55 pages • 1 hour read
By not responding to Jason’s text messages, Jen has effectively ended her affair with him. At this point, Sam still doesn’t know that Jen’s affair was with Jason. The idea of losing Sam almost makes Jen’s heart stop. Jason has been moping around, but she doesn’t miss him at all—which has always been the case with her lovers. She is sure that Lauren is having an affair with Robert and probably wouldn’t care about Jason’s affair anyway.
Rachel is angry that Jen and Lauren have beat her and Emily in their tennis match, and afterward, Jen sees Rachel take Sam into the tennis storage hut. Jen follows and interrupts them, but it is too late. Rachel has already told Sam about Jen and Jason’s affair. Sam walks out of the hut, goes straight to Lauren, and tells her that he knows. Then he walks away. Jen texts Jason to warn him that Sam has found out about their affair. Realizing the extent of the damage she has caused, Rachel regrets her action almost immediately.
Between tennis matches, Larry Hayward offers to teach Robert about investment finance after the summer is over. This offer represents something that Robert has always wanted: for someone to take him under their wing and mentor him. Robert quickly agrees. Now that he has a real job lined up for the off-season, he wonders if he should cease his embezzlement endeavors. There are open blocks in his ledger book in which he was getting paid, but he was not recording the sessions. Getting caught now would spoil everything. Robert is contemplating the ledger when Susan Steinhagen walks in. He slams the ledger shut. When he goes out to watch the next round of the tournament, he notices that Jen and Lauren are both playing badly. During a questionable call, Robert notes that the women cheat more than the men. He reflects that he himself has never cheated—not at tennis. He thinks of his ledger and wonders whether he put it away when he left the hut.
Jen and Lauren lose their final match. When they see Rachel come out of her house, they rush off to talk to her. Rachel hurries away, and the other two go after her. Meanwhile, Robert returns to the hut and finds Susan looking at the ledger. She tells him that some lessons haven’t been recorded. She points to some blank spaces and says that she remembers him teaching during those times. Robert plays it cool, but Susan slips out with the ledger before he can stop her.
Larry Higgins knows that Robert is a thief. Larry oversees the tennis finances and has noticed the missing lesson charges. He sees it as partly his own fault, for he put the idea into Robert’s mind. Larry doesn’t care about Robert’s transgression, for he has found that the best employees are sometimes the most dishonest. He offered Robert the job with full knowledge that Robert was embezzling from the tennis club, for he knows that Robert will stop embezzling in order to preserve his opportunity to move on to a better job with Larry. Now, Larry hears a crash and looks up in time to see Susan fleeing from the tennis hut, carrying the ledger. Realizing the implications, he feels sorry for Robert, for he will have to withdraw his job offer now that Robert has been caught.
“Jason Parker and Sam Weinstein”
A storm has rolled in after the tournament. Jason is out in the storm, hiding from Sam. Jason has always imagined he might someday kill his best friend. Now, he wonders if Sam will wind up killing him instead. Jen has been sending him text messages, warning him that Sam is dangerous. Jason has always hoped that his affair with Jen would become known so that they would be free to be together openly, but now it seems like a disaster. He still feels that it is better for everything to be out in the open, believing that he and Jen can now start over and move on.
Sam is out in the storm, hunting for Jason and armed with a kitchen knife. The thought of his best friend having sex with his wife makes him sick with rage. He genuinely doesn’t know what he will do if he finds Jason. Checking his messages on his phone, he finds one from work, telling him that the harassment investigation is over and he has been cleared; it was all a setup. Sam wonders if everyone in his life is a liar and a cheat. Standing there in the rain and the dark, Sam sees Jason emerge from his hiding place under a playground slide. Jason heads toward his home, and Sam follows.
“Lauren Parker and Jen Weinstein”
Lauren and Jen have never really been friends. They have been thrown together by their husbands’ friendship. Now they are out looking for their husbands together, and they are both equally disgusted with their husbands’ behavior. Jen has realized that there was something wrong with her that led to her chronic cheating, but she still has no intention of changing her ways. Now, she apologizes to Lauren for the affair, but Lauren replies that she honestly doesn’t care. Lauren’s only concern is that the affair makes her look bad. The two women joke that neither of them really wants Jason. Lauren tells Jen that she had always known Jason was in love with Jen, but she didn’t care. She has her money and her kids, so she doesn’t care about anything else.
Jen tells Lauren that everything will be fine between her and Sam, revealing that Sam is too traumatized by his parents’ divorce to give up his marriage. Jen believes that Sam will have to forgive her. While the women are searching the tennis court, they see Jason climb out from under the slide on the playground and head for home. A moment later, they see Sam go after him.
“Micah Holt”
Micah is waiting out the storm in the bar with his friend Willa. Through the window, he notices Lauren and Jen looking for something on the tennis courts.
“Rachel Woolf”
Rachel has been hiding out in the neighboring town of Kismet when Robert finds her. He tells her he is looking for someone but does not say who. In the course of their conversation, she admits to him that she is the one who told Sam about Jen and Jason’s affair. He laughs and tells her that everyone in Salcombe acts equally erratically. Rachel feels sick at the thought of going back to Salcombe, or to New York City at the end of the summer, for that matter. She and Robert return to Salcombe, riding their bikes through the dark. They pause at her street, but instead of turning toward home, Rachel waits a moment and secretly follows Robert, wondering where he is going.
Robert stops in front of Susan Steinhagen’s house and hammers on her side door. Susan ducks out the front door, gets on her bike, and speeds away down the boardwalk. Robert gets back on his bike and speeds after her, unaware that Rachel is following him. Rachel also sees Lauren and Jen confronting Jason and Sam. Rachel decides that she doesn’t want to get involved and turns around in a hurry. Suddenly, a branch blown by the wind strikes her and knocks her off the boardwalk into the brush.
The next day, Susan is found dead beside the boardwalk with her bike on top of her.
In this section of the novel, the disparate threads of secret affairs and dishonest behavior intertwine in a complex, action-packed series of events that brings the narrative rushing quickly toward its climax. Everything comes to a head as secrets are exposed and the characters finally begin to reap the rewards of Betrayal and Disloyalty. Ironically, even within this framework, Robert persists in regarding himself as an honest person, at least as far as tennis goes, and he feels no guilt over his ongoing thefts from the tennis club because he is indifferent to the larger metanarrative of honesty and fair play. Instead, he considers only his self-serving micronarrative, and therefore, his highest priority is not amending his poor behavior, but rather avoiding the consequences of being caught, and he considers that much only because he knows that Susan has the power to impose such consequences on him. Ultimately, Robert is mired in deep denial of his own corruption. His observation that the women cheat more than the men—at least at tennis—overlooks the fact that he has been as much a cheater as anyone else.
Like Robert, Rachel cannot escape the consequences of her actions, for her jealousy and sense of being an outsider triggers her revelation of the affair and causes considerable consternation throughout the social group, ostracizing her even more. Rachel craves acknowledgment, and tennis is one way in which she judges her own personal value, so when Lauren beats her at tennis, Rachel feels that her loyalty has been rebuffed. Her revelation of the affair is her way of taking Lauren down a peg by exposing the crack in her facade of perfection. Lauren’s response, however, is as cool and regal as always, and she ultimately tells Jen that she doesn’t care about the larger metanarrative of marital fidelity because it doesn’t impact her comfortable life. Her power therefore lies in her indifference to the affair, for she only cares about her reputation and public image. Meanwhile, Rachel’s decision to reveal the affair has resulted in a new level of isolation from the social group, prompting her to temporarily flee the island and further emphasizing the effects of Betrayal and Disloyalty.
Until the revelation of Jason’s betrayal, Sam has been the most sympathetic of the main characters. He is easy-going, charming, and loyal, and he always assumes the best of others. His personal micronarratives also conform to the grand narratives that maintain a stable society. Jason and Jen’s betrayal of his trust shatters his faith in those metanarratives, and he finally recognizes that the people around him have a very different set of values in which lying and cheating is perfectly acceptable; their actions only appear on the surface to coincide with common ideas of right and wrong, for in reality, the other characters find ways to rationalize their self-serving behavior in order to pursue their own goals guilt-free. Now, ironically, Sam finds himself in the same position, for he has been overcome by personal emotion that he now experiences a near-total loss of self, thereby losing his own moral compass. Jen’s observation to Lauren that Sam will get over his hurt suggests that Jen believes his adherence to the larger metanarrative of marital loyalty will eventually dominate his actions and prevent him from ending his marriage.
As the various issues all come to a head simultaneously, the author forces all of the characters into close proximity, using the literal imagery of the storm to symbolize the figurative storm of emotions, desires, and conflicts of interest that push everyone into a chaotic jumble. By deliberately crafting this element of confusion as the moment of Susan’s death draws near, the author also cleverly gives more than one person the opportunity to commit the crime—even though only one person has a clear motive to do so. Thus, even though the identity of the corpse is finally revealed, the “how” and the “why” of Susan’s death have yet to be discovered. Likewise, the full actions of every participant in the scene are still unknown, allowing the author to draw out the suspense, for her narrative skips right over the climax and then proceeds to the denouement in the following chapters. Only in bits and pieces will she reveal the full extent of the chain of events that occurs during the storm.
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