“So are you going to divorce him?”
“I don’t know. I don’t love him anymore. But I haven’t got a dime of my own. And I just don’t know if I could get enough alimony and child support if I bring suit.”
I turned in at the Wahini Lodge and parked away from the entrance lights, over near the architectured waterfall and the flaming gas torches.
“You’re too darned easy to talk to, Mr. McGee.”
“Maybe because we just wear the same kind of battle scars. I had to get out of my setup just as fast as I could.”
“Any kids?”
“No. She kept saying later, later.”
“It makes a difference, you know. It’s a pretty nice house, nice neighborhood, good school. There’s medicine and dental work and shoes and savings accounts. It’s an arrangement, right now. I do my part of the job of keeping the house going. But I won’t ever let him touch me again. It would turn my stomach. He can find himself another playmate. I don’t give a damn. And we don’t have to socialize, particularly.”
“Can you live the rest of your life like that?”
“No! I don’t intend to. But I have a friend who says that we… says that I had better just sort of go along with it as is for the time being. He is a dear, gentle, wise, understanding man. We’ve been very close ever since I found out about Rick. His marriage is as hopeless as mine but in a different way. I’m not having an affair with him. We see each other and we have to be terribly careful and discreet because I wouldn’t want to give Rick any kind of ammunition he could use if and when I try to get a divorce. We don’t even have any kind of special understanding about the future. It’s just that we both… have to endure things the way they are for a while.”
“Then, I guess the family outing Rick told me about, the trip to Vero Beach yesterday, must have been pretty grim.”
She had turned in the bucket seat to face me, her back against the door, legs pulled up. “Was it ever! Like that old thing about what a tangled web we weave. I didn’t have any idea he’d want to spend any part of Saturday with his wife and children. I’d told him I was going to drive over and see June and leave the boys off with my best friend on the way. She lives twenty miles east of here. Her boys are just the same ages, practically. I’d fixed it with June to cover for me in case Rick phoned me there for some stupid reason. And I was going to drive to… another place close by and spend the day with my friend. But out of the clear blue Rick decided to come too! I didn’t see how in the world he could have found out anything. But he was so ugly I decided he must have had a little lovers’ spat with his girl friend. When I left the boys at my friend’s place, I had a chance to phone my sister and warn her, while Rick was out in the car, but I couldn’t get hold of my friend to call the date off. Rick was in a foul mood all day.” Again the mirthless laugh. “What a lousy soap-opera!”
I could not leave at that moment because it would give her the aftertaste of having been pumped, of having talked too much. So I invented a gaudy confrontation between me and the boyfriend of a wife I never had. I spun it out and when I was through, she said, “It’s wretched that people have to be put through things like that just because a wife or a husband is too immature to… to be plain everyday faithful. Do you ever run into her? Is she still in Lauderdale?”
“No. She moved away. I have no idea where she is now. I send the money to a Jacksonville bank. If I want to find out where she is, all I’d have to do is stop making payments. Look, do you want to come in for a nightcap?”