Writers & Lovers(35)

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 how Muriel affords clothing like this or her pretty one-bedroom in Porter Square. I don’t know how everyone else is getting by, paying their bills and sleeping through the night.

She doesn’t try anything on and when we’re back on the street, she says, ‘Have you read his books yet?’

‘Not yet.’

‘How can you not have read them?’

‘It will mess with me. It’ll sway me one way or the other. It always does.’

‘But it’s important information.’

‘Is it? It’s so easy to get the guy and the writing confused.’ If Oscar made clay pots I wouldn’t care. I could look at his pots and love them or hate them and it would have no bearing on how I felt about him. I wish I could feel as neutral about writing as I do about clay pots.

‘Don’t you want to at least read the sex scenes?’

‘No!’

‘He likes to write about sex.’

‘Stop.’

‘Can I just tell you this one thing about his sex scenes?’

I can tell she’s been saving this for a while. ‘No. Okay. One thing.’

‘He always uses the word “sour.” ’

‘Sour?’

‘It’s just something I’ve noticed. Usually pertaining to the woman: sour breath, sour skin. Something is always sour. It’s like a tic he has.’

She is laughing hard at the expression on my face.





Oscar meets me after my Friday night shift. His mother is spending the night so he can sneak out of the house when I’m free. She made a carrot cake for dessert, and he brings a big slice. We share it as we walk down Mass. Ave. It’s delicious. When we’re done and he balls the cellophane in his pocket, he takes my hand. He has a plump, warm hand.

‘My mother is very nervous about this. She thinks you’re going to break my heart.’ He laughs like it’s an absurd idea and kisses me. I smile while we’re kissing, thinking about telling Muriel later that we both tasted sour because of the lemon in the frosting, and he feels me smile and smiles wider.

I like kissing Oscar. He breaks it up with things that come into his head, a student he had with twelve fingers, Jasper biting him hard on the thigh during John’s T-ball game that afternoon. There isn’t that feeling you get with some guys, like they’re barreling toward one place and one place only and seeing how fast they can get there without complication or too much conversation.