The House Across the Lake(5)

I nod. Of course she does.

“It’s for charity,” Katherine adds.

I nod again. Of course it is.

I must make a face, because Katherine says, “I’m sorry. That all sounded like a brag, didn’t it?”

“A little,” I admit.

“Ugh. I don’t mean to do it. It just happens. It’s like the opposite of a humblebrag. There should be a word for when you accidentally make yourself sound better than you truly are.”

“A bumblebrag?” I suggest.

“Ooh, I like that,” Katherine coos. “That’s what I am, Casey. An irredeemable bumblebragger.”

My gut instinct is to dislike Katherine Royce. She’s the kind of woman who seems to exist solely to make the rest of us feel inferior. Yet I’m charmed by her. Maybe it’s the strange situation we’re in—the rescued and the rescuer, sitting in a boat on a beautiful autumn afternoon. It’s got a surreal Little Mermaid vibe to it. Like I’m a prince transfixed by a siren I’ve just plucked from the sea.

There doesn’t seem to be anything fake about Katherine. She’s beautiful, yes, but in a down-to-earth way. More girl-next-door than intimidating bombshell. Betty and Veronica sporting a self-deprecating smile. It served her well during her modeling days. In a world where resting bitch face is the norm, Katherine stood out.

I first became aware of her seven years ago, when I was doing a Broadway play in a theater on 46th Street. Just down the block, in the heart of Times Square, was a giant billboard of Katherine in a wedding dress. Despite the gown, the flowers, the sun-kissed skin, she was no blushing bride. Instead, she was on the run—kicking off her heels and sprinting through emerald green grass as her jilted fiancé and stunned wedding party watched helplessly in the background.

I didn’t know if the ad was for perfume or wedding dresses or vodka. I really didn’t care. What I focused on every time I spotted the billboard was the look on the woman’s face. With her eyes crinkling and her smile wide, she seemed elated, relieved, surprised. A woman overjoyed to be dismantling her entire existence in one fell swoop.

I related to that look.

I still do.

Only after the play closed and I continued seeing the woman’s picture everywhere did I match a name with the face.

Katherine Daniels.

The magazines called her Katie. The designers who made her their muse called her Kat. She walked runways for Yves Saint Laurent and frolicked on the beach for Calvin Klein and rolled around on silk sheets for Victoria’s Secret.

Then she got married to Thomas Royce, the founder and CEO of a social media company, and the modeling stopped. I remember seeing their wedding photo in People magazine and being surprised by it. I expected Katherine to look the way she did on that billboard. Freedom personified. Instead, sewn into a Vera Wang gown and clutching her husband’s arm, she sported a smile so clenched I almost didn’t recognize her.

Now she’s here, in my boat, grinning freely, and I feel a weird sense of relief that the woman from that billboard hadn’t vanished entirely.

“Can I ask you a very personal, very nosy question?” I say.

“You just saved my life,” Katherine says. “I’d be a real bitch if I said no right now, don’t you think?”

“It’s about your modeling days.”

Katherine stops me with a raised hand. “You want to know why I quit.”

“Kind of,” I say, adding a guilty shrug. I feel bad about being obvious, not to mention basic. I could have asked her a thousand other things but instead posed the question she clearly gets the most.

“The long version is that it’s a lot less glamorous than it looks. The hours were endless and the diet was torture. Imagine not being allowed to eat a single piece of bread for an entire year.”

“I honestly can’t,” I say.

“That alone was reason enough to quit,” Katherine says. “And sometimes I just tell people that. I look them in the eye and say, ‘I quit because I wanted to eat pizza.’ But the worst part, honestly, was having all the focus be on my looks. All that nonstop primping and objectification. No one cared about what I said. Or thought. Or felt. It got real old, real quick. Don’t get me wrong, the money was great. Like, insanely great. And the clothes were amazing. So beautiful. Works of art, all of them. But it felt wrong. People are suffering. Children are starving. Women are being victimized. And there I was walking the runway in dresses that cost more than what most families make in a year. It was ghoulish.”

“Sounds a lot like acting.” I pause. “Or being a show pony.”

Katherine laugh-snorts, and I decide right then and there that I do indeed like her. We’re the same in a lot of ways. Famous for reasons we’re not entirely comfortable with. Ridiculously privileged, but self-aware enough to realize it. Yearning to be seen as more than what people project onto us.

“Anyway, that’s the long story,” she says. “Told only to people who save me from drowning.”

“What’s the short version?”

Katherine looks away, to the other side of the lake, where her house dominates the shoreline. “Tom wanted me to stop.”

A dark look crosses her face. It’s brief—like the shadow of a cloud on the water. I expect her to say something more about her husband and why he’d make such a demand. Instead, Katherine’s mouth drops open and she begins to cough.