Elin Hilderbrand - Here’s to Us

One day a few weeks earlier, on a flight from New York to Quito, Ecuador, Hayes had indulged his grief and had binge-watched his father’s shows. He started with Day to Night to Day with Deacon. His father looked so young in that show; he was really just a kid, barely twenty-five, nearly ten years younger than Hayes was now. He scowled a lot, narrowed his eyes, dropped the F-bomb as if it were his cool second job-it was bleeped out every time, obviously, although there were black-market unedited versions floating around out there-flexed the muscles in his forearms, did some circus tricks with his sauté pan, and generally perpetuated the stereotype of chef as badass. Actually, Hayes thought, his father had invented that stereotype. He, after all, had been on TV long before Ramsay or Bourdain. The cameramen followed Deacon downtown after service and shot footage of him drinking Guinness chased with Jameson all by himself in the shadows of any number of dive bars-Milady’s was a popular one because of Deacon’s banter with the geriatric bartenders, Doris and Millicent. And then, once properly lubricated, Deacon went looking for dinner. The show portrayed him as a lone wolf-hungry, hunting, an orphan, an R-rated Mowgli. He liked to eat deep in the heart of Chinatown; when that became too mainstream, he sought out Little Ethiopia and Little Burma. He loved momos.

After he’d eaten, Deacon would take the subway all the way back up to West 119th Street. This was where the camera work got artsy-Deacon in silhouette on the train, headed home with all the other poor souls who worked the third shift, the sun coming up over the East River; the juxtaposition of Deacon in his white jacket, houndstooth pants, and clogs with men in three-piece suits headed to their jobs on Wall Street or Madison Avenue.

The best part of the show for Hayes, of course, was watching for glimpses of himself at the end. He was just a little guy, usually shown in footy pajamas, scurrying down their long hallway to greet his father at the door; his mother, barefoot, her hair loose, belting her robe, followed behind him. This was the moment of salvation: Deacon-who looked first so angry and then so lonely-had a family!

The second show, Pitchfork, was shot in a Food Network studio kitchen. Deacon wore jeans, an Hermès belt, and a $450 black Rick Owens T-shirt. The edgy yet insanely expensive outfit was a wink and nod to Deacon as grown-up. He had manned the helm at Raindance for more than a decade; he had been married to the highest-paid actress in Hollywood. He had done things the Deacon way, and that had more or less worked out. He made his unorthodox recipes-the clams casino dip, the mesquite-smoked lobster-tail momos, the champagne caramels with potato-chip salt-and he tossed his forelock and scowled at the camera every time an egg didn’t break cleanly. He pretended to have retained his fierceness, but it was obvious to viewers that the good life had softened Deacon. He was a sexy teddy bear now. The only point of real controversy was that he still drank like a third-year senior at Jameson University. Each episode of Pitchfork ended with Deacon and his producers and cameramen and key grips doing a shot together.

As Hayes watched show after show after show, he marveled at how a man could be so alive on the screen, cursing and laughing and measuring flour and chopping onions and popping a whole clove of garlic in his mouth as if it were a piece of Dubble Bubble, for the ewwwww effect-and now he was dead. Never coming back.

As Hayes and Angie walked to the parking garage, Hayes said, “Dad loved you more than me.”

“Shut up,” Angie said.

“You know it’s true,” Hayes said.

“He was better with girls,” Angie said.

“You two were way closer,” Hayes said. “You were friends.”

“I logged in the hours,” Angie said. “We worked together every single day. Any idea how mentally exhausting it was to handle that much Deacon?”

“I’d trade places with you,” Hayes said. Before he could say, I didn’t get enough of him, he started to cry. I didn’t get enough of him, and now he’s gone.

Angie threw an arm around Hayes’s shoulder. “Are you okay?” she asked. “I mean, do you feel okay, Hayes? Because, I’m not kidding, you look like hell. You look…”

He knew what was coming. You look like a junkie. Are you using?

“You look tired,” she said. “Maybe I should drive.”

“Yeah,” Hayes said. “Maybe you should.”

Upon first seeing Laurel and Buck, she had had a dramatic emotional moment, but for the first time ever, the person she was playing was herself. She shed real tears, uncontrollable tears. There were so many feelings where Deacon was concerned: guilt, ecstasy, sadness, regret, love, desire, guilt, more guilt, love, heartache, confusion. Belinda couldn’t talk to anyone about these feelings-not yet, anyway. Maybe ten or twenty years from now, with the help of a good therapist, she could address them lucidly in her memoir. When Belinda was acting, she always tried to keep her character’s motivation in the front of her mind. What was her motivation in coming to Nantucket? What did she expect to achieve?

She wasn’t sure. But when she saw Laurel and Buck, she realized that she had had a leading role in Deacon Thorpe’s life, too, and if she had stayed in Los Angeles or returned to Kentucky, there would have been an absence, a vacuum, an empty space, where she should have been.

Or maybe she was just being narcissistic, as always.

She was back in American Paradise after a twelve-year hiatus. It looked exactly the same, and it smelled exactly the same. That was what really transported Belinda back in time-the smell, the comforting scent of cedar from the two front closets, mixed with the musty, marshy odor of the shipwreck furniture, mingled with the green fragrance of freshly cut grass, blown in off the golf course by the breeze. Good or bad, it smelled to Belinda like summertime, and, even more disquieting than that, it smelled like her marriage to Deacon.

She had had an ambivalent relationship with the house. She hadn’t wanted to go to Nantucket at all, but Deacon had worn her down. When he left Laurel, he moved with Belinda to L.A. and then announced that it was only fair for Belinda to give him three weeks-just three weeks-in his favorite place in the world. Nantucket Island.

But it’s the beach, she said. And I don’t swim.

It’s more than just the beach, Deacon said. There was a town filled with shops and restaurants and charming churches and stately homes that used to belong to whaling captains, all of them with polished door knockers and window boxes bursting with summer flowers. The streets were paved with cobblestones. The island was understated and old-fashioned, the polar opposite of Los Angeles. She would love it, Deacon assured her. There were hundreds of acres of moors to hike through, and miles of paved paths for her to bike along. There were two theater companies, two movie houses, a museum dedicated to the history of whaling. There was a tiny hamlet on the east coast of the island called Sconset, where all the cottages were blanketed with roses. There were two bookstores and a big library in the center of town called the Nantucket Atheneum. There was a restaurant called the Club Car, where they served caviar and where in the back a piano player took requests when everyone gathered after dinner to sing. I’ve never known you to pass up a chance to belt out “Send in the Clowns,” Deacon said.

She couldn’t articulate her real objection, which was that Deacon had bought the house and moved to Nantucket with Laurel. All his memories-short of the one perfect day with his father-were forged with Laurel. Belinda would be Laurel’s replacement, and Belinda worried that she wouldn’t be as good at Nantucket-did that phrase make any sense?-as Laurel had been. Deacon had solid gold memories of the place, and those memories were-they had to be-inseparable from the person he created them with. Belinda yearned to pick a new place, a place that had no history-Montauk, maybe, or Long Beach Island, if he had to be near the ocean. Even Martha’s Vineyard! But Deacon was dead set; Belinda at least had the perspicacity to realize this. If she wanted to keep Deacon, she would have to go to Nantucket and make the best of things.

Living in a house once occupied by Laurel was even more difficult than she’d anticipated. The furniture, Deacon said, had come with the house, and Belinda could tell-it all looked as though it had washed up on shore sometime during the Great Depression. But there were little things that Laurel had left behind-a hairbrush, a white tank top in the top drawer of a dresser that Deacon had said would be Belinda’s-and there was a framed photograph on a side table in the front room of Deacon, Laurel, and Hayes at the beach, their faces bathed in the rose-gold light of the sunset. Belinda had taken the photograph out of the frame, torn it in half, and buried it in the kitchen trash.

She remembered the first time she did the laundry, throwing towels and her underwear and shorts into the washing machine and then, an hour later, realizing there was no dryer. She had gone to find Deacon, and he had said, “We don’t have a dryer, so we normally hang stuff on the clothesline.”

Belinda had stared at him. The “we” he was speaking of was he and Laurel.

“Let me buy a dryer,” Belinda said. “Please.”

“No,” Deacon said. One thing about Deacon: when the man said no, he didn’t waver and he didn’t negotiate. “The clothesline is a part of the experience. It’s summertime. We dry our clothes and the sheets and the towels on the line. We aren’t getting a dryer.”

He’d eventually discovered that the picture of him, Hayes, and Laurel was missing-Belinda would have been well advised to have tossed the frame as well-and he confronted Belinda.

“What happened to this?” he asked.

Initially, she shrugged. He gave her an incredulous look until she said, “I threw it away.”

She had been stretched out on the bed, reading a script. Deacon sat next to her.

“Listen,” he said, “I know it must have been painful to see…”

“You don’t know,” she said.

“I do know,” Deacon said. “Your place in L.A. is filled with pictures of you with other men-you and John Lithgow, you and Pierce Brosnan, you and Brian Dennehy…”

“That’s not the same,” Belinda said.

“It is the same,” Deacon said. He took her hand. “We both have a past, right? A path that brought us to where we are now. I’m going to honor your past and try not to feel threatened or jealous, and I’d like you to do the same, okay?”

“Okay,” she’d said. But inside, she was glad the photograph was gone. If Deacon had sorted through the trash, he would have found that she’d torn it in half, right down the middle of Laurel’s face.

There had been other things Belinda had wanted to change. Frankly, she would have liked to have gutted the house and remodeled from the studs-or, better still, have sold the house and bought a house in town. She had a favorite: 141 Main Street. She had enough money that she could have knocked on the front door and made the owners an offer. But she had known better than to ask Deacon what he thought about this idea.

During the years she spent with Deacon, she had grown to love Nantucket for all the reasons he had listed, but also because on Nantucket, no one hassled her. Everyone knew she was Belinda Rowe, obviously, but she had never been followed by paparazzi, never been interrupted while at dinner, never been hounded by fans except the occasional autograph seeker. Belinda had been able to belt out “Send in the Clowns” at the Club Car and receive a good-natured round of applause without worrying about her picture appearing on Page Six of the Post. It was a welcome change, the opportunity to relax.

Once Belinda had dried her eyes, blown her nose, removed her hat, and shaken out her hair, she dealt with the pragmatic reality of her situation. Laurel had gotten here first, and she moved around as though she were completely at home, even though it had been nearly thirty years since Laurel had lived here.

“Where am I sleeping?” Belinda asked. That was officially the longest sentence Belinda had ever dared say to the woman.

“Clara’s room,” Laurel said.

“Clara’s room?” Belinda said. Clara had been a nursemaid to the Innsleys’ children back in the 1950s. Her room was hardly bigger than a closet! Of course Laurel had assigned Belinda to Clara’s room, with its ascetic twin bed, meant for a bony-assed spinster. “Who’s sleeping in the master?” Belinda asked, though she could easily predict the answer to that question.