Because of his past, Len was determined not to make the same mistakes as his parents. He never got angry and was rarely sad. When he laughed, it was with his whole body, as if there was too much happiness within him to be contained. He was a great cook, an even better listener, and loved long, hot baths, preferably with me in the tub with him. Our marriage was a combination of gestures both big—like when he rented an entire movie theater on my birthday so the two of us could have a private screening of Rear Window—and small. He always held the door for me. And ordered pizza with extra cheese without asking because he knew that’s how I liked it. And appreciated the contented silence when the two of us were in the same room but doing different things.
As a result, our marriage was a five-year period in which I was almost deliriously happy.
The happiness part is important.
Without it, you’d have nothing to miss when everything inevitably turns to shit.
Which brings us to Step Five: Spend a summer at Lake Greene.
The lake house has always been a special place for my family. Conceived by my great-great-grandfather as an escape from New York’s steaming, stinking summers, it was once the only residence on this unassuming slash of water. That’s how the lake got its name. Originally called Lake Otshee by the indigenous tribe that once lived in the area, it was renamed Lake Greene in honor of the first white man intrepid enough to build here because, well, America.
My father spent every summer at the lake that bore his family name. As did his father before him. As did I. Growing up, I loved life on the lake. It was a much-needed reprieve from my mother’s theatrics. Some of my fondest memories are of endless days spent catching fireflies, roasting marshmallows, swimming in the sun until I was as tanned as leather.
Going to the lake for a summer was Len’s idea, proposed after a frigid, slushy winter during which we barely saw each other. I was busy with the Broadway thriller I’d chosen over the Transformers movie, and Len kept having to return to LA to bang out another draft of a superhero screenplay he’d taken on because he mistakenly thought it would be easy money.
“We need a break,” he said during Easter brunch. “Let’s take the summer off and spend it at Lake Greene.”
“The whole summer?”
“Yeah. I think it’ll be good for us.” Len smiled at me over the Bloody Mary he’d been drinking. “I know I sure as hell need a break.”
I did, too. So we took it. I left the play for four months, Len finally finished the screenplay, and we set off for Vermont for the summer. It was wonderful. During the day, we whiled away the hours reading, napping, making love. In the evenings, we cooked long dinners and sat on the porch sipping strong cocktails and listening to the ghostly call of loons echoing across the lake.
One afternoon in late July, Len and I filled a picnic basket with wine, cheese, and fresh fruit bought that morning at a nearby farmers’ market. We hiked to the southern end of the lake, where the forest gives way to a craggy bluff. After stumbling our way to the top, we spread the food out on a checkered blanket and spent the afternoon snacking, drinking wine, and staring at the water far below.
At one point, Len turned to me and said, “Let’s stay here forever, Cee.”
Cee.
That was his nickname for me, created after he had deemed Case too hard-boiled for a term of endearment.
“It makes me think of a private detective,” he said. “Or, worse, a lawyer.”
“Or maybe I don’t need a nickname,” I said. “It’s not like my name’s that unwieldy.”
“I can’t be the only one of us with a nickname. That would make me incredibly selfish, don’t you think?”
We’d been officially dating two weeks by then, both of us sensing things were getting very serious very quickly but neither of us ready to admit it. It’s why Len was trying too hard that night. He wanted to dazzle me with wit. And even though the wit might have been strained, I was indeed dazzled.
I remained that way most of our marriage.
“Define forever,” I said that July afternoon, hypnotized by the sunlight sparking off the lake and the summer breeze in my hair.
“Never leaving. Just like Old Stubborn there.”
Len pointed to a petrified tree stump that jutted from the water about fifty yards from the shore below. It was legendary on Lake Greene, mostly because no one knew how this sun-bleached piece of wood came to be poking twenty feet out of the water or how much more of it stretched from the surface to the lake’s bottom. We all called it Old Stubborn because Eli, who researched such things, claimed it had been there for hundreds of years and would remain long after the rest of us were gone.