“Did you??Yes, CeCe! Of course you did. Why do so many women feel that they don’t deserve someone who sees and values them forwho they are? François isbetter. He’s handsome.Andpassionate and thoughtful. Remember when he came to your place with Leelou and said someone had left her in a box at the Raspail market and he couldn’t bear to leave her there because she had almond-shaped eyes that reminded him of you, and if you didn’t want to keep her then he would?” she recounts. As if I could ever forget. “And he’s tallenough. Plus, beautiful and sexy and French. He’s like a full smorgasbord of things. Do the French do smorgasbords?”
“No, not really.”
“A charcuterie board, then. Your husband is a charcuterie board of desirables.”
I chuckle. And even that feels forced. “So is yours.”
“Anyway… I wish I’d known you were coming for the show. I would have loved to have seen your pieces. With you. I still get swoony when I think about what you did with thatBrokenshort. Such a beautiful love story,” she says, referencing a project I’d poured my heart into. A project that in retrospect might have cost me everything. Because I’d been too busy creating art to pay attention to what was happening around me.
“Thank you. But it’s a trek for you from Brooklyn. And it’s not a big deal. Really. Just a few photos.”
“Itisa big deal. You’re an artist, Cee. We need to support each other. You know that I’m very familiar with the torture of being an artist in this family and the lack of respect. Sylvie, too, although she often acts otherwise. I mean tolerance, yeah, sort of, but real respect for what we do?” She shakes her head and sighs. “They save the glory for the lawyers.”
“Thanks, cuz.”
“What are the pieces like?”
I pause. I want to tell her. I want to tell her everything. But I’m not ready. “They’re moody. Complex,” I say, and I leave it at that.
I’ve gotten quite good at hiding things.
“Well, these next few days are hectic with the girls’ piano recitals, but I’m going to try to make it over there.”
“That’s sweet of you, but you don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t have to. Iwantto. You would do the same for me.”
The following evening, after a full day at the armory and meetings with two LA-based galleries in town for the show—including the one I was scheduled to meet with the morning I went careening into Anouk’s Tesla—I find myself back at my Midtown hotel going down a familiar rabbit hole. My mother mentioning his name hadn’t been a trigger so much as an inconvenient reminder of what I’d been trying to bury. But there was no being in New York and not thinking of him. Imagining him in random doorways, on street corners, in all the places we’d been. The boy from Connecticut. The boy who broke me. Lorry.
He’d moved on.
After my week in Cabo. After the thing with Anouk. After I’d picked up and moved to France to flee the carnage.
He’d married the girl we’d met outside of the Louvre, all those years ago. The tall, horsey brunette from Virginia. They’d had twin girls. Towheads. At some point they’d left the East Coast and moved to Los Angeles. Where exactly I didn’t know. Some place open and rustic and, I hoped, far, far from our rented house in the canyon. I had not told François.
I’d learned all this on the internet, of course. Late-night googling, over the better part of two decades.
It’s where I find myself again that night. Dissecting Lorry’s Instagram account: the kids, the wife, the mindful-awareness practice (because that is apparently one of the many things he is doing now in LA). It’s a unique form of self-torture. Like cutting, but without the telltale scars. And then, to ease the pain, I peruse my own profile. The carefully curated life I want the world to see. The one I hope he will trip upon if and when he puts my name into a search engine. My photography, my art, my charming, devoted husband, my winsome, well-adjusted kids. Look at how beautiful my life is, Lorry Kenter. Look at how content I am. This is what you threw away.
When Lorry and I first broke up and I spiraled into a suicidal depression, my then new therapist asked me if I had ever cut myself.
“Intentionally??”
She nodded. “As a coping mechanism.”
I laughed aloud at the idea. “I am far too vain to ever do such a thing,” I said.
But this kind of self-harm, cutting on the inside. At this, I had become quite good.
I am half asleep when the phone vibrates. My ringer is off, but the rumbling on the nightstand jars me, and I click through without fully registering the number, other than that it is coming from our new area code in California.
“You’re sleeping?Déjà? I’m sorry. I can call you back.”
It takes a second. Her voice deep, slow.
“Anouk?”
“Oui, c’est moi. Sorry. I thought you would be awake.”
