“Unimaginative slut,” Henry says, despondent, then rolls off like he’s taken a bullet. He folds his arms behind his head. I turn to study him in profile. The heavy, furrowed brows, the bead of sweat in the fluffy bow of his lips, sand and grit in the hair at his temples. That one tendon in his jaw, right next to his ear, keeps popping out like a broken bone.
“Which famous friends attended?” he wants to know.
“All of them,” I say. “But they’re not my friends.”
“Are they all as brutal as they seem?”
“Some of them are about as normal as they can be, given their circumstances, and I would go so far as to say they’re good people. The fun ones are really fun.” I close my eyes to the sun, not because it feels good but because I’m worried about squinting, wrinkles, that crepe-like texturing. “It’s just, you can’t get close with people like that. They’re guarded; they have to be.” Henry exhales through his nostrils, a nearlysoundless snort. I hear it too. The second I say it, I hear it. That I was drawn into a world of walls, of parties and pleasantries and protections.
“What did you do for yours?” I ask him.
“My daughter had just been born.”
“She was the most precious gift,” I intone.
“Kids aren’t like that, actually.”
“Are you one of those who just talks about how hard it is all the time?”
“No, that’s the height of childishness. If you’re surprised that it’s hard, you’re probably not much smarter than a fifth grader.”
“So what are kids like, then?”
“They love remote controls.”
I laugh. How random. “Remote controls?”
Remote controls, sunglasses, and keys, Henry says. And yet somehow the house feels haunted by a poltergeist with an affinity for beautiful wooden blocks and ugly plastic stackers, books about belly buttons and berserk hippos. He is never too tired to clean up even though he is unbelievably tired. Some days he is sure his children hate him. Or don’t hate him, exactly, but don’t feel any special attachment to him. He loves them and that’s nice, but a lot of other people do too. Some of those people, like their aunt with the trampoline in her backyard, they might miss more than him if they were to go away. And other days they take a wrong step and whack their heads on the edge of the coffee table and he is the only one they want, the only one who can soothe them, and they nuzzle their heads under his chin and cling to him with shuddering, shaky breaths, and it feels so good he wonders if he is suffering from that Munchausen by proxy thing. He spends more time on the floor than he ever thought he would. He changes his clothes three times a day because he never feels clean with two under four running aroundwith hummus in their hair and someone else’s snot on their sleeves. He is relieved his daughters take after him and not his wife in the looks department, but terrified that they also contain the same reject quality that Henry has grappled with his whole life. His wife joined a baby group with their first, and slowly over the years the invitations to the birthday parties have fallen off. It happens, she assures him. But Henry has met the other mothers, and he detected a core clique that excludes his wife. Their children played well together even as babies. They didn’t cling and cry. They didn’t puke constantly the way his first did. Too many times a day to count, until she turned one. Not all babies puke, it turns out. And if they do, it’s a tiny dribble. His daughter was constantly wet under the neck. He was afraid to pass her to strangers. Afraid no one would think she was cute anymore if they saw how much she barfed, and it matters to him more than it should that other people think his children are cute. When people say that having a child is like having your heart beat outside your chest, he thought that had to do with love. But it doesn’t. It has to do with all your own wounds and shame. Because the biggest revelation Henry has had since becoming a father is that he would never, for one second, consider locking his baby in the cabin while he posted up at the main house without a monitor, which is what his mother did to him.
I don’t know what to say and so I say nothing. I reach for his hand and squeeze. We lie next to each other, ruining our skin for some time. Tomorrow is Sunday. The day after that, I’ll go back to Los Angeles with a tan.
Chapter 23
That night, we eat leftovers warmed up on the stove, and after we’ve washed and dried the dishes, Henry tells me to put on a coat. The day stayed hot, but now the windows are pebbled with rain. When I ask him where we’re going, he pretends not to hear.
We get into the boat, and instead of following the backbend curve of the lake’s shores, Henry steers us diagonally across. We used to do this drive with Henry’s parents on Friday nights. I would be entrusted with the shopping bag containing bottles of Merlot and disks of soft cheese, Henry’s mother repeatedly reminding me to keep it in my lap so that the bottom did not get wet and tear. The first time I carried that intact shopping bag down the dock and up the stairs to the front door where PT was waiting for us with a warm smile and an immediate offer to take the bag from me, I did not understand why the other residents spoke ofPT’s placein such breathless tones. His cabin looked like all the other cabins on Lake Wanika: cozy and unassuming with a dash of intentional kitsch. It was only after Henry took me to see the tree that Dorothy Parker engraved, a winding but mostly flat mile from PT’s back door, that I understood. In the distance Henry pointed out peaks of open rock to five thousand feet and said that from up there youcould look down and feel like you were king of an entire continent. That’s how vast PT’s property was, how wildly the terrain varied, from sandy hills with conifer cover to private ponds of screaming frogs to stretches of boulder and, in the spring, pockets of what everyone referred to as “lovely black goo,” actually some kind of fungus that can almost act as quicksand. And all of it belonged to PT, an unpatrolled hunk of private, howling real estate.
It’s been years since I’ve been in this house, but Henry opens the doors and twists the switches of the gas sconces, and I reacquaint myself with the tatty tribal rugs, the art on the walls that is not fish, and I remember the relief I used to feel when PT opened the door and invited me inside. Here, it didn’t matter that I didn’t know how to check a boat’s engine oil or bushwhack a trail. There were old films to watch and discuss, meaty pours of Italian reds, PT asking me what I thought aboutJaws—the book, not the movie, told from the perspective of the shark.
PT never had a television. No one on Wanika Lake does. He would use a battery-operated projector, which Henry removes now from the low wood console pushed into a white wall, the only painted wall in the cabin, on which I watchedCasablancafor the first time.
“What are we watching?”
“Pick out a bottle,” Henry answers without answering. “You’ll see in a minute.”
I go through the kitchen and into the pantry, find a white Burgundy with a scrawly old label. I hear a few chords of a theme song that freezes me in my tracks, and just as quickly it cuts out. I come back into the kitchen area and stare at Henry.
“I’ve never seen it,” he admits. “Other than that episode, I mean.”
I’m flooded with my favorite kind of feeling. It is a full-body rush to get to watch something you’ve made with someone who has never seen it before. Though I’ve seen my show dozens of times between writing it, shooting it, editing it, screening it, and editing it again, the thing always feels brand-new again when I am with someone who does not know what happens next.
“Why start now?” I say. I’m trying to play it cool but I am profusely happy.
“Because it won’t be painful to watch you when you’re sitting here next to me,” Henry says.
We start with season three, the season I finally raised my hand and ended up writing and directing four of the nine episodes. Henry laughs at the parts that I intended to be funny. He claps when my name comes on the screen.It’s so good, Faye, he keeps saying to my utter delight,I get it.
“I have to know,” he says, when we take a break to use the bathroom and scrounge around in the kitchen cabinets for snacks. “What do your parents think?”