Chapter 21
In the parking lot, a sudden, strong panic grips me to my bones.
“Henry,” I say, paralyzed with dread, “wasn’t Campbell’s boat docked over there when we left?”
Henry follows my eyeline to the white runabout with sporty green stripes. I swear it had been one over from the boat slip when we first arrived, and now it’s not.
“It’s only because you’re looking at it from the inverse direction,” Henry says.
Does he sound unsure? I cannot tell. A shiver goes through me.
The temperature has dropped to somewhere in the sixties, though it’s difficult to gauge after so long living in a desert climate.
The humidity does this thing, traps you in a disorienting, sticky web.
We are walking back over to the boat slip, our boots scuffing the packed-sand parking lot, and now I stop and fold my arms over my chest and look out at the clear water, the low, dark sky. It’s going to rain any minute now.
“How long are we going back there?” I jut my chin over Henry’s shoulder. There. The cabin. Our rotten slice of paradise.
“Corrine is expecting to hear from Campbell on Monday. I imagine that’s when she’ll start calling around, asking people if they’ve seen him.”
Monday is three days away. I look up at Henry, my eyes smarting under the harsh gray clouds.
I’m remembering Susanna Moore’s novel In the Cut, which I finished on the plane to New York not even a week ago.
I read it as a middle finger to anyone who would believe a smart, self-sufficient woman could be turned so stupid by lust.
“I have so much to lose, Henry,” I whisper.
The look on Henry’s face rips me in two. “I have more,” he says.
I sigh. Drop my head. Nod. Let’s go. We start walking toward our slip, and I help Henry load the grocery bags into the boat. He steps onto the deck and turns around to offer me his hand. Stupidly, I take it.
I spend a long time in the old copper tub with the wood-covered bottom painted something called Japan green.
It was site-made nearly one hundred years ago, in front of the fireplace, so that the metal could absorb the heat and keep the water hot enough for multiple family members to take a soak.
I had forgotten the very particular smell I’d sometimes pick up on Henry’s skin, that dissonant combination of smoky and squeaky clean.
Now I sink into the bathwater and think.
I think about the tone of Henry’s voice when he assured me Campbell’s boat was parked in the same place as where we’d left it.
I am of course rattled by the conversation I had with my husband, by the thought of what would happen to me if he were to find out where I really am, but even when I set that aside, I can’t shake the sense that Henry is hiding something from me that I need to know.
I rub my legs together, feeling how smooth they are, relieved I committed to all eight appointments of laser even though my husband no longer touches my legs.
Sometimes, I can’t believe this is my lot in life.
I have a therapist, obviously, with whom I’ve spoken about my marriage at length.
We’ve dissected my parents’ marriage, my husband’s parents’ marriage; we agree that nothing is happenstance.
I’m playing out something that I experienced young, some vital need of mine being unmet, misunderstood, frustrated.
I used to think that if I could make sense of it I could fix it.
No, no, my therapist had said, shaking her head.
Fixing is not how this works. You either decide you can accept this, live like this, or you cannot.
In the kitchen, I can hear Henry rinsing things in the sink and placing pots on burners.
He’s getting started on dinner. I step out of the bathtub and wrap myself in a towel.
I freeze, hold my breath, listen to make sure Henry is still occupied.
Then I start to open drawers. This room used to belong to Henry’s parents, but now the surfaces are covered with photographs of Henry and his wife with their girls doing outdoorsy, fresh-air things.
They watch me with their freckles and gummy baby smiles as I go through their parents’ belongings, looking for I don’t know what, but something that will assuage my fears that I’m being had so I can go out into the kitchen and have sex for the first time in two years.
I open the nightstand drawer, and I must be on the wife’s side, because there is a little porcelain dish cluttered with ticky-tacky jewelry, greenish from wear.
My eye immediately goes to the small blue pouch that should be faded with age but somehow isn’t.
Tiffany must use some crazy dye preservatives.
I unsnap the button and turn the pouch upside down.
The long silver chain unspools first, the open silver heart tumbling after.
I brush the signature twisted metal of the old Elsa Peretti design with my thumb.
I’d never officially earned it, and it makes me queasy to think what his wife did that maybe I did not.
I wonder how Henry can stomach it, looking at his wife wearing a piece of jewelry that was meant for me, or maybe it’s like reminiscing about a loved one you’ve lost, a way for the living to connect with the dead.
Henry is standing at the kitchen counter, holding a knife.
He looks like a scolded little boy when he sees me, with his ruddy cheeks and pouty pink lips, put in time-out for playing with a toy that does not belong to him.
There is no full-length mirror in the cabin, but the floor-to-ceiling picture windows capture my reflection.
I am once again wearing one of Henry’s button-downs, bunchy thick socks, and nothing else, like here on the island we are stuck attending a purgatorial Risky Business costume party.
My hair is wet and my skin is dewy and radiant from the bath, and around my neck I’m wearing the necklace Henry bought for me twelve years ago.
“Did you really give this to your wife?”
“Did you really go through my shit?”
“I looked under the mattress too. Your turn.”
Henry turns his attention back to the onion on the cutting board. “She found the gift bag when she first moved in with me,” he said. “I told her I’d bought it for an ex, but it was from Tiffany and you’d never worn it, so she didn’t care that much.”
“Did she know the ex was me?”
“She knows all about you.”
This is intriguing. “I want to know all about her.”
Henry brings the knife down on his index finger, opening a thin red seam above his knuckle. “Fuck.” He turns from me, reaches for the roll of paper towels on the counter behind him.
“Put it under water,” I tell him.
He flicks the faucet on and jams his finger into the stream.
I go over to him and peer into the sink. “Is it deep?”
“I’ll live.”
“Why don’t I take over?”
I can already tell that Henry has no idea how to make an adult pasta, only the buttered kind for his kids.
I push him aside, pluck the tomatoes from the vine, rinse and dry them thoroughly, then toss them in a hot, dry pan.
I mince a few cloves of garlic while the tomatoes blister, then add the aromatics and olive oil, a few splashes of sweet, tangy vinegar and salty pasta water.
I drain the ziti two minutes before the package instructions and finish everything off with grated parmesan cheese and a pat of butter.
I’ve always been a good cook, but for whatever reason, the men I am with don’t like the kind of food I make.
There’s never enough meat or it’s too much lemon or they’re afraid it will make them fat.
“Low carb is a very provincial way to eat,” I tell Henry as we sit. When he knew me, I did not know how to cook. He fed me, clothed me, housed me, then we called it love.
“Entertainment is the original provincial profession.” Henry inserts a single tine of his fork into the ziti’s tunnel, holds it aloft, and examines it warily.
I sip the red wine he’s poured into short, mismatched water glasses.
There was once a blistering conversation between the Spaldings at this very table about the burgeoning trend of stemless wine glasses, what an affront they were to civilized society.
“Tell me, what is your wife’s honorable profession? ”
Henry takes a slow sip of wine, eyes on mine. “She used to be the deputy director of philanthropy at the Gates Foundation.”
My face reveals my utter surprise that Henry has a wife who held such a prestigious position. “Did she quit when you had kids?”
“She didn’t quit,” Henry says. Then, before I can probe more, “Does your husband have a drug problem?”
I chew my food. Swallow. Smile. “He’s never so much as smoked a cigarette in his life.”
“Never smoked a cigarette and calls you babe. I’d stop wearing my wedding ring too.”
I sit back. Settle cross-legged in my chair. Okay. Now is as good a time as any to have this conversation. “There’s a little more to it than that.”
“Are you going to make me guess?”
“You could never. Not in a million years.”
Henry puts down his fork. “He cheated on you.”
That’s funny. “No.”
“You cheated on him.”
“Are we counting this right now?”
“No.”
“Then, no.”
“He’s threatened by your success.”
“We are successful together.”
“He wants kids and you don’t.”
“He wants whatever makes me happy.”
“He’s gay.”
I sip my wine, shake my head. Try again.
I am deriving immense pleasure from this.
You may be unique, but your problems are not.
I’ve heard this in therapy, on podcasts, from sober friends who have turned to AA.
But I do feel unique and so does my problem, and it feels good, it feels validating, to see that reflected in Henry’s inability to guess what the problem is.
“I already know you’re a little bit gay,” Henry says. Something alights in his eyes. “He doesn’t like that you’re a little bit gay.”
I pause. Press my lips together. It’s not quite it.