Chapter 2 #3
I shake my head. “The acting thing was kind of a one-off for me. We’ll go out to someone else for the role once it’s ready.
” Henry is leaning toward his daughter, with his hands clasped between his knees and his head turned so that she can speak into his ear, and she is telling him something with a protruding lower lip.
He frowns and encourages her to say more.
Henry knows how to console. That is his singular talent.
Sometimes I’d let him whip me up just to bring me down.
Not only because I liked it but because I sensed it was the only way Henry knew how to connect with people, that he was desperate for it, actually.
I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me before that Henry would make a great father. Kids are so upset so much of the time.
“Sorry to interrupt.” Marjorie is standing tableside, and by the looks of the eager young woman next to her, she’s found my protégé.
“This is Emma King,” Marjorie says, “our senior Granger Scholar.”
Emma is brunette and very tan. She flashes a crisp white smile. “It is such an honor to meet you,” she says to me with a demure dip of her knees.
“I’m looking forward to reading your script.”
There is a flash of disappointment on Emma’s face that I did not immediately devour her magnum opus the moment it landed in my inbox, despite the fact that she turned it in late.
“I know you must be very busy,” she says in a sullen tone.
The kids are always like this. Champing at the bit to be read, to be discovered.
I was out of my mind with impatience at Emma’s age.
“I promise I’ll get to it soon,” I assure her. I glance at her dull shoes. The uneven stitching in the pockets of her pants. I was not one of them either, I want to tell her, and it turned out all right.
“When the torch passed to you,” Campbell says with a grin, “were you like, ‘Now I’ve made it’?
” He has his hand on the back of Corrine’s neck, and he’s pulsing the points beneath her ears.
She twists her head like she’s trying to direct him toward a sore spot, but there is something like anger in her eyes.
“When they start calling it the Faye Heron Scholarship,” I say, “then I’ll know.
” This is the first year anyone but Jonathan Granger will read a student’s script.
It’s his scholarship, in name and in funding, but he’s been shamelessly checked out for a while now.
Twelve years ago, when I sat down for my feedback session with him, I could not shake the nagging suspicion that he had only read the CliffsNotes version of my script that one of his assistants had typed up for him.
I found out I was right when I eventually became Jonathan’s assistant myself and learned all about the time-honored tradition known as script coverage.
“Well,” Marjorie says. “We should take our seats. Looks like the slideshow is about to start.”
“Nice to meet you,” I say to Emma, who dips again at the knees.
I turn my attention to the front of the tent, where the president stands patiently while someone adjusts the gain and dinner conversation dies down.
He begins the solemn task of welcoming everyone for a weekend to celebrate the life and impact of his dear friend colloquially known as PT.
“The film students wanted to put together the following tribute for their professor,” the president says.
“And if I may be so bold—Faye Heron, you have yourself some competition.”
I laugh with everyone else, but my body is tense enough to snap in two.
I had not stopped to consider what it might feel like to hear my name spoken in the same room as Henry in a way that acknowledges my ascent.
I feel like we are images on one of those infrared cameras, everyone else in blue, us in red.
The only two in the room burning with the truth about who I really am when it is just the two of us.
The president steps away as the projection screen fills with an image of Professor Toner as a young man with a beard and gold aviators, a Bob Dylan track playing, though the picture looks to be from the eighties.
A voiceover begins, and the camera cuts to a self-tape from Jonathan Granger, talking about the premiere of the first show he ever made, how he brought PT as his date and he wound up on the worst dressed list and PT on the best. The film students managed to dig up a twenty-year-old issue of US Weekly, and a cheer goes up from the crowd, seeing PT in his suspenders and dapper velvet slippers.
When everyone settles again I realize that there is a scene unfolding behind me, a child demon-growling the word no over and over.
I only dare to glance back when the screaming starts in earnest and only then because a few others do too.
Henry unbuckles his youngest from the high chair, her legs swinging and kicking, and carries her into the house without expression.
But there is some sort of amplification that occurs once he’s inside with her.
It’s like listening to your neighbors fight, wondering if you should call the cops, if that would be overkill, if it will make it awkward next time you run into one of them taking out the garbage.
The tribute is going, but everyone is stiff with these kinds of thoughts, and after a moment Henry’s inoffensive-looking wife whispers something to her older daughter, and she scoots off her chair and follows her mother into the house, dragging her rapidly blinking doll by one arm.
And with that, Henry leaves without ever saying hello.