Guilty Wives (3 page)

MY HEAD WAS
throbbing the next morning and I needed to melt for a while. The best beach and pool are the private ones at the Monte Carlo Beach Hotel, which is actually just over the border in France—something I knew without Bryah telling me. Bryah wasn’t her normal encyclopedic self this morning, having probably even less familiarity with a night of drinking than I. We had some thoughts of shopping, seeing the royal palace, Princess Grace’s grave—but first we all just wanted to chill.

We were all suffering but enjoying it at the same time. By the time we dragged ourselves to the beach club, it was almost eleven. The sun was high and brutally hot. The air was clear and dry and the sky was cloudless. The Mediterranean was an endless deep blue. The good life.

The pool at the Métropole was great, but this one was the place to be. That’s what we were told, anyway, and it turned out to be true. The place was at full capacity, making it hard for us to scramble together four chairs. There were plenty of swimmers in the humongous pool, but the sides were lined with people sitting and getting their legs wet. It was like a singles bar.

“A bit knackered, are we, girls? Then nothing like a dip.” Winnie slipped off her cover-up, revealing her black bikini. Two dozen men injured their necks in the process of getting a look at her. Serena, though not Winnie’s equal in beauty, was even taller and still had an athlete’s lithe body. Her bikini was gold. It seemed like we were under a spotlight.

Bryah kept her cover-up on—“It’s not like I need a tan,” she joked—consistent with her routine. We’d never talked about it. After the sprained arm, the dislocated shoulder, the broken fingers, the bruises on her forearm or thigh or back—somewhere in there it stopped being a coincidence, ceased being clumsiness. It wasn’t a regular thing, which meant that her husband, Colton, wasn’t a serial abuser. He was just a small, spiteful brute. And it was never Bryah’s face. Always a part of her body she could cover up. Which meant Colton was cautious. That, for some reason, made me despise him all the more.

I’d wanted to say something to Bryah so many times, but the three of us made a decision not to: she knew we loved her, that we’d do anything for her. If she wanted to talk, she would.

“Well?” Winnie looked back at us. She fingered the clasp on her bikini top. “When in Monte Carlo?”

Most of the people at the pool were topless. I would not be one of them; a red bikini underneath my cover-up was as racy as I got.

“When in Monte Carlo,” said Serena. She was still intoxicated by her performance at the casino last night. It wasn’t about the money per se; it was about her competitive nature. She’d turned her last bet of five thousand euros into a payout of 175,000 euros, putting her up 75,000 for the night. That’s over 100,000 U.S. dollars, if you’re keeping score.

Serena went first, removing her top. Winnie quickly followed. They covered themselves in suntan lotion, with extra for their headlights, and sauntered over to the pool to dip their toes in.

“I hate them,” I told Bryah. A waiter appeared out of nowhere. I ordered bottles of water, Champagne cocktails, and fruit plates for each of us.

Bryah settled in, donning fashionable shades and stretching her limbs in ecstasy. She really seemed to be unwinding. Serena and Winnie were making out okay, too. About a dozen men surrounded them within seconds of their approach to the pool. They were the flirtatious ones in our crew.

Sometimes it was more than flirtation. Serena hadn’t been faithful to Simon. The marriage had grown loveless, and sexless, years ago. Simon was good to her, by which I mean he provided for her, but that wasn’t really Serena’s style. Serena craved excitement, adrenaline, and there were only so many times she could jump out of an airplane or race a Formula One car around a track. She wanted passion in her love life. So, on two different occasions over the last five years, she’d found it with another man. And she’d been remorseful both times. She even suspected that Simon knew. My theory: She
wanted
Simon to know. She wanted him to fight for her. She wanted him to want her.

Now, it seemed, all she had was Katie Mei, the child she had adopted from China after two near-term miscarriages had ended her appetite for pregnancy. Katie was everything to her.

And Winnie? She was married to James Bond. Christien had been with British intelligence for years before taking a desk job with the British Embassy in Bern. Christien was handsome and mysterious. Just Winnie’s type. They were two drop-dead-gorgeous people with two drop-dead-gorgeous children. But something was off with them. It was hard to pinpoint it. And Winnie wasn’t one to complain. It was just the way she talked about Christien, the absence of enthusiasm. Winnie doted on her kids and threw herself into her charity work, raising money and advocating on behalf of autistic children, honoring her autistic brother, Winston. (That’s right, Winston and Winnie. Her parents had a sense of humor. Having these two kids, they always said, was a Win-Win situation.)

“If you’re a woman anywhere at this pool right now, you hate Win and Serena,” Bryah said with a chuckle. She was probably right. Almost every head was turned in their direction, and, look, this wasn’t exactly a pool full of homely people. Most of the women here were more done-up than the women at the casino, and at least half of them had improved a body part or two with surgery.

Drinks arrived, and I started on the Champagne. Why not? I was on vacation. I didn’t miss Jeffrey, I had to admit. I missed my kids, but I would have missed them in Bern, too. Richie and Elena were in boarding school in Connecticut, the same school Jeffrey attended as a child. I’d objected but lost the argument. I usually did, which was hard for me to admit. It was one thing for the kids to be in Connecticut when we were at Georgetown—Lakeville was about six hours by car, ninety minutes by plane—but quite another when we were in Switzerland. But I couldn’t ask Jeffrey to turn down this position at the U.S. Embassy, and I couldn’t ask my kids to pick up and leave the only school they knew, a school where they were happy.

“Enough,” I said to myself. “I’m on vacation.” I finished my Champagne and decided to drink Winnie’s, too. One of her poolside suitors had already bought her one.

“Let’s jump in,” said Bryah. “Want to?”

I looked at her and smiled. What was I waiting for? And why? Jeffrey? He was probably with his girlfriend at this moment.

“That sounds perfect,” I said.

NOT EVERYONE AT
the Monte Carlo Beach Hotel was having a wonderful time. Four men stood on a private balcony, sharing binoculars, observing the activity by the pool with something less than warm feelings.

“You see what I mean?” Colton looked at the other husbands. “Not just catching a tan, are they?”

“At least Bryah still has her bloody top on, Colt.” Christien couldn’t say the same thing for his Winnie.

“This is why you called?” Simon asked. “This is why we had to fly down here?”

Colton turned to Simon. “Look at them, man. Your Serena, as much as anyone—but all of them. It’s like they aren’t married women!”

“Oh, Colt—”

“And you should have seen them last night at the casino. A gaggle of wild
stukkies,
they were. Waltzing in, attracting attention. Not shying away from it, I can tell you.”

“Colton’s right. We should do something,” Jeffrey said in agreement. “This is unacceptable.” Tall and lean with carefully coiffed hair, he now looked more like the top U.S. diplomat he was than the Georgetown international relations professor he’d once been, back when he’d first met Abbie.

“There you go,
brah.
” Colton’s normally pale skin was purple with rage. To the others, he didn’t fit with Bryah. A forty-eight-year-old, pudgy, temperamental white man with an exotic young black wife. A cerebral young lady with an angry man who fancied a bulldozer over a handshake.

“And what,” asked Simon, “are you planning to do?”

“Not let them get away with it, that’s what.” Colton lifted his beige shirt, revealing a handgun stuffed in his pants.

“Bloody
hell,
Colt.” Christien, with the baritone voice, the detached manner. He took one step back.

Jeffrey stepped back, too, but didn’t speak.

“You’ve lost your mind!” said Simon. Prematurely gray but still physically fit at forty-four. Too focused, he would admit, on adding to a portfolio that already could keep generations in comfort. The adopted girl, Katie Mei, had been good for him, grounding him a bit more.

“This whole thing was a waste of time.” Simon looked at his watch. “My jet’s leaving in one hour. I need to be back in Zurich tonight. Will you all be joining me?”

Christien didn’t answer, keeping a cool stare on Colton’s weapon.

“Will you be joining me?” Simon asked again.

Jeffrey, the stuffy diplomat, raised the binoculars again. Abbie was in the pool, laughing at something a young man said to her. The man was younger, more muscular—more exciting than Jeffrey. He lowered the binoculars and looked alternately at Colton and Simon.

“I want to hear what Colton has in mind,” he said.

AFTER THE POOL,
we returned to the hotel. Winnie and I, sharing the front bedroom, chatted like schoolgirls about the cute boys at the pool while we put on makeup and plucked eyebrows and drank Champagne from long-stemmed glasses. Winnie went through a box of tissues as her allergies momentarily flared up. I was doing fine except that I had some water in my ear from the pool that numerous Q-tips failed to remedy. Life’s rough, right?

Then dinner in our hotel at Yoshi, Joël Robuchon’s Japanese restaurant. Quaint in terms of size—seating only forty—but not in design, which was luxurious Japanese modern with muted colors and stone. At the far end, the room swept open to a second story, from which hung a pearly eight-foot spiral chandelier. Beyond the far wall of glass was an ornate Japanese garden.

Serena and Winnie sat on the burnt-orange silk banquettes along the wall. Bryah and I took the comfy yellow chairs across from them. The table was set with black plastic mats, black-and-clear water glasses, and glass plates. A soft light burned in a green glass in the center of the table. Before we could say
banzai
we were drinking the house’s Bruno Paillard Champagne.

We were, quite simply, having a blast. We were sun-drenched and intoxicated and giddy. Over salmon sashimi and our first flask of sake, we decided to forgo our usual topics of conversation—global warming, nuclear proliferation, emerging markets in Latin America—in favor of describing the looks on our husbands’ faces during sex. In a nutshell: Simon looked like a chipmunk holding his breath. Colton, a seal giving birth. Christien gnashed his teeth as though he were about to pass a bowling ball. My Jeffrey was always a quiet one, closing his eyes intensely as though he were trying to remember the lyrics to a song.

“When was the last time, for any of you?” Bryah asked. She actually won; she and Colton were intimate last week. For Winnie, it was weeks. For me, months. For Serena, years.

“Wait,” I said. “Do you mean, when was the last time Jeffrey had sex? Or the last time he had sex with
me?
”

The joke fell flat. Even I had surprised myself with the comment. Winnie knew about Jeffrey’s affair, and I’d alluded to it previously with the others but never so explicitly.

“I don’t think Simon cheats,” said Serena. I was alarmed at how matter-of-factly she put it. She poured from a new flask of sake, which had been recommended by the sommelier. “He’s only attracted to things he can buy or sell.”

“Honestly, I don’t know about Christien,” Winnie chimed in. “I don’t think he cheats, but I never know
anything
about him. Y’know, last week he had a bit of the lurgy? I only found out when I heard him puking in the loo. And then I took his temperature and it was bloody through the roof. Not five minutes before that, I’d asked him if he was feeling up for a jog and he said, ‘Could be,’ with that straight face of his. Then he’s keeled over on his arse spilling his guts. He’s just got one speed, that one: man of mystery. Sometimes I want to remind him that he stopped playing Double-O Seven eight years ago.”

The edamame—salted, boiled soybeans in the pod—were fresh and firm and the octopus salad and boiled potatoes were seasoned to perfection. We shared orders of prawns tempura and vegetable fritters and grilled black cod wrapped in a banana leaf. A broth soup with tofu topped it off until dessert. I preferred the lime snow eggs but everyone else liked the lychee sorbet best. Ah, well, we celebrate our diversity.

More sake, and we were perilously close to being drunk—or perilously close to being so drunk we no longer realized it.

“Colton is just so insanely insecure,” said Bryah. “Whatever else—and I know what you all think of him—it all comes down to that. Insecurity.”

“I’d like to box his ears right, I would,” said Winnie, the alcohol loosening her discretion.

“No, I mean—oh, this is yummy.” Bryah had her first taste of the new sake.

“By all means, keep drinking, Bryah,” said Serena with her patented wink. Bryah was the most petite—probably a hundred pounds soaking wet—and I was a lot closer to her than to our tall, leggy friends across the table. Bryah and I were matching them sip for sip, regardless.

“But here’s an example. We were at dinner a few weeks ago and Colton’s talking to the waiter. The waiter’s a grad student in psychology. He said he was doing a thesis on the relationship between psychotherapy and Christianity. Colton makes a comment that Jung is the founder of psychotherapy. The waiter didn’t say anything, but later on, Colton realizes he meant Freud. It bothers him so much that he looked stupid to the waiter that he finds out the waiter’s schedule and makes us go back there for dinner again, just so he can strike up another conversation with the waiter and correct himself.”

“That would qualify as insecure,” Serena said in agreement.

“So here’s a question.” Bryah was coming out of her shell more and more as the weekend traveled on. “Raise your hand if you’re still in love with your husband. Honest, now.”

I looked at each of the ladies. Eight hands among us, all resting on the table.

I raised my hand.

“Abbie, really?” said Serena.

“No, I have another question,” I said. “Why are we spending our time on our getaway weekend talking about our husbands?”

“As of now, we aren’t,” said Winnie. “Promise?”

Our hands all met in the center of the table. Screw the husbands. We had each other. And the night, as they say, was still young.