Chapter 11
Natalie was standing in her kitchen, eyes fixed on the broken burner on her stove—the one that her landlord had been promising and failing to fix for months—when Gabby rang the bell.
In a normal kitchen, one broken burner wouldn’t be that big of a deal. How often did you use all four at the same time? But Natalie still lived in the same crappy apartment she’d moved into right after college, an apartment in which everything was a little too small. That included the stovetop: a two-burner unit on top of a half-sized oven. Two burners were fine when you were twenty-two and subsisting on ramen packets, a person without standards. But somehow the years had passed, and her apartment had stayed small and her life had too.
Now, she opened the door to Gabby, who smiled and held out a bottle of wine. “Hey! Sorry I’m late, the trains were so backed up.” She walked in and hung her jacket carefully in the small closet by the door, just as she’d done when she lived here.
“Thanks for coming. I was thinking maybe we do a fun one-pot meal? Rice and beans?”
“Sure,” Gabby said, bending down to rummage in her bag. “I also brought some veggies I can start sautéing.”
“Great. Um, we’ll just have to do it in stages,” Nat said, her cheeks flushing. “Because one of the burners isn’t working.”
Gabby straightened up and squinted at the stove. Her eyes flitted around the rest of the living room / kitchen, as if she’d forgotten just how small and shabby it was. Or maybe she hadn’t registered the size and shabbiness before because she’d been used to it, but now that she and Angus lived in a two-bedroom in a luxury apartment building (with a roof deck and a gym!), she couldn’t see anything else. Natalie and Gabby had tried, ever since the wedding, to have a good long talk at least once a week, either in person or over the phone. Mostly, Natalie came to Gabby, or they met at a restaurant in the middle, but this week she’d felt too sad and broke to go anywhere else, so Gabby had invited herself over. Here she was, a local girl made good returning to her shitty hometown, feeling utterly relieved she’d gotten out.
Natalie couldn’t help seeing the place through Gabby’s eyes: The tiny rickety table. The peeling paint up by the ceiling. A pipe in the corner began to clank, as it liked to do at random intervals, including in the middle of the night.
“No need for the veggies,” Gabby said, settling herself down at the table and opening up the wine bottle. “A one-pot meal sounds wonderful.”
Natalie began to chop an especially large onion with a dull knife, wincing as she tried to cut the whole thing in half. She paused and rubbed her wrist. A few weeks ago, she’d tripped up the apartment steps on her way home from a late-night catering event (she was exhausted, not drunk, at least not that night). She’d used her wrist to break her fall, and it hadn’t felt right ever since. But she was off her mother’s health insurance now that she was twenty-eight, and since none of her part-time jobs gave her benefits, the only plan she could afford was a basic emergency version. It would come in handy if, say, she was run over by a taxi, but made less-urgent care seem out of reach. A doctor’s visit would probably cost her a few hundred dollars, only for them to give her the same recommendations she could get from WebMD—wrap it in an Ace bandage, take some Tylenol, try to be gentle with it.
She recommenced onion-chopping more gingerly, glancing over at Gabby to see if she’d noticed. She had not.
Natalie could feel the walls of this place closing in on her. She needed to get out. But moving was expensive. Once she got this new book deal and the first chunk of her advance came through, then she could get on StreetEasy and make some changes. As Natalie sautéed the onions and Gabby began to chat about the latest annoying stunt that her work nemesis had pulled, Natalie reached over to her phone on the counter and checked her email. Still no word from her agent.
“Hello?” Gabby asked.
“Sorry, I am listening, I promise.”
“No offense, my love, but you look like a zombie. What’s going on?”
Nat sighed. “It’s just been a stressful few weeks, waiting around for these editors to get back to me about the new book.”
“Mm,” Gabby said, her tone sympathetic. “I’m sure someone will come through soon.”
“Yeah. They have to. I mean, I got a deal for Apartment 2F, and I know this one is better.” She shot a look at Gabby. “You’re welcome to read it, if you want.”
Gabby made a noncommittal noise, a little door inside of her seeming to slam shut. Rob’s face, during the wedding reception, flashed into Natalie’s mind, a familiar and annoying intrusion.
In the year and change since that night, Natalie had tried a few times to delicately feel Gabby out on the subject of Apartment 2F, and each time, Gabby had closed herself off. Maybe Rob’s horrible barb had been true. Or maybe Gabby just felt embarrassed that she hadn’t gotten back to reading, and that was why she was so weird about it! If the latter, Natalie certainly didn’t want to start apologizing and bring up a whole unnecessary mess.
Because, yes, she could admit to herself that Angus had provided her with a certain inspiration. How could he not have? In the thick of her writing process, he was always either sweeping Gabby away for another celebratory engagement dinner (At what point did you stop celebrating? He was really milking it.) or joining them in the apartment (“Girl talk time!” he’d say, settling himself on the sofa like he belonged there). Her resentment of him was top of mind, along with her sadness that Gabby was abandoning her, leaving up searches for luxury apartments on her computer screen as if each one wasn’t a dagger in Natalie’s heart.
Natalie had channeled it all. And the writing had swept her up so fully that she’d never stopped to think about other people actually reading it. She’d thrown in details to disguise the portrayal, but during the revision process, it felt impossible to make bigger changes to Dennis without doing fundamental damage to the whole book itself. Besides, it wasn’t that obvious, was it? And people understood the nature of fiction!
“The new one is super different from Apartment 2F,” Natalie said to Gabby now. “I think writing about a woman during the suffrage movement allowed me to get outside my own head and experiences, you know? Think about bigger issues?”
Again, Gabby made that noncommittal noise. Back in college, she and Natalie would occasionally proclaim their dorm room an “artists’ den.” They’d turn off their phones for a whole afternoon, light some candles, and Gabby would paint while Natalie wrote. To-do lists melted away. Hours flew by. And when they finally yanked themselves back to the real world, Gabby always demanded to read whatever Natalie had been working on. She declared to all their friends that Nat was her favorite author. Was she not going to read any of Natalie’s work going forward, slowly but surely unraveling another one of the ties that bound them to each other?
Tonight, her wrist aching and her anxiety spiking, Natalie couldn’t move on like she had every other time this had happened. She put down the spatula and braced herself.
“Speaking of Apartment 2F,” Natalie began, and Gabby started concentrating very hard on pouring them both glasses of wine. “You do know that it’s all fiction, right? I hope you don’t feel strange about it.”
Gabby sighed, setting the bottle down on the table a little too hard. “Look, I started reading and it was good. Really good. But it did hit a little close to home, so I put it down. I talked to my therapist about it, actually. We agreed that maybe it’s best for our relationship if I cheer you on but don’t finish reading, at least not for a while. Is that okay?”
Natalie forced a smile, even as her heart cracked at the knowledge that Rob had been right. “Of course. You should do what you need to do.”
If your best friend was a doctor, you didn’t need to watch her perform an open-heart surgery in order to love her. Nat didn’t attend Gabby’s marketing pitches, so why should Gabby have to read her books?
And yet. She couldn’t stop herself from feeling like her writing was more than a career to her. That it was like she’d invited Gabby to her wedding, and Gabby had sent a gift but not bothered to attend the ceremony. But she knew that was childish, so she turned and reflexively checked her email again. Still nothing.
“How many times have you checked that today?” Gabby asked.
“Five hundred and twenty-two. Roughly.”
“Oh, Nat. Things are really hard right now, huh?”
Gabby looked at her with such concern, her face so familiar and comforting that Natalie couldn’t stop herself from leaning forward and grabbing her best friend’s hands, a hope seizing her.
“Maybe we could go away, just the two of us. Nothing fancy. Take the train out to your parents’ house for a couple nights and explore the beaches of Long Island. Or, I don’t know, borrow a tent from someone and camp?” Time together, quality time, could help fix everything: Nat’s current anxiety, this weirdness between them over Apartment 2F. She needed her best friend.
Gabby looked down at their hands, frowning. Nat wasn’t so much grabbing as holding on for dear life. “Work has been nuts, and I already took off for Angus’s weekend away, so I don’t know if…”
“Right. Just a thought.” Natalie let go and stepped back, turning toward the stovetop, unable to stop her shoulders from slumping.
Behind her, Gabby let out a soft sigh, then said in a bright voice, “You should come to the cabin with us this weekend.”
Natalie paused. “For Angus’s special trip? I can’t intrude like that.”
Gabby waved a hand through the air. “You know him. The more the merrier. He wants other people to come. That’s why he rented such a nice place. Well, that, and I think he wanted to celebrate by throwing around some of his signing bonus, which, when I saw the amount, I was like ‘This is obscene,’ but I guess that’s the finance world for you.”
Don’t be jealous, Natalie told herself, biting down on the envy that rose up in her throat. You don’t want to work in finance. The money would not be worth the misery. She’d have to develop some extremely expensive hobby to make her life worth living—tasting thousand-dollar bottles of Scotch, getting into sailing—but now, she worked on her life’s purpose / career in every hour outside of her money jobs, and she had no time for expensive hobbies, so maybe the finances all evened out anyway. And you certainly don’t want to be married to a finance bro, especially not one like Angus.
“Anyways, it’s already all paid for, so you could come for free,” Gabby said. “You just might have to share a bed with my sister.”
“Melinda and I are old pros at room-sharing. I didn’t realize that she and Angus had gotten close.”
“They haven’t, particularly. But she invited herself along as soon as she heard about it.”
“Of course she did.” Natalie laughed. It felt unfamiliar as it came out. Had it really been that long since she’d laughed that the act of it felt foreign to her? All the anxious waiting lately had sucked the joy, the color, out of her life. She was living a sepia-toned existence. Maybe this wouldn’t be the uninterrupted alone time with Gabby that she craved, but it would be far, far better than sitting here in her apartment. “Okay, yes, I’m in. Thank you so much.”
“Yay! This will be fun.” Gabby began to type furiously into her phone. “I’m telling Angus that you’re coming too.” She sent the text and, almost immediately, the phone dinged with a response. “He says, ‘Excellent,’ with five exclamation points.”
“That’s kind of him.”
“Forwarding you the email with all the details now. You can hitch a ride with us.”
As Gabby kept chatting about how much fun they were going to have, Natalie pulled up the email, her mind whirring ahead to visions of herself rejuvenating, revitalizing. Emerging from a swim in the lake dripping with water and newfound peace. Serenely sipping a glass of wine as the sun set. Having a heart-to-heart with Gabby. Making a group dinner on a stove with more than one fucking burner. Not even thinking about the fate of her new book for a brief shining weekend.
Gabby, as per usual, had loaded up the email with details. Nat began to skim them, then stopped, her eyes skipping back up to the email’s recipients. Angus. Melinda. And Rob Kapinsky. She strove to keep her face blank as her mind whirred.
No. Shit. No.Natalie still hadn’t told Gabby that Rob was her sworn enemy, because that would require explaining exactly why. She had a feeling that Rob had never told Angus either (which she supposed was decent of him—he was loyal but not a tattletale). Their best friends were blissfully unaware of the roiling hatred between their former best man and maid of honor, and it was probably best to keep it that way.
So she should tell Gabby that she’d just checked her calendar and had some unmovable conflict. Anything to avoid being stuck in a house with Rob, especially after her most recent contact with him.
Now, a month after that late night at her computer, she couldn’t believe that she had given him the upper hand. How idiotic, how impulsive of her.
She’d finished revising her second book, burnishing and polishing until it shone so bright she thought that anyone who saw it would want it. She’d written with a fire under her ass: the sooner she finished this book, the sooner she could move to the next stage of her life. She’d researched the suffrage movement for untold numbers of hours. She’d turned down a promotion to management at her catering company because it would have interfered. She’d given up offers of vacations with Shay and Becks, passed on parties and events, even at one point fasted for a day to understand the hunger pangs her protagonist experienced in jail. (She was Method Writing.) And yet when her agent had sent it out to the editor with whom she’d worked on Apartment 2F, they’d waited and waited only to get a rejection email—not even the decency of a phone call!—about how they were so sorry, but due to budget cuts and the fact that her first novel had underperformed, they could not take this one on.
She’d gone out with a couple of friends and gotten stupendously drunk. And when she came back and stumbled up the stairs to her apartment, Rob’s name had flashed in her mind. Because Rob was the turning point on her first novel. Everything had been hope and possibility until he’d made her ashamed of her book, hadn’t it? He’d given her that one-star rating, and then others had started to trickle in, reviews delighting in their own cruelty, perhaps feeling like Rob’s one star lit their way, encouraging a race to the bottom, and then the reviews had largely stopped. Rob’s face kept appearing in her mind when she doubted her talents now, all her negative self-talk taking the form of one annoyingly handsome man who smirked in satisfaction that she’d gotten what she deserved.
It struck her then that she should write him an email. So she copied his address from a group message that Angus had sent and started a new one, attaching her latest draft.
What’s your opinion of this one, oh arbiter of great literature and all that is morally right in the world? I dare you to tell me that it’s not a step forward!
(To be completely honest, the actual email included many more typos.) Before she could think better of it, she clicked send.
Then she went and fell asleep on the living room floor. Forty-five minutes later she jolted awake, filled with a sense of nameless unease, like a heroine in a horror movie investigating a strange sound in her basement.
Cursing under her breath, she sprinted to her computer, ignoring her pounding head, and read her email again. Oh, it was bad. So bad that she wished she could go investigate a murder basement, because being chainsawed to death seemed more appealing than the idea of Rob opening her message.
Okay, how could she undo this? Was there any world in which Angus might know Rob’s Gmail password, and Nat could use it to log in and delete her message before he saw it? Maybe Angus and Rob shared a Netflix account, and Rob was one of those people who used the same password for everything.
No, no way Rob was one of those people. He probably had a unique and hacker-proof password for every website he’d ever visited.
Shit. She gaped at the email, her face burning and her brain exploding, then quickly typed, Whoops, meant to send this to someone else, please delete!
Only after sending that did she realize that her excuse didn’t make any sense, and perhaps made the entire thing even more embarrassing. (Who else would she have been sending that email to? How would she accidentally send it to Rob when she had never before emailed him in her life?)
Mercifully, he had never responded. But the act of pretending that her emails had never happened would be much more difficult if they went on vacation together.
Speaking of emails, she clicked back to her inbox and refreshed it. Still nothing from her agent, Iman. Of course not. It was eight p.m. and Iman had a life. Nat and Iman had put together a list of other editors at other companies. Maybe this rejection was a blessing in disguise, Iman had said, an opportunity for Nat to find a new home that would cherish and support her more. And yet, slowly but steadily, the rejections from all those potential new homes had rolled in. Not the right fit or My list is too full, and I can only take on the rare projects that I absolutely love.
But still, Natalie was waiting on three. Three editors who were potentially interested and just needed some time to think it over or bring it to their higher-ups for approval. Three editors who had promised to get back to Nat and Iman very soon.
Natalie refreshed her inbox again. Fuck. She needed this weekend. How often did she get offered an all-expenses-paid trip to the Poconos with her best friend? Never. Nat hadn’t really had a vacation in years.
“So, we’ll pick you up at four?” Gabby asked.
Screw it. She could stay out of Rob’s way, right? Awkwardness be damned, she was going to dip herself in a lake.
“Can’t wait,” Natalie said.