The Best of Youth

by Michael Dahlie

  “Okay,” Henry said. “This sounds interesting to me.” Here Henry paused, and for long enough that Merrill apparently felt like he should jump in again.

  “By the way,” he said. “Your cousin, I already have her number. So this isn’t some trick I’m playing. I’m not opposed to sneaky ways of getting phone numbers, and I’ll admit that it’s why I first looked you up and read your stories, but I wouldn’t mess around with my work like this, and I certainly wouldn’t fuck my client.” Here, Merrill paused. “Henry,” he continued at last, “you are a truly gifted writer. The stories blew me away. The pathos—it’s something. That’s the only reason we’re having this telephone call right now. And anyway, Abby and I already went out and it seems like there’s nothing there, despite what an obviously wonderful person she is. I’m too old, she’s too young, but it wasn’t an awkward realization—just so obvious that there was no reason to take things further. So, there’s no bad blood. We’re going to a Yankees game together. Next week. With a bunch of people. I’m even bringing a date. You can come if you want. I’ve got extra tickets. I have a whole box, actually, from a client. But all right, aside from that, what do you think about the ghostwriting thing?”

  Henry paused for a moment and then said, “Well, again, all this sounds very interesting to me. I suppose I’ll have to think about it. And hear more of the details.”

  “Yes, details,” Merrill replied. “You’ll be paid well for this kind of thing—I can promise you that—but a lot of what we talk about can only come after you sign the confidentiality agreement. It’s a total pain in the ass, but that’s how these things work. You’ll know the guy immediately, he’s a pretty prominent actor, and he’s leveraging himself into new things and thinks this might be a good line for him. And I agree. For a lot of reasons. Anyway, since it sounds appealing to you, let’s have lunch. We can talk money and I’ll let you know what the deal will look like.”

  “Okay,” Henry said.

  “I’m going to put you through to my assistant and she’ll get us a time. And Henry, I know I’ve said this, but I’ll say it again, the only reason we’re having this call is because I loved your stories. Believe me, when we met at the benefit, I never imagined we’d be on the phone right now. This isn’t a favor I’m doing for you. I’m simply in need of your talent.”

  “Thanks. That’s really nice to hear,” Henry said.

  “Okay. Sit tight. I’m transferring you to Joanne.”

  With that, the phone made several barely audible clicks and Henry was soon talking to Merrill’s assistant.

  4

  NEEDLESS TO SAY, it was quite an unexpected offer, and for the next few days—Henry and Merrill were meeting two weeks later because of a trip Merrill was about to leave on—Henry thought about the proposal. It all seemed so strange, though, and the truth was that there were other matters in Henry’s life that also took some effort to consider. Among these was an unexpected development regarding a matter having to do with his parents. Henry had gotten word, via a cryptic email and then a formal letter, that the family collective that managed shares in an ancestral summer home in upstate New York (called Pembry Cottage) was making some decisions about the future of the estate. Henry’s stake in the home, following his parents’ death, was now one–thirty-second, the house having been built long ago by a great-great-grandfather (a close associate of Teddy Roosevelt’s, it was said, although Henry never quite understood all the details). Pembry Cottage was managed by a trust, and Henry had rights to use it a certain amount of time every year. He occasionally took advantage of this, but he had spent such happy times with his parents there that he hadn’t been up much recently, since he found returning to be extremely depressing. It was quite a beautiful property, though—a sprawling shingled house on Lake Placid that had even hosted Roosevelt on several occasions, as the stories went. The house was also linked to a family trust fund that paid for its upkeep and whatever taxes were levied on a home of this kind—the taxes, Henry had heard over the years, were shocking.

  Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on whom you asked), the money and the estate also came with a bewildering set of legal documents and binding rules, preventing the house from ever being sold and making all decisions about the house a matter of democratic vote by a system that Henry found completely unintelligible. Certainly he had never been asked to vote on anything having to do with the property, although his father had attended family meetings in Boston more than once to assent to one resolution or another (to remount the awning on the boathouse or to resurface the tennis court, for instance). Henry, however, only received a list of already-passed resolutions every six months or so (he was owed at least this because of his one–thirty-second stake), but as for being a full-fledged voting member, he didn’t seem to have yet made the cut.

  At any rate, it was this strange and tentative association, with its complex parliamentary procedure, that led to the puzzling email and then a fairly surprising letter (written by the trust’s executor, Lilly Holloway) telling Henry that the family board had decided to convert a storage room on the ground floor into a studio for “the many family members with serious interests in the arts” and that Henry would have to come up to collect possessions of his parents that had been “illegally left” in the storage room in question. “You may pick up the items anytime over the next six weeks. After six weeks we will donate them to Goodwill.”

  It struck Henry as a strangely aggressive and mean-spirited letter. Henry did acknowledge that he was not the only person the letter was addressed to—there were two others—so he couldn’t take it too personally. But at the bottom of the letter was a handwritten note from Aunt Lilly’s father, an elderly uncle wishing Henry well and apologizing for the inconvenience of the request and assuring Henry it was only a carload of his family things that he had to retrieve. And then, in smaller script and squeezed between parentheses—as though the note were meant to be read in a darkened room and in a whisper:

  I’m afraid you’ll have to do this! You’re aunt Lilly is quite cross with you! Apparently you caused some kind of disaster at a farm belonging to a friend of hers from Choate! You killed a flock of priceless goats! My goodness! But I’m on your side, Henry! Always have been! Sadly, even I can’t stand in the way of the bylaws of the august Pembry Cottage estate! So you shouldn’t ignore this! I know you’ve rescued your more sentiment-laden artifacts from the house, but there are a few things here that have some value, in particular a mahogany lap secretary that was made, I know from poking around, by Price and Jacobsen in Philadelphia! All right! More anon! But we should meet for dinner in the city soon!

  Uncle Louis

  Henry remembered the mahogany secretary his uncle mentioned and he concurred that it must be worth quite a bit, but more on his mind was his aunt Lilly’s anger. Uncle Louis could do no wrong in Henry’s mind, but Lilly was precisely the sort of bitter Protestant matron who gave his people such a bad name, and it was more than alarming that she was talking about the goats Henry had killed. Was there some kind of annual meeting in Narragansett or Litchfield where well-healed fiftysomething heiresses exchanged the names of people who had crossed them?

  “Are my failures in Vermont going to follow me forever?” Henry asked Abby not long after receiving the letter. They were eating at a Vietnamese restaurant in Fort Greene that Henry particularly liked.

  “Kill a lot of goats and it follows you for life,” Abby said. “And WASPs tend to intermarry, so that’s another problem for you. But anyway, enough about the goats, because, frankly I don’t ever want to hear about them again. Is Merrill going to rep you or what?”

  With this sudden shift in topic, Henry quickly became nervous (from a legal standpoint, because of the confidentiality that was in question with the agreement and his continuing general worry about being sued). He abruptly stood and said he needed to get a beer and then walked to the front counter to place his order. By the time he returned he’d once more rehearsed the story that he�
��d planned to present, namely that he and Merrill were going to work together, but that he was still a long way off from having a book. Thus, as far as his publishing career went, there really wasn’t much to say.

  “But he’s going to read my stories before I send them out,” Henry said. “And if it makes sense, he might even put in a call for me to a few places where he knows people, although agents don’t really sell short stories these days. Not to the places where I’d be a good candidate, at least. It sounds like I’ll need to write a novel before anything much happens, and that’s a long way off. But we’re going to stay in close touch. I’m probably going to see him a lot.”

  “So that’s great news, right?” Abby said.

  “Yes,” Henry replied, “I suppose it is great news.”

  “It is great news!” Abby repeated, and it looked as if she were about to give Henry a lecture on staying positive when three women Abby knew suddenly appeared, and soon the conversation turned to the matter of a party later that night that they wanted Abby to come to. They invited Henry as well, and although it did sound fun, he was just a little tired and not really in the mood to wander around some stranger’s apartment, so he said he needed to get home. And soon they all parted on the street outside the restaurant. As Henry watched them walk away, he did feel just a bit of regret over not joining in. He could put off sleep for a while longer, after all. But he also thought about something else at that moment. As he watched Abby walk away, he wondered again if he was over the crush he’d had on her. He instantly concluded that he was. That moment of his life was well over. And anyway, the fact was that he needed her now too much as a friend to indulge that kind of idea.

  At last Henry turned and headed home. His romantic future lay elsewhere, he decided. And probably his social life, its platonic aspects, might lay elsewhere as well. And in this regard, things had been changing somewhat for Henry in Brooklyn recently. For the better. In particular Henry had recently made something of a new and good friend, a friend who was not Abby. And this new friend was a person who had a deep grasp of the social world of Williamsburg and, perhaps most important, he was a person who had absolutely nothing to gain from the friendship other than honest camaraderie—he was not, for instance, trying to secure funding for Suckerhead, although it was true that Henry had first met this person at a Suckerhead meeting.

  The friend’s name was Whitney (his mother was British, as he said when his name came up, although Henry had already heard this explanation). He’d been at Harvard when Henry was there, although he was two years older. He’d even studied with the same professors that Henry had, “although I can’t say they liked my fiction much,” he confessed when they had their first real conversation one evening at a party. “Apparently I have no talent at all, and I didn’t have the guts to argue. Of course,” he continued, “one day I’ll show them, when I publish some magnificent piece of writing. But until then, I’m afraid it’s amusing myself in New York for me.”

  Astonishingly, though, Whitney was not really like Henry at all. He was very handsome and quite a heartbreaker, for instance, although he was also a man who truly regretted each time (was astonished, in fact) when he hurt the feelings of the various women he dated. Whitney was also extremely charming and socially adroit in other venues—also part of the origin of his success with women. He could dominate a conversation with the most aggressive equities analysts and then quickly move into other circles commenting on obscure details about the lives of poets or the more comical mannerisms of composers and painters.

  It was writing, though, that led Henry and Whitney to become friends. Henry had met him one night at a party and discovered that Whitney was the so-called literary editor of a free Brooklyn magazine called Merit, a sideline as he pursued a graduate degree in romance languages at Columbia. They talked some when they were first introduced about various books Whitney had reviewed and how Henry felt about them, and soon they were in a fairly deep conversation about nearly everything they’d ever read. They left that party at three to go to Whitney’s then-girlfriend’s house, where she was having people over for some kind of late-night eating event, and the two of them sat together for another few hours eating endless crepes—the girlfriend had just bought a large cast-iron crepe-cooking pan—and talking even more about their lives, books, and then Henry’s short stories.

  Henry left after they exchanged numbers and he was quite pleased to discover a voice mail on his phone just three days later from Whitney inviting him to dinner (again at his girlfriend’s house) “to keep going with our conversation.” Whitney also added that he’d read two of Henry’s stories online and loved them, although he had “some advice for them to be even better” and that he’d be happy to share it as they ate their dinner. Henry wasn’t sure he wanted to hear Whitney’s advice, but it might be interesting and perhaps Whitney’s insight would give him new perspective on his work.

  It turned out that Whitney’s feelings about Henry’s stories were not very helpful, although Henry found that he still liked Whitney a great deal as he presented his ideas. Whitney seemed to think that it was important for a young writer to write about what he was experiencing. “And all these fucking old people, old people having sex, even, what’s it all about? These people have been written about. And here, here, you’ve got a whole world here, right here, that you could write about. And, Henry, Henry”—they had now eaten their dessert and were drinking coffee mugs filled with what had been described to Henry as grape brandy—“I say this because I loved the stories. I fucking loved them. I mean, I’m so impressed. But what’s it all for? Why all the fucking old people? I mean, why all the fucking old people?”

  Henry was now quite drunk, and the sugar high he’d just been experiencing (dessert had been crepes with Nutella and ice cream) was now bringing him to a more confused and sleepy state. Still, he managed to follow everything Whitney was saying and then replied, after pausing again to think, “I guess I don’t know.”

  At this point, Whitney leaned very close to Henry. He paused, then said, “You dating anyone?”

  Henry blushed at this. He could feel it, the blood in his face. All he could say, though, was—there was no way to be poetic about this—“No. Not now. I came here with a woman from Michigan. But she wanted to see other people. Or she wanted to see another guy and make that exclusive. And I have this cousin, but that’s over. So, no, I’m not dating anyone.”

  Whitney nodded as though he understood exactly what had been said to him and then replied, “Well, I’ll do what I can, but god help you. And I say that with the best possible feelings.” He then stood up and walked to the kitchen, where his girlfriend was still making crepes.

  At any rate, this was how he’d met his new friend, and Henry couldn’t have been happier or more surprised that he’d been embraced by this quite popular Brooklyn man.

  5

  IT SHOULD BE NOTED at this point that just as Henry’s career was showing promise—it was an accomplishment, after all, to publish a handful of short stories in respected literary journals—Abby’s future in music had also brightened. Abby’s band was gaining a foothold in the Brooklyn music scene. It wasn’t a contract with Atlantic Records (although that wasn’t entirely crucial in the age of the Internet), but her band was being booked at bigger venues, their songs were being downloaded at a swift pace, and Henry had even seen a person walking along Bedford Avenue with a T-shirt that had the band’s (new) name on it: Odd Girl Out.

  Abby too had been developing quite a bit as a musician, and although there were, of course, limitations for a person who played viola in a group designed to appeal to a broad (if sophisticated) audience, she had an impressive stage presence, as these things go, and Henry couldn’t help but notice that she’d slowly moved to the front of the ensemble in the ever-changing seating arrangement. She was also singing more, when she managed to put the viola down, and she got better and better, to Henry’s surprise. He’d certainly never grasped that this was a talent she was wo
rking on. But she began to be the lead on more and more songs and she’d managed to develop a sort of waiflike inflection to her voice that seemed to be increasingly popular with people around New York.

  Henry, of course, did his best to make it to all her events, and the truth was that he’d only missed two over the past many months, both because of stomach viruses, although had he only been feverish and not also throwing up, he would have attended (despite the fact that he was definitely over his feelings for her).

  It was about this time—about the time that he had first been given the proposal by Merrill—that a somewhat important show was scheduled at a sort of rentable warehouse in Bushwick. Henry went with Whitney and arrived at eleven to a packed house.

  Abby was not onstage (or at the performance end of the warehouse) when they arrived. People were milling about and drinking quite a bit and looking very excited. It was true that Henry had still hardly made a name for himself in the social world of Williamsburg—he did not have a lot of friends, and the people he knew (often attached to Suckerhead) now filled him with suspicion and some resentment—but Henry truly, truly loved parties like this. He loved big social gatherings where people were talking and laughing and drinking cocktails and snacking on whatever was being served. (Tonight, because of the higher-than-normal cover charge and the expensive drinks, there were endless tables of artisanal Japanese dumplings, made by some kind of highbrow local Japanese dumpling maker.) And the one person he saw who was from the Suckerhead crowd was, in fact, the tattooed girl, and since she had apparently liked his story, it was hard for him to feel any kind of resentment when he saw her. He wanted to say hello, in fact, but she drifted off before he could approach her, and she never rematerialized.

  At any rate, Henry found himself to be very drunk and quite happy by the time Odd Girl Out came on, and he continued to drink with great enthusiasm, standing with Whitney, greeting Whitney’s friends as they arrived to say hello, and watching Abby with quite a bit of psychological introspection.