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“The long version is that it’s a lot less glamorous than it looks. The hours were endless and the diet was torture. Imagine not being allowed to eat a single piece of bread for an entire year.”
“I honestly can’t,” I say.
“That alone was reason enough to quit,” Katherine says. “And sometimes I just tell people that. I look them in the eye and say, ‘I quit because I wanted to eat pizza.’ But the worst part, honestly, was having all the focus be on my looks. All that nonstop primping and objectification. No one cared about what I said. Or thought. Or felt. It got real old, real quick. Don’t get me wrong, the money was great. Like,insanelygreat. And the clothes were amazing. So beautiful. Works of art, all of them. But it felt wrong. People are suffering. Children are starving. Women are being victimized. And there I was walking the runway in dresses that cost more than what most families make in a year. It was ghoulish.”
“Sounds a lot like acting.” I pause. “Or being a show pony.”
Katherine laugh-snorts, and I decide right then and there that I do indeed like her. We’re the same in a lot of ways. Famous for reasons we’re not entirely comfortable with. Ridiculously privileged, but self-aware enough to realize it. Yearning to be seen as more than what people project onto us.
“Anyway, that’s the long story,” she says. “Told only to people who save me from drowning.”
“What’s the short version?”
Katherine looks away, to the other side of the lake, where her house dominates the shoreline. “Tom wanted me to stop.”
A dark look crosses her face. It’s brief—like the shadow of a cloud on the water. I expect her to say something more about her husband and why he’d make such a demand. Instead, Katherine’s mouth drops open and she begins to cough.
Hard.
Much harder than earlier.
These are deep, rough hacks loud enough to echo off the water. The blanket falls away, and Katherine hugs herself until she rides out the coughing fit. She looks frightened when it’s over. Another cloud shadow passes over her face, and for a second she looks like she has no idea what just happened. But then the cloud vanishes and she flashes a reassuring smile.
“Well, that was unladylike,” she says.
“Are you okay?”
“I think so.” Katherine’s hands tremble as she pulls the blanket back over her goose-pimpled shoulders. “But it’s probably time to go home now.”
“Of course,” I say. “You must be freezing.”
I certainly am. Now that the adrenaline of my earlier attempted heroics has worn off, a fierce chill takes hold. My body shivers as I haul the anchor up from the bottom of the lake. The entire rope—all fifty feet of it—is wet from being stretched underwater. By the time I’m finished with the anchor, my arms are so spent it takes me several tugs to start the motor.
I start to steer the boat toward Katherine’s place. Her house is an anomaly on the lake in that it’s the only one built after the seventies. Whathad previously been there was a perfectly acceptable bungalow from the thirties surrounded by tall pines.
Twenty years ago, the bungalow was removed. So were the pines.
Now in their place is an angular monstrosity that juts from the earth like a chunk of rock. The side facing the lake is almost entirely covered in glass, from the wide, rambling ground floor to the tip of the peaked roof. During the day, it’s impressive, if a little boring. The real estate equivalent of a store window with nothing on display.
But at night, when all the rooms are lit up, it takes on the appearance of a dollhouse. Each room is visible. Gleaming kitchen. Sparkling dining room. Wide living room that runs the length of the stone patio behind the house that leads to the edge of the lake.
I’ve been inside only once, when Len and I were invited to dinner by the previous owners. It felt weird to be sitting behind all that glass. Like a specimen in a petri dish.
Not that there are many people around watching. Lake Greene is small, as lakes go. A mile long and only a quarter mile wide in spots, it sits alone in a thick patch of forest in eastern Vermont. It was formed at the tail end of the Ice Age, when a glacier plowing its way across the land decided to leave a chunk of itself behind. That ice melted, digging a trough in the earth into which its water eventually settled. Which basically makes it a puddle. Very big and very deep and quite lovely to look at, but a puddle all the same.
It’s also private, which is the main draw. The water is only accessible by one of the residential docks, of which there are few. Only five houses sit on the lake, thanks to large lot sizes and a shortage of additional land suitable for construction. The northern end of the lake is lined with protected forest. The southern end is a steep, rocky bluff. In the middle are the houses, two on one side, three on the other.
It’s the latter side where Katherine lives. Her house sits tall and imposing between two older, more modest structures. To the left, about a hundred yards down the shore, is the Fitzgerald place. He’s in banking. Shedabbles in antiques. They arrive at their charming cottage on Memorial Day weekend and depart on Labor Day, leaving the place empty the rest of the year.
Sitting to the right of the Royces’ is the ramshackle abode of Eli Williams, a novelist who was big in the eighties and not so big now. His house resembles a Swiss chalet—three stories of rough-hewn wood with tiny balconies on the upper floors and red shutters at the windows. Like my family, Eli and his wife summered at Lake Greene. When she died, Eli sold their house in New Jersey and moved here full-time. As the lake’s only permanent resident, he now keeps an eye on the other houses when everyone else is away.
There are no lights on in Katherine’s house, making its glass wall reflect the lake like a mirror. I catch a distorted glimpse of the two of us in the boat, our reflections wobbling, as if we’re made of water ourselves.
When I bring the boat to the property’s dock, Katherine leans forward and takes my cold hands in hers. “Thank you again. You truly did save my life.”
“It was nothing,” I say. “Besides, I’d be a terrible person if I ignored a supermodel in need.”
“Formersupermodel.”