Chapter XVII. Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe #2
And with that, she saunters off. And I am incredibly aware of my heart pounding outside of my chest.
We settle eventually on the grass, near the retaining wall abutting the ranch. There are fewer than half a dozen people spread out on the lawn, and it feels like our own private Eden. The scent of eucalyptus in the air, a cloudless blue sky above. God, LA really is something.
For a good while neither of us speaks. But then Anouk opens her backpack and pulls out a container of cherries. A small bag for the pits. Like an environmentally conscious mom. I can’t help but laugh.
“What? They’re in season. You want your first time to be special, n’est-ce pas?”
“I didn’t know first LA hikes were something to be celebrated.”
“Every first is something to be celebrated,” she says then, withdrawing an insulated wine sleeve. Inside, a bottle of Bollinger Rosé.
“I thought you didn’t day drink.”
She smiles, unveiling two plastic flutes. “I’m making an exception.”
There is something alluring in her gesture. The spontaneity, the tenderness, the flirting. I had missed this. It had been so long.
We toast. Drink. Eat cherries and dispose of our pits. We lie on the grass, staring up at the sky. Her fingers, red from the fruit, entwine with mine. A dove coos in the distance.
From here I can smell her sweat, her sunscreen. This, I think, is intimacy. This wonderful closeness.
“I wish my first time had been this special.”
“Laurence?” She says it again with the French pronunciation.
“No, it was a … guy … I knew. I wouldn’t even say we dated. He was in a band.”
“A guy in a band?” she questions, amused. “You??”
“Yes. I don’t advise it.” I drift off for a bit.
“I was young. Impressionable. I was assistant to the photo editor at élan magazine, and we shot them for a feature.
Four guys from LA. They were just becoming famous and there was this excitement, just being around them.
They were charming and adorable and talented, and my age.
We shot them in the studio, and we all got on well.
A bunch of us went for drinks after and stayed out late. Laughing into the night.
“And one of them, the drummer, whom I won’t dignify by naming…
” I shake my head, the moment returning.
“He asked for my number. Nothing happened that first night, but two months later the guys were in town filming Carson Daly for MTV. And he called and told me to come to his hotel. That we would all head out to dinner. At Indochine. So I went. I called up from the lobby, and he said the others were running behind. To just come up to his room so we could hang until they were ready. So I went.…”
I can feel her, squeezing my hand. As if she already knew.
“The other guys never showed up.… I felt sick about it after. For a long time, I felt sick.”
She rolls onto her side then, her gaze meeting mine.
“He raped you?”
“I don’t think I thought of it that way.
I tried not to think of it at all. But that wasn’t what I went there to do.
And I got myself into a situation where I was thinking, Fuck.
How did I get here? I blamed myself for being so fucking stupid.
And then I didn’t want to upset him. I didn’t want to be rude.
As ridiculous as that sounds. Because that’s not how I was brought up.
I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I didn’t know how to say no.
I rationalized it. Well, I’ll just let him do this.
… Well, I’ll just let him do this.… Well, I’ll just let him do this. … Until there was nothing left to do.”
I am aware of the sounds surrounding us. The birdsong. The cars below on Sunset. The wind rustling through the eucalyptus trees, the peeling of bark. A slow unraveling.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, her hand at the side of my face. “Women so often find themselves in these situations and we don’t know how exactly we got there, but we blame ourselves. We shouldn’t. For a long time, I blamed myself for things that…”
She trails off.
I anticipate she is going to mention the incident in Cabo. She is going to share her assault. And I know that I will have to say something. I will have to tell her I know that something happened. I will have to tell her, since she seems to have forgotten, that I was there.
“We shouldn’t,” she says again eventually. And nothing more.
And because I’m not a stronger person, I leave it alone.
“Yes, well, Lorry came after that and was everything I needed him to be. He was … perfect.”
“I’m glad that he was that for you. Even though it didn’t work out. Some women don’t even get that.”
“Yes,” I concede, “some women don’t even get that.”
That night, I dream of Lorry. We are back at his parents’ house.
In backcountry Greenwich. The sprawling colonial with white shingles and forest-green shutters, set majestically on four acres just off Lake Avenue.
How I’d been in awe upon first seeing that house.
How it was so much larger than anything I was familiar with in our middle-class corner of Westchester.
“You sure your parents aren’t Republicans?
” I’d asked him that day. I was nervous about meeting Robert and Gwendolyn Kenter.
Him the Goldman Sachs partner. Her the soft-spoken book editor.
Lorry had laughed and nuzzled my neck. “I’m positive.
We’re Jewish.” It was two weeks into our courting, and we had yet to close the deal.
“There are Jewish Republicans.”
“Not in my family there are not.”
But the dream version of the house on Wilshire Road is somewhat altered.
My favorite guest room (there were three) has a crib.
And in place of the twin beds with the topiary-patterned duvets, there’s a sleek rocking chair, a white shag rug, and on the walls, a hand-painted mural of a herd of elephants.
We are sitting on the rug, talking. He is telling me about his wife and daughters and how he wishes I could meet them.
And then in the next breath, he tells me I am beautiful and that he doesn’t know why it didn’t work out between us.
It takes everything I have not to say, “Because you ended it, bastard.” But I refrain.
Because I don’t want to be rude, even in my dream.
Because I don’t want to ruin any chance I might have of being with him once again.
Even though in this dream state I am aware that I have a husband, if a philandering one, and two kids somewhere in the outside world.
I am still trying to win back Lorry Kenter.
We start to fool around. There is some giggling on my part, and him thrusting his hand over my mouth.
“My parents are home,” he says. The image of them comes to mind.
His father, dark hair, olive skin, affable.
And his mum, a petite, refined, Somerset blond.
And I realize then that they are entirely as I remember them, athletic, quick-witted, capable, not quite fifty.
Which makes little sense, because Lorry and I are our current-day selves.
“We’re adults,” I say to him, there on the floor of the dream nursery.
“Are we?”
I watch him wrestle out of his flannel shirt, his pants, his plaid boxer shorts—I marvel that all these years later he still has them—and when he goes to unbutton my shirt, I flinch. “I’ve had two babies, you know.”
“I know.”
“Things are like … in different places.”
“Ceece,” he says to me, tucking a lock of hair behind my ear. “You’re beautiful. Just the way you are.”
I let him undress me, and I have never felt more vulnerable. Raw, exposed, hesitant.
“If we do this,” I hear myself say, “my husband will leave me. He will take the kids and leave me. And all that I’ve been trying to hold together these past fifteen years will be gone.”
Lorry registers the weight of what I’m saying, nods. “We don’t have to have sex, Ceece. We can just cuddle.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t want to just cuddle.” And I pull him down on top of me, having made my choice. Knowing that this one thing will blow up my marriage, my family, my world. And the realization that I do not care.