“Campbell,” I gasped. I was pacing the street, and I had just pivoted and was facing the valet, where Melanie Griffith was getting out of her car. It struck me as fitting, that I would hear about PT’s death while watching a Hollywood legend fish through her bag for her car keys. Professor Toner, or PT as I would come to know him, was the reason I was a member of this members-only club in West Hollywood that requires guests to cover the camera lens on their phones with branded stickers so that people like Melanie Griffith can eat their chop salad without fear of being photographed with their mouths open and one eye closed. People like me too, I suppose.
“What happened?” I asked in a high, nasal voice.
“It looks like he had a heart attack at some point Sunday evening. The house cleaner found him Monday morning.”
Vaguely, I recalled that PT had some sort of inherited heart condition, and this is why he walked everywhere and avoided red meat and, though it took great effort, eventually kicked the Pall Malls. He was tall and trim, and he looked like he belonged in Los Angeles, which he tried out for a few years before his prodigal return to the East Coast to inaugurate the film department at the colleges. When I made it here myself, I found tons of other industry people, just like him, who were fastidious about their health but would never turn down a light.
“I’m so sorry, Campbell.” I was trying to picture PT lying dead on a bathroom floor. In what, a robe? Pajamas? Death seemed beneath him somehow. I don’t think I ever saw the man wearing anything but a slim-fitting black T-shirt, even at his cabin on the lake during the summer. I used to see PT all the time in the summer, because Campbell’s family has a cabin on the same lake and so does his cousin, Henry Spalding, who is the one with the voice that makes me feel like I’ve sat on a stick of dynamite.
“I’m sorry too,” Campbell said back. “I know what he meant to you.”
My nose felt peppery. “Yeah” was all I said.
“You two were in touch about the scholarship student, right?”
I groaned. “He sent me her script a week ago, and I never even wrote him back. In my defense, she turned it in a week late.”
“Don’t beat yourself up, Faye. You’ve got a lot going on.” I could picture the kindness in Campbell’s face as he said this. Though it goes against every rule in Central Casting, Campbell is as decent a human being as he is handsome. In college, he remembered that orange was my favorite flavor of Gatorade, and he got a husband pillow because I had one, and we would fester on the floor together watching marathons ofProject Runway. When I broke up with Henry—not just Campbell’s cousin but his constant companion since they were in diapers—he sent me a text:I love him but I get it.
“Have you made any of the funeral arrangements yet?”
“This weekend. At the chapel on campus. I was wondering… if you might be willing to speak?”
A warm, buttery feeling enveloped me. I was always on the periphery at a place like the colleges. Even after I became a frequent guest in PT’s home, I would suffer lashes of self-consciousness, wondering if I was only included because I was dating Henry. Fame has done an all right job of soothing my fears that I don’t matter to the people who matter to me, but having your name listed on the funeral program of a person who loved you the way your parents should is more of the elixir I’m after. “You want me to do the eulogy?” I said, touched.
“Sorry,” Campbell said, because I’d misunderstood. “Not the eulogy. Henry and I are doing that.”
“Oh.” Melanie Griffith had found her car keys, and she was laughing with the valet, something about how she’d lose her head if it weren’t attached to her body, probably.
“I think we are going to do some sort of ceremony on the dock the day after the funeral. He wanted to be cremated and have his ashes spread in the lake where Sarah is.”
I had dipped my head, swallowed hard, the totality of the tragedy summed up neatly in one sentence. PT had a wife who drowned herself in the lake just before I graduated. She had wanted children, noise, mess, chaos, and instead her life became too quiet to tolerate.
“I was thinking you could speak at that,” Campbell said, and when I didn’t respond right away, he spoke to the thing that we both knew was giving me pause. “I know it’s awkward with Henry being there, but he’s coming with his wife and kids, and honestly he’s, like, a totally different person now.”
A pleasant electricity lifted the soft blond hairs on my forearms, thinking about seeing Henry again. Besides my head, my eyebrows,and my lashes, grown thick and dark with one of those serums that is probably also making me blind, my forearms are the only place left on me with hair. This was the year I got everything lasered, vanquished. You could slip me on like a cashmere glove and my husband has no idea.
“But…,” I said. “The show.” I played a small but zeitgeisty role on the first season of a show created by a thirty-year-old sitcom star who had enough of reading canned lines set to a laugh track. People liked me enough that my role went from recurring to regular. In the third season, I wrote and directed an episode based on my breakup with Henry that made a viral, career-making splash.
“Faye, he didn’t watch it.”
I didn’t think he would have, but put so bluntly I was instantly reminded that there was a whole world out there that did not give a shit about me, that I could disappear into thin air and it would be news for about a week. “But he must know what it was all about.”
“He has two under four. He’s underwater.”
In theory, I understand that children are a cover for everything. It’s just that I do not aspire to understand in practice. I had looked down at my nails, realized I needed a manicure. Did I have enough time to get my eyebrows done before I left? It didn’t matter that Henry and I were both married to other people now. We had shattered each other. We would be checking, inspecting, merciless in our appraisal. “Okay,” I agreed.
We spoke for another minute or two and said goodbye. Inside, at reception, Melanie Griffith was spelling the last name of her guest for a staff member in a green-piped blazer. She put her hand on my elbow as I walked by and told me in her sweet, seductive voice that she was a fan.
Chapter 2
I drive around in circles for too long, and by the time I feel ready to face Henry, there is no space left on PT’s street, or the street before that, or the one before that. I park in the lot for the science building, an almost-too-long walk from PT’s waterfront painted Victorian at the edge of campus. For a while, when PT talked about his lake house, I assumed the Victorian was the house he meant. But when Henry and I became a couple toward the end of sophomore year, he explained that when PT said he was going to the lake house, he meant the one located on the shores of Lake Wanika, a private community in the Adirondacks, about four hours west of the colleges, to which Henry’s and Campbell’s families also belong. I was envisioning a cushy chalet with snow-covered eaves until Henry brought me there and introduced me to the curious nuances of East Coast generational wealth. The cabins were only accessible by boat, and they were humble, sure, but not without antique Turkish rugs on the floors and thoughtful finishes in the kitchen. There was limited electricity by design. Just enough to power some interior lights and the fridge, and even that they could only run a few hours a day. That was the first time I realized that not only will wealthy people pay to live like they’re poor, but they’ll call it a vacation too.
The front door to PT’s home-home is propped open to welcome mourners, and at the threshold time collapses in on itself. I can see straight back to the patio doors that open to a private dock where PT’s wife used to keep their sailboat shrink-wrapped in winter. Sarah was the coach of the girls’ crew team, and the foyer was usually jammed with rowing shoes that clipped into racing shells. During the pandemic, when my husband and I acquired a Peloton along with every other intially optimistic workaholic in the country, I would look down at my feet in my red-and-black cycling shoes and think of all the evenings I stepped out of my snow boots in this foyer. PT and Sarah used to host movie nights, usually between Thanksgiving and Christmas when PT would receive DVD copies of either movies that had been in theaters but weren’t available to rent yet or, even more exotic, movies that had not yet come to theaters. Now that I’m a member of all the guilds—actor, director, writer—I get them every year between Thanksgiving and Christmas too, though now instead of DVDs they send you QR codes to scan.
PT’s dog, a tubular, squat thing already memorialized in the brass doorstop next to my foot, throws back his head and howls as an ambulance races north on Main. The house is packed with people, but for a moment the grim revelry wanes as everyone listens to the dog lose his mind with small, sad smiles. The irony that the tragedy is already here.
The president of the colleges notices me, comes over, and embraces me with open arms. We exchange condolences for the various ways we get to call this our loss.