The Roughest Draft(10)
“Okay,” Harriet says. “Then why’d you call me? You want me to lie and tell you you’ll work everything out? That you’ll have the perfect partnership you used to?”
I deflate. Harriet’s always been uncanny when it comes to finding the heart of things. In the weeks of the New York Resident Writers’ Program—dinners of Chinese or pub food in the small neighborhood where we were staying—and on our retreats, she would often rib Katrina and me about having hidden romantic feelings for each other until, one day, she suddenly stopped.
“Are you ready to grovel?” she asks.
“Me?” Groveling to Katrina is the second-most preposterous idea I’ve heard today, and it’s close. “Come on. You know what she did.”
“Then you took your New Yorker interview. The one where you said writing Only Once was the worst time in your life, and you don’t think even Katrina Freeling’s genius is worth the torture.”
I grimace, toeing the carpet. It’s not a direct quote. It is, however, close enough for discomfort. I remember the interview fairly vividly, the sterile modernity of the restaurant where I met the middle-aged journalist, the sound of my criticism of Katrina leaving my lips. It stung the second I said it.
The New Yorker interview was the end. The formal end, anyway. Truthfully, it was over the day we turned in the draft, but after the interview, Katrina had Chris call and inform me, sounding stiffly professional, that she was retired.
“You want my advice?” Harriet asks when I don’t reply. I wait for her to admonish me, to instruct me to grow up and work with my collaborator like a reasonable adult. “Stay the hell away from each other,” she says decisively. “If you can’t, then write this book as fast as humanly possible.”
I nod to myself. It’s refreshing, if sobering. “Thanks for your honesty,” I say.
I hear the screen door open and shut again. “Have a good night, Nathan.”
“Hey, Harriet,” I say before she can hang up. “I read your book. It was incredible.”
There’s silence over the line for a long moment. “Thanks,” she says, her voice warming like stone in sunlight. “Really.” I don’t have the opportunity to expand on the compliment. Harriet hangs up.
In the quiet of my room, I’m left only with her advice. I feel worse, which I wouldn’t have imagined possible. I look over, finding my computer on the drab hotel desk, hoping ideas spring from the machine fully formed. They don’t, of course. The only thing occupying my head is Katrina.
Working with her would be torture. But the undeniable truth is, there’s a part of me eager for the torture. The woman is brilliant. I’ve loved everything she’s ever written. Just knowing she’s going to write again, it’s inspiring. The writer in me can’t wait.
The problem is, it’s not just the writer who’ll have to work with her. It’s Nathan Van Huysen she can’t stand, and who can’t be in the same room with her.
Instead of reopening my computer, I reach into my suitcase.
I pull out my copy of Only Once, which I’m hardly ever without. The pages are folded in places, the hardcover edges misshapen. Katrina’s name hangs above mine on the front cover. I open to the first chapter, dropping onto the edge of the hotel comforter, and read. There’s no truth to these pages, but the trick of fiction is to make you think there is.
I let myself fall for it as often as I can.
5
Katrina
I’m in my office that evening, pages and pages in front of me on my desk. They’re not pages of prose, though. They’re financial statements, records of payments and royalties occupying the wood surface everywhere it’s not piled with books. I ran out of bookshelf space years ago and resorted to double-shelving, then putting them in stacks on the floor and in boxes in the closet, then finally giving up every semblance of organization and depositing them wherever there’s room.
After talking to Chris, I spent the rest of the day on the phone with our financial adviser. She emailed over the documents in front of me now, which I pored over, unraveling the numbers. It’s a myth writers have no faculty for math. I understood Chris’s position quickly, and it wasn’t good. Earnings from my books and from his other clients, vacations in Europe, the failing investment portfolio on which he’s overspent. Then there’s the house. I had no idea when we moved out to LA that Chris couldn’t afford what he’d put into our four-million-dollar home. Add in a two-hundred-thousand-dollar renovation and the fucking Tesla, and he’s in over his head.
I feel stupid. I should’ve been conscious of how his finances measured up to mine, but I wasn’t. Honestly, I’d been too depressed to focus on much.
I cap my pen and rub my palms on my pants, working to unwind my nerves. James Joyce, who was curled on the rug in the center of the room, gets up on noiseless cat paws and slips out of the crack in the door, perhaps intuiting my mood.
I wouldn’t mind selling our house, downscaling our lifestyle. Chris . . . would. It’s not just the money, either. Chris likes being attached to a famous author. Every day I don’t write, don’t publish, I disappoint him—I let him fall a little more out of love with me.
I don’t want him to fall out of love with me. Not only for the promise of our engagement but for the Chris I know he can be. For the Chris who would wrap me in huge hugs with sparkling eyes when he’d sell new manuscripts, or who would hold my hand in museums we’d visit on vacation and request I show him my very favorite painting in the gallery.