Lies That Bind Us(86)

Marcus gaped.

“Yeah, we’re from the States,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Hi,” said the girl. “I’m Melissa. My husband is sitting over there behind the white umbrella, trying to look cool in his new shades. Look, this is gonna sound weird, but we’re trying to make a reservation at the restaurant tonight, and they’re saying they only have a table for six. It’s dumb, but everything is booked up and they don’t want to waste seats. There are only four of us. We’re with a couple of people we just met. So we were wondering if you’d like to join us. Seven thirty tonight. Totally fine if you can’t. But we kind of need to know. Dinner is on us, by the way.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Marcus, smiling doubtfully. “We were gonna go into town, and we really couldn’t accept . . .”

“Food from strangers,” she finished for him. “No worries. Have a good—”

“Wait,” I said. “We can go into town tomorrow. Might be nice to meet some new people.”

I gave Marcus a look, my eyes shaded against the sun, and he floundered.

“We’re in,” I said. “I’m Jan. This is Marcus.”

“Are you sure that . . . ?” Marcus began.

“Yes,” I said, feeling suddenly sure that this was what we needed. “We can go into town tomorrow night.”

We didn’t, of course. We had every meal from that night on with Melissa and Simon, Kristen and Brad, holding on to them so that we spent less time sniping at each other, and they had been a godsend. It struck me as slightly odd that she should invite us like that, that they couldn’t have just slid the concierge a few euros and kept the table to four. And as we got ready to join them that night, I even wondered if the spectacular bikini entrance had been deliberate too. In fact we had been so charmed by them—so dazzled—that we didn’t look the gift horse in the mouth, but later I found myself wondering if we had always been designated as audience to their greatness, as if they’d needed people to perform their perfection to. They’d recruited us as ordinary people, lesser people who would bask in their reflected glories as a way of making them feel better about themselves. We just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Could it have been that simple?

Maybe.

What the hell did I know? And even if I was right, I couldn’t put all the blame on them. We had loved it, Marcus and I, the glamour, the sense of being part of their social circle, like we had been scooped up from our quiet gray lives and raised above the clouds to a place of golden light and the promise of continual happiness. It was the life we had been promised by every magazine I had ever looked through, every TV commercial I’d ever seen. So we embraced it and clung on, even when the cracks started to show, even—God help us—when we secretly knew what they were under the shine.

I think of Melissa rubbing suntan lotion into Simon’s back on the beach, kneeling astride him, turning to look at me and smiling, aglow with sex and charm and the easy confidence of wealth. I can almost smell the warm coconut oil, hear the music from the hotel’s sound system, feel the glow of my skin under the sun, Marcus lying, eyes closed, beside me. It’s idyllic, glorious, and I want it back so much that it tugs at my gut, my heart, like the most exquisite pain. And then, quite suddenly, the light changes, and now we’re in the dim lobby of the villa, and Mel is straddling not Simon, but Marcus. He’s faceup and she’s shoving a hose into his mouth. She snaps her head round to look at me, and her face is full of malice and rage, her eyes black and toxic. It’s as if she’s trying to eat him, like she’s a vulture on the road, protecting the carcass she’s found from interlopers. Yes. That’s it. She’s a gaunt, ravenous thing, starving to gobble up that crumb of the world that someone tried to take from her.

I don’t know why I keep coming back to her. It was Simon, after all, who set this all in motion, his crime five years ago that made everything at the villa necessary for them. Maybe women always seem worse when they turn nasty because we expect better of them, though that is clearly stupid. The papers called her Lady Macbeth, a lazy and inaccurate reference, but I sort of understood it, particularly when I learned that the first time I had been visited by the monster in my cell, it hadn’t been Simon under the scuba gear, it had been her. They traded off. Like they were sharing chores.

Was that love? The willingness to do absolutely anything for each other? To imprison, torture, kill to keep their perfect and exclusive bubble intact?

The idea bothered me. It didn’t seem like love, but I watch the parents in the park with their kids, the obsessive care and attention that feels so proprietary, so consuming, the families so ready to circle the wagons and point their guns and knives at whoever is outside the limits of their love, and I’m not so sure. Strange that love can turn so poisonous, so corrosively selfish. I think of the Goya painting, the wild-eyed Cronus devouring his child, and I see the mad hunger I glimpsed in Melissa as she squatted over Marcus with the hose.

It’s hard to remember her now as she was when we first met, when she and Simon seemed so gloriously unblemished, and I can’t do it without delving back through old photographs. There, in those first days of the 1999 we promised to celebrate, I see captured not so much who they were, but how we saw them, and each untainted image is full of light and energy and laughter, a joy so unconscious and complete that it brings tears to my eyes. I don’t hate Simon and Melissa for what they did to me. I hate them more for what they did to a Greek family they thought beneath them. I hate them for what they showed the world to be.