* * *
“I’m going home, John. I’m sick to death of this place. All you do is play golf all day with Steve and I’m stuck in this damn hotel room. I told you I didn’t want to come back here again.”
Sighing heavily, I turned away from her. I didn’t really give a damn what she did at this point, having a nagging, unhappy wife around was not exactly how I’d planned to spend my vacation. I knew that I had to at least look like I was making an effort to get her to stay, or I’d never hear the end of it when I got back to New York. “Come on, honey, it’s just a few more days. You know how I need the break. Can’t you just read or talk to Adelaide or Monique?”
She shot me an icy look. “Adelaide and I ran out of things to talk about years ago, and Monique doesn’t do anything but sit in her room and sulk over her obviously unfaithful husband.”
My wife had a cruel side to her that I’d learned to accept years ago, but I still didn’t like. “That’s not very kind of you to say.”
“Oh please, John. Everybody knows what’s going on. She’s a fool to stay with him…and then to go and get pregnant again…I don’t know what she’s thinking about, frankly. I know I’d be gone if you ever carried on the way her husband does.” She snapped her suitcase shut, picking up the phone. “Yes, I need a bellboy for room 218…thank you.”
She hung up the phone and plopped her hands on her hips. “Well, I’ll see you back in New York. Now you can play golf to your heart’s content for the next four days without having to worry about me…not that you were anyway…but at least I’ll be able to do what I want away from this God awful island. I swear if I see one more strip of sand or one more piña colada, I’ll scream. Absolutely scream.” Alone in the room, with my wife on her way back to New York and I’m sure heading straight to Bloomingdales to drown her boredom in the latest sale, I felt relieved. At least I could enjoy the rest of my vacation. I stretched out on the couch. Kicking off my shoes, I’d take a quick nap and then head on off to the golf course to get in a few holes before dinner.
Bang, bang, bang! “Mr. Lanier, it’s me, Dolly…Mr. Lanier!” I opened one eye.
Bang, bang, bang! “Please, Mr. Lanier…open the door!”
I pulled myself up painfully, feeling every bit of my fifty-one years, and the effects of a week walking around 18 hole golf courses, lugging my own clubs, from now on I’d take the cart. I walked slowly to the door and opened it. “Dolly, what’s wrong?”
“It’s Mrs. January. She’s sick and nobody else is around!”
“Did somebody call the hospital?”
She was crying now, stumbling over her words. “Yes…but the doctor told me to find Mr. Janaury, but I can’t, and Mrs. January’s parents, they’re gone, too…so that’s why I come to you. I don’t know what to do!” I shoved my shoes on and grabbed my wallet, thinking my God what next.
At the hospital, the doctor hurried toward me. “Are you, Mr. January?”
“No, I’m a family friend, a close friend of her father’s.”
“Well where is Mr. January? We need his signature on a consent form immediately.”
“I…I don’t know. I think their housekeeper was trying to find him.”
“Well what about her parents? I understand they’re here, too.”
“Yes, we were traveling together, but they went into Kingston for the weekend. They won’t be back until Monday.”
The doctor looked worried. “Mrs. January had a miscarriage, but there are some complications. I’d feel better if Mr. January were here in case…well, in case we had to make an emergency decision.”
I didn’t know what to say. I’d known Monique since Steve and Adlelaide moved in the neighborhood with their cute as a button daughter, Monique. Steve and I were golf partners. Almost twenty years now. Monique was just a child then, eight, maybe ten years old. The same age as my daughter.
The doctor interrupted my thoughts. “I have to go back in there…but if Mr. January comes, send him in immediately.” January never did show up until it was too late to make a difference. I left as soon as he got there. I heard that it got nasty, and that’s why he decided to take their daughter and go back to New York. The official reason was that Monique needed rest and the doctor felt that it would be better if she were alone. Steve and Adelaide stayed on and so did I. Now I wonder if I’d left then, if things would have been different.
“So you didn’t go back after all?” Monique was standing in front of me, looking tired and drawn.
“No…my wife left early, but I decided to stay on for another few days.”
She sat next to me on the wall, swinging her legs back and forth like a child. “Well I’m glad you stayed, at least now I’ll have somebody to talk to.”
“Your parents are here.”
“I know, but sometimes it’s nice to talk to someone different. We always seem to have the same conversations, and I’m a little tired of it.” Her eyes had started to cloud up with tears. I took out a tissue and handed it to her, thinking about years ago when she and my daughter had been playing a particularly raucous game of dodge ball in the street, and Monique had fallen, scraping her knees badly. I remembered picking her up and wiping the tears off her face, just like now.
She tried to smile, taking the tissue from my hands and blowing her nose. “I’m sorry. It just seems like no matter what I think or do these days, I can’t stop crying…probably because of the…baby and everything.”
“It’s normal. You just need to relax, that’s all.” I remember that she leaned her head against my shoulder crying softly, like she had that day years ago when she was a child. I held her and let her cry out all of her anger and hurt and unhappiness on me. Wishing that I could somehow stop her heart from ripping apart.
That night at dinner with Monique and Steve and Adelaide, I think was the first time that I really looked at Monique and realized that she wasn’t a little girl anymore. The experiences etched on her face were those of a woman, a really beautiful woman who had seen and felt the depths of unhappiness and was struggling to pull herself back up.
“Monique…what are you doing out here so late?” I’d noticed her huddled on the beach. She was wrapped in a blanket, sitting in front of the breaking waves.
She looked up without saying anything. I sat on the sand next to her. She took a shell and turned it over in her hands. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Neither could I.”
She smiled hesitantly, cocking her head to the side as she asked. “So what’s your excuse?”
“I don’t really have one. I guess I’m just thinking about everything that I have to do when I get back to New York, and I’m not particularly looking forward to it.”
She tossed the shell into the waves, saying wistfully, “If it wasn’t for my daughter being there, I’d stay here longer.”
“Monique, why don’t you leave him?”
“You sound like my parents.” She turned away from me. “But then, I forget you are almost like my parents.”
I got up and walked around her in a circle. “Look, Monique, you’re young and attractive. You can find someone else. You don’t have to stay in an unhappy marriage.”
“You did.”
I looked at her hard, wondering how she knew. “I didn’t say I don’t have my regrets either.”
She was quiet for a moment, drawing the blanket around her more tightly. “I told him that I wanted a divorce. He wouldn’t give it to me. He said that if I insisted, he’d fight me for our daughter. He’d try and get sole custody.”
“No court would take your child away from you.”
“Clive January always gets what he wants. He’d bribe the judge if he had to…just to prove a point. I can’t go through that now. Maybe in a couple of years. That’s why I really wanted the baby, to take my mind off the rest of my life. I thought that I could just bury myself in this new little person and forget everything else. I guess it was pretty selfish of me. Maybe that’s why God took the baby away from me…I�
�m being punished.”
“Monique…stop. Stop talking like that.” I started kissing her, on her face at first, but when she turned her lips up to me, I didn’t stop. And neither did she. We didn’t make love that night. We both stopped ourselves. I think we realized the implications of what we were doing and drew back. But later in New York after weeks of avoiding each other’s eyes at social functions, we finally acknowledged what we both already knew.
I lay there on the slick hotel sheets looking at my naked body. I’d never really cared what it looked like before. My wife certainly didn’t care. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d made love. But now I cared. I cared how every ripple, every muscle, looked. Pale legs, used to be muscular, from my days as a track star at Yale, class of ’66. But now it was 1986, and I was fifty-one, with the stomach of a fifty-one year old, the legs of a fifty-one year old, the graying hair and thinning temples of a fifty-one year old, but the desires of a twenty-one year old.
I also cared what she thought. I heard the water running in the bathroom. I tried to imagine what she must be doing, fixing her hair, putting on perfume in the right places, all for me. A fifty-one year old white guy. I’d never made love to a black woman before. I’d thought about it, but I’d never had the nerve to approach any of them. But Monique was different. She wasn’t a black woman to me. She was just Monique, the daughter of my best friend, and now my lover.
The water had stopped. The bathroom light went off. She walked in the room. At that moment, I forgot about being fifty-one. She smiled and I pulled her toward me. Making a tent out of the sheets and losing myself in her.
Once it started, we couldn’t stop. The feeling we had kept growing and growing, until I was sure that someone would guess the truth. Someone had to see the way we looked at each other. Someone had to know my secret thoughts. I came to despise my wife. I wanted to divorce her, as Monique wanted to divorce Clive, but we both knew that in so doing the forbidden love that we shared would be exposed.
It felt forbidden because I’d always been like a second father to her. Now I was making love to her with a passion and depth that I’d never felt for anyone else. We had to make a decision. But at the moment when the obvious decision seemed imminent, just do the right thing, get the divorces and stop spending our lives sneaking around in hotel rooms and deserted beaches, it was all snatched from us as rudely as it began. And I had only my own ambition to blame.
The first time I saw my face on the poster, I knew that I couldn’t throw it all away. Not for Monique or for anyone. VOTE FOR THE MAN WITH THE PLAN JOHN LANIER FOR LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR. When they asked me to run, I didn’t hesitate for a moment. After all that’s what my whole career had been engineered for. My law practice, all of the political contacts carefully massaged through the years. The aborted congressional campaign ten years ago, nursing my wounded pride, but always keeping at the back of my mind the hope that someday I could get back out there in the political fray. And now was the day and I wasn’t giving it up. No, I could not throw away my kingdom for the woman I loved. I guess I wasn’t English enough for that type of drama.
The night that her husband was killed, we had met in the cottage that I rented in a deserted corner of Montauk. We’d started going there because we could come and go quietly without anyone knowing or caring.
“So you’re definitely going to run?”
I avoided her eyes. I couldn’t look at the hurt. “Yes.”
“So then I guess that means that it’s just to hell with our plans. Isn’t that what you’re saying John? Because heaven forbid if the press got a hold of this juicy morsel—John Lanier, respected attorney and candidate for Lieutenant Governor, in a love tryst with married woman, daughter of best friend…”
“Monique…I can’t walk away from this. You know how much I want it. I mean, damn it! My whole life I’ve wanted this, and now I’m just supposed to throw it all away!?”
She looked at me with disgust, and then grabbed her coat, spitting the words out, “You’re just like Clive. You’re no different from him!” She slammed the door behind her. I remember looking at the clock— exactly midnight. I remember because I thought of the symbolism of it all. A moment before the beginning of a new day, and the moment I turned my back on the only real love I’d ever had.
* * *
“John! Are you listening to me?!”
I jolted back to reality. My wife was leaning in my face shouting. “Did you hear what I said????”
“No…No…I guess I’m in shock about Monique.”
She slammed down her coffee cup, eyeing me suspiciously. “Well, I’m not. I always knew she’d end up to no good. Even as a little girl, she had a nasty temper. I’m not surprised at all.”
My wife continued to talk, but I blocked out her words. I continued reading the article. God, what am I going to do? She was with me when Clive was killed. The coroner listed the time of death as between 11:30 and twelve midnight. I was her alibi. Her only alibi, and I saw my career shredding like a million pieces of gaudy confetti being blown away by the wind.
Desperate thoughts overwhelmed me. Maybe I didn’t have to say anything. I could deny it if she told the truth. No one else saw us. No one else could prove that we were together. Maybe I could just say nothing.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Monique
Numb. The things that happened to me in the past forty-eight hours hadn’t really happened to me but to someone else. I was merely a casual observer. Perhaps that’s the only way that I could cope.
My bail hearing was slated for tomorrow. The look on my parents’ face when they came down to the station will forever haunt me. As if all the hopes and dreams they’d had for me, their only child, had ended up as some cruel joke. A meaningless statistic. I wondered what they’d set bail at. My lawyer said it may go as high as a million dollars because it was a murder case, and they thought that I’d hop on a plane and disappear forever on some obscure South Sea island.
They wouldn’t let me see my child, they decided it was better if she didn’t know exactly where I was yet. Clive’s mother had insisted on moving back in the apartment and caring for her. I wanted my parents to take her, but the psychologist thought it would be better for Ariel if she stayed in familiar surroundings. She’d grown so attached to Clive’s mother during the time that she stayed with us after his death that everyone decided it was better for Ariel to be with her. Except for me. I didn’t want his mother living in my apartment, sleeping in my bed, but my opinion didn’t seem to matter these days.
I lay on the cot, staring at the cracked cement ceiling. My world had become a 10 X 12 holding cell. A cot, a toilet and my thoughts whirling around in my head. I’d called John when it happened. He was out of town and hadn’t called me back. He knew the truth. But would he tell? Would I tell? What was worse, the humiliation of being charged with a crime that you didn’t commit or exposure for one that you did? Which one would hurt my parents more? Which one would hurt my child more, murder or adultery with my father’s best friend? Perhaps John would lie. No one else saw us there. It was his word against mine. And with his career on the line, would he consider my life a necessary cost of doing business? I don’t know. I thought I knew him, but now I wonder if I even know myself.
Sleep had started to invade my thoughts. I didn’t fight it. I had no reason to stay awake. My world was more palatable in the dark anyway. I drifted into a dream but it all seemed so real. I was home in my apartment. It was the night that Clive was killed. But earlier. He was rushing off to some cocktail party. For once he came in to say goodbye. He must have wanted to talk about something. I didn’t want to talk to him. My evening later with John, in the cottage, the place that had become my sanctuary, was the only thing on my mind.
Clive intruded on my thoughts. “Monique, I need to talk to you.” I glanced his way, thinking what now.
“It won’t take long.”
“All right, so what is it?”
“I’m liquidating my
business.”
“I know you told me already…and?”
“And I’m not going to start another firm like I told you. I’m taking the money and I’m getting out of the business. I’m leaving New York.”
I sat down stunned. “And what about Ariel and me? Does this mean that you’ll finally agree to a divorce without fighting me every step of the way?
He was silent for a moment. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? You tell me you’re going to pack up and move to God knows where, but you don’t know what you want to do about our marriage and our child?” I stood in front of him, shaking with anger. And for the first time that I could remember he looked broken and weak. I shouted at him. “What is all this about anyway?”
“It’s about trying to make some sense out of my life.”
“Yes, at everyone else’s expense as usual!”
“Monique…please…”
“What is it really, Clive? Are you finally going to go away for good with that woman?” I turned my back on him. “I hope you didn’t think that I didn’t know.”
“No…I’m not leaving with her. I had planned to, and then I decided that I needed to be alone. I haven’t told her yet. I can’t be with anyone.”
“Oh then there must be someone new. You’ve dumped both of us for some third woman.”
“Monique, it’s not about some woman. For Christ’s sake, will you just listen to me for a minute!”
I pursed my lips, saying nothing.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my life lately, and everything I’ve always wanted for it…I don’t know where it is or what it is anymore. I just need some time to sort it all out.”
“So in the meantime, we’re all just supposed to cool our heels until you come back from this spiritual retreat to wherever that you’re going to…is that it?”
A Dead Man Speaks Page 31
