The Charmers: A Novel(50)

My Iron Man, of course, was with me, though he spent much more time in the water than I ever did. I was always worried about my hair, like most women, and I hated those rubber bathing caps. He would emerge, dripping, usually carrying a shell, a conch, spiraled and cream with a pink interior that he swore looked like me. Or intimate parts of me, anyway.

It was at the end of a calm, hot day, when I noticed a woman standing at the back of the beach. She was tall, her long dark hair drifted over her shoulders in the fresh breeze that had sprung up, the way it often did of an evening. In fact, I had seen her several times, always standing in the same place, always with dark glasses, always watching. She’d made me feel uncomfortable, but I’d dismissed it; she was just a woman, taking the air, looking at the sea, as we did, because it gave us never-failing pleasure. After all, is there anything more sybaritic, more sensual than a long day spent at the beach in the shade of an umbrella, lying on a towel, gathering the sun into your body, like wine for the soul?

Now I gathered up our scattered belongings: the towels, the wet bathing suits, the books and sun creams, the tired bunches of grapes and cast-off sandals and began to walk back to the lane fronting the beach, where the villa was located. She turned her head as I approached. I threw her a friendly smile, as one does when sharing a beach, but this woman did not smile back.

Surprised, but untroubled, it was so insignificant a thing, I continued on my way, followed by my Iron Man, carrying the heavy bags. Behind me, I heard her say something. Since I was sure she was not addressing me, I simply walked on. Of course, I was not unaware of my Iron Man’s attraction for women, but I was sure of him and sure of myself. I reigned, I believed, supreme in his life.

I heard his bare feet clacking across the slatted wooden walkway laid over the hot sand, and turned to smile at him, to say what a lovely day and that I had champagne cooling in the refrigerator. I did not say I also had a great surprise, a secret I was going to tell him over that delicious chilled glass, both of us cool and fresh from the shower, which was where I intended to make love to him, or he to me, or both to each other. The end of a perfect day.

I saw the polite puzzled smile on his face as the dark-haired woman confronted him. She grasped his arm and held onto it, talking all the while. I couldn’t hear what she said and alarmed by her behavior, I hurried back toward them. She turned to look at me. I shall never forget that look. It was what hatred means, though why, I did not know. But I knew it was also what evil looked like.

And then I saw the gun.

It all happened in an instant, on a beach still busy with late sunbathers, swimmers, and children. I could hear their shrill happy cries, even as she lifted that gun and aimed it at me. I felt sure my heart stopped beating even before she shot. But then she swung around, held the gun to my lover’s chest.

For me, the world stopped. It fell silent. Yet everything was going on as normal around us, the three of us isolated in our drama of terror.

Walt raised his arms above his head, he spoke softly to her, told her not to worry, everything was going to be alright, he would take care of her, make sure she was safe. I stood, frozen, listening to him saying these words to a madwoman who at any moment could blast him into eternity. I thought of the child he did not know about, growing inside of me, of our love, our lives together, our perfect happiness. Terrified, I lunged for that woman, screaming my own hatred and fear at her.

She went down under me. I heard Walt yelling at me to watch out, felt his weight as he threw himself over me, heard the dull thud of the first bullet, then the second and a third. I grabbed the revolver from her, even noting as I did that it was feminine, pearl-handled, a swanky kind of gun that I might have chosen myself. In fact that Walt had chosen for me. It was my gun she held. My gun with which she had shot my man. My child she was now threatening.

She lay back, hands held out in front of her, a mocking look in her eyes as she looked at me. “Go on, then, do it, why don’t you?” she said.

So I shot her.





41

It all happened so quickly. In moments everything that had been so right went wrong. I remember sinking to my knees in the sand, putting my hands under my man’s head, trying to lift his face to mine with some misguided thought of breathing life back into his lifeless mouth.

A group rapidly surrounded us, silent, shocked. “She shot him,” I heard someone say. “She shot the woman, then she shot him And isn’t she Jerusha? And isn’t he Walter Matthews? Iron Man Matthews? Oh my God,” I heard them saying, the words sounding as though they were in capital letters. And then, “Call the gendarmes immediately,” they cried.

Police sirens wailed as half a dozen cars, blue lights flashing, screeched onto the beach. What seemed like a dozen uniformed men spilled out. Two of them pried me off my dead lover. Others checked the body of the woman I had shot.

“She shot him,” I heard people saying. “But she shot the woman first. He’d gone to help her.” Jerusha was jealous. He’d been having an affair; the woman was known in the local cafés and bars and she’d told everybody about her famous lover. Nobody believed her, until now. Because how could Jerusha’s lover want another woman? They had mocked the girl, at first. But now they saw it was true, and I had taken my revenge, the way all betrayed women did. I was, they said, a classic case.

I heard it all through a haze of grief as the gendarmes took me, unhandcuffed as a tribute to my fame and for the benefit of the photographers that clamored around as they walked me from the beach to the police car, pushing my head down to get me into the backseat, a cop sitting to either side, both smiling for those same photographers. That photograph went around the world. It was my epitaph.