Chapter XLV. Portrait of a Man.
XLV.
PORTRAIT OF A MAN.
LOS ANGELES.
In the second week of January, when Francois is in New York for meetings, I have lunch with my ex-boyfriend.
He’d texted in the days following the Hammer opening, but I’d pushed it off until after the premiere and the holidays.
Stalling more, I thought, would feel like an obvious avoidance, and I did not want to give him the impression that I was so damaged from our breakup twenty years prior that I couldn’t handle a casual lunch date. Although, clearly, that was the case.
He chooses a Cuban-Mexican restaurant in Malibu, unassuming, informal, slightly out of the way. His choice, like everything else about him now, is unexpected and unknowable. In so many ways, he is a stranger to me.
I arrive to find him already seated on the terrace, in the dappled shade of bougainvillea and palms. Dignified profile, perfect yogi posture.
My heart all but flips out of my chest. Decades after the fact, and just the sight of him still has that effect.
He sees me, smiles, and stands awkwardly to make the greeting.
It’s a brief hug, but I’m close enough to inhale him.
His stubble rough and warm against my skin.
That familiar Lorry scent of sun and soil.
And just like that, every minute of our relationship comes flooding back.
All the pain, all the anguish, all the rush, all the sex.
The sex.
“Hi,” he says, and even that feels loaded. As if he can sense that I am feeling all these things. As if he is feeling them, too. And I catch myself wondering if this is indeed just lunch.
“I’m just amazed that you’re here,” he continues. “I never imagined you’d come back to the States. And to California, of all places.”
“It’s only temporary.”
“Have you liked it here?”
“It’s … different.”
“I can imagine. It’s also a weird time to be here. In America.”
“You don’t say.” I laugh.
“But we need people like you. We need art like yours. Art as resistance.”
“I was not aware I was resisting anything.”
“For some, simply existing is resistance.”
I do not have the heart to tell him that simply existing has become exhausting. At least not this early into the date. Is this a date?
His arms are crossed before his chest, and there is something both at ease and cocky in his posture. His forearms golden. His hands, capable. His thick fingers. Oh, his fingers.
He is not wearing a wedding band. Had he been wearing one at the Hammer opening? Had I missed that detail?
A waitress comes by then to deposit two glasses of ice water on the table. I am pretty certain I’m going to need something stronger.
“You look great, Ceece.”
Ceece. Jesus fuck, are we there already?
“Thank you.”
“I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable at the opening, but you looked incredible. You haven’t aged.”
“I have. And that’s okay.”
He smiles at that, nods. “Well, the only other option is to die, right?”
“The only other option is to die.” I return the smile. And then, “They’re a little obsessed here with the not-aging thing.”
“You’ve noticed?”
“Hard not to. It’s an interesting dichotomy: the laid-back attitude and the rigorous battle to stop time.”
“Yes,” he says. “Los Angeles is a curious place.”
For a moment, he takes me in. A wry smile on his face.
And I wonder what it is he is seeing, thinking.
His own face has changed. A distinct furrow between his brows.
A delicate spray of age spots marring his left cheek.
His hair, notably thinner, less grabbable.
“Oral sex hair,” I used to call it. Once thick, wavy, soft.
Hair that demanded to be pulled on during marathon sessions of cunnilingus. Would that I could shake the memory.
That time in the summer of ’95, when he’d taken me to Black Rock Forest, a picturesque corner of the Hudson Highlands in Cornwall, New York.
The area was maintained in part by Columbia University, and as a member of the hiking club, Lorry had somehow finagled permission to spend a night at Stone House, one of the few structures on the near-four-thousand-acre property.
A rustic farmhouse from the early nineteenth century, there was no electricity, no running water, no other guests.
But we set up camp in our sleeping bag and spent a memorable night playing our version of Little House on the Prairie.
Earlier in the day, we’d hiked two hours to a spot called Eagle Cliff, a bald rock atop a precipice at some fourteen hundred feet, looking out over Orange and Putnam counties and points south.
The views were breathtaking. The Hudson twisting lazily through rolling hills of green.
Manhattan a speck in the distance. We’d set aside our backpacks to rest and in no time I was fully undressed.
His head between my legs, his very grabbable hair, his mouth.
Warm and wild and knowing. That sucking thing he did.
The way I came. Again and again and again.
My pleasure heightened by the splendor of the Hudson Valley.
The way he stripped off his Knicks T-shirt and khaki shorts.
Undaunted by the possibility of encountering another hiker.
His body, young, and long, and golden. His soccer-player legs.
His firm ass. His beautiful, beautiful dick.
Afterward, when we had collapsed in a pool of sweat and sunscreen, and I’d marveled at how good it was, how good he was—every. single. time.—he’d lifted his head from the crook of my neck and said, “Do you hear that?”
“What? Is someone coming?”
“No. The bird. That’s a warbler.” He’d smiled, bright. “A black-throated blue warbler. I think. I could be wrong.…”
I’d stared at him in awe for a second. His face in profile, his thick, dark lashes, his eyes searching the trees.
“Is there anything you can’t do, Lorry Kenter?”
He’d thought about it, shrugged, then rose to fetch his boxers. “I can’t fly a plane,” he’d said.
I’d laughed at that.
That moment, the two of us, exposed, in love, seemingly on top of the world. I had wanted to hold on to it.
“But,” he’d added, making his way back over the rock, lowering his face to mine, kissing me. “I can make you feel like you’re flying a plane.”
And here we are, two decades later in a Malibu strip-mall restaurant, making uncomfortable small talk. Had I really shared all that with this person? This stranger? Am I supposed to sit here in the present day and act like I hadn’t? Is he?
“Shall we order?” he suggests, casual.
I waste no time grabbing the menu. “Let’s.”
Later, when Lorry is downing a plate of fish tacos and I’m picking at a salmon, kale, and Manchego salad and trying hard not to revisit every intimate moment of our life together in my head, he fills me in on the essential stuff.
His parents, enjoying their retirement, back east. His sister, Serena, a human-rights attorney.
His ranch in Topanga. His practice, the new studio, the twin daughters, the fact that he’s been working on a book, Living with Mindfulness, that he’s now firmly agnostic.
I wonder what his parents have to say about that—his Ashkenazi father whose grandparents had fled the Nazis, his Waspy mother who’d converted. His kind rabbi at the welcoming temple in Greenwich.
“That’s a lot to process,” I say. “It sounds like you’re happy.”
He takes a half second to respond. The expression on his face unreadable.
“Mostly, I think. Or I was.” He pushes his plate away, swigs from his Modelo Negra. “I mean, well, obviously Bronwyn and I are going through a bit of a rough patch right now.…”
Bronwyn. It is the first time he’s said her name. The horsey brunette from the Louvre. I assume he was keeping mentions of her to a minimum to make things less painful for me. But it has been two decades, I can handle it. Or at least I want him to think I can.
However, it’s the rough patch that jolts me.
His delivery of it casual, unsettling. The offhand way that he’s referenced his marital woes.
Is this why he had asked me to lunch? Surely it couldn’t be a coincidence that after twenty years of no communication he’d reached out when everything was no longer hunky-dory at home.
But Lorry had never struck me as a person who would take advantage of a situation.
Our original introduction on the train to Brewster North notwithstanding.
“Oh,” I say after a moment. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
And then I trip on something else. Why would he think such news was obvious?
“I assumed Anouk told you,” he says, as if reading my mind.
“No. Why would she tell me that?”
“Because Anouk…” He trails off. “Oh.”
I watch as he cocks his head to one side, and then the other. I’m trying desperately to read his expressions, but I’m out of practice.
“Never mind,” he says. “Sorry. I thought you knew. Forget I said anything.”
He sips his beer again. But it sits there. His slip. My brain attempting to grasp at fractured pieces and assemble them into a whole.
There are a handful of girls at the table next to us who are gossiping in lowered voices and then every so often erupting in laughter. It rattles me.
Because Anouk what? He thought I knew what? Why would his and Bronwyn’s rough patch have been obvious?
And then I feel a sensation that I can’t quite put my finger on.
A tightness spreading across my chest. As though my body knows something that my mind has yet to figure out.
My organs, my nerves, my skin constricting.
There’s a sudden thickness at the back of my throat.
It moves down toward my gut. And there, deep within, I know. I know.
What she had done.
What they had done.