The Roughest Draft(6)
It’s not my cappuccino burglar, of course. It’s Chris, who I realize in seconds has come home in the middle of the day. I walk into the living room, where he’s spread out his laptop and contract pages into an impromptu workspace.
He comes out of the kitchen carrying his coffee and sits on the couch, hardly glancing up. “Where were you?” he asks.
I hold up the bookstore bag. “I went to Forewords. When did you come home?” Chris doesn’t work from home often. Every chance he gets, he’s in the office or riding the endless carousel of networking with editors and authors.
“Had lunch with a client nearby, then needed to take a call. It was just closer to come here.” Chris’s voice is deep, declarative. It’s like everything about him—conventionally desirable. Golden hair, green eyes, sharp jaw, former-Duke-quarterback shoulders. It’s funny, having a handsome face in front of you for years, you start to lose the whole for the composite parts. It’s like how if you focus on each individual word in a gorgeous passage of writing, they cease to have lyricism or meaning.
I sit on the ottoman, pulling off my flats. I don’t exactly get lonely while Chris is in the office—I enjoy the freedom to organize my own days—but I do miss my fiancé. The chance to talk to him isn’t one I’ll pass up. “Was it for the Vincent Blake book?”
He grimaces. “He turned me down. Signed with someone else.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, meaning it. I respect Chris’s drive, despite how his work life occupies his entire life. I shrug my jacket off, moving to sit next to Chris on the couch. When I entwine my arm with his, he looks down and unlinks our elbows. While he doesn’t move away from me, I’m pretty sure he’s leaning imperceptibly in the opposite direction. It dims my enthusiasm.
“He’ll regret it,” Chris intones.
James Joyce darts out of the hallway, finding my feet immediately. Well, someone’s glad to see me. I stroke his head, his ears flicking while I do. “Yes, I’m sure he will,” I say.
Chris scoffs. It’s pointed, purposeful. Not just from professional dejection.
I furrow my brow. “What’s that for?”
“You make it sound like you respect me.”
His words hit me like a slap. Chris and I fight every now and then. Unremarkable fights—whether I’m “meddling” when I urge him to network less, if I’m pushing him too hard to set the date for our wedding, whose family we’re visiting for the holidays. It’s never about whether I respect him. I’m reeling slightly from this jab out of nowhere.
“Of course I respect you,” I say. “Why would you think otherwise?” We’ve been engaged for two years. He was Nathan’s and my agent for the three years before that. I respect him professionally and personally, though it’s not why I fell in love with him.
When I was a kid, I would go hiking in the hills outside our house. South Dakota is humid in the summers and hilly twelve months out of the year. My mom would serve us vanilla ice cream when we got home, hot and exhausted. It was from the rectangular Dreyer’s container, the cheapest from the grocery store, I guess, and with four kids in the house, vanilla was a safe choice everyone would enjoy. I remember the way the perfect, cold sweet would melt in my mouth while sweat stuck my hair to my forehead. In those moments, vanilla ice cream was the greatest ice cream flavor—the greatest food in the whole world. When people asked me what my favorite ice cream flavor was, I would say vanilla without considering the question.
Chris was vanilla ice cream.
The hiking days were the pre-publication fervor of Only Once. Nathan and I were no longer speaking. We’d finished rounds of developmental and copyedits and were in the crush of publicity and meetings for other opportunities, which we did over the phone whenever possible. Every day, instead of writing or reading or just enjoying my downtime, I was watching what was only a Word document on my computer grow into this monster of epic promotional proportions.
I wasn’t well. I woke up with cold in my fingers and my feet and went to bed exhausted from worrying and inexpressibly grateful for the reprieve of sleep. I googled “post-success depression” from my phone under the covers. I sought out my therapist in New York, who I still call, though less often now. Interviews were grueling—I, who once wrote hundreds of words per hour, struggled to push single sentences past the cage of insecurity and uncertainty in which I lived.
I’m under no illusion that what stressed me out was watching the success of Only Once. It wasn’t humility. It was fear. I hadn’t felt this way with Connecting Flights, with its modest deal, its respectful but ordinary reviews. But with Only Once, I was close to having what I wanted, and if I had what I wanted, I could lose it. The possibility felt like radioactive material, and I was certain it would chew up my insides or make me lose my hair or whatever holding onto plutonium would do. I hated it.
The fear was what caught me in the women’s restroom of one of LA’s film and TV agencies, where I was pitching Only Once for development. It was an important meeting, hence my flying out, and on the same day as one of Nathan’s divorce mediations, hence his not. The restroom was entirely white stone, like a spaceship or something. The lights were iridescent. When I stopped in front of the sink, feeling the sweat sliding down my sleeves, the idea of charmingly reproducing our pitch points overwhelmed me. I worked to even my breathing, and I . . . couldn’t. Then I was crying, hiccupping, gripping the sink like the seat of a crashing plane.