A Wedding on the Beach

by Holly Chamberlin

  Who would break the news to Chuck and Dean come morning?

  Chapter 34

  Bess was alone in the kitchen the next morning when Allison appeared. Bess thought she looked remarkably well; maybe the unburdening of her secret had helped restore some of her native vitality. Or maybe Bess was imagining Allison’s healthier demeanor. Wishful thinking.

  “I’m sorry for ruining your wedding celebrations by telling you what happened between Chris and me,” Allison said by way of greeting. “I should never have told you now. This should be a happy time for you.”

  “Please, Allison, don’t apologize! I’m so not mad at you for telling me—for telling us—what happened. We’ve all been so worried . . . And curious. At least now we know the truth.”

  “My version of it,” Allison corrected, pouring a cup of coffee. “No doubt Chris would have another tale to tell.”

  “But I believe you!” Bess said vehemently.

  “Why? Because we’re both women?” Allison smiled kindly. “Don’t get me wrong, Bess. I appreciate your support. But to be absolutely fair, our friends should hear Chris’s version of the story before choosing sides.”

  “I don’t want to choose sides,” Bess argued. “Anyway, Chris doesn’t want to talk to us. It’s obvious he doesn’t feel the need to tell us his version of what happened, or to justify his actions, so why should I be eager to hear what he has to say?”

  “I’m not sure he doesn’t feel the need to talk,” Allison said thoughtfully. “Remember, he said he didn’t want the pity—or the scrutiny. But he might want the sympathy. Maybe he can’t talk to one of the group because he’s afraid of judgment or outright condemnation.” Allison sighed heavily. “Oh, I don’t know. The point is I’m sorry if I sullied your happiness and your optimism. I really am.”

  “I tried to get Chris to change his mind about not coming to the wedding,” Bess blurted. “Marta says I harassed him but honestly, all I tried to do was to make sure he believed that my invitation was meant sincerely.”

  “But he still said no.”

  “Not exactly,” Bess admitted. “The truth is he never answered any of my calls or messages after returning the reply card in the invitation. I’m sorry, Allison. If I had known then what I know now . . .”

  Allison smiled. “You would have done the very same thing. You want everyone you love to be happy.”

  “That’s not a bad thing to want,” Bess protested. She thought there had been something critical in Allison’s tone.

  “Of course not. You just haven’t learned that you don’t have the power to make that happen.”

  Bess considered this for a moment. There had been times when she had been called pushy and interfering when all she had wanted was to help. She could hear the accusations in her head. “What gives you the right to think you know what’s best for someone else? Just because X or Y is what you want for someone, just because it will make you feel better if X or Y happens, doesn’t mean it’s right for someone else.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bess mumbled.

  Allison didn’t reply. She went to the fridge and took out two bottles of water. “I’m going down to the beach,” she said.

  Less than a minute after she was gone Chuck came into the kitchen, yawning.

  “Dean has a bit of a headache,” he said. “And you look as if you might have one, too. What’s wrong?”

  “Did you see Allison this morning?” she asked.

  “From a distance. Why?”

  Bess told him. “It’s too horrible,” she said when she had related the tale. “Allison’s not wanting to go through another round of IVF, the accident, Chris’s leaving. They were the perfect couple. If their marriage couldn’t survive a tragedy, how can anyone’s?”

  Chuck shook his head. “This is awful but Bess, no couple is perfect. Nothing human comes anywhere near perfection. That said, Allison and Chris were a pretty great team. At least, they appeared to be.”

  “They were,” Bess insisted.

  “Look,” Chuck said. “I feel awful for Allison, and for Chris, but we can’t let this ruin your wedding celebrations. Besides, your being miserable won’t do Allison or Chris any good.”

  “I know, but suddenly I feel so guilty for being happy when my friend is so sad.”

  “Of course, you do,” Chuck said with a smile. “You’re a good person. But your guilt isn’t doing Allison any favors, either.” Chuck picked up a mug. “I’d better bring Dean some coffee. We’re both getting too old for late nights.”

  When Chuck had gone, Bess put her hand out to take a peach muffin off the platter she had laid out earlier. Then she let her hand fall. She had no appetite. In fact, she felt slightly sick to her stomach.

  Chapter 35

  Mike was still snoring when Marta quietly left their room and tiptoed down to the first floor. It was only six o’clock; she had been able to slip out of Driftwood House unseen and make her way to the beach, where she was blissfully alone but for one other early riser who seemed as disinclined as she was to socialize.

  Marta went down to the water’s edge and began to walk in the direction of a very exclusive beach club whose members paid for the privilege of a semi-famous chef in the restaurant, a full-service spa on-site, and marble-clad changing rooms.

  That stupid one-night stand, her one instance of infidelity! No wonder she had felt nervous in the moments before Mike had come into their bedroom the night before. Might Chris have told Allison about the brief affair in a fit of anger, as an act of revenge? Would Allison spring her knowledge of the affair on Marta or on Mike? Was that the real reason she had come to this reunion before the wedding?

  An especially bold seagull swooped down only feet away from Marta. He fixed her with a beady eye and began to walk closer. “Shoo!” Marta cried, waving her arm. The bird scurried off a few yards. A silly little incident, but it rattled Marta.

  Nothing about the afterward of an affair was good, she thought gloomily. If you had even one moral bone in your body, any pleasant memory was invariably tainted by shame and guilt. And to recall the feeble justifications you had constructed for doing what you knew you shouldn’t be doing!

  Marta remembered the path to that fateful night all too well.

  A founding member of the International Institute for Women’s Economic Empowerment was coming to Boston to give a talk. Marta was keen to hear the woman speak, but none of her friends was interested. In the end, Mike had agreed to be dragged along.

  After the lecture, which Marta had found greatly inspiring, Mike suggested they stop by a party before getting the bus back to campus. Marta hadn’t been in the mood—especially not after the eye-opening and sobering content of the talk they had just listened to—but Mike had been decent enough to accompany her to the lecture so she felt that the least she could do was chat with a few of his rowdy friends before calling it a night.

  The party was in full swing when they arrived at Howard’s Allston Street apartment at around ten o’clock. Mike immediately accepted a beer and a moment later Marta found herself on her own amid the crowd of laughing and shouting guests, the majority of whom she didn’t know even by sight. It took close to fifteen minutes for her to locate Mike, what with being waylaid by the host, who pressed upon her a clear plastic cup sloshing with a liquid that smelled suspiciously of gasoline (Marta did not drink it) and who felt it necessary to tell her in great and specific detail the story of his visit to the doctor’s that morning to have a “honking huge” boil on his butt lanced. Finally, Marta found Mike in conversation with a very striking girl with the sort of figure that would have made her a successful pinup star in the 1950s. Mike’s gaze was riveted to the girl’s perfectly made-up face, which was surrounded by an impressive head of dark wavy hair; his mouth hung open slightly. Marta, pulling herself to her full height of five foot five, joined her wayward boyfriend and the Amazon.

  The Amazon was complaining to Mike that she was constantly compelled to reject the advances of wealthy men looking
for a gorgeous young mistress. “It’s seriously a drag,” she said, placing a well-manicured hand on Mike’s arm. “All I want is to be taken seriously.”

  Marta refrained from pointing out to the Amazon that she had used “seriously” twice and that there were plenty of other words in the English language she might have chosen. “Mike?” she said.

  Mike, whose eyes had not once left the eyes of the Amazon, said, “Whaa?”

  “I’d like to go home now.”

  Mike’s head turned a bit—just a bit—in Marta’s direction. “In a minute,” he said. Then he looked back to the Amazon. “Go on,” he requested earnestly. “It must be seriously difficult for you being treated like you don’t matter.”

  Seriously? Marta thought.

  The Amazon smiled dazzlingly. “I’m so glad you understand,” she said in a breathy tone of relief.

  Marta rolled her eyes—not that either Mike or the Amazon was paying any attention to her—left the noisy party on her own, and got the last bus back to campus. Mike did not call that night. Marta knew in her gut that he had not gone to bed with the Amazon. But she would have appreciated a call.

  Only at eleven the following morning had Mike finally rung to apologize for having “lost track” of her at the party. Marta felt the apology wasn’t enough. He had been letting her down a lot; in the past three weeks he had forgotten an appointment they had made to hear a mutual friend play guitar at the opening of a new coffeehouse; he had canceled a movie date at the last minute because a buddy who had graduated the year before was back in town for a night and Mike didn’t want to miss hanging out with The Beer-meister; and most annoying, he had forgotten that he had promised to help Marta move a dresser she had bought at a local secondhand shop to her dorm room. Bess and Allison had come to the rescue.

  Things hadn’t been perfectly smooth between Chris and Allison, either. A week earlier Allison had gone to a memorial rally in support of a local boy who had been brutally beaten to death because he was gay. Chris had been worried things would get violent and had asked Allison not to go. “I didn’t tell her she couldn’t go,” Chris explained to Marta as they sat at a dive bar in the next town over from school, sharing grievances two weeks after the incident with the Amazon. (Allison was visiting her parents that night; Mike was visiting his. Chuck was on a jaunt to New York City. Bess was spending the night in the room of a classmate who had recently become “expert” at reading the Tarot.) “I asked her. But she said no, anyway. Why couldn’t she have done this one thing for me?”

  Present-day Marta frowned at the rippling waves and battled a rush of shame. At the time beer and her hormones had gotten in the way of applauding Allison’s very reasonable desire to live her own life. She remembered consoling Chris, agreeing that Allison had been wrong to go against his wishes. One thing had led to another. . .

  Before sunrise the next morning Marta had jumped out of Chris’s bed (he was still asleep), dressed, and scurried back to her own room, furiously regretting her lapse in judgment.

  That afternoon, Chris called. They agreed that what they had done was wrong. Fun, but wrong. They agreed to never do “you know” again. They swore secrecy and it wasn’t long before the one-night stand was pretty much forgotten.

  Only once, on the weekend of his wedding, did Chris mention the incident. “Allison is my everything,” he had said. “I don’t know what I would do without her. I feel guilty almost every day about that one night you and I spent together.”

  Chris’s confession had made Marta feel strange. Months went by without her being bothered by any conscious memory of the event. Either the “you know” had meant a lot more to Chris than it had to her, or his devotion to Allison came far closer to worship than hers did to Mike.

  A high-pitched scream alerted Marta to the fact that she was no longer virtually alone on the beach. Marta turned to see two teenaged girls leaping about in the shallow water. No doubt the scream was due to the fact that the water temperature was probably hovering at forty. She turned away and continued to think about Allison and Chris.

  The problem with worshipping a person, she realized, was that you were likely to become possessive, to stop seeing the person as an individual and to regard her as a manifestation of your own desires. Could this dynamic have morphed into the hold Chris had developed over Allison, leading to his utter rejection of her when she “defied” his wishes by going to the photo shoot that fateful day?

  Poor Allison, Marta thought. Twice betrayed by Chris and once by one of her best friends. Old sins cast long shadows. There was a menacing sound to that adage—that warning?—as well there should be. No bad deed went unpunished? Marta didn’t believe that; all you had to do was glance at the nightly news and you could see evidence of all sorts of bad deeds being left not only unpunished but virtually unnoticed. Or nervously laughed at before being pushed aside.

  Marta sighed. If she had known what trouble going to bed with Chris would cause in the future . . . Who was she kidding? To a young person, the future didn’t really exist; long-term consequences were insignificant; trouble could be dealt with in a mythical “later”; there was always time to give up the bad habit, start over, change direction. Until there wasn’t. Until what was done was done and you were left with coping with a deep and unending feeling of loss and bewilderment.

  Marta glanced at her watch. She had been gone longer than she realized. She had better get back to the house or Bess would be sending out a search party.

  Chapter 36

  “A few months ago, Dean suggested that I fly to Chicago and confront Chris, demand to know what was going on.”

  Allison and Chuck were on the back porch. Bess had told him what she had learned the night before, but Chuck had had questions of his own. Allison had answered them as honestly as she could. Now, hearing this bit of information from Chuck, Allison felt her stomach sink. Finding himself the subject of an intervention—of the sort used when well-meaning but misguided people separated a troubled friend from his daily surroundings in the hopes of forcing him to get help and in the process, of making themselves feel morally superior—might very well do lasting damage to a sensitive man like Chris Montague.

  “Don’t worry,” Chuck added quickly. “Dean meant well, but he doesn’t know Chris the way we do. A direct confrontation would only further alienate him.”

  “Yes,” Allison agreed with a sigh of relief. “It would. But it was nice of Dean to suggest you be proactive.”

  “He knows how much I miss Chris’s friendship. It’s not as if we spoke every day, but we had—we still have, I hope—a strong bond. I’ll never cease to be grateful for the support he gave me back in college when for a few months I was being bullied by two vicious little frat boys for having the audacity to be gay. Anyway, I’m not going anywhere. If and when Chris is ready to reach out to me again, I’ll be there.”

  “That’s good of you, Chuck.” Allison smiled ruefully. “I wish I could say the same. The truth is I’m just not sure. As much as I still love Chris, as much as I believe I always will love him, there are moments when I very much doubt I could forgive and forget enough to have him back in my life in any meaningful way.”

  “Sometimes choosing no communication whatsoever is the wisest choice. Difficult, but the most self-preserving.” Chuck smiled. “But I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  No communication whatsoever, not even through lawyers. Was that what Allison wanted? Her blood chilled at the thought.

  “Maybe I should have said something to him when we were in college,” Chuck went on, “and he first told me about Robby. Not that a nineteen-year-old would have known what to say.”

  Allison smiled sadly. “I doubt he would have listened to you even if you’d been the wisest teenager ever. He didn’t listen to his parents or to the therapist he saw after Robby’s death. And any time I tried to make a suggestion that might lead toward Chris’s letting go even the tiniest bit of his—well, his obsession—with his brother, he shut me down
. Eventually, I stopped making the suggestions. After all, Chris’s life is his own.”

  “As your life is your own. But being married complicates that truth. By taking that pledge of love and commitment, you’ve created a third being, the union, to which you each have a duty to contribute the best person you can be.” Chuck sighed. “I think about this dynamic all the time. I try to talk to Dean, just to get things clearer in my head, but sometimes I drive him nuts. He says, just live and stop talking about living. As if that were easy!”

  Allison smiled kindly. “Easier for some, surely.”

  Chuck rose and stretched. “I need to make a call to my office. And here comes the swing shift.”

  Bess and Marta came out to the porch. Each took a seat, Bess to Allison’s left and Marta to her right.

  “Do you like your lawyer?” Bess asked abruptly.

  “It doesn’t matter if she likes her lawyer,” Marta said. “It matters that her lawyer knows what she’s doing.”

  “It’s just that I don’t want Allison to be cheated of anything she deserves.”

  “Illinois is an equitable distribution state,” Marta pointed out. “All marital property is divided fairly and equitably. And by marital property it’s meant all property acquired by either party since the marriage.”

  Bess shivered. “It all sounds so . . . so sordid.”

  “The law isn’t sordid. People make things sordid.”

  “And people make the law,” Bess said, undeterred. “But the stuff that’s yours alone,” she said, turning to Allison, “like your cameras and clothes, that’s all still yours, right? And what about the presents Chris gave you over the years, special things, like for an anniversary or a birthday?”

  “He isn’t asking for anything I need for my career or for a return of the gifts he gave me,” Allison explained.

  “Could he if he wanted to?” Bess pressed. “I mean, legally?”