Moss
Though in the days since Forrest had begun his affair I hadn’t been getting up as early as before, that day I made sure to be out of the house first. On the chance that what Regina imagined was actually going to take place, I had to be out of sight, out on the canoe, and around the point by the time Forrest set out to pick up Brenda and head to the island.
The trip across the lake to the island was an ambitious one.
At first I had a hard time keeping the canoe on course, but after a few minutes I started getting the hang of it.
The trick was alternating which side of the water you dipped your oar in, and alternating sides often enough to keep a steady course.
I started to enjoy it. Nobody had told me, but I figured out things went a lot better in a canoe if your strokes were long and you kept your paddle close to the boat.
When you lifted the paddle out of the water, the idea was to turn the blade sideways, just over the surface of the water, before you dipped it in again.
Stroke, turn, dip, stroke. I got a nice rhythm going.
At the moment Regina had suggested this plan, I’d been disappointed that I’d have to miss tennis time with Jonathan.
But once in the canoe, I surprised myself by enjoying the experience.
Even in the middle of the mess of Forrest and Regina’s marital problems (or maybe in part because of them), I experienced a feeling of peacefulness from the slow, steady motion of the paddle in the water.
Lost in the beauty of the early morning—mist over the water still, the sun just coming up over the trees, a lone fisherman way out on his boat—I almost forgot the nature of my mission.
By this point in the summer, I’d become familiar with the long, sorrowful sound made by the loons when they called to each other across the water, as they were doing now.
Forrest had explained to me that loons had several different calls, each distinct.
One of these was a simple hello to some other loon.
Then there was the mating call—longer, higher, more insistent.
Then came the rarest loon call, the one signifying danger.
A pair of eagles lived at the lake. They knew not to go after full-grown loons, who possessed the ability to dive deep under the water to safety.
But the babies were vulnerable. Once, sitting on the dock with Regina, watching the children play Marco Polo with their friends from a nearby house, I’d watched an eagle dive for a baby loon who’d been swimming alongside his mother.
There was a frantic flapping of wings, and a sound coming from the mother loon—mother and father both, I think—that sounded almost like a human scream.
The eagle circled a few times, lower and lower.
I got up from my chair, transfixed. There was nothing I could do but watch a murder taking place.
An attempted murder, anyway. The loon parents succeeded in driving the eagle away, though whether they did this before he’d got his prey or after, I couldn’t be sure.
The loon who called out that morning—just one, though he must have felt the presence of a fellow loon, too far for me to see—conveyed no sense of danger.
He didn’t seem put off by my presence either.
I couldn’t have been more than a few feet away from him as he sat there, lower in the water than a duck and larger, his beautiful feathers, black and white, glistening in the early morning light.
I dipped my paddle in the water again. He dove under, gone for over a minute. When he surfaced again, he did so in a whole other spot on the lake, far from the one I’d seen him in before.
It took me close to an hour to reach the island. My arms were sore by then, but it was a good feeling. The weeks I’d spent on the tennis court had strengthened my muscles and tightened my body without my having realized it was happening.
I found the cove Regina had told me about—the blueberry bushes, the tall grasses, the sandy bank where I dragged the canoe up onto land.
A person would have to look hard to spot it, and more than likely, the two people visiting the island today—if they did come here, which felt like a long shot—would have other things on their minds. One, anyway.
Prudence had packed a lunch basket for me—an egg-salad sandwich, potato chips, a bottle of Snapple, and a blue-and-white-checked napkin. I had not explained to her the nature of my mission, naturally. She thought I was just taking a few hours off to have a picnic.
Now I lifted this out of the canoe, along with the Polaroid camera, the mini tape recorder, my spiral notebook, and my Stephen King book.
Once on land, it took me a while to locate the place Regina had told me about, the mossy spot where she and Forrest used to come to have sex.
“Make love,” was how she put it. When referring to the activities of her husband and Brenda, she employed a different term.
Once I saw the place, there was no mistaking it.
I’d seen plenty of moss before, but nothing like this: Tucked away inside a circle of pine trees and ferns, the moss formed a deep, spongy bed, green and damp from the dew, with the most wonderful rich, earthy smell.
Even if you hadn’t come to this place with a person you planned on having sex with, it was a spot that made you want to take off your shoes—take off all your clothes, even. Lie down, roll around, breathe it in.
I couldn’t stay on the open patch of moss, unfortunately. If Forrest and Brenda actually did show up, I had to remain hidden. There was a large rock thirty or forty feet back, with a thick tangle of brush behind it. I could sit here with my book and my sandwich, waiting.
The morning passed. I didn’t have a watch, but based on the position of the sun, and my hunger, I guessed it was probably lunchtime. If Forrest was going to bring his lover to the island, I figured he’d be here by now. Still, I’d wait a little longer. It was a long way back.
Squirrels came. I spotted a bush with wild blueberries on it, low to the ground. Just six of them, but they were ripe and sweet.
I heard a woodpecker tapping his beak against a dead tree. Then something else: the sound of a motorboat—the unmistakable low whir of a Chris-Craft—far off at first, then closer, slowing down, pulling up to the shore.
I heard the splash of the anchor hitting the water. Then voices. Forrest and Brenda. As they got closer, I could make out the words.
“It’s so beautiful here. How did you ever find this spot for us?”
This would have been the moment for Forrest to explain that the island belonged to his wife and her family. He might have told Brenda about coming here with Regina, long ago. He didn’t.
“I wanted to bring you someplace where I could have you all to myself.”
“Oh, darling. I love you so much.”
“I want to tear these clothes off you,” he said.
Something about the intimacy of the scene had a surprising effect on me: two people kneeling together, as Forrest and Brenda did now on that patch of moss, the sunlight streaming down on them through the trees, the sound of lake water lapping against the shore, the smell of juniper, and that loon off in the distance, her voice long and low.
For reasons I could not have explained, I started to cry.
But soundlessly. I couldn’t risk letting the two of them hear me.
I peered over the top of the rock. This was the first time I was actually able to really see Forrest and Brenda together instead of just hearing their voices.
He was unbuttoning his shirt now. Then her blouse.
He undid her bra. It didn’t take him long to understand that it fastened in front.
Regina wouldn’t be the type to wear sexy underwear, as I knew from my perusal of her drawers at the house that day.
But I understood now, as I didn’t once, that Forrest was a man who knew his way around women’s lingerie.
A surprising thing happened to me then. I was a girl who’d spent the last couple of years fixated on the idea of people having sex.
I’d tried to figure out how they did it and struggled to understand.
I’d constructed fantasies. Now here I was, situated in such a way that I could finally observe the real thing from a safe distance that allowed me a clear and nearly unobstructed view.
Brenda and Forrest had taken all their clothes off.
(Almost all. Crazily, Forrest was still wearing his white tube socks.
Those, and nothing else. It wasn’t a particularly sexy look.)
Now, at the very moment the secret of lovemaking was about to be revealed to me, I looked away.
I couldn’t bear to see it. Most of all, I couldn’t bear to see a man I had worshipped in the act of doing something that still seemed to me strange and unsettling—fascinating and thrilling, but also repellent.
I turned on my tape recorder. Knowing the clicking sound my camera made, I didn’t want to risk taking a picture at first. But I got up my courage once they were in the thick of it—Forrest on top of Brenda, then Brenda on top of Forrest, then the two of them, side by side, touching each other and gasping for breath.
They were making enough noise by this point that I knew they wouldn’t hear the Polaroid as it spit out the photographs.
There they were in the flesh. I’d heard the expression, but it never applied so accurately before.
In the pictures I held in my hand, I could see Brenda’s fingers digging into Forrest’s broad, muscular back, and his mouth on her breast. Then another picture, of his head between her outstretched legs.
A long, loud wail came out of them both, like a pair of loons who’d just found each other in the middle of a lake in Maine.
Well, they had.
After that, everything changed with surprising abruptness.
In the movies, a couple usually lay there, side by side in the bed after sex—an actual bed, not a bed of moss.
They’d whisper tender words to each other or exchange loving caresses.
One or both of them might smoke a cigarette.
None of this took place between Brenda and Forrest that day on the island.
When it was over, Forrest handed Brenda her underpants and bra, then her shorts.
“I hate to rush things,” he said. “But I need to take my wife to her doctor’s appointment.”
My wife. The way he spoke the words surprised me. Not Regina or her—though he might have put it that way. Brenda would surely have known who he was talking about.
He sounded so married.
“When are you going to tell her about us?” Brenda asked. I heard the faintest evidence of annoyance in her tone.
“I just can’t,” Forrest said. “It would kill Regina.”
“You know we can’t be together unless you end it with her,” Brenda said.
“It’s just too soon. I need . . .” What did he need? He didn’t finish the sentence, probably because he didn’t know this himself. Or maybe he did know. He knew he wasn’t going to leave his wife. He just didn’t want to admit this to Brenda.
The two of them were sitting on a rock now, side by side. Forrest’s shirt was misbuttoned.
“I know this could sound mean,” Brenda said, “but I can’t help thinking it. Everything would be so great if your wife would just . . . disappear.”
“Disappear?” Forrest sounded genuinely baffled.
“You told me she’s always talking about killing herself. What if she finally did it?”
Forrest sat there, facing her. He had been reaching for his pants, but now he stopped.
“What are you talking about?”
Brenda’s voice as she spoke to him was oddly businesslike. She was fastening her bra as she spoke.
“I mean, wouldn’t it make things easier for the two of us?” Brenda said. “If she finished things off.”
Forrest just sat there in his white tube socks, staring at her.
“It could happen, right?” she said. “She was probably always going to do it sooner or later. What if we . . . you know . . . sort of helped her along with things.”
“Helped her along?”
“Look at it as bringing an end to her suffering.”
“I don’t understand,” Forrest said. Or maybe he did, but he wished he didn’t.
Now Brenda sounded excited. For once she had come up with an idea she hadn’t heard someone express on a show she was watching. “Suppose she showed up dead one day. Considering her past history, nobody would bat an eye.”
She was on a roll now. She was talking faster. I couldn’t see her face, but I could imagine it. That pale skin, with the foundation that ended at her jawline.
“Suppose Regina just turned up dead?” Brenda said.
“There’d be this note next to her body where she explained she’d had enough.
She hated ruining everybody else’s life, but she just wanted it to be over.
The pain of being alive. She’d say how sorry she was to let everyone down, but she knew she was just a drag on them, and they’d be better off without her. ”
“That would never happen,” Forrest said. “My wife would never write a note like that.”
“You’re missing the point.” Brenda looked annoyed. I caught a glimpse of what this woman would be like if someone crossed her in a serious way—or simply didn’t give her what she wanted. Now here she was having to explain everything to him.
“What if someone else wrote this note for her? Only this person made it sound like Regina wrote it, because they knew that was the sort of thing she might do anyway; she just hadn’t gotten around to it.”
Forrest took a few moments to respond. When he did, he seemed to choose his words with more care than usual. On his face, a look of pure shock. Call it horror.
“You’re kidding, right?” he said. “I could never . . .”
“Just think how it could be,” she told him. She ran her hands over his chest. Then lower down on his body.
“It’s not Regina’s fault that she’s depressed,” Forrest told her.
“But what about us?” Brenda said. “What am I supposed to do?” He had put his pants on at this point, but her hands had made their way inside them.
“Oh, baby,” he moaned. “I can’t.”
“Think about it,” she told him. All of a sudden there was a hardness to her voice. I’d seen that part of Brenda all along. I might be young, but I understood her way better than Forrest did.
“I love my wife,” he said. It made me sad to hear how weak he seemed now. He sounded like a puppy. Being trained. She’d have him peeing where he was supposed to soon. And not where he shouldn’t.
“You know that’s one of the things I love about you,” Brenda told him. “Your loyalty. But we both know she’s a sick woman, and it’s only going to get worse.
“Just think,” she went on. “You could have me all to yourself every day for the rest of your life.”