He didn’t wait for her. He veered off the roundabout, went down a set of wooden stairs from the higher ground on Mulberry Row, and strode down a path through the vegetable garden. In the middle of the garden, some hundred feet out, a small garden pavilion stood, overlooking the orchard and vineyard. It looked for all the world like a miniature house, and, as Laura saw when she followed Richard inside, it was indeed private. Sunlight washed in through the double-sash windows, with the instant effect of shutting them off from the rest of Monticello.
She sank down on a chair against one of the walls. He took up a spot against the opposite wall, and the couple of minutes of walking hadn’t made a dent in his anger. His body language announced that they were teetering on the brink of explosion. All 6′5″ shimmered with tension.
“Speak,” he said abruptly. “You have known about my trip up here with Francie for fourteen years. You covered for her at school that day. Why – when we have had such an enjoyable weekend – are you dragging that up now?”
She tried to concentrate. Her thoughts were skittering all over; she couldn’t keep them in order.
“You might as well tell me,” Richard said. “We are not going anywhere until you do.”
And he crossed his arms and prepared to wait.
She said, “I know what happened that day. I remembered, and I’m sorry, it bothered me.”
“And what,” he said, “do you think happened?”
She looked away, deeply humiliated. He wasn’t going to rest until she exposed every bit of her stupid, childish jealousy over a past he could do nothing to erase. “Oh, God, Richard, do we have to go through it all? I know what happened, okay? I know you can’t do anything about it. It’s my problem to deal with. I’m just going to have to learn to—”
“What is it that you think happened?” Deceptively soft, uncompromising.
“Okay.” Laura looked at him bleakly. “You and Francie came up here. It was snowing – she had trouble getting here because some parts of I-64 still weren’t clear. No one was around, and you—” No, she couldn’t tell him that Francie had detailed their lovemaking in front of the fireplace in Jefferson’s bedroom. Now that she had seen the room for herself, she wasn’t sure she remembered that correctly. They wouldn’t have had the necessary time or privacy. “You went upstairs to the dome room, and it was empty, and you – oh, for God’s sake, Richard, you know what happened.”
“No,” said Richard. “I don’t, because Francie and I did not go up to the dome room.”
That statement hung in the air. “I remember that pretty clearly.”
“I don’t care what you remember. Tourists aren’t allowed in the dome room. The only times I’ve ever been up there have been on research trips through UVA.” He settled back against the wall, and she was too miserable to enjoy the splendid picture he made. “Is that it?”
“You went down into the dependencies, and Francie said you pulled her into the wine cellar.”
“Which then – as now, as you’d have seen if you’d come down there with me – has a locked gate door.”
She couldn’t quell her uneasiness. Either Richard was a smoother liar than she had ever imagined, or her memory was badly off – but he was genuinely angry. She didn’t think he was lying.
“And then what?” said Richard. “Mad passion in the parking lot? I’ll stop you right now. I drove a Honda back then, and you girls had a Toyota. I couldn’t fit in the back of either with my height.”
“No.” She drew a breath. “Not there. Before. You walked down the mountain, and there’s a forest or a grove or something.”
“That’s right. You’ll see it in a few minutes.”
She stared down at the wooden floor. “You pulled her back into the trees, and—” She remembered Francie talking dreamily, her eyes closed in remembrance, the smile playing around her lips. She remembered methodically shredding a tissue into a snowstorm of specks as she listened. It was the first time she’d known men could do that to women; Peggy had left out this part of the birds-and-bees talk. “You had oral sex.”
She didn’t dare look up. And if he touched her – she was going to fly apart.
His voice sounded strangled. “Who was the lucky recipient?”
“Francie.” This had to be the single most humiliating moment of her life. “You did it to her.”
Dead silence. And then he started laughing.
Laura looked up, incredulous, as he collapsed back against the wall, and she drew back. She knew men had a different perspective about sex – how many times had Cam joked that women needed a reason, men just needed a place – but she had never seen a man laugh so hard about it.
Richard’s laughter ended in a coughing fit. He took a deep breath and sank into the chair opposite her, leaning back and stretching out his long legs. “I’ll make you a deal, my love,” and he swallowed another laugh. “I’ll bring you up here next February – when it is usually snowing, and the average temperature is thirty degrees, as you’d remember if you hadn’t been living in Texas all these years – and we’ll go out in the forest, and then let’s see how interested you are in sex, oral or otherwise.”
“Oh, my God.” Laura stared at him, and the world turned upside down. “It didn’t happen.”
“Of course it didn’t happen. I remember that day. It wasn’t only snowing, the road coming up the mountain had patches of ice. I damn near spun out of control a couple of times, but, oh no, Francie was determined that she was going to do what Diana refused to do, she was going to share my interest in Monticello, she was going to learn all about Palladian architecture. Then when we got up here, it was almost deserted – she got that right – because most people had the good sense not to drive up a mountain in that kind of weather.” He stopped, and shook his head. “We did walk down the mountain, true, and I won’t say that there wasn’t a kiss or two, but mostly she bitched about how cold she was.”
“Richard – she made this tape.” She had to work out the memory. Had she dreamed it all? “She came back that night, and she sat on her bed right across from me, and she told me everything. She was wearing the nightgown Lucy gave me for Christmas, I can see it now, and we were drinking lemon tea. She swiped one of Daddy’s tapes and taped over it. She described everything – I mean, some of it embarrassed me half to death, I didn’t even know men did that to women. And you’re telling me she made it all up?”
“Oh, those tapes!” Richard dismissed it out of hand, as if the tape was hardly worth remembering. “Francie made four or five tapes. I don’t recall that specific one, but she was always sending me stuff at the school – books, cookies, tapes, cards. I told her she had a promising future ahead of her, writing erotica.”
“Why – why did she make the tapes?” Laura asked in bewilderment.
“Because I liked them.” He shrugged. “They were fun, and Francie had a clever way with words. I’m a normal heterosexual male, Laura, even if I live a life of depressing celibacy. I like sex. I like reading about it. I like hearing about it, even if—” and he laughed again— “it’s in the realm of fantasy. Oh, my God, in the snow!”
She was stunned. She thought of all Francie’s confidences about him in the dark of night, Francie describing what he had said, what he had done, how he had touched her. For fourteen years, she’d brooded over Francie’s words, letting them poison her thoughts and feelings – and now he sat there, telling her that none of it was real.
What else did she believe that hadn’t really happened?
She said cautiously, “You – you and Francie did, you know, have sex, didn’t you?”
You are Meg’s father, aren’t you?
“Yes, as much as I wish we didn’t, we did,” Richard said, and his voice was rueful. “You know about New Year’s Eve, although I’m not sure I want to hear what she said about that. I’d been drinking, and I’m not at my best when I’ve had too much to drink. A handful of other times.” He looked at her straight, and she trusted his words. “For all the
trouble it caused – not an affair for the ages.”
A handful of other times. But Francie had said— “Richard,” Laura stopped to put together her thoughts, “you saw each other every weekend. You flew down to pick her up at that airfield – I know, because she’d drop me off at the bookstore, and then she’d take the car and leave it at the airfield while you flew off to Ash Marine.” She hated even mentioning the island. “I always had to wait at the mall after I was off work until she came to pick me up. Richard – that was practically every Saturday.”
Richard regarded her curiously. “Didn’t you know?”
“Know what?”
“I was teaching her to fly,” he said. “I’d gotten my instructor’s rating at Christmas. I had some idea about making extra money giving flying lessons, and she had asked me to teach her before – well, before anything ever started. I arranged for the insurance, and Francie sweet-talked your father into paying for the fuel. Sure, we went out to the island. It has that flat plain for landing, and it was the only place I knew where no one would see us.” He shrugged. “I wasn’t crazy about the idea at first, but she made an ideal student to practice on. She did what I told her to do.”
Laura stared at him in shock.
His eyes were speculative upon her. “You really didn’t know, did you? She thought it was more fun to spin all these great sex tales and let you believe that she was living the great romance.”
Laura shifted abruptly, hugging her knees to her chest, burying her face against her crossed arms. She felt numb. All these years, she’d believed a lie – and Francie had known, she had to have known, the effect of her words. Impossible that she hadn’t known, as she played make-believe, that every mention of Richard had driven a dagger straight into Laura’s heart.
What had she done to Francie to deserve that?
“Now that’s out of the way,” Richard said, “can we have a rational discussion about her?”
She lifted her head wearily. “Do we have to? I – I am tired of Francie.”
He nodded. “Yes, we do. She’s there. In her own way, she’s a greater barrier than Diana.”
Diana. At the moment, she scarcely remembered that Diana was actually his wife. She managed to nod, and waited for him to begin.
He was silent for a moment or so, marshaling his thoughts. Laura watched him, and it occurred to her that they were back on her terrace the morning before, a man and a woman meeting honestly to lay out their hearts. This was even more important, she sensed, their entire future lay here in this small garden pavilion. Their words here would determine what was to come.
“A couple of nights ago, I told you that I wanted Francie to stay in the past.” Richard leaned back and clasped his hands around one bent leg. “I know it bothers you when I say I don’t think about her, but I don’t. That’s the truth. Francie is part of my life, but she’s in the past. She reminds me of a painful time in my life, and – just as I’m sure you have painful times that you don’t like to think about – I don’t spend much time dwelling on my relationship with her.”
She nodded nervously.
“I don’t know,” he said, “if you’ve ever done something that you are so ashamed of that you would do anything to keep it a secret. That’s Francie to me, Laura. To me, she represents – well, a lot of things, but mostly, she represents the time when I discovered that I am not exactly the upright and honorable man I thought I was.”
Laura’s breath caught.
“All my life,” Richard continued evenly, “I had this image of myself. We all do, we all think we are much better than we really are. Few of us look in the mirror and see our inner flaws. No one ever says, ‘I’m weak’ or ‘I’m dishonest’ or ‘I can’t be trusted worth a damn.’ I never saw myself as a man who would cheat on the woman he had sworn to love and cherish his entire life.”
He leaned over towards her, and his gaze took hers and held it.
“Francie was only the second woman I’d touched in my life,” he said. “Up till that time, even before we were married, I was completely faithful to Diana. I don’t know if you know how unusual that was, you were pretty sheltered, but trust me, I was an anomaly among my peers. I never dated around, never went out behind her back. Diana was all I wanted, and I swear to you, Laura, it never once crossed my mind that I would not be a faithful husband to her. And then – well, I won’t go into specifics, but you’ve already guessed that things went badly wrong between us.”
She scarcely breathed, not waiting to miss even a second.
“Even then—” Richard shook his head. “I was convinced that everything was Diana’s fault, that I was blameless. After all, when I looked in the mirror, I saw a man of integrity and loyalty and steadfastness – I saw myself as everything my father was. God knows, he was the most uxorious of men, he was as deeply in love with my mother on the day he died as he was when they got married. I’ll admit too – I made life miserable for Diana, sitting on my moral high horse, looking down on her laziness and her addictions – and then one night I drank too much champagne, and I kissed Diana’s sister who looked so much like her, and I found out that I was not such a saint after all.”
He walked over to the open wall of the pavilion, his back to her. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from him.
“I might have excused that in myself,” he said. “I wasn’t so naïve as not to know that Francie was culpable too. But then Diana returned the next morning, and Francie made a comment that reminded me of all that had gone wrong, and I looked at my dear wife, and I remembered what a true deceitful bitch she could be, and I deliberately embarked on an affair with my nineteen-year-old sister-in-law.”
Laura whispered, “Eighteen.”
“What?” He looked over his shoulder at her.
“She was eighteen.”
“Oh, Christ.” Richard sounded appalled. “Well, at least she still wasn’t jailbait. And the next time you start wishing you’d been there instead of her, you need to remember that you were jailbait, and it would have been a criminal act for me to touch you.” He looked at her gravely. “God, this feels strange. I have never talked about this before.”
“Not even your father?” How isolated he must have felt, as isolated as she had felt about Ash Marine… something that you are so ashamed of… you would do anything to keep it a secret….
“No. Lucy guessed some of it that spring. You know how she is – I’d feel those X-ray eyes on me, and I knew she was trying to figure out what was going on. Francie and I were particularly careful when I was home for exactly that reason. I didn’t care, Laura. I knew I was doing something as dishonorable as it could be, and honest to God, I – did – not – care.”
She thought he had cared, very much.
“Besides – and this excuses nothing – I liked Francie. Oh, she was a world-class liar, and she never missed a chance to take a swipe at Diana, but I didn’t care. She was warm and funny, and she was always laughing. Diana and I lived in such an armed camp that it was a relief to be with someone who smiled, who put herself out to please me, who was glad to see me, for God’s sake. It was a relief to make love with a woman again, even if it violated every principle I held. When you live with a woman who wants nothing to do with you, you lose confidence in yourself as a man. Francie restored that, and for that, I will always be grateful to her.”
She swallowed hard and nodded, even though he didn’t see her. He was still staring into the distance.
“Finally, though,” Richard made a gesture, “it was time to cool off. We were moving back home, Francie was going off to college – I knew it was time to end it. So I met her to tell her we needed to stop, and somehow, I have never figured out how, Diana found out and tracked us down. And that was such a disaster – I had sweating dreams about it for a couple of years afterwards. I woke up then, believe me, I saw what a hash I had made of things, and the first thought that went through my mind was that I was going to lose my daughter.”
“Oh, no.”
&nb
sp; “Oh, yes.” He turned around. “I’m not the first man to have risked my child for a few afternoons with a pretty girl, but I can tell you I was the sorriest in a hurry. And then – then Dominic called a few days later and said that you and Francie were missing, and I knew I had driven her away, and I looked in the mirror and all I saw was a faithless bastard.”
She felt tears welling up in her eyes. Her heart ached for him. He’d been only twenty-three, after all, and it was easy to sit in judgment from the thirties and forget that he’d been a young man, with all the maturing and tempering of adult life still ahead of him.
“Here I was, finally out of grad school, finally ready to get started on the career I’d wanted all my life, but I had wrecked my personal life beyond repair. There was no hope for Diana and me – there hadn’t been for years, and it’s not all her fault. She doesn’t bear all of the blame. I didn’t know what to do, except go back home, and start working, and try to rebuild myself into the man I had hoped I was.” He fell quiet. “And the one thing I was determined was that no one would ever know. My father suspected, and Lucy outright accused me, and by that time I figured you had to know. Diana thought she had the whole picture. But the only two people who knew for sure were Francie and me, and I wanted to keep it that way.”
Laura thought of her ill-advised remark to Diana and Lucy.
“It’s an old joke about unfaithful men. Deny, deny, deny. I didn’t even do that. I just never spoke of it. And gradually – as time went on, I gained some perspective. Part of it was work; I’m damn good at what I do, and people knew it. I worked hard at being a good father, and you can’t feel like a complete failure when your little girl thinks you hung the moon. I reached out to Lucy, who took her time forgiving me, and I worked to get my father’s respect back.” He stopped and then said slowly, “I worked harder at relationships with other people in those years after than I had worked at anything in my life.”
All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Page 54
