Writers & Lovers - Lily King Page 0,45
‘You have to stop.’
‘I did remember to tell him about my periods and the pain and he said I might be a “candidate” for endometriosis. It affects fertility he said. No treatment, no cure. Which means now I can be terrified equally of getting pregnant and not ever getting pregnant.’ I eat a fry. I can’t eat my burger. ‘How’s the writing?’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t get that damn war to end. Every day I sit down and try to end it and I can’t.’
‘It’s a big war. Two fronts. Not a small task.’
‘I think I’m nervous about that scene.’
‘You mean the lake scene?’
‘Yeah.’ Muriel got the idea for the lake scene before anything else. All the other ideas grew around it. ‘I’m getting all wobbly about it.’
‘You just need to write it out and get it over with.’
‘I don’t know why I feel this way. It’s like performance anxiety or something. What if I can’t get it up?’
‘Your readers will just spoon you and tell you it doesn’t matter in the least and that it happens to everyone.’
‘It’s the whole reason for the book, this scene.’
‘No, it’s not. Maybe it once was, but it’s not anymore. You have to let that go. It isn’t a short story with its one perfect culmination. It’s messy.’
‘Yeah, I know. A novel is a long story with something wrong with it,’ she quotes. It’s a line that gets passed around and attributed to a variety of writers.
‘Just get them down to the lake, and they’ll do what they need to do.’
We always sound confident when we’re talking about the other person’s book.
The small publishing company she works for is sending her to Rome to a conference. For a while she went back and forth about asking Christian to come with her. She says she finally asked him.
‘He said no. He told me on our first date he’d always wanted to go to Italy, and then he says no without even thinking about it.’
‘Why?’ I don’t like the idea of Muriel leaving the country. My stomach gets cold and hollow. People die when they go on trips.
‘He said Italy was for romance, for pleasure, not for some corporate retreat. I told him there was nothing corporate about it. It’s a series of literary roundtables. He said he didn’t want to tag along on my work trip. I told him he was being sexist and rigid.’
‘He wants it to be special. He travels for work all the time.’ Christian is an embedded firmware engineer. I don’t know what that means, but he’s often away for a part of each week.
‘To Detroit and Dallas–Fort Worth.’ She waves her hand. ‘It’s okay. It just makes it clear. I want someone who’s supportive and spontaneous, someone who would leap at a chance like that. That’s not him, so now I know. How’s the rewrite going?’
I’ve been printing the novel out and going through it, trying to pretend I’m someone else, someone who’s just come across it in a bookstore. I make notes all over the manuscript, type the changes into the computer, and print it out again. ‘I’m not sure I can really see it anymore.’
‘Give it to me.’
‘Not yet.’
‘Casey, just let me read it.’
I want to. I want her to read it. But she has stacks of manuscripts all over her apartment not just from work but from every writer she knows asking for her opinion, and she’s too nice to say no.
‘You’ve got to get another set of eyes on it, Case. I’m going to be insulted if you don’t show it to me soon.’
‘Okay.’
‘When?’
‘In a week or two.’
‘Date?’
‘September twenty-fifth.’ It sounds like a long time away.
‘Next Saturday. Okay.’
The twenty-fifth is next Saturday?
We walk back to her place. I tell her a few more details about my date with Oscar that I forgot at lunch. The gouge in his forehead and the X-marks-the-spot moment.
‘It’s freaky,’ she says. ‘It’s like you’re talking about a totally different person than the one on Wednesday nights.’
We go into a shop she loves. The owner is tall like Muriel and all the clothes in there look good on tall women. The dresses are over a hundred dollars, the shirts, even the soft T-shirts, are over fifty. I can’t afford a pair of socks at a place like this. The only nice clothes I have came from my mother. Muriel, flicking through the hangers on the rack, reminds me of my mother. I haven’t seen the similarity before. I don’t know