31
More days of waiting.
“Waiting isn’t wasted time. It’s the golden thread that weaves desire,” Tess declared, her voice pitched like she was performing for an invisible audience. “If you win him quickly, you’ll have a man. If you make him wait, you’ll have an obsession.”
At that point, though, we were the obsessed ones.
Would Ryder really take the bait and invite us both to his Florida show? Or would he just crumple Tess’s reply into a ball, sink it in the trash can like an NBA veteran, and move on with his life?
Too many variables. Way too many.
He could’ve received it high out of his mind, lost in one of his so-called creative trances, the letter dissolving into the chaos of a hotel suite “destroyed for inspiration.” Or, even if it somehow reached his hands, it might get swallowed by a memory already shredded by powders and liquids of questionable origin.
And even if he read it sober, there was always the “post-night-with-a-supermodel” scenario: wake up, reassess, and realize maybe it wasn’t worth his time to chase a Brooklyn girl who’d never done anything remotely epic.
In short… the odds weren’t exactly stacked in our favor.
I laid out every possibility to Tess like a lawyer presenting damning evidence.
“Stop contaminating my seductive aura with your doubts,” Tess snapped.
“It’ll be fine. The emotional blow he got that night was so violent it already shifted the course of his life.
Didn’t you notice? Maybe it’s imperceptible now…
It’s like a straight line stretching toward infinity suddenly veering off by 0.
01%. At first you can’t tell the difference, but weeks, months, years later—he’s in a completely different destination than if he’d stayed the course.
Honestly, Bea, you really didn’t see it?
After just one evening of hints—and that’s all it was, I never even said anything—he did the rest. And now, just to earn my respect, he’s already trying to change his entire musical style. ”
“He said he was already working on a Mirov-inspired album.”
Tess burst out laughing, wild and sharp.
“And you believed him? Really? Okay, okay… let’s say for argument’s sake he was dabbling with Mirov influences.
But the point is: after that night here, he went back to his hotel and pushed harder, worked to make that shift even stronger.
For me! Just to win my admiration. And the proof is right there—he sent me the record and asked for my opinion! ”
“Your opinion… you, who knows nothing about music.”
“Exactly!” Tess cackled. “E-xactly! Without even lifting a finger, I’m already pushing the highest-paid musician in the world—Forbes said so last year!
—into copying a washed-up jazz player from the sixties.
Do you get what that 0.01% deviation means?
I can already see it: a year from now—assuming I haven’t dumped him yet—his new album bombs.
Total flop. And he’s a humiliated man, once obsessed with me and his music…
and by then, his obsession will be only me. ”
“Jesus, Tess. That’s evil. You don’t even sound like yourself.”
Her face hardened in an instant. “Every seduction is a siege: it’s not enough to get inside—you raze everything to the ground.”
Days of waiting.
Days of tinkering with the opening chapters of my novel: a trim here, a merge there.
Add a comma, delete a comma. Then I stopped, afraid I was sanding down too much of the first draft’s heat.
Okay, maybe it wouldn’t be perfect—but at least it would be alive, with a heartbeat pulsing between the lines.
Better a messy, beating novel than a flawless little assignment, a cold exercise in style.
Of course I wrote a whole chapter about those waiting days: Tess gearing up for her little Florida trip, coming home with sunscreen, wide-brimmed hats, and sarongs—though naturally, all of it in some kind of gothic-Victorian palette.
One night she shut herself in her room. I stationed myself outside, notebook in hand, ear pressed to the door so I could jot down the lines from the manual she was reciting aloud, intoning each one like she had a secretary in there taking dictation.
“Smile rarely. And when you do, make him doubt whether he’s earned it.”
“Don’t seek love. Seek unrest.”
“Ask a profound question. Then leave the room before the answer.”
“Genius fears the ordinary. Show yourself as prophecy, not routine.”
“Read poetry out loud. Even if you don’t understand it. Especially if you don’t understand it.”
Days of waiting.
Days of red X’s marking the countdown on the calendar.
Less than two weeks left before rent was due, and I already knew the deposit from my parents wasn’t coming this time. Poor things—they’d been more than patient. They’d given me two whole years of breathing room to “get established in the city,” find a real job, build an actual adult life.
But I’d used that time for something else entirely: escaping my little provincial town and throwing myself headfirst into the big city, convinced it would welcome me like a favorite daughter, ready to feed me stories—stories of triumphs and failures.
Two years! That had seemed more than enough for someone with my supposed potential.
Instead, the stories slipped through my fingers like oily fish, leaving me empty-handed.
Worse, I was unwittingly contributing to the city’s growing archive of failures.
My provisional biography, if I’d had to write it right then, would’ve had more tragicomic chapters than triumphant ones—a collection of botched attempts and half-baked endings.
The kind of thing the city loves to watch… but never rewards.
One afternoon, while I was hunting for a halfway decent synonym for “manipulation,” Tess burst into my room like a lieutenant colonel doing a surprise inspection of hopeless recruits’ bunks.
“Okay!” she announced, no preamble. “This has officially become a matter of life and death!”
I swiveled slowly in my chair. “Ryder finally wrote back?”
“No. Ryder’s got nothing to do with it. ”
“And what else could possibly matter right now?”
“Chad.”
“Oh, right… the whole reason behind this circus.”
“I went out looking for Lev Mirov’s old house in Queens.
But it wasn’t like—like the Louis Armstrong House Museum or anything.
Nope. Just regular people living there. Nobody’s even heard of Lev Mirov.
Anyway, that’s not the point. On the way back, I remembered the banana milkshake I never got to drink the day Chad dumped me. Remember?”
“How could I forget?”
“So I told myself, Fine, I’ll have that milkshake on my own.
Because last time I didn’t even get a sip.
And who cares if I’d made a scene—this diner makes the best banana milkshake in New York.
They probably wouldn’t even recognize me now, not with my new style.
You remember the bit about ninety percent of a person’s recognizability… ”
“…comes from body language. Yeah.”
“Exactly. So I walked in. And who was sitting there with a strawberry milkshake?”
“Chad.”
“No—Chad doesn’t drink milkshakes. He drinks Pepsi. But yeah, he was there. With her. And she was drinking the milkshake. Strawberry.”
“ She who? ”
“Medusa.”
“Medusa was drinking milkshakes with Chad.”
“She’s gorgeous, Bea. You should see her. Emerald-green eyes, a storm of dark curls. I honestly don’t know how Chad landed a woman like that—maybe he’s spiking the milkshakes—but whatever. Point is, I walk in and they see me immediately.”
“So much for that magic ten percent…”
“She looked at me like she already knew my entire life story—or at least Chad’s version of it.
That I’m intense, boring, frigid, psychotic…
plus the scene I’d pulled that day. We locked eyes, and I swear I felt petrified.
Me, Bea! Protégé of la Contessa élo?se de Saint-Rouge!
I had a lapse, a little crisis of confidence, maybe from all this waiting…
and instead of being gloriously diva as usual, I got distracted.
And before I could come up with a sharp comeback—not too bitter, not too meek—I walked straight into a six-foot aluminum magazine rack. ”
“Oh no.”
“It toppled like the Tower of Babel. The second I hit it, I knew it was going down. I tried to grab it, but it was dragging me down with it, so I let go. When it hit the floor it was deafening, like someone unloading a machine gun. Newspapers and magazines flew everywhere, and the rack rolled three, four feet before stopping against a table. ”
“I told you not to go back to that diner.”
“Everyone stared. I was just standing there, a total idiot, my glasses crooked on my nose. The other customers politely pretended nothing had happened, and thank God for that. But Chad and Medusa? Oh, they were definitely laughing into their drinks.”
“Does the manual say anything about handling public humiliation?”
Tess shook her head, taking the question dead seriously when I’d only meant to joke.
“The manual says: be present in the world. Be here and now. But I saw Chad with her, and the wound reopened. I got distracted—and it was fatal. Think about it, Bea: I abandoned la Contessa’s teachings for a fraction of a second, and look what happened. ”
“So what now?”
“What happened was like throwing a barrel of gasoline onto an already burning house. I’m even angrier now—and more motivated.”
“And if Ryder never reaches out again?”
“He has to. He will.”
“And if he doesn’t? Do you have a plan B?”
“There is no plan B, Bea. We’re talking about laws of nature here.
If you’re planning to launch a rocket, you don’t prepare a backup in case the sun decides to rise in the west. What I’ve done to his brain means he will get in touch, and soon.
It’s physics. It’s anatomy. It’s math. You smash someone’s finger with a hammer—they feel pain. ”
Right then, the doorbell rang.