“I wanted to bring you someplace where I could have you all to myself.”
“Oh, darling. I love you so much.”
“I want to tear these clothes off you,” he said.
Something about the intimacy of the scene had a surprising effect on me: two people kneeling together, as Forrest and Brenda did now on that patch of moss, the sunlight streaming down on them through the trees, the sound of lake water lapping against the shore, the smell of juniper, and that loon off in the distance, her voice long and low. For reasons I could not have explained, I started to cry. But soundlessly. I couldn’t risk letting the two of them hear me.
I peered over the top of the rock. This was the first time I was actually able to really see Forrest and Brenda together instead of just hearingtheir voices. He was unbuttoning his shirt now. Then her blouse. He undid her bra. It didn’t take him long to understand that it fastened in front. Regina wouldn’t be the type to wear sexy underwear, as I knew from my perusal of her drawers at the house that day. But I understood now, as I didn’t once, that Forrest was a man who knew his way around women’s lingerie.
A surprising thing happened to me then. I was a girl who’d spent the last couple of years fixated on the idea of people having sex. I’d tried to figure out how they did it and struggled to understand. I’d constructed fantasies. Now here I was, situated in such a way that I could finally observe the real thing from a safe distance that allowed me a clear and nearly unobstructed view. Brenda and Forrest had taken all their clothes off. (Almostall. Crazily, Forrest was still wearing his white tube socks. Those, and nothing else. It wasn’t a particularly sexy look.)
Now, at the very moment the secret of lovemaking was about to be revealed to me, I looked away. I couldn’t bear to see it. Most of all, I couldn’t bear to see a man I had worshipped in the act of doing something that still seemed to me strange and unsettling—fascinating and thrilling, but also repellent.
I turned on my tape recorder. Knowing the clicking sound my camera made, I didn’t want to risk taking a picture at first. But I got up my courage once they were in the thick of it—Forrest on top of Brenda, then Brenda on top of Forrest, then the two of them, side by side, touching each other and gasping for breath. They were making enough noise by this point that I knew they wouldn’t hear the Polaroid as it spit out the photographs.
There they werein the flesh. I’d heard the expression, but it never applied so accurately before. In the pictures I held in my hand, I could see Brenda’s fingers digging into Forrest’s broad, muscular back, and his mouth on her breast. Then another picture, of his head between her outstretched legs. A long, loud wail came out of them both, like a pair of loons who’d just found each other in the middle of a lake in Maine.
Well, they had.
After that, everything changed with surprising abruptness. In the movies, a couple usually lay there, side by side in the bed after sex—an actual bed, not a bed of moss. They’d whisper tender words to each other or exchange loving caresses. One or both of them might smoke a cigarette. None of this took place between Brenda and Forrest that day on the island.
When it was over, Forrest handed Brenda her underpants and bra, then her shorts.
“I hate to rush things,” he said. “But I need to take my wife to her doctor’s appointment.”
My wife.The way he spoke the words surprised me. NotReginaorher—though he might have put it that way. Brenda would surely have known who he was talking about.
He sounded somarried.
“When are you going to tell her about us?” Brenda asked. I heard the faintest evidence of annoyance in her tone.
“I just can’t,” Forrest said. “It would kill Regina.”
“You know we can’t be together unless you end it with her,” Brenda said.
“It’s just too soon. I need ...” What did he need? He didn’t finish the sentence, probably because he didn’t know this himself. Or maybe he did know. He knew he wasn’t going to leave his wife. He just didn’t want to admit this to Brenda.
The two of them were sitting on a rock now, side by side. Forrest’s shirt was misbuttoned.
“I know this could sound mean,” Brenda said, “but I can’t help thinking it. Everything would be so great if your wife would just ... disappear.”
“Disappear?” Forrest sounded genuinely baffled.
“You told me she’s always talking about killing herself. What if she finally did it?”
Forrest sat there, facing her. He had been reaching for his pants, but now he stopped.
“What are you talking about?”
Brenda’s voice as she spoke to him was oddly businesslike. She was fastening her bra as she spoke.
“I mean, wouldn’t it make things easier for the two of us?” Brenda said. “If she finished things off.”
Forrest just sat there in his white tube socks, staring at her.
“It could happen, right?” she said. “She was probably always going to do it sooner or later. What if we ... you know ... sort of helped her along with things.”
“Helped her along?”
