Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here(48)

When I return, some older man in a suit with purple wine lips is talking my dad’s ear off, and I tune in and out.

“. . . wanted to talk to you about the Observer review because I immediately thought he didn’t get the point about the epigraph. That Tolstoy quote is overused for a reason, you know? In any case, that guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and I heard that your editor at Random House gave his novel a pass, so of course he’s not going to . . .”

I get on the wine line and wait for somebody to stop me. Nobody does. He must be talking about that Tolstoy quote about families, I guess: They’re all f*cked up in their own way, or whatever it is. Meanwhile, that guy is still braying drunkenly from across the bookstore.

“. . . and you know how it is. They really rolled a lot of PR out for this title, and whenever anything is presented as the Next Great American Novel, the critics are going to want to be contrarian. So you got panned in a few major outlets! Who cares? Nobody reads the Washington Post anyway!”

“Sure,” Dad says mildly.

“And yes, naturally some of their thoughts are valid, you know that. It’s a debut. I mean, the daughter character is an issue. . . .”

Dad nods politely.

“But stay strong, buddy! I remember what this is like, and I was a kid when my first novel came out, so at least you’re not a twenty-nine-year-old ‘literary genius,’ you know?”

Jesus, this guy.

“Hey, you want a drink? Let me get you a drink; everything’s gonna be okay. Don’t take it so personally.”

Then he starts talking about Paramount unfairly low-balling Dad on the movie rights—which I had absolutely zero knowledge of, incidentally—and he should really switch agents. Wine in hand, I walk over to them.

“There’s gonna be a movie?” I’m incredulous. “What? That’s insane! How could you not tell me that?”

Dad rolls his eyes. “It’s a circus.”

He doesn’t elaborate.

I hit up the ladies’ room. When I come out of the stall to wash my hands, I find Kira trying to juggle a sleeping Matilda and simultaneously reapply her eyeliner; for once, she’s not effortlessly succeeding. I walk over to her and take Matilda, a soft, warm weight in my arms. Kira looks in the mirror and says nothing, just smiles tersely at me. She places her eyeliner back into the zip pocket of her purse, I hand Matilda back to her, and she walks out of the bathroom.

At this point, maybe from the wine, I start to feel a little nauseous.

But after I leave the bathroom, I go back on the wine line again, and then again, and finally wander over to the display of signed copies of my dad’s book. The daughter character is an issue, I think, fairly tipsy now. I pick one up, running my finger over his signature, a burst of pride washing over me.

I read the blurbs, from writers famous enough that even Dawn has probably heard of them.

A tragicomic roman à clef that may well be the modern answer to Updike’s Rabbit, Run . . . A male protagonist in the vein of Roth and Bellow . . . One man’s emotionally fraught journey from an unhappy marriage and frustrated life to salvation . . .

I turn to the epigraph:

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

I feel a spike of annoyance as I begin flipping through. He couldn’t have picked a more original epigraph?

John had long ago tired of being the only adult in the house, remembering to pick up Sara from school while Kelly forgetfully guzzled a bottle of white wine and sang along to Avril Lavigne.

John watches as Kelly flirtatiously asks the twenty-two-year-old waiter his zodiac sign, then checks out his ass as he walks away.

John wonders why Sara turned out so unlike the cute, sunny teenage girls he’d had crushes on in high school.

John doesn’t understand why Kelly won’t talk to Sara about why she’s stopped eating, the evasive jokes she makes to the many therapists they’ve spent thousands of

John wants to scream at them both about how selfish they

John looks at Sara’s babysitter’s low-cut top and can’t help but notice her

John wishes he could just

John knows

John is

John feels

John feels

John f

Little dots of hurt flash white in front of my eyes. I feel smothered with jazz and the buzzing conversations and one-sided stories and stifling self-congratulation.

If John is being honest with himself, it bothers him that his daughter is the kid at school nobody likes.

I chug the rest of my Solo cup down. I lose count of the times I get back on the wine line.

Kira is kissing my dad goodbye; Matilda has stopped dozing and started getting fussy and needs to go to bed. Kira waves goodbye to me and says I’ll see her at home. I think I say goodbye to her. My dad is talking to more men. I realize there are an equal amount of men and women in this room, but only the men are talking and the women are listening.

“. . . daughter is about to start reading David Foster Wallace, and it makes me want to reread Infinite Jest.” Dad gestures for me to come join the conversation he is having with three plaid-shirted, hip-bespectacled acolytes. I drink the remainder of my thousandth cup of wine, let it roll off my limp, flat palm onto a bookshelf, and walk up behind them. Almost immediately, someone from the publishing house leads Dad away to shake hands with some other people.