“It’s not enough for him, is it?”
“No. At first he was silent. Then he was angry. He said terrible things, and I said things to him I never thought I would. I reminded him that when we married and decided we would lead separate lives at least half the year, it was HE who said it would be too difficult to be celibate half the year. It was HE who said that as long as we were careful to be discreet and avoid emotional entanglements, we could enjoy purely physical relationships. I reminded him that it was HE who has had a hundred times the affairs that I have had over the past decade and I have never thrown one in his face.
“I have tried, Bill, I have tried in every way I can think of, to heal the rift between us. I have been loving, I have given him space, left him alone to come to grips with what has happened. But things have only gotten worse.”
“How?”
“When we have been together he has always made great efforts to ensure we spend some time apart from his duties as a couple, and with Andre. In the months past, he has spent almost no time with me. He tells me his duties are more intense, but he doesn’t even make the effort to lie believably.
“He has not – he has not – touched me - but only a few times. Every other time, he has – I’m sorry – devoured me. I know he has women when he is not with me. But when we are back together again, it is like the first few months of our marriage. But this time-“
She stopped and I thought heard a sob.
“It’s as if he can’t stand to touch me. He has to force himself.”
“Has he –“ It was hard to say the next words because I had known and liked Philippe.
“Has he hurt you? Struck you?”
“No. But, Bill, there are times when he looks at me, when he approached me, and I feel the anger roll off him. In waves. I want to cringe away from him, and that is an emotion I have never felt around Philippe. He has always been my protector, my rock. And now-
“The worst of it is that Andre senses what is happening. He has not said anything, other to ask me several times when his father is not around if something has happened. If we are fighting. And I am sure that he has talked to his father when I am not there. I think that Philippe has been merciful. I don’t know what a young boy would think if his father told him that his mother had betrayed him, been with another man. But I think I’d sense it if Philippe had, and I don’t think he has.
“But even that – even that – is not the worst of it. There have been several times – several arguments – in which he has threatened me with the loss of Andre.”
“How?
He has said that he will free me to return to my American lover, and keep Andre so he will not be in my way. And when I have said I will never leave Andre, he has told me that the courts will never give a young boy to a gypsy cruise ship worker with no permanent home, one who has left her son behind for half his life to pursue her pleasures, when a prominent attorney and rising member of the French government has raised the boy and can provide him with a stable and safe home.
“Bill, I saw it in his eyes. He said it to hurt me. I could not believe he could hate me that greatly.”
“Like you, I find that hard to believe.”
“I did too. But – it is you, Bill. It is you that he hates.”
When I said nothing, she said, “I think it is because he thought of you as a friend.”
“And I considered him a friend as well. Of course, friends probably should not go to bed with friends’ wives.”
There was a long silence. Behind her I could hear the sounds of traffic and French voices raised in laughter and cursing.
“I am frightened, Bill. When I think that he might take Andre, I don’t know if I could stand that.”
“Is there anything I could do?”
“No. I don’t think so. I’m afraid to have you speak to him, in his present mood.”
“I won’t approach him, then. But I am here, Aline, if you should need anything, I’m here. I supposed the best thing would be just to give him time. I know that while I was hesitant about your revealing – what happened – I never thought he would react like this. I thought because – of the nature of your marriage – he would not…be as hurt as he obviously is. But like I said, that kind of hurt takes time to work through.”
There was another silence.
“It all seems like a terrible nightmare, Bill. I will never regret our meeting, but…”
Again that silence descended.
“Before I met you my life was alternating sadness and joy. Now it is sadness and terror. And it is all my fault.”
“NO. You did nothing wrong. You were living by the rules Philippe established and lived by. Philippe is the one who changed the rules of the game. And that is NOT your fault.”
“But, I had a life, Bill. And now I don’t. I can’t have you. I don’t have him. And I may lose Andre.”
“You won’t lose him, Aline. No matter what else happens, you won’t lose him.”
“How can you be so sure? This is not your country, or your system of laws.”
“Just keep fighting for your marriage. If Philippe loved you, there is a chance that you two can put the pieces back. But whatever happens, put out of your mind the fear that you will lose Andre. That will not happen.”
“I don’t know why, Bill, but when you say it, I believe you. Thank you. If you ever say a prayer any more, say one for me and Philippe, please.”
“I will.”
“Bon soir, ma cheri.”
“Goodnight, Aline.”
I sat back and looked out the window. It looked cold. The sun was shining, but there was a cold feel to it. Or maybe that was just a coldness settling in me. Of all the things I had worried about when I’d been with Aline on the Bonne Chance or with her here, our affair destroying her marriage wasn’t one of them. I had accepted too glibly her assurance that her marriage was ‘open’ and my having sex with her wouldn’t endanger her life in Paris.
If I’d entered into an affair with any woman in a ‘conventional’ marriage, I would have known how dangerous the game we played could wind up being. I’d known what it had done to my marriage. But I’d just blithely assumed the only danger might be a guilty conscience I’d have to carry around while Aline went back to her comfortable life.
But even in Paris, even in an ‘open marriage’, open wasn’t really all that open.
I tried to go back to work, But I couldn’t get her off my mind. I still thought about her, but I’d made my peace – or thought I had – with the fact that she was my past. I was enjoying Myra and maybe I’d someday begin to feel single again. But-
What if Philippe divorced her, or she had enough and divorced him. What if she were a free woman at the same time that I was a free man?
Yeah, what if?
Over the next two hours I talked to two members of the little task force I had looking for an unsolved murder that William Sutton might have committed the same week he killed his estranged wife and unborn son. They had come up with 10 possibles during the time period and in the area between Jacksonville and Ocala. There were seven more outside the geographic area we’d focused on. I had my doubts they could be the one we were looking for. We’d still keep looking for more, but I told them to focus and dig into the details of the 10 possibles.
And then Len Holt called and came up. He was handling the case of the 38-year-old Ponte Vedra wife who had faked her own kidnapping with her chauffer lover to extort a cool million from her 85-year-old husband. It was such a fucking cliché, such a pulp noir plot, that it was sometimes hard to take it seriously.
But it wasn’t a Lifetime Movie of the Week. She and her 34-year-old Rumanian lover had tried to steal a million dollars from an old man that trusted her, trusted both of them actually. Police and detectives and my office had spent time and money trying to rescue the little lost kidnapped wife while and she and the chauffer were fucking each other in hot tubs and enjoying the good life in Daytona Beach.
The case had wou
nd its way through the labyrinth of motions and depositions and dueling attorneys and it had seemed pretty cut and dried. Until Hopper called me and told me the latest twist. And now things had gotten confusing.
I looked at the clock on my desk thinking about the cheating wife, the cheating lover, the cuckolded old man, murder and Aline and Debbie and a lot of other things. I enjoyed looking at it every day, but I didn’t think about it often. It showed a couple minutes before 5 p.m. and the exodus from the courthouse. It was a small clock, the glass face showing antique roman numerals. It was only six inches across, set into the side of the beaten copper frame of an old sailing ship. The ship was nearly 18 inches long, the copper sails nearly a foot and a half high. The odd thing was, even standing still and solid, it gave me the impression of movement and I could imagine those sails gusting in a strong breeze on the open sea.
I had carried it with me for 20 years. I’d kept it at home for a few years, but after that I’d always kept it in my office. Debbie had only said something one time, and she’d never come out and told me her feelings about it, but it wasn’t hard to imagine.
If you looked carefully at the bottom left, you could see faintly inscribed in the metal, ‘Jenny’. Like the name which 20 years of stroking absentmindedly had reduced to a shadow, I had to think hard to remember the real Jennifer. A pretty, sweet girl from a small town north of Atlanta with that Georgia peach drawl. A good girl who had been raised by her grandmother and attended the Assembly of God religiously every Wednesday and Sunday.
We had never been intimate, a few kisses late at night when I was taking her back to the off campus house she shared with three roommates. I could never remember exactly how we had started hanging out. We just had. During the six months Debbie and I had been broken up during my senior year. The six months I never asked Debbie about because I never wanted to know. And she had never asked me questions, but she had to know Jenny and I had been close.
I met to have lunch with Jenny between classes the day after I’d met with Debbie at her parents’ home in Jacksonville and begged her to take me back, promised that the past was the past, that I would never doubt her faithfulness again. Promised her trust and as good a life as I could humanly give her if she would give me a second chance.
I told Jenny that Debbie and I were getting back together. We could still study together, maybe get together with friends at the Union, but it couldn’t be like it had been. Debbie and I were still too fragile. I wasn’t going to give her a chance to misunderstand the relationship between Jenny and I.
She had just smiled and said she was happy for me. Then she had to go to a class. She kissed me on the side of my cheek and walked out of my life. I hadn’t seen her for a few days and then someone said she had transferred to Georgia State in Atlanta.
A week after that a UPS package showed up at the small off campus apartment I’d moved into when Debbie and I became a couple. I’d kept it during the six months we had been split. I had to work my ass off to afford it and Debbie had helped out with the cost before our split and I wasn’t too proud to accept her help.
I opened the package. It had Jenny’s name on the outside. I opened it up and lifted the beaten copper ship out and if you can fall in love with an inanimate object, I fell in love.
As I lifted it up, I noticed a small card at the bottom.
“This is the ship of your dreams,” it read. “I hope it takes you wherever you wish to go. I wish you happiness, Bill.”
There was no signature.
Debbie saw it the moment she walked into the apartment. I never showed her the card but I told her it came from Jenny.
She didn’t say anything.
I held her in our apartment for the first time in six months and told her, “I’m keeping it.”
She kissed me and never said a word about it again in the next 18 years.
The phone buzzed and Cheryl came on.
“I was getting ready to leave, Mr. Maitland. But this call came through on line 2. It’s direct from Paris. Do you want to take it?”
“Yes,” and I punched the button. I expected to hear Aline, but instead, Philippe said, “Still hard at work, I see, Bill. How many marriages have you destroyed today?”
I let the silence grow for a minute.
“I’m sorry for the way things have worked out, Philippe. I never wanted this. I hope you know me well enough to know that I didn’t do this deliberately.”
“I don’t know you at all, Bill. I thought I did, but we only spent – less than a week together. I thought you were a decent man, a fellow prosecutor, a happily married family man and father. I never imagined what you really were.
“But just out of curiosity, how did you seduce my wife and fuck her on the Bonne Chance and then spend two weeks at your home fucking her there before sending her well used ass back to me in Paris without doing it deliberately?”
“It’s not the way you make it sound, Philippe.”
“How would you describe it then, my good friend, Bill?”
“She probably told you, but I’ll tell you again. I had no idea she was your wife. When I met her I was reeling from the loss of my wife, Debbie. I was barely holding my life together. My heart, my ego, my pride was in shreds. My boss seriously thought I might harm myself, which is why he asked the captain of the Bonne Chance to give me a baby sitter.
“Aline was kind, and for the first time in months I found myself interested in another woman, thinking about being with another woman. But it was only a fantasy. Before I knew she was yours, I never really expected anything to happen. What happened – happened and we were both…swept away.”
“Just swept away?”
“It happens, Philippe. I already knew you’d been with other women. You didn’t make any secret of it when I was there with you. And she told me you accepted her seeing other men when she was away from you on the Bonne Chance. She said the two of you had agreed on an open marriage. That’s why I still don’t understand why you’re so angry.”
“You really don’t understand?”
“No. We had sex. She’s had sex with other men since you’ve been married. And she went back to you and told you the truth about what had happened. What made her time with me so terrible?”
There was another long silence.
“What is a marriage, Bill?”
I thought for a moment.
“An agreement – a promise - between two people to love each other and stay with each other in sickness and in health, until death.”
“You do understand. When you strip everything else away, that is marriage. A promise to love each other, to stay with each other, in sickness and health. It doesn’t say, a promise to have sex only with each other, although that’s what many people assume. It’s a promise to love each other, and only each other.
“You are right. I have had sex with a lot of women since I made that promise to Aline. And I enjoyed it, but I never loved another woman. I never made promises I couldn’t keep to another woman. No one else ever took her place in my heart.
“But Aline – can’t say that.”
“I don’t understand, Philippe.”
“Then you are either lying, or you are a fool. I sensed it when I talked to her in St. Augustine and I knew it when she stood before me. She says she loves me. And she may. But she loves you as well.”
“She may have feelings for me-“
“She loves you. She can’t even deny it when she is with me. And she will not take off that fucking Fleur-de-Lis, even when I asked her. It means more to her than our marriage, or even our son.”
“She might be confused, Philippe, but she loves you. Not me. She left me when I wished with everything in me for her to stay with me. Even if it meant betraying your friendship, I was praying she would choose to stay with me. But she left me to go back to you – and Andre.”
“Maybe she came back for Andre, but not for me. And it doesn’t matter whether she still loves me. I will not share my wife with another man.
Her body, but not her heart and soul and loyalty. We have no marriage any longer, since you destroyed it.”
“She still wants you.”
“And you know this how? Oh, that’s right, she slunk away from our home to find a phone to make a private call – to you. Sad that people don’t realize how easy it is to tape conversations at long distance. I know exactly what she said and what you said. Amazing how easily you promise that which you cannot deliver.”
“Philippe-“
“Andre is MY son. I have raised him. And I will not let that cheating bitch take him from me to the U.S. to be with you.”
“You know she wouldn’t do that. But you can’t be serious about trying to take him away from her completely. She’s his mother.”
“If I decide to remove her from his life, I will do so.”
“You can’t do that to someone who’s a good mother.”
“And what exactly makes a good mother, Bill? Leaving her son alone for six months a year so she can sail the seven seas and screw whatever man she takes a fancy to? In any event, she and you will have no say in the matter.”
“You’re a powerful man, Philippe, but don’t do this.”
“And again, who will stop me? A cruise ship social director? A small time American local prosecutor with delusions of grandeur based on a dramatic news story? The Angel of Death? You are a joke to anyone in a serious position of power.”
“Would I be a joke to the family of Gerard Belanger?”
“You cannot be serious. You would-“
“Everyone has secrets, Philippe. Gerard was an animal and scum. But he was also a member of a wealthy and powerful family with ties to industry and politics. He deserved killing, but does anyone in the Belanger family KNOW you are the man who ordered his death for his part in the Muslim white slavery ring operating out of Paris?”
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