Fidelity

15

Ted Forrest stood at the eighteenth tee and adjusted the brim of his cap to shade his eyes as he stared at the long strip of deep green fairway. He had played this course as a child. He knew the five hundred and sixty yards, the dogleg to the right that began about two hundred and fifty yards out, and the stand of tall eucalyptus trees that made a straight drive to the right across the curve an illusion. He knew he must try to place the ball in the center of the fairway as far out as possible so he would be able to see the green for his second shot. All day he had noticed the fact that there wasn’t much roll on the fairway because the liberal watering had caused a lush growth of grass.

Forrest planted his feet, riveted his eyes on the ball, and began his backswing. At the top of it, his left arm was straight and his hands in a firm, comfortable grip. Then he swung. There was his fluid hip motion, and he caught a glimpse of the perfect silver whip-flash of the shaft coming around. The clean clop when the head hit made the ball whistle off straight into the distance like something fired from a launcher.

Forrest didn’t really have to look because he could tell from the feel and the sound that the ball was on its way to the spot he had chosen, but he watched because he loved the sight. The trajectory was low, straight and accurate, the ball retaining its momentum for second after second, the air finally slowing it enough to make it drop. He had been right about the roll. The ball bounced once, then dribbled and rolled a short distance. But he could tell it had cleared the eucalyptus woods.

“Perfect,” Cameron Powers said. “We might as well pay you now.”

Forrest held out his hand. “I’m perfectly willing to save you the trouble of paying me in front of the club, if you’d prefer to give me this hole.”

“Very kind,” Dave Collier said. “But paying gambling losses in public builds a reputation as a good sport and a gentleman. So go fuck yourself.”

“Said like a true sport and gentleman. Good luck with that reputation.” Forrest turned to the others in the foursome. “Anyone else want to take advantage of my thoughtful offer? You won’t even have to humiliate yourselves by teeing off.”

Owen Rowland said, “Thank you, but no.”

Cameron Powers merely shook his head without speaking because Collier was taking a practice swing. They all watched in silence as he smacked the ball and it flew with perverse intelligence straight to the woods, caromed off a tall tree to the ground, and caused a small explosion of dry eucalyptus leaves and shredded bark. His companions guffawed, but he said, “What? That was the tree I was aiming at.”

The others took their turns. No drive was as good as Forrest’s or as bad as Collier’s. This was as it had been all morning, and as it had been for most of the past forty years. It was always Ted Forrest who hit the best drive, or, when they were in high school together, threw the pass for the touchdown, or won the race. It was the natural order of things. The others competed hard, but when one of them won, there was always the same agreement among them that it was an oddity, that the story of the game wasn’t what had worked for the winner, but what had kept Ted Forrest from winning.

The four friends were nearly the same age-all in the last few seasons of their prime. They had already turned fifty, but still looked like hard-worn forty, and each of them felt the poignancy of these games they played together, but expressed it only in jibes and self-deprecating humor. They had all been born to the class who found open sincerity between men to be in poor taste except on the battlefield or in a hospital, but somehow jokes about age had come up more than once in this game, and had dampened some of the group’s exuberance.

Forrest walked with Cameron Powers for their second shot. The Los Ochos Club was one of the old-style private courses where golf carts where not permitted. The members whose physical infirmities or moral laxity kept them from carrying their clubs could hire caddies at the pro shop, but the four friends never did. It was partly because they were all vain about fitness, but partly because the presence of another person would have violated the exclusivity of the foursome, and inhibited conversation. They carried their own clubs, just as they sailed their own boats in the summer and carried their own skis in the winter.

They all worked hard, although none of the four had ever performed services for money. When they spoke of work, it was understood that they meant some form of regular practice to improve their skills or their fitness. Cameron Powers said, “You’ve been working on your drive.”

“That’s right,” said Forrest. “I’ve been working with Dolan, the new pro. I figure we’ve reached the top of the mountain. We joke about age, but it’s going to start being a factor. Strength and flexibility decline. Eventually even stamina becomes a problem. So from here on, it’s all going to be about technique. Whoever goes into middle age with the best technique is going to be the one to beat.”

“Goes into middle age? Aren’t we middleaged now?”

Forrest looked at Powers with an expression of exaggerated concern, moving his eyes from Powers’s golf shoes up his pressed pants, lingering for a second at the way his knitted golf shirt stretched at his belt line, and up to his forehead. “I guess you are. Sorry, buddy.”

“Come on. I mean we’re over fifty. If I remember, you turned fiftytwo last month. In fact, didn’t fifty used to be the end of middle age?”

“Yep. We’re practically dead.”

“I’m not tying to depress you, but hell, Ted. Those of us who don’t have technique by now are just going to have to accept the news that we missed it.”

“Suit yourself,” Forrest said. “I’m fighting it.”

“No, I meant I already have the perfect technique,” Powers said. “I was just feeling bad for you.”

“We’ll have to see whether that’s justified, or it’s just stray voltage in your ancient brain.” They arrived at the part of the fairway where their balls lay. Forrest’s drive had been at least fifty yards farther. They selected their clubs for their second shots and stood patiently while the other players went first.

When it was his turn, Forrest made the green in two. Powers hit a sand trap to the left of the green, topped the ball with his wedge shot and sailed it over the green into the rough beyond. Rowland’s cautious play got him on the green in four and a short putt put him in second place to Forrest’s birdie four.

Afterward, the four men walked to the clubhouse and had lunch together. A membership in Los Ochos was now officially two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, but it was whispered that the going price had recently gone to a million, because the bylaws required that a new member be nominated by one member and seconded by two. There were rumored to be some unfortunates who had begun to make a business out of the nominations so they could remain solvent until some business embarrassment reversed itself. The foursome didn’t especially care about the scandal because they didn’t associate often with any of the newer members, and they didn’t care about price because they had all been enrolled at birth. The club had been constructed on land donated by the great-grandfathers of Owen Rowland and Ted Forrest, and the older fake-adobe part of the clubhouse had been built by a consortium of founding members, including a few named Powers and Collier.

When the lunch was finished, the three losers made a show of giving Ted Forrest their long-standing hundred-dollar bets. As always, the winner signed the lunch bill to celebrate, so with the bar charges and tips, the four went to the parking lot about even. Forrest loaded his clubs into his BMW, waved at the others, and drove toward home.

In the ten miles from the club to his house, he passed through several stretches of land that his family cooperative still owned. The land was mostly fallow fields now, with only a couple of the larger properties occupied by caretakers, and used for horse pasture or shooting. Now only the quail and deer came to harvest the wild descendant plants that had once been crops. When Forrest was a teenager, he used to cultivate small plots of high-quality marijuana on remote parts of the parcels.

He would have had a difficult time saying what was growing on any of the Forrest properties now; before his marijuana crops, it had been at least forty years since anything had been planted on any of them.

Two generations ago, the family’s farmland had been permanently allotted thousands of acre-feet of federal water per year from the Colorado River projects. Over the decades, the water had become much too valuable to pipe in and pour over rice, hops, and barley that nobody could sell for a profit anymore. The Forrest family business was selling federal water, and each year business had gotten better. The coast of California from Mexico to Oregon was populated, the Los Angeles basin was full, and the houses just kept going up, farther and farther inland toward Las Vegas. All the water for those extra people had to be bought on the open market.

He reached the gate at the end of his long driveway, pressed the button on the opener in his car to make the gate slide out of the way, and then pressed it again to close it when he had driven through. The house was built on what used to be a ranch bought from a family called Hardin. That had given Forrest’s wife Caroline an excuse to call the place Hardinfield. Seeing the artificially aged bronze sign on the gate’s ornamental pillar always made his stomach tighten.

Forrest had been forced to tolerate Caroline and her pretensions for so many years that most of the time he could barely remember how things had been when he had met her. She had been seventeen and he had been thirty. He could just bring together the sight and feeling by conscious effort now because his memory had been dimmed by years of attempts to keep from looking at her, even when he was talking to her.

He remembered the moment. It was a party in the afternoon at the Sheffield family’s winery. The sun had the peculiar golden quality it took on in the late afternoon sometimes in Napa. She had been a classmate of one of the Sheffields at the Moorhead School-was it Mary Ellen or Jennifer? There had been about five or six of them that afternoon, all in light summer dresses that made them look like girls in a French Impressionist painting. He had not scouted Caroline. She had simply held the center of the group, and he couldn’t look at any of them without following their eyes to her. She had been beautiful that summer. Now he knew that it was because beauty was one of the attributes of the young, only imputed to older people retroactively by an act of the imagination. After about ten minutes, during part of which he had gone to get a fresh glass of wine from one of the roving waiters, and listened to Collier tell a joke badly, he had decided he would meet Caroline Pacquette.

Hundreds of times since then he had strained to reproduce the logic of that moment: First I saw her looks and liveliness, then I listened to her voice and found the sound of it pleasant, and then I thought-But what did I think? There was no way to reclaim it now. He was not thirty and she was not seventeen, and so the eye and what it saw were both gone beyond retrieval.

She had changed. He’d had some suspicion at the time that she was desirable partly because she was so young. At her age she was sure to be sweet-tempered and sincere, and if she was at the Moorhead School she was certainly smart enough to learn: She and Mary Ellen Sheffield had been admitted, but Don Sheffield and Ted Forrest had been turned down many years earlier. She was unspoiled. That was the word he had been searching for-she had not been ruined by cynicism and selfishness, like most of the women his age. By claiming her now, he could shield her from the rejection and disappointment that ruined college-age women, and allow her naturally to become the perfect wife.

He watched surreptitiously until she and Mary Ellen Sheffield were on their way across the lawn, made sure his path intersected with theirs, and forced Mary Ellen to introduce him. Now it seemed only moments until they had married, but it had taken about four years for her to reach the socially acceptable age. By then she was nearly finished with college.

It was the most egregious case of marrying under false pretenses that he had ever heard of. Everyone had assumed, because she was a Pacquette, that she would bring significant assets to the merger. The appearance was deceiving, and that deception, he was sure now, was the root of the problem. The Pacquettes had managed to decline very slowly, without letting the change be visible. Instead of selling the plots of land along the Sacramento River or the big old house in San Francisco, which would have caused talk, they had mortgaged their properties one at a time, so that year by year, the big holdings that had been owned outright a hundred years ago were hollowed out by debt. The only reason Caroline could attend the Moorhead School and Princeton was that the house where she had grown up was gradually converted to a series of tuition payments.

Even at the age of seventeen, Caroline was acutely aware of the financial disaster she lived in. For at least a generation, the Pacquettes had been living in a kind of desperation, essentially burning the furniture to keep people from knowing they couldn’t afford firewood. Caroline’s parents had taught her to understand the gamble. They were impoverishing themselves at an ever-increasing rate to maintain her access to the most exclusive strata of Central California society. They were decimating their fortune to give her the education, the clothes, and the spending money to maintain a presence among the children of the honestly wealthy. But it was a race, a struggle to make the funds and the credit last until she was settled. The public extravagance required a brutal frugality in private. Later, Ted Forrest had calculated that if Caroline Pacquette had not married a rich man by the age of twenty-three, there would not have been enough assets left to keep up the pretense. She and her family would have had to move out of their ancestral home and slink off to some suburb to look for jobs. As it was, within a few days of returning from their honeymoon in Europe, Ted Forrest learned that a number of bills for their opulent wedding had been re-charged to his accounts by the signature of his new bride.

Caroline won. She detected the vulnerability in Ted Forrest, his sensitivity to her delicate beauty and the air of innocent grace that she had been cultivating under her mother’s coaching since she could first walk and talk. Her father had retained Dun & Bradstreet to do a work-up on Ted’s financial health only a few months after they met, and did some investigating of his own, and so did his wife. They spoke quietly to people who were close to the Forrests and would know of any scandals in the family or any vices of Ted’s that would make him a poor prospect for future support.

As soon as the inquiries were completed, Caroline began her campaign. Forrest supposed that her decision to choose him, when she must have met hundreds of single men between her seventeenth year and her twenty-first, was a kind of love at first sight. She clearly had marriage in mind from the outset, and she accomplished it in the simplest and most businesslike way.

She told a couple of friends-including Don Sheffield’s sister, after placing them under vows of secrecy-that she had a crush on Ted Forrest that made her feel weak when he came near. Then she contrived to be where he was. As soon as they’d had a proper date or two, she made sure that the next date culminated in sex. This she did in a particularly opportunistic way. He had asked her to dinner at a restaurant in Sonoma. When he picked her up, she made it clear to him that she was planning to spend the night at a friend’s houseOwen Rowland’s cousin Emma, if he remembered right-and wasn’t expected home. At dinner she had asked, “Wouldn’t it be fun if this date didn’t have to end at all?” He rented a hotel room and then suggested she tell Emma by phone that she couldn’t make it.

Caroline handled him expertly. She managed to give the impression that even mild intimacy was not an event that had occurred often in her life. She had to convey that in sharing a room with him she was sacrificing her own scruples and risking her own reputation and interests out of extreme devotion to his. Then, during and after the event, she had to flatter him into believing that he had changed her view of the practice, and that she was eager to have the event repeated frequently for the rest of her life, thus qualifying herself as the ideal wife. That was more than she could communicate in a single night. It took a few similar evenings for her to persuade him, but she did.

Almost immediately after the wedding, Caroline became less attentive to Forrest, and spent more of her time being Mrs. Forrest, the beneficiary of Forrest’s money and position. She spent her early mornings in pajamas at the computer e-mailing friends in the East and looking for advertisements for items that she would later go out to buy in person. Then she exercised. Her lunch times and afternoons were for her friends-the same six or seven who had been with her the day he met her at Sheffield’s and a couple of others-and her evenings were for him to escort her to dinners, plays, and parties. Increasingly, her nights were spent going to sleep early and alone to keep up her strength for the next day’s repetition of her routines. By the end of the third year, the admiration and desire for him that she had expressed so recently was already gone.

When he tried to be affectionate, her indifference made his attempts painful. When he tried asking about her lack of interest in him, she turned defensive. To bring up the deterioration of their relations was unspeakably indelicate and insensitive to her feelings. To imply that she was responsible was unfair and cruel. She hadn’t said she had changed her feelings about him, so how could he say it was her fault? His questioning was what was causing their problemshis implied criticisms had made her feel under scrutiny, and made sex unbearable.

He still had a naive belief that she was sincere, and so he kept trying for a long time. He managed to get her to relent and sleep with him once every month or two, and kept himself going by assuring himself that their relationship was improving and the marriage was preserved. But the truth was that it was mummified, retained in a desiccated state with its guts removed. He was sure it probably looked about the same from the outside: Caroline was an expert in conveying to the rest of the world that all was well. She had been doing it all her life.

Forrest never found any indication that Caroline was engaged in relationships with other men, and he looked hard for one. Like many women who were incapable of conducting marriages, she was excessively warm in greeting male friends, but he could not detect any indication that she did worse than that. She was very demonstrative with her female friends, too, but she had never seemed to be sexually interested in women. And she always had lots of pets, and spoke to every one of them with more affection than she showed when she spoke to him. She would turn away from him so he wouldn’t spoil her makeup, and then kneel to kiss a dog or cat on the mouth.

He had no choice but to pursue other women, and she never seemed to notice. Sometimes he thought she was simply retaliating: What greater proof of his insignificance than that she didn’t even notice that he had moved on? At other times he thought she was operating according to obscure plans of her own-perhaps a relationship that was carried on in safety at times when he was out trying to avoid her attention.

They held each other this way. It was to his advantage and to hers that they never let any of the truth become overt and undeniable. For her a divorce would be a demotion, either a reversion to the status of her genteel but declasse family, or the half-life of an aging woman who had some money that wasn’t really hers, a person who could still use the Forrest name, but who was no longer welcome at any of the Forrest estates, and whom the family’s relatives and friends would consider an embarrassment, someone to be forgotten. For Ted Forrest, a divorce would be financially crippling, and would give the same relatives who would ostracize Caroline an excuse to patronize him. For years any woman he cared to date would be scrutinized as the one-the woman whom Caroline must have caught fornicating with Ted Forrest.

He and Caroline lived in Hardinfield but avoided each other as much as possible. They gave the servants nothing tangible to repeat. They gave their friends no hint that when they went home together after a party, they might not speak again until a day or two had passed, and there was some practical reason to talk.

Ted Forrest had made a big mistake once, but he had managed to salvage things and keep Caroline from knowing about it. That was eight years ago, and he had survived. He had held his head high and behaved as though nothing was bothering him, and nobody had ever suspected he was in agony. He had been the same old Ted Forrest day after day, a man who would listen to a friend’s troubles as though he had none of his own, or laugh at a joke about himself.

But there was one part of the mistake that he had not been able to overcome with a simple reassertion of self-control, and that was the private detective, Philip Kramer. Forrest had made a point of doing everything in the most cautious and premeditated way, so that none of his trouble would stick to him or come back later. Hiring the detective had been the first example of his caution. Normally he would never have considered hiring such a person without a recommendation from someone whose judgment he trusted. Usually, he would have had one of his attorneys make inquiries and then act as his go-between in dealing with the detective. Not this time. He had driven down to Los Angeles, chosen a private investigator out of the phone directory, and called him. He had decided in advance to choose one who had his own agency, whose ad said he had been in business for over ten years, and gave a license number. That had led him to Philip Kramer. He met Kramer in his office, told him the story he had constructed, and gave him an advance payment in cash. That day had set off such a monstrous set of surprises that it was sometimes difficult to remember that it was all done for love. All Ted Forrest had ever suffered had been for love.

Now he stopped his car at the top of the driveway where it became a circle, then pulled ahead so he wouldn’t block the front entrance. He didn’t mind. The extra walk would give him another half minute before he had to face the wall of resentment that Caroline kept between them.

Forrest opened his trunk, took out his golf bag, slung it over his shoulder and walked under the high portico, through the courtyard to the big front doors. Caroline hated it when he came in the front way after golf. She was convinced that he would bring pieces of grass and leaves and burrs into the formal foyer, even though he wasn’t wearing his golf shoes, and hadn’t been on the course for three hours.

He opened the door and walked in. The marble floor shone so the reflection brought a blinding replica of the chandelier into his eyes at this angle. He heard a loud sigh.

She was standing ahead and to his left in the entrance to the library. “Ted! How many times have I asked you to come in the other ~” way.

“Not sure. It’s my house and I can drive cattle through it if I want to, so I don’t pay much attention.”

“No, you sure don’t. I just had that floor polished.”

“Then have somebody polish it again, or don’t. I haven’t brought anything alive in.”

“I’m having a dinner party in two hours, remember?”

“No, actually, I didn’t. Remind me who this one is for?”

“It’s the party for the donors to the chamber orchestra,” she said. “Is it coming back, sounding familiar?”

“Vaguely,” he said. “I’m sure you have lots to do, so I’ll head up to the shower.” He climbed the stairs, and she had the sense to stay down there and do whatever it was that a woman with a half dozen servants and another half dozen caterers needed to do.

He reached the top of the stairs and one of his moments-attacks, really-took him. He felt slightly dizzy and weak, looked down at the floor to steady himself, and realized he had been disoriented because there were tears in his eyes. He went into the master suite, locked the door, and set his clubs in the closet. He took a cell phone out of his golf bag, went into the bathroom, locked that door, too, and turned on the shower.

He dialed a number that wasn’t in the telephone’s memory. “Baby? It’s me. I just had to hear your voice. I just got back from the club, and the horror of this place got to me. God, it’s hard to be here without you. I’m about love. I’ve never been about anything but love.”