Finally he picks up his phone, opens a new browser window. He’s not supposed to do this—his therapist back in New York explicitly told him to stop doing this, actually, on top of which it’s not like he doesn’t have the whole thing memorized—but he types in the first few letters of the address for theNew York Timesreview anyway, his phone autofilling the rest. “A Sea of Troubles forHamletat the Hayes,” the headline reads, right below an enormous photograph of Will’s pale, sweaty face.
He’s halfway through the second paragraph when he’s interrupted by a soft knock on his door; Caroline doesn’t wait for him to answer before she eases it open and slips inside in leggings and a tank top, her hair combed out for bed. “I thought I heard you rattling around in here,” she says, perching on the edge of the dresser and stretching her long legs out so her bright red toes just brush the edge of his mattress.
Will shakes his head, rubbing hard at the nape of his neck. “Couldn’t sleep.”
Caroline grins. “Poor baby,” she singsongs softly, then slips like a cat off the dresser and stamps her mouth against his.
Will lets out a quietoof, catching her weight and falling backagainst the pillows, his fingertips tangling in her silky blond hair. They haven’t told Charlie about this. It’s been on and off for almost a decade, since the summer Caroline’s old agency sent her to New York to sign an up-and-coming director based in Brooklyn. Will was inCoriolanusin the park that year, grit and sweat and pollen creased into his elbows as they collapsed into her fancy hotel bed. It’s friendly, their arrangement, both of them entirely free to see other people. There have been years when they met up every other weekend; there have been years they didn’t meet up at all. “No strings attached,” Caroline told him the morning after the first time they slept together, bending down to scoop her lacy underwear off the carpet, and he’s never had any reason to think she didn’t mean it. Still, it occurred to Will when he accepted Charlie’s invitation to come stay here that possibly it was a bad idea for them to be living in the same place for an extended period of time.
Caroline, evidently, has no such reservations: in the half dark of his borrowed bedroom she slings a leg over his hip bones, planting a hand on either side of his head and leaning forward so that her hair makes a shampoo-scented curtain around his face. “Do you have a crush on Lilly Benedetto?” she asks.
Will freezes. “I—what?” he asks, his voice cracking a little. “Of course not.”
“Because she’s sexy, in a Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show kind of way,” she continues, sitting back so that her ass grinds against his dick. “I’m just saying, I would get it.”
Will huffs out a laugh that sounds more like a wheeze. “Caro,” he says, reaching for her hands and lacing their fingers together, his hips bucking up against hers, “there is nothing going on between Lilly Benedetto and me.”
Caroline gazes down at him with great skepticism. “Prove it,”she says imperiously, then reaches back behind her and pulls her tank top over her head.
***
Caroline slips out of his room sometime before dawn, Will stirring awake as the door snicks shut behind her. He lies there for a while, watching the light get gray out the window and trying to ignore the creeping feeling that he’s doing something wrong or dishonest or sleazy. He meant it, what he said to Caroline: there’s nothing going on between him and Lilly Benedetto. He barely even knows Lilly Benedetto.
He reaches for his phone on the nightstand one more time, scrolling news headlines long enough for plausible deniability before blowing a noisy breath out and typing the name of her show into the search bar. He has to subscribe to some obscure streaming service to get access to the episodes; the whole thing gives him the queasy feeling of paying for pornography—not that he’s ever paid for pornography, for the record. Which isn’t to say that he doesn’t think sex workers deserve a living wage, or that he—oh, for fuck’s sake. Will grits his teeth and hits play.
The show is... not good. The plots are farcical—one episode revolves entirely around two of Lilly’s sisters going to war over an excruciatingly ugly dress both of them want to wear to a launch party for a vegan food product of their father’s invention that is called, regrettably, WheatBallz—and the whole thing looks like it was shot on a flip phone and edited with scissors and tape. Still, he guesses it’s not entirely without its charms—the way they talk and laugh and argue, the rise and fall of their voices like a chorus of sirens in a myth. He always thought it might be nice, to be part of a big family. All this time it’s only been Georgia and him.
He watches all three seasons in one long feverish binge, morning turning to late afternoon outside the window. The theme song is so loud and jarring he’s sure the whole house can hear it, and he frantically lowers the volume on his phone every time it jangles out into the room. The whole thing ends with no ceremony, a snoozer of an episode about a dopey, contrived family garage sale; at first Will thinks maybe there’s something wrong with the website but a quick Google search confirms that that’s all there is.A spin-off of the show focusing on fan favorites Lilly Benedetto and her fiancé, Joseph Ianuzzi, was greenlit by the Tinseltown Network,Wikipedia informs him,though production was shut down following Ianuzzi’s death by heroin overdose during the filming of the pilot. It is rumored that there is video footage of Benedetto discovering Ianuzzi’s body in the couple’s downtown Los Angeles apartment that was never released.Will thinks of the look on Lilly’s face the night of Rebecca Barnes’s party—It was heroin, actually—and feels a little sick.
He throws back the covers and jumps out of bed, striding across the room and out the door to—do what, exactly? He stops short on the second-floor landing, dehydrated and dazed. “Television rots your brain,” Charlie informs him cheerfully—jogging down the steps in his gym clothes, humming theMeet the Benedettostheme song under his breath.
Chapter Seven
Lilly
Lilly comes downstairs for breakfast on Saturday morning and finds June in the kitchen dressed head to toe in Lululemon, her golden hair in a sporty fishtail down her back. “Are you doing a partnership?” Lilly asks, peering at her curiously across the island. June, though tall enough that every gym teacher they ever had spent years trying fruitlessly to recruit her to play basketball, is hardly what one would call athletic. She once wound up in the ER with a sprained knee after tripping over a doll-sized windmill at a celebrity mini-golf tournament to benefit scleroderma research. Lilly hasn’t seen her wear sneakers in years.
But June shakes her head. “Caroline Bingley invited me to work out with her trainer,” she explains, yanking at one of the crisscrossed straps of her sports bra. “Be honest: do my boobs look like they belong to a JV volleyball player right now?”
“A little,” Lilly admits. Then, trying to sound as casual as humanly possible: “Did you eat?”
June’s gaze lingers on Lilly’s just a moment too long. “I had a yogurt,” she says at length, still rummaging around inside the bra. Lilly tries mightily to resist the urge to look in the trash for the empty cup: June has done inpatient treatment for anorexia on three separate occasions, and lately it’s like Lilly can hear the sound ofthe fourth time coming closer and closer like the growl of a far-off engine in the desert.Be careful, she knows better than to say.
“She couldn’t have invited you over to do something normal?” she asks instead, opening the fridge and pulling out a string cheese, biting off the end with a plasticky snap. It feels somehow suspicious, this olive branch from Caroline, though Lilly knows better than to say that out loud. “Like cocaine?”
June grins. “You should come,” she says, reaching down and tightening the laces on her running shoes with the grim determination of a late bloomer suiting up for middle school dodgeball. “I’m sure she wouldn’t mind one more.”
“Can’t,” Lilly says immediately. “I’m getting my underarms depilated by Edward Scissorhands.”
“Sounds invigorating.”
“One can hope.”
Once June’s gone Lilly heads up to her bedroom in search of her laptop; she passes her father doing wall sits in the hallway, his calf muscles like a pair of genetically modified grapefruits bulging under the skin of his legs. “Elisabetta,” he says, jaw twitching with exertion.
“Dad.” Lilly can’t help but smile. She’s not sure when exactly she realized she was her father’s favorite. She guesses she kind of always knew. Her earliest memories are of sitting on the counter at the original Meatball King with its revolving dessert case and red melamine bar, Dominic slipping her an extra garlic knot still hot from the oven when her mother wasn’t looking. “Don’t tell your sisters,” he always said, and if occasionally in the years since then she’s felt a little bit guilty about a certain lack of parental discretion on his part, she’d be lying if she said she didn’t love him the most, too.
“Can I ask you something?” she says now, sitting down on the second step so they’re more or less at eye level. “How much of what you said at dinner the other night about the house was real, and how much was you trying to put the fear of God in Kit and Olivia?”
