The Best Man on the Planet, page 16
It was a lot to think about. Add in his health situation—which could take him from her in the blink of an eye—and a quicksilver dart of panic shot through her.
No life came without challenges, but compared to the challenges of the Nonez children, or Ray Albanese’s family, or what Natalie Marshall had gone through, her challenges were nothing. Her fiancé was a good, kind man who wanted to help others. He was sexy, funny, and sweet. Their sex life was beyond anything she’d ever experienced. She was so lucky.
The fact was—it would be disingenuous not to admit it—he had wealth. While she wasn’t interested in using this wealth for herself, she did think about her parents. They were advancing in age, and if they needed extra care, she assumed her husband would help out, as he’d done for Miss Brock and her daughter. She was also grateful his wealth allowed him to afford specialized treatment in Geneva, treatment that was saving his life.
She had the nerve to sit here, worrying about grad school deadlines and where they would live in Geneva? She shook her head at her egregious lack of perspective.
Deciding to take a break, she went to look for Mr. Foster—though she had to stop thinking of him like that. By tomorrow, he would be her husband. Samuel. She would be Casey Matos Foster. She’d decided to take his surname. Why not? She liked the sound of it.
He was kneeling at his bedroom closet, pushing aside boxes. Several were open, articles of clothing limping towards the floor. She came up behind him, slipped a kiss on his neck, and cupped his behind. “What are you doing, you glorious Greek God, you?”
He laughed, and leaned back for a deeper kiss. “Have I told you today how magnificent you are?” he asked.
“Not today.”
“I want to tell you every day.”
“That could get repetitive, but I’ll deal with it.”
She draped herself around him, paying more attention to nuzzling the bristle on his jaw than what he was doing in the closet.
“I can’t find my tuxedo. The movers must have packed it before I left.”
“Well, wear anything,” she said, with a nip to his earlobe.
“Wear anything? This is already a bare bones affair. I’m not showing up in jeans.”
“As long as it’s not skinny jeans. Or khakis.” She fluffed his hair, maneuvered around some boxes, and then swept her arm into another closet, where a few articles of leftover clothing were hanging.
“I could have sworn I’d left here,” he said, thumping boxes around. “It’s made-to-measure from Kilgour in London. Would have been perfect. I didn’t know my future plans included a wedding. I gave away a bunch of suits.” He slapped his forehead, looked at her helplessly. “I think I gave it away.”
“Why did you wait so long to look?”
“I don’t know, I thought it was here.”
Casey eyed the opened boxes sprinkled at her feet inside of the closet and a silver reflection pinned her attention. Without making a move, she zeroed in on a compact disc. Handwritten in black marker on the front were the letters “GIR” with the rest hidden by a large book.
Her imagination filled in the rest of the word— “LS.” For some reason, she felt absolutely right about that.
She focused back on him, careful not to let on to what she’d seen. “Listen,” she said, coming over and kneading the muscles around his shoulders. “It doesn’t matter what you wear. It’s you I want, not your tuxedo.”
“But I have to look pretty.” He grinned, and scooped her up so her legs dangled over his arms, and swung her back and forth. “Have I told you how excited I am to be your husband?”
“You must be the only man on Earth so excited about becoming a husband.”
“They’re not marrying you, are they?” He kissed her and put her back on the floor. “I’ll go into Benicio’s in the city. He’ll have one.”
He called his regular driver and within fifteen minutes was out the door. This time she took no chances. As soon as the long black car disappeared around the corner, she went inside and turned the old upper lock, the one they never used. If he came back early, she’d say it was a mistake.
She ran up the stairs and into his bedroom and dug the disc out of the box. Written on the front, in capital letters, was “GIRLS NYC 4.”
In the past, she would have put the disc back, told herself trust was integral to a relationship, that everyone deserved their privacy, even their little secrets.
But it was all catching up to her. The rings in his wallet. Miss Brock’s pecking insinuations. He’s not what you think.
She held the disc at the very top edge with thumb and forefinger, as if it were a half-dead beetle, its gangly legs twitching. In her office, she propped her laptop on the desk and slid in the disc. For several moments, she saw only a black screen. She hoped that’s all she would see.
She was about to pull the disc icon into the trash for eject when heaving sounds charged the air around her, unmistakable sounds that slashed at her like a cold knife, and a muted image lit up the screen.
Her stomach curdled, her mouth flushed with a metallic-tasting secretion, and her senses improbably heightened with arousal. There was the slope of his back, the swelling of his shoulders, the languid pumping of his ass. Enamel legs clutched in a V-formation around his waist, long black hair flipped back.
The quality was poor and the lighting ghostly, but there was no question she was watching Mr. Foster and a woman having sex. She could tell this wasn’t in the mansion. The sharp corners of the white bed, the dark pillows, the glass end table, the art deco floating square lamp, all had the look of modernity.
A snake let loose in her chest, thumping and slithering. Her breath quickened and her scalp tingled, there were tiny pops in her ears, yet she couldn’t stop watching.
She fast-forwarded until the scene changed. The camera was at a slightly different angle. Another woman. This one had a tower of curly hair suspended above their naked bodies, swaying over his head. She pushed the video on and came to another woman. The first woman came into frame again, her plump, sculpted ass pointed at the camera. She joined them in bed. Casey shut her eyes but she could hear what she hated most—his animalistic grunts and the woman’s high-pitched, porno star pants.
She couldn’t look at this anymore. She reached out to try to stop the video, but hit the forward button instead. Suddenly, she could see the side of another woman’s face, and her long, almost white, hair. She vaguely recognized her. Sharon! His “executive director.” She runs the foundation. She’s married and has a child.
He moved down Sharon’s fleshy breasts, kissing her taut belly, obviously headed between her legs. Casey put up one hand to block the image on the screen, and stopped the video with the other.
With her hand over her face, she peeped out of her fingers to minimize the browser and dragged the disc icon into the trash. It exhaled a low whirr as it popped out of the computer. It wasn’t until she tried to hold the disc and it capsized out of her fingers and clattered on the wood floor that she realized how badly her hand was trembling.
“Got it!” Mr. Foster said, looking jaunty, twirling the hanger of a long garment bag. “Was the last one too.”
He came half way across the drawing room to where Casey sat on the couch, his legs swinging purposefully as if approaching for a kiss, but she cut him off at the knees with a keep-your-distance look. “Samuel, I have to ask you a question.”
He draped the garment bag over the back of a chair, and looked at her expectedly, but her voice gave away something was wrong, because he grasped the back of the chair as if trying to balance himself.
“I found a disc in one of your boxes when I was looking for your tuxedo. It said ‘Girls’ on it. So I watched it.” Her voice was as low and flat as she’d ever heard it.
He said nothing, did not move.
“It was a sex tape. You and a bunch of different women. Too bad you didn’t have a reality show.”
He said nothing.
“Are you hearing me?” she snapped.
“I don’t understand,” he said, inching forward, a grain of impatience scratching his voice. “I was very upfront with you I wasn’t an angel in the past. I even told you the other night I’d slept around.”
“I know that. But I have to know—there’s one thing I have to know.”
“Yes?”
“Did these women know they were being filmed?”
He hunched, focusing on the floor. He moved to the nearest chair and plopped, rocking. Several more seconds of rocking, maybe minutes. Rocking, rocking.
“Some probably did. Some probably didn’t.” He looked around at the walls, as if he didn’t know where he was. “Let me rephrase. No. I don’t think they did.” His lips smacked together, seemingly involuntarily. “I did some bad things before my aneurysm.”
“Oh, really?” Casey yelled. “So you secretly videotaped women?”
“I could say they all knew. But I want to be honest with you.” He circled one thumb around the other. “I’m almost certain I filmed them without their knowledge. My memory isn’t what it once was. But in the past, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to consider the ethics of something like that.” He stood made his way over to her, his gait so shaky she thought he might fall. “May I sit next to you?”
Casey was rigid, wound tight, as if she would pop a spring. Appearing to take the hint, he squatted in front of her.
“This isn’t an excuse, but I was one person before the aneurysm and a completely different person after. I never wanted to be with women in that way again, like they were nothing. I thought I’d gotten rid of everything.”
“And there’s more? Number four, eh? What number did they go up to? You know what, don’t tell me.” She thrust her palm at his face.
“I don’t—I—” He braced his hands on the floor and hung his head. “Casey, I’m not like that anymore, isn’t this all that matters?”
“So you used to be a complete scumbag.” She took pleasure in watching him flinch slightly.
“Yes. I feel I’ve told you this. More than once.”
Oh, no. No. He’d told her he bought a boat and an expensive map. He’d told her he had a masseuse. He’d told her he’d partied, slept around. He hadn’t told her this.
His head was in his hands, she heard him making guttural sounds, sounds torn from his soul. “Oh God,” he gasped. “I knew I wasn’t good enough for you. I knew it. I should never have thought I could leave my past behind.”
Casey clutched her hands around her chest, and neither one of them spoke for a while.
She tried to think. He’d not only had a ruptured brain aneurysm, but a stroke and had gone into a coma. She’d read stories of outlier cases of stroke victims—a heterosexual rugby player who woke up gay (he became a hairdresser, if you’d written that in a novel, you’d be accused of stereotyping), another man who lost the ability to feel sadness (unsurprisingly, he was happy about that).
There were those who came out of strokes or comas with all kinds of language oddities (speaking with foreign dialects or accents they claimed to have no previous knowledge of), and those who instantly gained genius level math, art, or music skills. She supposed it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that a brain trauma victim could develop a sense of… ethics.
He finally looked up and his face was so blighted with sadness that the tenderness she had for him began to seep back into her heart, against her will.
“Why didn’t you tell me about Sharon? You kept saying she was just your foundation person.”
He sighed and seemed to crumple from within. “What happened between us was a long time ago. But I needed her for this project. She knows more about my finances than I do. It didn’t occur to me to fill you in on a past relationship with a woman who doesn’t live in the country and is married. You and I weren’t even together when I saw her last.”
“I guess I knew you were active, Samuel—but to see it…”
“I’m so sorry, Casey. This is why I don’t like to talk about the man I used to be. It’s like I was a stranger to myself, a stranger I hate to even think about. And I want you to know that every blood test in the world has been run on me. I’ll give you my results.”
“Obviously, we should have discussed this before,” she said, shaking her head.
She retreated into palpitating silence, nursing her righteousness, sucking on it like a candy that was irresistible despite its bitterness shivering along her taste buds.
“Now what?” He scraped at one nail, his voice foggy. “We’re getting married tomorrow.”
She couldn’t say anything. She was too preoccupied with doubts about how a man who used to live that way could settle down into lifetime monogamy.
He pushed up next to her on the couch. “I want to tell you I hadn’t been with a woman since the aneurysm, no one for two years. You’re the first. I didn’t want any attachments. You know why. But it happened.” He spoke quietly and evenly. “I’m in love with you and I’ll be faithful to you. That’s all I want, you and I together. I couldn’t betray you, Casey. But if you want to call off the wedding, I understand, and won’t blame you.”
It was as if a spiny rope was being pulled hand over hand out of her lungs. She sagged into the cushions.
That video was the first time it hit her that someone she loved, someone she thought she knew on a deep emotional level, could be a different person too—a person she despised. She’d seen him as the best man she’d ever known, the best man on the planet. In reality, he was just a man. Not even a great man. Or hadn’t used to be one.
What did that matter? If the man he used to be wasn’t the man he was now, what did it matter?
Here he was, his face so stretched with worry, that the man she’d seen in the video receded, as if she’d watched someone who looked like him, but wasn’t him.
Her eyes flitted along his bicep, and before she knew it, one hand reached out for him. His brain had rewired itself. She couldn’t ask for more reassurance that he was different. If you could bottle such a thing and sell it to embattled wives, you’d make a fortune.
And if he wanted to live like he had in his past, nothing was stopping him. The man she knew hardly left the mansion and spent his all his time trying to help people. She’d never once seen him pass a furtive glance at another woman when they were out.
“Tell me you didn’t put that stuff on the Internet,” she said.
He gave a brusque laugh and crossed his heart. “I swear. I’ll destroy it.” He coiled around her until they were breathing in sync. “That’s not me now,” he said, smoothing the back of her head. “And never will be again.”
Perhaps perversely, unearthing this muculent remnant of his past made her feel closer to him. She was getting to know him, all of him. He was a human being, a flawed one, as all human beings were. Rare was the person who corrected his or her flaws. He had corrected them.
Didn’t that make him more special?
33
The day was overcast, the sky gray and white, mottled like a marble. Out on the balcony, the air smelled metallic, of imminent rain. Casey raised her palm, catching only dampness.
The wedding coordinator assured her Belvedere Castle’s gazebo would offer enough coverage from the elements for such a sparse party, but they could move to an indoor reception room if things took a turn for the worse.
In the late morning, a small wedding preparation army arrived. There was the coordinator, a hair stylist, a makeup artist, and Miss Brock. Casey’s hair was styled (the sides swept up, pinned in curls at the top, the long back down) and makeup (natural colors) applied, her bridal dress affixed. Someone ushered her into a waiting limousine.
The tradition about being kept apart until the ceremony was kind of ridiculous. She’d wanted to go to Mr. Foster and gauge his mood. But when she’d tried to leave the blue spare room, Miss Brock chastised her, saying to see him before the ceremony was “bad luck.”
The first she saw of him was atop the gray-brown stone of the castle’s terrace. Her first thought was he looked shockingly handsome in his midnight blue lapel tux. So handsome it caused an anguish of pleasure to look at him, like peering into a starry cave of gypsum crystals.
A breeze ruffled her tulle veil, but there was no rain. They’d have the ceremony outdoors as planned, underneath the larger gazebo with its checkered red and yellow roof, overlooking seaweed green Turtle Pond.
It was a small party. Besides herself, Mr. Foster, Miss Brock, the ceremony coordinator, the officiant, and a photographer, there was only the other witness, Mr. Foster’s lawyer, an older man with rubbery cheeks who effortlessly gave impression he’d rather be somewhere else. This was the “Max” he’d mentioned in the past.
With Astrid and Tyler in Los Angeles, and Kate and Mia on vacation, and her parents unable to travel, there was no one she really cared to have at the wedding anyway. Things had been too hurried to coordinate everyone’s schedules. Besides, there was a part of her that felt the smaller and more intimate the ceremony, the more real it would be.
The coordinator handed her a spray of white roses and the officiant indicated Casey and Mr. Foster should approach. They made eye contact and mild titters escaped them. When he looked at her, he did it cursorily, and then turned to the officiant.
“Good morning,” said the officiant. “We are gathered here today to celebrate the love of two people, Samuel and Cassilda, and to unite them in the commitment of marriage.”
The officiant smiled with an open smile, bobbing her head.
“It is a blessing for two people to find one another and to love each other so deeply they embrace the bond of marriage.”
The officiant looked out over the sparse crowd, still smiling, but her eyes serious.
“I welcome you to witness their commitment to this union. Samuel and Cassilda, I remind you marriage is a precious gift, a lifelong commitment, and a challenge to love each other more each day. Please join both your hands together.”
A splintery tension within Casey had been building like a rising drumbeat during the officiant’s words. Something had abruptly, without any explanation, swerved away from her. Mr. Foster had not looked at her once during those words of love and commitment.
