by Joy Fielding
“Lynn Schuster?” the man on the other side had asked.
It wasn’t that peculiar, she told herself now, leading him back into her living room, that she should feel such a strong physical attraction for this man. She and Suzette (the name stuck in her throat) obviously shared the same taste in men. Was Marc Cameron a lawyer as well?
“Are you a lawyer?” she asked, resuming her position on the sofa, thinking that by being the one to ask the questions, she retained at least a semblance of control.
Marc Cameron walked to the large front window of the comfortable, predominantly green living room and stared out into the starless night. “You can almost hear the ocean,” he said, more to himself than to her, then: “No, I’m a writer.”
“Really? What do you write?” She bit down on her lower lip. She had sounded too curious, too interested. Now he would go into a long explanation of the sort of things he wrote and she would be powerless to stop him.
“Books,” he said simply, then: “Don’t ask me their titles because you won’t have read them and my ego’s at a low enough ebb as it is.” He tried to smile but quickly abandoned the attempt. “I also write the occasional short story for various artsy New York magazines, and lots of silly articles for local publications, profiles of visiting celebrities, that sort of thing. Are you really interested?”
“Well, I …” She realized she was, but didn’t want to say so.
“I understand you’re a social worker.”
Lynn nodded. “For twelve years.”
“Do you enjoy it?”
“What’s not to enjoy? Poverty, violence, neglect, abuse. I’ve got it all.”
“I would think that it might get depressing as a steady diet.”
“Well, to be honest”—why was she being honest?—“I’d been thinking about making a switch before all this happened. Now, well … I guess one major change at a time is enough.” She cleared her throat although she didn’t have to, surprised to hear herself continue. “The trick is not to allow yourself to get emotionally involved. You have to divorce yourself … Sorry, that was a rather unfortunate choice of words.”
“This picture was taken a few years ago,” Marc Cameron remarked, changing the subject, as he lifted the small, silver-framed photograph of Lynn’s once happy family into his large hands.
“Yes, it was. Three, to be exact. Have I aged so noticeably?” Why had she asked that?
“Not you,” he said, returning the picture to its place on the windowsill. “Gary.” He pronounced the word carefully, giving it an exaggerated fullness that made it sound vaguely obscene.
“Oh yes,” she said, picking at the already chipped white polish of her nails. “I’d forgotten that you’ve met.”
“Met? Why, I introduced them. ‘Gary Schuster, I’d like you to meet my wife, Suzette. Suzette, I’d like you to meet Gary Schuster. He’s the lawyer who’ll be finalizing the deal on our new house.’” He laughed. “A writer’s supposed to appreciate irony.” He took a long sip of his beer, then looked back out the window. “It’s nice to live so close to the ocean,” he added incongruously.
“I love to walk along the beach,” she confided, finding this a safer topic, momentarily relaxing her guard. “It helps me keep things in perspective.”
“Just how do you keep this in perspective?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Well, your husband comes home from the office one day and tells you that he’s leaving you for another woman. How do you deal with that?”
“Privately,” she said, her defenses back on full alert.
He smiled, the creases around his blue eyes deepening. “Sorry. A writer’s natural curiosity.”
“Sounded more like the curiosity of a spurned husband,” Lynn said, then immediately wished she hadn’t. What was the point in being cruel? The man had obviously been hurt enough. His question wasn’t unnatural or even unexpected. But how could she tell him that even now, almost six full months after her husband had announced that he was leaving her for another woman, had, in fact, packed his bags and his law books—she had known he was serious when he packed his law books—and moved out, the whole thing had a distinct air of unreality? When he told her, straight out, “I’ve fallen in love with someone else; I’m leaving you,” she had experienced the peculiarly insular sensation that none of it was really happening, that she had fallen asleep while reading, comfortably curled up on the living-room sofa, and that this was merely an unpleasant dream. It was only when she spoke, and she had spoken only because he was obviously expecting her to, that she realized she was functioning in all three dimensions, and that her husband of fourteen years, father of her two young children, was actually planning to leave her.
“You’re not serious,” she had said at the time, although it was perfectly obvious that he was. He had that hangdog look he always got when he thought he was saying something important, and his normally sweet mouth was twitching expectantly, as if he had been formulating his rebuttal even before she spoke.
“I am,” he told her slowly, “very serious. You know that we haven’t been really happy together in some time …”
“What are you talking about?” she broke in, aware that he hated to be interrupted. “I didn’t know that we haven’t been happy. I’ve been happy. What are you talking about?”
It was at this point, as he began his painstaking explanation, that she had begun feeling that this was not happening to her, but to someone else. It was as though she were behind her desk at the Delray Department of Social Services, listening to someone else relate this story secondhand. She saw herself sitting where she always sat when sad stories were being related, on the side of the desk that was free of such woes, the professional side, the safe side, where she could be moved, sometimes to tears (especially in the early years), but never actually touched, and certainly never bruised. She regularly gave ear to stories of severed households, of marriages that had been ripped apart in a flurry of fists, of neglected and beaten children, of emotional blackmail, of souls lost and only occasionally found. It was part of her job to listen, to sympathize, to analyze, to find solutions if possible. And when she was through listening and finding possible solutions, she would write up her reports, trying to force some sense into the madness she had heard. Pain was part of her job as a social worker in the Department of Social Services in Delray Beach, Florida, but it was not part of her life.
And so it was only after her husband of fourteen years had packed his bags and his law books and moved out that the bitter truth began to sink in, and she realized that, like thousands of other women across the country, she had been unceremoniously dumped for another woman. And now that woman’s husband was standing in her living room. Why? He still hadn’t told her.
“Could we get to the point of your visit, Mr. Cameron?” Lynn heard the impatience in her voice and realized from the way his shoulders slumped that Marc Cameron had heard it too. “Is there one?”
“I’m not sure,” he admitted, dropping his large frame back into the green-and-white-striped chair, for which he suddenly seemed too big. “I thought there was when I phoned.” He paused, his smile slowly spreading across his face. “My intentions were good. At least I thought they were.”
“You said there were things I should know.”
He shrugged. “There are things I could tell you, things that might help you with the settlement you’re trying to work out with Gary, things, I don’t know, just things. But I realized as soon as I walked through the door that none of them would be the truth of why I’m really here.” He paused, a flair for the dramatic in the pacing of his words. “The truth is that I was just curious. That word again. The spurned husband was curious,” he clarified, “to see what you looked like. You’re prettier than she is, you know.”
“Am I supposed to say something?” Lynn asked after a long pause during which she desperately tried to think of a witty response.
“I guess I was hoping you’d be as angry
as I am, that you’d want to tell me all about it. All the sordid little details—when you found out, what exactly Gary said to you, what you said, how you felt, if Gary told you anything about Suzette, if he said anything about me. If he said that she said anything about me. If I was a lousy husband, a lousy father, God forbid, the worst cut of all—a lousy lover. Details, details. Grist for the writer’s mill.”
“I’m not a big talker,” she told him truthfully, not wishing to find herself dissected in the pages of his next book. “I am a good listener, however,” she surprised herself by continuing. “If you’d like to talk about it …”
“The truth is,” he said, standing up abruptly, his words gaining speed and conviction, “that I would like to talk about it. The truth is that I’d like nothing better than to sit and compare notes with you, match you juicy tidbit for juicy tidbit until we were both too bored to care anymore, and then I’d like to take you to some motel, preferably the same motel they went to the first time, definitely the same motel they went to, preferably the same room with the same goddamn bed, and then I’d like to …” He stopped abruptly. “Maybe my intentions weren’t so good, after all.”
There was a long pause during which nobody seemed to breathe.
“That was quite a speech,” Lynn said after several moments, trying not to sound shocked or excited, though, in fact, she was both.
“Take that one for a walk on the beach.” He finished the last of his beer and deposited the glass roughly on the rattan coffee table between them. “Tell me, social worker, how you put that proposition in its proper perspective.”
“You said it yourself—you’re a very angry man,” she told him, not sure what else to say and feeling shamefully flushed from the heat of his words, hoping her face didn’t betray the disturbing emotions he had aroused. She felt seized by the conflicting desires to either order this man out of her house or jump into his arms.
“And you’re not angry?” he asked as she looked away. “Oh, I forgot. You deal with things privately.” He lifted his hands helplessly into the air. “Look, I’m sorry if what I said offended you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“No, I’m not. You’re right. It’s probably exactly what I came over here to say.”
“Feel any better?”
“That depends on the answer.”
She couldn’t help but smile. “The answer is no.”
“I still feel better.”
“Good, then you can go now.”
He nodded, though he didn’t move. “I’m feeling a bit stupid at the moment …”
“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t feel so great myself.” She stood up, walking past him to the front door, opening it to the summer night and coming up against an immediate wall of heat. “It’s been a rare pleasure meeting you, Mr. Cameron. That’s a little further irony for you to appreciate,” she couldn’t help adding.
“I’d like to see you again,” he said. He was standing in the middle of her doorway, preventing her from closing the front door. Lynn felt the warmth of the summer night on her face, the coolness of the air conditioning on her back. “Look, I don’t always behave like such a cretin,” he was saying. “And I sensed that when I first came in here, well, I thought that I sensed a few vibrations. Maybe I was wrong. But the truth is that I like you and that I’d like to see you again. I think that we have a lot in common, aside from the obvious. And”—he hesitated— “maybe I would like to talk to you. I’m not coping as well as you seem to be. I guess I don’t have the ‘proper perspective’ on things as yet.” She smiled. “Maybe the next time you go for one of your walks along the beach, I could go with you.”
“I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”
“I think I’ll call you again anyway.”
Lynn shrugged and kept her face resolutely blank as he backed out of her doorway and walked slowly down the front path to where his car was parked on the street. She watched him climb into the compact car, but she closed the front door before he could look back and see her watching. Hearing him drive off, she marched back into her living room, and was surprised to find it all in one piece. She felt as if a hurricane had just swept through. Her hands shaking, she retrieved the empty beer glass from the coffee table and brought it into the kitchen, where she quickly washed it out and returned it to its shelf in the cupboard, all traces of Marc Cameron suddenly gone. She then took a deep breath, and then another, and finally, checking the clock on her microwave oven to make sure the hour wasn’t too late, picked up the phone and put in another call to her attorney.
TWO
There were three messages waiting for Renee Bower when she and her husband, Philip, returned home at just past one in the morning. One was from her sister, Kathryn, in New York, and two were from a client, Lynn Schuster, whose husband had recently left her and who was being offered a fairly generous settlement to end the long-standing marriage.
“I wonder what that’s all about,” Renee said, sitting at the side of the king-size bed and pulling off the silver shoes which had been pinching her toes all evening. Were her feet getting bigger too? Could toes put on weight?
“You know what it’s about,” her husband told her from somewhere on the other side of the all-white room. “She just needs somebody to talk to.”
“I don’t mean my sister. I mean Lynn Schuster. I thought we had things pretty much wrapped up. I wonder why she’s calling me at home.”
“Whatever it is will have to wait until morning. Come to bed,” he urged, already undressed and under the covers.
“I don’t understand how you can be in bed so fast,” Renee marveled, walking into their large, carefully organized closet and pulling off her black sweater and pants, leaving them on the floor where they fell. She threw a long nightgown over her head and quickly moved across the thick white carpet toward their en suite white-marble bathroom.
“I don’t spend twenty minutes on the phone at one in the morning checking my answering machine for messages,” he reminded her gently.
“Neither do I.” Renee stared at her reflection in the harsh light of the bathroom mirror, thinking her complexion looked sallow even under all her makeup. “Don’t blame me because your friend decided to throw his wife a surprise party in the middle of the week.” She put a large blob of cold cream on each cheek and one on the tip of her short, upturned nose.
“He’s not your friend too?”
“I don’t have any friends,” she joked, then thought this was probably true. All her friends were really his friends, and hers only through osmosis. She had inherited them when she’d married Philip six years ago. All her old friends—some of them friends from childhood—had somehow disappeared, lost to conflicting schedules and only so much time. She rarely thought about them anymore. They belonged to another era, to a world before Philip.
“Will you hurry up and come to bed,” he called from the next room, his voice sexy despite his stated fatigue.
Did he want to make love? she wondered, wishing there was a way to speed up her nightly routine, knowing there was not. She needed all the help she could get. She couldn’t afford to rush these things. With deliberate slowness, Renee began massaging the cold cream into her skin, taking care not to rub too hard in the area around her eyes, wishing she were naturally more attractive, if not for herself, then for Philip. Though she was only thirty-four, she had noticed at the party tonight that the lines around her eyes seemed more pronounced than those of most of the other women present, including the birthday girl, who was a surprised forty and not very happy about it. Renee pulled a tissue from its marble case and gently began removing the thick cream from her face in a series of soft, steady strokes, studying her pores through tired brown eyes. “Why couldn’t I have green eyes like Kathryn?” she asked herself softly, thinking that her sister’s voice on her answering tape had sounded even more desperate than usual, desperation being the norm since her husband’s sudden death from a heart attack three months before
. Still, though the number of phone calls had increased, Kathryn refused to leave New York, even for a short visit.
Renee studied her image in the mirror, trying to find traces of her sister’s face in her own. But there were none. Kathryn was the pretty one in the family, Renee reflected again, carefully wiping away the mountain of mascara she had painstakingly applied earlier in the evening. She might have inherited their father’s brains, but as their father himself had often pointed out, Kathryn had been the lucky recipient of their mother’s deep green eyes and fine, high cheekbones. Whatever cheekbones Renee had once possessed, she thought now, angrily slapping at them with night cream, had long since disappeared into what was at least ten too many pounds, pounds she didn’t need but had been carrying around for over a year now, probably closer to two, if she was being honest. Probably closer to fifteen pounds, if she was being really honest. She glanced over at the scale—the enemy—she hadn’t stepped on in weeks, thinking that, at only five feet three inches, it wasn’t her weight that was the problem, but her height.
“You’re doing it again,” she told herself angrily, amazed that a woman in her position, with everything she had going for her, with everything she had achieved at a relatively youthful age, with all her supposed smarts, was just another obsessive throwback to the days before liberation when it came to her looks and her weight. She was a successful lawyer, she told herself, and a very good one. Her clients all thought her capable and shrewd, even tough. It didn’t seem to matter to them that she was a few pounds overweight. What difference did it make how much she weighed? She began to brush her teeth vigorously. When she was with Philip, nobody ever noticed her anyway. How many times had she heard, even tonight, even among their so-called friends, “You’re so lucky. He’s so gorgeous. How’d you ever manage to land him?” She had stopped being surprised by the insensitivity of such remarks. She’d gotten used to them after almost six years of marriage to a man who was not only handsome, successful, and distinguished-looking but perpetually boyish as well, an interesting combination at age forty-six.