“Wow. You look—”
“Younger. I know.”
For some reason she’d expected him to lose interest then. He did not. Instead, he had laughed, and said in his New England boarding-school accent, with its telltale prolonged vowels and broadAs, “Pretty sure if I’d known that when I saw you on Sahhturday ahhfternoon, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to stalk you in the way I did.”
“Stalk me?”
“Um, sort of. Yaahh. That wasn’t my train. I’m on the New Haven Line. I live in Greenwich.”
For a moment Cecilia had been speechless. The familiar melody of the Mister Softee ice-cream truck wafting up through her window. A random car alarm. Her bedroom, stifling and humid. June in the city. A world away from the bucolic splendor of Fairfield County and what she imagined was Laurence Charles Kenter’s charmed life.
She’d wondered then if she should have been concerned for her well-being or impressed with his audacity. She’d decided on the latter. “Greenwich? So, then, how did you get home?”
He’d smiled. She couldhearhim smiling. “I got off at North White Plains and took a cab.”
“Wow.”
“That sounds completely crazy, right? I swear I’ve never done anything like that. But I saw you at the ticket booth and you were just… beautiful… and I thought, well, carpe diem. You only live once, right?”
The memory of that phone call, and the numerous heady moments that followed in those first few months, were still so clear. He’d pursued her unabashedly. Fearlessly. He’d opened up his heart and his world and his bed. And everything about it was new to her, and extraordinary.
He was everything that she was not: wealthy, Jewish, preppy, white. He was sensitive, and thoughtful, and aloof. And while others his age were consumed with random hookups, partying, and generally having a good time, Laurence Charles Kenter was fixated on saving the planet and humanity. Additionally, he was surprisingly adept at navigating female genitalia for one so young. And he had a penchant for the R&B group Jodeci. For all these reasons, Cecilia found herself enamored. And, it appeared, Lorry felt likewise.
But that was eighteen months ago.
“Hey,” he said now. He’d answered on the third ring. Nonchalant. As if a few days prior he hadn’t placed a missive in her hands that might ultimately destroy her.
“How’s Cabo?”
“Fine. Good. Fine.”
“And the weather?”
“Sunny. Eighty degrees. No humidity. Perfect.”
“You guys shot today?”
“Half day. Just one setup. Tomorrow is our first full day. We’ve got a fourAMcall time.”
The small talk was excruciating, but Cecilia hesitated to initiate more, knowing once they got to the crux of the matter, there’d be no turning back.
“Soooooo,” he said finally. “I’m guessing you read my letter.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“And I imagine you have questions.”
“A few.” She could hear her voice trembling, and she struggled to steady it.
She pictured him in the off-campus housing he shared with his two roommates, Hadley and Anne. Anne was a childhood friend from Greenwich, and Hadley a friend of Anne’s. Both were artists, and their small apartment on Amsterdam Avenue was often in disarray. The bathroom especially, littered with brushes and half-empty jars of paint. The tub often clogged with Hadley’s sometimes-pink, sometimes-purple, sometimes-blue hair.
He was likely lying on his bed, with the mustard-yellow sheets. The dream catcher mounted above his headboard. His desk opposite, with its Mac PowerBook, his works by Kierkegaard, his leather journal. A photo of the two of them pinned to his corkboard, taken that first fall when they’d hiked that stretch of the Appalachian Trail near Salisbury. Far up in the northwest corner of Connecticut, where the state abutted both New York and Massachusetts. On that trip he had pitched a tent and built a fire and made them a lentil stew with fresh sage and thyme that he’d grown in his parents’ garden. And they’d sipped hot chocolate while gazing at the stars and followed that up with mind-blowing sex in his sleeping bag, which kind of clinched it for Cecilia that if she ended up with anyone but Lorry Kenter she would be settling.
“I don’t know, Ceece,” he said finally. “I had all these things on my mind. Things that have been weighing on me for a couple of months now, and I just… needed to share them. You’ve always been so good about expressing how you feel—in general—but about me particularly, and I didn’t think it would be fair to not do the same for you. To keep it all bottled up, and not let you know that I was… I don’t know…”
“Wavering?”
“Maybe. No. I wouldn’t call it wavering. Just… conflicted.”
