20. Adrian
— ? —
Adrian
The thing nobody tells you about getting the good version of a life is how loud it is at seven in the morning.
Brooke is enormous now, gloriously, defiantly enormous, and she has opinions about it at high volume before tea, and she is currently standing in the kitchen of the apartment we rent while our real house gets built, wearing one of my shirts because none of hers fit, glaring at a jar of pickles she can’t open.
“Give it here,” I say.
“I can open my own pickles, Adrian.”
“You have been fighting that jar for four minutes. I’ve timed it. There’s a spreadsheet.”
“There is not a spreadsheet.”
“There’s a mental spreadsheet.” I hold out my hand. She glares at me, glares at the jar, and then slaps it into my palm with the fury of a woman conceding a war, and I open it on the first try, which is a mistake, because now I have to live with the consequences.
“I loosened it,” she says.
“You absolutely loosened it.”
“Don’t patronize me, I’m growing an entire person, I’m allowed to lose to a jar.” She takes it back and fishes out a pickle and points it at me. “You’re enjoying this too much. The domesticity. You’ve got a look.”
“I have a look because my wife is standing in my kitchen in my shirt eating pickles at seven in the morning and complaining about a jar, and a year ago I would have missed all of it, I’d have been on a call, and now I get to be here, and yeah, Brooke, I’ve got a look.
I’m going to have the look for the rest of my life. You should get used to the look.”
She rolls her eyes, but her mouth does the thing, the soft thing at the corner she can’t help anymore, and she comes around the counter and lets me put my hand on the enormous curve of her and feel our daughter kick the inside of her ribs like she’s trying to file a complaint.
For a second neither of us says anything, we just stand there in the loud ordinary morning being disgustingly, unglamorously happy, and I think that this is the thing I almost threw away for a room full of strangers clapping.
We’re not fixed. I want to be honest about that, because I promised her honesty and I’m keeping it, the way I keep everything now.
We still have the bad days. She still, sometimes, gets quiet in a way that makes my stomach drop until I remember to actually ask instead of assuming, and I still, sometimes, catch myself reaching for the old reflex, the retreat into work, the comfortable distance.
The difference is we catch it now. We say it out loud. Two people paying attention on purpose, which is unglamorous and constant and the best thing I’ve ever done.
“So,” she says, around the pickle. “Tonight.”
“Tonight.”
“You nervous?”
“Terrified.”
“Good. You should be.” She grins. “It’s a big deal, your first real book. The honest one.” Then, softer, “The good one.”
“You’ve read it.”
“I’ve read it four times, Adrian, I photographed the entire thing off your passenger seat like a criminal, we’ve established this.
” She sets the pickle down. “It’s the best thing you’ve ever written.
And you know how I know? Because there’s no showing off in it.
It’s just true. It’s the first thing you ever wrote that wasn’t trying to make anybody clap. ”
She pokes me in the chest. “Don’t ruin that tonight by being weird about it.”
“I’m going to be extremely weird about it.”
“I know. I’ve made peace with it.”
***
The launch is nothing like the last one.
That’s the entire point, and I built it that way on purpose, brick by brick, the exact opposite of the machine that ate my marriage.
A few rows of seats in a small warm bookstore downtown, the kind with creaking floors and a cat that lives in the poetry section.
No step-and-repeat. No press line. No sponsors, no signage, no carefully managed guest list of people who are useful.
Priyanka fought me on all of it, gently, the way she fights me on everything, and then she read the dedication and stopped fighting me and just made it happen.
The people here tonight are not useful. That’s how I chose them.
They’re the people who were there in the dark part, when I was a man nobody should have rooted for and a handful of people rooted for me anyway.
My mother, in the second row, pretending she isn’t emotional and failing.
Laura beside her, who taught me to cook her daughter’s childhood in a small warm kitchen and decided, somewhere over the sofrito, not to hit me with a door.
Gemma, who threatened my life in a hospital hallway and has since appointed herself the baby’s most dangerous aunt.
And Brooke.
Brooke is in the front row, in a dress she picked herself, deep green, the color of a decision, and she is not invisible in the back of this room, she is the first thing you see when you walk in, because I arranged the entire evening around being able to see her from the stage. That was my only real requirement.
Priyanka could have the venue, the date, the list, all of it.
But I told her, the last time I stood up at one of these, my wife was standing in the back in the dark and I never once looked for her, and this time I need to be able to find her without looking.
Put her where I can see her. Everything else you can have.
So there she is. Front row. Radiant and mine, one hand resting on our daughter, watching me with an expression I spent two years too blind to earn.
Gemma leans over and whispers a joke to her, and Brooke laughs, that real laugh, the one that used to be aimed at me across a table during dawn, back when we were nobody, and the sound of it carries over the small warm room, and my hands, which have been steady all day, pick that exact moment to start shaking.
Because I know why they’re shaking. I know exactly why.
The last time I stood up in front of a room to talk about a book, my wife was invisible in the back of it, and I walked out of that night with the wrong woman on my arm and never even knew Brooke was there.
Tonight she’s in the front row, and I’m about to try to say, out loud, in front of everyone who matters, the thing I spent our whole marriage failing to say.
Priyanka introduces me, warm and brief, and there’s applause, the small real kind from a small real room, and I walk up to the little podium with my hands shaking and a copy of my own book in them.
I look out at the roomful of people who came to a bookstore on a Tuesday night, and then I look at the front row, and I find her without looking, exactly like I promised myself I would, and the shaking gets worse and better at the same time.
“Thank you for coming,” I say.
“I’m going to be honest with you, because it’s the only thing this book knows how to be, and I’m out of practice at everything else.
The last time I stood up at one of these, I gave a very smooth speech.
I’d rehearsed it. It was charming. And it was, front to back, a lie, a beautiful lie about a book that wasn’t mine, dressed up by people who were very good at dressing things up, and I stood up there and I performed it and everyone clapped, and it cost me the only thing I’ve ever actually cared about.
” I have to stop for a second. “So I’m not going to be smooth tonight. Bear with me.”
There’s a soft laugh from the room, kind, and I keep going.
“This book is about a man who has everything and can’t see any of it.
I know how that sounds. I wrote it anyway, because it’s true, and because I was that man, and the only way I know how to apologize for being him is to tell the truth about him without flinching.
” I turn a page in the copy I’m holding, not to read it, just to have somewhere to put my hands.
“There’s no muse in this one. Some of you know there was supposed to be a muse in the last one.
There isn’t one here, because I finally understand that I never needed a muse. I had an editor.”
And I look at her.
“There’s a woman who read every single thing I ever wrote, from the very first terrible draft of the very first book nobody bought, back when I was just a guy with a laptop and a coffee habit and no reason for anyone to believe in me.
And she read all of it, and she left notes in the margins in blue pen, and the notes were never kind, because she didn’t love me by being kind, she loved me by being right.
She once looked at a sentence that won me a literary award and told me, to my face, that it was three adjectives in a row describing a chair, and she was correct, it was, it is, I’ve never been able to unsee it. ”
The room laughs, and I hear one laugh over all of them, wet and helpless from the front row, and I don’t look yet, because if I look too soon I won’t finish.
“For years, her notes made everything I wrote better, and I let myself believe the work was mine. And then I stopped hearing from her. The margins went quiet. And I was so busy being admired that I didn’t even notice the single most important voice in my life had stopped speaking, until she was gone, and I was standing in the wreckage of everything holding a book full of blank margins, understanding far too late that the notes were never criticism.
They were the truest love letters anyone ever wrote me, and I threw every one of them away, because I mistook being adored by strangers for being known by the one person who actually saw me. ”
I have to stop again. The room is very quiet now, the good kind of quiet, the kind that only happens when people have decided to let you be honest at them.