jealous husband, rushing out to catch his bisexual wife in flagrante delicto. More likely he didn’t like his wife monopolizing a woman he was interested in. Didn’t want them becoming friends, swapping notes.
The whole thing was sick. Jenny was sick of her part in the soap opera. “Regis!” she called over the engine noise. “This is a bad idea. We need to turn back.”
“We’re almost there,” he said determinedly. Less than a minute later, when he throttled back to turn the boat into the side canyon, Jenny tried again.
“Regis, take me back. The sun is nearly down. It will be too dark to make the climb up and back.”
“So we meet them halfway.”
He was set on making this particular mistake, and Jenny was along for the ride. She gave up.
Anna didn’t know she was in love with her, Jenny reasoned. Anna wouldn’t know that she’d agreed to “surprise” her and Bethy from base motives. No one would know except Regis and herself. That Regis now knew she was an easily manipulated lovesick fool didn’t much bother her.
That she was one did.
Regis nosed the speedboat in beside the Zodiac on the minuscule beach, nimbly walked over the pointed bow, and began tying up to the same deadwood to which the Zodiac was moored.
Before he finished, Bethy came stalking out of the opening in the sandstone. Suffused with blood, her face lent her the aspect of an exceedingly angry beet. Her hair, pulled back in a high ponytail, fifties cheerleader style, had partially escaped its rubber band and made inharmonious lumps on the side of her head.
“Bethy, is everything okay?” Regis asked cautiously at the same moment Jenny demanded, “Where’s Anna?”
“I want to go home,” Bethy said as she clambered over the side of the speedboat. “She can take the Zodiac.” She turned cold eyes on Jenny and said, “You can wait for her, for all the good it will do you.” Bethy dug the key to the Zodiac out of her shorts pocket and was about to heave it over the bow onto the sand.
“I’ll take it,” Jenny said quickly, grabbed the key, and climbed awkwardly out of the boat.
“Regis, I want to go home
“Anna—” he began.
“Now!”
Emotion left Regis’s face with the suddenness of a shade being drawn over a window. Without another word, he untied the boat, shoved it back from the sand, then leaped over the gunwale. In thirty seconds all that remained of the Candors was a wake lapping fiercely at the beach.
Key clutched in her hand, Jenny turned toward the neat vertical crack in the cliff.
“Anna?” she called timidly. Then, with rising panic, “Anna!”
Before Jenny could rush headlong into the slot, her housemate stepped from the dark of the crevice into the shadowless gray light of the evening. Her shoulders were slumped with weariness, a bruise was forming around her right eye, and a thin trail of blood from her nose had been smeared into a fan across her cheek.
“Jenny!” Anna said with a start.
“I came to surprise you,” Jenny said lamely.
“Everybody seems bent on surprising me today,” Anna said.
FORTY-FIVE
For the first time since Anna had arrived at Dangling Rope, she and Jenny spent the evening in the dim cool rattle of the swamp cooler’s realm. Anna was in no mood for social intercourse with their next-door neighbors. One on either side of the kitchen counter, she and Jenny sat on stools picking over the carcass of a frozen chicken-and- pineapple pizza.
“So she just hurled herself at you?” Jenny asked.
“I sat down next to her, prepared to be awed by natural beauty, and she went in for the kill. Our foreheads banged together and her chin hit me so hard it made my nose bleed. If we were still in high school, I swear our braces would have gotten locked. I haven’t been kissed like that since I was in fifth grade and George Cramer kissed me on a dare.”
“Is Bethy gay?” Jenny sounded more shocked than questioning.
“Beats the hell out of me,” Anna said. “If she is, she’s not very good at it.” Carrying her wine in the jelly glasses Jenny kept for that purpose, Anna slid off the stool and spread herself more comfortably on the couch, feet up on the scarred coffee table. The entire doomed affair was ridiculous. Anna doubted Bethy was now, or ever had been, homosexual. She dove in for the kiss with all the romance of somebody bobbing for apples.
“Regis was acting like he was afraid she was,” Jenny said. “He seemed jealous. That’s why we so conveniently turned up. Regis, checking on his wife.”
That surprised Anna. That he cared enough to be jealous of Bethy surprised her as much as the idea that he thought he might be married to a follower of Lesbos. Then, again, jealousy was not about caring, it was about fear of loss: loss of love, loss of power, or loss of security.
“So he thought Bethy took me out to the overlook for, well … for exactly what she did take me out to the overlook for?”
“To deflower you,” Jenny said wickedly.
“Compromise me,” Anna added.
“Take advantage of you.”
“Ruin me.” They laughed together easily. “If he thought Bethy was up to something, she had to have been dropping clues,” Anna said. “It’s not like anybody watching us together would get the wrong idea. Unless, of course, they were prurient bastards.”
“I don’t know,” Jenny said teasingly. “Pumping iron. Running bras and sweat.”
Anna scooped a none-too-clean sock up from the floor and flung it at her housemate.
Jenny snatched it out of the air and lofted it expertly into the wastepaper basket on the far side of the room. “What are you going to do?” Jenny asked. “Tell Regis he’s got nothing to worry about? Tell Bethy she’s straight?”
“Nothing,” Anna said. “I’m going to do exactly nothing. This is the sort of situation in which not taking any action whatsoever is the safest course. In fact, I’m going to pretend it never happened. Maybe that will let Bethy save face.”
“Maybe she’s been locked tight in the closet and this was her attempt to kick down the door,” Jenny suggested as she settled on the opposite end of the couch and propped her feet next to Anna’s. Between them was a triangle of sofa cushion fenced in by their legs, precisely the right size for a little skunk to safely play in.
“Wish Buddy was still here,” Anna sighed.
“Me, too,” Jenny replied.
They shared a moment of remembrance before Anna said, “I don’t think this was a closet thing. Have you ever felt one shred of heat from Bethy? I sure haven’t.”
“Me neither,” Jenny admitted.
“Sexual beings exude pheromones, esters, vibes,” Anna said. “If Bethy is gay, she is flying so far under the radar I doubt she’ll ever know why she cried more at the end of
Jenny thought about it for a moment. Anna waited. Whatever else Bethy had done today, she had certainly given her and Jenny endless grist for the gossip mill. It wasn’t often that anyone took Anna as off guard as she’d been at Lover’s Leap.
“No, now that you mention it,” Jenny said. “At least I don’t think so. I don’t know what her social life is like in Page, but on the lake it’s always been about Regis. Her first season she had a female housemate. They occasionally did things together—lift weights mostly, I think. They had different lieu days. After Regis started paying attention to her, that was that. No more time for the girlfriend. Regis loved his fast boat; Bethy loved fast boats. Regis loved to fly; Bethy loved to fly. I think she even soloed. If Regis had loved rolling in bat guano, you can bet that would have suddenly become Bethy’s favorite pastime.”
Holding a tangy swallow of wine in her mouth, Anna closed her eyes and returned to the unfortunately named
