Chapter 5 A Proposition #2
Jack: So you want me to move into your pool house so you won’t be lonely. But you also told me you’d leave me alone to work.
Blair: I will leave you alone. You will go entire days without seeing me. But I’ll know you’re there.
Jack: What difference will that make?
Blair: I will find out what your favorite foods are and deliver them to you.
Jack: Are you kidding me?
Blair: I don’t really do that.
Jack: You don’t kid?
Blair: Not unless I need to in order to get a deal done.
That was strangely compelling. It probably summed up why he liked her in spite of himself.
Jack: Aren’t there much easier ways to accomplish your goal? Actually rent your pool house to a paying tenant, say? One who might actually socialize with you?
Blair: Yeah, but I want you to get your book done.
Jack: Why?
Blair: Because I want to read it. Because the first one cleaved a chasm in my chest, which should have been an unpleasant sensation but somehow wasn’t.
That’s what the best books do. You know what I mean, right?
They must have taught you about that while they weren’t teaching you life skills in your MFA.
Jack: I know what you mean.
It was why he did what he did. In some ways, he and Blair weren’t that different. It was an unsettling thought.
Equally unsettling: he wished they were on FaceTime, despite his misgivings about disturbing their text-enabled truce, so he could hear her voice. See her hazel eyes.
Blair: When I was a girl, I used to spend the summers reading.
I’d read in this giant sycamore tree we had on our estate.
I’d read on one of the porches. I’d read by the pool.
Time went away. I changed up the locale, but where I really was was inside the story.
It was such a powerful feeling, the days stretching on ahead of you with nothing that needed your attention but a good book.
As an adult, you don’t really get to have that feeling, even if you have a great book on hand.
Because you have responsibilities, you know?
But every once in a while I start a book and it gives me that feeling, a flash of that feeling, that sense of urgency combined with…
Blair: I don’t know, combined with comfort, I guess.
Well. Jack was pretty sure he’d never received a better, or more authentic, review. And he knew about flashes. His were less flashes of feeling and more visual things, but he understood what she was saying.
Blair: Basically, I want to read another book from you, so I’ll do what I can to facilitate that.
Jack: Even though I refused to give you the first one for your book club?
Blair: Even though.
Blair: And hey, is the impending winter in Minnesota going to make your back feel any better, or is writing by the pool in the sunshine going to make your back feel better?
Blair: Wait, I retract that last bit.
Jack: Why?
Blair: I think it was a miscalculation. You’re probably a vampire who will die when the sun hits his skin. And dead vampires don’t meet their book deadlines. So no writing by the pool. I’ll install blackout blinds in the pool house.
He laughed out loud into his empty condo, which he suddenly realized was freezing.
Jack had inherited his father’s parsimoniousness when it came to HVAC.
He took a perverse pleasure in postponing turning on the heat each winter until he could no longer stand it.
Even when the heat was on, he turned it way down at night.
It had been an unusually cold autumn. Still, October twentieth was way too early to turn on the heat, especially given that he lived on a high floor in a tall building that retained heat to a degree that inspired glee in the condo’s board members.
Blair was right that he wasn’t a sunshine guy.
He used to be more outdoorsy than he was these days, but even back when he was chaperoning school trips to the Boundary Waters, or further back, when he was a kid spending summers at his dad’s cabin, the outdoors had meant trees.
Shade. Hell, he had spent two months this past summer as an artist in residence at a sleepaway camp in northern Minnesota, and he’d barely seen the sun.
He got up, gym plans abandoned, and walked over to the thermostat. Sixty-seven.
Yeah, he wouldn’t turn on the heat until it got a lot colder than sixty-seven. He shouldn’t be cold at sixty-seven.
Blair: Anyway, no big deal. I just thought maybe a change of scenery might help.
She was backtracking. He didn’t want her to do that.
He couldn’t heat up his condo, but could he move his body somewhere warmer?
People were always asking Jack about his “process.” Depending on the forum, he either made a joke or mumbled something arcane.
The truth was that he didn’t have a process.
With In Time, which he’d written in spurts on evenings and weekends and over summer vacations for the entire nine years he’d been a teacher, his process had been to sit and wait.
For what? It was hard to explain, which was why he never tried when reporters or panel moderators asked.
It had something to do with images, images rising through his consciousness.
His job as a writer was to see these images.
But the rub was that if he tried too hard to look at them directly, they shimmered away, mirages in the desert of his striving.
He had to side-eye them. Get a quick glimpse, then look away.
Hope it was enough for his mind to fill in the rest. Or hope the image would come again someday.
Jack wasn’t particularly woo-woo. Ninety-nine percent of the time, he didn’t find the writing process mystical.
He believed being a writer was a function of being well-read, having command of the English language and its rules, and having enough intellectual wherewithal to imagine the inner lives of fictional people.
That meant having enough patience to wait for those lives to reveal themselves.
That’s what the images were about. They were the reveals he needed for the story.
They were the 1 percent of the process that was woo-woo.
He’d gotten one of those flash images the other day, after texting with Blair. It was what had led to the crappy pages that got leaked—he had never believed that the result of this method was always sound, just that it was the closest thing to a “process” that he had.
He was getting an image now, too. It wasn’t an image from the book, though. At least he didn’t think it was, because he was pretty sure he was in it. Not that he was seeing himself, but it was a first-person view of a scene, which wasn’t the way the flashes usually worked.
It was a first-person view of a swimming pool.
Sunshine. Warmth. Him, on a lounge chair with a computer in his lap.
Definitely not a woo-woo book image, because now he was looking right at it, and it wasn’t slithering away.
Instead of fading, it was getting brighter.
More saturated. The high afternoon sun blazed down on a pool so bright, it was the color of a turquoise ring his mother always wore.
There was a big black bird standing at the water’s edge, its sleek inky feathers made more dramatic against the Barbie Dreamhouse pool background.
Jack’s fingers answered before his brain could override them.
Jack: I’d love to come.