This was where they'd first gotten together, vacationing with other wealthy Southern families the summer she'd flirted with his friend Huntley Parker, the year Lee was captain of the football team at his private boys' school and Kath made the varsity cheerleading squad at the sister school. And they couldn't not go. They'd gone every summer of their entire lives, and the children had, too, and they still hadn't said a word about their split to their families or to the children. And they weren't either of them ready to do that yet—which Kath took as a good sign. She thought maybe a return to the place of that early romance was what was needed to get her marriage back on track.
She dieted even more stringently in the weeks before they left, and lay out in her backyard in a new bikini so she wouldn't be marshmallow pale when Lee saw her in it. She packed the matching powder-blue suitcase and cosmetic bag Lee had given her for their anniversary one year, and she and Lee loaded the children into a taxi like they did every summer and set off for the airport. They flew to Atlanta and changed to a smaller plane that took them to the local airport where the family chauffeur—hers or his, that wasn't quite clear—picked them up.
I'm sure Kath had thought of the room arrangements. She must have. She'd been in that house enough to know that, big as it was, when Lee's whole family was in residence (his parents and grandparents and brothers and sisters and all the little cousins) there wasn't a spare room for spouses who weren't sleeping together. I wondered if she might somehow manage to stay with her family, use the excuse that she didn't see them but this once a year so she ought to stay with them, but I don't think that idea ever crossed her mind.
Did she sleep with him, cuddled together in the bed they'd first made love in one sultry summer night when his parents were at her house for bridge? He hadn't wanted to, he'd as much as said on the plane that he wouldn't do that, that he was in love with the other Kathy and he'd promised her he wouldn't. Kath choked on that. She wanted to whack him across the face, but she only turned to the window—thankful she'd taken the window seat—and looked out at the long stretch of square fields below, fields that looked unreal from this distance, that looked like a play world populated with dolls and toy cars and nothing that could really have any emotion at all.
The vacation was awful, Kath trying so hard every moment to win Lee back. She wooed him by wooing his mother, who'd always seen her as that slut of a girl who'd trapped her sweet Lee by getting pregnant, and his father, who could be wooed by almost any attractive and attentive young woman—at least there was that. She was the perfect sister-in-law; there were servants for the cooking and cleaning, but she watched all the children while the others played tennis or golfed or swam. She tucked her children in at night while Lee sat with the other men on the porch. Mornings, she brought him coffee and the newspaper in bed and made him eggs Benedict—the cook never did make it just the way he liked it—and he ate and read the paper and pretended she wasn't there. But those Southern manners go a long way toward covering up reality. No one had any idea that there was anything amiss.
Kath went to bed with Lee every night like a good wife, too, never once giving even a hint of the fact that, back in California, he was sleeping with someone else. The first night, the second, the third, she stayed up far too late, long after the other wives had gone to sleep, waiting for Lee to finish drinking and telling off-color jokes with his brothers. She wore sexy negligees, and she climbed in next to his turned back, and she didn't say a word about how humiliating it was to be sleeping with a man who'd rejected her, a man who was dreaming of another woman in his sleep.
It was the fourth awful night that she let go. She'd had a sidecar before dinner—they always had cocktails before dinner—and a refill at the table, and another afterward, and when everyone was out on the porch, lost in the kind of summertime laughter that the beach brings out in even the sourest of people, she'd slipped inside and poured herself a good stiff fourth. It wasn't the first time in her life she'd had four drinks in an evening, but she hadn't eaten much, either. She looked great in that bikini—all Lee's brothers had remarked on that, much to their wives' dismay—and she was not about to let go of that attention, that reminder to Lee of what he had in her.
She dawdled in the bathroom that night till Lee was in bed, then went to his side of the bed rather than hers. She stood in front of him, carefully silhouetted in the moonlight so he could see through her negligee. She knelt down on the floor beside the bed, and she touched his cheek, his hip, his leg. He didn't say anything, didn't respond, so she did the only thing she could think to do. She pulled her nightgown up over her head and knelt there, naked and exposed.