“Look, I support you writing a ‘literary novel,’ but you need to be realistic about the publishing business. The fact that you’re my daughter will help get editors to read your book, but it’s not enough to pushit through an acquisitions board. Literary fiction is so hard these days. Writers need a platform, a big social media following, they need to make a splash. If Ned took you on as a client, he could help you with all that.”
Caroline snorted in annoyance. She understood all this. It was the drumbeat that sounded behind her every single day as she typed away on her stupid historical novel. “Mom, you’re forgetting that I actually worked in the industry. I know how it works.”
“Well, honey,” Gwendolyn said smoothly. “If you know how it works, you’ll figure out how to make a splash on your own. But take Ned out for coffee. I think he could give you a hand.”
“Thank you,” Caroline said tightly, wishing she could tell her mother exactly what Ned Clark could do with that stupid hand of his.
She had never really considered telling her mother that Ned had slept with her. Maybe that had been a mistake. Maybe she should have warned Gwendolyn that he was a user, that he was a snake. But the thought of admitting to her mother that she’d been so gullible, that she’d fallen for a slick talker in a suit, was too humiliating. She already felt the full force of her mother’s judgment over her professional life, she couldn’t stand to feel that judgment over her heart as well.
That night Carolinelooked over her bookshelf and pulled down a copy of Palmer Preston’sTarbox. When it had first been published in 1968, he had set out to capture the changing sexual mores of the times. The pill was newly available, American attitudes about sex were suddenly flexible, it was a huge shift. People were torn between their puritanical upbringings and the idea that sex could be for fun. The book was full of affairs, couples meeting for afternoon trysts on the sunporch, hard drinking, an accidental pregnancy, an abortion, a divorce.
Sixty years later the sexual mores had changed in America, but notexactly in the ways Palmer Preston might have predicted. Sexuality was now understood to be a spectrum, gay marriage was legal, and the whole concept of open marriage had become so normalized there were entire sections for it on Feeld, Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge. “Ethical nonmonogamy” had become the Birkenstock sandal of relationship statuses, ubiquitous, but still frankly unattractive.
The more Caroline thought about how Greenhead had changed since the publication ofTarbox, the more convinced she became that they were living through another huge cultural revolution. You could see it even among Van’s social circle. Bailey and Van had a child before even becoming a couple. Fran and RJ were monogamous but unmarried, hard drinking, and high all the time. Weed and shrooms were totally acceptable, part of parenting culture the way Valium was for housewives in the ’60s. Colin was bisexual, first partners with one sibling and now married to another. Eben and Max were gay, but entirely monogamous and fairly traditional. Somehow, this little friend group was representative of something larger. No, it wasn’t San Francisco or New York, it wasn’t kitchen table polyamory or swinging, but it was still something. The germ of an idea began to form, and Caroline felt a buzz building in her chest. She had been drawn to Greenhead to follow in Palmer Preston’s footsteps. She just hadn’t known exactly how. But finally, she had an idea. She could turn her heartbreak into art.
For the next four weeks, all through the month of April, Caroline barely left her cottage except to buy coffee and winter fresh sugar-free gum with tooth whitener. She almost contemplated taking up smoking—it felt somehow right when conjuring the ghost of a 1960s writer and icon—but cigarettes made her stomach hurt and her hairsmell, so she chewed her gum until her jaw throbbed and typed late into the nights. She wrote like a cultural anthropologist, like Margaret Mead, but instead of writing about sex and adultery in the islands of Samoa, of virgins and ceremonial princesses, she wrote about sex and parenthood in the marshes of Greenhead, of perfect Augusta’s hypocrisy, of Fran’s financial ruin, of gay babysitters and the princess of Budweiser Manor.
She changed the names of course, she changed Augusta and Eben’s childhood horse farm to an apple orchard, changed Bailey’s swans to sheep. She disguised what she could, but told her story, the fact of her own heartbreak, the group’s icy treatment of her as an outsider, the revelation that life in the American suburbs was just as full of sex and drugs as Woodstock in the ’60s, that along the coastal towns of New England the sexual revolution had never really ended.
When Caroline finished writing the short story, five thousand words long, she pitched the fiction editor who had published her atThe New Yorker.The editor read it overnight and called her the next morning. She loved it, and with all the renewed interest in Preston’s work she knew they could create a real PR moment for the magazine. Preston had been, after all, a staff writer forThe New Yorker, and their offices were going to feature largely in the biopic. Together Caroline and the editor crafted the logline that would appear with her bio in the front of the magazine: “In Greenhead, Massachusetts, Palmer Preston’sTarboxis alive, but marriage might be dead.” They would only pay her $6,000 for the story, but that was beside the point. It wasTheNew Yorker, and, once again, Caroline had gotten there all alone, no help from her mother, her friends, or even Ned Clark.
Fourteen
Augusta
The Last Straight Generation
When Augusta was in the seventh grade there was a school camping trip to Sandwich, south of Boston. They spent the night in a row of orange canvas tents, walked ten minutes down the path to a bathhouse with gross toilets and showers, and passed a long and boring afternoon identifying trees and drawing pencil illustrations of leaves in their marble notebooks. Augusta was assigned a tent with three other girls she only socialized with peripherally, two who were in band and one who had hair down to her bum that she wore in braids that looked slightly Amish. Augusta had thought they were nice enough, had figured they liked her okay, but one evening, coming back from the bathhouse with her toothbrush, Augusta walked up to the tent and heard her name through the thin canvas.
“Did you see the way Augusta was kissing up to Mr. Killbourne? She’s such a suck-up.”
“She’s like ‘Mr. K., did you see my drawing? Aren’t I perfect?’ ”
“She’s high on herself because she has horses. She thinks everyonewants to come over to her house to ride them, but I don’t. I think horses smell disgusting.”
“ ‘Oh, Mr. K., let’s have an affair like my daddy.’ ”
“ ‘Oh, Mr. K., come over to my horse farm so we can have sex.’ ”
The tent dissolved into giggles and Augusta stood in the dark, holding her small, quilted toiletry kit, frozen with surprise. Is that what everyone thought? Did they all say it when she wasn’t around? She waited ten minutes and then crawled into the tent and pretended to fall asleep, eventually drifting off hours later, heartbroken to know that the only thing unusual about that night was that she had happened to overhear it, that there would always be gossip, there would always be people who didn’t like her, that other girls weren’t trustworthy creatures. There was nothing she could do but ignore it and swallow the hurt.
Augusta heard about Caroline Lash’s story inThe New Yorkerbefore she realized how much it would change everything. One of the mothers at school pickup, a woman named Christy who had only moved to Greenhead that year, was holding a copy of the magazine and reading it on the bench. “Did you hear there’s a piece about Greenhead in here?” she asked. “It’s about how all the couples in town are doing drugs and sleeping with each other.”
“What?” Augusta scoffed. “Why would someone write that? And why would it be inTheNew Yorker?”
“Probably because the girl who wrote it is Gwendolyn Lash’s daughter,” Christy said knowingly.
“Caroline?”
Christy flipped back a page. “Yeah, I wonder who it’s about. Apparently, she changed the names and says it’s ‘fiction’ but it’s not.”
Augusta felt her mouth go dry. Would Caroline have written about Bailey and Van? Or Fran and RJ? “Can I have it after you’re done?”
“Sure, or it’s online. Just search her name and Greenhead or Palmer Preston.”
The door to the school opened before Augusta could find it on her phone, and Charlie came running out, backpack thumping, holding a painted cardboard egg carton covered in dental floss. “Mom! I made an aquarium!”
As Augusta drove home, her phone dinged with text after text, the group chat with class parents, someone sharing the link, someone sending a popcorn emoji, someone asking how to get around the paywall, and someone else explaining it. At home Augusta handed the kids cheese sticks and pouches of dried fruit before clicking on the link to read for herself. As she skimmed the short story it was like looking at familiar photos through an Instagram filter, everything strange and distorted. There was Bailey, renamed but recognizable, living in her parents’ renovated church-mansion with a tacky reflecting pool in the middle. There were Fran and RJ, high on gummies at a kids’ soccer game. Augusta was there too, daughter of an old Boston family, raised with horses and married to her brother’s best friend. But there was so much that was wrong, reworked to make a point or to become tawdry. The Bailey character was cartoonishly cheap, all gel manicures and chunky highlights, manipulative and oversexed. Caroline had made Fran out to be some kind of victim, held hostage by the financial ruin of her family, tragically tied to a man whose drinking threatened to topple it all like a house of cards. Most absurd of all was the story of her own character, funhouse Augusta. Caroline had woven a love triangle between Augusta’s husband and her brother, a gay romance that the Augusta character had obliviously broken up, a delusional housewife so bent on keeping up appearances that she couldn’t even see whatshe had done. It was insane. It was salacious, it was gossipy, it was wrong, but it was just close enough to the truth that everyone would eat it up like candy.
