Chapter 13 #2
“I’ll take a look at what they’ve got. But they wouldn’t take a chance like that.
It sounds like they dredged up everything they could from the past in their research.
What about the rape?” Martin asked. “That’s the only thing that concerns me.
Is it true? Anything you tell me is privileged, so you can tell me what happened.
” It sounded credible to him, and could be a real problem if the rape victim pressed charges, even all these years later, and she could.
“It was a misunderstanding. She’s a hot little number, she’s a prick-tease, or she was then.
And a liar. She’d been goading me since she was in high school.
I thought she meant it this time, and she was twenty-two then, not a minor.
I fell for it. She propositioned me. I thought we both had a good time.
She looked like she was enjoying it. She was an adult, and she knew what she was doing.
She led me on. No one ever said anything about rape until the article came out.
They disguised her very thinly in the article, but I knew right away who it was.
That only happened to me once. I’ve been more careful ever since.
” He sounded like injured virtue when he said it.
It had happened to others and his attorney believed him.
He believed John was an honest man. He was tough in business, but not a rapist.
“The magazine claims they have a police report, and the records from the hospital trauma unit, with photographs. Both the hospital and the police listed it as a rape.” Martin had spoken to Henry about it to see what they had. And he needed to know John’s reaction to it.
“It’s listed as a rape because she said so.
I told her I couldn’t see her again because I was married, so she was pissed.
” There was a vast discrepancy between John’s story and what the magazine said about the hospital records, but his attorney didn’t press the point and hoped it didn’t come back to haunt them.
“She’s a married woman with four kids now.
She’d embarrass her husband if she tried to press charges, he has a big job.
It wouldn’t hold up in court. Her parents are my best friends.
Her mother is on the boat with me now. It’s not a problem,” John assured him.
“I hope your perception of it is the same as theirs.” Martin Schultz knew of cases like it that had gone badly in court for the defendants, but John was very convincing.
He was furious at the accusation he said was false, and clearly wasn’t worried.
“And they’re not going to fire the writer.
They have complete faith in her, and all the backup they say they’d need in court.
They sound very confident. She’s their most important writer, and a senior editor.
She’s not going anywhere. Can you live with that?
” Martin asked him. “I know you want her fired, but they maintain her innocence and accuracy as a journalist. They’re standing behind her. She’s a prize-winning journalist.”
“What about the damage to me?” John asked him, sounding wounded. “They victimized me. They lied. They destroyed my reputation.”
“It’s up to you,” Martin said. “Think about it while you’re on the boat. It’s an unfortunate situation. I think you should ignore it and move forward. You don’t want all of that dragged through the press.”
“I’d be okay with a public apology from them.
I don’t need money out of this.” Martin was exasperated but didn’t show it.
Wherever the truth lay about the rape, John had a total lack of empathy for what the others had suffered.
Martin wanted to ask him if the two men who had taken their own lives owed him an apology too.
Nothing was ever John’s fault, according to him, and his total lack of humility didn’t help him publicly.
No one was sympathetic to his cause. John Williams wasn’t a man people felt sorry for.
He was a man people feared and even hated.
He was only charming to a select few, when he chose to be and if he had something to gain from it.
—
John and Isabelle spent lazy, easy days on the boat.
It was a wonderful place to relax. He had a terrific chef onboard, and St. Barth was a beautiful place.
Isabelle’s only complaint, if she had one, was John’s sexual appetite.
He wanted to have sex with her three or four times during the day and again at night.
She was beginning to think he needed a much younger woman.
At times he made her feel like a hooker hired for the trip, expected to service him whenever he wanted, to relieve his anxieties and satisfy his desires. He was almost insatiable.
“Every time I see your body, I go crazy. You’ve bewitched me,” he explained it to her, as though his constant need for sex with her was her doing.
“Did you and Helen make love this often?” she asked him.
“Helen didn’t like having sex. She tolerated it.
She didn’t mind if I had an occasional fling with another woman, sometimes she encouraged me to.
” Isabelle had the distinct recollection of two occasions when Helen thought he was having an affair and she was frantic about it.
She had never said anything to Isabelle about not liking sex, or wanting him to pursue other women for relief.
John would tease Isabelle into having sex with him and sometimes arouse her against her wishes, when she was reading a good book, sunbathing, dozing in the sun, or swimming in the pool for some exercise, and eventually, he got her to do what he wanted.
He was gentle most of the time, and only once in a while too rough, if he was in a hurry.
She tried to get him to play cards with her, or dice, or dominoes, as distraction, but the only thing he really wanted to do, as many times as he could lure her into it, was make love with her.
And she saw him take a pill one day and realized that he was taking Viagra so he could go on for hours.
It was the greatest discrepancy between them.
He was a raging bull in bed, always at the ready.
At times Isabelle longed for the days when there was no man in her life.
But she enjoyed John’s company otherwise, and he was fun to talk to.
But between his occasional quick flashes of temper and his never-ending sexual prowess, she was beginning to suspect that Helen hadn’t had an easy life, although she almost never complained about him.
He didn’t seem like the right partner for Isabelle, and she was beginning to have strong doubts.
But he was impressive in other ways. He had an extraordinary mind, and was knowledgeable on so many subjects.
He was intelligent, and kind when he wanted to be.
He was a mass of complexities and contradictions, and at times extreme pleasures.
But he was not an easy man to live with and she wasn’t in love with him.
He was right, Helen had been a saint. And Isabelle wanted to dampen down their affair when they went home.
His intensity on every subject was overwhelming and his lack of empathy for others disappointing, and even alarming at times.
—
As Isabelle had asked, Lillith took on the project of the new dressing room in Isabelle’s absence, to get it done.
It wasn’t complicated, it was just a question of logistics, as to which of her closets Isabelle wanted to give up, and how to configure them.
Isabelle still hadn’t told her designer who the new man in her life was, or even that there was one.
She was discreet in all things, but Lillith had seen that there was one closet already half full of men’s clothes.
It was helpful to have some of his jackets to measure, so the carpenter would know how high to put the racks for his hangers.
One day, Lillith took out a jacket and a pair of gray slacks to measure them.
He was a tall man. There was a pile of mail on one of the shelves, and a few of the envelopes fell when she put the jacket back and she picked them up to return them to their place.
Without paying close attention, she saw the name on the envelope.
It jumped out at her and she felt stunned for an instant.
The name was John R. Williams. She took out the stack of mail and looked at all of it then.
All of the mail was addressed to John, at Isabelle’s address.
Why was his mail at Isabelle’s? She flipped through the jackets then and recognized two of them, and the scent of his cologne.
He had worn one of the jackets the last time she saw him, on the day he left.
Lillith sat down on a little stool in front of Isabelle’s makeup table, and she realized that John was living with Isabelle at least part of the time.
He was sleeping with both of them. And it dawned on her as well that Isabelle and John were both out of town, and had left at the same time.
It hadn’t occurred to her at first. And she was still deeply disturbed by the way John had treated her the last time she saw him, and she believed now that the claim of rape against him from the past was probably true.
And clearly, with his clothes in Isabelle’s closet, he was sleeping with Isabelle too.
She felt sick thinking about it. He had played her for a fool.
She wondered if Isabelle knew about her too.