Funny You Should Ask(26)

It’s not because it’s the one that went viral, and got me an agent and a book deal. It’s because it was special. Because I made it special.

Nothing since then has come close to feeling as satisfying or triumphant. And even so, that pride I feel at the work has been tempered by the reality of how it’s been received. How I’ve been received.

There’s no denying that my career is intrinsically linked to Gabe’s. To Gabe.

No matter what I do—no matter what I write—that will always be a footnote in my career, if not the footnote.

It makes it hard to know if my pride in that piece is well-earned, or if it just went viral because of its content.

Our drinks arrive and we both stare at my beer.

“It’s okay, really,” he says. “I don’t spend a lot of time at clubs or bars anymore, but I can handle someone having a drink at lunch.”

I take the world’s tiniest sip.

“How has sobriety changed your life?” I ask.

There had been rumors of Gabe’s drinking problem during the filming of Murder on Wheels—his second Bond film—six or seven years ago, but his management had denied and distracted until they couldn’t anymore.

“How hasn’t it?” he asks. “Sobriety—like addiction—informs almost everything I do. When I was deep into my addiction, all I thought about was getting drunk.”

“What did drinking give you?”

“Distance,” he says.

“Distance.”

“It was a way to avoid the things I didn’t want to confront,” he says. “Drinking was a way to pretend that they weren’t happening. A way to escape what I was feeling. My insecurities. My fears. My shame. My inadequacies as an actor. As a person.”

I notice then how still Gabe is. How he’s sitting there, across from me, and not fidgeting, not restlessly moving.

“Sobriety gives me strength,” he says. “The strength to face the things I wanted to hide from.”

“Like your marriage?” I ask.

“Success” was what I’d meant to say. Not marriage. And I definitely hadn’t meant to ask it in that bitter, angry tone.

I didn’t really want to talk about him and Jacinda.

This interview already feels dangerously personal, with Gabe being as vulnerable and open as he is. It makes it hard to be angry at him. But that anger is what’s protecting me. I need it.

“Chani,” Gabe says, and his eyes are so very sad.

But before he can say any more, our food arrives.

He watches me put my fries on my burger and after I’ve taken a bite, swallowed, and glanced back at my notebook looking for another question, he picks up right where we left off.

“I fucked up a lot,” he says. “And my marriage…”

He pauses.

“It was complicated. But I don’t regret it.”

It’s a bit like a boot to the chest, those words.

“Why would you?” I ask, going for breezy. “?‘Jacinda Lockwood is the most beautiful woman in the world.’?”

That had been the headline they gave her when she landed on the cover of Vogue this last spring.

“She was a good friend to me,” Gabe says. “Is a good friend.”

“Mmhmm,” I say, looking down at my notebook, looking for questions that will get us away from this topic.

“What about you?” he asks.

“I didn’t marry Jacinda Lockwood,” I say.

“You did marry the Novelist,” he says.

“Jeremy,” I say.

“?‘The man with his finger on the pulse of modern literature,’?” Gabe says.

It was a pull quote from The New York Times’ review of Jeremy’s first book.

The day he’d heard had been a good day.

It had been a struggle for him to write the book. When I moved to New York, the release date had been pushed out twice and he still barely had a manuscript. This time he had been the one struggling with focus. By that point, I was working consistently and managed to convince Jeremy to stick to a rigid writing schedule in order to get the book done.

He’d resisted at first, but it was successful in the end.

When we heard the news, we’d both been working nonstop—him gearing up for his book’s release and me with an avalanche of projects that I had been happy to have but happier to be done with. We’d taken a day to enjoy the city, spending the morning at the Met and then walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, getting ice cream on the other side. The whole outing, really, had been an attempt to distract from the news that would be coming from Jeremy’s publisher. And it had been there, at the base of the bridge, ice cream melting down my wrist, that Jeremy had learned that The New York Times had loved his book.

We’d shared a kiss that was sticky and jubilant and then, with a smear of my pistachio on his cheek, Jeremy had gotten down on one knee.

“You inspire me,” he’d said. “Every day we’re together, you inspire me. Please, Chani Horowitz, will you be my wife and my muse for the rest of our lives?”

There had been a crowd and when I’d said yes, everyone had applauded. I’d ducked my hot, happy face into Jeremy’s neck while he beamed at Manhattan. We took a cab to Grand Central to eat oysters because it had felt so New York and so glamorous, and we’d walked home, Jeremy telling me that he loved me over and over and over again.