Winter in Paradise (Paradise #1)(30)
Irene sits on the bed, her hands shaking.
The photograph is of Russ with a beautiful young West Indian woman. They’re lying in a hammock, their limbs intertwined. The woman’s skin is the color of coffee with cream, and next to her Russ is golden, glowing. He looks healthy.
He looks happy.
Irene lets out a moan. She can’t believe the agony she feels. Russ had another woman, a lover. More than a lover: Irene can tell from the ease and familiarity of their pose, from Russ’s smile, from the woman’s eyes shining. They were together, a pair, a couple. They were in love.
Irene wants to smash the glass. She wants to go onto the balcony and throw the offending photograph as far as she can into the tropical bushes below.
But she needs it. It’s evidence.
Irene is mortified to think that Cash has seen this photo, this proof of his father’s secret life. It conveys failure—on Russ’s part, certainly, but also on Irene’s part. She wasn’t sexy, desirable, or enticing enough to have kept her husband happy at home. This photograph is proof.
Irene screams until she feels her voice reach its ragged edge. It feels so indulgent, so childish, but it’s also the release she’s been waiting for. Russ was cheating on her, living with someone young and beautiful, having sex with her, laughing with her, kissing her, eating meals with her, curling up in a hammock with her, falling asleep next to her. For how long? For years, Irene has to assume. Every single time he told her he was “working” in Florida or God knows where else, he was here, in this house, with this woman. The depth of Russ’s lies takes Irene’s breath away. Hundreds of lies, thousands of lies. He had professed his love for Irene daily, every single time she spoke to him on the phone. He had told her he loved her so often, she had stopped hearing it. She thinks of the airplane he hired to drag a banner around Iowa City on her fiftieth birthday. At the time, Irene had been embarrassed by that blatant show of devotion. What she hadn’t realized, of course, was that Russ was trying to compensate. He hadn’t hired the airplane because he loved Irene and wanted everyone to know it; he’d hired it because he felt guilty.
And did this woman know? Irene wonders. Did she know that Russ was married and had two sons? Did she know that he lived in a Victorian house in Iowa City, Iowa? Had Russ shown her pictures of Irene? It’s too heinous to contemplate. Irene cries, she wails, and Winnie starts to bark, but Irene can’t stop. She’s grateful that the boys are gone so she can just let go. She was such a trusting fool.
She thinks back on the many hours that she spent comforting Lydia when Lydia found out that her husband, Phil, philandering Phil, was cheating on her. Phil worked as the head of security for the University of Iowa. One night, he answered a call from a freshman named Natalie Mercer, who was receiving calls on her dorm room phone. The caller kept saying he was watching her, he could see what she was wearing, he was coming to get her when she least expected it. Irene could remember Lydia relaying these terrifying details to her, back when Natalie Mercer was a faceless university student. Phil ended up catching the guy, a doctoral candidate in psychiatry, of all things. He was expelled from the school and this was, in theory, a happy ending. Peace was restored; Phil was a hero. But then, over a year later, when Lydia sensed the temperature of her marriage cooling to a suspicious low, she did some snooping—and what did she find? Phil’s cell phone documenting a lurid affair with Natalie Mercer that dated all the way back to the day Phil caught the caller.
Irene remembers feeling disgusted with Phil, but also—in her most private thoughts—a bit incredulous that Phil had been conducting an affair for over a year and Lydia hadn’t noticed.
Compared to what Russ has done, Phil having an affair with a student seems almost quaint.
Irene and Russ were married at the First Presbyterian Church in Iowa City in 1984, when they were fresh out of college. They had been together for a scant year and a half, since that football game in the blizzard. Russ’s father, the navy pilot, was dead by then, but Milly was there to represent the family. Milly and Irene had hit it off from the moment they met. Because Russ had grown up in so many places, he didn’t have any longtime childhood friends or neighbors or members of the community attending the wedding, the way Irene did. He had Milly and Milly’s two sisters—Bobbie and Cissy, whom Russ called “the aunties”—and there were also a bunch of Russ’s friends and fraternity brothers from Northwestern. Nothing about Russ’s background had seemed unusual, and certainly not sinister.
Irene and Russ had said their vows and kissed at the altar. There had been a reception at the Elks Lodge, where they ate filet mignon and cut the cake and danced to “Little Red Corvette,” and then after the reception, Irene and Russ ran through a shower of rice to get to the getaway car. They drove to the Hancock House, a bed-and-breakfast in Dubuque, Iowa, where they were given a suite with a library, and a claw-foot tub in front of a fireplace in the bathroom, and it was in this moment that Irene fell in love with the style and decor of Queen Anne houses. She said to Russ, “I want us to live in a house just like this one.”
Russ had laughed nervously. They were renting a one-bedroom apartment in University City. They were kids. They had, Irene sees now, barely known each other then, the newly minted Mr. and Mrs. Russell Steele.
Irene had grown to know Russ the only way it could be done—by putting in the time. She had learned how Russ liked his coffee, how he liked his eggs, the way he brushed his teeth, the sound of his snoring, the habits of other drivers that made him angry, the actors he admired and found funny, the way he whistled “Penny Lane,” only that song, when he was doing small home improvement projects. Irene knew his shoe size, his jacket size, his waist and inseam measurements. She knew how he had voted in every election. She knew his first, second, and third favorite flavor of ice cream. She knew he would get forty pages into a book and then abandon it, no matter how good it was. She knew that he had spent his childhood as a constant outsider because he moved so often. She also knows he never felt like his father loved him. Russ’s father was a military man, a fortress, with a mind and heart that were impossible to penetrate. Irene knew that, because of his father, Russ had never wanted to serve in the military. In fact, if Irene were to disclose Russ’s biggest secret, it was that he had sabotaged his chances of getting into the US Naval Academy by intentionally missing his interview.