49
Stupid People Having Sex
It was a hot day when I set off for the abandoned farm stand. Getting there required me to ride my bike up a series of hills on a surprisingly busy two-lane road with no shoulder for bicycles. The picture came to me, as I pedaled, of what would happen if, on my way to scope out a possible rendezvous location, I got hit by a truck. No doubt the Emersons would be sad. Forrest would probably express bafflement as to what I’d been doing, out on that highway on a day when the temperature registered ninety-five and I was supposed to be bringing the children to sailing class.
“I gave Frances the afternoon off,” Regina would tell him. “Poor thing.”
That would be the end of it. And maybe the end of her plans to track down evidence of her husband’s affair too.
I was just thinking how stupid this whole plan was, when the remains of the farm stand came into view. Regina’s directions had been perfect.
This wasn’t the only part of her project Regina had planned out efficiently, though. Just behind the falling-down wall of what had once been Murchisons’ U-Pick Blueberries ’N More—mostly hidden, but not entirely—I could make out the tail of Forrest’s Porsche.
Still a couple hundred feet from the farm stand, I got off my bike.
My heart was beating fast, naturally. Up until now, the whole idea of my doing this had been largely an abstraction, not all that different from the fantasies I’d cooked up in my journal in the early days of summer, of sexual scenarios that weren’t ever going to take place in real life. Suddenly the whole plan had stopped being a game.
I set my bike down in the brush and walked in closer, concealed in the trees. I could hear voices now. It was clear, without seeing, what they’d been doing.
“That was amazing,” she said.
“When can I see you again?”
“Tomorrow? The ground’s too rough here,” she said. “Let’s go to our other spot next time.”
I watched them get up. He was buttoning her blouse for her. She was stroking his face. I reached in my pocket for the Polaroid camera.
It was in its case, and the zipper was stuck. As I struggled to get it open, the two of them got in the car.
By the time I got the camera out of the case, Forrest had started the engine. I lifted the camera into position, but it was too late. The Porsche had pulled out onto the road. I’d missed them.
I had no idea where the other spot was that Brenda had spoken about. On the map she’d given me, Regina had identified ten possible locations. It was also possible that none of these was the one.
A wave of terrible sadness came over me. It wasn’t even from wishing I was the person whose face Forrest had been stroking, or my deep disappointment at confirming that the man I had admired more than any other was evidently no better than some character in a Lifetime movie or a guest on a segment of Phil Donahue. Partly I felt sad that my magical Wonderland summer was turning into this, a series of afternoons spent riding around on my bicycle in the heat of the day, looking for Forrest’s Porsche. Assuming I found it, I’d be scrunched in some patch of bushes, trying to get a picture of two stupid people having sex.
50
Surveillance Operations and a Dead Hummingbird
Nearly every morning when I came downstairs—early, just not as early as Forrest—I’d find a note or a small, odd gift waiting for me. It wasn’t just flowers now. One day a perfect, intact butterfly lay on the table by my bowl. Another day it was a single clamshell with a rhinestone ring inside, the kind you get at one of those machines at the drugstore for fifty cents. The best of all of them—not the type of thing everyone would have appreciated, but I did—was a tiny, perfect hummingbird. He must have flown into the French doors on the patio and died on impact. He was laid out on a piece of Kleenex, his beautiful iridescent wings folded against his little body. As with every one of these morning offerings I’d been receiving, a piece of paper sat next to the bird’s body with the letterXon it.
I remembered reading somewhere that a hummingbird weighed roughly the same as a penny. Now I saw this was true.
These gifts baffled me. What did it mean that the same man who seemed to have utterly abandoned our precious friendship (precious to me, anyway), who now appeared so unaware of my presence, had taken the time to leave me these daily treasures? And what kind of a jerk wasI, to be spying on the same person who left the body of a beautiful (though dead) hummingbird next to my cereal bowl?
I had no answer to that one. I just knew that every morning when I woke up, I looked forward to finding another magical gift. This was the reason I didn’t get up earlier. I didn’t want to interrupt the moment when he set whatever odd thing it was he’d chosen to leave on the table for me that morning. I was afraid that if Forrest and I met now, in the kitchen, in those early morning hours before he took off for his bike ride or his swim—on his way to see his lover—it might ruin the small, good thing that remained between us. I’d rather eat my breakfast alone than risk losing that.
So I chose to lie in bed until the sun was up and I’d heard the sound of his bicycle tires going down the gravel driveway, or the French doors slamming shut as he closed them on his way down to the dock.
I made sure Forrest was gone before I descended the long staircase into the kitchen to see what he’d left for me. It wasn’t how things had been when we’d sat side by side in the breakfast nook, starting our day together. But along with tennis, this was the best part of every day.
51
Make Her Proud
On the surface, it might have seemed that Regina’s goal, when she enlisted my services to spy on her husband, involved money. Specifically, protecting her inheritance. But I knew it wasn’t money, really, that Regina cared about. From the way she talked about Forrest—the look on her face when she described the places he might take his lover, based on her own experience of having made love with him there herself—I knew her true objective was holding on to her husband.
She actually believed that if she threatened him with financial ruin, he might stick around. In Regina’s mind, presenting Forrest with the prospect of forfeiting the comfortable lifestyle he’d become accustomed to—ensuring that he’d lose his home, his boat, his sports car, his golf membership, not to mention his children—served as her way of holding on to him.
