Stranded (16 page)

I stare at Cherry. She is more animated than I have seen her for a long time. The fish seems to have woken her up: for the first time in a while she is not crying. I say nothing. I have no desire to tell these people anything at all about myself. The weighty silence strongly suggests that the others feel the same way. In fact the silence has the same effect as a loud and forceful ‘No!’

Mark says: ‘Honey . . .’ in a warning tone.

‘I mean,’ she adds, after a while. She sounds less sure of herself this time. ‘I thought it might make the time pass a little less slowly. Now that we have some food inside ourselves. And we have water. I’m feeling stronger. I want to talk. Wouldn’t you like something else to think about? Someone else’s troubles? I’ll go first.’

‘Cherry,’ says Mark. ‘Please don’t. Honey.’

‘Why not?’ she says. Her voice is high and tight. ‘Why can I not tell them, Mark? What does anything matter now?’

‘It matters because—’ He stops. Then he laughs, a horrible unhappy laugh that is drenched in bitterness. ‘Oh, go ahead. Tell them everything. You’re right. Nothing fucking matters. I’m not even sure any of this is real, anyway.’ I nod at that, knowing exactly what he means.

‘I want to talk,’ she says. ‘Sweetie. I want to tell them. No one can be bothered with lies any more.’

Mark lies back on the sand. ‘Go ahead,’ he says quietly. ‘Do your worst.’

I am vaguely interested by this, but not enough to muster any words of encouragement. There is a little rustling around the fire, and an expectant silence falls. I think it is expectant, though it might be lethargic.

‘Right,’ says Cherry. ‘I am pretty sure I will feel better if I put you all in the picture. Mark and I are married – you all know that, right?’

I murmur my assent, as do others.

‘We can hardly have bloody missed that fact, young lady,’ Jean says. ‘You live on Long Island and you’re just married. On honeymoon, can’t keep your hands off each other. That’s actually just about all I remember.’

‘Yes,’ Cherry says. ‘We live on Long Island, right at the tip, in a place called Montauk. And we are married. Here’s the thing, though: we are not married to each other.’

It takes us a while to compute that. After a loaded pause, Ed says slowly: ‘So you’re married to other people?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Oh my God. Being here, then . . .’

‘Not ideal,’ Mark mutters.

‘So how on earth,’ Katy asks, ‘did you come to be here on holiday, having sex all over the place and pretending to be on your honeymoon? Cherry, you were right. This is a fascinating story, and for the first time since we’ve been here, I’m actually interested in something other than our plight. Will you tell us?’

‘Of course,’ Cherry says. ‘I’m sick of wishing it all away. I’ll tell you the whole damn story and at least you’ll get to share in the misery. And we might feel better for not having a secret any more. Lord knows, in the outside world we must be totally busted by now. There’s no point keeping any secrets here, is there?’

‘No,’ says Katy, at once. ‘Tell us everything.’

We shift in our places by the fire, which are the same places we happened to sleep in on that first night, and listen, agog, to Cherry’s words. Her voice is hesitant at first but becomes stronger as she realises we are all rapt.

‘I grew up in North Carolina,’ she says, ‘and moved to Montauk when I met my husband, Tom. We’ve been together for nearly seven years and we have two children. Hannah is four and Aaron is two. And now they’ve lost their mommy and it’s all because . . .’ She draws a deep breath. ‘Sorry. I will do my best to stick to the story. I am not happily married. No shit, right? People tell me Tom’s a good guy. I find him repulsive. You know when you start feeling that way about a person, and then every little thing they do makes you want to heave? That. He’s overweight – yes, even for an American, you guys. His T-shirts have sweat stains under the arms that never come out in the wash, and he thinks that a clean pair of sweat pants constitutes making an effort with his appearance. And as it happens, the sportswear is redundant: he works out as much as Homer Simpson.

‘But of course I am a million times, a gazillion times worse than he is. I know it; I can see you’re all thinking it, even though I can’t properly see your faces. Tom thinks Mark’s a good guy; he’s always said Mark is one of the best, though I doubt he’s saying that right now.

‘So I was bored, about to hit thirty, and waiting for Tom to notice how bad his cholesterol was and to go on a health kick so that perhaps I might fall back in love with him – or, failing that, to have a heart attack and do the decent thing and die on me. That was when the new family moved into the neighbourhood, into the house right across the street from us. We live in a little community close to the ocean and the harbour. Everyone knows everyone else. It’s a big boat place, Montauk, and the beaches are to die for, plus they’re joined up to the mainland, unlike this hellhole. So it would be impossible to become stuck there. I now value that about a beach. You know the movie
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
? Not my sort of movie, but it was shot locally to us. Those big white beaches – that’s us.

‘I stood at my upstairs window and watched them moving in. Three beautiful boys, that was what I noticed first. Adam, Brett and Connor. They all have Mark’s black hair, and their mother’s huge grey eyes. They look like the same boy at different stages, don’t they, Mark?’

I look to Mark for his confirmation, but his face is a mask. He is staring into the fire, not responding.

‘They’re stunning,’ Cherry confirms for him. ‘So I watched the boys for a while, and smiled and waved when they looked up at me. Then their mother – Antonia. She’s an ex-model, very tall and limber, with long dark curls and those grey eyes. I smiled at her and felt a bit small and lacklustre in her shadow. Then Mark came along, directing the removals, and my heart literally skipped a beat the moment I set eyes on him.

‘Anyway as he’s right here and not joining in, I’ll skip over that part. We got to know one another, in an entirely proper sense: our whole families were friendly. But I always felt there was something between Mark and me. Something unspoken, just a mutual appreciation, if you like.

‘Then came one sunny day when I had just had it with Tom. I told him to lose some fucking weight and have some self-respect. I told him that I was taking excellent care of myself, putting the effort into not only losing all my baby weight, but maintaining the body I had at sixteen, and for what? I also reported that my friend Jess had said I looked like a trophy wife, and that when we were out together, people who didn’t know us must think that Tom was seriously rich to have a woman like me on his arm. She said it to be kind to me, but it stuck with me and I shouted it to him in the heat of the moment. He said I was being discriminatory and sizeist and shallow and got in his car and shot off. That’s Tom all over: why deal with something when you can walk away from it? Or drive away, in his case.

‘It was hot, I was miserable. I saw Mark out in their yard attending to the weeds, so I thought I’d go over and apologise, because I knew he would have heard our quarrel, which I found embarrassing.

‘I admit, though, that I changed into hotpants and a halterneck before I went. Aaron was scooting around the place on his little tricycle, and Hannah was indoors watching TV.

‘I went over and smiled at him. He smiled right back.

‘“I have to apologise,” I said. “I know you must have heard Tom and me back then.”

‘He was charming and sweet and pretended not to have heard a thing. I caught him checking out my hotpants. We held eye contact for the longest time – far longer than people who were just neighbours having small talk would have done.

‘“No one ever said it was easy,” he said. “Marriage, that is. Please don’t apologise. How are you doing?”

‘“Oh, you know,” I said. It was such a humid day. That was why I said: “Hot.” And from the look he gave me, I knew it was just a matter of time. Mark, I wish you would join in with the story. Here I am talking about you, and there you are keeping silent.’

Mark grunts. ‘Carry on. You’re doing OK.’

‘What happened next?’ Ed speaks for all of us. We are collectively transfixed. I am lying on my stomach on my sarong, which is tattered and full of holes, propped up on my elbows, and I have almost forgotten our predicament.

‘What next? Well, I perked right up. There was a spring in my step. I apologised to Tom for my words, and he promised to take care of himself a little better. We started living together amicably. As friends. I had not felt friendly towards him for the longest time, and now I made a point of being pleasant, and we were all of us happier. I could see the difference in Hannah and Aaron, when Mom and Dad were suddenly playing nice.

‘I was a million times better to live with, because I was thinking of Mark. Our eyes would meet across the street, and suddenly I would be smiling and patient and loving to everyone.

‘The day came, of course. You all know it did. On that day, we met in the street between our two houses. Tom was at work. Antonia was not around – I guess she was at work too. All the kids were at school or daycare. So there was Mark, and there was me. We spoke for a while about nothing in particular. Then he suddenly leaned forward and said: “Hey. Cherry. Do you ever feel like doing something risky?”

‘And I said: “I thought you’d never ask.”’

Cherry stretches out and smiles. ‘And that was that. The big secret was born. The vows were broken. As soon as we did it once, we knew we had to do it again and again. It became something we did every week. I loved our Thursday mornings more than anything. The whole thing was completely addictive. I rationalised it all to myself in every which way. People do this all the time. I’m a nicer wife, a better mother. If I can look after my needs like this, there’s less chance of the boat being rocked for the children. And so on.

‘Every Thursday, Tom would leave the house for work at eight. He has an OK job – he’s a chef at a diner, always busy through the summer. I would dress carefully, with my best underwear, and before I set off I would make sure I was thoroughly groomed all over. I would buckle Hannah and Aaron into the back of the car and take them to daycare, and then I would drive right out of Montauk, because staying in town would be like putting up a billboard announcing our infidelity. Anyway, Mark works out of town, a long way out of town, in Brentwood. So I’d head to Starbucks, and then to a motel close to his office.

‘Mark says you have to keep as close to the truth as possible if you’re going to get away with it, don’t you, Mark? He won’t answer, but he does say that. He told his office, and even his wife, that he was using the motel as a work space every Thursday morning, a place where he could clear his head. He’s a project manager, he needs to do the blue-sky thinking, so everyone believed him. In fact they thought he was damn brilliant to do something so maverick.

‘I would park in the lot at the Starbucks and go in, so that if anyone saw me or my car there’d be no problem. I’d buy two coffees, then carry them direct to the door of our room, using a route that I knew kept me away from the eyes of staff. I kicked the door, which he left unlocked, and walked in.

‘It worked. It just worked. Those mornings kept me alive. I didn’t even feel I was doing anything immoral after a while. I felt that my home life was so much happier while I had this thing going on that in the overall scheme of things, what we were doing was a force for good. It’s not exactly unknown, right? Marital infidelity. I started to feel that this was the way people lived, the great unspoken secret of everyone’s lives, and I can tell you I loved it. It was like nothing I’d ever known. We could not keep our hands off one another. You noticed? There you go.

‘But after a bit, the motel became stifling. Boring. We started planning to go away together. At first it was a fantasy. “Wouldn’t it be amazing?” we’d say. “A foreign beach, palm trees, nobody we know, a place we could be together and proud instead of hiding away.”

‘One Thursday, Mark got out his laptop and started googling for a place to go. It had to be a tropical paradise. It had to be a place where Americans don’t go, so not the Caribbean, for instance. We needed there to be no chance of running into anyone. We thought about Cuba, but we’d have had to fly to Canada first, or Mexico, and it would have been complicated. We ended up landing on this place, and it looked perfect. Well, not
this
place. Obviously we did not plan for
this
fucking thing.

‘I’m not sure when the fantasy started becoming real, but suddenly it was. We planned our cover stories. We looked at it on the web and emailed the Paradise Bay to book. We composed the email together, and when Mark wrote that we were on our honeymoon, I thought I would die of happiness. I could not get enough of staring at the photos on the web. The paradise beaches, somehow different from our beaches at home. The little wooden cabins. The day spent snorkelling with the turtles and the tropical fish. Yeah, that. The one that brought us right here.

‘Mark got a new credit card and we paid for the flights with it. We were paying it back together. It was a store credit card so it looked as though those payments were just going to the store. We thought of everything.

‘We felt that because we were daring to do this, we would be sure to get away with it. Every detail was planned. We flew out separately, via different routes. My cover was a break in California to visit my cousin Liza. Liza was fine with my using her like that. She likes an adventure and she’s none too fond of Tom. She was the only person who knew about Mark and me. “All you have to do,” she said, “is to promise to tell me all about it when you’re back. Promise me that, and any time Tom calls you, I’ll say you’re in the bathroom.” In fact, my cell phone worked at Paradise Bay, so I was able to check in every day and tell him what I was up to, before he called me. A careful bit of planning of time zones, and he was never going to question it.

‘Mark’s story was a work trip in Hong Kong. He even went to Hong Kong and had a meeting there before we hooked up in Singapore.