Chapter VII. Bright Young Things. #3
She pictured him in the off-campus housing he shared with his two roommates, Hadley and Anne.
Anne was a childhood friend from Greenwich, and Hadley a friend of Anne’s.
Both were artists, and their small apartment on Amsterdam Avenue was often in disarray.
The bathroom especially, littered with brushes and half-empty jars of paint.
The tub often clogged with Hadley’s sometimes-pink, sometimes-purple, sometimes-blue hair.
He was likely lying on his bed, with the mustard-yellow sheets.
The dream catcher mounted above his headboard.
His desk opposite, with its Mac PowerBook, his works by Kierkegaard, his leather journal.
A photo of the two of them pinned to his corkboard, taken that first fall when they’d hiked that stretch of the Appalachian Trail near Salisbury.
Far up in the northwest corner of Connecticut, where the state abutted both New York and Massachusetts.
On that trip he had pitched a tent and built a fire and made them a lentil stew with fresh sage and thyme that he’d grown in his parents’ garden.
And they’d sipped hot chocolate while gazing at the stars and followed that up with mind-blowing sex in his sleeping bag, which kind of clinched it for Cecilia that if she ended up with anyone but Lorry Kenter she would be settling.
“I don’t know, Ceece,” he said finally. “I had all these things on my mind. Things that have been weighing on me for a couple of months now, and I just … needed to share them. You’ve always been so good about expressing how you feel—in general—but about me particularly, and I didn’t think it would be fair to not do the same for you.
To keep it all bottled up, and not let you know that I was … I don’t know…”
“Wavering?”
“Maybe. No. I wouldn’t call it wavering. Just … conflicted.”
For a second, she said nothing, her eyes on the stucco ceiling, her fingers twisting in the phone cord.
“Are you saying you don’t want this anymore?”
“No. I don’t know.”
“Are you saying you…” She drifted off, the words too difficult to wrap her mouth around, her mind around.
“Ceece, you are, like, the most incredible thing that has ever happened to me,” he said then. His voice sure, earnest. It was not the first time he’d expressed as much.
“Then what are you saying, Lorry? What do you want?”
“I don’t know, Cecilia. I want us to be happy. I want you to be happy. And … I don’t feel that you are, really.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Because you say it all the time. That you’re not happy with your life. That you feel unsettled. That you don’t feel like you’re doing what you should be doing. That you want more.”
This was all true. That she was almost five years out of Yale and had begun to feel stuck.
Her classmates graduating from top law and business schools and landing cushy jobs with fancy titles, while she was still a lowly assistant.
Doing mostly manual labor, to boot. If she’d not lucked out and been invited by her college roommate, Audrey, to share the two-bedroom prewar co-op Audrey’s parents had gifted her upon graduation, she would likely still be in lower Westchester.
Living with her parents, in the split-level ranch in which she’d grown up. They, too, had begun to complain.
“We didn’t send you to an Ivy League school so you could load and unload film for the rest of your life, Cecilia.
Figure out what it is you’re going to do and do it.
” This from her irreproachable mother, on the phone just a week earlier, had stung.
They’d wanted her to go to law school like her younger brother.
That had always been their plan for her.
Cecilia was just delaying the inevitable.
“When I say I’m not happy with my life,” she said now, to Lorry, “I’m talking about my job, my career. I’m not talking about you. I love you.”
“I know you do,” he said, soft. “And I love you, too. But I don’t want to be the only thing making you happy.
When we first met you used to talk about traveling the world.
Moving to Europe and becoming some brilliant artist whose work was featured in permanent collections in museums. You and Pilar,” he said, referencing one of Cecilia’s close friends, a fellow artist she’d met while studying in Paris her junior year.
Pilar had recently followed up her Harvard degree with an MFA in painting from SVA and was already being repped by a small gallery in Soho.
But Pilar came from a wealthy Argentine family and did not have to worry about paying rent or school loans.
Like Audrey’s, her parents had bought her a plum two-bedroom on lower Fifth Avenue.
She was using the second bedroom as her studio space. Cecilia did not have that luxury.
“And now, I get the feeling you’ve put everything on pause because of me,” Lorry continued.
“Like you’re waiting for me to finish college and figure out my next step, and I don’t know what that is yet.
But I feel like it makes you dependent on me for your happiness.
And I can’t be the only thing making you happy. ”
Cecilia was quiet, letting his words sink in. Wondering what had brought him to this revelation.
“It’s just a lot…” he continued. “It’s a lot of fucking pressure.”
She was taken aback. She had, to the best of her knowledge, gone out of her way not to pressure him.
Nor to be beguiled by his emotional maturity.
But for months now she had imagined their relationship years down the line.
Blissfully married and living on a farm somewhere in New England.
Because that is where he wanted to be, not off gallivanting with the haut monde and attending fashionable parties in Europe.
They would have three caramel-eyed children and a golden retriever.
He would write books and paint and plant things.
And she would take photographs and only occasionally travel for work, always eager to return to her little bohemian family.
She had visualized it all. But she’d been careful not to share too much of the fantasy for fear of scaring him off. He was twenty-one, after all.
“Wow. Okay. Um.” Her head had begun to throb. The air-conditioning unit in her room was thrumming loudly yet producing little cool air. “I’m sorry you feel pressured. I didn’t think I was pressuring you.”
“No. I know you’re not doing it on purpose,” he said. “But it’s like this thing that hangs over me because I know part of you being unsettled is feeling uncertain about us. About our future. And you being older, and maybe feeling like you can’t afford to wait around while I figure out my life.”
“Have I ever said that?”
“No. You didn’t have to.”
It packed a wallop. That she was so easy to read.
That even though she thought she was being careful to conceal it, all her anxieties were there at the surface.
She was going to have to work at not being so obvious with her emotions.
At holding her cards closer to her chest. At being more like the French.
For a moment, she thought of Anouk. Her angelic face, her inviting mouth. How she’d reached out and encircled Cecilia’s wrist, her wide green eyes betraying nothing. She thought about what Marc had said. If she had, in fact, been hitting on her. The idea was outlandish. And yet …
“Lorry, I’ve got a four o’clock call time, and I’m not feeling so great, so I’m going to go.”
“Ceece, I don’t want you to be angry.”
“I’m not angry, Lor. I’m just … tired. And I have to be up early and … I need to think about all of this.”
“Okay,” he said. “Call me tomorrow then, okay. Please. Same time.”
“I’ll try.”
An hour later, Cecilia lay wide awake. And she was not thinking about Lorry.