Last Resort (60 page)

His jaw tightened for a moment; then, continuing, he said,

"She got me so screwed-up over her I didn't know what the hell I was 468

doing. It was the same for her - it was like we just couldn't get enough of each other. We met at some party in LA and within half an hour of being introduced we were screwing our brains out in the spare room, while my wife and her husband were downstairs mingling with the other guests. I hadn't met Christian before, I hadn't even heard of him, but knowing him wouldn't have made a difference. I'd still have screwed his wife and I'd have done it right in front of him if that was what she'd wanted.

"Of course the minute we walked back in the room Gabriella knew what had been going on. She was standing there, almost eight months pregnant, radiant and happy and flirting with some guy, like she was glad to have the attention when she was so heavy and close to giving birth. I don't think she'd ever dreamt that I would screw another woman while under the same roof as her, much less do it while she was pregnant."

The edge of bitterness that had crept into his voice was evidence enough of how digusted he felt at himself for what he had done. Til never forget the look on her face when she saw me,"

he said.

"The pain was raw. But it wasn't only pain, it was fear. It had frightened her to realize that I could hurt her that much; and it was like she knew already that this was the end, that there would never be any going back. I had committed the ultimate sin and no matter how much we loved each other she would never be able to forgive this single act of treachery that made all the others pale by comparison.

"We left the party soon after. I don't remember much of what we said on the way home. She was crying, I was yelling, trying to deny it, I guess, I don't really remember now. By the time we got home she was hysterical. She grabbed a knife and tried to stab me with it. I managed to get it away from her, but she damned near wrecked the place - throwing things at me and telling me to get the hell out of her life. I didn't want to leave her alone, 469

but I knew I was only making things worse by being there, so I called a friend of hers and asked her to come over. When the friend got there I left and went to a hotel. And do you know what I did then? I called the party we'd just left and spoke to Jenny. She came right away and she was barely in the door before I was screwing her again."

He was shaking his head in disbelief, as though he just couldn't connect with the man he was talking about. Sighing deeply, he forced himself to go on.

"We stayed holed up in that hotel for four, five, days, I don't remember now.

No one knew where we were - Jesus, I don't think we even knew where we were except in some Orphic oblivion where nothing existed beyond the madness that had possessed us both. I tried to call Gabriella a couple of times, but she put the phone down on me and I just turned over and went on screwing Jenny like I couldn't give a damn. Of course, I did give a damn, I loved Gabriella, but I just didn't seem able to stop what was happening. It was like I had lost control. I could see everything slipping away from me, but none of it seemed to matter."

He pressed his fingers to his eyes. "My father had died six months before and

... Well, I'm not about to use that to make excuses for myself. All I'll say is that his death hit me hard. We'd always been close and when he went it was like nothing made sense any more. Nothing seemed to have a point to it. I had no idea just how fucked-up I was because of it, but, looking back, it was like I was on some kind of mission to self-destruct. But like I said, it's no excuse for what I did to Gabriella.

"At the end of the four, five, days I went back to her. She'd calmed down a bit by then, but, when she asked where I'd been, like a god-damned fool I told her. Don't ask me why, except I didn't want to lie to her, not when she knew I was lying. My mother had flown up from Miami by then with torn, our eldest, who was two at the time. I don't even want to think about the scenes that 470

went on over the next few weeks until Gabriella gave birth, but they were hell for us all, particularly for torn His mommy was constantly in tears, his granny hardly stopped shouting at his daddy and meanwhile all daddy could think about was Jenny Mureau. She was like an obsession with me. I couldn't get her out of my mind. I was on fire for her every minute of the day. She kept calling me at the office, begging me to see her. I held out for a while, but not for long. I couldn't. I can't explain it now, I don't even understand it now, but back then it was like it was eating me up, like I'd go crazy if I didn't see her. So I saw her."

He paused for a moment, frowning. Tou know, the strange thing is/ he said,

"I can't even say the sex was good. Maybe it was -1 guess it must have been to have got me so worked up - but I can hardly remember it now. All I remember now was this compulsion to do something I knew right from the start was going to end up destroying my life. Which it has, but in ways I couldn't even begin to imagine then."

Pausing again, he leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, linking his hands in front of him and staring down at the sunbaked deck. "The turning point came when Jack was born,"

he said tonelessly.

"I was there with Gabriella throughout the labour. She had a pretty rough time of it and the fact that my mother had located me in some hotel with Jenny to tell me the labour had started turned the whole thing into a bloody nightmare.

It went on for hours ... You don't need to know the details: just suffice it to say that Gabriella's pain, on all counts, was what finally started to bring me to my senses. And then, seeing our second son coming into the world, seeing Gabriella's love for him and the hesitancy in her eyes when she handed him to me..."

He swallowed hard.

"She was afraid I wouldn't want him; she thought I was going to turn my back on them."

His breath caught on the words and he stopped.

Then, swallowing again, he said,

"My mother brought

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torn into the room then and as I looked at her face it was like I could see my father. It was like she or he was reminding me that I was a father too, a father who was fucking up his children's lives. And I guess it was then that I realized that nothing was as important as those two boys - no woman, no obsession, no amount of money or success, just nothing. They were all that mattered and I had to do something to get myself together before I ended up losing it all.

Tn the weeks before Jack was born my mother had hardly been able to bring herself to speak to me. She was still dealing with her own grief over my father's death and seeing her son behaving the way he was, neglecting her grandchild, abusing his wife, bringing the kind of shame upon himself that would have broken my father's heart... Well, it was a lot tougher on her than I realized at the time and that's why I don't blame her for what she's done since. God knows, I've deserved it."

Lifting his head, he gazed sightlessly out at the view. T saw Jenny one more time after Jack was born,"

he said.

"We made love, but after, while we were going back in the car, I told her it was over. By then I knew who her husband was, mainly because she'd told me about him, but now that I knew his name I'd started to listen whenever it cropped up in conversation. On the face of it he was an art dealer, but it didn't take much scratching beneath the surface to know that the incredible sums of money he'd made had come from a more sinister source. At that stage of the game it was only marijuana - the heroin came later, much later ..."

He stopped and turned his heavy eyes to Penny. She held his gaze, saying nothing as he smiled weakly then looked away. There were no words to ease his suffering, nothing to be said that could undo what he had done in those nightmare months between the death of his father and the birth of his son. He was paying for it now and she guessed that no one was going to be harder on him

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than he already was on himself.

"Anyway/ he went on,

"like I said, I told Jenny we couldn't continue. Surprisingly, I didn't find it as hard as I thought I would. It was like the fever was coming to an end and, beautiful as she was, I couldn't work out what it was about her that had driven me to such a pitch. I knew it was Gabriella that I loved, that I had a long way to go before I got my marriage back together, but that was all I wanted then. Jenny was a madness I had miraculously and mercifully recovered from. The trouble was that those around us never recovered. Jenny did, but it took a lot longer for her than it did for me and by then it had destroyed her marriage. She didn't love Christian and wasn't sure she ever had, but he was as crazy about her as I had been. More so. He worshipped her. He lived for her. Everything he did was for her. So when she told him she was leaving it was like his entire world fell apart.

"I think the first he ever knew about me was when she told him she was leaving him because of me, even though we hadn't seen each other in months by then.

She told him she couldn't go on living a lie, pretending she loved him when the only man she wanted was me. Whether it was true I don't know. As I said, I hadn't seen her in months and neither had I heard from her. I got to hear about it through Gabriella, who'd heard it from one of Jenny's friends. Of course, Gabriella presumed from that that Jenny and I were still seeing each other. Nothing I said could persuade her otherwise and who could blame her for not believing me when I'd never given her much reason to trust me even before all this."

He stopped and rubbed a hand over his face, giving himself a moment to think.

"The months following Jack's birth hadn't been easy,"

he continued.

"Gabriella had tried to forgive me, but we both knew she hadn't: in truth she wasn't even close. Then, when she heard that Jenny had left Mureau, she became convinced I was

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going to leave her and almost overnight she went crazy. I mean, she lost her mind. She did things ..."

He took a breath.

"She got a priest in to exorcise our house. She held a crucifix in my face every time I tried to go near her. She started talking to people who weren't there, or telling people who were there that I was trying to kill her. It was obvious she was heading for a serious breakdown; but when I finally got her to a doctor, it was like ..."

he shook his head incredulously'... it was like nothing was wrong. She was suddenly back to normal and I was the crazy one for saying she'd done all those things.

"Anyway, she might have had a better grip on her sanity by then, but the bitterness had reached an all-time high. Her sole purpose in life now was to make me suffer for what I had put her through. She started jeering at me and trying to humiliate me in public. She was spending to the point she might bankrupt us and threatened all the time to leave me and take me for every penny that was left or I'd ever make in the future. If it weren't for the boys I'd have got out then, but I couldn't leave them with a mother who was as unstable as that, and to take them away ... Well, God only knows what that would

have done to her.

"Then one day she just packed up and went. She did it without telling me: I just arrived home to find them all gone. I didn't know then what had happened to make her go. It was only later that I found out Mureau had called her and told her that I was seeing Jenny again. It was a lie, of course, but when I finally tracked Gabriella down at my mother's she wouldn't even speak to me and neither would she allow me to speak

to torn.

"Anyway, knowing that not seeing the boys would be what would hurt the most seemed to keep Gabriella happy for a while. But then, when I stopped calling, in the hope that my silence would provoke her into calling me, she went the other way and responded to the over-474

tures Mureau had been making to her ever since Jenny had left him.

T knew nothing about the approaches he'd made, of course. Not until Gabriella told me herself that she was divorcing me to marry Mureau did I know that he'd even been in touch with her. I flew straight to Miami and forced her to see me. I knew by then that we were never going to repair things. Oh, in our own miserable and pathetic ways we still loved each other, but too much damage had been done. She just couldn't find it in her to forgive me and I couldn't blame her for that when I couldn't forgive myself. Still, like I said, we saw each other. She broke down the minute she walked in the room, we both did, and for a while there it seemed like we might get it together. She broke off her affair with Mureau, I moved to Miami because that was where she wanted to be and though we lived separately we saw each other all the time. But she just couldn't let it go. Every time she saw me talking to another woman she accused me of sleeping with her. If I was as much as five minutes late to pick up her and the boys she'd put it down to me not being able to get out of another woman's bed in time. And every time I picked up Jack she'd remind me of what I had done while she was carrying him.

It got so that I couldn't take it any more. We were destroying each other and I could see what an effect it was having on torn."

His voice had become unsteady now, strangled by unshed tears.

"Every time I looked at his little face and saw all that confusion and the way he was struggling so hard to make things better, like he was the one to blame

... It damned nearly broke my heart. When his mother wasn't around he used to creep into my lap and hold on to me like he was ... like he was trying to tell me he was sorry. He was three years old, for God's sake. Three years old and he was blaming himself. He didn't dare to show me any affection in front of 475

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