Forever
It was a few days later—the fourth week in July now.
I’d used up Olivia’s tennis lessons a while back, but more than ever I wanted to work with Jonathan. In a matter of weeks I’d become obsessed with tennis.
Regina had recently decided to increase my pay by another thirty dollars a week.
I’d started to use this money to cover the cost of my lessons—four a week now, sometimes five.
Jonathan probably imagined that, like all the other kids at the club, I had parents footing the bill.
That would have been nice, but on the other hand I liked that I was paying my own way.
I didn’t ever want to be a person like Jilly and Hayward, or Olivia.
After my lesson that day, I biked over to the library. I’d finished Pet Sematary and needed to find something new to read.
Between reading and tennis, it came to me that I’d been thinking less about Forrest lately. I wasn’t even writing about him so much in my journal anymore. I felt relieved that this was so. I wasn’t over my feelings for Forrest, but he no longer occupied the same space in my brain.
Then it happened. Wandering through the stacks, I heard a familiar voice. Just the voice, but I knew right away who it was, though two or three rows of books concealed us from each other. I didn’t need to see his face to know who was speaking.
“I think I can get away Thursday night,” the man was saying. “The kids have a sleepover at their friends’ house. I’ll tell Regina I need to head into the city for the day. I need new running shoes.”
A woman’s voice then. “Oh, darling.”
“But what about your husband?” The man again. I knew who this was, of course.
“Kyle’s an idiot.” Her voice was less familiar than the man’s, but it wasn’t difficult to figure out to whom it belonged. “He never notices anything if the Red Sox are on.”
There was a pause. Kissing, probably. Then the man’s voice again. “I don’t know how I can wait that long to have my arms around you again. I have to be inside you.”
Brenda’s voice took on a concerned tone as she said, “I just want to make sure you feel as good as I do about what we’re doing. I don’t want us to do this if it doesn’t feel totally right. What we have is too important.”
The two of them had chosen a spot deep in the stacks to meet—someplace that housed books about medieval history or outdated manuals for things like crochet and training your pet. It was a part of the library where vacationers at Lake Catherine were unlikely to venture.
What was she talking about—wanting to make sure that what they were doing with each other was right?
How was it ever supposed to be right to have sex with someone else’s husband?
Not to mention cheating on your own husband at the same time, and lying to everyone while you were at it.
Then there was what Forrest was doing, cheating on his wife and his two children.
And—this part I kept in the most hidden-away portion of my brain—the way he’d hurt me too.
“How can something that feels this right be wrong?” he said to Brenda.
I probably missed the irony here. It did not occur to me that at least the first part of this scenario was one I had imagined, myself—a version of it, anyway, with me playing the role now enjoyed by Brenda.
Like Brenda Barnett, I had constructed scenes of myself in the arms of someone else’s husband. This same husband, actually.
In my case, what I had envisioned had unfolded as a fantasy. It wasn’t ever going to happen, except in my imagination. What Brenda and Forrest were talking about in the stacks of the Lake Catherine Library was actually taking place.
I held my breath. I stood there with my hand on the spine of the Stephen King book I’d been planning to check out that day.
A couple of rows over, I could hear the sound of the two of them breathing heavily.
Forrest was whispering. I couldn’t make out the words.
He was nuzzled up close now, most likely. Her hair muffled the sound.
“I knew the moment I saw you we were meant to be together,” she said.
“Me too.”
“I feel like we must have known each other in another life.”
“I was thinking the same thing.”
“It’s going to be agony waiting until Thursday.”
I might be fourteen years old, but even to me, a kid, their words to each other sounded dumb. Gag me with a spoon, Hayward would have said. The two of them talked like characters from one of Prudence’s soap operas.
“You know this is crazy, don’t you?” she said.
“If this is crazy, I don’t ever want to be sane.”
Then came more breathing, followed by what was probably the sound of kissing. A book falling off the shelf. A few of them. Nervous laughter.
“We’d better get out of here before we get in trouble with the librarian,” he whispered. “You know librarians.”
“I don’t know anything anymore. I just know I have to be with you.”
“You will be, darling,” he told her.
This last part was what startled me.
“Forever?” she asked him.
“I’ve never felt like this about anyone, ever,” he said.
“I want to spend my life with you,” she said. “We’ll figure out a way, right?”
Based on the sounds emanating from their section of the library stacks, it seemed Forrest agreed with her.
I stayed in the stacks for a few more minutes, until I was sure the two of them had left. I got my book and brought it to the front desk.
“You’re quite a little reader, aren’t you?” the librarian asked me, stamping the well-used copy of Christine. “You’ve become one of our best customers.”
“I really like Stephen King books,” I told her.
“You work for the Emersons, right?” she said. “You just missed Forrest. What a sweetheart.”
A look came over her. The librarian was on the older side, but the thought occurred to me that maybe she had a history with Forrest too, long ago.
“He was picking up a book for his wife,” she said. Back to librarian mode. “She’s not a well woman, I gather. He’s such a caring husband.”
Outside, I hopped on Buttercup and headed in the direction of the house.
But I couldn’t go back there yet. Until this moment, I hadn’t fully accepted what Regina had told me about Forrest’s affairs.
I’d held out a slim hope that she could be wrong about Forrest and Brenda.
I might have told myself it wasn’t Forrest’s fault women chased after him all the time. He was just being nice.
What I felt now, pumping my bicycle up the long hill toward the road leading to the lake—standing up on the pedals, tears coming so hard I could barely see in front of me—was an emotion I had not registered before. Not toward Forrest, anyway. I wasn’t just hurt. I was angry.
When Regina confided in me about her husband’s summer liaisons, she described them as if they meant nothing.
“It’s like a sport for Forrest,” she’d told me.
“Sometimes he plays tennis. Sometimes he golfs. Sometimes he fools around with somebody’s wife.
When the summer’s over, he’s mine again.
He’s always mine in the end. Forrest isn’t going anywhere. ”
What I’d overheard at the library told me otherwise. To hear Brenda talk—and not just Brenda, but Forrest himself—the two of them seemed to be embarking on a serious all-out love affair. With a future that went beyond Labor Day.
Brenda believed she’d be with Forrest forever.
He had not disputed the idea.
What did I know about love affairs? Nothing beyond what I’d picked up at the movies and in a few books.
But nobody could have mistaken the tone of Brenda’s voice as she talked about their upcoming get-together as that of a woman interested in nothing more than a casual flirtation.
And then there was Forrest. He sounded like a drunk person, but not the kind of drunk I was familiar with. Drunk on love. Or sex, anyway.
I had pedaled Buttercup halfway around the lake now, and up into the hills above Lake Catherine. My legs were sore, and it had started to rain, but I couldn’t turn back. I had to calm down first and figure out what to say when I got back to the house and saw Regina.
Was I supposed to keep this new information to myself?
The truth was that even after Regina had explained to me about Forrest’s summer flings, he had remained my favorite person in the universe—as opposed to her, a woman it was hard to feel affection for.
But she and I had become allies now. Regina wasn’t the only person Forrest had cheated on.
This was when I discovered what rage felt like.
It seemed to me that in addition to having betrayed his not-particularly-lovable wife, the man I loved more than anything had betrayed me, personally.
Every kindness he’d shown me—playing me Creedence Clearwater and Bob Seger tapes in the car on our long drive from New Jersey up to the lake, letting me steer the boat, hitting golf balls with me on a driving range in the last light of day, bringing me along in the Porsche to pick up strawberries at the farm stand and eating the whole box in the car on the way home while we talked about my dream of becoming a writer, telling me I was part of the family now and that I had an amazing life ahead of me—all that had been a lie.
I was a sucker and a loser to have imagined he ever cared about me.
He probably made fun of me to his girlfriend. “Can you believe our babysitter’s in love with me?” he’d say. “That flat-chested little girl who plays with my daughter’s dolls?”
They’d laugh. Then they’d start kissing again. Then would come the sex part. The fucking.
I said it out loud. Yelled it actually. On my yellow bicycle, pedaling hard, I yelled it. Fuck him. Fuck everyone. Fuck everything.
Forrest had conned me. All those questions he’d asked about my thoughts on life were just his way of keeping me on board as someone who’d ensure that Jilly and Hayward stayed occupied while he fooled around with Brenda. I was a dope and a loser to have ever believed otherwise.
It’s one thing when people you never trusted in the first place turn out to be mean—people like Olivia. The worst thing is when the person who lets you down is a person you loved more than anyone else in the world.