"How long did it go on with him and Annalise?"
"A while. Until he met somebody new, I guess."
"Does Maureen know what he is?"
"Hell, how could she not know? She either doesn't care or just turns a blind eye because she loves him."
So that was the cause of the rift between her and Annalise, the reason they'd stopped being friends. Had Annalise felt any shame? Probably not. Did she feel any over running out on me? Probably not.
"Who else besides Verriker?" I asked him.
"Nobody you or I know. Some rich tourist from New York."
"Name?"
"Jackson, Johnson, something like that. Manufacturer of women's clothing. Down here for the sport fishing, stayed at the old Grand."
"How do you know about him?"
"It was right before she left you," Gavin said. "A week or so. By then she wasn't bothering to be discreet about it. Snuggling up to him in public, spent at least one night in his room while you were off on your cruise."
"When did he go back north?"
"I can't tell you that. You'd have to ask at the hotel." Pause. "You think she ran off with him?"
Of course she'd run off with him. A women's clothing manufacturer from New York? She'd have sat naked on his lap on the plane for an opportunity like that.
Gavin said, "Richard, man, you're not thinking of going after her and this guy? Trying to get her back?"
"No," I said.
He seemed relieved. "That's the right attitude. What you heard me say to Horler . . . well, it's a fact. You really are better off without her."
He was right.
I had no doubt of it by then.
In an odd way, finding out the full scope of Annalise's betrayal made it easier for me to get on with my life. You might think that I hated her then, but I didn't. Nor did I have any love left. I felt nothing at all for her. It was as if someone who had once been very close to me had died, and I'd gone through a short period of bereavement, and then I was able to move ahead with no emotional baggage.
At first I tried to figure out how and where it had all gone wrong, if there was a turning point, any specific incident that had led to her betrayal. But of course there wasn't. It was a gradual thing. She had been right when she accused me of evolving back into Jordan Wise, but she'd been undergoing a metamorphosis of her own. We were two divergent life forms, changing in opposing ways—that was what had doomed our relationship. It wouldn't have mattered if I'd realized it along the way. I couldn't have stopped it. The deterioration, the decay, was inevitable.
I could see all this now with an objective eye, as if across a chasm. I understood Annalise as I never had before. And I understood myself, as an individual and in relation to her.
She'd given me a lot to be thankful for since that night in her apartment in San Francisco. Four years of greater passion and stimulation than I'd ever known. St. Thomas and the sea and sailing and Bone's friendship. But I hadn't given her all she'd wanted. She had never been content living here. Or content with me. From the first, I was a means to an end, a source of satisfaction for her cravings—an integral part of a package deal. If she'd ever felt love for me, even a little, it had been for that reason and that reason alone. That was why she'd stayed with me as long as she had.
Verriker had been a dalliance, a way to relieve the restless boredom. The New York clothing manufacturer had been a ready-to-wear excuse. When I refused to satisfy the most important of her hungers, a shot at the New York fashion world, she ran off with the first man who could offer it to her. She'd been gone a long time before she actually left.
What it boiled down to was that I couldn't have held on to her because I'd never really had her in the first place. That was what hurt the most. Even at the moments of our deepest connection, in and out of bed, she'd never really been mine in the way that I'd been hers. I don't mean love—I mean the extension and cornmingling of self, the absorption of one persona into the other that creates a bonded third. Or, hell, maybe I do mean love. Maybe that's another thing love is, the only definition that's not strictly personal.
If I hated anybody during that time, it was myself for not understanding sooner. Love is blind—the platitude makers got that one right. Blind and stupid and short-sighted. I accepted that, and accepted that I was a fool for believing otherwise. That was why, when the hurt went away, the rest of the emotion went with it.
Did I stay in the villa? Yes. I would have moved out right away, except that the lease ran until December; I'd been paying the rent in six-month increments to take advantage of a discount offered by the owners. Giving it up immediately would have meant breaking the lease and taking a heavy financial hit, because one condition of the discount was that the biannual payments were nonrefundable. I'd been so careful with money up to then, I couldn't bring myself to throw away thousands of dollars for no good reason.
Aside from a short period of adjustment, I had no trouble learning to be alone again. I slept at the villa most nights, but I spent very little time there otherwise. Days, except when there was a storm, I was at Sub Base harbor or Frenchtown or the native quarter, or out on Windrunner. In port I worked on the yawl's upkeep or just sat on deck reading and listening to music. Sometimes Bone would join me; sometimes I would join him on Conch Out. I ate all my meals alone or with him on one boat or the other, or in Harry's Dockside Cafe or one of the native eateries. Now and then I would drive over to Red Hook to see Dick Marsten, or up to the top of Crown Mountain for a sunset watch, or out to Coki Bay or Sapphire Bay for a swim and some snorkeling among the coral reefs. Once at Sapphire I helped a native kid with a speargun drag a big moray eel in from the reefs offshore—an ugly creature with a body like a bar of white iron and foxlike jaws, that even dead scared hell out of a couple of female tourists.
St. Thomas crawled with unattached and willing women; it would have been easy enough to pick one up for a one-night stand. But I had no interest in playing that kind of game. No interest in female companionship, no interest in sex. My libido had reverted to what it was before I met Annalise. Maybe that would change eventually, I thought, and maybe it wouldn't. It didn't seem to matter much either way.
What mattered was doing as I pleased twenty-four hours a day, every day, with no encumbrances. I didn't have to attend any more parties, play any more handball, dance in any more nightclubs or eat in any more expensive restaurants or take any more lengthy trips that didn't involve sailing. I let my hair get long and shaggy and I grew a beard to go with my mustache. I saw none of the people who no longer cared to see me. The only one of that crowd who ever came around, once, was Jack Scanlon. I didn't encourage him and he never came again.
After a while I came to realize that I not only preferred this way of life to the one I'd had with Annalise, but that it was actually a relief to be alone again. You can change your financial status, your environment, your perspective, but you can't change your basic nature. After three years or thirty, you're still the same person. Jordan Wise had led a quiet, contemplative, mosdy celibate, loner's existence in San Francisco; Richard Laidlaw, without Annalise, gravitated to the same on St. Thomas. She had been only half right when she accused me of evolving back into my former self. I'd never really been anything else.
I thought about her less and less. And when I did, it was only to wonder, with detached curiosity, whether she was still with the manufacturer, whether her intro into the fashion industry had paid off, whether she had any regrets, whether she ever thought of me. I didn't wish her ill and I didn't wish her well—I didn't care one way or the other.
Out of sight, out of heart, out of mind.