Abby was a truly beautiful woman and it seemed that she was growing aware of this herself. As he watched her sing some kind of old popular song that Henry knew from parties but which he didn’t remember the name of, he came to a conclusion that had somehow been in the back of his mind but which was now completely evident: Abby was simply far out of his league. Such things usually never occurred to Henry at all. He believed with conviction that love and friendship (in their truest form) were not about gamesmanship or status evaluation. But watching Abby onstage—she was wearing a white tank top and overalls that no man (Henry was sure) could resist—he grasped that he was simply no match for the many other potential suitors. Or, and this was a more charitable assessment, if she hadn’t already decided that Henry was what she was looking for, she probably wasn’t going to change her mind now. Of course, a man could never be entirely sure, but the fact was that there really was quite a bit of opportunity for someone like Abby in the world. It was not as though they were living in some kind of tent village in Finland, after all, where a sensitive and artistic man like Henry might stand out a bit more. Maybe more than that, Henry grasped that Abby had somehow become aware of all this, of what kind of world was open to her now.
Henry was thinking very deeply about all this when Whitney approached him—he’d just been talking to some woman he claimed to have a “minor interest in”—and he put his arm around Henry’s shoulder in a very gentle way.
“I don’t think that’s what you should be thinking about,” he said to Henry, with kindness and also smiling.
“What?” Henry said. Whitney knew most of the story of Henry and Abby, although Henry had told Whitney that those feelings were long behind him.
“Henry, you’re one of the best guys I know,” Whitney said. “Abby’s appealing, no question, but there are lots of other women here as well, and you’re young and this is no time to get hung up on one person, because even if it does go your way, it will probably fall apart eventually. Do you see yourself getting married in the next ten years?”
Henry hesitated for a moment and thought deeply about the question before finally and abruptly saying (and to his own surprise), “You’re not interested in Abby, are you?”
Henry expected one of two responses to this question (which he tried, at the last minute, to deliver in the mode of a joke, although it had more of a tone of desperation to it). The first anticipated response was laughter—who would ask such a question in such a way? The second was a heartfelt apology followed by an assertion that, yes, he’d fallen in love with Abby. To his amazement, though, Whitney looked at Henry with great seriousness and said, “Henry, I’ll never, ever go after Abby. I promise you that. No matter what. I’ll never do that. I know you’ve moved on. Still, I know how these things can linger. Or, how they can be brought to the fore again when something happens. But I’ll never do that. I promise.”
Henry paused for a second and then said, “Well, I didn’t mean it like that. I mean, I don’t want to interfere with what you think you want to do. And really, there would be no hard feelings about it. I’m totally over it.”
“No, Henry,” Whitney said. “I’d never do that. Never.”
Henry didn’t quite know what to say. It was such a gallant assertion and he was extremely touched. But just as he was about to make yet another gentlemanly statement about the murky nature of love and his understanding of the ways of the world, two women approached Whitney (quite excited) and asked him what he was doing after the show. It struck Henry as just a bit strange that anyone would assume there was an “after”—it was already far past three a.m. and the event was scheduled to keep going until five. Henry resolved that he needed to make a general point of going to bed later, but once more he turned toward Abby—she was now singing a fairly slow ballad about a romance that began on the G train—and thought about how his life really was drifting into unknown territory.
6
HENRY, THOUGH, HAD other matters in his life that helped distract him from romantic longings, the most important of which was what to do about the prospect of becoming a ghostwriter. He hadn’t thought very carefully about the matter over the past several days, but this mostly had to do with the fact that he’d quickly decided, unconsciously at least, that he’d take the job and there wasn’t much to consider. Henry didn’t really need the money, although the prospect of living the rest of his life only on his inheritance did make him feel somewhat uncomfortable. He felt as though he really ought to be part of the working world, that he ought to contribute some kind of useful labor to the larger society. Merrill was also right that it would be an excellent experience.
And Merrill had sent him some of the financial details via email and the deal seemed very good, although, given the Hollywood origins of the plan, perhaps this was not much money. The fee for the writing would be $60,000. (“Excellent for this kind of thing,” Merrill said in the email.) The money, however, would be spread out over time and in parts, each part to be paid upon approval of the mysterious actor. On top of the advance, Henry would receive 10 percent of the royalty that the named author would be making, which was not good on its own, since it would be 10 percent of the actor’s 15 percent royalty. But it was good in context because much of the sales, Merrill asserted in his email, would be based on name recognition. “He’s sold nearly a million children’s picture books,” Merrill wrote, “so this guy will be bringing in an enormous amount of money just because of his name.”
At any rate, Henry agreed to meet for lunch and, according to the plan, if the discussion went well, they’d head back to Merrill’s office to sign the appropriate contracts.
They met at a midtown restaurant that was near Merrill’s office. It was not an impressive place from the outside but the food more than measured up to the quite extraordinary prices. And the conversation went very well also. At first Henry and Merrill talked mostly about books and movies they liked, and things they liked to do in New York. They also had a fairly deep discussion about losing loved ones at an early age. Merrill had lost his father when he was ten—a thing Henry couldn’t imagine and which he decided might have been even more unbearable than what he himself went through. At last, though, they got to business, which Henry found fairly interesting, seeing as he’d never had such close contact with a man who was clearly involved (as Henry soon learned) with so many high-end editors and publishers. And so it was mostly Merrill who talked, although Henry did interrupt just once because he felt suddenly moved to remark on how delicious his Dungeness crab club sandwich was.
“I think this is one of the best sandwiches I’ve ever had,” he told Merrill. “It’s so delicious. Do you want a bite?”
“No, I’m okay,” Merrill said. “But thanks. The food’s definitely good here. This is what they call a power lunch, Henry. I’m trying to impress you. So now that I know that you like your food, maybe I can be a bit more explicit.”
Henry knew most of the broad aspects of what was at stake from the email he’d received, although Merrill wanted to make sure Henry understood that this deal was much better than Henry would have gotten on his own as a first-time novelist for kids. He did also want Henry to understand that there would be stages of approval and his client reserved the right to abandon the project if he didn’t feel as though it were going well.
“If you write it and he absolutely hates it,” Merrill said, “you’ll still get twenty grand. That’s good money for this kind of work. And if all goes well you’ll make something in royalties, as small as your percentage is. The guy’s got a serious brand. And a highly regarded artistic one at that. A forty-some-thousand-word book, though—that’s what we want this to be—it’s a bit out of his wheelhouse. This book will fit into some other recent projects he’s been doing, though, and, well, for a number of reasons there’s a harmony to it all.”
At any rate, they talked about details for another few minutes before Merrill (just after, apparently, swallowing a large piece of beef gristle) put down his knife
and fork and said, “Okay, Henry, yes or no, in or out?”
Merrill was smiling as he said this, and Henry felt like there was honest warmth coming from him as he advanced the issue to its crisis, so to speak. And Henry was sure that if he asked for more time to think, he’d receive it. But it really was a good proposal, so Henry swiftly replied by saying what he’d already planned to say: “Okay. I’d like to go ahead. I’d like to do it.”
Lunch ended quickly after Henry’s acceptance, and before long he was in Merrill’s offices signing the previously mentioned nondisclosure agreement. “We’ll get to the rest of the contract shit in the next few weeks. You can have someone else look it over if you like. But this is just so I can tell you more about who you’re working for. But you understand this nondisclosure agreement you’re now signing is pretty serious, right?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“There’s a lot at stake for my client regarding your discretion—reputation and money. Think of this agreement as something like what people sign before they join one of those competition reality shows. So much of the taping happens long before the show is aired, so if someone blows the name of the winners midway through the season, the studio suffers major damage—the whole show is tanked. And that kind of damage can be addressed in all sorts of ugly ways in court. Like getting sued for everything you have.”
Henry nodded. It was suddenly a bit frightening, but Henry was a magnificent secret-keeper (ironclad discretion was, in fact, at the core of some of his more mysterious notions of male virtue), so he wasn’t particularly reluctant to sign. And when he did, Merrill was able to divulge the more interesting details of the project.
“All right,” Merrill said, “here’s who you’re working for.”
The news was fairly interesting—not mind-blowing, as these things go, but interesting. That is, the person he was writing for was not Al Pacino or Queen Elizabeth, but it was certainly an actor who had a solid artistic reputation and someone Henry knew of and had seen perform. His name was Jonathan Kipling. He was in his mid-forties and he’d started his career on the stage in New York—he and Merrill had been great pals in the city when they were younger (even though Merrill was ten years Kipling’s senior) and they’d started working together then, although Merrill didn’t handle his acting work in later years. Kipling had made the leap to Hollywood via a much-praised independent film about a dying industrial town in New Hampshire, and he’d then gone on to play several important smaller roles in larger movie productions. He was not what anyone would call a true and pure top-shelf star—he was not the lead billing in movies made by studios like Columbia or Paramount (with one exception). But he had high-end name recognition and had even made the various “most beautiful people” lists in the popular magazines.
The one exception to his role as supporting cast member was the lead in a movie made for young people about a basketball coach who was dying of cancer. It hit all the notes that such a movie tries to hit, and did surprisingly well financially, and this movie was what prompted Kipling to write the picture books for children—his name was now well known among parents looking for nurturing printed culture for their kids. And he was able to pull off the new venture and keep his highbrow status intact because he was also appearing in other more “artistically motivated” movies, playing the roles of an alcoholic, a terrorist sympathizer, and even a failed book editor. More than this, though, and this was something Henry thought with conviction well before he knew who he was working for, Kipling really was an excellent actor—the real thing, as they say. And because of this reputation, Merrill asserted, he could also afford to branch off in more lucrative areas of the entertainment world. For instance, he endorsed a brand of Swiss watches, a sort of environmentally sustainable compact car, and even a line of frozen desserts (which he ate with great pleasure and conviction on daytime television advertisements). He was fairly rich from all this, but he was still looking to continue to leverage his name, and this was why he was hiring Henry.
“Multiplatform is where it’s at these days,” Merrill said. “There’s incredible commercial potential here. A really great book will bolster Kipling’s other endeavors, but we’re looking for something real, something heartfelt, something artistic, and something I know you can produce for us. Again, I told you this before, Kipling has a strong idea of what this book is going to look like. So you’ll be working very closely with him to implement his vision. We think that you can do a great job for us. And if your stab at all this doesn’t work out, you’re in for twenty grand and you walk away with a great experience and some extra cash to blow on whatever you want.”
All of it, Henry had to agree, sounded very appealing.
7
WHAT KIPLING’S VISION was for all this, Henry couldn’t say. But the one other important aspect of the meeting, and the one that might answer Henry’s question, came at the end when Merrill said that Kipling would very much like for Henry to go (that weekend!) to Kipling’s country house in England so they could spend some time “hashing out” what the book would be about.
“I mean, he knows what he wants the book to look like, what he wants it to deal with,” Merrill said, “but I think he just wants to lay it all out in person. I don’t know too much, so I’ll be as interested as you to hear about it. Anyway, I’m assuming you’ll want to do this because we’ll fly you first class and he’s got quite a place over there, so I think it will be a blast.”
It was a surprising proposal, and one that truly interested Henry. Now that Henry lived in New York, he did what he could to affect the sort of blasé demeanor of someone who saw great things and rubbed shoulders with great people all the time, but he found that he could not help but be excited at the prospect of meeting someone as famous as Kipling and staying at his country house. After pausing for what he imagined to be a dignified amount of time, he said that he’d be happy to do it. “And I’ve only been to the UK once,” he said, “when I was young.”
“Well, time to go as an adult!” Merrill quickly replied. “And Kipling’s stuff is big in Britain. I think that’s why he’s got a place there, but don’t tell him I said that. I just think it makes him feel pretty good to be there.”
Travel plans were arranged swiftly, and when Henry got off the phone later that day with Merrill’s secretary, who Merrill had said would “handle everything,” he also decided to figure out his upcoming schedule in general. After several more phone calls, including a very enjoyable one with Whitney (where Whitney said, several times, “Shit, I’d love to go upstate with you!”) Henry finally decided on a date—about six weeks away—when they would travel to Pembry Cottage and deal with his parents’ unlawfully stored possessions. (He managed to schedule the weekend for just himself and Whitney so he wouldn’t run into Aunt Lilly or anyone else who might abuse him for the slaughter of Hannah’s Libyan goats.) “And it really is a beautiful house,” Henry said to Whitney. “And the lake. Lake Placid is really beautiful. And there’s lots to do. We’ll have a lot of fun.”
“I can’t wait,” Whitney said. “I can’t wait.”
At any rate, the meeting with Merrill took place on a Tuesday, and the following Thursday evening Henry was at JFK boarding a flight to London. He was pleased to be flying first class, a thing he’d only done a few times, and he was fairly dazzled by the innovations in luxury travel that had occurred in recent years. The seat that folded into a bed, the television screen on the articulating arm, and a puzzling climate control system that Henry spent most of the flight adjusting and readjusting (with pleasure) according to his mood and activities. He slept for much of the flight, but he was awake to eat his dinner and then his breakfast, and he even drank two glasses of port, served to him in what the menu boasted was “authentic crystal.” And when he at last arrived, he felt refreshed and looking forward to the day ahead. Because it was only a weekend trip he also didn’t have much luggage—just a single carry-on bag and his backpack, so he was able to pass through the airport with littl
e trouble. On the other side of customs, he found a driver with a sign with his name on it and soon he was in the back of a Mercedes and headed south to Dorset.
And when they arrived, Henry couldn’t help but note that Kipling’s house was striking in all the ways that a person might expect from a movie actor’s estate. It seemed something a person would be justified in calling a large manor, although it was also simple, a white Georgian structure with clean lines and symmetrical windows and elegant but restrained flourishes on the corners and roof joints.
After coming to a stop at the front door (which sat at the edge of a large, flat gravel lot), Henry stepped out. The driver quickly followed—he looked, in fact, as though he would have preferred to be the one to open Henry’s door—and soon Henry was ringing the doorbell of the house, the driver dutifully holding Henry’s small bag and backpack.
A brief moment passed, then the door opened. Kipling stood on the other side. Henry was a little surprised to see Kipling himself answer the door, although he wasn’t sure why—had he expected a butler? But before he could think too much about it, Kipling was extending his hand. “You’re Henry!” Kipling said. “I’m so happy you were able to come out for this.”
“I’m very happy to be here,” Henry replied.
Kipling then nodded at the driver, took Henry’s bags, and soon Henry was standing in the entryway and looking up at the curved banister of the house’s central stairs.
“This is a beautiful house,” Henry said, looking to his left at an ancient mahogany bench that sat in an alcove next to the door.
“I think so too,” Kipling replied. “Thanks. I’ll show you around if you like. I’m about to make a late breakfast at the moment, though. Are you hungry? We could eat something and then I’ll give you a tour?”
The Best of Youth Page 9
