The Roughest Draft(4)

What I need is to write. I’m not me if I can’t write.

Jen frowns. Her fingers worry her delicate gold watch. She says nothing.

It scares me. “Don’t sugarcoat it now.”

While she hesitates, my mind rehashes the scene I’m working on. It feels less like a reverie now, more like a coping mechanism. Sarah’s in their kitchen, the domesticity of the setting purposeful. She doesn’t need to speak. He knows. He says, They’re going to pass on the proposal.

Wait.

I refocus on Jen. The words I just heard weren’t in my head. They were from her.

They’re going to pass on the proposal.

The weight of it settles on me. They’re rejecting me. I wasn’t rejected from Dartmouth, wasn’t rejected when Katrina and I queried our agent, wasn’t rejected when we sold Connecting Flights or Only Once on proposal. I haven’t been rejected from anything.

No, that’s not true.

It hurts. No matter how much success you’ve had, insecurity is never far from reach when you’re being judged on pieces of your soul. If you won’t kill your darlings, I guess someone else will. There’s no indignation where I expected there to be, only whispers of doubt newly insistent in my head.

I force my next words past them. Wallowing won’t help. “Okay. It’s a setback, but I’ll write something else. What’re they looking for?” This is how I’ll fight those whispers. I’ll write. I have enough ideas in my head to fill my hard drive. It’s not difficult to imagine, if given the time, loving one of them the way I do this one.

“Nathan.” Jen says my name forcefully. It’s her reality-check voice.

“What? I have the 1950s novel I was developing—”

“They don’t want another book from you.”

I’ve never felt O’Neill’s was small. The extravagance is part of the point. The grandeur of the floor plan, the glittering shelves of liquor, the expensive suits and handbags of the patrons.

With Jen’s words, the place feels small. The walls press inward, warping nauseatingly. I fight the sensation. “So we’ll submit wide,” I say. “Send the manuscript everywhere. I’m a New York Times bestselling author. I have a movie in development. I’ve had other publishers salivating over me for years.” I’m half convincing her with my confidence, half convincing myself.

“We could,” Jen replies levelly. “You won’t get a good offer, though, which could eventually kill your career. Your sales are dropping, and your reviews are lackluster.”

I clench my hand reflexively on my drink. I know she’s right. What’s more, I know why. Anything I write is compared to Only Once. Which is unfair. It’s ridiculous to compare me to one of the most successful books of the past five years. I wrote it, but not alone. Of course it’s better. Katrina’s a genius. It’s why I walked up to her on the first day of the New York Resident Writers’ Program, dazed from the power and clarity of the excerpt she’d read, and practically prostrated myself telling her I wanted to collaborate. I remember how surprise didn’t enter her round eyes. How she’d said yes like it was easy.

The first night out there in Cooperstown, New York, we left the introductory dinner with our workshop classmates together. We introduced ourselves for real, got to know each other. She was fresh out of undergrad, unlike me. I kind of figured she couldn’t be single, though the question only crossed my mind objectively—I’d proposed to Melissa three months prior and was enjoying the post-engagement rush of pride and promise. While we walked, Katrina read me her favorite poetry from off her phone. I found myself loving her choices, understanding what resonated for her in each of them.

It wasn’t romantic, Katrina and me. It was romantic when Melissa would come home from one of her work events in her semiformal dress and I couldn’t decide whether I was more eager to hear how her day went or run the zipper down the black-diamond ski slope of her backside. (I ended up doing one then the other, though the order changed often.) It was romantic when we’d count down from three and simultaneously say the same movie we wanted to watch on Friday nights.

But with Katrina—was it romantic when you instinctively knew someone’s very existence fascinated you, made you grateful? Finding it romantic would be missing the point, like valuing the sun because it was bright. I’m glad for the light, but really, I’m grateful for the fact it sustains life on Earth.

Not that Katrina sustains my life on Earth. I— No. Inelegant metaphor.

It’s over with Katrina. That’s what’s important. And, presently, damning. Being compared to her and what we did together for the rest of my career is a death sentence.

“What’re you saying, I’m finished?” Hearing the words out loud nearly paralyzes me. It sends me back to those years in high school, before I’d shown anyone my writing. I wasn’t athletic, wasn’t particularly good-looking or funny. I had trouble talking to my peers. Even the wealthy family I came from didn’t exactly distinguish me in the marble halls of my prep school. I was no one.

Until I sent a short story to the New Yorker. I couldn’t talk to my peers, but I could write for them. I could write my way onto their breakfast tables, next to their parents’ grapefruit. Into their older brothers’ bedrooms, in piles they’d catch up on over winter breaks home from college. Nathan Van Huysen—the Nathan I was meant to be—was born on those pages, his life written in fine black print. Elegant and undeniable. “I’m not going to quit, Jen,” I say. “I’ll write the best fucking book they’ve ever read.”