Chapter 4 Nate
Something happens in the days that follow. I’m not sure how to pinpoint the shift, but all of a sudden, I’m able to write. It’s like a door that was jammed is busted open, and words rush through it like a biblical flood.
I get up early and walk out to a picnic table overlooking the water, the glow of my laptop illuminating the space around me like a force field until the sun comes up. I get into this very calm, zen space in the solitude of the morning. The crickets in the grass arrange a private symphony for me with the waves that crash against the rocks along the perimeter of the retreat center. I do this every day for the five remaining days of the residency. With the stress of my seminar gone and the four days of workshop over, I am merely a participant here, and somehow this unlocks my creative juices. I write for three hours each morning, from 4:30 until 7:30, when the scent of bacon wafts out of the kitchen and mixes with salt air in the atmosphere of my outdoor office. I pack up my things and drop them in my room, then head out for a run to digest the morning’s work. Come back, shower, grab breakfast, and because I only have to lead a workshop for the first half of the residency (after which point, the students are placed in a second workshop with a different faculty member), I find myself free for another three hours from 9:00 a.m. to noon.
So I write some more.
I manage to cram almost fifteen thousand words into five days of writing, and I realize, Alice Devereaux be damned, I love this place.
In the afternoons, I host an office hour so that I can be interviewed by students as a possible mentor choice for the semester. It feels a little bit like what I would imagine speed dating to be like. They come in, sit down, ask me a bunch of questions off a list, and decide whether we would “be a good fit,” which is funny to me in that it should really be mutual, but evidently I am just the writing equivalent of a piece of meat at the butcher shop.
On the last day of the residency, a hilarious if tragic thing happens. Mentor choices, which have the entire student body in a tizzy, are posted on the whiteboard during breakfast, so as soon as the clock strikes 9:30 a.m., students and faculty are welcome to go and check out who they’ve been assigned to. The expectation is that once you know who your mentor is, you’ll seek them out prior to the end of the day (which is abbreviated so that folks have time to ferry over to the mainland to catch connecting flights or pick up their cars and drive to wherever they hail from). Students are to, at the very least, exchange personal contact info with their mentors or—best-case scenario—they should come up with a semester plan.
So I’m walking to the North Wind building at around 9:15 a.m. on this final day, as faculty are allowed fifteen minutes of whiteboard time prior to it being available for students, and who’s barreling down the hall toward me but my favorite student, CJ. (She hates that I’ve persisted with this nickname, but it suits her and makes her laugh, and she’s the only person besides Dillon who I actually like here, so CJ it is.) Lucy has just finished writing out all the mentor pairings—a lofty assignment as there are seventy-four students to match—and is en route to the dining room to inform folks that the board is available for viewing. This leaves me standing there, alone, with a bewildered and frazzled CJ.
“I overslept,” she whines. “I never oversleep.” There’s panic in her eyes as she searches the board. Her full name is written under Dillon Norway. “Oh my gosh!” she exclaims. “I got paired with Dillon Norway!”
“That’s great,” I say. “He’s awesome. I think he’ll be a really good mentor for you.”
“He was my top choice,” she confesses. “No offense.”
“None taken.”
“Who’d you get?” she asks, scanning. “Oof.” Her face drops. “I don’t know these two”—she points—“but you got Tim and Gurt.” Her face turns solemn. “You’re going to learn a lot about hamsters and passive-aggressive behavior this semester, I guess.”
I grin. “Yup. I’m actually eager to hear about what an awful roommate you are. I have no doubt that Gurt will provide me with endless stories about you.”
She swats my arm. “You stop that,” she chides me. “Listen, I’ve got to get something in my stomach before workshop. I’ll catch you in a little bit.”
“You got it,” I say.
Then CJ spins around so quickly that her massive backpack sweeps against the whiteboard, taking at least a third of the names with it. She looks over her shoulder in horror. “Oh, shit,” she seethes.
I die laughing. I can’t help it. “Go,” I tell her in an exaggerated whisper. “Hurry—before anyone sees!”
“Everyone’s going to be so mad at me,” she cries.
“Nobody has to know,” I insist. “Just go. Your secret’s safe with me. You go to the dining hall, and I’ll go out the other door. It’ll be fine. But get a move on!” I shoo her out the door, tears forming in my eyes from giggling like a child.
Poor CJ leaves, her small frame speed waddling like a third-trimester penguin under the weight of her gargantuan pack, now marred with the scandalous evidence of red dry-erase ink that will hopefully go unnoticed. Like a salmon swimming upstream, I watch her enter the dining hall just as the rest of the student body spills out onto the walkway to come find out who they’re assigned to work with for the semester.
I duck into Room B to hide and hold in my hysterical guffaws as I listen to the wails of students who cannot locate their names in the red-streaked mess.
For some reason, this lunacy is a major highlight of the whole residency for me.
Later on, after the whiteboard is corrected and I’ve had the distinct displeasure of meeting with Gurt (who looks like she could beat me in an arm wrestle), I board one of three vans headed to the 3:00 p.m. Block Island ferry. Of course, I’m stuck with Maggie, who’s inappropriate undersized T-shirt boasts the line Books make me touch my shelf. She gives me her phone number as I unload my bag at the dock, and I’m so caught off guard by it that I ask, “Do you give rides on the mainland as well?”
“Sugar,” she replies. “I’ll give you a ride wherever you like.”
My face turns beet red, and I shove the slip of paper with her phone number on it deep into the pocket of my jeans. “Um, ’kay. Thanks,” I say and promptly hightail it onto the ferry.
The boat ride is a bit surreal, as the small interior cabin is jam-packed with students and faculty, many of whom are napping, some who are quietly chatting in pairs, and others, like me, who’ve tuned out the noise with AirPods. I see CJ reading a book several rows to my right, and when she looks over and smiles at me, I shoot her a wink and try not to chuckle at the memory of her whiteboard mishap from this morning.
The ferry is not quite as nice as the one that I’ve taken out of Orient Point, on the northern tip of Long Island, across the sound to Connecticut, with connecting buses to the casinos there. That ferry accepted cars and was a nice way to avoid all of the I-95 traffic if one was trying to escape the city for a weekend. I don’t have a car (don’t need one in Manhattan), but the Hampton Jitney offered a nice straight run from Midtown out to the ferry on Friday afternoons and back home again on Sundays.
That ferry was Avery’s favorite. I used to tease her that she had a gambling problem, but really she only played the penny slots at Mohegan Sun (although she could sit there for hours if I let her). We only did that trip twice in our two and a half years together. The first trip was good, but the second one catapulted us toward our inevitable demise.
Avery and I met back in my old copyediting days. We worked together at the magazine; she was the assistant to the editor in chief, and our paths crossed weekly during Friday staff meetings. We caught eyes once, and she asked me what my favorite kind of breakfast pastry was as I was doctoring my coffee. Bear claws magically appeared on the danish tray the following week, and when I asked her out, she said yes.
Our relationship was fun at first. I mean, all relationships are usually pretty fun at the beginning, right? I’d say it became a little strained at about the one-year mark. Two things happened then: (1) I started the visits with my grandfather, as he was on the decline, and (2) we celebrated our one-year anniversary, and she began throwing out hints about wanting a ring. I was twenty-seven at the time though, and an engagement was the furthest thing from my radar.
I’d spend my days at work, and we fell into a pretty comfortable routine—we’d have lunch together in the break room on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and she’d stay at my place on Friday and Saturday nights. On Wednesdays, we would grab dinner somewhere near her apartment on the West Side (which she shared with two roommates, thus, we never spent the night there), and on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, I would fly solo to visit with my grandfather. I liked our routine. I’m a fan of schedules. But after that one-year mark, she wanted to switch it up and be together more often, and there just wasn’t a whole lot of extra time. I used Monday nights to write, since at the time I was beginning to take the stories my grandpa would share with me and build them into a novel, and the deeper he descended into oblivion, the more important and sacred our time together felt. So I certainly wasn’t willing to give up my Tuesdays or Thursdays.
Avery called me a workaholic; she said I didn’t know how to let loose and have fun. I told her I wanted to find a literary agent because my novel was really shaping up to be interesting, and I wanted to see if I could sell it. She said I was too ambitious. She was the maid of honor in her older sister’s wedding and recounted every single detail to me, swooning over nonsense like party favors or seven different blue fabric swatches. (“Who cares about the difference between teal, aqua, and turquoise?” I made the mistake of asking. In response, she didn’t speak to me for two days.) On more than one occasion after sex, she snuggled up to my chest and whispered her ring size in my ear.
Her birthday came, and I took her to Mohegan Sun for the weekend. She had a blast: we went out to a fancy steak house where the waiters sang “Happy Birthday” while a sparkler spit out tiny bits of fire over her molten lava cake, I sent her to the spa for a facial and a pedicure, and she spent upward of four hours and $300 playing slots. Yet somehow, at the end of the weekend, she was pissed at me because nowhere in there did a diamond ring present itself.
I finished my novel after my grandfather passed away and began to submit it to literary agents. Avery felt like I was wasting precious time writing query letters and researching agency trends on Query Tracker when I could have been spending what little savings I had on our future together. I got some full-manuscript requests, and every time I’d share my excitement with her, she’d respond by reminding me that most authors can’t make a living writing without a solid day job and that being so busy would really cut into my ability to be a good father to our potential 2.5 children. (To which I responded with silence, because by this point, it just made more sense to stay quiet than to argue with her. Plus, I could tell that our days were numbered, even if I didn’t necessarily want to admit it.)
When I got signed by Trina Richards from Table of Contents Literary Agency, I was over-the-moon excited. To celebrate, I booked a surprise trip for Avery and me to go back to Mohegan Sun. I thought it would be fun. I planned us a big night at that same steak house that she liked so much, and between the main course and dessert, I told her I had big news. Her eyes got wide, and she gazed at me with weighty anticipation.
I should have seen it coming.
I should have known she was expecting a proposal.
I shouldn’t have been shocked when, after sharing my big news, she got up and left the table to cry in the ladies’ room after screeching, “That’s what you wanted to tell me?”
The ferry ride home that weekend was awkward, to say the least.
Even more uncomfortable was the email she sent me almost two years later, a few months into the pandemic, once news of my book was all over Yahoo and my name was in everyone’s mouth.
Hi Nate!it read. I know it’s been a long time, but I just wanted to check in with you and tell you how totally psyched I am for you about your book. I always knew you’d be a big deal. Xoxo, Avery
PS—We should get together sometime. You’re welcome in my pod if you want.
Hard not to remember that story anytime I get on a ferry now. She was my last girlfriend—and that was over five years ago. It’s not that I haven’t been with anyone since then; I’ve just been a lot more careful not to inadvertently lead anyone on. Plus, I started to find that the more people learned about me, the more attractive I became to women, especially when it came to the dollars attached to my film option and subsequent second book deal. To be clear, I’m not saying that all women are gold diggers. I’ve just been a little hard-pressed to find a woman who isn’t asking about my net worth by the third date.
When I look over at CJ, with her nose buried in that thick YA paperback, I consider what she shared in my seminar. I haven’t met many women who put their professional ambitions ahead of their relationships. I wonder if she would feel the same way if her ex-boyfriend hadn’t married her sister. I feel something tug at me, annoying me in the same way a tiny piece of gravel might if it landed inside my shoe during a hike.
Dillon’s lucky he gets to work with her this semester.
When the boat docks, I see the jitney parked in a bus lane. We line up to disembark from the ferry, and I pop out an earbud as I move next to CJ. “What’s the next leg of your journey?” I ask.
She nods at the long-term parking lot. “Just a drive. It’s only about two hours, so it’s not that bad.”
“You live on Long Island?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Queens.”
“Cool. I’m on the jitney back to the city,” I reply. “You should come in for one of my events sometime.”
CJ smiles. “Maybe.”
“Are you on social media?”
“Nope. That’s a time suck,” she says as the crowd inches forward.
“True,” I agree. “Well, I can have my publicist add you to my mailing list if you want. I have your email from workshop.”
She shrugs. “Sure.”
“So then maybe I’ll see you before the next residency.”
CJ grins, and her nose wriggles, showcasing a sprinkle of freckles. “Perhaps. But if not, I wish you a happy Halloween, happy Thanksgiving, happy Hanukkah, merry Christmas, and happy Kwanzaa. And anything else you might celebrate.”
“Thanks. And yes, all of those things to you as well.”
She reaches out to shake my hand, like she did when we first met. “Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you,” she offers.
I slide my hand around hers, noticing its dry warmth. “It was great meeting you this week,” I say, meaning it.
“You too,” she replies. “Have a great semester.”
Then she whacks me in the stomach with her backpack as she turns to leave the boat, and all I can do is laugh.