20. Adrian #2
“I don’t recommend it, by the way,” I say.
“Learning that lesson the way I learned it. There’s an easier version, and it’s just this, if there is one person in your life who tells you the truth when it would be so much simpler to flatter you, who reads your worst draft and stays anyway, who loves you by refusing to lie to you, you hold onto that person with both hands and you never, ever let being comfortable make you stop listening.
I had that. I stopped listening. Don’t be me. That’s the whole of what I know.”
Now I look at her.
Brooke is crying, openly, both hands pressed to her mouth, and my mother has an arm around her, and Gemma is holding her other hand, and Laura is just beaming through her own tears, and the whole front row is a mess, and it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
“I didn’t put her name in the book,” I say, quieter now, just to her, though the whole room can hear it.
“Because I did that once, put a woman’s name on my work as a muse, and it was a lie, and it hurt her, and I will never do that again.
She was never my muse. A muse is a decoration.
She was the architecture. She was the load-bearing thing the whole of it stood on, and you don’t put the foundation on the cover, you just build everything on top of it and hope it holds. ”
My voice goes rough. “So there’s no name.
There’s just a dedication, and it’s the truest sentence I’ve ever written, and I hope it’s the one she remembers, out of all the pretentious ones she had to fix.
It reads: To the best editor I ever had.
Thank you for the notes. I’m sorry it took me so long to read them. ”
The room comes apart.
There’s applause, and there’s crying, and I step down off the little stage and I don’t go shake hands with anyone important, because there’s no one important here except the people in the front row, and I go straight to my wife, who has hauled herself up out of her seat despite being roughly the size of the bookstore, and she grabs the front of my shirt with both hands.
“You absolute idiot,” she says, sobbing and laughing at once. “Three adjectives describing a chair. You told a whole room about the chair.”
“You’ve been right about the chair for two years. The people deserved to know about the chair.”
She laughs, and I hold her, the whole enormous wonderful weight of her and our daughter between us.
Over her shoulder my mother mouths a word at me that I think is finally, and Laura is openly weeping into a bookstore napkin, and Gemma points at me and mouths good, which from Gemma is basically a marriage proposal, and for one perfect minute the whole small warm room is just people who love us being happy that we made it.
In the car afterward, before I start the engine, I reach into the back seat and take out the very first printed copy, the one that came off the press before all the others, the one I’ve been keeping.
“Here,” I say. “First one. Before the store copies, before Priyanka’s, before anybody’s. This one’s yours.”
She takes it, and she doesn’t open it to the first chapter. She opens it straight to the dedication page, like she knew exactly where to go, and she runs her finger over the words in the dark of the car, the streetlight catching the wet on her face.
“You kept my margin notes,” she says softly. “All this time. Even after I left. You kept them.”
“I kept everything, Brooke.” I mean it more than I’ve meant anything.
“Every note, every draft you touched, the sketchbook, all of it. I kept every single thing you ever gave me. I just didn’t understand what I had until you took it with you and the whole apartment went quiet.
” I reach over and tuck a piece of hair behind her ear.
“That’s the whole book. That’s the whole everything.
I had the best thing in the world and I didn’t see it until it was gone, and then I spent every day since trying to become a man who deserved to get it back. ”
“You did, you know.” She’s still looking at the dedication, her thumb moving over the words like she’s reading them in braille.
“Get it back. Deserve it. I wasn’t going to tell you, because your head’s big enough, but you should hear it once, out loud, in a car, where there’s no one around to make it a scene. ”
She finally looks up at me, and her eyes are wet and steady and completely certain, and it undoes me.
“You came back. Every single morning, for months, you came back, when it would have been so much easier to give up and let me be right about you. That’s the thing I’ll never be able to explain to anyone who wasn’t there.
You didn’t win me back with the book, or the land, or any of the big things.
You won me back at seven in the morning, with a tea, over and over, when nobody was watching and there was nothing in it for you.
That’s the you I married. I just had to leave to find him. ”
I can’t speak. I genuinely cannot speak, so I lean across the console and I kiss my wife in a dark car outside a bookstore, softly, the way you kiss a person you get to keep, and she kisses me back, and for a second the whole impossible size of our luck sits in the car with us.
She looks at me, and she opens her mouth to say a thing, and instead she makes a sound I’ve never heard her make, a short startled gasp, and her hand flies to her side, and the copy of my book slides off her lap onto the car floor.
“Brooke?”
“Adrian.”
Her voice has gone strange, high and stunned and delighted and terrified all at once, and she grabs my hand and presses it flat against her side, and under my palm I feel it, a long hard tightening, a wave of it, unmistakable.
“Adrian. I think, okay… I think that was, that wasn’t a kick, that was a whole different thing, that was a, oh.”
Her eyes go wide.
“Adrian,” she says again, and grips my hand hard enough to hurt, and starts to laugh, breathless and disbelieving. “Your daughter waited until the exact night of your book launch. Of course she did. Of course she did.”
She squeezes her eyes shut through another wave, and when it passes she looks at me with the most terrified, radiant, alive expression I have ever seen on a human face.
“I think you need to drive. Right now. I think she’s coming.”