There remained one source of reassurance—Regina’s words to me that Forrest’s affair didn’t really mean anything. This would pass, as it had with Pam Oliver and the others before her. I told myself the fact that there had been many women before Brenda was the good news. Forrest’s affairs meant so little. This one would be over soon, same as the others.
Meanwhile I was feeling a surprising new connection with Regina. As little warmth as I sensed coming my way from her in the past (even when she gave me the fishnet stockings and the wooden owl, and the Maria Callas album, and the awful Fourth of July dress, and when she played me the Elgar concerto), I’d come to feel something for her—not affection, exactly, but a weird kind of sisterhood that I could never have anticipated. Forrest mounted his road bike. Regina and I exchanged a look, shared a mutual recognition of the fact that the man we both loved was likely to find himself, within the hour, nuzzling the flowing auburn hair of Brenda Barnett.
It was after midnight when Forrest returned. His bicycle made no sound as he pulled up to the house, but for some reason, even though I’d been asleep up until then, I knew he was back, and when I looked out the window, there he was in the moonlight, resting the bicycle against the house, unbuckling his helmet and setting it on the seat of his bike.
He didn’t walk into the house right away. He stood there for a moment, facing the lake. From my small bed three stories up I watched him out the window. Even knowing what I did, the sight of Forrest Emerson standing there in the moonlight still lifted my heart.
He ran his hand through his hair. He stretched his arms out wide, as if he was reaching for something. His back was arched, his head thrown back. I couldn’t see his face, but I imagined it. His eyes would be closed, as if he was going over in his head everything that happened that night.
The thought came to me.This is what a man looks like after he has sex.
38
Forever
It was a few days later—the fourth week in July now.
I’d used up Olivia’s tennis lessons a while back, but more than ever I wanted to work with Jonathan. In a matter of weeks I’d become obsessed with tennis.
Regina had recently decided to increase my pay by another thirty dollars a week. I’d started to use this money to cover the cost of my lessons—four a week now, sometimes five. Jonathan probably imagined that, like all the other kids at the club, I had parents footing the bill. That would have been nice, but on the other hand I liked that I was paying my own way. I didn’t ever want to be a person like Jilly and Hayward, or Olivia.
After my lesson that day, I biked over to the library. I’d finishedPet Semataryand needed to find something new to read.
Between reading and tennis, it came to me that I’d been thinking less about Forrest lately. I wasn’t even writing about him so much in my journal anymore. I felt relieved that this was so. I wasn’t over my feelings for Forrest, but he no longer occupied the same space in my brain.
Then it happened. Wandering through the stacks, I heard a familiar voice. Just the voice, but I knew right away who it was, though two orthree rows of books concealed us from each other. I didn’t need to see his face to know who was speaking.
“I think I can get away Thursday night,” the man was saying. “The kids have a sleepover at their friends’ house. I’ll tell Regina I need to head into the city for the day. I need new running shoes.”
A woman’s voice then. “Oh, darling.”
“But what about your husband?” The man again. I knew who this was, of course.
“Kyle’s an idiot.” Her voice was less familiar than the man’s, but it wasn’t difficult to figure out to whom it belonged. “He never notices anything if the Red Sox are on.”
There was a pause. Kissing, probably. Then the man’s voice again. “I don’t know how I can wait that long to have my arms around you again. I have to be inside you.”
Brenda’s voice took on a concerned tone as she said, “I just want to make sure you feel as good as I do about what we’re doing. I don’t want us to do this if it doesn’t feel totally right. What we have is too important.”
The two of them had chosen a spot deep in the stacks to meet—someplace that housed books about medieval history or outdated manuals for things like crochet and training your pet. It was a part of the library where vacationers at Lake Catherine were unlikely to venture.
What was she talking about—wanting to make sure that what they were doing with each other was right? How was it ever supposed to be right to have sex with someone else’s husband? Not to mention cheating on your own husband at the same time, and lying to everyone while you were at it. Then there was what Forrest was doing, cheating on his wife and his two children. And—this part I kept in the most hidden-away portion of my brain—the way he’d hurt me too.
“How can something that feels this right be wrong?” he said to Brenda.
I probably missed the irony here. It did not occur to me that at least the first part of this scenario was one I had imagined, myself—aversion of it, anyway, with me playing the role now enjoyed by Brenda. Like Brenda Barnett, I had constructed scenes of myself in the arms of someone else’s husband. This same husband, actually.
In my case, what I had envisioned had unfolded as a fantasy. It wasn’t ever going to happen, except in my imagination. What Brenda and Forrest were talking about in the stacks of the Lake Catherine Library was actually taking place.
I held my breath. I stood there with my hand on the spine of the Stephen King book I’d been planning to check out that day.A couple of rows over, I could hear the sound of the two of them breathing heavily. Forrest was whispering. I couldn’t make out the words. He was nuzzled up close now, most likely. Her hair muffled the sound.
“I knew the moment I saw you we were meant to be together,” she said.
“Me too.”
“I feel like we must have known each other in another life.”
“I was thinking the same thing.”
