Chapter 17
Henry floated the idea of a summer at the lake about a month before we graduated.
It was April and a hard one. The trees would not bloom.
There was a once-in-a-century ice storm that shocked the buds and delayed the dogwoods.
At the colleges, the surest sign of spring appeared at the lake, when crew practice transitioned from indoors to out.
Sometimes, on your way to class, you would find yourself neck and neck with the needlefish-like body of the racing shell, eight rowers moving as one to cut a neat center seam down the center of Seneca Lake.
But that spring was the coldest on record since World War II, and only three weeks earlier, PT’s wife had left a suicide note alongside her latest negative pregnancy test and paddled her single scull into the lake in the middle of the night.
They said it probably happened in an instant.
Something called cold shock response. Falling into water so bracing she would have involuntarily gasped, aspirated, and choked, all the while sinking into even colder deep water.
They believe Sarah died without surfacing and that the currents carried her to the Erie Canal and eventually out into the Atlantic.
The search for her body was called off after only two days.
PT had returned to teaching, though he was scattered and half there.
He needed a dedicated assistant, Henry said.
Someone to help him sort through Sarah’s belongings, decide what should be kept and donate what should be donated.
Henry had spoken to him, and PT had agreed to pay me twenty dollars an hour, an ungodly sum I would not come close to clearing if I moved to New York or LA to waitress while I searched for a real job in a fake and fickle industry.
Henry told me to think about all the money I would save on rent and incidentals while I simultaneously sent out my résumé and accepted any interview opportunities that came up.
The Albany train station was a two-hour drive, and an Amtrak from there to Penn Station took another three hours, but this was not any more inconvenient than if I chose to live at home in Massachusetts while doing all the same things.
Plus, Henry said, this was the last summer we could respectably spend free of the demands of adulthood, and we would always look back and remember that we spent it at Lake Wanika, together.
I broke the news to my parents at graduation.
I thought it would soften the blow that I’d decided to move in with my boyfriend if I told them in front of Henry’s parents.
His father was a big, warm man, and his mother a natural blonde with ruddy cheeks, a merciless snob, but she liked me for Henry.
I caught a look she gave to him the first time he introduced us—it was a look of droll humility that said, I take it back, I was wrong—and I knew he had told her about me and she had asked all kinds of questions about where I was from and the schools I had attended and found his answers lacking.
Occasionally, I still wonder what it must have been like to have a son who was so handsome that you also had to worry about in the romance department.
Henry should have been the grand slam of offspring—good-looking, tall, monied, and male.
But the way his mother embraced me, despite my lack of pedigree, carried with it the distinct whiff of relief.
“Hmmm” was all my mother said when I told her about my postgraduation plans.
“We will be there, of course,” Henry’s mother jumped in to say.
My mother gave her a hard smile.
“I think this is a nice opportunity for Faye,” Henry’s mother persisted. “She’ll be day-to-day with PT, who is always the first one informed when an assistant or internship position opens up in the space she’d like to be in, and New York is only a train ride away.”
My mother did one of her never-ending shrugs then. Her shoulders go up into her ears and they stay there. They do not release. “It’s just not appropriate.”
Later, in his room, Henry was livid. Who was my mother to judge us, to judge his mother?
People like her, with their puritanical beliefs, lived limited lives.
Limited, code for middle class. My mother had always worked and made her own money.
It wasn’t a lot, especially with four mouths to feed, but Henry’s life was just as small as hers, two darts on a map, one in the southern Adirondacks and the other pinning his parents’ primary residence in New Hampshire.
And he had limited ideas about what life should look like too, at least that’s what I began to realize when I packed up my things and defied my mother by moving to Lake Wanika one week later.
I don’t know if I changed or Henry did, if we both did just enough that our edges stopped fitting together and instead poked and prodded.
I went into the city for an interview at a production company at some point in June, and when that didn’t pan out and I got another interview at one of the talent agencies, Henry gave me a hard time about going back to the Staples in Mount Emerson for more quality stock paper on which to print my résumé.
It was nearly an hour’s drive, and that didn’t include the ten-minute ride on the boat to the parking lot.
Why didn’t I just buy a sleeve of it when I was there the first time?
He taught me to drive the boat but never actually let me drive it, and his school-bus-yellow Defender was a stick shift that was vintage, temperamental, and he’d rather just drive me himself than risk me blowing out the clutch.
Then, in July, PT sat down to dinner with us and announced that Jonathan had recently decided to promote his assistant and was looking for a replacement ASAP.
“And it would be in LA?” I said. Henry sat next to me, silent, cutting his chicken marsala into smaller and smaller pieces instead of eating any of it. It was Italian night at the clubhouse.
“I know you’re trying to focus your search on New York,” PT said. He cleared his throat, glanced at Henry. “But this is the opportunity, Faye.”
New York had been a concession to Henry.
We were talking about moving to the city together, and I was applying for assistant positions in the literary departments in the New York offices of all the major talent agencies and the smaller ones too, at the production company run by the man who would later end up behind bars and the one run by the guy who would not ask for hotel room massages but would throw office supplies at your head.
Henry’s family needed someone to run point on their rustic furniture suppliers from New Jersey to Virginia.
New York made a little bit of sense for both of us.
There was nothing for Henry in Los Angeles, and it would be easy to blame him for the location limitations I’d set on , but the truth is that taking a job in Los Angeles was akin to breaking up with Henry, and I did not want to do that for reasons that were both noble and not.
I cared for Henry and I did not want to hurt him, but I also knew that being on my own meant a grimy apartment, freaks for roommates, public transport, and no sides of guacamole in my Chipotle order.
At the same time, it thrilled me to think about nights out on the town, wearing high heels and eyeliner, socializing with people other than Henry’s parents.
Henry was willing to try New York with me while in the same breath proclaiming his loathing for the city.
It was dirty and loud and riding the subway made his chest feel squeezed, but those were his noble reasons.
Henry hated the idea of leaving the lake because he was afraid of losing me out there in the world.
PT sent my résumé to Jonathan, and his recently promoted assistant emailed me to set up the interview for the following week.
I had some savings from the four years I worked as a lifeguard for the swim and dive teams at the colleges, money that had remained untouched in my bank account because I lived at the lake those first two months following graduation, but when I went to book my flight and hotel room, Henry said he wanted to come with me, and it made no sense for us to book the flights separately, and he might as well book the hotel while he was at it. I let him, though I had a bad feeling.
On the morning we left for the airport, Henry picked a fight.
He was angry that I would not use one of his weekender duffel bags, which would fit into the overhead, that I instead insisted on bringing my massive rolling suitcase that I would have to check.
We had an eleven-hour travel day ahead of us, and we were landing late and now we would have to wait at baggage claim.
I was not traveling alone. I should think about other people for once.
I could be selfish, had anyone ever told me that?
Yes, actually. My mother did all the time, and once I went to my father with tears in my eyes and asked if it was true.
I asked because I wanted to be told different.
I wanted him to say without hesitation, Your mother was angry when she said that, she didn’t mean it.
Instead he muted the television and furrowed his brow and thought about it.
Sometimes, he said, yes, you can be. I was ten years old, and I hadn’t taken the trash out before my parents got home from work, though I must have noticed it was full.
This was obviously years before I employed a famously published therapist, out of network, of course, who told me this was an egregious thing for a parent to say to a child because children are, by nature, selfish, and it is your job, as a parent, to meet the needs of a child and not the other way around.
This was before she taught me about patterns.
If I had noticed a pattern before this, it was people calling me selfish; heretofore, I must be selfish.
But the motif was not that, as it turned out, but that I was seeking out connections with people who made me feel bad about myself in the ways my parents did.
This was all beyond my reach on the morning I was trying to leave for Los Angeles, but with Henry hounding me and the clock ticking down, I grasped the essence.
I knew Henry was trying to do whatever he could to keep me all to himself, and I also knew if I said any of that to him, it would only agitate the situation.
You’re right, I said to him with as much humility as I could stand to muster, I’m sorry.
I’m so sorry. He calmed down; he bought it.
I knew then it was done, but I also knew I would do whatever it took to make my motherfucking flight.
We got in the boat. We got in the car. Henry was sweating.
It was a hot day, and he was the one who had to haul my heavy suitcase around—did I not think of that too?
Ten or fifteen minutes into the two-and-a-half-hour drive and he could not cool down.
The air-conditioning was roaring and I was sitting on my corpse-cold hands, but he could not stop sweating.
Is this normal? He looked at me, but I was too panicked and furious to see the real fear in his eyes.
He pulled over, curled into a ball, told me he thought he was having a heart attack.
But when I went to call 911, he took the phone out of my hand and told me to give him a minute to see if the feeling in his chest might go away.
I sat there, staring at the clock, while Henry hugged his chest with his huge arms. I loved his arms, his wingspan, his height.
I was small then and I’m smaller now. Even short Hollywood men are taller than me, but sometimes Henry used to spread his arms and block me when I tried to get past him, swoop down on me, envelop me, throw me on the bed, against the wall, over his shoulder.
I would miss all that, but I would not miss this flight.
I turned to him, my face worried, and asked if I could put my hand on his chest. He let me, and I worried my face more.
That doesn’t sound right, I told him, though his heart felt like any heart, beating a little too hard in its enclosure.
His face crumbled. He gripped my hand. We could call Dr. Payne, I suggested.
Dr. Payne was a retired pediatrician who had a cabin on Lake Wanika.
We thought it fantastic that this was a doctor who administered to frightened children and his last name was pain.
Henry handed me my phone then. I did not have service, and so I wandered down the road and called PT and told him what was happening.
Thirty minutes later PT arrived with Dr. Payne in the passenger seat.
PT got out and came over to the car and opened the trunk.
He put my suitcase into his car. I went over to Henry.
Dr. Payne was saying it was good that Henry didn’t feel nauseous, that he did not have pain in his jaw.
I told him he would be all right and I was sorry and goodbye.
He turned his head away from me. That was it.
The drive to the airport was tense. We were up against the clock, and PT suggested that I transfer the essentials from my suitcase into a gym bag he had in his trunk.
I was just barely going to make my flight, but not if I had to wait in line to check my bags.
I crawled into the back seat and I was editing my things and I felt I had to acknowledge what had just happened.
“I feel terrible for just leaving him,” I said.
PT nodded and said nothing. I needed him to know I was not a bad person, and so I started to cry. I learned I could make myself cry when I was in the seventh grade, so long as I was saying something that made me genuinely sad.
“Who knows, maybe down the line, we can figure it out. My parents broke up for nine months and then got back together and got married. I can’t picture my life without Henry.” I tried to picture it, then sniffled. “It’s too sad.”
“Can I give you some advice?” PT said. He was wearing his glasses but not sunglasses, and in the rearview mirror I could see he was squinting painfully at the bright road.
He left in such a hurry that he didn’t grab his sunglasses, and this realization made me enormously sad.
Sarah had died only a few months ago. He was fifty and he would never have children though he would have been one of those fathers a child referred to as her best friend, even as a hormone-riddled teenager.
“Okay,” I said.
“Don’t be afraid to write about this one day.”