The Wild Zone

by Joy Fielding

  “This was my doing,” Suzy insisted.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “I goad him.”

  “You goad him,” Will repeated incredulously.

  “I should never have gone to the Wild Zone. I knew how risky it was.”

  “What do you mean ‘risky’?”

  “Bars are strictly off-limits when Dave’s away.”

  “What?”

  “Normally I go with Dave when he has to attend a conference out of town,” she explained, talking more to herself now than to Will, as if trying to understand what had happened. “But this time he said he was going to be so busy all week with meetings and lectures—he’s a doctor—and there was no point in my being cooped up in a hotel room all week by myself, that I might as well stay home, get a few things looked after around the house. And I’m usually so bored at those medical conventions. I was really looking forward to having time to myself, going for a walk on the beach, going into some of those cute little shops along the ocean. I never should have gone into the Wild Zone. For sure, I never should have gone back more than once. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I thought Dave wouldn’t find out. He wasn’t supposed to be back until Saturday. But he left right after his last meeting on Friday night, drove all the way from Tampa without stopping, just to be with me. Only I wasn’t there.”

  “You were with me,” Will stated, feeling sick to his stomach. When he’d left her, he’d all but floated home. He’d been asleep on this very sofa, dreaming of long, soft, tender kisses while she was being beaten to a bloody pulp.

  “It was the most fun I’ve had in I don’t know how long.”

  “I don’t understand. Why do you stay with him? You don’t have kids. Do you?” Will asked sheepishly, suddenly realizing how little he actually knew about her.

  She smiled. The smile accentuated the small scratch at the corner of her upper lip, a scratch he hadn’t even noticed before. “No, I don’t have any children. I also don’t have a choice.”

  “Of course you have a choice,” Will argued. “You can leave him, you can report him to the police, you can—”

  “I can’t,” she said simply.

  “Why not?”

  “He’ll kill me,” she said, simpler still.

  “No, he won’t. He’s just a bully, a—”

  “He’ll kill me,” she said again. “Please. I can’t stay much longer. Can we please talk about something else?”

  “You want to talk about something else?” Will asked helplessly, his head spinning.

  “What do you think of Miami?” she asked brightly, as if this was the most natural of questions.

  “What?”

  “Please, Will. Can we just pretend to be a normal couple? Boy meets girl. That kind of thing. For a few minutes, before I have to go?”

  Tears filled her eyes, and Will felt his own eyes moistening. He looked away. Why do things always have to be so complicated? he was thinking. Maybe Kristin and Jeff had the right idea after all. Keep things as simple as possible. No expectations, no recriminations. “I think Miami’s great,” he said. “A little hot, but . . .”

  “It’s Florida,” she said, completing the thought, with a shy chuckle. “I guess it’s a lot different than New Jersey.”

  “Actually I’m from Buffalo. I just went to school in New Jersey.”

  “I’ve never been to either.”

  “Buffalo’s okay,” he said, continuing the pretense. “I mean, I know it’s popular to badmouth the city, but I always liked it there. It was a pretty cool place to grow up.”

  “You had a happy childhood,” she stated more than asked.

  “You didn’t?”

  “We were always moving, so I never really settled in anywhere. It was hard to make friends. I was always the new girl. Just when I’d start to get comfortable, we’d take off again.” She raised her glass of water to her lips, then returned it to her lap without taking a sip. “So, what did you want to be when you were a little boy?” she asked, suddenly shifting gears. “Don’t tell me you wanted to be a philosopher.”

  He laughed. “No. I wanted to be a fireman. Don’t all little boys want to be firemen when they grow up?”

  “I don’t know. Do they?”

  “I did. Jeff did,” Will added, remembering Jeff pleading for a fireman’s costume one Halloween, a request that was denied.

  “And you wanted to be Jeff,” Suzy said.

  “I guess I did.” Still do, he thought. “What about you?”

  “I never wanted to be Jeff.”

  Will smiled. “What did you want to be?”

  “When I was little, I wanted to be a ballerina.”

  “Of course.”

  “When I was a little older, I changed my mind, decided I was going to be a fashion designer.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  My father’s fist, Suzy thought. “No talent,” she said out loud.

  “When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a rock star,” Will confessed.

  “Singer or lead guitar?”

  “Drummer.”

  Suzy laughed. “Get out.”

  “Seriously. I was very gung-ho, as I was about everything in those days. Very, very intense. I actually talked my parents into buying me this incredibly expensive set of drums, and I used to bang on those damn things morning, noon, and night, drive everybody crazy . . .”

  “And?”

  “And then one day someone took my drumsticks and punched holes through the tops of all my drums. They were completely ruined.”

  “Jeff?”

  “No,” Will said. “Although that’s what everyone thought. But it wasn’t Jeff.”

  “Who was it?”

  Will took a deep breath, released it slowly. It scraped painfully along the side of his windpipe. “It was me,” he admitted.

  “You ruined your own drum set?”

  “I couldn’t stand it anymore. Talk about having no talent!” He laughed. “And I was sick of taking lessons, sick of practicing, sick of never getting any better, of pretending to enjoy it. But my parents had spent all this money, right? I couldn’t just give it up. And then one afternoon, I come home from school, my parents are out, and there’s Jeff sitting in my bedroom, beating on my drums. And he was great. Perfect. It was effortless for him. Just like everything was. And I don’t know. I just snapped. I yelled at him to get out of my room, not to touch my things ever again, standard little-brother shit, and next thing you know, I’m slashing at those drums like some monster in a horror flick. Of course, my parents blamed Jeff. And I was too much of a chickenshit to tell them otherwise.”

  “Jeff never said anything?”

  “What for? He knew they’d never believe him.”

  “So you just let him take the fall?”

  Will hung his head. He was suddenly twelve years old again, crying in the privacy of his room. Why had he told her that story? He’d never confessed his shame to anyone before. “They never gave him anything, you know. Not like me. ‘The Chosen One,’ Jeff used to call me. And he was right. I was my parents’ golden boy. My mother’s pride and joy. Whatever I wanted, she made sure I got. Drum sets, basketballs, private schools, money for Princeton.” He rubbed his forehead. “Jeff was like Cinderella, the kid nobody wanted. He had to beg for every scrap. And he had too much pride for that. He wasn’t going to put up with it any longer than he had to.”

  “What happened?”

  “He took off for Miami, dropped out of college after a couple of semesters, joined the army, became a personal trainer. He keeps in touch with his sister, Ellie,” Will explained, answering the question on Suzy’s face. “She’s how I knew where to find him.”

  “Is that why you came here? To make amends?”

  “I’m not sure why I came.”

  “Have you talked to Jeff about this?”

  “What’s there to say he doesn’t already know?”

  “That you’re sorry,” Suzy said.

  “I used
to worship him, you know?” Will continued, as if a valve had been turned on in his memory and he was powerless to turn it off. “He was like this god to me. He was everything I wanted to be. Everything I wasn’t. Handsome, charismatic, athletic, talented. The girls couldn’t keep their hands off him. He’d cock his little finger and they’d come running. Me too. I used to run after him when I was little, which drove him absolutely crazy. He’d yell at me to get lost, call me a dork and a loser, and I’d just bask in all that fury. I finally had his attention. As much as he hated me, that’s how much I loved him. Except I hated him, too, hated him for being everything I knew I could never be, hated him for not loving me back. Shit,” Will said, feeling his eyes fill with unexpected tears.

  Suzy reached for his hand. “I think you should tell him.”

  Her touch sent shivers up his arm. “I think you should leave your husband.”

  She smiled. Again, the corners of her lips turned down instead of up.

  Smile, sucker, he heard her say as strains of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” began emanating from deep inside her purse.

  “Oh, God. That’s Dave.” She quickly extricated her cell phone from her canvas bag. “I have to take this.”

  “Do you want me to wait in the kitchen?”

  She shook her head, lowered the phone to her lap. “I want you to kiss me,” she said. “Like you did the other night.”

  In the next second she was in his arms, his lips brushing tenderly against hers, afraid to apply any pressure to her bruised mouth.

  “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I won’t break.”

  Will kissed her again, this time harder, deeper. Once again, the opening bars of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” pushed their way between them.

  Reluctantly, Suzy pulled out of Will’s arms, although he continued to hold on tight. She smiled her sad smile and flipped open the phone. “Hi,” she said.

  “Where are you?” Will heard Dave demand. “What took you so long to answer your cell?”

  “I’m just heading into Publix,” Suzy lied. “It took me a minute to find the phone.”

  “You’re sure that’s where you are?”

  Suzy’s eyes shot to the window, as if Dave might be standing there, staring inside. Will jumped to his feet, walked to the door, opened it, took several steps into the outside corridor, and returned shaking his head, assuring her no one was there.

  “Of course I’m sure. I was thinking of making some chicken with Cumberland sauce for dinner, and we didn’t have any red currant jelly, so I—”

  “I might be a little late coming home today,” he interrupted.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “Have dinner ready for seven o’clock.”

  The phone went dead in her hands.

  Suzy returned the phone to her purse. She sat very still for several seconds, her head down, her breath seemingly frozen in her lungs. When she looked up again, her eyes were clear, hinting at defiance. She looked at Will. “I have until seven o’clock,” she said.

  THIRTEEN

  “PLEASE, TOM,” LAINEY WAS saying, her hands in front of her chest as if she was trying to keep him at bay. “Don’t make a scene.”

  “Who’s making a scene?” Tom asked, eyes sweeping the back of the salon as if there might be someone else present who was creating a disturbance. He glanced at the young man, whose hands were still full of lather. His black eyes were open so wide, they were threatening to overtake his forehead. “You must be Donatello. I’m Tom, Lainey’s husband.” He extended his hand.

  The young man shook it warily, said nothing.

  “This is Carlos,” Lainey explained. “He does shampoos. He doesn’t speak much English.”

  “In that case, vamanos, Carlos,” Tom said dismissively.

  Carlos looked to Lainey. “It’s okay,” she told him, nodding.

  “What—I need his permission to talk to my wife?”

  “What do you want, Tom?” Lainey asked, her voice low and radiating disdain, as Carlos disappeared around the curved wall to the front of the salon.

  Her dark eyes were losing some of their fear, Tom realized, his fists clenching with disappointment. Who the hell did she think she was? He noted the wet hair plastered against her scalp like a bathing cap, accentuating the width of her nose. She was hardly a beauty, he thought, watching her push the hair away from her face and swipe at the soapy water running down her cheeks with the palm of her hand, as if aware of his silent assessment. What gave her the right, the nerve, to be acting so high and mighty, to think she was so much better than he was? “You know what I want,” he said.

  “No, I don’t. I never have.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I don’t know what you want, and I’m tired of trying to figure it out.”

  “You’re tired of trying to figure what out?”

  “What you want,” Lainey snapped, obviously louder than she’d intended, her voice ricocheting off the walls and echoing throughout the shop. She lowered her chin, stared down at the narrow walnut planks of the floor. “Look, let’s not do this. I’m too tired to keep going around in circles.”

  “You’re saying you’re tired of being married?”

  “I’m tired of your attitude.”

  “What’s my attitude?” Tom demanded.

  “You use our home like it’s a hotel, somewhere you can visit whenever you don’t have somewhere better to go or something better to do. You have no respect for my time or my feelings. You don’t give a damn about what I want.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “It’s not bullshit.”

  “I’m telling you it’s bullshit,” Tom said angrily.

  “Okay. Call it whatever you want. I’m sick and tired of it.”

  “So . . . what? You just leave?”

  “I didn’t just leave.”

  “I come home the other night, you’re not there, the kids aren’t there. What would you call it?”

  “You’re missing the point.”

  “What is the fucking point?”

  “Please, Tom, can you keep your voice down?” Lainey looked anxiously toward the front of the salon. “Not everyone has to know our business.”

  “Just the lawyers,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I know you’ve been talking to a lawyer, Lainey.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Tom noted the fear was back in her eyes. He couldn’t help but smile.

  “Have you been following me?” she asked.

  “You think I’m going to just let you take my kids away from me?”

  “Nobody’s trying to take your kids away from you. Once things settle down, once you’ve moved into your own apartment—”

  “My own apartment? What the hell are you talking about? I have a house. I’m not moving anywhere.”

  “—and a settlement has been worked out,” she continued as if he hadn’t spoken, “you’ll be able to see the kids.”

  “I just told you I’m not going anywhere.”

  “You don’t have a choice, Tom. You signed away your legal rights when my parents agreed to take on our mortgage.”

  Tom shook his head. “I didn’t know what I was signing.”

  “Then you might want to consult a lawyer of your own.”

  “Oh, I might want to consult a lawyer of my own,” he mimicked. “Where am I supposed to get the money for that? Tell me that, bitch, since you seem to have an answer for everything.”

  “Okay, Tom. That’s enough. I think you should leave.”

  “Oh, you do, do you?”

  “It’s obvious we aren’t going to settle anything here.”

  “You think you’re entitled to a settlement?” he demanded, deliberately misinterpreting her remarks. “You think I’m gonna just hand you money for kicking me out of my own house?”

  “I’m not asking for alimony,” Lainey said, a slight tremor rippling through her words.

  “Well, aren�
��t you the generous one,” Tom sneered.

  “Only child support.”

  “Child support?” What the hell was she talking about? He barely made enough money to cover his own damn expenses. “With what?”

  “A portion of your earnings. The courts will decide what’s fair.”

  “None of this is fair, and you know it. I don’t care what the courts decide. You’re not getting a goddamn dime.”

  “It’s not for me, Tom. It’s for your children, who you claim to love.”

  “You’re saying I don’t?”

  “I’m saying they have certain needs—”

  “I’ll tell you what they need. They need their father,” he shouted.

  “Maybe you should have thought of that before.”

  A man peeked his way around the curved wall. His black hair was shaped into a high pompadour, and he was wearing a white T-shirt tucked inside tight black leather pants. “Is everything all right back here?” he asked.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m Donatello. This is my salon,” the man said politely. Then less politely, “Who the fuck are you ?”

  “I’m the lady’s husband. We’d appreciate a little privacy.”

  “Then perhaps you might consider lowering your voice.”

  “Sorry about that, Donny boy,” Tom said. “We’ll try to keep it down.”

  “I don’t think your wife wants to talk to you anymore,” Donatello said, looking to Lainey for confirmation.

  She nodded.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave the premises,” Donatello said.

  “And I’m afraid I’m going to have to knock you on your fat little ass.”

  With that, Donatello spun around on the heels of his black leather boots and returned to the front of the shop.

  “Stupid faggot,” Tom muttered, turning back to Lainey, watching fresh resolve harden in her eyes.

  “I want you to leave,” she said.

  “And I want you to come home.”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “Look. I’m sorry. Okay?” Tom said, hating the whine in his voice. “I didn’t mean to create a scene. It’s just that you have no idea how frustrating this whole thing is for me.”

  “Trust me. I understand exactly how frustrating it is.”