Chapter 7
SEVEN
‘Are you a romantic, Frank?’ The interviewer, Darcy Delaney, tries to gently blindside him with her question, but by the way he smiles you sense he saw it coming.
Oh good heavens, why am I watching this? I don’t know how I’ve come across this old TV interview from 2000, or why I even went looking. Clearly, I’m desperately bored and should have spent the evening cleaning my shoes with a toothbrush. But I am glued to the young Frank.
‘Probably not in the red roses, candlelit dinners demonstrable ways, no,’ he answers. ‘I have a good deal of self-improvement to do there. But I believe that at the heart of all of us, beating away beneath every encounter we have with another human being we find attractive, is the desire for a love, a connection, of epic proportions. I think we’re always subconsciously chasing that.’ He relaxes into the hard-backed chair, rests his right ankle on his left knee, knots his fingers at his chest.
Darcy lets his answer breathe. But her balmy composure makes me unprepared for what she says next. ‘So, how do you feel about people reacting with cynicism to your story?’
‘Are they?’ A pop of red appears on his cheeks. ‘The book’s sold close to thirty million copies. I’m not sure that’s the overarching public opinion.’
Okay. Good answer. Got to give him that.
Darcy smiles a little. ‘Well Love for Lara is indeed the biggest selling novel of our era. How do you account for the book’s phenomenal success? People have written love stories before. Why was this one so resonant?’
He holds his shoulders a touch too high for him to be as relaxed as he sounds. ‘I think I lucked out,’ he says. ‘I think it was timing, like success often is. The nation has been shaken by our President Bill Clinton being impeached for perjury relating to sexual misconduct. People probably just needed something wholesome to latch on to again.’
‘But critics haven’t responded so well to wholesome.’
‘Some critics, I think you mean.’
‘Some critics, yes.’ She is unfazed by how he carefully corrects her. ‘Your story is an unabashed tearjerker. How do you respond to those who call it…’ She glances down at her note card, ‘“Shallow and poorly written”?’
‘I don’t.’
‘You don’t have any reaction to that at all?’ She remains as soothing as warm bath water, as incisive as a contract killer.
He clears his throat, changes position, rests the other ankle on the other knee. Something in his expression calcifies. The camera zooms in for a close-up. ‘Of course I felt it,’ he says, diffidently. ‘It’s hard hearing someone saying you can’t write. That’s a very different thing to them not liking the story. You have this tremendous sense of unfairness. And then you realise that you’ve put yourself out there, and, well, you have to take the bad with the good.’
‘But it failed to gain a nomination for the American Literary Award. Didn’t that hurt?’
He shrugs. ‘It’s not the first time that a commercially popular book hasn’t been accepted in literary circles as having merit. I am not the first. Fortunately, I don’t need an award to be able to look at myself in the mirror, to validate who I am as a writer.’
I smile. Darcy clearly thinks this is a good answer too.
‘And there’s a movie in the works! How does that feel? And when can we look forward to seeing it?’
He loosens his hands that were interlocked at his chest, his shoulders relaxing. ‘How does it feel? Well, it’s all a new and remarkable ride for me. As for when it’s coming out, that’s for the big guys to decide.’
‘So you’re not one of the big guys, Mr World’s Bestselling Romantic Novelist?’ She might be flirting with him.
‘No.’ He shakes his head. ‘I don’t think of myself that way. I’m just a guy who gets a great deal of joy from telling myself a story.’
She smiles and tells him she hopes this is the first of many more.
I wait until the clip ends, then rewind to the part where he talks about epic connection, about how we’re all secretly searching for it. I let this tread softly around me, wanting him to be right, and wanting him to be wrong. What if we live a life never having known it? If we silently longed for so much more than that which was given to us, that which we chose?
It’s a fascinating question. In fact, now that it’s in my head, I can’t let it go. Is he right? Do most of us yearn for a spectacular, breathtaking involvement with another human being? Or do we just want to be loved, and to love back? To be found worthy, and to find that worth in someone else?
One thing I do know is… I’m dying to see Love for Lara again.
I wonder if it’s on Netflix.
It’s well after midnight when the film finishes. I have blown my nose and mopped my eyes through an entire roll of toilet paper. I can’t believe how it has stood the test of time, how I reacted exactly as I did twenty-plus years ago when I first saw it. How the love story of two fictitious strangers can do this to me. The scene at the end where he allows himself to openly grieve for his dead wife, a young man skipping stones on the edge of a lake, his tears merging with the rain… I realise I’ve never forgotten it, it’s never been far from my heart, even though I’ve had no cause to think about it for so very long.
After the credits roll, I stare at the last words to leave the screen: Written, and based on the novel, by Frank Lewis.
The man I’m hiking a mountain with tomorrow.
A strange fluttering happens in my stomach. It feels like the butterflies, but I decide it can only be gastroenteritis.