Chapter 6 #3
“Faye,” my husband says, a kind of awe in his voice, “you were right. Holy fuck, you were right.” I can tell that he’s smiling, which means he’s had a few drinks.
In the eleven years we’ve been together, he’s smiled infrequently, even though we’ve produced three television shows and two indie films, all of which have been well received critically but did not quite manage to dent the culture in a way that matters to the studios.
Still, they will always hear a pitch from us.
Not all of them will make an offer on that pitch, but enough that occasionally a project of ours gets competitive.
We’ve been photographed for the cover of The Hollywood Reporter and given a tour of our production offices to Architectural Digest. We are usually invited to the Vanity Fair after-party.
Objectively, we are doing well, but one thing my husband and I agree on is that the term objectively well can kick rocks.
We want our white whale, something unapologetically commercial and occasionally brilliant.
One thing we cannot agree on is what that looks like.
My husband is after me to pitch something dark and female-driven and, most important, franchise friendly; I sat down and wrote this script instead.
He read it, asked why I wanted to waste two years of my life on another quiet indie thing.
The caliber of the actress who has requested a copy of the script makes mincemeat of that question.
She will get us money. She will make us noise.
‘ “We love a man who can admit when he’s wrong,” my agent jokes, and I am glad we are not on a FaceTime so I am free to roll my eyes.
I know what she’s doing—selling my husband back to me.
She thinks it will be professionally disastrous for the two of us to split.
My husband’s older brother runs the venture capitalist arm of the agency that represents us; I could triple my writing and directing quote and I still wouldn’t be considered an earner, not when my brother-in-law is bringing in Mint Mobile partnership money.
If my husband and I do separate, if things do get ugly, if it ever does come down to a choice between the two of us, it’s me who will be shown the door.
My best friend and agent has not explicitly said so to me, nor does she have to.
“Tell her it will be ready to read next Monday,” I say. “But that means no one can bother me for the next week. No check-ins. No updates about set drama. Nothing. If I need something, I’ll reach out, but otherwise treat me like I don’t exist.”
“Will not disturb,” my agent solemnly vows.
“Do your thing,” my husband says, and I can hear in his voice that he’s grinning ear to ear. “I love you, baby.”
I am saved from saying it back by the knock on my door.
Henry is standing in the hallway, the handle of a small shopping bag hooked around his pinkie. His hair is spiked with rain and his eyes are a bit wild. “Did you scream?”
“It was good news.”
“I was worried, Faye,” Henry says in soft admonishment.
He puts his hand on the door above my head and pushes it open all the way.
There is a moment as he steps past, him looking down at me, me looking up at him, that is eddied with turbulence.
I want him to toss the bag with my cheap old clothes and pin me against the wall with his pelvis.
No. Scratch that. This is Henry. We can do better; we have done much.
I want him to keep the bag. I want him to pull out one of the slutty sundresses I used to wear without a bra, tell me to go into the bedroom and put it on, don’t even think about coming back out unless I’m crawling on my hands and knees.
I want him to be sitting on the couch with his feet propped up on the coffee table and his arms crossed behind his head, watching me with all his furious control.
Stop, I want him to say. Get down on your elbows.
I want him to take his time standing, coming over to me, I want him to circle me a few times, tilting his head this way and that while I hang my head in remorse.
The sundress is psychotically short. Bent over, the wet slash in my underwear is on display until Henry decides it isn’t.
Look at me, Faye, he’ll say in that aristocratic voice, and I’ll have to twist my head over my shoulder because he will be standing behind me, and he will want me to see that he is looking at me too but not in my eyes.
Reach around. Take it off. When I do, I want him to kneel behind me, adjust my nice underwear so that it’s sitting just right in the crooks of my knees.
Jesus, Faye, I want him to sigh, sounding brokenhearted and heartless in the same breath.
I could pick your pretty pussy out of a lineup.
“Want to make us drinks?” I say, feeling woozy.
I am swollen like a tick. “I need to make one quick call.” I lead him through the sitting room and point him toward the small kitchenette, where a bottle of bourbon sits on the counter.
I am not a bourbon drinker, but it seemed a safer bet than the selection of wine at the liquor store that shares space with the tanning salon that still charges a dollar a minute.
Henry picks up the bottle, stares at the label a long moment.
“How do you take it?”
“Little bit of water.”
“Look at you,” he says quietly.
I slip into the bedroom and close the door so that I can change into the black underwear that sits low on my hips and high on my ass.
I call my assistant on speaker as I do this, and when she doesn’t answer, I leave her a message telling her to cancel the few Zooms I’d kept on my calendar this week.
I stare at the damp prints I’ve left on the screen.
I’m scared. How long has it been since I was scared?
I use the top sheet to wipe away evidence of my nerves.
This cannot be happening, and yet it is.
I go out into the faux formal sitting room and catch Henry staring out the window in a moment of deep thought.
He has taken the grand Louis IV chair in the corner, next to the modern media center.
He turns to me, his face grim, and then topples me with a sorrowful half smile.
“Bourbon?” he says, and the word is the sun around which so many unasked questions revolve.
When did you start with this? When did you become not-Faye, the way I’ve become not-Henry to you?
“It was that or Cupcake chardonnay.” I tuck myself into the corner of the grandmotherly couch.
It’s late afternoon and the light is gray and forgiving, the rain lazily streaking the windows.
We have all day, I realize. We can do it mean.
We can do it nice. We can do it mean again and again.
I reach for my glass, sip amber, wondering which one of us will make a move first and how we will even get there.
With his cold blue eyes, Henry tracks the motion of my hand to my mouth and back to my lap. “You don’t wear a wedding ring,” he remarks.
I feel cool and clean under my clothes, ready for his hands, the rough way he will want to do it after all these years. He must be so angry with me. It’s a little bit about the episode, I’m sure, but mostly it’s because I’ve surpassed him. That was not how things worked when we were together.
“It gave me a rash,” I say.
Henry brushes his lips with a knuckle. “At first I thought you said it gave you a rush.”
“Oh.” A light laugh at the misunderstanding. “No. Just a red, itchy rash.”
“Kind of a metaphor, no?” He’s doing this thing, parting his lips while he waits for me to speak, his eyes narrowed, brow heavy and furrowed, like he must turn over everything I say before deciding if he believes it.
“Putting that English minor to good use, I see.”
Henry rolls his glass around in his hands, frowning down at his lap. He locates a wrinkle in his pants, sweeps it away with the heel of his hand. “Are you getting a divorce?”
“Why would you ask me that?”
“You’re not acting married.”
“And you are right now?” We stare at each other, standoff style. His tongue is behind his front teeth, pushing forward in frustration.
“There are a few things I need to understand first.” First. That word is interesting to me, for some reason. I watch as Henry sets his drink down on the small desk where I’ve been attempting to polish a scene in my second act but mostly watching porn.
“What things?”
Henry uncrosses his legs, leans back, and reclines luxuriously, like the bored heir to an empire of rustic cabin furniture, which is exactly what he is. His family invented the Adirondack chair, if you can believe it. “How far this goes.”
I can feel my drink, that all-over surge of chatty, confessional courage. “I want a divorce,” I say out loud for the first time. “But I’m scared it would ruin me.”
There is a sudden flash of fury on Henry’s angelic face.
With slow menace, he gathers himself and stands, making his way over to me.
My heart rams my ribs. So this is how it happens.
I track his movements in a sleepy kind of awe, watching as he sits on the other end of the short couch, drapes his arm over the back, taps an index finger on the padded frame, inches from my shoulder.
I do not know where to look—into his malignant, concord-blue eyes?
Or at his hands, fingers twitching like he is trying to restrain himself from hurting me?
I’m worried I will explode before he can touch me, that he’ll be staring at my brain matter in his lap like Jackie Kennedy in the back seat of that convertible.
“Is he waiting for you? Your husband, I mean.”
“He’s in London.”
“What about friends? Your family?”
A small wave of sadness, realizing how few people I needed to alert to my sudden sabbatical, but also confusion too. Why would that matter to Henry? “I pretty much told everyone to leave me alone this week.”