3. Hendrix #2
Every line of her poured toward one thing with a wholeness I hadn’t felt in months, maybe in years, maybe ever.
She was not performing a life the way I performed mine.
She was living one, out loud, in front of a room full of strangers, unafraid, and I sat there in the dark and felt the flat nothing in my chest crack straight down the middle.
What came up through the crack, so fast and so complete it emptied my lungs, was wanting.
Just wanting, the raw capacity for it, roaring back to life after a season of famine. I gripped the armrest with both hands, a grown man coming apart at a children’s recital, and I thought, with a fear close to awe… oh.
So this is the thing I’ve been missing.
This is what it feels to be alive in a body instead of just maintaining one.
She captivated me in the space of a single dance. I know how that sounds. I didn’t believe in it either, until it happened to me in a dark auditorium and rearranged the entire architecture of my life in about four minutes.
“Hendrix… Hendrix, where are you going? We have dinner after this with the Hearsts…”
My father’s voice faded.
I left before the house lights came up, so no one would see my face.
And on the way to the dinner where our families were going to make the whole arrangement official, I stopped the car.
I got out, and I went to the wall at the edge of the garden, and I took a single pink rose off it with my bare hands, because I could not walk into that room and hand her nothing after what she had just handed me without knowing she’d handed me anything at all.
I crushed the stem in my fist. I got the green of it on my cuff and I did not care.
“You looked like a doll.”“I was the doll.”“You were a pretty doll.”
Words are my thing yet somehow, she always leaves me speechless.
I reached into my coat and took out the pink rose I literally stole from their garden.
“For the recital.”“Thank you, that’s very gentlemanly of you.”
In the end, I said almost nothing, because I had no language for what had happened to me and the language of my childhood had never included a word for it.
Everyone believes I married her because my dying mother asked me to. It’s a clean story. It makes me a dutiful son instead of a man ambushed by his own heart in the dark.
But that isn’t why.
I discovered later that until the end, my mother gave me a gift.
Through her, she gave me Imogen.
The woman who brought me back from my darkest hours and taught my heart the first real taste of affection.
But I have never told Imogen any of that. I’ve never told anyone.
It sits in me, a swallowed stone, and some nights I think the reason I can’t write the book is that every sentence I have wants to be about her, and I’m too much of a coward to let them.
“You look like hell.”
I come back to the room all at once because of the sudden voice.
Shane is standing in the doorway of my studio with his coat still on and his phone already in his hand, and I have no idea how long he’s been talking or how much of it I missed.
“How did you get in?” I ask.
“You gave me a key, which you’re clearly regretting.”
He steps over a crumpled page without comment, the way you’d step over a body you’d agreed not to mention.
“I’ve been calling you for two hours. You didn’t pick up, so I came. Good news first, because you look like you need some. I’ve got you an interview… Big one. Primetime, the biggest culture program on the network, and they want you soon. This is the promotion the new book needs!”
“I’m not doing press for a book that isn’t finished.”
“You will be by the time this airs, and even if you’re not, presence is the product, Hendrix.
We keep you visible.” He’s pacing now, energized in the way he only gets when there’s a thing to be worked.
Then he stops, and his tone shifts. “Which brings me to the other thing. The reason the timing’s actually perfect.
You really haven’t looked at your phone tonight, have you? ”
“Why?”
“The old manuscript.” He says it lightly, the way you set down a thing you hope won’t break. “The one from years ago. It’s out. It leaked this morning, and it’s everywhere, and by everywhere, I mean everywhere. It’s the only thing anyone’s talking about right now.”
The floor of my stomach drops out from under me.
“What manuscript? What do you mean it leaked?”
“The Bridget book.” He says her name, because to him it doesn’t mean anything. “That novel you wrote about your ex, back in your twenties. Says so in your notes. The full manuscript is on the internet, and the internet has opinions.”
He’s watching me now, careful, reading my face the way he reads a room before a pitch.
“Which is why the interview is a gift, do you see? We get you on camera, calm and charming, you frame it as old work, you’ll trend even without the new book yet.
It’s the best case we could have asked for, honestly. ”
Shane keeps talking but I stop hearing him.
Because the thing he’s calling the Bridget book was never really about Bridget, an old fling.
It was about a few months in my twenties, a relationship so short I’ve spent longer on single chapters. She was a reference point, nothing more, the one time I tried to feel the thing everyone kept promising I’d feel and came up with nothing.
I wrote the book to figure out why nothing was there. Her name isn’t in a single page of it. The whole thing is a study of an absence, and I used the shape of a brief, forgettable relationship to draw the outline of it.
None of that is going to matter. I know it the way you know a fall is coming before you hit the ground. But that was a draft from back when I was still an immature writer, and I’ve turned it into a different story. People won’t know what I was going for.
They will just think it’s a love story.
I think about Imogen back at home.