“Honey,” I said to Mona as she lay dejected and wretched on our couch.
“What?”
“Let’s go out to dinner and then, and then let’s get Seela and go to that inn you like in Montauk.”
“It’s Saturday,” she said. “It’ll be booked up.”
“I’ll call,” I said. “If they’ve got a room, we could go there.”
Seela answered the door wearing the same blue housecoat.
“Millie and Martin are asleep,” she whispered.
“I got us a room in Montauk for tonight and tomorrow night,” I said. “Come with us.”
At any other time Seela would have said no. She didn’t like sudden changes. But I was sure that she was in bed thinking about her transgressions, and she must have felt especially used with Martin in bed with Millie again.
Seela was a good girl and easily made to feel bad.
“Okay,” she said, failing to make a smile.
“We’ll be in the car out front,” I told her.
I had already called Svetlana.
“I’m going to take Mona and Seela out to Long Island for a day,” I said. “I have to get things straight with them.”
“Okay,” Lana said.
“That’s all? Just ‘okay’? Aren’t you mad at me?”
“No. They are your family. I will be here — waiting.”
“Lana—”
“Don’t worry, Ben, darling. I am here... for now. You must live your own life. I will be here waiting for you.”
When I got down to the car, I found Mona asleep against the passenger-side window. We owned an old Citroen. It was olive green and had the look of a VW bug that had been squashed down by some heavy-footed behemoth. It had a hydraulic system that made you feel as if you were riding in a boat instead of a car. And owning a Citroen was unique; there were no other cars on the road to rival it.
I got in behind the wheel.
“Is she coming?” Mona asked.
“I thought you were asleep.”
I rubbed the palms of my hands along the laced leather guard on the steering wheel. The supple and yet rough texture against my skin elated me. I was alive and still able to move forward in my own life.
“I was watching two men have sex in that doorway across the street,” she said, almost wistfully. “One of them was dressed like a woman. He was fucking the other one. I was watching them and then I was in Saint Croix with my family on a vacation.”
“She’s getting dressed.”
“What are we going to do, Ben?” Mona asked, sitting and waking up with a twist of her shoulders and torso.
We hadn’t talked much at dinner. She was still too sad about Harvard and his sudden, inexplicable desertion.
“Why didn’t you tell me about Barbara Knowland?” I said in answer to her question.
We both knew how long it took for Seela to put together her things and so it made sense to start a longer conversation. We had at least fifteen minutes’ waiting time.
“Harv said that he should look into it before bothering you,” she said, avoiding looking into my face.
“Had you already started your relationship then?”
Mona hesitated a long while and then whispered, “Yes.”
“So you made love and then decided, or maybe it was the other way around,” I speculated. “Maybe he told you to leave me flapping in the wind and then he took you up in his arms.”
“You don’t have to be cruel, Ben.”
“Did you at least consider telling me?” I asked.
“Yes. Of course I did. But, you see, Barbara didn’t call me first, she called Harv. She knew him because he had talked to her in Oakland, to see if we should do the original story on her. He’s the one that told me about the accusation. Telling you would have involved him and that was just too... confusing.”
“But, honey,” I said in an evenly metered voice, “not telling me might have gotten me sent to prison for the rest of my life.”
Mona looked at me sorrowfully and Seela rapped on the window. She had a bag that was filled with enough stuff to go away for a week.
“Pop the trunk, Daddy.”
Mona and Seela slept on the long late-night drive. Or, when I think back on that night, maybe they just pretended to be asleep. Both of them had a lot on their minds. Mona betrayed me and in return was let down and deceived by both me and her lover. Seela was losing her parents, and she had in her own way betrayed those that she loved.
I worried about them on that ride, and not as distant relatives with vague problems, which is how I usually saw my wife and daughter, but as victims of my own wanton disregard.
I didn’t feel guilty about what I’d said to Harvard “Harv” Rollins. A man had to do something to derail an affair like that. But all those years of quiet indifference I showed Mona and Seela had taken from them the water of life. They were dried-up seeds hoping for dew or the sweat of strangers. And I was the drought, the famine that afflicted them.
Oddly, these thoughts soothed me on that three-hour drive. I felt that my passive crimes against my parents, my wife, and daughter explained why people were after me, looking to put me in prison.
It was as if I had summoned up Barbara Knowland and Winston Meeks, Harvard Rollins and my wife’s betrayal. I was guilty and this was my punishment.
Most guilty men, I’d been told many times over, see themselves as innocent; this is the tragedy of the criminaclass="underline" Because of his denial of guilt, he can never learn and therefore cannot contribute to the rehabilitation, not of himself but of the world that he has wronged. But I was guilty and I knew it. Maybe I hadn’t murdered Sean Messier, but I had wronged my family.
When these notions came into my mind, I laughed out loud. The ladies roused in their slumbers, or pretenses, and then settled again.
We got a place at the beachside Montauk Manor House because someone had cancelled a reservation just an hour before I called. They left the door to our bungalow open and we tumbled in late that night, all of us going to sleep almost immediately. We didn’t even take our bags from the car.
I awoke to the sound of the ocean through the open window, the susurration of waves felt as if it were calling to me.
Mona was deep asleep. She didn’t stir as I climbed out of the rickety bed. I went into the common room of the suite. Seela’s bag was on the broken-down blue sofa. That meant she was up and had already gone to the car.
The sliding glass doors that led to the ocean were open.
I could see my daughter walking down along the beach in shorts, her dark legs scissoring the bright sunrise.
“Hi, baby,” I said, coming up to Seela.
I was barefoot, wearing gray suit pants and an old T-shirt.
“Hi, Daddy.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked, responding to her tone of voice.
“I don’t know how to talk to you now that you found me up there with Martin.”
“I already told you about me, honey, and it’s not like you did something wrong, Seela. You aren’t married to Jamal. Martin’s not married to Millie. It was me that was wrong for even mentioning Jamal’s name.”
“It’s not that,” she said.
The cold water from the sea rolled over my bare feet and pant cuffs. It crossed my mind that I would have never allowed my business clothes to get wet like that before.
“What is it then?” I asked.
“Are you going to break up with Mommy?”
“That has nothing to do with you or anything you’ve done.”
“When Marty came over yesterday, I had no idea what was going to happen,” she said. “Neither did he.”