After I’d gotten those Polaroids of Forrest and Brenda together—and the tape—I figured Regina would be satisfied that we had enough evidence for her case against Forrest. But she still wanted more. Now even as summer drew to a close, with Prudence already packing up boxes of the family’s possessions for their return to Boston, she wanted me to keep tabs on Forrest’s every move—even the times (and there were plenty of these) when he really was just out playing golf with his foursome or running errands, most of which had to do with picking things up for Regina.
She was relentless in the way she kept wanting me to locate new evidence for her. She wouldn’t leave it alone. When all I wanted now was to hit tennis balls and forget everything else.
So I had come to despise my assignment of collecting information for Regina. More than this, I had come to despise Regina. That night I wrote in my journal.
If I never see her again after this summer, I won’t miss her. She’s always talking about killing herself. Sometimes I wish she’d do it.
Forrest was scheduled to play a tennis match down at the club. Regina insisted that I go down to the court to keep an eye on him. By this time, I was a regular there, from all the hours I spent watching the children’s lessons as well as taking my own. But as much time as I’d devoted to sitting by some court or another that summer, it was harder to justify why I’d be sitting on one of those benches again that afternoon, watching Forrest play—assuming anyone would notice. As it turned out, no one did.
Forrest wasn’t a good tennis player. He would have been lost without his doubles partner, Evan. Unlike most of the men who played at the club, who each grew up at some tennis club, Forrest hadn’t taken up the sport until he got together with Regina, and never had lessons. I guessed the men included him for the simple reason that he was just so likable. Though he’d probably had sex with a few of their wives.
Forrest was the athletic type for sure, but his form was all wrong. After working with Jonathan as much as I had that summer, I could have given him some pointers myself. Still, I derived a surprising pleasure watching him play. Just watching him live.
Following Forrest’s match that day—with his ungainly method of reaching a ball and his odd, graceless forehand, totally lacking follow-through, as if he were swatting more than swinging—there was no way to view him as a god anymore. He was just an uninitiated and secretly insecure outsider, trying hard to fit in to a world he didn’t really belong to. In some ways, who Forrest reminded me of, as I sat watching him, was myself.
Over the course of his time with Brenda, he had appeared so distracted that he barely noticed me anymore. But I wanted to believe that was over now. Partway through his match, on the crossover, he spotted me sitting on the sidelines. At one point he looked up from the service line and shot me a grin. “Let me show you how it’s done, Frances,” he said, grinning, as he launched into another messy serve. I pretended to be impressed.
After the match was over, Forrest and his friends headed to the snack bar while I rode home on Buttercup. One of my last bike rides of the summer, it occurred to me.
“So, don’t tell me my husband was actually playing tennis,” Regina said to me when I got back to the house.
He was. “No sign of Brenda,” I said. No sign of her ever anymore. Brenda was history.
Regina just shook her head. She wasn’t buying it.
70
A Good Friend
August was almost over now.
It felt as though I’d lived a whole lifetime since I’d begun my surveillance activities and borne witness to Forrest and Brenda making love on the moss, the day I heard Brenda’s plan and shared it, disastrously, with Regina. Life went on—seemingly—as it had before. But not really. Not even close.
Sometime in the late morning—a day when the children had gotten a ride to tennis with one of the mothers—Regina received a call. Sitting with her in the kitchen, waiting for her to type up my list for the day—Prudence having taken the day off, Forrest on his way to play golf—I studied Regina’s face as she held the receiver. A strange combination of emotions appeared to pass over her as she listened to what the caller had to tell her. It looked like a mixture of fury and—weirdly—pleasure. She barely said anything for the duration of the call. Just before it ended, she spoke for the first time.
“Thank you,” she told the caller. “I appreciate your telling me.”
“That was Pam Oliver,” she said. Pam Oliver, the woman with whom, Regina was convinced, her husband had been carrying on his annual affair the summer before.
“You won’t believe what that bitch said to me,” Regina said. As usual, she seemed to have forgotten completely that I wasn’t some forty-year-old woman down at the club, sitting on the chaise lounge next to her with a G&T in hand, or sharing a glass of wine on the patio. Now she launched into a surprisingly accurate imitation of Pam.
“‘As your friend, and a wife and mother like yourself,’ she tells me, ‘I couldn’t in good conscience hold on to the knowledge of what’s going on with your husband and a certain woman who’s been renting a place on the other side of the lake.’”
“My friend,” Regina hooted. “That’s a good one.
“She started in by telling me how she was ‘always on the woman’s side.’” She reached for a celery stick—her version of stress eating. Seldom a person to crack a smile, Regina had made a sound resembling laughter, though it wasn’t, really.
It occurred to me that Regina had crossed over a line now. She was pacing the room, waving her hands. She might have lit the curtains on fire. Nothing would have surprised me.
“Evidently Forrest hasn’t been keeping up with his golf foursome much this summer,” she went on. “Pam found out this much from her husband, who told her they’d had to find a substitute the last two times they’d hit the links.”
It hadn’t taken Pam long to spring into action. A few weeks before this—having learned that Forrest had once again called in requesting a replacement—she’d driven past the Barnetts’ place. (Theirrentalplace, Regina was careful to point out.) This was when she’d spotted Forrest’s Porsche parked behind the barn where the town road crew stored their equipment for the winter. Snowplows, salt, sand. Not the kind of place frequented by the people who showed up at Lake Catherine strictly in the summer months.
Once she’d calmed down, Regina filled me in on the details of what Pam had reported. The lot used by the road crew was a short walk from the Barnetts’ house—no more than one hundred yards—another clearindication, Regina had noted, that the house the Barnetts were renting was hardly normal Lake Catherine caliber.
Pam had watched what happened next from a safe distance. She happened to have a pair of binoculars on her at the time.
She saw Forrest walking into the Barnetts’ house. He’d felt no need to knock first, evidently. While he was still in the doorway, someone—she couldn’t make out who, but it wasn’t difficult to guess—extended a long, slim arm, which she wrapped around his neck as she kissed him. The two of them disappeared into the house.
