The Miseducation of Henry Cane Read online

  Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

  Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

  To Liza, who taught me the value of telling the truth

  PROLOGUE

  I wasn’t raised to be a liar. I was raised to be a good son, a good friend, a Princeton man, a publisher, someone’s boss, someone’s devoted husband, a child’s caring father.

  And yet, this summer, my lies nearly derailed all of it.

  My memory of the night before was hazy and disjointed, but I knew I was to blame for every terrible thing that happened. I sat up and rubbed at my eyes. Judging from the position of the sun I’d been asleep on the beach for quite some time.

  My recollections came in waves. Fishing, drinking, crashing the party, the disgusting words that came out of my mouth, getting smacked across the face. The way she looked at me. The way he looked at me. Shame knotted my insides. How had I let it go so far? I wasn’t this person.

  But I’d become a different person with her.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Two months earlier . . . June 1, 1994

  “Will you miss me?”

  Caroline had asked me this twice already, and each time I gave her the required “Yes, of course . . . very much.”

  I wondered if she’d ask a fourth time, and I told myself that if she did I’d come up with something more clever. In fact, I started practicing witty things I could say in my mind, but they all sounded cheesy and lame, so we rode the rest of the way in silence.

  Before she got out of the car at the British Airways doors at JFK I gave her an awkward hug, because, for all intents and purposes, we’d broken up the night before in a very courteous and official way. She’d be spending the summer in London interning with the Royal Shakespeare Company and hoped to stay on in the fall as an associate producer. We’d gone back and forth for months about the idea of staying together. I needed her to be the one to break it off. I’d always been terrible at making big decisions. If I’m being honest I was used to women making all my decisions for me: first my mom, then Caroline. I’m not gonna lie about the fact that I liked it. I functioned best when things just sort of happened to me. When Caroline finally announced we were definitely calling it quits, in an act that involved plenty of tears and bold proclamations about what we both really deserved and needed, she told me she still wanted me to be the one to see her off at the airport. I’d never once told her no during the course of our three-year relationship, and I saw no reason to start.

  I carried her luggage to the curbside check-in and tipped the guy there twenty bucks for no real reason except I wanted Caroline’s last image of me to be me handing off her bags and tipping some guy too much. She leaned in and kissed me goodbye on the side of my mouth the way you’d accidentally kiss an elderly aunt.

  Caroline Alby. I’d loved her the moment I set eyes on her, but by the time I was back on the Long Island Expressway I felt a strange relief, the kind of feeling that comes when winter becomes spring and you get to take off a too-heavy and too-itchy sweater. I would have stayed with Caroline as long as she wanted me to. I hadn’t known the freedom would feel both sweet and terrifying.

  * * *

  My mother kept threatening to sell our beach house. Every single June that I can remember, Deidre Cane packed two suitcases for each of us and drove the three hours from our town house on East Eighty-Third Street to the beach house in Sag Harbor. Once she was there she flung open all the windows, wiped her finger through the collected winter dust, and declared, “We should get rid of this old wreck and get an apartment in Paris.”

  For a long time I believed that was actually what she wanted. Only in my teen years did I understand it was sarcasm or maybe irony. It took a while before I became fairly certain my mother just enjoyed being unhappy.

  The house, a weather-beaten colonial revival, had certainly seen better days, but it wasn’t a wreck by any means. This was the Hamptons after all. The peeling paint and the floors that forever smelled a little like salt, sand, and damp towels only made me love it more. I knew my mother secretly took pride in our rickety old house with its musty furniture. Old-money houses out east tended to have an up-market thrift-store decorative style, whereas new-money houses were all white leather and sharp edges. I once attended a party with my parents at the home of this Internet millionaire. That’s what everyone was calling him, “that Internet millionaire,” like it was a strange sort of profession, an encyclopedia salesman or that guy who sells you potions out of a briefcase. “That Internet millionaire” helped build Prodigy or had a diaper delivery service you ordered through AOL or something like that.

  “It looks like it was decorated by a Colombian drug lord,” one of my mother’s friends said to another woman. “And not even one of the interesting ones.”

  But this summer, Deidre had gotten her Parisian wish, or at least a taste of it. My father had been invited to teach a summer session at the Sorbonne, something about publishing the great American novel, and Mother said if he didn’t take it she was finally going to leave him for Stan the butcher, a man she insisted knew how to take a damn vacation. How she knew anything intimate about Stan, a man who also had a lazy eye and was missing a canine tooth, was beyond me, but Mother did have the ability to talk to anyone about anything, and maybe she’d managed to unlock secrets about Stan beyond how he trimmed a pork shank.

  My father suggested renting out our old house at the beach, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it.

  “Strangers putting their filthy feet on my furniture,” she scoffed.

  “I thought you couldn’t stand that wreck of a place anyway,” my father replied with a bemused smile.

  “It’s my wreck, and I don’t want anyone else in it. Henry will spend the summer there before he starts work with you in the fall. Let him relax a little before you and the cutthroat world of publishing break his spirit.”

  I couldn’t object. Having the beach house all to myself for the entire summer was a better plan than staying in our place in the city, which, by the way, was also the complete opposite of a wreck—a four-floor town house with actual servants’ quarters. There hadn’t been any servants in the house since at least the turn of the last century, but the quarters were still there all the same. Mother used them for storing holiday ornaments and one time for an au pair from Germany who Deidre said smelled like sauerkraut.

  Their house wouldn’t be my house for that much longer. Beginning in September I had a lease on a studio on West Eighth Street. I would never say out loud that I wanted to escape the Upper East Side. I just wanted something new, something different. And maybe a part of me liked the fact that my mother didn’t love trekking below Fourteenth Street unless she was picking up whitefish from Russ & Daughters.

  Relaxation was a foreign concept to my father, but because my mother was keen on it he accepted it and Paris all the same. I’m fairly certain I inherited my desperate need to please beautiful women from him.

  * * *

  It took only two hours to get to the beach from the airport. That’s what happens when you leave on a Wednesday afternoon. I rolled all the windows down and indulged in the guilty pleasure of singing at the top of my lungs to the entire CD of Madonna’s greatest hits, which Caroline had left in the six-disc changer. I hadn’t exactly forgotten to remind her about it.

  Nothing had c
hanged about the beach house since I’d seen it last September, and its sameness comforted me. By the time I opened all the windows and swiped away enough of the dust from the furniture, I had no idea what I wanted to do next. Endless days of nothing stretched ahead of me. I had a stack of novels I’d been meaning to read, and part of me relished the idea of staying put in the house for an entire week as I made my way through them in delicious silence.

  I didn’t get that luxury

  “Hey, dildo.”

  Sperry never knocked. He hadn’t knocked since he started wandering into our beach house when he was five years old. It’s how we became friends—he just wandered on into a stranger’s house. His parents bought the place next door, and they were the kind of parents who had no trouble setting their child loose on the neighborhood while they unpacked. He came right into our kitchen, opened our fridge, and made himself a ham sandwich. My mother found him sitting at our kitchen table and sent him up to my room to play. That was how Deidre parented in the late seventies. Sperry was a real big kid. My mother called him husky and was always trying to get him to eat things like celery sticks with peanut butter and raisins, and instead he’d demand a sloppy joe.

  It turned out he lived not too far from us in the city, and we both wound up at Collegiate for kindergarten through the twelfth grade. When I left for college in New Jersey, Sperry went to Dartmouth and made a big deal about how it was just his safety school, even though everyone knew his dad paid for a new wing at the main library to get him in. If I thought hard about it (and I tried not to), Sperry and I shouldn’t still be friends. He’d grown into the kind of frat boy who would go down in Dartmouth history for rushing the field naked during the Ivy championships and doing a five-minute keg stand, whereas I could never even find the keg at most college parties. But it was easier to keep him around than to get rid of him. He was familiar and comfortable, like waffles or a crocheted quilt.

  Sperry opened my freezer and turned back to look at me with disappointment in his puppy-like eyes.

  “No ice cream.”

  “Haven’t shopped yet.”

  How had it just occurred to me that I would need to go to the market and fill the refrigerator myself? The realization was both enlightening and embarrassing.

  “I gotta eat, man.”

  “You know there’s probably food at your house.”

  “There definitely isn’t. Kelli-Anne is on a new diet where she doesn’t eat things that have mass.”

  Kelli-Anne was Sperry’s latest stepmom. She wasn’t all that much older than us. In fact, we could have overlapped in high school. Sperry was saved that indignity. Kelli-Anne came from some small town in Texas.

  Sperry mimicked Kelli-Anne’s high-pitched, nasally twang. “Brett, you could stand to quit eatin’ so much too. You’re as fat as a sow ready for slaughter.” He placed one hand on either side of his formidable gut and shook it like he was a mall Santa Claus. Nobody but Sperry’s parents called him by his given name, Brett. We called him Sperry since he owned more boat shoes than anyone I’d ever met. No one had ever seen anything else on his feet. Not even when he was just a chubby kid raiding my mother’s fridge.

  “Come on. Let’s get out of this house. Let’s get crabs,” Sperry insisted.

  “You had them. Remember junior year.” That was a joke that didn’t get old.

  “You’re funny. At least I got laid in high school. Nothing a little antibiotic didn’t clear up. Let’s go.” He was already halfway out the door. “We’ll take the boat and get some good claws across the bay.”

  By the boat he meant my boat, which should have irritated me, but I let it go.

  “You want to go all the way over to Greenport?” I complained.

  “They taste better out there. So do the beers. And the girls are prettier.”

  “The girls out there just don’t know you. That makes them prettier,” I countered. “You haven’t done anything to offend them yet.”

  “Touché. Come on, dildo. I’m starving.”

  * * *

  My boat wasn’t anything special. But it was all mine, every single piece of her. I started building her from scratch when I was thirteen years old. My grandfather was alive back then, and the only thing he wanted to do besides work was show me how to build a wooden boat, a childhood dream of his. Her name was Arabella, from the Captain Blood pirate stories, which I read when I was way too young to be reading them because they were filled with blood and guts and nasty men doing nasty things. My Arabella was a flat-bottomed skiff made entirely out of sweet chestnut, and, in my opinion, she was only getting better with age. I didn’t let just anyone go out on the boat. I’d never once taken a girl out on her; it would feel curiously unfaithful.

  The water was smooth as glass, and the tides were in our favor to whip us around Shelter Island and over to the North Fork in less than an hour.

  Sperry removed his salmon-pink polo shirt and let his pasty chest bake in the midafternoon sun, stretching his arms skyward. That was another difference between the two of us. I preferred to keep my shirt on unless I was planning on swimming, showering, or getting with a girl. At the age of twenty-one I was the rare man who still slept in a pair of pajamas bought by my mother. Sperry liked to be naked as often as possible.

  “This summer is gonna rule,” he shouted, even though I was well within earshot. Like me, Sperry was taking a break for the summer before he’d start a job his dad got for him in the mergers and acquisitions department of Goldman. Unlike me, Sperry was wildly excited about his life come September. Sperry had never wanted to do anything but work in M&A at Goldman. It’s what his dad had been doing for the past thirty years and what his grandfather did for fifty years before that.

  I knew I should feel grateful that I had such a good job lined up for me. I’m not one of those people who take these kinds of things for granted. Still, I was less enthusiastic about my future working for my father than Sperry was. I also wasn’t even that excited for the next two months. I knew this summer would be exactly like every summer we had at the beach. That’s the thing about the Hamptons. It’s all about the same people doing the same things in the same places and then pretending something new and interesting was happening.

  Sperry kept going on and on about his plans for our epic season. His specialty was making plans. In another life, another world, he should have been an event or wedding planner, maybe a hotel concierge, not a corporate banker.

  “Johnson’s cousin is bouncing at the Sand Trap and he promised to let us cut the line as long as we bring some hot chicks. I feel like Beth is pretty hot, and she’s got enough decent-looking friends to get us in all summer.” Beth was Sperry’s stepsister from his dad’s third marriage, the shortest marriage of the five, and the two of them never actually lived under the same roof, which is probably why it was so easy for Sperry to constantly fantasize about taking off her clothes.

  “It’s still creepy when you talk about how hot Beth is,” I said.

  Sperry flipped his palms toward the blazing sun.

  “I can’t help it. The heart wants what the heart wants.” He pounded on his chest like he was Tarzan and did a cannonball off the boat and into the water, making a splash that forced me to hold tight to the steering wheel.

  * * *

  Because it was a Wednesday we found a spot to dock right next to this place called the Feisty Crab and Sperry was out of the boat before I could even tie her up. By the time I got to the table he’d ordered a basket of fries, clam strips, crab legs, and two frosty mugs of beer. The Feisty Crab was small and warm, with taxidermy fish and photos of fishermen covering the wooden walls. The crowd, even on a weekday, was feistier than the crab, which, to be honest, was perfectly serviceable, but not any better than a crab we could have ordered in Sag Harbor or Montauk. It was absolutely better than anything we could get in East Hampton, where all the food was the same as country-club food the world over: overcooked chicken, frozen crab legs, and enormous rubbery shrimp covered in ketchup
that someone claimed was cocktail sauce.

  The Feisty Crab’s menu consisted of things that came directly out of the ocean and other things that had been dropped in a deep fryer for approximately seven minutes.

  “I’m in love with the waitress,” Sperry informed me as we dug into our food.

  “Which one?”

  “That sloe-eyed goddess who just wiped the crab crumbs off the table.” He pointed with his chubby index finger.

  “She’s pretty,” I said, because Sperry likes validation and because it was true.

  “Man. Are you still hung up on Caroline? She’s definitely boning a Frenchman at thirty thousand feet as we speak.”

  I didn’t tell him I’d imagined the same thing as I pulled away from JFK. I took a long sip of my beer instead.

  “Nah. I’m just getting reacclimated to being a single man.” That was true. Caroline was only the second woman I’d ever slept with, a fact Sperry may have thought but not known for sure. Contrary to his previous jest, I did have sex in high school, I just didn’t talk about it the way Sperry did all the time. I’d done it seven times to be exact, with the same girl—Annie Westover. And then I met Caroline the first day of freshman orientation. We weren’t exactly strangers. We had circled each other for years in various Manhattan and Hamptons social circles, but that icebreaker session in Annenberg Hall was the first time we’d ever spoken to each other beyond Hey and Are you spending the summer out east? It turned out we were in the same microeconomics section, a requirement that neither of us had any interest in. We sat next to each other there because we’d already developed a vague familiarity. I became her study buddy for all of freshman year. I figured spending time in her dorm room was better than staying in my own double and listening to my roommate have loud sex with Michiko, our Japanese RA. Caroline dated this guy named Carter for the entire first semester. Carter happened to be the Princeton quarterback and the lead baritone in the campus’s most adored a cappella group. It probably doesn’t mean much anywhere else, but at an Ivy League college the Venn intersection of football player with a cappella geek is equivalent to a Mount Olympus–level god. But Carter broke her heart when he fell for the second-string baritone. I pretended to be incredibly surprised, let her cry on my shoulder, and delivered pints of rocky road to her dorm room every night for a week. My persistent presence eventually wore her down, and sometime during sophomore year she started calling me her boyfriend, and that was that. I think she knew I would never break her heart.