“Professor Toner was our longest-serving member of the faculty,” the president tells me. For a moment we stare silently at a photograph of PT and Sarah on their wedding day at the courthouse down the street. Sarah was fifteen years younger than PT, and normally thatsort of thing irks me, but there was something about the pair of them that looked right together. Sarah was a stout woman with muscular legs and a big, booming voice, messy topknot, and chewed-off nails. Even on her wedding day she did not have a manicure.
“They were happy,” the president says now. The grief on his face is acute, and I look around the room at all the people gathered here, and it soothes me to see that you don’t need to have children to matter deeply to people.
I am introduced to a trustee in a sweat-wicking golf vest whose daughter is a fan, and on our way to the bar, we collect the director of financial aid, and then at the bar another trustee in a baseball hat. I still remember the first time I was the only woman in a standing conversation with all men in a professional setting. It was the moment I realized I’d gone from being someone recognizable to someone who had financial influence, and that those two things were decidedly not the same and I’d been an amateur to think they were. I had swayed on my feet, dizzied like I’d woken up in a different body, Freaky Friday style. I don’t dare look around, but my private hope is that Henry is watching me float through the room like a lightning bug, invisible until my sudden flare attracts yet another board member holding a mason jar. My captors deposit me in the dining room, where Corrine Holland is sedating herself with a clear, deadly drink.
“Faye, wow,” she says with bland surprise, though she must have known I was coming. “It’s good to see you.” Corrine is the lucky little girl who married Campbell straight out of college, an aloof blonde who eschews makeup in favor of a tan, a real one that has prematurely crinkled the skin beneath her eyes. She is tall and triangle-shaped, like an Olympic swimmer, and nowhere near as good-looking as Campbell. I might ascribe this to Campbell’s decency—the sort of guy who falls for what’s on the inside—only that Corrine is a rarefied bitch.
“You too,” I say, and then we stall out, wondering if we should hug, and whatever we decide we wait too long and miss the moment. We stand there, smiling unpleasantly at each other, until Tookie comes bounding through the room to save us.
“Mom,” Tookie pants. He looks like he’s been running around outside, screaming in that way children do that could mean they’re having fun or someone needs to dial 911. “Where’s Dad?”
“I don’t know, Tooks.”
“But he has my wand.”
Corrine stares at Tookie’s grass-stained knees, chewing hard on a piece of ice. “Have you seen Uncle Henry?”
Uncle Henry. My pelvis throbs like an open wound.
“He’s in the kitchen.”
“He’s probably with him.”
Tookie dashes off. “His wand?” I say. “Is he into magic?”
“It’s his lacrosse stick,” Corrine says with a snort. “He’s not very good. He used to have blond hair,” she adds, apropos of nothing. Here she takes out her phone and begins to show me images of Tookie from when he was first born. “He was the most stunning baby.”
“Beautiful,” I agree, and then I ask her to show me more, but what I’m really doing is studying the wistfulness in her face as she gazes at her child before he entered his awkward stage, and I’m trying to commit the moment to memory because, of all the things I do, I consider myself a writer first and the steal never stops.
“Anyway.” Corrine puts her phone away and rolls her eyes at herself.Enough of my mom shit. “I haven’t seen you in forever. Congratulations on, well,” she laughs, uncharitably, “everything.”
“Thank you,” I say in the same half-assed tone that she used to congratulate me.
“I keep meaning to go back and watch your show,” she says. “It cameout right when Tookie was born, and I could barely keep my eyes open. Nothing personal—I missed like three seasons ofThe Bachelorette. It’s still streaming, right?”
It is. On the big one. But I wave her off. “It won’t be your cup of tea.” The show is about a group of young women trying to make their way in Los Angeles. They live in seedy first apartments and date unkind men and work soul-crushing assistant hours that leave them with vitamin D deficiencies. It was a full-scale cultural phenomenon because it touched on something true, though not for everyone, and certainly not for someone like Corrine, who arrived at the colleges more or less betrothed to Campbell, her boyfriend since freshman year of boarding school. Not that long ago, my interior designer dragged me to some art show—I have a staircase landing with a blank wall begging for a statement piece that can be seen from the front door—and I got to talking with the artist and discovered she had grown up with Corrine.Does she still write?the artist had asked me, and for a moment I was sure there had to be a mix-up, something to do with Corrine’s maiden name, that we were not in fact speaking about the same person, but the artist had been resolute. Corrine Holland was the editor in chief of their boarding-school literary magazine, and not only that, but her father published theNewport Daily, Rhode Island’s oldest newspaper, and her mother was their art critic.That’s a shame, the artist said when I told her that I never knew Corrine to be a writer.I think she met Campbell and decided she wanted a different kind of life. Really, it’s less that my show isn’t Corrine’s cup of tea and more that she does not want it to be.
“You might be right,” Corrine agrees, no offense taken. “But you know who loved it?”
I stare at her indifferently.
“My brother. Who is demanding we bring you to Sig Phi after this.”
“Oh God,” I say with a shudder. “How can he live at Sig Phi when he’s only twelve years old?”
Corrine nods in a commiserating way. “We got old, Faye.”
It must be something children do to you, make you feel like your time is over and theirs has just begun. Because I don’t feel old at all. I’m in it, this ismytime, and what floors me is the people—the person, really—who is watching time bleed me dry like that is his kink. To waste me. Maybe, partly, that’s why I came.
I feel light fingers on my elbow, turn to find a woman with her gray hair held back in a satin headband, introducing herself as Marjorie, the head of student outreach whom I have emailed but never met. “May I borrow you?” she asks with whispered reverence. “I’d like you to meet Emma King.” When I give her a blank look, she elaborates with just a touch of reproach. “She’s the scholarship student who submitted her script to you.”
“Yes, of course,” I say quickly.
Corrine raises her glass in a Gatsby-like send-off. “We’ll grab you later,” she promises.
At every turn, I brace myself to come face-to-face with Henry, but neither he nor Emma are anywhere to be found.
“I just don’t know where she could have gone,” says Marjorie. “I know she was over the moon to meet you.”