I never responded to her email. I hadn’t known what to say, my footing weak and unfamiliar. I’d solved the problem with a big sleeping pill, topped off with Chardonnay and hostility toward my husband. That email had been the spark that had started Marka’s and my rivalry. The kindling had been our constant competition on the bestseller ranks, every week a new scorecard, our print runs and sales figures a giant tally that anyone with a Publishers Weekly subscription could access. That email had been the first of many, each release bringing another, my competitive nature unable to resist similar pettiness, barbs exchanged with increasing hostility.
I’d always told myself that it didn’t matter what Marka Vantly thought. I’d convinced myself that she wrote trash, and couldn’t tell intelligent talent from the smutty garbage she vomited out. But honestly, her prose isn’t trash. If anything, behind all of the ass slapping and handcuffing and screaming orgasms… it’s fairly good. What I hate—and what I can never confess in my emails to her—is that she is wasting such writing on smut. I write sex. I write, in the majority of my novels, a fair amount of sex. She can write sex and still write a great novel. And that’s what infuriates me about the woman, even more than her perfectly pouty lips and incessant publicity. She’s wasting her talent. She could be giving us more.
Then again, she might not have anything more to give. Maybe all she was blessed with is the talent to tell stories, and not the talent to create them. There’s a very real distinction between the two. Maybe she writes drivel because she doesn’t have a better story to tell. I feel a momentary burst of empathy for the woman, the sort of emotion I instantly recognize as condescending. But still, it’s there, a crumbling of the hatred I’ve fostered for so long, a peace at the understanding of my adversary. Maybe that’s why she sends such vile emails, the poor woman coming from a place of insecurity, jealousy, and frustration.
It’s a good possibility, and I hold onto it, envisioning the positive scenario as an actual tree, giving it roots that dig into the earth and branches that reach into the sky. It is an exercise I haven’t done in a decade, the concept taught to me by my psychiatrist mother, back when I was a bookworm without friends, a condition worthy of concern. I had a dozen painful appointments on her micro-suede couch before my mother gave up. In those appointments, I learned how to compartmentalize worries into an imaginary box in an attempt to relax. I also learned this stupid tree exercise, and how to bore clients while pretending to know a lot of stuff. Mom learned she was stuck with me and my ‘oddities’, which I’m fairly certain she blamed on my father’s genes. If he loved learning, the dogged pursuit of a perfect SAT score, and setting the bell curve out of pure competitive spite? Then yes, we’re practically twins. But I wouldn’t know any of that. He took off two weeks after Mom told him she was pregnant. He left his wedding ring on the kitchen counter, along with divorce papers and a note. I don’t love you enough. I’m a pretty cold, emotionally distant individual, but even my black heart can tell you that’s just wrong.
I shove my Marka tree of happiness into a wood chipper and give up, pushing to my feet and abandoning the manuscript, moving downstairs in search of food and a distraction.
Seventeen hundred words down. Seventy-seven thousand to go.
Impossible.
Running. Wet grass tickles my legs, and I gasp out his name, pulling on his hand. He looks back and laughs, slowing to a walk. He tightens his grip, his fingers on mine, and tugs me closer, my shoulder bumping against his chest, the smell of his cologne mixing with the scent of moonlight and wildflowers. A foreign collision, my senses going wild, my chin tilting up, his mouth lowering to mine. The taste of peppermint and salt, his tongue so firm and confident, his hand sliding up my stomach and under my shirt.
“Simon…” I stop as his fingers work their way under my sports bra, my heart thudding at the contact of his palm against my breast. His kiss deepens, then breaks, and my shirt is pulled over my head, and he presses my hand to the buckle of his jeans.
“Touch me,” he pants.
I sigh, leaning back, needing space from the scene, from the memories. My chest pounds, my breaths tight and painful, and I don’t know if it’s due to the cancer or the pain of the past.
There is nothing like young love. It comes at a time before the heart knows to protect itself, when everything important is raw and exposed—the perfect environment for a soul-sucking, heart-crushing burst. It burns brightest, hits hardest, and touches deepest. It’s why Facebook flames erupt two decades later between high school sweethearts. Between two naive and innocent souls, anything can happen. Soulmates or Tragedy. And sometimes, both.
I had been completely exposed when Simon hit, his presence a glowing meteor through my life, one I had followed as blindly as a firefly to an electric light.
I stand, my knees cracking, back crying in protest, and it takes a few steps toward the door before I work out my kinks. I open the office door and step into the empty hallway. One lap through the house, one pill, one nap, and then back to work. It’s an equation I’ve used for years, even before the cancer—only the pills back then were for depression, not pain.
I walk down the hall, my steps slower than they used to be, my breath harder. Bethany used to sprint down this hall, racing from our bedroom to hers. The media room to her bedroom. The guest room to the top of the stairs. The only room she never ran to and from - my office. That space had been “off limits”, my rules unwavering, any violation met with swift punishment. I fix my eyes on the floorboards and try to push the image of her out of my head.
My lap of the house used to include the entire second floor. I would carry a damp cloth in hand, a Clorox bottle in the other, and clean baseboards, door knobs, and light switch panels as I went. On weekends, the Clorox was replaced with Windex, and the windows were taken care of. Each room got a once over, and when writers block would hit, the entire house gleamed. My lap changed four years ago. It now avoids the media room and our master bedroom. I don’t carry cleaning supplies, and avoid the windows altogether.
My house, like the rest of me, is falling apart.
I head downstairs slowly, taking cautious steps, my hand tight on the wooden rail, no room in my timeline for missteps or injuries. I reach the last riser and lower myself to the step, taking a deep breath, my energy gone.
From this spot, I can see both front rooms, the sort of grand places that rich people like to put uncomfortable furniture in, back before formal living and dining rooms went extinct. When Simon and Bethany lived here, the left room was a den of sorts—filled with her toys, a comfortable chair I would read in, and an old firetruck from Simon’s youth. The right room had held a dining room set that Simon had found online—one that cost a fortune to ship in, but that had once belonged to Clint Eastwood, and should have been in a Colorado hunting lodge and not our McMansion.
Now, both rooms are empty, the front curtains pulled shut, the rooms somehow smaller without anything in them. My eyes drift over the bare foyer and to the great room, where a lonely sofa sits in front of a TV. The sofa I bought off a Craigslist ad, the TV off an internet special. Both purchases were made a few weeks after I sold everything, once I realized that my crazy had more room to grow, and its feed was boredom.
Sometimes novels aren’t enough. Sometimes I need the mindless drone of a television, the brief escape of superficial housewives and train wreck relationships, something to assure me that Simon and I weren’t alone, and everybody has problems.
If only our problems had been simple, the sort fixed by a marriage boot camp, or a romantic getaway, product endorsements and scripted discussions.
I close my eyes and try to summon the energy to stand, to make it the thirty or forty feet to the kitchen. Maybe food will help. Food and a pain pill. Then maybe I can churn out some more words.