The Best of Youth

by Michael Dahlie

  “I’m not hungry,” Whitney said groggily. “Can we make it tonight? I think I need more sleep.”

  “I really need to see you,” Henry said. “Really. This is really important.”

  Whitney sighed, but it was the kind of sigh that indicated he was willing to comply. “I’m over at Katie’s right now,” he said. “How about we meet at my apartment? We can eat there.”

  “All right,” Henry said. “Half an hour?”

  Whitney groaned, but in another second said, “All right. I’ll see you at my house in half an hour.”

  Henry paced for a little while after he hung up, then put on a sweater and a jacket and headed out, stopping by a polish butcher for some sausages and then a liquor store for a liter of cheap vodka and some kind of repulsive Bloody Mary mix that Henry suddenly found himself desperately wanting. Thus, in a little over half an hour, Henry was sitting on Whitney’s balcony, hovering over a small Weber grill, cooking his sausages and drinking a very appealing (but, in formal and aesthetic terms, horrible) Bloody Mary.

  Henry was cagey about bringing up his main concern—the reliability of the people who now knew his story—and he addressed his situation with a general rehearsal of his anger toward Kipling. Whitney again listened attentively, himself standing up every few minutes to pace and nod his head. He too was drinking a Bloody Mary and becoming more and more glum as the story continued. At last, Whitney stopped his pacing, took a long sip of his drink, and said, “What are you going to do? You’ve got to do something. This man is a total fucking asshole.”

  Henry agreed to the asshole part, but quickly reminded Whitney of how powerless he was. “That’s why this is all so difficult,” he said as he eased a sausage off the grill with his thumb. “I can’t do anything. I’m totally trapped. You should have seen the contract I signed.” Henry handed the sausage (now wrapped in a slice of rye bread) to Whitney. “There’s just nothing I can do,” Henry repeated, now almost in tears.

  Whitney again nodded, and there seemed to be the beginning of an encouraging speech on its way. But before he could say anything, Henry finally got to the heart of what was worrying him the most: “So, Katie, she seems cool. How well do you know her? I mean, she seems great. So great. An MTV pitch? That’s really amazing. You guys seem made for each other. It seems serious to me. How well do you know her? I don’t think you should break up with her.”

  Whitney nodded. “She’s reliable,” he said, after thinking for a bit about Henry’s comments. “She won’t say anything. She’s not a gossip. But I don’t think we’re right for each other. I was thinking of breaking up with her.”

  At this Henry jammed his own rye-bread-wrapped sausage into his mouth, imagining that this might hold back the tears that were surely about to flow. Whitney moved the conversation back to Kipling, though, and, after saying once again, “Katie would never say anything,” he added, changing directions (in a very surprising way) from what he’d just said, “This has got to be pretty terrible for you, Henry, but you definitely need to stop reading reviews of The Best of Youth. There are just a bunch of people in the world who get away with a lot, and Kipling is one of them. You need to find a way to close the book on it. We’ll go out drinking a lot this winter, and you should treat yourself to new skis or something and maybe we can take a trip out West. You could go dick around in Colorado for as long as you like, if you wanted to. Or we can eat sausages and drink Bloody Marys on my balcony every day if that’s what you want.”

  Henry was in fact now making himself another drink, although this time around the pint glass he was using was half filled with vodka. He didn’t let his drink-making distract him from what was still on his mind, however. “You can’t break up with Katie,” he said, a little too pleadingly. “She’ll tell people what I told you last night and then I’ll be dead. You don’t know women like I do.”

  This was a patently absurd statement, as Henry well knew, although he did think that Whitney’s trustfulness was the sort of foolishness that comes to a man when he always has his way. Women, for Henry, never seemed to do anything he hoped they’d do (and this was not a sexist, abstract assertion, but an empirical fact developed from years of direct observation of the world). Still, it was obvious that Whitney couldn’t go out with Katie for the sake of keeping her quiet. Despite how obvious this was, though, Henry did manage to propose it in even more explicit terms: “I’m sorry, Whitney, but you have to keep going out with her.”

  Henry smiled as he said this, though. It was funny, after all. And although Henry desperately wanted what he’d just asked for, he knew it was a completely ridiculous demand. And he even laughed a little, just after Whitney himself smiled. But then, at last, both hands wrapped around his Bloody Mary, Henry did finally begin to cry. The worst person he knew was being hailed as a genius for work he didn’t do (for Henry’s work!), and it was already selling like crazy. And the girl he’d most been in love with in his life was going out with this man (was “whipped,” as she said). And the previous night he’d gotten drunk and done a thing that he was now worried would cost him everything he owned. Surely, Henry thought, as the tears started coming more quickly, this was a thing to cry about.

  Whitney appeared quite surprised by all this. But he was also moved (as might be expected from a man with sympathies for Romance languages), and soon he was standing at Henry’s side, his arm around him, and then, in an extremely uncommon act of physical kindness, he began stroking Henry’s hair, saying, “Things will get better for you, Henry. I promise. And Katie won’t say anything. And we’ll work out whatever comes along. And you and Sasha were great together last night. She really, really likes you, Henry. I can tell. You’ve got a lot to be happy about.”

  It was a remarkable moment, and as Henry continued to cry (over Abby, over Kipling, and over his still-unassuaged fears regarding Katie), he found himself unusually comforted by Whitney’s affection. It took a few moments to understand the interaction, but he realized that the last time he’d been handled this way—in a nonamorous mode, that is, and specifically with the stroking of his hair—was by his father, who did this often and even when Henry was in college. The realization made Henry cry harder. The truth was that he was able to take comfort in the fact that Whitney really was a great friend—maybe the best he’d ever had—and that if disaster came, he would (this was true) be able to continue grilling sausages and drinking cocktails on Whitney’s balcony. And grilling sausages and drinking cocktails with Whitney, in the end, was something to be very grateful for.

  13

  SO, IT WAS A therapeutic barbecue, as they say, and Henry made his way home that afternoon about four o’clock, stumbling as he went, feeling quite a bit of relief. And after he woke up from a long nap, at about seven that night, he was able to make his way to the kitchen to boil a pot of buckwheat noodles he’d purchased a few days before from a kind of Asian health food store that had opened nearby. Soon he was watching television and drinking hot chicken broth from his noodle bowl, and feeling even better. He thought about having a glass of Pernod—as a preventative measure—but the noodles were so good and the television program (a kind of reality show about house builders) was so enjoyable, that he figured he could make it through the night without French alcohol or another Bloody Mary.

  And the next morning, as Henry made his way to Red Hook, the respite from his earlier anxiety continued, although it was, sadly, short-lived.

  “Have you calmed down any?” Sasha said to Henry as they opened the first boxes of the day.

  “What do you mean?” Henry said.

  “Yeah, that’s the gunrunner in you. Always calm. Well, don’t worry. I haven’t told anyone. So from my end, you won’t get sued. But that Katie, I don’t know about her.”

  But then, glancing at Henry, Sasha immediately said, “Oh, god, I’m sorry. I’m sure, positive, she won’t tell anyone,” letting Henry know that he’d hid nothing at all of his fears.

  “What?” Henry said. “I’m fine. I’m su
re Katie will be cool.”

  Sasha looked at him for a moment, then said, with real compassion, “I really am sure it’s fine. I’m sure Katie won’t say anything. And what if she did? You can always deny everything. It’s not like you’re running for office—who cares if you lie?”

  Henry nodded. He knew he still looked panicked, but he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. He pulled a book from his box and said, “Ford Madox Ford!”

  Sasha nodded. “It will be fine,” she said again.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Henry said. “This is a first edition!”

  “Pretty cool,” Sasha said, nodding again.

  “Very cool,” Henry replied.

  14

  HENRY AND SASHA went out that night, and the next, and both evenings ended with kissing on street corners and even kissing a few times in bars. This was not a thing that Henry particularly felt comfortable with (the public nature of their affection), but it was hard to avoid since it made him feel so happy. It also seemed that it was a safe way to let things progress, since Henry always felt that bedrooms and sudden nudity with another person were the absolute worst ways to establish intimacy. This is not to say he was a prude—had Sasha suggested that they go home together he would have agreed with customary enthusiasm. But Sasha too didn’t seem anxious to start taking off her clothes, which seemed especially charming since she was so entirely covered with tattoos. Physical modesty simply wasn’t what Henry would have expected from a person so ornamented, but the fact was that her shyness did match very well with her personality. At any rate, the bottom line was that there were no complaints on Henry’s part. As far as he was concerned, they could spend the next year in straightforward physical embraces and he’d be thrilled about it.

  By Thursday, though, there was a bit of a break in their interactions. Sasha had to go west, to Michigan, over the coming weekend. She had a sister who was getting married in a few months and the family was assembling to talk about procedure. “So I won’t see you till next Tuesday,” Sasha said to Henry as they kissed outside a bar famous for its free assortment of artificial cheese snacks. “I hope you’ll wait for me,” she added.

  “I’ll try,” Henry said. “But no promises.” Henry was actually feeling quite good, at this point, in terms of his capacity for ironic remarks, and he thought that Sasha was helping him quite a bit where this was concerned. But they were soon kissing again and Henry’s ideas about his expanding conversational repertoire fast receded as more emotional instincts took over.

  The next day, Henry worked on his fiction for nearly twelve hours straight—he was writing a story about a ninety-year-old woman who scandalized her family by piercing her nose and tattooing exotic birds (her late husband was an ornithologist) all over herself. The story unfolded well, in Henry’s estimation, and included several comic scenes concerning the looseness of a ninety-year-old’s skin and the difficulty of inking a smooth picture on it, and by the time the evening rolled around, he was nearly half done. He only stopped because Whitney called. Henry was quick to say that he was probably too busy that night to hang out, but after Whitney said, “Katie and I broke up,” he and Henry were soon at dinner—a German restaurant with an extensive beer list—talking of the implications of this, at first concerning Whitney’s well-being but then concerning Henry’s fears about her talking about Kipling.

  “Look Henry, please, please don’t worry about that,” Whitney said. “She’s totally solid. She’d never sell you out like that.”

  “But the breakup?” Henry said. “It was mutual?”

  “Well, no,” Whitney replied. “I mean, yes, officially, but no, it was mostly me.”

  “How did she react?”

  “Well, I suppose I’d have to say that she didn’t take it well. I mean, I’ve seen worse, but I’ve seen better. Seriously, what’s up with all that anger? Sadness I get, but the accusations of betrayal—I don’t understand the logic. You can’t decide who to love. It happens or it doesn’t. There’s no betrayal.”

  Here Henry paused for a moment before saying, “Holy fuck, am I dead.”

  “Henry, it’s not like that. She was mad, but not at you. Why would she say anything? She really likes you, Henry. And who would she even tell?”

  The answer to the question, of course, was absolutely everyone she knew she was pitching to at MTV, plus whatever other contacts she had in the industry. Kipling’s story was not the embarrassing behavior of some random Brooklyn freak (like Henry, for instance) but of a person many, many people were interested in. And because of that, it likely wouldn’t be long before Henry was once again in court, now for the purposes of losing all his money. He suddenly thought of his great-great-grandfather, who had left the family farm in Sturbridge to become a clerk at a textile mill in New Hampshire, and how he’d gone on to establish the kind of industrial wealth that almost didn’t seem to exist in New England anymore. Of course, his father’s share (now Henry’s) was merely a portion, so it was not as if the man’s entire legacy were gone. But Henry couldn’t help but think about how this august Yankee ancestor would surely lose himself to fury if he knew that one of his distant offspring squandered such an enormous sum of money because he got drunk and angry one night and couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

  “I think I should call Katie,” Henry finally said.

  “You should definitely not call Katie,” Whitney replied.

  “I just think I need to explain to her what’s at stake. I think the other night it just sounded like some kind of ordinary secret, but everything I have is on the line here.”

  “Do not call Katie.”

  Henry thought about it for a moment, then said, “I think it would be a good idea.”

  “Henry, she’s not even thinking about you. It would not be a good idea. If you call her, she might actually think that this might be a good way to get back at me. But as of right now, she’s not thinking about Kipling and his ghostwriter.”

  Henry wanted to say more, but Whitney did have a point. Still, would a call really set off that kind of scheming? Maybe Henry could even befriend her. Needless to say, he’d always take Whitney’s side in anything, but perhaps she could use a friend, and Henry was usually praised for his frankness and his kindness by women who’d had their hearts broken. Again, Henry sighed, and then nodded, and then began eating quickly, because he wanted to go home to think about how to get out of the trouble he now felt he was in.

  And the prospect of calling Katie stayed on his mind into that night and then the next morning, when he woke up early and rehearsed what he might say to her if he called—something about his great friendship for Whitney but knowing the suffering caused by a lost love. At eleven that morning, though—it was now Saturday—Henry got a call from Abby that quickly took him very far away from his current dilemma.

  15

  “HENRY?” ABBY SAID with a voice so strained that Henry could hardly decipher his name.

  “Yes,” he said, after hesitating. “Abby. What’s wrong?”

  She was clearly crying, and after a pause she said, “I’m pregnant.”

  “What?” Henry said.

  “I’m pregnant, Henry,” she said, still barely intelligible through the tears. “I don’t know how. It doesn’t seem possible. But I am.”

  “And with Kipling? From Kipling?”

  “I haven’t slept with anyone but Jonathan for almost a year,” Abby said, the crying increasing.

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s Jonathan’s!”

  “I mean, are you sure about being pregnant?”

  “I’ve been through six different tests—three different brands. I’m pregnant, Henry.” Here, remarkably, she started crying even harder.

  Henry paused for a moment, entirely unsure of what to do. “I don’t know what to say,” Henry said at last. “I’ll do whatever you need.”

  At this Abby let forth a loud but halting sob before saying, “Can I come over?”

  “Of course.”

  “Righ
t now?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m coming over now. I’m leaving now.”

  Abby arrived about fifteen minutes later, and as she walked in, her eyes were so swollen that Henry wondered how she could see.

  “He’s going to kill me,” she said as she walked through the front door.

  “He’s going to kill you?” Henry repeated.

  “He’s going to kill me.”

  “Kill you for what? How is it your fault?”

  “I missed a pill. Or two. He can blame me. But I only missed them because I was out all night with him. You think you can just take it the next morning and everything will be fine. I don’t know. Maybe the pills just weren’t working right. Henry, he’s going to kill me.”

  “Are you going to have it?” This, Henry realized, was a fairly indelicate question, and also none of his business, despite the fact that Abby had come to see him in this state. Still, it was certainly the question that must have been on Abby’s mind.

  And here Abby hesitated, seeming to have a great deal to say on the matter. But as she opened her mouth to speak, she burst into tears again, and didn’t stop crying until several minutes later, her face pressed against Henry’s neck the entire time. At last, though, she pulled away, and Henry insisted that she sit down. He’d made coffee right after he got her call and then suggested that she might like hers with a little scotch in it. He certainly wanted scotch. But it instantly occurred to him that such a thing was definitely not a good idea given the nature of the news. Maybe even the coffee might not be good for her. “I have juice too,” he said. “Maybe alcohol and caffeine aren’t the best thing for you right now. I have orange juice and I have pomegranate juice and I have two cans of pear nectar.”