An Absence of Light

Her hand dropped, and she sat up in bed. “Turn around,” she said. “Let’s talk.”

Last turned around and sat with his back resting against the headboard. Rayner arranged herself beside him and facing him, her legs crossed yoga style, her hands straight down on either side of her for support as she leaned back slightly. This provided him a wonderful view of her bosom, which he loved to look at and which she loved to have him to look at. Her strawberry blond hair was tousled.

“You know once you asked me why I never seemed hurt or sad or bitter because of the way Colin treats me?”

“Yes.”

“I gave you some fluffy answer.”

He nodded.

“The truth is that by the time you and I met in Veracruz, I had already been through that ‘hurt’ stage of our so-called marriage. It was past, well past. I should have listened to his first wife. She actually came to see me once, before I married him. A nice woman. I liked her, which should have been warning enough.” She paused and looked at Last. “That makes sense,” she said, “but I’m not sure you’d understand it. Anyway, when everything she had warned me about began proving true, I saw the handwriting on the wall.”

She paused and raked the fingers of one hand through her hair. “I’m not a total bitch,” she said, “but I’m not a patsy, either. We’d been married a couple of years, this house was new, and his business had just undergone a giant growth leap. Boom. Suddenly the business was huge. That was because Brod Strasser and another guy had bought into it.”

“Who was the other guy?”

“A Greek-a weird man if you ask me-named Panos Kalatis.”

“Colin told you all this?”

“God, no.” But she didn’t say how she knew. “Actually, these men own controlling interest now, or Strasser does, through one of his holding companies. Poor Colin’s just an employee for all practical purposes. A highly paid errand boy, no longer his own man. The man’s smart, Colin is. I’m not saying he’s not smart. It’s just that… I didn’t have much respect for the choice he made.

“Once he’d sold out, figuratively and literally, I thought to myself: okay, where am I, exactly? I’m married to a man who’s indifferent to me, treats me like an outdated appliance. I could live with that, I guess, for a while, if the benefits were good. I mean extraordinarily good.”

“But they weren’t.”

“No, not in the long term, I didn’t think. Colin makes this fabulous salary, but he doesn’t have a piece of the action. Fabulous salaries are great as long as you’re employed. But people get fired. I mean, the 1980s are littered with surprised executives. They thought it would never end too. But it always does. People like Strasser and Kalatis own the action. They don’t get fired. And when Colin’s no longer any use to them they’ll throw him away like something they’ve wiped their behinds on. He’s only a breath away from losing everything… whenever it suits them. And then where would that leave me?”

She reached out and took one of the tea rose pillows and held it in her lap, her arms wrapped around it. She looked at him a moment before she continued.

“So I made up my mind to get something out of this… relationship. I thought, well, if they can buy information I can too. I hired a first-rate private investigator. He documented on film and tape Colin’s affair with his secretary. In flagrante, as they say. It was rather erotic footage, if you could forget who they were. When I had had enough of it, when my sick curiosity had been indulged ad nauseam, I told the guy thanks and paid him off. Then I contacted the secretary and had her come over here one afternoon when Colin was out of town.

“We sat in the living room over there,” she said, looking through the walls of glass, “and I showed the videos to her. She was stunned and frightened. Ashamed. I kept playing them until she simply ducked her head and wouldn’t watch them anymore. It was cruel of me and, frankly, I surprised myself. By this time I didn’t think I had any emotional investment left in the man, but I found that I was getting some kind of unseemly satisfaction out of this perverse humiliation of her. But finally I stopped.