I related to that look.
I still do.
Only after the play closed and I continued seeing the woman’s picture everywhere did I match a name with the face.
Katherine Daniels.
The magazines called her Katie. The designers who made her their muse called her Kat. She walked runways for Yves Saint Laurent and frolicked on the beach for Calvin Klein and rolled around on silk sheets for Victoria’s Secret.
Then she got married to Thomas Royce, the founder and CEO of a social media company, and the modeling stopped. I remember seeing their wedding photo in People magazine and being surprised by it. I expected Katherine to look the way she did on that billboard. Freedom personified. Instead, sewn into a Vera Wang gown and clutching her husband’s arm, she sported a smile so clenched I almost didn’t recognize her.
Now she’s here, in my boat, grinning freely, and I feel a weird sense of relief that the woman from that billboard hadn’t vanished entirely.
“Can I ask you a very personal, very nosy question?” I say.
“You just saved my life,” Katherine says. “I’d be a real bitch if I said no right now, don’t you think?”
“It’s about your modeling days.”
Katherine stops me with a raised hand. “You want to know why I quit.”
“Kind of,” I say, adding a guilty shrug. I feel bad about being obvious, not to mention basic. I could have asked her a thousand other things but instead posed the question she clearly gets the most.
“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, insanely great. 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. What had previously been there was a perfectly acceptable bungalow from the thirties surrounded by tall pines.