The Best of Youth

by Michael Dahlie

Again, now seated on the couch with her head in her hands, Abby’s tears only increased, and Henry at last did nothing other than sit down and put his arm around her. It was baffling. Even despite the obvious gravity of the situation, he’d never thought Abby capable of such a breakdown. She was always so tough, although it was a fact that she’d seemed so scattered in recent months that maybe this was just the new state of things. And the reason for the breakdown, of course, was monumental—impossible, really, to exaggerate.

  But Abby finally relaxed for a moment, and after she asked for a glass of orange juice and then Henry returned with it from the kitchen, she calmed down even more. Or, it struck Henry, she’d at last exhausted herself.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I don’t know what to say to him. If I should say anything. Maybe he doesn’t need to know.”

  This, on the face of it, was very disturbing to Henry, not because he believed Kipling had any sort of right to know, but that Abby was so lost to a person to whom she didn’t think she could tell this kind of news. “Don’t you think it’s a little strange that you’d even consider not telling him? I mean, what kind of relationship do you two have?” Then he added, although he knew as he spoke that it was a mistake, “He’s just such a fucking scumbag.”

  Abby sat up straight and Henry could tell that he was about to be yelled at. Henry took the ensuing abuse gracefully, though, and weathered the recriminations for not being able to transcend his attractions. He quietly said things like, “It’s really not like that Abby, not anymore,” and he didn’t scream things about how it was completely clear that she’d lost her mind. (On this point, Henry was once again astonished that someone as singularly strong and independent as Abby could be so obsessed with a man like Kipling.) But the yelling eventually stopped. And as she put her hands on her stomach and she looked down, Henry concluded that the anger had passed. And he was right, although what followed was even more unexpected. “I don’t know, Henry,” Abby said. “Sometimes I think a guy like you is who I should be with. It’s someone like you who I’d always thought I would be with. Maybe that’s why I’m yelling at you. But it didn’t turn out that way for us and at this point there’s nothing I can do about it. That I find Kipling so attractive still shocks me, but my heart does what it wants to do, not what I want it to do.”

  It was a confusing thing to hear, and Henry wasn’t sure how to respond. At last, though, he tilted away from Abby and said, “There will be a way through this. I promise you. And I’ll do anything you want or need. You’re in the middle of all this, right now, in the middle of the shock, and I promise you’ll feel better in a bit. Or you’ll be able to think about how to move forward. Just hang out with me here now and things will get better and you’ll think of how to go forward.”

  At this, Abby started crying once again. But she did manage to choke out, “I don’t want to move forward. I just want all this to go away.” And this time the crying lasted for several minutes and without any attempt to “talk things through,” although Henry imagined that the intensity of the crying now might help some.

  And Henry’s assessment was correct. Once the emotions had settled, though, she was up on her feet and saying she had to go.

  “I’m sorry, Henry,” she said. “I’m sorry for dumping all this on you. I don’t even see you that much anymore.”

  “You didn’t dump anything on me,” Henry said. “You can do no wrong as far as I’m concerned and you can stay here for the next month if you want. The next year. I’ll make you dinner every night.”

  Abby smiled. “That’s pretty nice and that sounds pretty great,” she said as she began gathering her things, “but you’ve got to learn not to be such a pushover, despite how much I need it right now.”

  Abby took a deep breath here and Henry really felt a kind of gratitude and affection from Abby, although as she started walking to the front door he wondered if he’d done anything for her at all.

  16

  THAT AFTERNOON, Henry distracted himself by working on his latest story, and he also sent an email to Sasha (who replied directly, and with real affection), and he even took a brief and nonpurposeful walk around McCarren Park to think about all that Abby had told him. Had he handled it all properly? he wondered.

  Henry called Abby that evening to make sure she was doing all right, but she didn’t pick up her phone, so he left a message expressing his various worries, and on Monday, when he still hadn’t heard back from her, he left the same message again, although once more he heard no response.

  By Tuesday, he was quite a bit more apprehensive, but once he was back at work in Red Hook, in the company of Sasha (now back from Michigan), he felt so good, his sense of anxiety tempered with such overwhelming happiness, that he was able to keep hold of his emotions.

  And that night they went out to an unusually traditional French restaurant that served standards like coq au vin and blanquette de veau, and the food was so excellent, and so interesting, and they drank so much wine, that Henry couldn’t help but grasp in a very tangible way how happy he was with what he imagined might now be called his girlfriend. And after dinner, after (once again) kissing on the street, Sasha whispered in Henry’s ear, “Why don’t you come home with me tonight?” Henry was surprised at that moment to find that he wasn’t crippled with anxiety about how he might best execute his duties, or whether his potential failures would be written up online, or even on the matter of birth control (although Henry did conclude that they should definitely use some, if it came to that).

  And it did come to that. Sasha was prepared, however, and afterward Henry felt quite confident that, if he did later appear as some kind of figure on a website, Sasha’s comments would be delivered with warmth and contentment. “I really like you, Henry,” she said as they lay on their backs in her bed. “I mean, I really like you.”

  “I really like you too,” Henry said. “This is one of the best nights I’ve had in a long time.”

  Sasha turned and faced him. “Me too, Henry. I hope you know that. I’m getting very attached to you. That doesn’t happen very easily with me.”

  Henry turned now as well and said, “It doesn’t happen easily with me either. Or it’s pretty rare that I feel so good around someone else.” Henry almost added, Except for when I’m with Whitney, but he caught himself in time because, after all, this was really not the sort of thing he ought to be saying. But Henry quickly concluded that he’d probably be forgiven if he’d said it. Sasha would probably forgive him for such a statement. Henry’s lack of anxiety astonished him once again, although he was soon resting his face in the crook of Sasha’s neck (just where a bloom of three roses was tattooed) and was once more forgetting about anything at all besides how good it felt to be with her.

  17

  THE NEXT MORNING, Henry stumbled out of bed and found his pants, and as he did so, he pulled his phone from his pocket, turned it on (it had been turned off for logical reasons), and saw he had two voice mails. Both, according to the call log, were from Abby. The first seemed to be a sort of general check-in, including an apology for not getting back to him sooner. The next, though, left at the end of the night, was so tear-filled that Henry could barely understand what Abby was saying.

  And when he called her back he was just as hard-pressed to decipher her words beneath the crying, although he managed to calm her down enough to understand that she’d told Kipling about the baby, and then, after a moment of more intense crying, to get her to understand that he was coming over. “I’m leaving right now,” he said.

  “You don’t want to see me now.”

  “I’ll be over in ten minutes,” Henry replied, and quickly hung up.

  Sasha was still mostly asleep, but she’d been roused somewhat by Henry’s phone call and was able to respond with some sense of awareness as Henry apologized and said he had to go to meet a friend. “It sounds really bad,” Henry said. “I’ve got to go. It’s my cousin. Kind of. She’s not really a cousin, except for in a techni
cal way.”

  Sasha put a hand up to Henry’s face. “So long as she’s related, even just technically, I’ll let you go. Anyway, I’ll see you in Red Hook in a few hours.” Sasha’s smile seemed to express such genuine happiness that Henry almost got back into bed. But this instinct was momentary because he could hardly help but realize that Abby was truly, truly distressed—even more than she’d been the last time he’d seen her—and soon Henry was on the street and headed to Abby’s apartment.

  He really was quite panicked by the phone call. He’d never heard Abby like this at all (not even the last time they were together) and he could only imagine that she’d been up all night in a state of despair over how the discussion about the pregnancy had gone. But when he arrived, when he knocked on the door, when Abby let him into an abnormally darkened hallway, her head down, he began to realize that things were far worse than he’d expected. And as they walked into the main room of Abby’s apartment, where the blinds could not entirely conceal the daylight that was coming in at the edges of the windows, Henry himself almost burst into tears. Abby’s face was covered with bruises—her left eye was nearly swollen shut—and her lips were so scabbed over that Henry wondered how she had been able to talk at all on the phone. Abby quickly grasped that the dark room was hardly enough to diminish the magnitude of what had happened, although she must have anticipated this and she even seemed relieved to be revealed, and soon she was crying harder than she had so far. This time, though, Henry could make out more of what she was saying, most of which concerned her crushing disbelief that she’d ever find herself in a position like this.

  “I mean, getting the shit kicked out of me by a totally fucking high boyfriend is the last problem I ever thought I’d deal with,” she said. “I went to fucking Oberlin, for Christ’s sake. I minored in women’s studies. I thought this was something the sweater-knitting Peruvian women on my semester abroad had to deal with. And Henry”—here Abby started crying even harder—“I kept telling him how sorry I was as he was hitting me. I kept telling him I was sorry.”

  After that, Abby gave up trying to articulate the state of her distress. Henry guided her to the couch and helped her to sit, and then he sat down as well, and soon they were embracing and Henry was doing his best to comfort her, although his own state of agitation was itself becoming overwhelming.

  18

  BUT HE MANAGED not to break any furniture. In fact, he remained entirely in control. He sat with Abby for the next hour, his arms around her, telling her stories that he thought she might find distracting—embarrassing moments at Harvard, plotlines of his latest short stories, a rehearsal of his interaction with the vet after he’d killed all her aunt’s goats, and even an involved description of another of his cousins who hated him beyond all reason and had lied several times to get him in trouble when they were young. “He eventually went to Dartmouth,” Henry said, trying to make Abby relax a bit more. “I hear they appreciate people like that. Not a Harvard man at all.”

  They did touch on what Abby ought to do about her situation. Henry implied that they should, at that moment, be on the phone with the police. But Abby quickly said no. Or she said she needed to think.

  “I have a friend,” she said. “A doctor. I went to her clinic last night. She said the baby is fine and she won’t report this. She promised. I don’t want to go to the police. Or I need to think about everything, because if I do go to the police, I’ll be on every fucking magazine cover in America. So far, the tabloids have just treated me as Jonathan’s irrelevant girlfriend. Obviously, this will change that. But fuck, I can’t believe I’m even saying something like this. Don’t go to the police? It’s so fucking weird. I can’t believe anything I’m saying now.”

  Henry still thought they definitely needed to call the cops, but for the moment he’d do whatever Abby wanted. And Abby did have a point. It was completely astounding that they wouldn’t call the police, but the important thing now was finding some kind of refuge, and tabloid reporters were hardly going to help that. Hopefully she’d change her mind later. It was just so crazy that they weren’t getting the NYPD to fuck Kipling up. Still, Henry wasn’t going to do anything without permission. He just kept telling his distracting stories, and at last Abby’s breathing began to slow, and before long she drifted off to sleep.

  Henry, however, hadn’t relaxed at all, and as he watched Abby sleep, his mind raced. He did manage to lay Abby’s head on the couch properly, and he put a blanket over her, but then he whispered in her ear that he had to leave for a little while, making sure she understood that he’d be back soon. “I’ll bring lots of food,” he said, “so we can hide out as long as we want.” And then he left the apartment because, with some sense of urgency (police or no police), he felt he had something to do.

  Henry called Sasha first—it was now a couple of hours since he’d left her in her bed. “I’m not coming in to work today,” he said as soon as she picked up the phone. “I’ve got a really bad thing going on with my cousin. I’ll tell you all about it later. But it’s pretty serious. So if you could cover for me—tell them I’m sick—I’d really appreciate it.”

  “Yeah, anything you want,” Sasha said, and then, as Henry had been secretly hoping for, notwithstanding the seriousness of his call, she added, “It was really something, last night. I can’t wait till I get to see you again.”

  Despite the fact that he was still feeling such agony over Abby, it was really good to hear this. He managed to maintain his composure, however, and said, “I’ll call you later.” But then he added, “Yeah, I thought last night was so great. I’m kind of afraid to say anything about it in case I sound completely stupid. But it was so great. I had such a great time.”

  “Yeah, like I said, me too,” Sasha replied. “Me too. Go do what you have to do. And call me later.”

  “All right,” Henry said, and then, after another goodbye, they hung up.

  Henry quickly began dialing his phone again. After a few rings, he got Merrill’s secretary, and after Henry said he absolutely had to be put through immediately—Merrill was in a meeting—he got to Merrill and asked, “Where is Kipling staying?”

  “What?” Merrill said.

  “Where is Kipling staying? I’m supposed to meet him at his hotel for lunch but he didn’t tell me where he’s staying and he never picks up his phone.”

  “Yeah, he’s a dick with his phone,” Merrill replied. “He’s staying at the Montcrieff on Sixty-second. He always stays in Penthouse Two. Go kick him out of bed.”

  “Thanks,” Henry replied. “I’ll give you a call later to check in.” And with that, Henry headed for the subway to make his way to Kipling’s hotel.

  19

  WHAT HE INTENDED to achieve with the confrontation was a mystery, but as Henry considered it all, first on the subway, and then walking north to Sixty-second, he decided that Abby was simply a very important person in his life and it was terrible how they’d drifted apart in the past year. Above all, though, he felt much worse about the fact that someone he cared about (unconscious reasons aside) was being abused by what had to be the most repulsive person he’d ever known.

  It was strange, though, because as thoughts of Abby crowded Henry’s mind, he suddenly found himself thinking about his father, and, in particular, a time when he avenged Henry after a series of fairly humiliating events when Henry was in sixth grade.

  Before he went to Deerfield, Henry attended a so-called country-day school in Lincoln, Mass, called the Keller Academy, which educated the various well-heeled children of Middlesex County and its surroundings. The Boston area, of course, has a long reputation for its progressive thinking and liberal restraint, but Henry always knew that it was also true that there was a certain kind of thuggishness that Massachusetts males clung to, mostly out of some kind of concern that the rest of the world thought of them as infirm, Harvard-educated, belles lettrists (like Henry, for instance). And this thuggish spirit, in particular, was most evident on the hockey rink. Whil
e young men in places like Minnesota and North Dakota devoted themselves to the purity and elegance of what is, in fact, something of a beautiful and exhilarating sport, Boston-area hockey programs focused on athletic techniques like hostility, spitting, and semi-accidental self-mutilation (for the purposes of appearing more terrifying). At any rate, Henry played in the Keller Academy hockey program and, although he was a just-below-average player, he stayed with it, mostly because of his father’s encouragement. His father had played hockey as a young person, was even a second-line left-winger for Harvard’s team in the 1970s, and Henry could grasp, even at ten, that it was somehow important to his father that he play. But what Henry could also grasp was that his father realized that he wasn’t very good, and that the advantages of hockey had something to do with character-building, rather than being about Henry’s fun and glory. Of course, the future was still uncertain. Perhaps there was some tremendous growth spurt in the offing, or Henry’s motor skills would undergo some kind of miraculous maturation.

  The thing was that, as with all organized sports, there was an extremely important social component of everything, and there was one particular person (another young boy on the hockey team and an absolute star) who despised Henry, and, despite the fact that they were teammates, inflicted the Boston type of thuggishness and brutality on Henry as much as he could, even once going so far as starting a fistfight with him on the bench because, as he said, “Henry was such a fucking pussy.” And it was not uncommon for him to bump him on the ice, hit him with his stick on the bench, push him in the locker room, and actively harass him (“It’s the fucking pussy”) in the Keller Academy’s halls and lunchroom.

  It was the sort of problem that good parents are tortured by, especially because it was clear that intervention on Henry’s behalf would have a real cost. “Pete,” the offender, might have to face a dressing-down by the principal, but what would happen when the authorities weren’t around?