Writers & Lovers(50)

He starts talking about the last Wednesday-night workshop he went to. ‘Muriel read this section of her novel, and I swear no one was breathing by the end. Not even Oscar.’ Every time he says Oscar’s name I feel an unpleasant zap.

‘You okay?’ he says.

‘Yeah. Just a bit tired. How’re your vegetables?’ I ask.

‘Good,’ he says, but he hasn’t eaten much, either.

After dinner we walk to the T stop. Neither of us suggests anything more to prolong the date. I follow him down the steps and through the turnstiles. I’m headed inbound and he’s going out. We stand where our sets of stairs break off to separate tracks. Here? This is where I tell him? This is where we talk? A group of teenagers rush by us, yelling at each other. A train rattles through a tunnel. I want him to kiss me. If I talk about Oscar, he won’t kiss me.

‘I better get this.’ He bats me lightly on the arm. ‘See you.’ He takes the stairs two at a time and makes it through the doors before they close.

I guess there was no need to say anything after all.





My first rejection letter arrives.

‘We don’t feel it’s the right fit for us,’ it says.

‘That agent didn’t read it,’ Muriel says. ‘His assistant or intern read it. That’s why it says “we” and not “I.”’ We’re at her apartment. She’s made me a lovely sandwich, but I can’t eat it. My appetite is dwindling, along with sleep. ‘When someone actually reads it, it will be a different story.’

I can’t speak, and she gets up and hugs me. ‘You are going to sell that fucker. I promise you.’

I need to sell it. I need more money. A guy named Derek Spike from EdFund has gotten my work number and spoken to Marcus about seizing a portion of my wages. Marcus hung up on him. ‘Those dicks. They made my sister’s life hell. I was smart not to go to college.’

I’m starting to think he was right.

Adam wants to increase my rent. We’re standing in the yard beneath the big maple, its last leaves dropping like rain. I ask if I could have until the new year at the old rate.

‘What makes you think you’ll be able to afford it then?’

‘I finished my novel.’

‘And?’

‘I sent it out to agents and if—’

He knocks his head back and laughs hard.

I call Caleb and rant. ‘Your friend lives in a fucking mansion and drives a fucking Mercedes-Benz, but he has to suddenly raise my rent?’

‘He has strains of his own, Case.’ He and Phil and Adam were in a different orbit, with their houses and their salaries. ‘Divorce is a financial apocalypse. Phil says he’s lucky it’s illegal for us to marry because I would have fleeced him by now. Probably true. Adam says he could get a lot more for that apartment.’

‘It’s a room, not an apartment. A moldy room.’ I’m touching the lump under my arm. I can’t tell if it’s getting bigger. It might be. If it’s cancer, I won’t have to pay anyone anything. I’ll move back in with Caleb and Phil, ruin their lives for a year or two, and die.

‘Still. It’s a tight market in Boston.’ When I don’t respond, he says, ‘You there?’

‘Just stroking my lump.’

‘Casey. Phil says it’s most likely nothing.’

Caleb must have called Adam, because he meets me at the door the next morning when I come in for the dog.

‘Could we talk?’ he says and points to the kitchen table. We sit. Oafie walks in circles around us, waiting for me to get free. I’m thinking he’s reconsidered the rent hike. Instead he tells me he’s decided to divide his property and sell the garage and the yard to the far side of it. He’s evicting me.

‘When?’

‘We’re going to list it in three weeks. You don’t have to clean or anything. Whoever buys it will tear it down. It’s the land they’ll be looking at.’





Silas leaves me a message, then another, and I don’t call back. I’ve made my choice. I’m done with the seesaw, the hot and cold, the guys who don’t know or can’t tell you what they want. I’m done with kissing that melts your bones followed by ten days of silence followed by a fucking pat on the arm at the T stop.

Oscar’s boys have a day off from school, and he invites me over for lunch. It smells delicious. He’s making grilled cheese sandwiches. The boys are drawing at the table.

I’ve spent the last few days reading Oscar’s books: his first novel, a collection of short stories, and Thunder Road, which is the story of a boy in the late fifties, losing his mother to cancer in the course of five days. It’s told from a many-years-hence perspective, when the boy is grown and has sons of his own. The sentences are pristine and careful. The arc of the story is clear and controlled, with a swell of emotion at the end that he’s withheld and we’ve been waiting for. There’s a sadness that surprises me, not in the plot, which of course is about loss, but a sadness within the prose separate from content that I find in all his work—in his first novel, which was billed as comic, and in all the short stories. It’s a sense of despair about writing itself, a sort of throwing up of hands, as if to say I’ll put this down on the page but it’s not what I really mean because what I really mean cannot be put into words. It creates a sort of drag on the narrative. I looked up some reviews on microfiche to see if anyone else has commented on it. They have not. The early reviews I read were all positive, young writer with great promise and a bold future sort of thing. And for Thunder Road they were glowing and grateful. At long last. Silent for nine years. The novel we’ve been waiting for.