Carried Away Page 10

  “I told him what he meant to me and how desperately I wished what I said hadn’t been true. I promised him everything forever. I swore that no matter what, whether he would have me or not, I would never leave him. He let me lead him to bed and make love to him. Maybe I was wrong to take advantage, but I’m glad I did. In the morning, he acted as if nothing had happened, made me go back to university, made me apply for internships, made me graduate. I always came back to him and did everything I could for him. When his assistant retired, he reluctantly agreed to take me on but only as an employee. Sometimes when he is tired or hurt, I can seduce him, but he never has loved me, not really, not the way I love him. I don’t think he has loved anyone since she broke his heart.”

  Her story had given him time to finish with dinner, which he brought out and ate with us in the peaceful night. She looked happy, gorgeous, again when he was there, glowing in the candlelight. We talked and laughed, ate and drank. With the candles burning low, Gretchen turned in, retiring to the guest room. As soon as she was gone, he gave me everything she ever wanted.

  --Gretchen--

  Dear Diary,

  Hellen was at Henry’s apartment yesterday, so I stayed in my flat. I really try not to be jealous, but I’ve never liked her. I saw her once talking to Henry. She smiled at him, but as soon as he turned away to leave, the smile disappeared from her face. That has bothered me ever since. I wondered if I imagined it. I thought it was just a figment of my envy. I was wrong.

  She was out on the terrace talking on the phone while Henry made dinner. She came over to the far corner, right next to my window, and spoke in a hushed voice. I shouldn’t have listened in, but in a moment of weakness, I did. At first she was talking about Henry’s apartment and how amazing it was. It seemed kind of strange that she would move away from his windows and lower her voice to say that. Then she said, “I doubt I’ll be able to get it, though.”

  I didn’t understand what she meant. She started talking about other places he owned, vacation homes and such, and about money. It seemed in poor taste to me, but I thought she was just bragging to her friend. Then she said, “It takes a year to qualify for spousal support, so I won’t be seeing Antonio for a while.”

  I tried, I really did, to find some benign way to interpret what she was saying, but then she added, “Or at least I won’t be getting caught.” She laughed. I cannot describe the sound of her laughter. Maybe it only sounded ominous to me. It was like broken glass grinding against concrete and a piece of chalk skipping a dotted line across a chalkboard and squeaking as it slipped. It made me want to throw up.

  She kept talking, saying terrible, terrible things. I won’t even write them down. I hate her now. I hate her with a burning sun of passion. She is going to hurt him, and she’s going to do it on purpose. I have never in my life wanted to hurt someone before, but now I want to hurt her. I won’t, of course. Henry loves her. He really does. I could never do anything that would hurt him.

  I hate to admit this, and I’m sorry, but I thought for a moment about killing her. I could have run out onto the terrace and tackled her over the side of the building. That way I wouldn’t have to face Henry afterwards. But what would that do to him? I can’t bear the thought of it.

  Now I don’t know what to do. What do I say to him? Am I to be the one who breaks his heart? Why do I have to know this? It seems an awful punishment for eavesdropping. This is all so cruel! What if I don’t tell him? She will hurt him even worse for every day he has to fall deeper in love with her. But if she plans to leave him after only a year, maybe that won’t be so bad? Life will go on?

  What about me? Will I hold this terrible secret every time I look at him? Will I lie to him? He will not lie to me.

  That really puts me in a fine mess, doesn’t it? Either I tell him or I lie to him, so I have to tell him. There is no other way. Either I hurt him or betray him. How has it come to this? I feel like I’m in a car with no brakes, speeding right toward him. He won’t even see me coming. How do I tell him? When? Should I confront her? Do I march over there right now and accuse her?

  I don’t want to hurt anybody. I don’t want to accuse anybody. What would Henry do for me? I’m sure he would tell me. He might also kill her. That’s a scary thought. No, he wouldn’t physically harm her, but he would definitely ruin her. He’s so protective of me. I’ve always wished I could shelter him the way he has sheltered me. Does it have to hurt like this? Does it always? Does it hurt him like this when he protects me?

  He has to know; I have to tell him. I have no choice. This is the end of the world, again. I had no choice last time, either.

  - gg

  She closed the book without drying her tears from its pages. The tears would dry just like they did before, disrupting the smooth symmetry of the book’s edge when closed. How many pages would it be this time? What is the width, in millimeters, of loss?

  Chapter Five – A Day at the Beach

  --Sally--

  Like all good beach house mornings, ours was a lazy one. I had never been in the ocean before, and I wanted to try it before the sun got too high. I went to Gretchen for help putting sunscreen on my back, but as soon as she saw me, she backed me up against one of the house’s blank, white walls and took my picture. Then she led me over to the wide bar around the open kitchen where she had left a form for me to fill out. Squeezing sunscreen into her hand, she said, “Papers, Love. Don’t leave home without them!” I looked down at the page.

  APPLICATION FOR A U.S. PASSPORT

  Please Print Legibly Using Black Ink Only

  1. NAME Last

  I felt the sudden weight of the pen in my hand and Gretchen’s soft touch sliding up my back. I hesitated, feeling I had just been asked to speak the names of haunting ghosts from whom I had so recently escaped. The slow and easy doom that was my birthright would find me, somehow, somewhere, and it would reel me back in. Of all the names of the living and the dead, of angels and demons and long-forgotten gods, the one that terrified me more than any other was my own.

  “Gretchen?” I asked nervously.

  Her gentle hands slid up over my shoulders and her body pressed against me while she spoke softly by my ear. “Yes, Love?”

  “Is there any other way?” Everything suddenly stopped: her hands, her sweet breath, my heart, the rising sun.

  “It’s just that…” I paused, trying to find words to explain. “I don’t want to be the person I was. I don’t want to live the life into which I was born. I’m afraid they’ll look for me, that someone will find me, that everything will catch up with me, somehow, and wake me from the dream I’m living. I feel like Eurydice, walking out of hell, and I’m afraid of what will happen to me if anyone looks back.”

  After an eternity, her hands continued slowly down my bare chest to embrace me. “No worries, Love.” Her soft voice caressed my cheek. “There is always another way.” She kissed the side of my neck, and then walked back into the guest room carrying the little camera with which she had photographed me.

  I’ve never thought of myself as bisexual, but I’m certain she could have had me any way she wanted. Her soft touch made me want to feel Henry’s strong hands too, but after last night, knowing how much she loved him, I couldn’t do that in front of her.

  It’s just me, I know. Most people go to the beach as kids, and it seems like a normal, natural place to them. The feeling of the waves floating me and tugging in different directions was novel, but not shocking. How would you expect waves to feel? What surprised me was the taste, as if the whole world were flooded in sweat or tears. I thought saltwater was what you used to boil spaghetti or freeze ice cream. The ocean isn’t like that. It’s just salt—liquid salt that looks like water.

  I could see other docks out in the distance, so I thought nothing of the small boat moving toward us, parallel to the shore. When Gretchen saw it, she squealed, “It’s here!” and struggled to wade back to the sand, prancing through the shallow water as she got close. She ran up t
o the house, then came out in a loose-fitting sundress that must have been the fastest thing she could pull over her head.

  Gretchen runs like a girl. She skip-walk-jogged down the dock, holding her chest with one arm or the other and interrupting her cadence to prevent her body from building up enough bounce to throw her into the sky. I rinsed myself off at the little shower near the wooden stairs down from the deck to the sand and watched her waiting impatiently on the end of the pier for her ship to come in. I waited by the house, wrapped in a towel I had used to dry off, while she ran back up the dock, clutching a package to her chest the way the librarian told us to hold books in elementary school.

  “It’s here! It’s here,” she shouted as she came close, adding as she passed me and went inside, “Come look!”

  I followed her to where she was already cutting into the mystery package at the end of the kitchen’s bar. “The rest aren’t finished yet,” she explained, “but I had them rush this one. We’re going diving today, and I want you to come with us.” She found the shoulders of a full-length wetsuit, mostly black with shocks of turquoise and aqua, and she held it up to me to check the size. As I took hold of the wetsuit, she jumped, laughed and clapped her hands, then ran off into the guest room, presumably to put on her own.

  It fit me tightly, as a wetsuit should. The box also had two neoprene boots in it, which fit me. There were gloves as well, thinner and of a different material. If it had all arrived earlier, I might have missed out on the sunscreen rubdown that morning.

  She did indeed return in a wetsuit that almost matched mine while Henry came in from the deck to laugh at us and to put on his own. Gretchen had her hair up under a wide-brimmed hat with sashes that tied under her chin. I found something similar in the collection she had given me the day before, and I put my hair up under mine too. When I came back out, she was loading two bags from the refrigerator, one of which was insulated, a soft cooler. I picked the other up to carry it to the boat and was only briefly surprised by its heft. Quickly putting one and one together, I figured there must have been about two gallons of bottled water in the bag.

  Of course: exercise, saltwater, an afternoon in the sun. The ocean is like cold weather and Yumiko-sensei. It kills you if you don’t respect it.

  The pilot, the dive master, looked like your stereotypical surfer dude except that he was tanned and athletic like a man who got that way in the sun and the water, not the gym. He wore cheap plastic sunglasses with an orange-ish film coating and sun-bleached hair raked back over his head. His name was Mick. He fit with the boat as if they had come as a set, which they had. It seemed like a small boat in the ocean, but if I had seen it on a trailer by the lake, I would have called it enormous.

  Mick took our bags and stowed them while I climbed onto the boat. After three stumbling steps athwart the rolling deck, I turned to collapse into a bench seat along the gunwale. I looked up just in time to see him helping Gretchen aboard, and I could swear I caught a glimpse of something mischievous in her smile.

  --Gretchen--

  Mick is fun: surfer boy, good head on his shoulders but careful not to use it, no questions, no promises, no love letters, hands like a hungry squid, good kid all around. How old must a younger fellow be before you can’t call him a kid anymore? Maybe someday I’ll find out. He is always up with the sun, but today I decided he should sleep in. I love it how a good ejaculation knocks a bloke out, splendid start for a lazy morning in bed.

  The sharp, brassy ring of an old telephone is as good an end to it as any, I suppose. At least it’s not beeping like a normal phone. A rotary-dial telephone in a weathered bungalow on the beach is allowed to ring even if I’m on holiday, and I’m still on holiday until I pick it up. Oh, well. “Hello?”

  “Gretchen. Yumiko.”

  “Yumi! How did it go?” Her plan was complicated, but if anyone could pull it off, she could.

  “Well. Henry has a headache.”

  “Poor thing. Is it bad?” He gets headaches from time to time. Usually he won’t tell anyone. The first sign is always a little furrow in his brow. He’s fine if I keep him on analgesics until he gets a good night’s sleep.

  “He stopped making eye contact three hours and twenty minutes ago.”

  That’s bad. If he tries to ignore them, he gets worse and worse until he blacks out. At least then he can’t decline an IV.

  Yumi doesn’t know about his headaches, but if she saw him in that much pain, she would know to put him to bed immediately. As long as it hasn’t already gotten so bad he can’t sleep, things will probably be manageable in the morning. “Did he fall asleep?”

  “We were in a meeting. He is returning to the hotel now.”

  “Oh dear. Are you with him?” Three and a half hours since he couldn’t see straight and he is still walking around? He won’t be walking around much longer. They must have been closing the Honshu deal. Yumi wouldn’t let him do that to himself otherwise. If I had been there, I still might not have let him do it, not that he ever listens to me.

  “No. I have to be in court in the morning. The driver will see that he gets to his room.”

  “What about the girl?” The last thing he needs right now is to have a little demimonde latched on to him, and that’s what she’ll do.

  “Waiting for him there.”

  That won’t do at all. “Can you put him in a different room?”

  “Unnecessary. She follows instructions.”

  “That’s not good enough, Yumi.” ‘Instructions’ aren’t going to help him.

  “It is. Her instincts commit her to him for now.”

  Yumi doesn’t mean to be cryptic; she just makes inferences at the same speed forward and reverse. “She…” Wait. Instinct has to mean either she has his child or he had her virginity. “I see.”

  Don’t be jealous. Don’t be jealous. Now he is hurt, weak, and heading straight for this girl? There is no way, but arguing with Yumi gets me nowhere. I need to be there. I need to get there fast. “I don’t like it, but I trust you. How is the weather?”

  “Partly cloudy, west wind, no chop, visibility unlimited.”

  Yes, she’s just as fast with the forward inferencing. If there’s not enough wind to raise chop in the harbor, I’ll be able to land. “Good. I should be there by the time he wakes up.”

  “Do you need any arrangements made?”

  How about put him in a different room like I asked you to? This is bad. He is going to be down for days. “Could you call the office when they open and have them clear his calendar as far as they can?”

  “Singapore?”

  “Cancel.” …unless you plan to wheel him in on a gurney.

  “Petronas won’t reschedule.”

  “Their loss.” Actually, in Yumi-speak, that would translate to ‘Irrelevant.’ “He can go if he’s better in the morning, but he won’t be.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No. Thank you, Yumi.” What he needs is for me to be there. I shouldn’t have left him alone.

  The line goes dead. That’s Yumi for you, never says goodbye.

  I don’t need to pack since I’m just going out to fetch him, but I do need to get dressed. I’m not sure Mick has ever seen me in a suit. I tell him to get up, but he just groans and rolls over. Maybe I shouldn’t have knocked him out so hard. I should probably also grab a robe for Henry just in case.

  Well, at least Mick managed to sit up on the side of the bed while I was in the other room. His keys were in his board shorts, which are now draped over his head where I threw them. I give the keys a little jingle and tell him I’ll leave his boat tied up at the taxi pier unless he wants to come with.

  “Nice one,” he groans. Maybe I should have kept the shorts. I do like his tan line.

  I already have the stern line untied when he comes jogging out the pier. He has to jump a couple of feet of water to make it into the boat. “Take me to the airstrip, driver,” I tease him, “and step on it, yes? I’m in a bit of a hurry.” As he takes the w
heel, I smack him on the rump for dramatic effect.

  “You’ll need some payback for that, eh?”

  Standing next to the wheelhouse, I thrust out my bum and say, “Bill me.”

  He does. “Don’t forget the service charge.”

  “...and accrued interest.”

  I have a few minutes more of vacation before we get into town, teasing him and staggering around the bouncing deck. The pier closest to the airstrip extends maybe a hundred meters inland, over grassy dunes. I hear him coming up behind me after tying up the boat, presumably to see me off. I certainly didn’t expect his arm to sweep up behind my knees, dropping me into his embrace. Before I can even get out a good laugh, he has me down on the side of a dune, with the tall grass prickling my back through my suit.

  “You know I would, Sweetie, but I really must go.”

  He keeps working the buttons on my jacket, kissing down my chest. “Mmm, yes, you really must,” he mumbles between kisses. His hands slide around me to unhook my brazier, then push my arms and my clothes up over my head.

  “Mick! Stop!”

  He hovers over me as if we’re playing freeze tag. Turning my head brushes my face along the wiry muscles of his chest and arm. I look at my watch and try to remember what the time offset is to Hong Kong. Then I try to remember where I was the last time I set my watch. It’s too much bother.

  “Five minutes,” I relent.

  I wonder if there is some other aquatic creature, bigger, stronger, with more tentacles than a squid. I’ll have to get back to you on that.