“Taking off,” I hear Henry say from behind me. I right the bottle as quickly as one can when they’ve been mortally wounded.
There are the sounds of hands clapping backs as I stir my plain tequila with a plastic knife and give myself a quick talking to. I am starved for attention for various reasons and just because Henry looked me in the eye with that old look, told another guy to ask before puttinghis hands on me in that old voice, does not mean there is something unfinished between us.
“Good to see you, Faye,” Henry says.
“You too,” I say with my megawatt Hollywood smile, like I am not bleeding out right in front of him.
Chapter 4
Back at the hotel, I take off my clothes and zip the pieces preciously into my garment bag. I get under the covers in my lacy silk set and thumb the papyrus roll of messages on my phone. Casting has sent me some audition reels for a supporting character in another series I’m producing, but earlier, as I waited for my phone to pair with the rental car, I was prompted to reenter my email password because my carrier did not believe I would voluntarily choose the Finger Lakes as a destination. I had guessed at it, then again and again, until I got myself locked out. Now when I go to check my email, I am informed that the server has detected too many authentication attempts and I need to wait a moment to sign in again. I Google how long until I can sign in to my email after getting locked out, and the responses range from one day to a week. I screenshot a summary of the problem and text my assistant:Help.And then I open the message from the person I should not be speaking to.I enjoyed our meeting,she has written.Let’s chat again when you’re back in town.
Guiltily, I navigate to a message from my husband, asking how things are going. It’s the middle of the night where he is—London, on set for one of our joint productions—but I need to unload, and so I tell him about my conversation with Emma.Isn’t that weird?That’s how I endthe text that details her claim that she found PT’s body, her intimation that there is more to the story than I’ve been led to believe. Then I put my phone screen-down on the bed and lie there, thinking about the parts of the night that were also weird but that I cannot tell anyone about, least of all my husband. Henry’s coerced apology. Him telling Win not to touch me in that voice that did not just implyor elsebut all kinds of creative consequences. I play that voice over and over again in my head, roll onto my stomach, and slip my hand into my silk shorts.
The fall of my sophomore year, PT was teaching a semester abroad in Los Angeles. Sarah went with him because crew is a spring sport. Henry and Campbell were always given a key to the house when they went away. PT relied on his nephews to water the plants, secure lines on the boats, bring in the patio cushions when it started to sleet in October, and to clean up after themselves when they inevitably threw a party.
It’s hard to recall now how I put together that Henry liked me. But he was always watching me, giving up a prime seat on the couch for movie night, or offering me a ride home in his school-bus-yellow Defender that he ordered off eBay drunk, where I would find myself crammed into the back seat with his girlfriend, an anxious girl with a perfectly patrician profile known by variations of her last name, Barrington: Bear, Berry, Blubs. Bear was Corrine’s best friend, and when Henry broke up with her at the start of sophomore year, she took it personally. That was when I started hearing the rumors about Henry that made me like him back.
It was just before Thanksgiving. Campus had thinned out, and Henry and Campbell decided it was a sensible time to have a party at PT’s house because they could keep it small. I got ready by taking a scalding-hot shower where I shaved everything and conditioned my hairfor ten minutes straight. I could not stop thinking about the rumors I’d heard about Henry and Bear and hoping they were true. I wore a bra that matched my underwear and very little makeup because I did not want it to come off on the sheets if that was where I ended up.
When I arrived at PT’s house, I located Henry but I did not go over and say hi to him immediately. I mixed a drink. I chatted with a girl from one of my writing classes. I went upstairs with her for a little and came down sniffling with courage. I found Henry and asked if he had a cigarette.What will you give me for it?That’s what he said, in an earnest and thrilling way that told me it better be good. I had the sensation that my blood was humming as it traveled through my veins, on the way to somewhere good.
We sat on the naked wood slats of the patio furniture and lit our Pall Malls. Henry made everyone who came into the house smoke the same brand of cigarettes as PT so that if he missed an errant butt in the cleanup process, PT would not immediately suspect that he had thrown a party at the house. Henry was wearing a nubby navy fleece with the collar turned up to the cold, and I remember thinking how compellingly it framed his face. We talked about what we were doing for Thanksgiving. Henry always spent the holiday at Lake Wanika. The three brothers—his father, Campbell’s father, and PT, technically not a blood brother, but the son of their father’s second wife, whom he married later in life—had kept this tradition alive for years. He told me that they had to cook everything at the clubhouse because it was the only structure on the property that was connected to the main power grid. There were nine other cabins on the island, and no one really went during the offseason because the cold was too extreme. The staff started opening the place right before Memorial Day and closed it down after Labor Day.Sort of like camp, I said, and Henry told me that’s literally what upstate people call their lake houses.Camp.
I had gestured out at Seneca Lake before us then and said it’s so funny to me that PT refers to that place as his lake house when isn’t this technically a lake house too? And Henry had shaken his head and said it was different. Seneca Lake was public. Anyone could swim or apply for a permit to boat and fish, and right down the street was a town center with restaurants and bars and dollar shops. The colleges are located in a municipality with its own hospital and public school system, chain hotels and boutique ones too. Four hours northeast of here in the Adirondack Mountains—a region larger than Yellowstone, the Everglades, Glacier, and the Grand Canyon National Parkscombined—more than half of the six million acreage is privately owned and unconnected to public utilities on purpose. The cabins are only accessible by boat. Henry showed me pictures on his phone of what Lake Wanika looked like in 1929, the year a collective of writers, critics, actors, and wits pooled their resources to purchase 250 acres of the Adirondacks and build a clubhouse and hire staff so they could spend the summers drinking, skinny-dipping, supposedly writing. Dorothy Parker engraved a tree with lines of poetry.“Scratch a lover, find a foe.”
By the 1950s, Henry said, the writers had died young of alcohol-related complications and the actors moved back to the Midwest to teach theater at their old high schools. That’s when the land was purchased by PT’s grandfather, an investment banker from Albany with a passion for the arts who had been a guest at Lake Wanika when he was a young man dabbling in a bohemian lifestyle. He kept everything to the west side of the lake and sold off the remaining cabins to the east. He created a small board and established membership rules and monthly dues. It’s a tight-knit, exclusive community that prides itself on a spartan existence, outdoor recreation, and wildlife conservation.
After all that Henry asked me what my family did for Thanksgiving, and I laughed. Our lives were poles apart. I told him that I had threebrothers and everyone sat around rooting for the Patriots even when they weren’t playing while my mother had a meltdown in the kitchen. Henry wanted to know why, if I was from Massachusetts, I didn’t have a warmer winter coat. I looked down at my anorak without lining. It was the first time I realized Henry noticed everything. I liked that about him. Even at nineteen years old, I knew this was a rare quality for a man to have. I explained how my mother got me a winter coat for my last birthday, something huge and hideous. I returned it to the Marshalls where she got it from and used the cash to purchase a subscription to Final Draft, the software program that Professor Toner said professional screenwriters use. I was writing in Microsoft Word. Clunking my keyboard at a glacial pace. Space. Left alignment for action. Space. Center. Bolded font for character’s name. Space. Center. Unbold for dialogue, which I could no longer recall exactly as I’d heard it in my head before all this maneuvering, when it was undoubtedly perfect. Final Draft did all the formatting work for you, but it was expensive and the school wouldn’t cover it, and even the kids who could afford it didn’t care enough to go through the trouble. I cared, even though PT assured me that when the time came to submit my senior script to Jonathan Granger, he would not be put off by an amateur document. But every time I read what I wrote in Word, I did not believe it. No one would say this. No one would act like this. And I became convinced it was the page that was the problem. A serious painter would not work on a piece of construction paper, I told myself as I forked over $179 for the same software used by Aaron Sorkin, and then I curled up into a ball and did not move for a very long time after I discovered that the new version could not be downloaded onto my ancient Dell laptop, handed down to me from my oldest brother. Of course it couldn’t. It had one of those fans that never stopped running.
The patio door opened and Corrine walked out. She stared at usa moment, breath steaming from her nostrils like a medieval beast, and then she made a flicking gesture to Henry, and when he didn’t move, she groaned with impatience that he didn’t understand. “Your lighter,” she said. “Can I borrow it?”
“Say please,” Henry told her.
Corrine laughed. “I’m not Bear.” She turned to me. “You know he tells her she’s not allowed to eat.”
That was one of the things I had heard, yes.
“That’s weird,” Corrine told me, with an ugly widening of her eyes.
Even if I did think it was weird, which wasn’t what I was thinking, wasn’t the tight feeling wrapping itself around my rib cage, I wouldn’t give Corrine the satisfaction of an alignment. She was in and out of this house a lot too, on account of dating Campbell, and we’d sat together on the couch for movie night at least ten times since the fall of our freshman year. This was the most she’d ever spoken to me.
“It’s none of my business,” I said.
“He would handcuff her to things and leave her there. You’ve got to thinkthat’sweird,” Corrine emphasized, like she was giving me one last chance to distinguish myself from the freaks.
I shrugged. Not really. Not at all, actually.
“Okay, then,” Corrine said with one of her more terrifying smiles. “Don’t want to be near this.” She turned and walked back into the house.
“Your teeth are chattering,” Henry said to me.
We went upstairs and into the guest bedroom, where twelve years later I would watch Henry argue with his wife in the garden at dusk. In the en suite bathroom I shimmied out of my stretch jeans, sat down, and peed in front of him like we’d been married for thirty years.
I flushed the toilet and washed my hands in hot water. Henry was using his thumb and index finger to flick the rocks in whatever substance the local Canandaigua dealer had filched from his laundry room and passed off as a sixty-dollar stimulant. He came up behind me and floated a small pile under one of my nostrils. I plugged the other and sniffed, threw my head back the way they do in the movies. It was an overperformance and I wobbled a little. Henry caught me around the waist, and for a few moments we stood like a couple at a concert, swaying sweetly to the overtly sexual rap song playing downstairs. I put my hand on his wrist and stared at the two of us center frame in the glass. I could see that Henry was nervous, that we were moments away from an escalation, and normally I did not like vulnerability in the men I was with. I liked to be railroaded, dominated, to feel like I was in brutal and capable hands. But Henry refined all that. Taught me that nothing made me feel more alive than being degraded by someone who also happened to worship me.
I pushed down on his wrist, squirmed my hips needily. Henry had dipped his head, smelled my hair, pressed his erection into my lower vertebrae.Is that what you like?he asked, and I knew he was referring to the conversation downstairs, to all the things I’d heard he’d done to Bear.
I nodded and Henry looked at me in the mirror and said,Okay, with a quiet kind of resignation I still think about. He hooked a finger in the strap just barely holding up my little going-out top and removed it from my shoulder, put his lips on my skin. I had that look on my face, the one that embarrasses me—sleepy, sexed—and I’d closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see. Henry gave my cheek one hard pat. Some girls might have called it a slap.