“What do you mean What am I gonna do after school?” he asked, while hefting my bookcase into the corner of my new dorm room that September.
“I mean that people are applying to grad schools or applying for jobs.” I flopped onto the bed and watched him work. “So what are we gonna do?”
“I’m not sure what you’re gonna do yet, but I’m sure you’ll land on your feet, even if you have to move back in with your parents for a few months.”
“And what about you?” I rose up on my elbows.
“Whadya mean?” He blew the hair out of his eyes and looked up at me. “What’s wrong with bartending until I sell my script?”
There was nothing and plenty wrong with it, but what was I going to say? That was when I realized just how committed he was to his writing, and it terrified me. Not because I thought he would fail, but because it might take him a very long time to succeed. And I didn’t want that kind of disappointment for him. I came back from summer convinced that it was my responsibility to seek out a career that would work for me, rather than waiting for one to fall into my lap. His summer had convinced him that dedication to writing wasn’t enough. Surviving without a safety net was some twisted sort of price he concluded he had to pay if he was ever really gonna make it. Encouraging him to seek stability at that point would have been like telling him that I had never believed in him at all. I snapped my mouth shut and swallowed, recognizing that my silence had made the space for the first small fissure in our relationship.
He didn’t seem to notice that anything had happened as the months took us into the winter and spring of our senior year. To anyone watching us during the Senior Ski Weekend at Bear Mountain or at the beach in Cozumel on spring break, our rhythm must have seemed unbroken. But every now and then I wondered…how much of our connection rested atop my conspiring to allow him to see himself a certain way? Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Even then I understood that I was a young woman in the throes of a connection that she knew she would never forget.
So I accepted, rather than decided, that there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t sweep under the rug just to keep him inhaling me with those eyes. I had to, you understand, because if I didn’t I felt sure that a later, older, wiser version of myself would have never forgiven me.
Just after spring break, Alex had sent copies of his manuscript to a handful of agents. A month later he received his first rejection letter.
“Well, I guess that was Round One,” I said, dropping my backpack on my dorm room steps to take a seat beside him. I slipped an arm around his shoulder. “So what are we gonna change before you send it out for Round Two?”
In the weeks leading up to graduation, he collected a stack of rejection letters almost two inches thick. There were enough as it turned out to wallpaper his entire bathroom. We discovered this one morning when we woke up—hungover—to find that was exactly what we had done the night before.
But in the light of day Alex didn’t think it was funny. In fact, he crawled into bed and refused to go anywhere for a week. Eventually I had enough of his moping and forced him out when we were to be fitted for our caps and gowns. He came along, but he wasn’t the same. And I was very close to being seriously concerned when he burst into the dorm, interrupting a margarita-soaked slumber party with my girlfriends a few nights before graduation, to wave a piece of paper in my face.
“It’s from ICM!” he shouted, yanking me up into his arms for what became a twirl around an imaginary dance floor.
“Oh my God!” I slapped both hands to my cheeks before remembering the avocado face mask. “They signed you?”
“No.” He ignored my wiping the gunk off on my pajamas, while my roommates poured him a drink. “But it wasn’t a form letter this time! This guy, this agent, he says my writing’s good…like, good enough to sell…if I can just tighten up my plot line. He gave me a few suggestions and said I could send him a new version if I wanted!”
After graduation I had decided to move back home and spend a year temping to keep myself in lip gloss and lemon-drop martinis while I decided where I wanted to land. Alex, as planned, was bartending by night and reworking his screenplay by day, sharing an apartment with a couple of guys in Venice near the beach. He was happier than I had seen him in months. As we rolled into midsummer, I told myself that until I decided to get serious, I had no right to tell him to do so.
However, as the saying goes the only things that truly can change a person are death and divorce. And seeing my mother so helpless in the hallway I had to wonder how long she would have stood there mumbling if I hadn’t come home. I wondered while I booked the funeral home with the crematorium to suit Hindu ritual and ordered the flowers for the small family ceremony. I wondered while I sat with Sheila’s mother, the lawyer, trying to make sense of our family’s finances and pay the inheritance taxes without losing our home. I wondered while I made a list of all of the relatives in Los Angeles, London and Bombay who needed to be notified, and had to decide which of the elder male relatives would take my father’s ashes to scatter over the Ganges River as he would have wanted. And I wondered while I forced my mother to eat something each day, and then stood staring out her bedroom window at the moon each night until the pace of her breathing assured me that her sleeping pills had started to kick in.
The harder Alex tried to connect with me, the more vehemently I told him I needed space. The further I tried to push him away, the harder he fought me for myself. The clearer it became that my mother and I would be lucky if we came out of this owning our home, the more Alex’s belief that love could conquer anything made me stiffen to his touch. I could tell myself that I was being irrational to regard him as naive, but I couldn’t explain myself to him. It was a time when being understood felt like being turned inside out. All I knew was that when he was around he made me feel, and feeling anything at that point simply made me want to throw up. One foot in front of the other was the only way I would make it through this, and I needed to be alone. Then there’d be nobody else left to lose.
So I met him at the Venice boardwalk and told him the one thing that would shake him out of this love, and make him want to run as far away from me as possible.
“I already have a job,” he answered, tugging at the grass as we sat in the picnic overlook. “I’m a writer.”
“Writing is not a job until you sell something, Alex. Your job right now is bartending.”
“So what are you saying? Why all of a sudden don’t you think I’m gonna sell this?”
My eyes were fixed on the horizon. “I’m just saying that after all these rejections…this is the real world. Thousands of people are running around Los Angeles with a screenplay to sell, and…and you might never sell a script.”
I could feel him staring hard at me, willing me to face him. I could hear him breathing heavily, gathering the steam for his words and then deciding against it. Soon enough, it was over. And he stood up and walked away. No matter how hard I tried to search inside myself, at that moment, all I could find was a very deep sense of relief. I knew that I was alone now, and that I could finally grieve. Because if you take away a man’s perception that his woman believes in him, then you might as well just take away the woman herself.
six
I GET A DAY OFF ABOUT AS ROUTINELY AS MEN IN BOW TIES GET invited up for a nightcap. And for me, that’s fine, because I knew what I was getting into when I chose the life that I did. So I saw no good reason to look a technical glitch in the mouth that Sunday afternoon when I was unable to log on to the computer in my office. After a few unsuccessful attempts, a message popped up telling me that my password was incorrect and I should contact the IT administrator. Had I known his name or had any interest in really