Chapter 10 #2
Poor Gary. Were there print shops open in this town on a Saturday afternoon after five? Did people do business here? They must, sometime between golf rounds. A lot of business was done on the links, right? Not in Wes’s business, but in somebody’s. Maybe in transportation logistics.
When Wes rejoined the sisters, they were deep in discussion, both holding fresh drinks.
Mo and Wes must be at least two drinks behind at this point, but how anyone could drink Mountain Dew in a room with West Elm wallpaper and original plaster sculptures, he could never figure.
Now that the windowsill was abandoned, he left his sweating, neon drink there.
The family seemed to have forgotten the authors in the room, except for Estelle.
She smiled at him, and Wes swore he saw an eye roll in that smile before she turned back to her daughters.
He should try to join their conversation, but there was something deliciously naughty about standing next to Mo in a room full of people who didn’t know they had been making out.
Well, not making out, but kissing at least. A kiss. A kiss he wished he could repeat.
Wes edged closer to the wall, and Mo followed. He wondered if her brain had played out a million scenes that could have been. She smelled delicious, like apricots. “You showered,” he said.
“I did. No Pert though.”
He couldn’t back down now. “Thought it might wash some of the dirty thoughts from your head?”
She didn’t look at him, but he saw her smirking into her glass. She took a long sip, then winced. “It didn’t.”
He grinned, not looking at her. She could be trying to off-balance him, but he didn’t care. The buzz in his blood was completely unrelated to alcohol.
“I heard you’re giving a copy of your book to the daughters,” Mo said.
“Yours too,” Wes said.
She reached discreetly behind him. From their position, it wouldn’t be obvious to anyone else that she momentarily rested her hand on the curve of his ass.
When she squeezed it, like testing a piece of fruit, he suddenly wished he worked in produce or that he was produce, more accurately.
That he was one of the apricots that got to make up the body wash she’d rubbed all over herself minutes ago.
“You’re trying to throw me off.”
“Wouldn’t even dream of it. But”—as she said the word, she lightly pinched his right cheek—“the competition ends after the reading. After dinner.”
“Officially.”
“At least our part of it,” she said, removing her hand and looking him in the eye now. Her expression was suddenly serious. “If this competition isn’t fair, Wes, then dirty thoughts or not, you’re getting nowhere with me.”
“It’s fair. I promise it will all be fair.”
She nodded, as if to herself. “So, do you have plans for tonight?”
His mouth went dry. He could make some, he was certain. He wanted them to involve more of that delicious pressure.
Luckily, the dinner menu featured no pork products.
For a few of the guests, it seemed to include almost nothing at all.
Flor was a vegetarian and Talia was doing a fourteen-hour fast. Talia refused to even acknowledge there was food on the table.
Drinks had been changed to something less fluorescent for dinner, a Riesling to pair with the meal.
Gus flushed as he drank, cheeks glowing under the chandelier’s light.
“Aren’t you fasting?” Flor asked her sister.
“Clear liquids only,” Talia said, gazing through the wine glass at Flor, then winking.
Instead of eating, they were talking about New York real estate. Wes could fake this conversation in his sleep, but it obviously baffled Mo. Flor turned to Mo after five interrupted minutes of monologuing. “And where do you live, darling?”
Mo stumbled through a response, but once she got her cross streets out, Flor raised her eyebrows and changed the topic.
Wes picked at the asparagus and goat cheese tartlets, his thigh pressing against Mo’s under the table. He wanted to be alone with her, to be past the final chapter. He was too nervous to eat or drink.
Dessert was raspberries and fresh whipped cream. As the bowls were being set on the table, Gary walked in. He glanced at the cold tartlet at his place setting and grimaced. “Can I have two desserts instead?” Wes heard him whisper to Angie.
Angie patted his shoulder and brought a second serving.
“These are delicious,” Mo said, trying to draw Gary into the conversation. Wes noticed that Flor and Talia hadn’t even said hello or thank-you to him since he reentered.
Gary finished his first bowl, then moved on to the second. “The raspberries were locally sourced.”
Mo looked shocked. “In April?”
Wes had no idea when raspberries were in season but was more than happy to continue a conversation that both Gary and Mo seemed interested in. “How do they manage that?”
Gary smiled. “It’s an indoor greenhouse for berries across the harbor. It’s an ingenious setup.”
Mo had a gift for putting people at ease, and Wes loved that she was interested in so many things that had nothing to do with things he understood.
Gary looked happier by the end of the conversation, and Estelle did too.
Flor and Talia looked either like the alcohol was finally hitting them or bored to pieces by the time Gary and Mo had discussed the pollination strategy, plus the couple that ran the place.
Flor’s head rested heavily on her palm as she stared out the window, while Talia kept stirring her uneaten dessert, pushing the cream side to side like a tidal wave.
After the plates were cleared away, Estelle clapped her hands together. “Shall we get into the main event?”
The entire group adjourned to the library, and Wes got to see Maureen’s expression soften, her gaze catch on the desk by the window. In the center of the room were several large, plush couches. The hardwood floor was softened by a gray-and-white plaid rug.
Seltzer fizzed in the background—Gus was using one of those old-fashioned seltzer bottles to make after-dinner cocktails in the corner of the room.
Talia opened a window along the far wall to smoke, and the breeze unsettled some of the dust on the bookshelves so that it caught in the light.
Gary settled himself in a stand-alone wooden chair next to Estelle’s side.
Wes sat next to Maureen on the love seat closest to the door.
It was hard to tell who was more likely to bolt.
Mo tapped her fingers lightly on the manuscript on her lap.
Her red nail polish had chipped in spots to reveal the pale natural nails underneath.
How hadn’t he looked at her long, tapered fingers yet?
He had been probably too busy looking at her other attributes, but now he wanted nothing more than to snag her hand off her book to keep it from shaking like it was now.
They were going to read the ending of the adaptations, by far the most problematic and often discussed part of the original book.
In the original, Eliza died in a car crash, but critics had debated for almost a hundred years whether that crash was an accident or suicide.
Any adaptation would have to take a stand on that.
“So, do we flip to see who goes first?” Wes asked once Talia had a chance to finish her cigarette and close the window.
“You can do the honors,” Mo said.
He didn’t really want to, but those shaking hands shook him too. Maybe it would help her feel better. Wes took a deep breath and dove in.
In his version, Wes ruled it an accident.
In Morgan’s novel, Eliza opened the door to the study of their large mansion and saw something, something unexplored, and drove off into the night.
In Wes’s version, Eliza walked in on the lieutenant and Clive holding hands by the fire, the closest Clive ever came to physical intimacy with Perkins.
Eliza had barely come to grips with accepting the lack of connection of her life when she walked in on this.
She could put up with a loveless marriage if both parties weren’t finding love.
In Wes’s adaptation—though it wasn’t explored in the original—Clive drove after Eliza in Perkins’s car.
It was snowing. It was late. If he had let her go, she might have lived, and thus was the ultimate new horror of it, and something that brought Wes’s book from a retelling to a true adaptation.
When he finished the chapter, he sat back on the couch, heart beating fast. He should have stood through the reading.
He should have slowed down a bit. He was nervous to look up at Estelle, her children, even Gary.
He was more nervous to catch Mo’s expression next to him.
In graduate school, he had taken creative writing courses.
He remembered the angst of sitting in a workshop with the rule of not being able to defend your work.
Criticism came from all sides: Why did the character do this?
What was their motivation? What if it started in a different place?
What if you crumpled this whole draft and started fresh with the echo of it in your head?
He was keenly aware, even more so than before, how he had been the only person to read this book.
He was a good reader, an even better editor, but suddenly he felt completely cut off at the knees about this tender project. Finally, he faced the room.
Gus was smiling broadly at Wes. “So, Clive is gay , huh.” He said it like the word gay could be substituted with drunk .
“Uh, bisexual was my interpretation.”
“Is that actually a thing?” Gus asked, eyebrows raised. “You can’t sit half on a horse.”
Wes felt his blood pressure spike. “Well, as a bisexual male, I’d have to say that horses haven’t come into my sex life at all. Can’t speak for you, though.”
Gus’s face screwed up, but he decided to laugh rather than be offended.
“So the love story with Eliza is fake?” Flor asked.
“I don’t think that his attraction to Eliza is fake, but I think he—”
“Spicy,” said Talia. The word made Wes crinkle his nose. “I liked him watching her crash. I could see the scene in the movie.”
“We haven’t talked about movie rights,” Estelle cut in. She wasn’t speaking loudly, but the strength of her words redirected the conversation.
“I thought it was well written,” Flor said judiciously, but didn’t expand on that to say what made her come to this conclusion other than the dollar signs that her sister had shot into the room.
Wes was nervous how Mo’s version might end, even having heard less than a third of it.
He remembered her old manuscript from the slush pile at the old agency and the keen way she used sparse prose to put in a knife and twist it before you’d even known you’d been stabbed.
Heartbreak with four words. He wasn’t a good actor, not really, and he worried how he would react to her Eliza, this Liza of 2005, dragged from independence into a prison of expectations and then brought to her death. He didn’t want to cry on the couch.
“Anyone need a fresh drink before Maureen begins?” Gary asked.
Talia shook her glass, though Gus and Flor covered theirs. “Are you expecting your hubby dearest to drive you?” Gus asked, his tone wry.
“Well, I can always take a horse if he doesn’t,” Talia laughed, shoving him with a hip. “Oh, someone will. Gary would, I’m sure. You know I have a tarot-reading birthday party after this and I don’t want to drink on camera right now.”
If she thought she would sober up before her drive to Manhattan, she must have a different metabolism. Like a hummingbird, but with chardonnay.
“Mo, do you need anything?” Wes asked.
She shot him a look, and he realized he’d called her the nickname. It was like his brain had a trading card with her photo and the name Mo underneath it. He hated that when he pictured this image, with full stats and facts on the other side, the o in Mo was a tiny heart.
“I’m good,” she said.
She began and shattered any chance that he might win this thing.