“I’m telling you the god’s honest truth,” he said. “All my life I’ve heard stories about the monster living at the bottom of our lake, but I never saw him before,” Forrest went on. “Her, actually. It turns out she’s a girl monster.”
“Yeah, right,” Hayward said. He was affecting his customary bored voice, but you could tell he was at least mildly interested in what his father was going to come up with next. “How were you supposed to know if the monster was a girl or a boy, anyway? What did you do, dive underwater and check out its genitals?”
The way he said it, you knew Hayward was enjoying saying the wordgenitalsin front of us all. Me, in particular. Maybe he imagined this would make him seem older. More sophisticated.
“You raise an excellent point, son,” Forrest said to him. “In fact, it is a known feature of sea monsters that the female of the species is considerably less colorful than the male—as is true of so many other species of wildlife. Peacocks, for instance. The Guatemalan quetzal. The African mandrill, a variety of monkey.”
“You’re full of it,” Hayward said, rolling his eyes. But I could tell he was enjoying it.
“This is hardly true of the human species, I have to admit,” Forrest went on. He was not yet finished with his discourse on plumage, evidently, and none of us was in a rush.
“Take your mother, for example,” he said, placing his arm over Regina’s shoulders and stroking her hair. “There is no question who the beauty is in this family. And you know the truth? It has nothing to do with this lovely blouse she’s got on, or these pearl earrings of hers.”
He tapped one slightly, enough that it spun.
“Your mother, children, glows from within.”
I shot a look over to Regina, her face softening slightly.
“Do I glow from within, Daddy?” Jilly asked him. That was Jilly for you. Always quick to see where she fit in the story and make sure she was the star of it.
I had no need to ask a similar question concerning myself. As Regina had reminded me that day, my great talent lay in attracting the least attention possible. Though I had briefly known the feeling—and it was intoxicating—of standing in the warm glow of Forrest’s attention, that magical and fleeting time was over. I might as well have been eating my dinner in the kitchen with Prudence for all the interest Forrest appeared to take in me now.
“So, what did you do when this monster approached you, darling?” Regina asked. She called Forrestdarling. Just three days after she’d conjured an image of him living in a trailer after their possible divorce. “Weren’t you scared she might eat you alive?”
From his spot across the table from me, Forrest flashed his irresistible grin. He might have grown up in the projects, but somehow he’d managed to emerge from there with the whitest teeth.
“You know I have a way of charming myself out of tricky situations,” he said. “I just told that ugly old monster she was looking particularly lovely that day. She batted her eyelashes and took off on her way.”
Regina smiled. I had the odd feeling that what I was watching—despite the presence of the children—was an intimate, almost sexual scene between the two of them. Even their children played a role in the drama, but I shouldn’t be here. I was an interloper.
Still, I couldn’t tear myself away. As out of place as I felt sitting with the rest of them, I couldn’t get up from the table. There was something about Forrest that drew you to him and made you melt.
“Did you really meet a monster that lived in the lake, Daddy?” Jilly asked him. “Really, truly, actually, for real?”
“Would I lie to you?” he said.
The next morning, when I came downstairs to the kitchen—the absence of Forrest at the breakfast table no longer a surprise—I found a small package, wrapped in tinfoil, next to my cereal bowl. When I unwrappedit, I found a fishing lure and a hook. A piece of paper was impaled on the hook. No words on it. Just the letterX.
Maybe I was wrong about his lack of interest in me after all. No question, he was having an affair with Brenda. But he still had a place in his heart for me.
What was he trying to tell me? What was I supposed to do about this?
42
The Assignment
Another few days passed in which nothing appeared to change. Forrest continued to leave the house just after sunrise, disappearing for hours. I made the rounds of the club, the Caboose, my chaise lounge down by the lakefront, the library. I had a tennis lesson almost every day now, not that anyone but Jonathan took note.
At night I no longer wrote my crazy, dangerous stories of sex and romance. Lying in bed now, I replayed moments on the tennis court, remembering what Jonathan had told me about my backhand grip, my footwork, my serve, my follow-through. If I lifted up the mattress and took out my journal at all now, it was only to make lists of pointers Jonathan had given me that day. I went over these in my head in the moments before sleep.
Regina continued to leave us all her daily lists of typewritten instructions—for Forrest, a reminder to pick up some medication and check the filters on the air conditioner, or that her pearls needed to be restrung and would he please bring them to the jeweler for her. There was a reminder that Jilly had another birthday party to attend and needed a gift. Her most recent birthday offering hadn’t gone over well, so Regina had increased the budget to twenty-five dollars.
I’ve been noticing you seem to have taken off a little weight, Frances,she wrote to me.Bravo.She followed this with a reminder that Hayward needed to clean out his earwax.
Other than the exchange of these notes, Regina and I had barely communicated since our discussion in her room. The same was true of Forrest and me; it was almost as if he knew I’d overheard his conversation with Brenda, or simply that he knew I knew what he was doing and couldn’t look me in the eye.
I missed him, of course. Even as I was busy trying to hate him. I was never very successful at accomplishing that.
