Chapter 6 #2
I continue, rain pricking my skin so lightly I keep looking down thinking there are gnats crawling on me.
“Sometimes, you meet people in life who offer a kind of cohesion.” I pick out Henry in the crowd.
He’s squinting at me as hard as if the sun were out.
“I don’t know why it came together like this for PT, but I do believe that somehow in the end it did come together for him.
His story made sense in a way none of us can imagine.
And I can’t explain this either, but I am certain I will somehow bump into him again. ”
The minister passes out individual plastic baggies containing a couple tablespoons each of remains.
Bone is the color of the thin sweater I am wearing, that’s what it said on the website.
The cashmere Kelly cardigan in winter’s bone.
But bone has a yellow cast, like a molar closer to the gums. I wander the dock, find a place away from everyone, sink down onto my knees.
I’m peeling apart the seal when Henry’s large form materializes by my side.
He stares down at me, his exquisite face tormented and tender.
“You want to do it downwind,” he says.
“Which way is that?”
Henry tips his head. “Other side of the dock.” He offers me his hand, pulls me to my feet so fast my head clouds with blood.
It’s a thing, isn’t it? That people fuck after funerals, hoping to forget that they will one day die too.
Henry’s fingertips are soft, but his palms are calloused and rough, and he uses both, I remember now.
Occasionally, and never often enough that it lost its impact, he called me sweetheart.
Spread your legs for me, sweetheart. I feel stabbed through with want, reprehensibly giddy as I stand next to Henry downwind, peppering the surface of the lake with ash that looks more like sand than bone.
“Faye,” Henry says alongside me, and there is a hushed, secretive quality to how he says my name. But when I turn, I find him looking over my shoulder, and then he brings his hand up and holds it in a stagnant wave. I follow his gaze to see Campbell and Corrine approaching us from the shoreline.
“God damn it, Faye.” Campbell draws a hand down his face, agonized. “That fucked me up.” He clears his throat, frowns hard at the shallow puddles collecting on the dock.
“We have to take off,” Corrine says, and this time she moves in to embrace me before either of us can think about it too long.
Her blond hair is beaded with rain, so wispy and fine I could count the number of droplets if she gave me one more minute.
Campbell and Henry exchange a few final words, clap each other on their backs.
Campbell moves in to give me a hug that lifts my feet off the ground.
“Jesus, you’re light,” he says, and I sense something familiar waft off Corrine. Her irresistible distaste for me. I imagine she finds my smallness and aversion to the sun prissy and high-maintenance, and that she is glad for the reminder that we have little in common.
And yet I never feel thin-thin until I hug someone outside of my strange endemic world, though I know exactly what Campbell feels when he touches me, that impossible birdlike lightness that unnerved me when I first started booking meetings with iconic Hollywood women, as though they had not just lost weight but eliminated their insides too.
The hollowing happened to me gradually but with such minimal effort that sometimes I picture the type of high-powered studio executives you think don’t exist anymore but absolutely do dispensing henchmen to creep into my room in the middle of the night and empty me out, organ by organ, bone by bone.
Would I even tell them to stop if my suspicions proved true?
Then, somehow, Henry and I are riding in a car together, only this time I am the one at the wheel. I don’t think I ever drove when Henry and I were together. I had nowhere to take him. I had no car.
I park in the small hotel lot, and we make a run in the rain, slipping on wet dogwood petals and huddling together under the first window awning, startling the manager with teased hair who sits in front of her blocky desktop.
We flee to the cover of the next awning, this one long and thin, shielding the red carpeted walkway into the bar and restaurant.
The garden doors are open on the other side, and beyond the hedges trimmed to match a Bridgerton set, the lake is gray and pockmarked with rain.
“You head back to LA tomorrow?” Henry checks. He removes his blazer and brushes it dry with the flat of his hand.
“Actually, no. Not for another week.”
Henry frowns, confused. “Another week?”
“I rented an Airbnb on the other side of the lake. Sort of like a solo writing retreat. I get more done alone.”
Henry digs his hands into his armpits and squeezes himself against the damp. “Let me swing by with your stuff. What’s your room number?”
We really are doing this, then. This dangerous, combustible thing. I am suddenly so nervous I could cry. The rain against the lake is like a setting on a sound machine. I let it soothe me. I think, This is Henry. It will be what you want.
“Three F,” I tell him, and I’m startled by the sound of my own voice, its ultrafeminine and frightened tenor.
Henry swings his blazer over my head and settles the shoulders on my shoulders, a cape to keep me dry.
He gives me a quick, reassuring smile. It’s me.
It’s okay. That’s the meaning I assign it as he turns and strides under the scalloped awning with his head bowed to the rain, disappearing into the secondary guest tower, which is not a tower so much as a long, low dormitory-looking structure with sliding glass doors lining the back.
I’m staying in the original building, the older but prettier one with the higher rate to match.
I raise Henry’s coat over my head and set off for my room at an unhurried pace, in case anyone is watching, in case Henry can still see me. But my heart is pounding like I’m running uphill.
Last night, when I got home and noticed the marks at the foot of the door, I briefly imagined that I might find Henry sitting on the fusty floral couch.
I would tell him that he shouldn’t be here.
He’s married, and so am I. I imagined him standing, approaching me, ignoring my continued pleas to leave me alone, knowing the way only Henry knows when my no means yes.
Now my hand shakes as I turn the key to the door, knowing he will be inside soon.
I brush my teeth, apply an extra coat of deodorant.
Henry is sensitive to smells, and he always smells good.
I used to joke he had his sweat glands removed, his tongue professionally bleached, and he would smile in this soft way, as though touched someone finally understood him.
I kick off my shoes and wash my feet in the tub.
Thank God I got a pedicure before I came.
I’m standing in an inch of soapy water when my phone rattles on the countertop.
It’s my best friend who is also my agent, calling on a Saturday. I answer on speaker.
“Hello?” I say, the question evident in my voice. What’s happened?
“I have news,” she says without preamble. “It’s good but it comes with a catch.” She wants to loop in my husband, but first she wanted to check to make sure that would be okay with me.
“Go right ahead,” I say benevolently. “We’re acting like everything is fine, as usual.”
“Are you ever going to tell me what happened?” The most I’ve told her, acting in best friend capacity, is that something has happened and I’m thinking of leaving. My husband has a secret. Not the one you’re thinking, the normal one that normal husbands sometimes have.
“Try him now,” I say. “It’s, like, nine or ten at night there.”
“Okay,” she says, uncertainly, and for a moment I think the line has dropped, but then she comes back on and says, “Everyone still with me?”
“Here,” says my husband. He must have popped out of whatever exclusive supper club he’s been invited to for the evening. I can hear someone in the background ask to borrow a lighter, the wet spray of the cars rushing by on a rainy London night.
“Here,” I echo.
My agent, who I alternately refer to as my agent and best friend, depending on which role she occupies in the moment, says the name of the actress who is asking for someone to slip her a not-quite-ready copy of my script. The name of this actress is cause to scream, and so I do.
“Hold up, hold up,” my husband says. “I thought she was doing that Apple show and then right into the Marvel movie and unavailable until 2029?”
“She has to drop the show,” my agent is delighted to report. “They pushed the start date, and now it’s a scheduling conflict with Marvel. She’s essentially free this whole next year and looking for a film, something with a short production window.”