6. Adrian
— ? —
Adrian
Two weeks out from the launch, my life has narrowed to the size of Wyatt’s calendar, and I have started to mistake motion for living.
The days blur.
There’s a radio interview in a studio off Sunset where they keep the air conditioning at a temperature designed for corpses, and a photo call on a rooftop in West Hollywood with the whole flat glittering city laid out behind me while a stranger tells me to look “thoughtful but approachable,” and a lunch meeting in Malibu where the Pacific does its endless bright thing past the glass and I don’t taste a single bite of a forty-dollar piece of fish.
I sign things. I answer the same questions about my process that I have answered a hundred times, and I answer them like they’re fresh, because that’s the job now, being fresh about the thing you’ve already said.
Underneath all of it, quiet and constant, I miss my wife.
I miss her the way you miss sleep when you’re running on adrenaline and caffeine and the momentum of a thing going right.
You know, somewhere in the back of your skull, that you are accumulating a debt. You know you’ll have to pay it. But you’re moving too fast to stop, and the not-stopping feels so much like strength that you mistake it for being fine.
I tell myself I’ll catch up on her after. That’s the phrase I use, in my own head, like she’s a season of television.
After the launch. After the launch I’ll take her somewhere. After the launch I’ll sleep for a week with her head on my chest and read her the boring parts of the book she’s too polite to say are boring. After the launch, I’ll be a husband again.
Right now I’m a product, and products don’t get to have wives, they get to have schedules.
There’s one memory that keeps surfacing, though, no matter how full the days get, and it surfaces at the worst times, in the backs of cars, in the pause before I fall asleep.
The night she leaned in to kiss me, and I turned my head.
I think about it now, in the back of a town car crawling down the 405 in traffic that has no beginning and no end, and the thing tightens in my chest the way it always does.
Because what she doesn’t know, because I never said it. I’d been fighting an illness for days.
A cough sitting low in my chest, my throat raw, that scraped feeling you get right before a real fever moves in.
The launch was two weeks out and I could not afford to be sick, and more than that, I could not afford to make her sick, to hand my wife a fever right before the busiest stretch of both our lives.
So when she leaned in, when I felt her come toward me warm and wanting on that couch, I turned my head. Not because I didn’t want her.
God, that’s the part that guts me when I let it. I wanted her so much in that second that turning away felt like a physical act, a wrench, my whole body arguing with the decision.
But I turned, and her mouth caught my jaw instead of my mouth, and I said a few tired words about a car at five, and I meant to explain. I did, I had the words half-built. I’m coming down with a bug, I don’t want to give it to you, let me just get through this week and I’m yours.
Then she said “Sure,” in that flat even voice she uses when she’s decided not to make a thing of a thing, and she got up and walked to the bedroom, and the moment quietly shut itself, and I let it.
I let it, because explaining felt like more than I had left in me that night, and because I told myself she understood.
She always understands.
That has been the load-bearing assumption of my entire marriage.
Brooke understands. Brooke reads me better than my editor reads my sentences. Whatever I fail to say, she fills in correctly, because she always has.
I don’t let myself sit with the possibility that a person can only fill in the blanks for so long before she starts filling them in with the truth.
“You’re doing the face again,” Wyatt says.
We’re in his car this time, headed to a bookstore event in Los Feliz, the independent kind with good coffee and a staff that will pretend not to be starstruck. Wyatt drives with the loose confidence of a man who has never once doubted he belongs wherever he’s going.
“What face?”
“The one where you’re a thousand miles away composing a paragraph.
You’ve been doing it all week.” He changes lanes without signaling, very LA of him.
“Save it for the page, Ashbourne. Right now I need you present. This crowd tonight is exactly your reader, literary, a little pretentious, the kind who’ll buy the hardcover and the tote bag. ”
“I’m present.”
“You’re not, but you fake it beautifully, which is honestly ninety percent of this job.” He grins. “The numbers, though. Have you seen today’s numbers?”
“You know I don’t look.”
“You should look. Just once, just to feel it.” He pulls up a screen at a red light and turns it toward me, and there they are, the graphs pointing the direction graphs are supposed to point in dreams. “That’s you.
That’s what happens when the whole city decides you’re the thing. Enjoy it. You earned it.”
I look at the numbers because he wants me to, and they are, objectively, extraordinary.
I feel the flat clean satisfaction I always feel, the professional pride, and under it, very faint, a small unease I can’t name and don’t examine, because we’re pulling up to the bookstore and there’s a line down the block and it’s showtime.
Here is what I don’t do. I don’t scroll past the numbers into the comments, I never have.
There’s a rule I made for myself years ago, back when the first book came out and a single cruel review lived rent-free in my head for a month.
Don’t read what strangers say about you. It’s poison either way, the praise makes you soft and the cruelty makes you brittle, so I stay out of it entirely. I look at the graphs Wyatt shows me and nothing else.
Which means whatever the city is doing with my face this month, I’m the last to know it.
From where I stand, the promo with Layla is clean and efficient and pleasant.
She’s professional. She’s good at this, better than I am, she knows how to hold for a camera and turn a phrase for a crowd. We do the appearances, we say the lines, we sell the book. That’s all it is from the inside. A colleague and a job.
If there’s a version of it out there that looks like more than that, I wouldn’t see it, because I’ve built my whole life around not looking.
To me it’s a spreadsheet. Numbers going the right direction, a book finding its readers, a job being done well. That’s the story I’m in.
But I did notice Brooke has gone quiet, in these weeks. I want to be honest about that, because it would be easier to say I noticed nothing. I noticed.
She talks less at dinner, the nights I make dinner. She’s stopped asking about my day with that particular lean-in she used to have, the one where she’d prop her chin on her hand and actually want the answer.
There was a stretch, early on, where she’d wait up just to hear how a scene landed, and I’d come home and find her on the couch with a page of mine in her lap and three notes already in the margin.
I can’t remember the last time she left me a note.
I notice that too, distantly, the way you notice a clock has stopped only when you go to check the time.
It’s as if it’s the steady, uncomplaining presence she has been since the day she moved into my life and started fixing my sentences. Brooke is quiet the way a foundation is quiet. It holds the whole house up and never once asks to be thanked.
That’s what I tell myself, in the car, on the way to sell my book to a room full of people who think they know me.
She’s just being steady.
She’s just being Brooke.
I walk into that bookstore under a marquee with my name on it, in a city that has decided to love me this month, and I feel like a man who has everything handled.
***
The bookstore event runs long, the way the good ones do, and by the time Wyatt drops me at the building it’s after eleven and the lobby guy gives me the nod he gives men who come home at hours their wives have stopped waiting up for.
The penthouse is dark and quiet when I let myself in. One light on over the stove, the way she leaves it, a small yellow square in all that black glass with the city spread out cold and bright below. And on the counter, under a plate she’s set over it to keep the dust off, is dinner.
She made dinner.
I stand there in my coat and look at it, and I feel a flicker of warmth that a smarter man would have followed all the way to its source.
She cooked. For me. Some pasta thing, gone cold now, the sauce set, a single place cleared at the counter with a fork laid across a folded napkin. She waited, and then she stopped waiting, and she covered my plate so it would be there when I finally came home.
I eat it standing up.
I don’t sit at the place she set, I don’t heat it. I peel off the plate cover and eat cold pasta over the counter with one hand while I scroll through emails on my phone with the other, answering Priyanka about a line edit, confirming a car for the morning.
The food is good. Even cold, it’s good, because she’s a better cook than I deserve, and I register that in the same flat way I register the launch numbers, a fact about my good fortune that I do not connect to the woman asleep down the hall.
I’m rinsing the plate when I think of the house.
The dream house, I mean.
The one she described on the terrace, that night that feels like a year ago, back before the whole world decided it needed me.
The kitchen big enough to bake in. The garden with the tomatoes.
The reading nook by the good afternoon light where “somebody” could ruin his eyes over a manuscript.
I remember telling her to build it. I remember meaning it, in that easy way you mean things when the meaning costs you nothing yet.