Short and amazing,I’d say.
Same here,he’d tell me.
Now, once again, I waited for him—though no longer, as I once did, with the fantasy that he might take me in his arms or tell me I was the most wonderful girl he’d ever met. That fantasy was gone, but the place Forrest occupied in my brain was only slightly less significant now. I still saw him as the most important man in my life. I couldn’t have articulated this at the time, but there was something I needed to understand, and it seemed to me that if we could just talk, maybe I’d figure out how a person I’d loved so much could behave as he did.
I didn’t need further confirmation that Forrest Emerson was no Claus von Bülow. But who was he, then? What was he doing with Brenda? If he really loved Regina, how could he keep having sex with someone else?
Most of all I wanted to know, Did I mean anything at all to him?
It was after two in the morning when Forrest walked in the door. He wasn’t drunk, but he’d definitely been drinking. Despite the hour, he didn’t seem surprised to see me on the couch.
“What do you know?” he said. “I may have just dropped a few hundred dollars in a poker game, but I get to finish off the night with one of my all-time favorite people.”
As I always did when Forrest was around, I felt my heart open up. How could I hate this man? I also believed he was telling the truth. He really had been playing poker.
“How about that moon tonight?” he said to me. “Let me play you a song.” He pulled an album out of its sleeve.
Neil Young. “Harvest Moon.” He set down the needle.
“Every time I hear this, I have to dance,” he said. “Someday, when you meet some man who truly deserves you, I’ll come to your wedding. You’ll dance with your father, of course. But maybe at some point, you’ll have a few minutes to step out on the floor with me.”
He opened his arms. He took my hand in one of his, the other resting on my back, as a father might. A different kind of father from mine.
I could see him clearly then. Forrest Emerson had his weaknesses alright—among these, an attraction to women in low-cut dresses. A tendency for brief enthusiasms that might not last beyond a summer, likely to distract him. For a while, anyway.
But his devotion to me—the place I represented in his life—was different. This would endure beyond the summer. Forrest actually cared about me, for reasons that had nothing to do with the things people did with each other when they took off their clothes and got into bed together. Into bed, or onto a patch of moss.
In some ways, this was better. I was not all that familiar with what Forrest Emerson had felt for me, but it felt like something real. It felt like love.
That night in my little attic room, I took out my journal again. It had been a while.
I was wrong to be mad at Forrest,I wrote.He never really cared for Brenda. That was all just about sex.
Forrest loves me,I wrote.I love him too.
65
Rich People
I’d taken the kids over to their friends Locke and Helena’s house for Helena’s birthday party. (Was there a single weekend in the summer when someone wasn’t celebrating a birthday? Was there any party theme—unicorns, rainbows, Care Bears, the groovy sixties—that hadn’t been exhausted? Was there a single child among the members of the Lake Catherine Country Club with a name like anybody I knew back in New Jersey?)
Regina had taken the children back-to-school shopping now. When they returned to Boston, Jilly would be enrolling in first grade at a private school in Back Bay. Hayward—his voice mostly changed by now—might be the only seventh grader in his class to sport a mustache. As for me, I’d be entering school the next fall almost as flat-chested as I had been before.
Back at Wonderland, an unfamiliar man sat at the dining room table across from Regina. His briefcase was open, and there were papers spread out on the table. He’d taken out a calculator.
Regina seemed to have pulled herself together for his visit. She had makeup on, and she was wearing a gray pantsuit with a pair of matching flats. I headed to the kitchen to make a snack.
“What’s up?” I asked Prudence. I’d never seen Regina dressed this way, carrying on what looked like a business meeting.
“Something to do with the Emersons’ money,” Prudence said. “I think he takes care of their insurance policies or something. Not that those two have anything to worry about. Rich people. Who understands anything about them?”
A change seemed to have come over Forrest since that day on the island with Brenda. He had started stopping by the club to watch the children’s tennis lessons, as he hadn’t done since the affair began. Though I had no proof to offer Regina that the affair was over—and she seemed determined to believe it wasn’t, and to accumulate more evidence—what I saw in Forrest’s behavior, in these final days of summer, suggested to me that since Brenda had revealed her plan to him, he’d been keeping his distance.
It was a late afternoon, the third week in August. Forrest and I were picking up Jilly from a friend’s house. Just as Forrest pulled into a gas station, we spotted Brenda’s little Honda parked by one of the pumps. Seeing her car, he swerved away, back out onto the road.
I said nothing, but Forrest did. “There was someone there I didn’t feel like running into,” he told me. “Let’s just say, I’ve made some stupid choices in my life.”
It was a surprising admission for a man to make to a girl my age. At that moment, he almost reminded me of the old Forrest, the one who talked to me as if I was a friend, not a kid. I offered no response.
