The Vanishing Year(24)
A woman in the group, blonde, coiffed, peaches-and-cream skin, simpers next to Henry. Her long red fingernails dance along his hairline as she shoots looks in my direction. He flirts back momentarily and then leans close to me, his breath curling around my ear: Don’t worry about Dianna. She’s not nearly as attractive as she thinks she is.
After dinner, there are speeches and some mingling, but Henry peppers me with questions, rarely leaving my side. A man has never been so goddamned interested in everything I have to say. We take his car home and he sits in the back with me but doesn’t make a move. I can’t tell if I’m impressed or disappointed.
He never flinches at my little run-down Hoboken neighborhood with the exposed fire escapes and barred windows. He walks me to the door with a chaste, gentle kiss on the lips, quick and soft as a feather.
His pursuit after that night is relentless. Hungry, primal. He can’t stop thinking about me, he says. He whisks me away: Madrid, London, Los Angeles. I accompany him on business trips and each time he presents me with a new glittering gown. Strappy sandals. Five-carat diamond necklaces. Teardrop sapphire earrings. Everything he can offer, on display. The Wheel of Fortune with your host Henry Whittaker.
All this doggedness wears me out. I say this to him, “Henry, I can’t be the woman you want me to be. Who will fit in your circles, go to your parties, be your arm candy. This is not a relationship that can work.”
He says he’s never loved anyone like this, so quickly, so intensely. He loves everything about me, he tells me. He comes to the flower shop sometimes, just to watch me work, late at night, working with a new bloom, willing new, thick stems to bend, not break. Trying to learn design, self-teaching, needing the elusive respect of Elisa. He takes home all my creations, successful or not, and sets them on his glass dining room table, prominently displayed at dinner parties. He calls me brilliant to his friends. Sometimes I think he’s lost his mind. They surely think that, too.
Me with my hair spiked like, well, a bat orchid, and dyed just as black. With my facial piercings and my fishnet stockings and knee-high boots. With my too-short skirts and my dubious taste in music. My suspect circle of friends, acquaintances mostly, Lydia’s friends. But most of them not so arrow straight, some who dabble in drugs. I’ve heard his colleagues say things, seen their looks. They smirk when they think I’m not looking—but I see it. I’m a dangerous hobby, an expensive yacht. I’m a midlife crisis. He’s slumming and getting off on it. I see it, they see it. Henry doesn’t. I tell him this and he just shakes his head.
“You don’t know me. I’ve never followed a crowd in my life.” So, he takes me. He takes all of it, never faltering. Absorbing Lydia’s sarcasm and attitude, her jealousy, with a resonant laugh and twinkling blue eyes. That subtle dimple, that only appears when he’s most amused. The way he pinches my chin. The way I can put on a show, all seductive kitten, and make him late for a meeting, a meeting he was running no less, just by using a whispered kiss of a voice. He rushes home, taking me in the hallway, unable to wait. He thought about it all day, he says.
I have no idea what to make of any of it. Slowly, I fall. I fall until I’m down at the bottom of the barrel so deep in love with those twinkling eyes and those dimples. I’m drunk on my own power and his power and his money and the world he holds, all for me. He offers it in one hand, without pretense, while holding his heart in the other. I want both, I take both. I let myself go, I stop pointing out that his friends and his colleagues laugh at me. I stop saying no. I stop protesting his indulgence, when he buys me clothing and shoes and jewelry. I stop looking for the catch. There doesn’t seem to be one. So what do you do?
He rents out Br?lée, where we met, and fills it with flowers from Elisa’s. In that back room, he gets down on one knee and delivers a speech that ends any doubt. He wants me for me, he claims. I don’t believe it, but he repeats again and again: You wanted me to woo you. So here I am. It’s all so hard to argue with. I say yes, crying and blubbering. Everyone wants to be loved for who they are, even if we keep our true selves locked up and hidden. It’s a nice little fantasy to believe that the right person holds the key and all the things you do not say are just somehow, magically, known.
I justified it then: keeping Hilary a secret. I suppose I justify it now. It’s been so long. I’m Zoe now, what does it matter? There are parts of my life I’d like to never think about again, even when it seems like all I do is actively avoid thinking about them. Evelyn, a barbaric burial. Rosie, abused, exploited. Those little pink nails, all those suburban moms, reaching for me, petting my hands. Wanting what I could offer, but never wanting me.
Then comes our wedding, small and private. His friends excluded, mostly because I think I’m not acceptable. He says no, insists it’s a bad time of year. Everyone summers in the Hamptons. Our honeymoon. Lavish: a world tour. Two months, maybe longer. All love and sex and sharing ice cream, giggling, drinking champagne. My ship finally came in—at some point, Evelyn always said, everyone’s does. We stroll the Gran Vía in Madrid, eat gelato, throw coins over our shoulders into the Trevi Fountain in Rome, spend hours in the modern art museum in Geneva. We spend months together, never tiring of each other. He hangs on my every word. Caters to my whims.
It’s so easy to fall in love with Henry Whittaker: his easy smile, his lifestyle, his profligate praise and unabating interest, his strong, capable hands and the way they caress my body. He offers what I’ve been so desperate for: a root. He offers money, which I’ve never had; security, so long missing. He fills the gaps that Evelyn created when she left me alone at night in a tiny apartment, in a bad section of town, to go to work, or on a date, but either way, not there to soothe my fears, push the wet hair off my perspiring forehead at three a.m. when I’d heard gunshots or had yet another nightmare. He offers me love, a boundless amount of it, as though everything I say amuses him or entertains him and as though he understands exactly what I mean. We watch documentaries on National Geographic and I test him by saying ridiculous things like, Do you think elephants are the communists of the animal kingdom? He offers me recognition, where I’d often only felt isolation, trying on different identities: college girl, druggie, punk hipster. He offers me all this on a shiny, silver serving tray.