Can't Look Away(57)
Chapter Twenty-three
Molly
2015
Molly stayed out late with Liz. She hadn’t seen much of her recently, not since the Amagansett share house over the summer. And even on those weekends, Liz had seemed distant and vaguely disappointed in Molly for being back with Jake. She hadn’t said so explicitly, but Molly knew her friend well enough to sense it. What Molly had begun to realize was that Liz didn’t like it when Molly got too happy—it knocked her off balance. Liz was supposed to be the one with the serious live-in boyfriend and steady career; Molly was the struggling writer who fell for duds like Darby and Cameron. Liz relished her role as advice-giver, high up on her perch. She was competitive and calculated at heart, and threatened by Molly’s sudden escalation to her same “place” in life. Liz had followed a certain trajectory and cared deeply about her position on it. She’d invested years in her relationship with Zander before he’d agreed to move in together; Molly and Jake had needed only six months to be ready. Molly finally understood: to Liz, this was a threat.
Jake had picked up on Liz’s MO from the beginning. He didn’t know why Molly put up with her, and frankly, Molly was starting to understand his outlook. But in her heart, she loved Liz and missed her desperately. She missed their nights together, cooking and drinking too much wine, howling with laughter and watching Friends until they couldn’t keep their eyes open. Liz had been Molly’s most devoted friend—her best friend, for a while—and Molly couldn’t just forget the intricacies of their recent, sisterlike closeness. So when Liz had texted asking to meet up, Molly was hesitant, but ultimately eager to see her.
When Molly got back to the apartment, drunk off sangria from Liz’s favorite tapas spot, Jake was already asleep. She sat down on the edge of bed and brushed a lock of hair off his forehead.
“Jake?” she whispered. She wanted him to wake up; she wanted to curl into his body and tell him about her night, but he’d been so exhausted lately, working on the new album, and she knew she should let him sleep.
He was up early the next morning, drinking coffee and writing, when Molly wandered into the living room, a hangover tugging at the back of her brain.
“Hey,” she said, placing a hand on the exposed patch of skin above his shoulder. “Want pancakes?”
He mumbled a reply, something short and incoherent that told Molly he was grouchy, preoccupied.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” His eyes stayed glued to his notebook.
“Don’t you want to hear about dinner with Liz?”
“Right.” Jake didn’t look up from the coffee table. “I do, Moll, but later. I’m swamped right now.”
Jake stayed in a bleak mood all day and the day after that. For the rest of the fall and through the winter, a dark cloud seemed to accompany his presence. A glaze coated his eyes that Molly could only partially penetrate, but she’d seen it before and knew what it signaled: the one-track mind of a tortured artist consumed wholly with his craft.
Things weren’t bad between Molly and Jake—their love was solid after all it had been through—but his sudden, almost ferocious preoccupation with rewriting the new album caused a shift in their dynamic, plucking them out of the dreamy, besotted daze in which they’d been since the summer.
After that they moseyed along hazily and erratically, some days better and others mundane, a fiery fight here and there. A cheerful, cozy fall morphed into a long, desolate winter. Jake was increasingly moody and discouraged, while Molly remained frustrated by the continual lack of movement with her manuscript. Bella had sent Needs out to more than a dozen editors, and while a couple of them had loved it, they’d taken their sweet time to ultimately tell her: not quite enough. She and Bella were back to the drawing board.
“Why don’t you work on your portfolio in the meantime?” Bella suggested over lunch.
“My portfolio?”
“You know, a professional collection of your work. Do some freelance writing for magazines or lit journals. It’s a good way to build up your platform, and the money isn’t always terrible. You must have a few decent contacts.”
Molly didn’t know anyone who worked in magazines except for Nell, an old classmate from undergrad who was in editorial at Cosmopolitan. They’d both been English majors and still saw each other every now and then through their loosely intertwined social circles in the city.
Molly felt as if she’d stripped down naked when she sent the email to Nell explaining that she was working on a novel and looking to do some freelance articles while she revised it. Was Cosmo seeking writers?
That’s how Molly ended up with her byline underneath headlines like “Eight Totally Random Things That Make Men Horny” and “Five Songs You Need to Add to Your Sex Playlist Tonight.”
Jake peered over her shoulder one afternoon while she was working.
“We don’t have a sex playlist.” He frowned.
“I know.” Molly closed her laptop. She didn’t like it when Jake read her stuff before it was finished.
“So why are you writing about sex playlists?”
“They’re all assignments, Jake. I don’t choose the topics.” Molly felt tense, edgy. At the root of it, she was embarrassed to be writing articles about vibrators and sex positions, but Cosmo paid well—fifty cents a word—and she needed the money. She’d pitched ideas for pieces she actually wanted to write to outlets like Vogue and Slate and The New Yorker, but never heard back from any of them. She’d submitted her favorite chapter of Needs as a short story to a number of literary journals. Crickets.