“And left you a big trust fund. How nice of him.” There was something in his eyes she hadn’t seen before. He had been easygoing till then. And now there was an edge to every word. It came out of nowhere.
“He left me something, but not a trust fund, and it wasn’t that much. I’ve been working hard since I left college,” Alex said calmly. Not that she owed him an explanation, but she suddenly felt as though she did.
“So have I,” Tim said, sounding almost nasty, which shocked her. “I live in a studio the size of a closet. It’s a walk-up. The Upper East Side address sounds good, but the building is falling apart and smells of cat piss. I don’t have a doorman, and I don’t live in an apartment like this. And while you’re dabbling with writing recipes or whatever it is for women’s magazines that keeps you so busy, I’m working my goddamn ass off trying to raise funds for a business that no one wants to invest in, and I’ll probably end up getting fired!” Suddenly his pleasant, well-educated, upper-middle-class WASPy mask had slipped and he was turning out to be a very bitter, angry guy. “And my father would have left me a trust fund too, except he was a drunk and blew all our money before he blew his brains out, when I was sixteen. I’ve been working ever since, and put myself through Stanford with scholarships and student loans, so I don’t feel sorry for you in your fancy apartment with your freelance work.” He stood up and looked down at her with ill-concealed rage, and the expression on his face terrified her, he seemed like he wanted to kill her for a minute. She felt like she was living in one of her own books. Her gut was telling her to get him out before something happened, but he was already walking toward the door.
“Sorry if this wasn’t quite the right fit. At least you don’t need a rich husband, or would you like to invest in the firm I work for? I guess I don’t know how to play the game, or I’d have stuck around and charmed you, but you’re a little too fancy for me. I guess you figured that out for yourself,” he said, walking out and slamming the door behind him, and Alex didn’t say a word before he left. She just wanted him to get out before he strangled her. She locked the door behind him, went to sit on the couch, and she was shaking. He had really frightened her, and it had been so unexpected. He had been so mild mannered till then. He’d obviously had a hard life, and had some bad things happen to him. But so had she. She’d been an orphan at fourteen, and abandoned by her mother at seven, but she’d had a good father, and the nuns had been loving and kind to her after that, and she had been immensely lucky with her books and she knew it, and didn’t take it for granted. But she had never seen hatred like that in anyone’s eyes, and she wondered if everyone was going to be jealous of her and hate her for her success for the rest of her life. The thought of it depressed her profoundly, and she was still upset about it when she took the train to Boston the next day. She went to see Bert at his apartment. He was the only man she knew and could talk to, and the only father figure she had.
She told him what had happened and he wasn’t surprised.
“I told you a long time ago when you started writing that there were going to be a lot of jealous men in your life. You didn’t believe me, or you didn’t want to.”
“But it happens to me every time. All the way back to that shit TA at BC, who was jealous of my writing and gave me rotten grades while the professor was away, and he hated me when she came back and changed them to what I deserved. Then the guy I worked with in London who hated me for writing and wanted to write a book himself but was too lazy to do it, and he cheated on me on top of it. The one in New York just now thinks I write recipes for women’s magazines, he doesn’t even know I’m a writer, and he loathes me because I live in a nice apartment and he thinks I have too much money and he hates me for that. And the screenwriter I worked with on the movie in L.A. thinks women are only worth going out with if they’ve got a name and he can use them to make connections or get in the press with them. He sees them as some kind of ticket to stardom by association. And I’m always lying to everyone about who I am, and what I do, pretending I write romance novels, or freelance for women’s magazines, or ghostwriting or editing. Nobody knows what I do except you, Rose, and the sisters, and even not knowing who I am, these men are jealous of me.”
She ran out of steam then and he looked at her seriously with an honest question.
“Do you want to come out in the open? Are you ready for that and what comes with it? You may lose some of your readership if you do, if they’re pissed at you for lying to them about who you are. But if you can’t live with the myth you’ve created, you can step forward and tell them you write the books that you do. But whatever you do, there are a lot of jealous people in the world—not just men who feel inadequate next to you, but women too. They don’t feel good when other people are successful. They don’t feel good about themselves. So they want to hurt you, and pull you down to their level and punish you. You’re a very, very big success, Alex. Professionally you’re huge. Few men are secure enough to have a woman like you in their life. I told you six years ago when we talked about it, the right man will come along at the right time, and you’ll know exactly who he is when you see him, and you won’t scare him. But there are a lot of shitheads out there, and you’re going to meet a lot of them, even more if you come out about the Green books. Your light is so bright it blinds people. It blinds me sometimes, but I love you for it. I’m so damn proud of you I could burst. That light will attract people to you, and it will burn the bad ones and hurt their eyes, and they’re going to try and hurt you for it. You need to watch out for them, learn to recognize them, and stay away from them. And you need to be patient while you wait for the right one. You don’t need to look for him—he’ll find you. There is nothing you can do about that light of yours. You shine like a beacon. You can’t turn it down or off and you shouldn’t. And that right guy is going to see the beacon, and turn up on your doorstep one of these days. In the meantime, kick the bad ones out, write your books, and stop complaining. Now go get me another bottle of wine,” he said, pointing at the kitchen, and she grinned and stood up and kissed him on the cheek.