Chapter 9
In the tiny bathroom, there are women’s sweatpants and a man’s fleece, thick wool socks.
Drugstore shampoo and conditioner. A bar of soap.
A bar. One of those very rudimentary toothbrushes they don’t sell in drugstores anymore, but for some reason is always a part of the amenity kits on overseas flights.
The bristles are so soft that for a paralyzing moment I worry I have his kid’s toothbrush in my mouth, before remembering Henry wouldn’t do that to me.
He will kill me, but he would not give me a used toothbrush.
The first time we came here, Henry said that if I didn’t want to bathe in the lake, which I didn’t, that I only got three pulls on the shower cord, and everyone would know by the level of the water tank if I took more, and I would be shunned.
We laughed but he was serious. This morning, I give myself five pulls, hissing each time the ice-cold water splits my scalp.
I get out, shivering, shuddering, really.
My chest hitches with painful breaths, and I look in the mirror and I am stunned to see I am sobbing.
I usually only cry when I’m angry, when I’m shouting at my husband and begging him to do something to save our marriage.
I dry myself with a tattered towel that catches in the clasp of the spiky bracelet I wear always.
I blink off my tears and stare at the underside of my wrist a long moment.
With the edge of my fingernail, I flick the double-pronged clasp with my thumb, and I wonder, could I use this?
He has left me a weak hairbrush with plastic bristles that snag and break my hair, which he knows I am very precious about. I work through it in small sections. My arm is heavy by the time I’m done, but it is a task that required enough concentration that my panic has momentarily subsided.
When I come out of the bathroom, he is there, standing by the window, his hands in his pockets like he’s waiting to take me on a date. He’s made the bed with pathological precision, the fold in the quilt at the exact place where the pattern breaks.
“You need to eat,” he says. He takes me by the elbow and ushers me outside and toward the main house. I’m barefoot, and he goes carefully, pausing so I can skip from stone to stone on the rough path. “We’ll get you shoes,” he says, bafflingly apologetic.
My phone sits on the kitchen table in a blast of sunlight, the once-finger-smudged screen pristine, like Henry spent the morning wiping it down with his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth in concentration.
I just know he has a big plastic tub of electronic screen wipes from Staples, a stocking stuffer he bought for himself and had his wife wrap last Christmas. Tragic, that image.
Henry toes the leg of an empty chair, angling it toward me with a jut of his chin. Sit. I comply, my heart beating in my back. The appearance of my phone, a tether to the outside world, is a thrilling development.
“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”
“Faye,” Henry says in a soft, sinister voice, “I will do whatever I want.”
My blood betrays me, moving in all the wrong directions.
It should be draining, running cold, not surging in the places it is surging, warm as the sun on my skin.
It is too much to look at Henry, and so I concentrate on the imperfections in the wooden floorboards that people pay a lot of money for back in LA—it’s called hand-scratched, and I’m the dummy who paid for someone to brutalize shiny new floorboards by hand—wishing for this moment to end but knowing that when it does, I will return to it forever.
“Don’t look like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re scared.”
I raise my eyes to his. “I am scared.”
Henry’s astounding face shows all his years of unforgiveness. “Maybe now you are.”
I blink slowly, thinking I might understand. “So you know, I was never afraid of you that day in the car. I was afraid of missing my flight and not making my interview. The episode was about ambition, but people interpreted it the way they wanted to interpret it.”
“And you let them.”
“I’ll take responsibility for that, yes.”
“How very noble of you,” Henry says, each word clipped and clean.
Anger churns in my chest. Anger feels so much better than fear.
Fear is something I like to experience when I know I am safe, and I don’t know what the hell I am at this moment.
“I was angry and I had a right to be. You wanted me to miss my flight. You did not want me going to LA. You did not want to lose your hold over me. And you know what, Henry? PT was the one who told me to write about it.”
Henry studies me, his pupils that unusually dark blue and the whites of his eyes veined red, like he’s been crying, or trying not to. “I disabled your facial ID and changed your passcode.”
It takes me a moment to register that we’ve moved on. Henry must know I’m right, that there is nothing he can say to defend himself. I stare at the dead face of my phone, dejected.
“You should really have some more discretion when it comes to saving your famous friends’ names. I mean, the full name, Faye. What, do you just go around hoping people see your phone light up with messages from Oscar-winning pedophiles so everyone is aware of how important you are?”
“Spoken like a card-carrying member of whatever backwoods society you were born into.”
Henry raises his hand and I cower, though he’s only reaching for my phone, not winding up to backhand me.
There is the smallest sliver of disappointment on my face, and Henry raises his eyebrows and then bunches them together in a broad performance of pity.
“I have no interest in smacking you around anymore, though you may want to see someone about yours.” He picks up my phone and punches in my new passcode.
“I’ve changed the passwords to all your social media accounts.
I’d hate to see you post about the wrong side of it. ”
“The wrong side of what?”
“The war, the election, Taylor Swift.”
I laugh, suddenly elated. “Henry, I’ve made it abundantly clear where I stand on those issues.
It’s part of the job of appeasing the public, and I’m very good at appeasement, as you well know.
If I suddenly go full Karen instead of my usual carousel of vanilla press photos thanking my hair and makeup teams, you’re going to draw attention to me in a way you can’t even begin to comprehend.
It will be a shitstorm. My husband, my representation, will be all over me, demanding an explanation, crafting a crisis response.
And when I don’t answer them, they are going to realize something is wrong. ”
Henry regards me with supreme boredom. “Do you think your representation will be so keen to help when they learn you are thinking of leaving them for their direct competition?”
A cold tremor pulses through me. Henry has found the conversation between me and the agent who is trying to poach me.
I enjoyed our meeting, she wrote to me, just a few days ago, and I have yet to respond.
Agents are always trying to poach. But you should never engage unless you are prepared for it to make its way back to your current representation, for them to drop you before you drop them.
A few weeks ago, I not only engaged—I met my rival recruiter for lunch in her sun-drenched living room in the flats of Beverly Hills.
“Faye,” Henry sighs contentedly, like a lucky man who wants for nothing.
“I’ve gone through every last one of your conversations while you slumbered your roofie slumber.
You told everyone to leave you alone this week.
You canceled all your meetings. You have an out of office set until May.
Your husband is in London in another time zone, and honestly?
Not that many people are checking on you, sweetheart.
” Sweetheart. I feel like I’ve been tased between my legs.
“I know because I’ve been going to shore in the morning to keep up with your correspondence.
My thumbs have barely moved a muscle, I’m afraid.
Though I’m sure that’s by design. You always were a bit of a lone wolf. ”
I used to ask Henry to humiliate me in all sorts of ways that at the time felt arbitrary.
But now I know they were not. I wanted him to tell me things I did not necessarily believe about myself.
That I was a whore, a piece of white trash, that I looked better with a cock in my mouth than without.
Never in a million years would I ask him to remind me of the first birthday party I had for myself in Los Angeles.
My husband, who was still my boyfriend at the time, had looked at the guest list and mentioned that I seemed to have only invited his friends.
Don’t you want to invite any of your own?
he had asked, innocently enough. I pointed out that my best friend was on the list, to which he pointed out that she was my agent and I should be careful about conflating the two.
I had been in Los Angeles enough years by then that I did not have the excuse of saying that I had just moved there and was still in the process of finding my people.
I don’t remember what I mumbled in response, but I do remember feeling like I had been slashed across the throat.
Slowly, I bring my hand to my neck and squeeze, hold my head in place.
It is my oldest wound that Henry has unstitched at the seams.
“What do you want?” I say, feebly. “What the fuck is all this, Henry?”
“I want you to understand the consequences.”
There is a sudden tightness to the air, the pressurized feeling before a storm. It’s that word. Consequences. Christ. My body aches. “The consequences to what?”