Chapter 22
I shove open a window and breathe in the pristine morning.
Henry’s golden head bobs in the lake, his hands working suds through his hair.
I make coffee for us like a dutiful little wife, head out barefoot into the thick, noisy morning, alternating the length of my stride to spare the worms and critters stranded after the storm.
The crickets are chirping at a frenetic pace, and I remember Henry telling me that there is a way to calculate the temperature outside by counting their chirps in fourteen- or fifteen-second increments, then adding some number I can longer remember.
I pause in the skimpy shade at the base of the dock and try not to squint.
The trees are flowering with small white and purple flowers, beautiful but ineffectual when it comes to my concerns—aging and melanoma, in that order.
Henry hauls himself up the ladder, biceps corded and dazzled with wet.
He steps naked onto the dock, a hulking, streaming sea creature.
He reaches for a towel and dries his hair as he strides over to me at an unhurried, unselfconscious pace, his cock swinging mightily between his legs.
“Why are you cowering back here?”
I hand him a mug. “Shade.”
He considers me with an up-and-down swoop of his eyes as he sips the coffee. “How do you manage living in California?”
“Hats, mineral sunscreen, depression.”
“Depression?”
“It makes it hard to leave the house during the day. I actually think it’s my best-kept beauty secret.”
Henry removes my mug from my hands and sets it on the floorboards of the dock. I know what he’s going to do before he does it, and I turn to get a head start. He gets me by my bouncy cheerleader ponytail, picks me up in a bear hug, and marches us to the end of the dock while I kick and protest.
Henry lays me down on the degraded gray floorboards and pins me in place with his knees.
From the shower caddy next to the ladder, he produces a slimy bottle of Hawaiian Tropic dark tanning oil with an SPF of two.
It is possibly the same bottle Henry used when we were in our twenties.
Despite all his preciousness when it comes to his diet and his teeth and his hair, Henry has always been reckless about the sun.
I watch from beneath him, appalled, as he lubes his coconut-sized shoulders, somehow nut brown though it is not even May yet.
“How are you not dead of melanoma?” I ask.
“The sun is not bad for you here,” Henry replies, completely serious.
I laugh. Here. Like the Adirondacks have a special kind of sun, one that doesn’t spot and wrinkle and metastasize to your brain.
Henry drags an oiled finger down the bridge of my nose. “Do you still get freckles?”
“They’re called sunspots in your thirties.”
Henry looks crestfallen a moment. “How did you celebrate it?”
“Thirty?”
“No,” Henry retorts, “your first sunspot.”
I squirm beneath him as he knots my T-shirt under my breasts. “You really want to know?”
“You’re not the only masochist on this dock.
” Henry drizzles my middle with more oil.
I am trying not to think of everything I will have to do to undo this—probably more of those tiny little needles with the electric microcurrent that makes my limbs involuntarily flail.
The thing they do with my own blood: extracting it, spinning it, injecting it right back into my face.
“We did a dinner,” I say as Henry bastes my thighs next, “at this old-school steakhouse in Hollywood that’s been around since the 1920s. You know, iceberg salad with creamy dressing and tiny martinis that go down in three sips.”
“What did you wear?”
I smile. I like that Henry cares about what I wear. “Black leather pants and a black tank top. No bra.”
“Unimaginative slut,” Henry says, despondent, then rolls off like he’s taken a bullet.
He folds his arms behind his head. I turn to study him in profile.
The heavy, furrowed brows, the bead of sweat in the fluffy bow of his lips, sand and grit in the hair at his temples.
That one tendon in his jaw, right next to his ear, keeps popping out like a broken bone.
“Which famous friends attended?” he wants to know.
“All of them,” I say. “But they’re not my friends.”
“Are they all as brutal as they seem?”
“Some of them are about as normal as they can be, given their circumstances, and I would go so far as to say they’re good people.
The fun ones are really fun.” I close my eyes to the sun, not because it feels good but because I’m worried about squinting, wrinkles, that crepe-like texturing.
“It’s just, you can’t get close with people like that.
They’re guarded; they have to be.” Henry exhales through his nostrils, a nearly soundless snort.
I hear it too. The second I say it, I hear it.
That I was drawn into a world of walls, of parties and pleasantries and protections.
“What did you do for yours?” I ask him.
“My daughter had just been born.”
“She was the most precious gift,” I intone.
“Kids aren’t like that, actually.”
“Are you one of those who just talks about how hard it is all the time?”
“No, that’s the height of childishness. If you’re surprised that it’s hard, you’re probably not much smarter than a fifth grader.”
“So what are kids like, then?”
“They love remote controls.”
I laugh. How random. “Remote controls?”
Remote controls, sunglasses, and keys, Henry says.
And yet somehow the house feels haunted by a poltergeist with an affinity for beautiful wooden blocks and ugly plastic stackers, books about belly buttons and berserk hippos.
He is never too tired to clean up even though he is unbelievably tired.
Some days he is sure his children hate him.
Or don’t hate him, exactly, but don’t feel any special attachment to him.
He loves them and that’s nice, but a lot of other people do too.
Some of those people, like their aunt with the trampoline in her backyard, they might miss more than him if they were to go away.
And other days they take a wrong step and whack their heads on the edge of the coffee table and he is the only one they want, the only one who can soothe them, and they nuzzle their heads under his chin and cling to him with shuddering, shaky breaths, and it feels so good he wonders if he is suffering from that Munchausen by proxy thing.
He spends more time on the floor than he ever thought he would.
He changes his clothes three times a day because he never feels clean with two under four running around with hummus in their hair and someone else’s snot on their sleeves.
He is relieved his daughters take after him and not his wife in the looks department, but terrified that they also contain the same reject quality that Henry has grappled with his whole life.
His wife joined a baby group with their first, and slowly over the years the invitations to the birthday parties have fallen off.
It happens, she assures him. But Henry has met the other mothers, and he detected a core clique that excludes his wife.
Their children played well together even as babies.
They didn’t cling and cry. They didn’t puke constantly the way his first did.
Too many times a day to count, until she turned one.
Not all babies puke, it turns out. And if they do, it’s a tiny dribble.
His daughter was constantly wet under the neck.
He was afraid to pass her to strangers. Afraid no one would think she was cute anymore if they saw how much she barfed, and it matters to him more than it should that other people think his children are cute.
When people say that having a child is like having your heart beat outside your chest, he thought that had to do with love.
But it doesn’t. It has to do with all your own wounds and shame.
Because the biggest revelation Henry has had since becoming a father is that he would never, for one second, consider locking his baby in the cabin while he posted up at the main house without a monitor, which is what his mother did to him.
I don’t know what to say and so I say nothing. I reach for his hand and squeeze. We lie next to each other, ruining our skin for some time. Tomorrow is Sunday. The day after that, I’ll go back to Los Angeles with a tan.