Chapter 24
Tyler
Katie’s second attempt at her new chapter was even worse than her first. And when I attempted to write mine, it was twice
as horrible. We, for all intents and purposes, had writer’s block, and by Wednesday evening, it no longer made sense to fight
we committed to forgetting all about our characters and, instead, throwing ourselves back into our real lives. The hope, we’d
agreed, was that by giving our brains the holiday weekend to breathe, we’d come back to our pages on Monday and see them in
a whole new light.
Katie, I’d surmised, wasn’t even coming back to the city. She had friends who’d rented a house in Montauk and was headed there
for the long weekend. I did not ask which friends, and she did not offer to tell me. I, on the other hand, had a ticket to
the hottest party in town: an unsanctioned picnic of recovering drunks in Central Park, where an Oakland-bound Arthur had
promised a newcomer I’d meet him.
I showed up with a tray of frosted grocery store cookies around two in the afternoon.
The newcomer—this happened sometimes—was nowhere to be found.
I moseyed past a potluck table, a throng of middle-aged men playing cornhole, and a few girls I knew from a meeting downtown who did not want to speak to me any more than I did not want to speak to them.
A few minutes later, I found Pedro sitting on a blanket, scrolling through his phone. I sat down across from him.
“You hear from Arthur at all?” I asked. “He and Rachel make it to the airport all right?”
Pedro laughed. “She texted me before they took off. Said Arthur was so excited last night, he refused to sleep. Laid out his
clothes for the flight and everything.”
I grinned, shooting Arthur a quick message demanding photos of his trip and telling him he should ask his grandkids to help
him set up a shared album—that I was more than happy to relinquish my role as explainer of all things electronic.
“So,” Pedro said once I’d slipped my phone back in my pocket. “How’s the book coming? Having any fun with it, at least? Now
that things are all right with the girl?”
I shrugged. I wouldn’t say that Pedro knew everything about Katie, but she didn’t not come up at dinner last Friday. “Everything was going great, honestly. Then Katie had to leave town, and now the pages are
lifeless. They suck. It doesn’t make any sense—that, all of a sudden, neither of us can string a decent sentence together.
I mean, it’s a romance novel. It’s not supposed to be hard. It’s all right there, what’s supposed to happen. There’s literally
a template: They fuck. They fight. They fall in love.”
Pedro scratched his mustache. The women who hated me laughed about something. A squirrel scuttered. In the distance, a horse
neighed.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s just amazing to me how bad you are at this.”
“At writing?”
“No, jackass. At love.”