She’s drunk, I realize. Two and a half drinks in, and she’s smashed; she’s already forgotten once again that I, in fact, hate my editor.
Athena doesn’t know how to hold her alcohol. I learned this a week into freshman year, at some senior’s house party in East Rock, at which I held her hair as she vomited into the toilet bowl. She has fancy taste; she loves to show off everything she knows about scotch (she only calls it “whisky,” and sometimes “whisky from the Highlands”), but she’s barely had anything and her cheeks are already bright red, her sentences rambling. Athena loves to get drunk, and drunk Athena is always self-aggrandizing and dramatic.
I first noticed this behavior at San Diego Comic-Con. We were clustered around a big table in the hotel bar and she was laughing too loudly, cheeks bright red while the guys sitting beside her, one of whom would soon be outed on Twitter as a serial sex pest, stared eagerly at her chest. “Oh my God,” she kept saying. “I’m not ready for this. It’s all going to blow up in my face. I’m not ready. Do you think they hate me? Do you think everyone secretly hates me, and no one will tell me? Would you tell me if you hated me?”
“No, no,” the men assured her, petting her hands. “No one could ever hate you.”
I used to think this act was a ploy for attention, but she’s also like this when it’s only the two of us. She gets so vulnerable. She starts sounding like she’s going to burst into tears, or like she’s bravely revealing secrets she’s told no one else before. It’s hard to watch. There’s something desperate about it, and I don’t know what frightens me more—that she’s manipulative enough to pull off such an act, or that everything she’s saying might be true.
For all the blaring music and bass vibrations, the Graham feels dead—unsurprising; it’s a Wednesday night. Two men come up to try to give Athena their numbers, and she waves them off. We’re the only women in the place. The rooftop feels quiet and claustrophobic in a way that’s frightening, so we finish our drinks and leave. I think, with some relief, that this will be the end of it—but then Athena invites me over to her apartment, a short Lyft ride away, near Dupont Circle.
“Come on,” she insists. “I have some amazing whisky saved, precisely for this moment—you have to come try it.”
I’m tired, and I’m not having that much fun—jealousy feels worse when you’re drunk—but I’m curious to see her apartment, so I say yes.
It’s really fucking nice. I knew Athena was rich—bestseller royalties do count for something—but I hadn’t processed how rich until we step into the ninth-floor, two-bedroom unit where she lives alone—one room for sleeping, one room for writing—with tall ceilings, gleaming hardwood floors, floor-to-ceiling windows, and a balcony that wraps around the corner. She’s decorated it in that ubiquitous, Instagram-famous style that screams minimalist but bougie: sleek wooden furniture, sparely designed bookshelves, and clean, monochrome carpets. Even the plants look expensive. A humidifier hisses beneath her calatheas.
“So then, whisky? Or something lighter?” Athena points to the wine fridge. She has a fucking wine fridge. “Riesling? Or I have this lovely sauvignon blanc, unless you want to stick to red—”
“Whisky,” I say, because the only way to get through the rest of this night is to get as drunk as possible.
“Neat, on the rocks, or old-fashioned?”
I have no clue how to drink whisky. “Um, whatever you’re having.”
“Old-fashioned, then.” She darts into her kitchen. Moments later, I hear cupboards opening, dishes clanging. Who knew old-fashioneds were such a hassle?
“I have this beautiful eighteen-year WhistlePig,” she calls out. “It’s so smooth, like toffee and black pepper mixed together—just wait, you’ll see.”
“Sure,” I call back. “Sounds great.”
She’s taking a while, and I really have to pee, so I wander around the living room searching for the bathroom. I wonder what I’ll find in there. Maybe a fancy aromatherapy diffuser. Maybe a basket of jade vagina rocks.
I notice then that the door to her writing office is wide open. It’s a gorgeous space; I can’t help but take a peek. I recognize it from her Instagram posts—her “creativity palace,” she calls it. She has a huge mahogany desk with curved legs beneath a window framed by Victorian-style lacy curtains, atop which sits her prized black typewriter.
Right. Athena uses a typewriter. No Word backups, no Google Docs, no Scrivener: just scribbles in Moleskine notebooks that become outlines on sticky notes that become fully formed drafts on her Remington. It forces her to focus on the sentence level, or so she claims. (She’s given this interview response so many times I’ve nearly memorized it.) Otherwise, she digests entire paragraphs at a time, and she loses the trees for the forest.
Honestly. Who talks like that? Who thinks like that?
They make these ugly and overpriced electronic typewriters, for authors who can’t string together more than a paragraph without losing focus and hopping over to Twitter. But Athena hates those; she uses a vintage typewriter, a clunky thing that requires her to buy special ink ribbons and thick, sturdy pages for her manuscripts. “I just can’t write on a screen,” she’s told me. “I have to see it printed. Something about the reassuring solidity of the word. It feels permanent, like everything I compose has weight. It ties me down; it clarifies my thoughts and forces me to be specific.”
I wander farther into the office, because I’m exactly drunk enough to forget that this is bad manners. There’s a sheet of paper still in the carriage, upon which are written just two words: THE END. Sitting next to the typewriter is a stack of pages nearly a foot tall.
Athena materializes by my side, a glass in either hand. “Oh, that’s the World War One project. It’s finally done.”
Athena is famously cagey about her projects until they’re finished. No beta readers. No interviews, no sharing snippets on social media. Even her agents and editors don’t get to see so much as an outline until she’s finished the whole thing. “It has to gestate inside me until it’s viable,” she told me once. “If I expose it to the world before it’s fully formed, it dies.” (I’m shocked no one has called her out for this grotesque metaphor, but I guess anything’s okay if Athena says it.) The only things she’s revealed over the past two years are that this novel has something to do with twentieth-century military history, and that it’s a “big artistic challenge” for her.
“Shit,” I say. “Congrats.”
“Typed up the last page this morning,” she chirps. “No one’s read it yet.”
“Not even your agent?”
She snorts. “Jared pushes paper and signs checks.”
“It’s so long.” I wander closer to the desk, reach for the first page, then immediately withdraw my hand. Stupid, drunk—I can’t just go around touching things.
But instead of snapping at me, Athena nods her permission. “What do you think?”
“You want me to read it?”
“Well, I guess, not all of it, right now.” She laughs. “It’s very long. I’m just—I’m just so glad it’s finished. Doesn’t this stack look pretty? It’s hefty. It . . . carries significance.”
She’s rambling; she’s as drunk as I am, but I know exactly what she means. This book is huge, in more ways than one. It’s the sort of book that leaves a mark.
My fingers hover over the stack. “Can I . . . ?”
“Sure, sure . . .” She nods enthusiastically. “I have to get used to it being out there. I have to give birth.”
What a bizarre, persistent metaphor. I know reading the pages will only fuel my jealousy, but I can’t help myself. I pick a stack of ten or fifteen pages off the top and skim through them.
Holy God, they’re good.