“Oh, just someone Robbie hooked me up with. You know Robbie.” Stuart sniffed the jar again. “I’ll smoke it with you,” he offered. “After Ted goes to bed.”
The idea of getting stoned together like teenagers was pretty cute. They could sit on the stoop—if she could make it to the stoop—and have their own little private party. Let the neighbors gossip. Worst thing that could happen: she’d get super paranoid and admit her lie. Which would actually be a huge relief.
“Sure. Okay. I’ll try it,” she said bravely.
* * *
Late afternoon light filtered prettily through the linen library curtains. Roy licked the toast crumbs from his upper lip and stared at his laptop screen, hating himself. What in bloody sweet hell was he going on about? Teenagers living on bloody Mars under surveillance with rationed ice cream. Everything he knew about space came from watching Battlestar Galactica back in 1979. His own teen years were a smelly, distant riot of drinking too much lager, smoking too many cigarettes, pissing in the rain, and unrequited crushes on beautiful older girls. But for some reason, ever since he’d begun Gold or Red or whatever bloody title the damned book was going to have, he kept coming up with teenagers. The girl hiding the family gold in the sand with a shovel, and now this space dust–induced spark between a boy and a girl with annoying names—Ceran and Bettina—and no acne because there was no humidity or bacteria or pollution on Mars, which he absolutely did not know for a fact, he was just guessing. What was he thinking? That as he typed all this gibberish into his laptop something brilliant would begin to blossom, like one of Einstein’s theories or da Vinci’s drawings? It might seem crazy and farfetched now, but once he got to the very end, four hundred or so pages later, it would all be so hilariously clear he’d wonder why he’d ever doubted himself?
Perhaps he was having a midlife crisis. Instead of buying a Porsche or having an affair with his personal trainer he was writing an insane, unreadable novel.
Roy thought he ought to talk to someone about it. This was forever his conundrum. Many writers had reading groups where they discussed their work with other writers and workshopped one another’s drafts. Some writers had a dedicated, trusted reader, like Stephen King’s wife, Tabitha. Some writers had editors who held their hands along the way. The Great Gatsby, for instance, would have been double the size and extremely convoluted and wordy had F. Scott Fitzgerald’s editor, Max Perkins, not demanded merciless cuts.
Wendy would be honored if Roy asked her to be his reader. But she was a magazine person, used to fitting columns on a page with eye-catching headlines and sexy photographs. Very quickly she would become impatient with herself for not knowing how to shape his pubescent ditherings into a Roy Clarke novel unlike any that had come before, and would take her impatience with herself out on him.
His brilliant young agent was no use to him either. She had gotten married and had two babies since being assigned to Roy and was clever enough to take on fewer and fewer novels and more and more celebrity cookbooks. Roy had recently received a vivacious company email thrillingly announcing the forthcoming Dining In with the Duchess of Cambridge, which would most likely be a gigantic hit.
He stared at his laptop screen, muttering, “A stranger comes to town or a hero goes on a journey,” the old adage adapted from something Tolstoy once said. Isabel, the Bahamas girl, was the stranger. She appears on Mars and needs to hide her gold. Perhaps she’s the daughter of some Elon Musk–type billionaire genius who funded the Mars colonization program, which is now bankrupt. There’s no money to bring anyone back, they’re stranded. Somehow, though, Isabel and the two horny space-station dwellers, Ceran and Bettina (whose names are so annoying they were probably kicked off Earth), figure out how to get themselves and the gold back to Earth, while Ceran, ever the romantic, struggles with being in love with both girls at the same time. Eventually all three return to Isabel’s family compound in the Bahamas to live forever in sin and bliss.
Roy hit return and stared at his screen some more.
He did like teenagers. Shy was endlessly amusing. And so was space, although he really knew nothing about it. He clicked on his search engine and typed in “Life on Mars.”