Last Resort (7 page)

The music is familiar to me, a calypso rendition of an American pop love song, and the band plays it expertly. I place my hand around Gwen’s waist and we sway unenthusiastically to the music, neither speaking nor looking at each other. With a jovial nudge, Don advises me how to dance with more zeal. I mumble a response, trying to force a smile. I look at Gwen; tears brim in her eyes. A lump rises in my throat. She breaks away from me, wipes her eyes, and heads towards the beach stairs. The couples dancing around us look on with concern. Embarrassed, I follow Gwen. She halts long enough to take her heels off, and then continues walking away from the bright lights of the restaurant towards the dark beach.

“Gwen, wait,” I call to her. She ignores me. I run after her, grab her arm, and spin her around.

“Where are you going?” I ask.

Weeping, she wraps her arms around herself. Wind off the ocean flings her hair in her face; she brushes it away. “What are we doing here, Phillip? We’ve spent so much money to come here and for what? I’m trying to save our marriage, Phillip. I’m really trying. Each time I feel I’ve made just a little progress with you…the next instant I find I’m right back where I started. We’re doing things together, having fun, and then we sit at a table like two complete strangers.”

“What do you want from me? To be the person I was before—the person I was before you cheated on me? You’re trying…well, I’m trying, too, but it’s not easy to go back to how things were before,” a sob catches in my throat. “Why’d you do it, Gwen? Why’d you throw it all away?”

A fat tear streams down her face. “I don’t know.”

“Was he funnier than me? Better in bed than me?”

“No, no,” she murmurs.

“Then why, Gwen? You’ve told me a lot of things since I saw you with Patrick. You’ve told me you were sorry. You’ve told me you love me. You even said that you’d work to bring us together again, but there’s one thing you haven’t told me. Why, Gwen? Why?”

Her voice is almost inaudible. “I don’t know.”

“Why?” I shout.

“I don’t know, Phillip. I don’t have an answer. If I knew maybe I wouldn’t have done it.”

I look back to the happy couples mingling in the lounge. Thankfully, they cannot hear us over the calypso band. Many of them are celebrating anniversaries while I stand on the shore with a marriage washing out on the tide.

I turn back to Gwen. “I’ll tell you something: I believe you love me. Yes, I do. Even when you were sleeping with somebody else I believe that you loved me.”

“Phillip—”

I raise my hand to stop her, and then continue speaking. “You said I was different from men you dated before. I made you laugh, I made you think, and that’s why you fell in love with me. But did I turn you on, Gwen?”

“Of course,” she responds.

I shake my head. “Not like Patrick, though. You’re a beautiful woman. You could have any man. On some level, you must have wondered to yourself how did I end up with this little drip.”

“That’s not true.”

“No? I think it is. In me, you had a man who was funny and smart, but I never really turned you on. Then someone like Patrick comes along, someone strong and tough, someone with money, a man that other people automatically respect, and he started paying attention to you. After coming home to someone like me every day all that attention from Patrick must have been very exciting.”

“Phillip, no.”

“It must have given you a thrill…this strong, handsome guy so interested in you. So, you decided ‘I’ll just flirt a little’ but it didn’t end there—no. Once you started, it felt too exciting to stop. Am I right, Gwen? Am I getting close?”

She swallows hard but does not answer.

“Am I getting close?”

“Yes,” her voice is barely a whisper, and then emphatically: “No! I don’t know. Maybe. One thing I do know is that I took you for granted. I admit it. I did not realize how wonderful you are—how right we are together. I know that now.”

“There’s something else you haven’t told me. Something you think I don’t know about.”

She looks confused. “What?”

“For the months that we were separated you led me to believe that you were crying in our empty bed, praying for me to come back. Yeah, you called me all the time…tried to work it out with me—but there’s one thing you neglected to mention: You were still with Patrick.”

She turns from me towards the dark ocean.

“Your affair with Patrick did not end the night I caught the two of you together. No, even while you called me—begging me to come back—you kept seeing Patrick—kept sleeping with him, too, I’ll bet. And how is it that I’m the one standing in front of you on this beach instead of him? Because, in the end, he didn’t want you.”

“It wasn’t like that,” she insists.

“Oh no? You’re telling me I am wrong?”

“I wasn’t with him. Not after you found out.”

I nod slowly. “Ah, but you did keep seeing him, correct? You wanted to keep me on the back burner in case your relationship with Patrick went nowhere. It took you a while, but eventually you figured out that he only wanted you for sex…he did not love you. Not like I did. That’s when you came crawling back to me. I’m not your husband. I’m your consolation prize.”

Gwen sniffles and wipes a tear from her face with the back of her hand. My words hang in the air like a storm cloud.

“Okay, yes, I guess it was exciting to be with Patrick—at first,” her tone is weary and forlorn. “But once you found out it changed everything. It wasn’t fun anymore. It wasn’t exciting. I felt dirty.”

“Then why’d you keep seeing him?”

“I was confused!” she wails. “I thought I’d lost you—that you were never coming back. Losing you caused me to see what a fool I’d been. I didn’t realize what an incredibly rare and beautiful thing I have with you…that we have together. I kept calling you but you wouldn’t take my calls and when you finally did, it was like talking to a statue. All the while, I had Patrick telling me to forget you. Okay, yes, it is true that I kept seeing Patrick even while I called you and tried to get you to come back to me, but I was not sleeping with him. Not anymore.”

“You expect me to believe that?” I sneer.

She is adamant. “You’re partly right when you talk about a consolation prize, but the consolation prize was not you—it was Patrick. When it looked like I had lost you forever I decided to salvage what I could, to see if out of the wreckage I could build something with Patrick. You were the one I wanted; Patrick was the one I was prepared to settle for. I tested him to see if his interest in me went beyond sex. You are right. I was just another trophy in his case. Once I realized that, it was fully and completely over between Patrick and me. I ceased all contact. Around this time, you started talking to me again. Just to hear your voice filled me with so much hope that I could reunite with the one man who made me truly happy. I was—and I am—prepared to do anything to win you back, even if it meant flying out to an island in the middle of nowhere just to spend time alone with you.”

I stare at her, uncertain what to say. She looks so earnest.

She takes my hand with both of hers and presses it to her heart. “I know I’ve lost your trust and you have no reason to believe me, but everything I just told you is true. Something horrible has happened between us, and it is all my fault, but I still believe we can move on from this.”

I pull my hand back and face the sea. It is so vast and empty. If only I could take all the anger, all the hurt I feel and throw it into that bottomless depth. How light I would feel—like being reborn.

She rests a hand on my shoulder. “It kills me to see the pain on your face and know that I put it there. Nothing I do seems to help. I don’t understand what I am doing here. Being with me only makes you miserable.”

“And being without you makes me miserable,” my voice is raw. “I can’t win, either way.”

“Phillip, let me ask you something,” she turns me around so that we are face to face. “I need to know this or else there’s no point in hurting ourselves any further. Do you still love me?”

I look into her eyes—those beautiful, beseeching eyes—and feel my heart disintegrating. The faith I’ve lost in Gwen cannot explain the intensity of the pain that sears my soul. If my agony only involved Gwen’s lies, then I would gladly believe the lies, turn a blind eye, and try as much as possible to believe in the illusion that was us. No, I realize that Gwen’s infidelity cost me two people: the woman I loved and the man I loved to be when I was with her.

“Phillip, please tell me. Do you still love me?”

“No,” I rasp.

A rush of emotions plays across her face—first surprise, followed by sadness, like a candle sputtering out. I start to speak, to say something else—maybe even to take back what I just said, but in that instant, all the lights in the resort go out, plunging us into total darkness.

Chapter Five

“Gwen?”

“I’m right here.”

“I can’t see a damn thing,” I look around waiting for my eyes to adjust to the sudden absence of light. “We must have lost electricity.”

The half moon barely sheds enough light to see three feet in any direction. I hear the waves crashing nearby, and feel the sea spray on my face, but I cannot see the ocean at all.

“The power outage must be affecting the other resort,” Gwen says. “The lights on the resort across the bay are out, too.”

I look to where I believe the other resort to be. In the impenetrable black, it is difficult to be certain. Gwen is correct; no lights twinkle back to us from across the bay.

“A power line may be down,” I suggest. “Let’s head back to the restaurant.”

We say nothing as we trod towards the restaurant. Surrounded in endless black, walking in solemn silence, I wonder if this is what death is like. A Greek myth springs to mind—that of Orpheus descending into Hades. Orpheus, stricken with grief over the death of his young wife, journeys to the realm of the dead to retrieve her soul. He sings a song of such beauty that the lords of the underworld permit him to take his wife’s soul back to the land of the living on the condition that he does not look behind him as he leaves. As I trudge in the darkness back towards the restaurant, Gwen silently following me, I imagine this is what Orpheus would have felt like. I cannot help but remember the myth ends badly; as they leaves Hades, Orpheus suspects his wife is no longer behind him and turns to check. She still followed him, but for breaking the rule against looking back, ghostly hands drag her to the realm of the dead, separated from Orpheus forever.

As my eyes adjust to the absence of light, I discern the shapes of the bungalows that line the beach. Tiny spots of light hover near the restaurant. Cigarette lighters. The people in the restaurant huddle around the small flames. I hear other guests emerging from their bungalow, stumbling in the darkness, and calling out in dismay over the power outage.

We ascend the restaurant steps to find Jonas Dunlap returning from the kitchen with a bundle of tiki torches and a large flashlight. “This should shed some light on the situation,” he lights the torches and passes them amongst his staff to disperse around the restaurant. He tries to use the flashlight but it does not turn on.

“That is odd,” Jonas empties and reinserts the batteries to no avail. “These batteries were not that old. Ah, well, now I know the meaning of the phrase
when it rains, it pours
.”

Jonas whispers instructions to the head of his wait staff, and then speaks to all those gathered in the restaurant. “I apologize for the inconvenience and assure you our back-up generator will be on momentarily. During this short wait for the electricity to return, I recommend you take advantage of our gracious staff and expert bartenders. If anyone wishes to return to their bungalow one of the staff will guide you, however I recommend remaining here until the lights come back on.”

“What the hell just happened?” Conner approaches the group with Alexandra and some other guests in tow. He wears the same dress shirt he wore earlier in the day, open to the waist, a white towel draped over his shoulders and his hair wet and slicked back. “I was in the middle of taking a shower and then it went black.”

“I am afraid we have temporarily lost power,” Jonas explains in a soothing tone designed to keep everyone calm.

“You’ve got bigger problems than that,” Conner asserts, his voice a little too loud. “There’s no water pressure.”

Jonas arches a questioning brow.

“Yeah, there’s no running water,” Conner says. “I couldn’t even finish my shower.”

“He still has the conditioner in his hair,” Alexandra volunteers to Conner’s annoyance.

One of the bartenders tests the faucet behind the bar. With a loud gurgle, water spurts out, but immediately dwindles to a trickle. With evident consternation, Jonas tents his fingers and touches them to his lips.

“I don’t see how this could be,” he muses aloud to no one in particular. “Unless the water plant also lost power, in which case the outage would be island wide.”

“I hope no one needs to use the loo,” one of the British guests gripes. Other guests mutter unhappily.

“Any water plant would have a back-up generator,” Bill advises. “The water pressure should be back soon. Call into town—to your sheriff, or whoever your authorities are. Let them know we’ve lost power.”

“Hmmm, yes,” Jonas agrees, his brows still wrinkled with concern. “In the meantime, let me check on our own generator. Please, everyone, order something from the bar while we make this inconvenience as brief as possible.”

The calypso band switches to acoustic guitars and steel drums to play again. A few stalwart couples make light of the disruption to their otherwise lovely evening and resume dancing.

Following his instructions, the staff encourages the throng of guests to take a seat at one of the tables so they can take our drink orders. Pamela and Bill beckon me to join them at their table. I begin to walk over to them and realize Gwen is not moving.

“You coming?” I ask.

“Go ahead,” she advises without looking at me, her tone flat and emotionless.

I leave her and sit with Pamela and Bill. A waiter comes for my drink order. The disorder from the power outage mirrors the confusion in my heart. It seems that nothing in this world works as it should—from the machines we build to the relationships we have to each other.