Make Her Proud
On the surface, it might have seemed that Regina’s goal, when she enlisted my services to spy on her husband, involved money.
Specifically, protecting her inheritance.
But I knew it wasn’t money, really, that Regina cared about.
From the way she talked about Forrest—the look on her face when she described the places he might take his lover, based on her own experience of having made love with him there herself—I knew her true objective was holding on to her husband.
She actually believed that if she threatened him with financial ruin, he might stick around.
In Regina’s mind, presenting Forrest with the prospect of forfeiting the comfortable lifestyle he’d become accustomed to—ensuring that he’d lose his home, his boat, his sports car, his golf membership, not to mention his children—served as her way of holding on to him.
I knew the truth. Regina still loved Forrest. She couldn’t help it. The plan she’d cooked up, in which I was to play a vital role, wasn’t really about supporting future divorce actions. It was about finding a way to stay married.
I could relate to Regina’s inability to give up on Forrest. As angry as I was at him for what I viewed as his abandonment of me, I was in the same boat.
As many times as I reminded myself that he was cheating on his wife, and that he’d done this repeatedly—every summer for years, it turned out—I couldn’t hate him.
I couldn’t help smiling when he came in the door with a bagful of lobster rolls for us, or when he whipped out his ukulele, as he still did on occasion, passing around a bag of kazoos—one for each of us—and burst into one of his made-up songs.
Times like those, all was forgiven. I’d forget I was supposed to be mad at Forrest, the guilt would return that I’d agreed to help his cold and unlovable wife prepare her case against him.
I never bought Regina’s theory that Forrest would go after her as an unstable person or take her children away. He might have a weakness for women in tight, low-cut dresses—clearly he did—but he wasn’t cruel.
And he was a loving parent. There were days when Regina barely spoke to Hayward and Jilly, days when she hardly got out of bed, and other days (many of these) when her chief form of communication with her children lay in her typewritten instructions for their lives.
Whereas even at his worst—preoccupied with Brenda, and more than that, obsessed—Forrest never neglected the children. They were captivated by him. So was I.
Still, I embarked on carrying out my assignment.
Regina and I were in this together now—two women who had been betrayed by the same charming, irresistible but unfaithful man.
If I had lost the tender affection of the one person in this family I truly adored, as it seemed I had, I’d shift my loyalty to the one who still took an interest in me.
And so the same intensity of feeling that had once fueled my total devotion to Forrest now attached itself to Regina.
I didn’t want to let her down. I wanted to please her. I wanted to make her proud of me.
“These girls don’t know what they’re doing out there,” Regina said. “They have no understanding of the sport of tennis.”
Her remark caught me off guard. I remembered what Forrest had said about Regina having played tennis herself when she was younger, but it was hard to picture.
Nothing in how she was now suggested a woman who’d won doubles tournaments once.
These days the game seemed not simply to bore her but, more than that, to irritate her.
I could have said a million things concerning my views on tennis, a sport that now occupied my thoughts every hour of my day, much as Forrest had done once.
Jonathan had recently invited me over to the club, where I got to join a group of die-hard players to watch the semifinals of the Volvo International being played in Vermont, in which John McEnroe had defeated Jimmy Connors—both of us McEnroe fans, naturally.
Some of the points they played felt so exciting I could barely breathe.
With the Labor Day match and my dreaded return to New Jersey less than a month away, I worried now that functioning as Regina’s detective was cutting into my ability to work with Jonathan on my tennis game.
I wanted to win that tournament.