“Whatever happened to the dragons?” he asks.
My hand—which was on a journey from the bag of fries to my mouth—freezes. I know what he’s talking about. The story. The only piece of fiction I’ve ever had published.
Something I’ve been thinking about more and more these days. A certain type of creative torture. Teasing myself with something I can’t have.
“I hate to tell you this…” I try for casual. Light. “Dragons don’t exist.”
“Ha,” he says. “You know what I mean.”
I eat my fries, not really wanting to answer.
“It’s not what people want from me.”
“Are you sure about that?” he asks.
“Are you my therapist?” I ask.
The sharp words echo in the amazing acoustics.
“Just someone who thinks you’re talented,” Gabe says, effectively cutting my anger off at its knees.
I breathe out.
“Can you imagine what my agent—what my editor—would say if instead of writing the third collection of essays they’ve been asking for, I told them I wanted to write fiction? Not even literary fiction, but a book about dragons and witches and fairy tales.”
I don’t have to imagine it. I already know their response.
They all thought I’d been joking. So I said that I had.
“I imagine,” Gabe says, “that if they’re the right agent and the right editor for you, then they would at least want to read what you came up with.”
I want to tell Gabe that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. That he doesn’t understand what it’s like to build a career on a certain type of image, and that changing that could mean losing everything.
Except, he does understand.
It isn’t a joke to him.
“Jeremy didn’t think it was a good idea,” I say.
It feels pathetic to say it out loud—that I let my ex-husband tell me what I should—or shouldn’t—do with my career. But no less pathetic than letting anyone tell me what to write.
“Well, if Jeremy didn’t think it was a good idea,” Gabe says.
His tone is as dry as a desert.
“He’s a successful writer,” I say.
“So are you.”
I’m looking at my sandwich as if it might contain the answers to life instead of just turkey, avocado, and cheese.
“I’m scared,” I say.
I’ve never admitted that out loud. Barely admitted it quietly to myself.
“Yeah,” Gabe says. “It’s scary.”
He leans back on his hands, legs extended out in front of him, an entire theatre at his disposal.
“What’s the worst that could happen?” he asks.
I discover that Jeremy is right. About everything.
He had been drunk that night. He apologized afterward, said that he didn’t mean it, but we’d both known that after that point, our marriage was irreparably broken.
It was a party for his friend—in New York, practically everyone we knew was a friend of his—a brownstone gathering in Brooklyn to celebrate a book release. All the writers we knew were “serious” writers, who wrote “serious” books like Jeremy’s.
He’d been struggling to finish his second novel—the one that was already way overdue.
“These deadlines are creativity killers,” he always said. “They’re the reason I can’t write.”
He’d been working on it for years. I’d published dozens of articles by that point as well as my first collection and was working on my second.
“It’s not the same,” he would always say when I tried to encourage him to think of the deadlines as motivation.
He’d been in a sour mood all day. He didn’t want to go to the party.
“The book isn’t even good,” he’d said.
It was getting great reviews, and even though Jeremy’s book had gotten the same, he was jealous. He was convinced everyone else was getting the attention he deserved.
“You’ll get it when your next book comes out,” I’d said.
“That’s never going to happen,” he’d said. “I can’t just churn out words like you. Everything I write is carefully crafted.”
He said things like that a lot, and he had laughed when I told him I was thinking about writing fiction.
“Oh, you’re serious?” he’d said afterward. “I’m sorry, I just didn’t think that was the kind of writing you could do.”
He’d laughed even harder when I told him what kind of books I wanted to write.
“I’m just being honest,” he’d said.
We’d arrived at the party and he’d gone straight to the open bar. Three whisky sodas later, he started getting rude, and I was trying to shepherd him out the door when the host cornered us, with a young woman with big glasses and red lipstick trailing behind him. She reminded me a little of myself when I was younger. Eager. Bold.
“A fan of yours,” the host said.
Jeremy had lit up.
“I love your work,” the young woman had said to me.
“Thank you,” I’d said.
“For fuck’s sake,” Jeremy had said.
We’d both turned to him, with different forms of surprise. He’d waved a drunken hand as if to say “carry on.”
The young woman had blinked, and turned to me, affixing her smile back in place. “I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed your book.”
“Thank you,” I said.
Jeremy had snorted, but we’d both ignored him.
“And your article on Oliver Matthias was really beautiful,” the young woman said. “You’re so good at making someone larger than life seem normal and relatable.”
“That’s very nice of you.” I’d been flushed with pride.
I was accustomed to people coming up to Jeremy at parties like these, listening as they told him how much his novel meant to them. And although I’d feel a twinge of jealousy, I was mostly happy for him.
I had figured he would feel the same.
I had been very, very wrong.
“And can I just say”—the young woman leaned forward, her voice going low and conspiratorial—“your Gabe Parker piece is probably my favorite celebrity profile ever.”
“Thank you,” I’d said.
“Of course it is,” Jeremy had scoffed.
“I hope this isn’t too forward,” she went on. “But I’m a writer as well, and I was wondering if I could just ask you about—”
“She fucked him,” Jeremy blurted out. “Obviously.”
My heart had dropped like a broken elevator.