed a second mortgage.

Well, I would, anyway. These were the jet-setters, the sheikhs and celebrities and assorted robber barons—and their adult children, vibrant and aimless in their ignorant youth. I missed ignorant youth. But I was living it again tonight.

Someone grabbed my arm. Winnie. “I’m going to the bar!” she yelled. She had to repeat it twice over the pulsating
thump, thump
of the music—or maybe that was my heart beating.

“If you need to sell an organ to buy a drink, make it a kidney,” I said. “You have two of them.”

“All right, then,” she said, which roughly translated to: “I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

I thought of following her but this was too much fun. I danced back-to-back with Serena and we almost stuck to each other from the sweat. I looked up to the open-air ceiling, through the exposed pipes to the freckles of stars overhead.

Nice night, I thought. This must be someone else’s life.

Three songs later, I’d burned off all the calories from Yoshi. Even Serena, the Olympian, was in need of a break. We couldn’t find Bryah.

We danced back to our seats, a semicircle of red leather within which were nestled tiny cocktail tables topped by candles. Winnie was seated next to a well-heeled man in an expensive suit with a full head of hair and a manicured beard, easy enough on the eyes but attractive more for his carriage, his evident ease with himself. He had his arm over the back of the leather and, thus, over Winnie.

“Who’re the hotties?” Serena said to me in what passed in this place as a whisper, meaning she was practically screaming in my ear.

Another man, wearing a dark suit and white shirt with an open collar, was chatting with Bryah while he nursed a glass of clear liquid that could have been anything. He was younger and stockier than the guy with Winnie, an athlete, maybe.

“Hey!” Bryah grabbed my hand and pulled me to her. “This is Luc,” she said. “These are my friends Abbie and Serena.”

“Enchanté,”
he said in a deep voice, giving each of us the European double-kiss greeting.

“He’s a race-car driver,” Bryah said. “He raced the Grand Prix here.”

“Really,” said Serena, her interest piqued.

My eyes stole around the two of them to another man in a cream silk shirt and black slacks talking to another woman. His eyes met mine and he managed a seamless departure from his conversation. The next thing I knew, he was extending his hand to me. He was dark and swarthy, a few days’ growth of beard on his face, thick dark hair messed in a haphazard style.

It took just that long for my brain to connect the dots, to recognize the face from the dozens of movies I’d seen.

“Damon Kodiak,” we said simultaneously.

“Enchanté,”
he said, then the kiss to each cheek. His cologne was something outdoorsy.

I felt something warm course through me, and it wasn’t the bass line of the music. Yeah, I thought.
Enchanté.

“You’re stunning,” he said to me. “If I may.”

It was like a dream. The darkness punctuated by the fluorescent colors. The thousand-dollar bottle of Cristal on the table. The alcohol numbing one part of me and awakening another. The attention of an A-list Hollywood actor with a barrel chest and a deep voice and piercing blue eyes focused, for the moment, on me.

“You may,” I said. You definitely may.

I DIDN’T KNOW
if time was standing still or accelerating. It became irrelevant. Two bottles of Champagne became four. The dizzying lights began to seem natural. The throbbing, percussive music became my pulse.

The darkness cast Damon’s face in shadow, but somehow I could see him clearly. The powerful, scruffy jaw, the warm eyes, the messy hair. At some point, his hand had become planted on my knee. At some point, that had felt natural, too.

“I love this song!” Winnie shouted. Something in French, a woman’s husky, sultry voice over pounding electronic music. The four of us had become eight. Winnie with the wealthy Frenchman, a man named Devo. Serena with the Grand Prix driver, Luc. Bryah was with a well-dressed musician from Morocco named François.

Make that nine of us. An American, whom Damon seemed to know, a heavyset man in a silk shirt, assorted jewelry on his fingers, and a goofy hat. He was pretty goofy himself, but it seemed like he was springing for the booze and nobody was complaining.

“Do you want to dance?” Damon asked me. The way those signature eyebrows arched, I could see that he didn’t.

“I’m fine where I am,” I said. We’d formed our own little cocoon at the table.

“Are you?” That strong hand, moving slightly on my leg.

I leaned into him. “Can I be honest?”

“Of course.”

“I didn’t like
Four’s a Charm.
I liked
Three.
And I thought
Five
was funny, too. But
Four
? Four guys break out of prison and steal all the evil warden’s money? C’mon.”

Damon nodded. “They wanted that one. I didn’t want to do it but they did.”

“They?”

“The money men,” he said. “The financiers. I had a ten-movie contract with them and they usually let me decide, but—once in a while…”

“Once in a while they make you do one that stinks.”

He smiled widely, as if genuinely amused. “I have to tell you, Abbie, most women wouldn’t admit to me that they hated one of my movies.”

“I’m not most women.”

“No.” He sipped from his Champagne. “No, you’re not.”

A group of women half my age stood a distance from us in slinky, sparkling outfits, noticing the famous actor making my acquaintance. One of them called out to him. He turned and gave them a warm smile, sending them into hysteria, before turning back.

“Admirers,” I said. “Does that get old?”

He considered that. “Only when I’m trying to focus on something else. Or some
one
else.”

Bryah broke into hysterical laughter, something François the musician said. Winnie was stroking the trimmed beard of her Frenchman, Devo, as if she thought it was funny. She’d grown very comfortable with him, and he with her. Serena was leaning in so close to the hunky race-car driver that they were on the verge of kissing.

So was I, I suddenly realized, as I turned back to Damon. “What project are you working on now?” I asked.

His eyebrows arched. “Right now, I’m working on you. How am I doing so far?”

He smelled so good. I was getting lost in those eyes.
Dreamy
was a word I used as a child, and I could see why. A fantasy. Someone else’s life, right?

“Tell me something nobody else knows about you,” I said. It felt exciting to ask. It felt intimate. It felt right.

He thought about that a moment. “I guess there is one thing,” he said, his eyes sparkling. “Whenever one of my movies comes out. I’ve never told anybody.”

“Tell me,” I said.

He brought his lips to my ear. The whiskers from his two days’ growth brushed against my cheek. He whispered to me, sharing something nobody else knew. Or so he claimed. But I believed him. I believed everything about him right now.

“I think that’s cute,” I said, when he was finished.

“Cute,” he repeated. “Cute.”

“No, I mean—it shows how much acting means to you.”

“A window into my soul? Something like that?”

“Something like that,” I said.

“Let me tell you something else.” He leaned in again. I felt a chill run up my spine. “I want to touch you, Abbie,” he said. “I want to put my hands on you. Tonight. Just one night.”

“Where?” I said without thinking. I was done thinking. I was finished with rational calculation. I was ready to surrender. “Tell me where you want to touch me.”

He never moved from my face. But he answered in a whisper, his lips tickling my ear. He told me where.

SOMEONE HAD THE
idea of returning to the casino. It might have been the chubby American, but whoever it was, the idea gathered steam, and soon we were piling into someone’s limousine. Damon sat across from me and didn’t take his eyes off me. It was like I was the only person in the limo. His eyes met mine, then they slowly lowered, then went back up, covering every inch of my body, up and down, before joining my stare again.

Someone made a joke and I laughed harder than I could remember ever laughing before. And I didn’t even know what the joke was. But everything was heightened: every comment was funnier, every sip of Champagne tastier, every moment more delicious than the last.

“You have been to the Grand Casino, yes?” It was the wealthy Frenchman Devo. I was pretty sure he was wearing a toupee, which made me howl with laughter.

“Serena’s a star there,” said Bryah, leaning against the Moroccan musician.

I looked over at Serena. She was busy nuzzling noses with the race-car driver Luc.

Then we were suddenly there, and out of the limo and making a grand display of our entrance. Damon walked up and took my hand and a jolt of electricity shot through my body. We weren’t three feet inside the ornate atrium and people were all over him, the big movie star. Everything was moving fast and spinning and then we were in a private room, different from the last one but with the same elaborate frescoes and lavish surroundings and the roulette wheel was spinning and everyone was cheering. At one point I was sitting down with money in front of me, too, and I was betting it all on number 4, as Serena had.

I was aching for him. I wanted to run my hands through his hair and over his chest and feel his hand slide up my leg, but he wasn’t there. Bryah was back at the table: I didn’t know she’d been gone, and she was giggling uncontrollably, something about how the toilet seat washed itself after you were done. That made me laugh, too. Anything and everything made me laugh. And the Champagne kept flowing.

“You are a very beautiful woman,” said Devo the Frenchman, sitting next to me. Winnie threw a playful elbow into him and I thought of his toupee and I started giggling again. I never giggled but now I couldn’t stop. Serena threw her arm around me and pulled me close and laughed along with me and I turned to kiss her on the cheek but she turned, too, at the same time, and we ended up kissing on the lips. That made Devo say, “Yes,
yes,
” in that cartoonish French accent and both of us howled with laughter and then kissed each other again.

I lost track of myself, time, everything. Expensive cologne and sweet Champagne and beautiful scenery and roulette wheels spinning and laughter and my best friends in the world and Damon, where was Damon—

And then some of us were in the limousine again and heading somewhere, I didn’t know where.

A DOCK. THE COOL,
fresh, salty air of the Mediterranean. The four of us were walking down a dock. Heels clanking on steel. Bryah’s arm was joined in mine. She was singing a song from her native South Africa—“Oh, take me back to the old Transvaal, there where my Sarie lives”—and I lifted my face up to the stars, thinking again about my friends: how did I get so lucky?

I spilled Champagne all over my dress and threw the glass in the water and found the whole thing funny. I said, “I love you, Bry,” and she kept singing her song and Winnie and Serena were climbing aboard this enormous yacht and then the fat American was opening his arm like a host, welcoming us inside.

Inside, Serena had her arms around the neck of the Grand Prix racer Luc. Winnie was stroking the beard of Devo the French Tycoon again and whispering something to him. “Drinks!” Devo announced and I laughed. I laughed at everything the man did now. But the hair thing aside, he had a commanding, confident presence and he had Winnie’s attention and there was something familiar about him, but I couldn’t place it and couldn’t imagine we’d ever met.

Racer Luc was showing Serena a large handgun and I did a double take and it should have bothered me, I was thinking, but it didn’t and Winnie said, “I want to shoot it,” and Luc said, “No, no,” and Devo said, “It’s okay, let her,” and Luc looked at Devo and said,
“Vraiment?”
and Devo said, “Yes, yes,” like he was annoyed and I didn’t know why Devo was suddenly the boss of Luc, why a race-car driver would take direction from a toupeed tycoon and I couldn’t imagine where they were going to shoot a gun unless we were going to start shooting each other and I started laughing and then Devo said, “You are afraid she’ll kill a fish?” and that made me laugh even harder. I had passed being drunk three stop signs back.

We went through two doors and then up some stairs and we were outside. It felt great out here with the breeze and the harbor was dark but the shadowy water beneath us looked beautiful and endless.

And then I jumped when the gun went off.