“So you’re saying everyone is a liar?”
“I’m saying it’s the way of the world now to display yourself. And there is no putting that genie back in the bottle,” he said. “And some people integrate it well, they find social media connective. But for the rest of us, it’s a different story. Literally. And no one’s talking about it. The cost of curating your life.”
There was that word again. Curate.
“And there is a cost to the people looking at that photograph and thinking that’s how their lives are supposed to be. And to my friend sending it out into the world. My friend, who savored the comments coming in about how she was a girl’s girl. About how the best women had lifelong girlfriends. It was like the feedback made her forget it was a crock, that she didn’t have a night with girlfriends. That what she was actually doing was having sex on that deck while her husband played golf in Pebble Beach.”
“That’s a lot of detail,” I said.
He laughed. “Believe me, it’s not,” he said.
I shot him a look.
Ethan looked right at me. “I don’t approve of the husband’s methods,” he said. “But I guess it’s possible he had good intentions.”
I sighed. “Whose side are you on?”
“His,” he said. “Obviously.”
I smiled. But, the truth was, Ethan had nailed it. I hadn’t begun to forgive Danny for what he had done, but I was starting to think that maybe he was right. I’d spent so much time playing make-believe, I’d lost the thread between who I used to be and the person I’d been presenting to the world. How do you begin to trace it back to when everything you did wasn’t a perfectly calibrated extension of who you thought you were supposed to be?
That was the cost of my curated life. I had no clue where I’d gotten so lost.
“So you’re sure she’s away? Your girlfriend?”
“A thousand photos on Instagram don’t lie.” He paused. “Well, not all the time.”
“Would you help me with something, then? It’s illegal.”
He was already standing up. “That’s my favorite kind of help,” he said.
43
Ethan put the keys on the credenza in the foyer and left me there.
I took a deep breath and started to walk through the house. My childhood house. It vaguely resembled the house I’d grown up in, but it had been renovated from the ground up. There were dark wood floors now and silky chocolate walls, covered in modern art. Colorful canvases lined the entranceway, art deco fixtures hung lavishly from the ceilings.
It was difficult to remember the house as it had been. The bleached floors and white walls, my father’s black-and-white photography the only “art” hanging anywhere. Some of the photographs had been personal, but most were of Montauk itself. This town had been my father’s escape and, for a long time, his dream. And he had captured his love for it in his house. The docks and the beach. Ditch Plains and the Montauk Association. The Atlantic Ocean right beneath it.
I walked toward the back of the house, the hallway narrowing, the door to the kitchen now a sturdy red wood. My father had refused to replace the door we’d had there, which was yellowing and nicked in the corners, the paint splintering off. He had jammed his foot on it the day he was nominated for his first Oscar—jammed it moments before he heard the news, his toe breaking badly on impact, turning an ugly black and blue.
Yet, he decided that the door was instrumental in that early victory, that somehow the way he’d banged it had led to the victory. So the rule was that the door stayed as it was and could not get altered in any way. As splintered and messy as it got, he wouldn’t even paint it. My sister didn’t like it when I joked that, by that logic, he shouldn’t have fixed his toe.
I ran my hand over the new door, pushed through past what had been my father’s small studio. It was now a grand opening to the kitchen, which they had blown out and doubled in size to accommodate the top-of-the-line commercial Viking ranges (two of them), an island that went on forever, a wood-burning stove. I opened the Sub-Zero refrigerator and, even though the owners weren’t in town, it was perfectly stocked. Eggs and shrimp and vegetables, farm-fresh strawberries and glass-bottled milk.
Our kitchen never seemed to have food, and there had been nowhere impressive to cook it. There had been a small stove, an island that had enough room for two bar stools. It had been simple and serene, as if a reminder of what the house was there for—what, even with all the remodeling, the house was still there for—the exquisite wraparound porch looking over the ocean.
I stepped outside, the sweet smell of the beach hitting my nose. How many days had I sat out there as a child, taking that smell for granted? Dreaming of going anywhere else?
My eyes ticked up to the second story. I walked back inside and headed upstairs to the room that Rain and I had shared. We’d had twin beds, a large desk with two chairs, and bright purple walls. My father had let us paint the room that color when we were little. And we had never changed it.
The room was now a meditation studio—complete with a Buddha and a small Zen garden, a large mat. But they had kept the purple walls. That was what they’d kept? The color was startling, taking me back in time, and, like that, it all came back to me. I was five and ten and fifteen at once, sitting in the window seat in the corner. Rain never far away.
I remembered her walking in, the day she graduated from high school. She was still in her gown, and I was sitting there imagining what I would do with the room when she left. Rain had graduated at the top of her class and received a full ride to Princeton. She would get to study in one of the most impressive math programs in the country and she would still be near enough to Montauk that it would be easy for her to come home regularly, which I knew was important to her.
Maybe that was why I didn’t believe her when she said that she wasn’t leaving, that she was staying in the house—staying where she was—and taking some classes at the college in Southampton instead. I wouldn’t leave you, she had said that day.