Chapter 2 #2
I feel light fingers on my elbow, turn to find a woman with her gray hair held back in a satin headband, introducing herself as Marjorie, the head of student outreach whom I have emailed but never met.
“May I borrow you?” she asks with whispered reverence.
“I’d like you to meet Emma King.” When I give her a blank look, she elaborates with just a touch of reproach.
“She’s the scholarship student who submitted her script to you. ”
“Yes, of course,” I say quickly.
Corrine raises her glass in a Gatsby-like send-off. “We’ll grab you later,” she promises.
At every turn, I brace myself to come face-to-face with Henry, but neither he nor Emma are anywhere to be found.
“I just don’t know where she could have gone,” says Marjorie. “I know she was over the moon to meet you.”
“Will she be at the lake tomorrow?”
“I can’t imagine she’d miss it,” Marjorie says.
A corollary of the scholarship is access to PT in a way that breeds an almost paternal bond, particularly during your senior year, when you work closely with him on a feature-length script to be submitted to his other former star student, Jonathan Granger.
Jonathan graduated seventeen years before me and has gone on to produce a canon of award-winning content as well as fund the scholarship that allowed someone like me, and presumably someone like Emma, the opportunity to attend the colleges to begin with.
Marjorie says we will try again tomorrow.
Dinner is being served buffet style, and I must escape, must not see Henry for the first time since I left him in a near-catatonic state on the side of a country road while we are ladling balsamic vinaigrette onto our mixed-greens salads.
The downstairs bathroom is occupied, so I sneak upstairs and into the guest bedroom that Sarah had briefly set up as a nursery and where Henry put his hand down my pants for the first time.
I use the en suite bathroom. Wash my hands.
In the mirror, I adjust the drape of my asymmetrical blouse and smooth my hair.
It’s fuller and bouncier at the ends than it is at the roots, a unidimensional light brown that has suddenly become trendy.
I stare for a moment at my face. I have oval, alien eyes; a heart-shaped upper lip; high, plump cheeks.
Some days it feels flat-out greedy to wear makeup.
A women’s magazine once described me as “superlatively beautiful” and now every time I ask my husband how I look, that’s his hokey answer.
Back in the dark bedroom, I stand at the window and take in the scene down below.
The caterers have erected a large white tent in the backyard, installed those temporary interlocking tiles that function as a dance floor at outdoor weddings, and I watch people file out from the house and disappear under the covered space, balancing dinner plates and drinks in their hands.
My eye trails the border garden that runs along the side of the house and lands on two figures, gesturing animatedly.
It is Henry, I realize with a shot of adrenaline to the heart, and his wife.
She is a monochromatic towhead with inoffensive features.
I do not know her name and I’ve tried here and there to find out, but neither of them appear to be on social media, at least not any account I can find, and I’d rather a root canal than ask Campbell.
In my mind the wife is a genuinely nice person who initially found Henry’s idiosyncrasies charming, then annoying, then exhausting, an impediment to a good marriage that she would gladly trade away.
I can’t live in a world where he ended up with someone who knows what to do with him.
The wife is wearing a clingy, shirred-jersey black dress and unbranded black flats.
She carries an overpacked tote bag with a short canvas strap that keeps sliding off the slippery material.
I can tell by the way she keeps hitching the bag up her shoulder, the tight shapes of their mouths, that they are fighting.
I am in thrall. They do not at all fight the way we used to fight, that tense and terrifying two-step that always ended with my back against some wall, Henry goading me in soft tones—Keep crying, Faye.
Keep fucking crying—as he undid his belt and slipped inside of me like we had already spent hours on the kind of foreplay I have always begrudged.
I don’t need someone’s tongue drawing endless figure eights between my legs, just someone who knows what to do with me too.
The room is suddenly flooded with overhead light.
I whip around to find a guy with his fingers on the switch, one foot in the room and one out, unsure of what to do next.
Down in the garden, Henry is staring up at his spotlit audience.
He rubs the arch of an eyebrow with a knuckle, exasperated but tender too.
What do I do with you? That’s what the gesture means.
He used to make it when I was bent over the back of the couch and sometimes just with my hands on the wall, welted and whinnying for more. I step back, mortified.
“Didn’t realize anyone else was in here,” the guy says, and maybe I’m imagining it, but I swear there’s a droll edge to his words.
He’s student-aged, with dark eyebrows and unruly blond hair, wearing that peculiar uniform I’d forgotten about—blue khaki shorts and dark blazer, loafers with no socks, his longish hair tucked wet behind his ears after his shower so that the ends have dried flipping out.
He has not moved from the doorway and I need to get by.
“Excuse me,” I say, and he turns sideways so that our bodies brush as I squeeze by him. My linen blouse crackles with static electricity, and he smiles down at me in a lascivious way. I swish my hips for him on my way down the stairs.
I am seated at a table with Campbell, Corrine, their formerly blond child, two trustees, and their wives.
My presence at the table, once I’m seated, has an effect that I once relished but is now so commonplace the novelty has worn off.
The conversation about schools peters out.
I am asked about a scandal with the mayor of Los Angeles that briefly united the nation, if I am planning on renting out my house three years from now when the city hosts the Summer Olympics.
Even for a week, I could make a killing.
“Now is the show done?” the trustee in the sweat-wicking golf vest wants to know.
“Yes. That’s been done for a while now.”
“To be honest,” this trustee says, “I didn’t watch it. I think it would have gone over my head.” He sails a hand hence and we all laugh.
“That’s okay,” I say. “I think what makes something great is when it’s not for everyone.” This is a platitude exchanged by fellow creatives to buffer us against future bad reviews.
“Don’t sell yourself short.” Campbell pats the man’s arm the way you would a dog’s flank: hard and with affection. “We loved it.”
We. No way. I glance at Corrine, who is using her thumb and index finger to coax a bone from her piece of salmon.
She wipes fishy pink foam from her fingers with a curled upper lip.
If she’s embarrassed to be caught in such a juvenile lie, she’s a better actress than some of the scene partners I’ve been paired with over the years.
“What are you working on next?” the trustee’s wife asks. I am so glad she asked, because it is behind her that Henry sits with his family, and she has provided me the opportunity to observe them through zoo glass while I answer her question.
“I’m directing my first feature,” I say.
Henry is cutting his daughter’s food into small pieces.
She is in a high chair and eating straight off the table.
I did not know children needed high chairs once they could walk.
What I know about children is limited to the certainty that I could not handle having any.
“How exciting. And you wrote it?”
“I’m still writing it, actually.” I tell her how, after this, I’m headed to an Airbnb in Ithaca, where my goal is to hunker down and finish, alone and without distraction.
“Will you act in it too?”