Guilty Wives Read online

  “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.

  CHAPTER 5

  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.

  CHAPTER 6

  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 tas
te 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.

  CHAPTER 7

  HE WATCHED THEM from the other side of the street, across from the Hôtel Métropole and the restaurant, Yoshi. Laughing and stumbling and hugging, the four lovely ladies. The four gorgeous troublemakers.

  They’d spent the entire afternoon at that pool, then had gone back to the room to shower and prepare. Cocktails on the terrace, no doubt, then dinner at Yoshi at nine. A busy day for them. A day that, from the look of things, was far from over.

  He stamped out his cigarette, his first in more than ten years. Excusable under the circumstances, he thought. Being nervous was natural, even for someone who prided himself on his focus during storms.

  He did feel nervous, yes, but in a positive way. He felt invigorated. He felt dangerous and volatile and he liked the feeling of empowerment. Light on his feet and ready for action. And always comforted by this fact: the decision would not be his. It would be her decision. No—their decision, the four of them.

  He was merely reacting. Eradicating a wrong. Avenging an injustice. This wouldn’t be his fault.

  Also comforted by this fact: he could always pull the plug. Abort. Right now he was only thinking, preparing. He could always change his mind.

  But his pulse was popping. He felt anger in the clench of his jaw, saw it in the white of his knuckles. He wasn’t going to change his mind. This was unacceptable. He could be a lot of things. He’d been called a lot of things.

  “But never a fool,” he said.

  CHAPTER 8

  “ACTING YOUR AGE is overrated!” I shouted—forgetting that I was a mother of two and a forty-one-year-old wife who’d been married seventeen years. Not that anyone else heard me. The music’s bass line pulsated like a collective heartbeat throughout the dance floor, where about two hundred of us were gyrating and throwing ourselves around and screaming for no apparent reason, other than that it was fun. Overhead scanner lights swiveled about desperately, cutting through the darkness. Fluorescent-tube lights adorned the walls, sometimes emitting a strobe effect, which made us all look like we were moving in slow motion as we danced around at top speed and the DJ above us orchestrated the entire thing.

  It was sticky-hot and we were wall-to-wall people and I kept thinking, Who concert, Who concert, but it would have dated me if I’d said anything to the vast majority of the dancers, whose average age was probably late twenties. The place was huge, the dance floor the principal focus, but there were still plenty of people crammed into the bar and seating areas, where they would have the privilege of dropping almost thirty euros for a bottle of water or a Diet Coke. Mix in some liquor and you needed a second mortgage.

  Well, I would, anyway. These were the jet-setters, the sheikhs and celebrities and assorted robber barons—and their adult children, vibrant and aimless in their ignorant youth. I missed ignorant youth. But I was living it again tonight.

  Someone grabbed my arm. Winnie. “I’m going to the bar!” she yelled. She had to repeat it twice over the pulsating thump, thump of the music—or maybe that was my heart beating.

  “If you need to sell an organ to buy a drink, make it a kidney,” I said. “You have two of them.”

  “All right, then,” she said, which roughly translated to: “I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

  I thought of following her but this was too much fun. I danced back-to-back with Serena and we almost stuck to each other from the sweat. I looked up to the open-air ceiling, through the exposed pipes to the freckles of stars overhead.

  Nice night, I thought. This must be someone else’s life.

  Three songs later, I’d burned off all the calories from Yoshi. Even Serena, the Olympian, was in need of a break. We couldn’t find Bryah.

  We danced back to our seats, a semicircle of red leather within which were nestled tiny cocktail tables topped by candles. Winnie was seated next to a well-heeled man in an expensive suit with a full head of hair and a manicured beard, easy enough on the eyes but attractive more for his carriage, his evident ease with himself. He had his arm over the back of the leather and, thus, over Winnie.

  “Who’re the hotties?” Serena said to me in what passed in this place as a whisper, meaning she was practically screaming in my ear.

  Another man, wearing a dark suit and white shirt with an open collar, was chatting with Bryah while he nursed a glass of clear liquid that could have been anything. He was younger and stockier than the guy with Winnie, an athlete, maybe.

  “Hey!” Bryah grabbed my hand and pulled me to her. “This is Luc,” she said. “These are my friends Abbie and Serena.”

  “Enchanté,” he said in a deep voice, giving each of us the European double-kiss greeting.

  “He’s a race-car driver,” Bryah said. “He raced the Grand Prix here.”

  “Really,” said Serena, her interest piqued.

  My eyes stole around the two of them to another man in a cream silk shirt and black slacks talking to another woman. His eyes met mine and he managed a seamless departure from his conversation. The next thing I knew, he was extending his hand to me. He was dark and swarthy, a few days’ growth of beard on his face, thick dark hair messed in a haphazard style.

  It took just that long for my brain to connect the dots, to recognize the face from the dozens of movies I’d seen.

  “Damon Kodiak,” we said simultaneously.

  “Enchanté,” he said, then the kiss to each cheek. His cologne was something outdoorsy.

  I felt something warm course through me, and it wasn’t the bass line of the music. Yeah, I thought. Enchanté.

  “You’re stunning,” he said to me. “If I may.”

  It was like a dream. The darkness punctuated by the fluorescent colors. The thousand-dollar bottle of Cristal on the table. The alcohol numbing one part of me and awakening another. The attention of an A-list Hollywood actor with a barrel chest and a deep voice and piercing blue eyes focused, for the moment, on me.

  “You may,” I said. You definitely may.

  CHAPTER 9

  I DIDN’T KNOW if time was standing still or accelerating. It became irrelevant. Two bottles of Champagne became four. The dizzying lights began to seem natural. The throbbing, percussive music became my pulse.

  The darkness cast Damon’s face in shadow, but somehow I could see him clearly. The powerful, scruffy jaw, the warm eyes, the messy hair. At some point, his hand had become planted on my knee. At
some point, that had felt natural, too.

  “I love this song!” Winnie shouted. Something in French, a woman’s husky, sultry voice over pounding electronic music. The four of us had become eight. Winnie with the wealthy Frenchman, a man named Devo. Serena with the Grand Prix driver, Luc. Bryah was with a well-dressed musician from Morocco named François.

  Make that nine of us. An American, whom Damon seemed to know, a heavyset man in a silk shirt, assorted jewelry on his fingers, and a goofy hat. He was pretty goofy himself, but it seemed like he was springing for the booze and nobody was complaining.

  “Do you want to dance?” Damon asked me. The way those signature eyebrows arched, I could see that he didn’t.

  “I’m fine where I am,” I said. We’d formed our own little cocoon at the table.

  “Are you?” That strong hand, moving slightly on my leg.

  I leaned into him. “Can I be honest?”

  “Of course.”

  “I didn’t like Four’s a Charm. I liked Three. And I thought Five was funny, too. But Four? Four guys break out of prison and steal all the evil warden’s money? C’mon.”

  Damon nodded. “They wanted that one. I didn’t want to do it but they did.”

  “They?”

  “The money men,” he said. “The financiers. I had a ten-movie contract with them and they usually let me decide, but—once in a while…”

  “Once in a while they make you do one that stinks.”

  He smiled widely, as if genuinely amused. “I have to tell you, Abbie, most women wouldn’t admit to me that they hated one of my movies.”