Chapter 15 MARCEL
Chapter 15
M ARCEL
Marcel was so used to doing his own thing that he found it hard to adjust to Siobhan’s presence. She was always there, all the time; she had invaded his space and altered his routine. His living room had turned into something resembling one of those coworking offices for startup entrepreneurs in SoHo, with shared access to premium services like the bathroom—his bathroom—and the coffee machine—his coffee machine. And if that weren’t enough, the princess was noisy.
“For crying out loud! Could you please turn down the volume or use headphones? It’s bad enough having to tolerate your abysmal taste in music without putting my aural health in jeopardy!” he shouted one day from his study.
To which Siobhan replied:
“Sorry, I didn’t know you were, like, sixty! And there’s nothing wrong with my taste in music! For your information, Maroon 5 have evolved a lot since ‘Moves Like Jagger’!”
Another thing that riled him: she didn’t keep her phone on silent, and the notifications never frickin’ stopped. How could she care so much about her likes and mentions on Twitter when the real magic was happening right there, on her computer screen? He would never understand this dependency on clicks. And her habit of constantly interrupting him with trivial matters like:
“Where can I charge my laptop? My battery is running low.”
Or:
“You’re out of milk. Do you have a preference? Whole? Skim? Organic? Soy? Oat? I’m asking because I’m going to go and buy a carton. And I was thinking, we should set up a shared kitty for that kind of expense, you know.”
Or:
“Why do you print the chapter double-spaced and on one side only? You don’t need to waste all that paper. Think of all the forests you could save.”
And without doubt, the worst of all:
“Why is my book buried under the sofa cushions?”
Shit.
Rule number one in the crime writer’s handbook: the criminal must always get rid of the murder weapon. Leaving it behind at the scene of the crime is not an acceptable option unless you’re a rookie or a second-rate author.
Since he wasn’t about to admit to having spent his money and a fair amount of time on a romance novel, his only options were to take advantage of his constitutional right not to incriminate himself by invoking the Fifth Amendment, or play dumb. He went for the second.
“I don’t have the faintest idea how that got there.”
The start of the most irritatingly triumphant smile appeared on Siobhan’s lips, the kind of arrogant shyster smile that tends to follow a “No more questions, Your Honor” when you know you’ve won the case. She wasn’t buying it, clearly, although Marcel was skillful enough to divert the focus back to where he would rather it stayed.
“How the hell do you expect me to concentrate if you won’t stop interrupting me with your horseshit?”
The situation forced him to make the drastic decision to move Siobhan into his own study, where at least he could keep an eye on her, and, using his prerogative as the more experienced author of the two, he imposed four unbreakable rules:
1) No music
2) No cell phone
3) No talking
4) No moving around
“Can I use the bathroom, or is that forbidden too?”
He didn’t even bother to hide his amusement as he replied:
“You can. As long as you don’t call on me to pass you the toilet paper.”
Siobhan tutted.
“You’re about as fun as a pimple on the ass, Mr. Black.”
The new dynamic only half worked. Marcel couldn’t have imagined that spending an average of six hours a day in front of her would end up distracting him even more. The fact that she sat on the other side of his desk—so close that every time he stretched his legs they grazed against hers—was exciting and agonizing in equal measure. Sometimes, he found himself watching her over the top of his screen. He counted her freckles. He studied her gestures. The way she absentmindedly twisted a lock of hair around the index finger of her left hand as she stared pensively at the ceiling. The way she narrowed her eyes when an idea was floating around her and suddenly opened them wide to trap it. Instead of keeping his eyes trained on his own screen, he was spending his time watching her. Siobhan caught him on one occasion, and he couldn’t help feeling like a creepy voyeur; it was humiliating. The worst thing was her scent, that striking fragrance of freshly cut coconut. She smelled like a summer’s day, warm, wild, and full of promise. Her perfume hovered in the air even after she had gone and hovered over him all night, disturbing his sleep. But it wasn’t just that. There was something about her that had wormed its way into his brain and all his senses.
Be careful, Marcel. Be very careful.
The days and weeks flew past. Over time, working with Siobhan didn’t seem so bad. And he was no longer annoyed by her presence, not even when she hummed those stupid Top 40 songs or appeared every morning with a bag of freshly baked bagels and an enthusiastic smile that should be illegal at that hour. He discovered he enjoyed her company, more than he was prepared to admit. And he also discovered, despite his best efforts to ignore it, that a vortex of loneliness sucked him in when she left. He blamed it on those brief moments when it felt like they were really connecting. They say there’s a way of getting to everyone, even the most impenetrable character; it’s just a question of working out how. Perhaps the way to get to Marcel was through a passion for writing. And perhaps Siobhan had stumbled upon the secret. Being a writer isn’t like having an office job that you forget about as soon as you turn off the computer. Writing requires a destructive mental detachment: being simultaneously in the world and outside it. You might say it’s like decompression in diving. You don’t surface quickly after a deep dive; you do it gradually. Sometimes, you get to a place where you feel too vulnerable to leave the waters of fiction. Other times, you don’t want to get out. It’s a matter of ego, pure and simple; after all, that world down there is yours, you’ve created it, and you govern it. That’s why writing is so addictive. The other side of the coin is a constant feeling of isolation. Of course, it was different now. There was someone diving by his side, someone having the same experience with the same obsessive intensity. Someone with whom he could stay submerged a while longer, in spite of the world and its biorhythms.
And it wasn’t all bad.
“You know what? I’ve figured something out. For authors, writing is both the illness and the cure,” Siobhan said to him on one occasion.
In that moment, Marcel thought perhaps they weren’t so different after all. Except that he had gotten used to living with that duality, and she was just discovering it.
“Not for authors,” he corrected her. “For us. Plural.”
Siobhan bit her lower lip, hiding a smile.
“You know, you’re generally kinda obnoxious, but sometimes you’re normal.”
“I’m not normal, princess. I’m a fucking genius.”
“And do you grant wishes too?”
“ Genius , not genie . And it depends how you rub my lamp,” he replied, winking mischievously.
That shared passion allowed them to progress extraordinarily quickly and reach the halfway point of fifty thousand words by the end of July. Without killing each other, which was an achievement. It seemed that the worst was over, although it hadn’t exactly been a bed of roses. Marcel was implacable in the face of Siobhan’s campaign to soften the story’s violent tone.
“But why do you have to get rid of Felicity’s police officer friend?” she asked him one day. “Isn’t one corpse enough? God, it’s depressing.”
“Do I try to tell you how much kissing there should be? No, right? So, why the hell are you encroaching on my territory? It would be nice if you could stop arguing about every little thing for a change.”
“Ha! As if you don’t do the same to me.”
“Only because you know nothing about crime novels.” He took off his glasses and held them up to the light. “I mean, wanting Felicity to open a double-locked armored door just like that!” he said, cleaning the lenses on his shirttails. “As if she’s Houdini’s daughter.”
“Now that you mention it, you don’t have the faintest idea what’s expected of a romance novel. To start with, you describe Jeremiah far too vaguely. He has to be more ... attractive. A gentleman who’ll make an impression on the readers from the moment he appears. Like Henry Cavill.”
“That side of beef? You must be kidding.”
“I’m warning you, Mr. Black: don’t mess with Henry, or you’ll have me to deal with.”
Marcel threw his head back as if he had just been punched. Then he raised his hands in surrender and, trying to contain his laughter, asked:
“Since when is it essential to the plot for the protagonist to be handsome?”
“Handsome, tall, strong, and . . .”
“And white, of course. I get it.”
Siobhan furrowed her brow.
“Why do you say that? William J. Knox is white too.”
“But no one knows his creator is Black.”
“Wait, wait. Don’t tell me your secret identity is for racial reasons.” She sounded surprised. “That’s absurd, Marcel. It’s the twenty-first century. Our previous president was a person of color.”
“So what? The United States is still the most racist country in the world. Have you ever put up with more from a Black man than you ever would from a white man out of fear of offending him? That’s what will happen if they discover who I am. People would be condescending toward me and my work. You can bet your life on it.”
It was a rehearsed speech, a narrative devised for his own convenience to avoid the truth.
But there was no reason for her to know that.
They got into the habit of working in a comfortable silence with frequent interruptions. When she was tired, Siobhan would get up from her chair to stretch and walk around the study, scanning the shelves.
“There are so many books here I’ve never read,” she commented one day. “I’ve never even heard of most of them. Would you lend me some? I promise to return them in a reasonable amount of time. I’m not the kind of monster who doesn’t return books.”
“Take all you want. Although I should warn you, you won’t find any sugar or happy endings in my collection, princess.”
“I’m not looking for happy endings, just ... other perspectives.”
He liked her answer.
It was as though a door had opened to reveal another Siobhan, one that was far more open-minded than the image he had formed of her in his head.
Sometimes, it was Marcel who broke their working rhythm. Like when he kept sighing, and Siobhan eventually had to ask what the problem was.
“Just something I can’t resolve. Nothing’s flowing. You have no idea of the battle I’m waging with this lousy paragraph,” he said as he drummed his fingers on the desk.
“Perhaps a fresh pair of eyes ...,” she suggested tentatively, as though fearing the idea that her assistance might be offensive.
And, to be fair, that would have been the case a month earlier.
“Sure. Take a look. I’d like to hear what you think,” he said.
Their working days grew longer, peppered with conversations that were never simple, no matter how straightforward they seemed. One night, as Siobhan was gathering her things, Marcel asked her, with a casualness that was unusual in him, whether she would like to stay for dinner. And just as casually, she said she’d love to. Maybe she was just tired and hungry. Or perhaps there was more to it. They ordered Thai food, opened a bottle of wine, and sat on the balcony facing one another. It was hot, and the city lights flickered against the dark backdrop.
“Manhattan at night is one of the most stunning sights in the world,” Siobhan remarked.
“I agree.”
She put her hand on his forehead to see if he was feverish.
“You must be ill.”
Marcel laughed.
That night, as they dug into their food, he discovered a lot about Siobhan Harris. Things he had already sensed. For example, that she came from a close family, that she was raised in Mount Vernon, and that Paige and Lena were her rock. He tried not to reveal too much. He limited himself to the obvious facts: he was from New Orleans—as if his accent hadn’t already given him away—he’d been living in New York for more than fifteen years, Alex was his only real friend, Bob Gunton was an unscrupulous bastard with a tendency to infantilize authors, and Baxter Books was typical of the ecosystem of penny-pinching and power games in any large publishing company.
“Did you say fifteen years? So you weren’t in NOLA during Katrina?”
Something churned in his gut. The air left his lungs momentarily.
“Well, no,” he admitted, disconcerted. “But in 1992, when Andrew devastated southern Louisiana, my sister and I saw the cyclone tear up a thirty-foot oak tree from the backyard in a matter of seconds, right in front of us.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister.”
“Why would you know?”
“Fair enough. I’d forgotten you were the hermetic man who never explains anything. Okay then, why New York?”
“I wanted to start from scratch. Where better than this city?”
When, after a brief silence, Siobhan continued asking about the reasons for his anonymity, Marcel limited himself to quoting Ovid.
“ Bene qui latuit bene vixit . One who lives well lives unnoticed.”
“Even so ... the world has a right to know the author of Marcel Black’s novels, and you have a right to be recognized.”
“I’m not doing this for recognition, Siobhan. I do it because it’s the only thing I know how to do. For me, writing has never been entertainment; it’s total commitment. And, anyway, the truth is always disappointing. More wine?”
Siobhan nodded, and Marcel filled her glass. Perhaps he had said too much. Not that he had revealed all his secrets—far from it—but he had hinted that he had some, which was reckless for him. Yet, there was something about this girl with her sparkling eyes and generous laugh that made him lower his guard. Not enough to answer certain uncomfortable questions, but enough to allow her to glimpse the difference between Marcel Dupont, the man, and Marcel Black, the writer.
He noticed her grimacing slightly whenever she picked up her glass.
“Your hand hurts, right? Between the thumb and wrist?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Oh, I know that feeling well. The tendons get inflamed when you spend a long time pounding away at the keyboard. You should try to stretch before and after each session to prevent chronic pain. Let me show you.”
Marcel took her hand and exerted a light pressure on her knuckles with his fingers. And suddenly ... boom! Something warm darted across his skin.
Adrenaline.
Fear.
Revelations.
“This might be a bit uncomfortable, but you’ll feel better afterward,” he said, maintaining the pressure.
The atmosphere had suddenly changed. It had become intimate. He could feel it. His voice sounded hoarser than usual. Siobhan raised her eyes and looked at him as though seeing him for the first time, with a glint in her blue irises.
“Okay,” she whispered, clearly agitated.
“Okay,” he repeated like an idiot.
He couldn’t avert his gaze from hers or let go of her hand. They stayed like that for a long time as the tension grew around them, coiling like a spring. Everywhere else, life was carrying on as usual, but on that balcony in Manhattan, time seemed to stand still. There’s something strange about touching someone’s hands, even more profound than sex. It’s as though you could reach someone’s soul through the thousands of nerve endings in the fingertips. Something suddenly sparked in his chest, and all at once his entire body was ablaze. Marcel thought he heard violins playing somewhere, but perhaps he had imagined it.
And only then, when he had realized the magnitude of the problem, was he able to release her hand.