5. Dead Serious
5
Dead Serious
THE FIRST TIME I met Lee Marlow, I was at a party with Rose and Natalie, our other roommate, who had since moved to South Korea. The party consisted of a lot of publishing people, though it wasn’t a mixer. There were authors, editors, quite a few assistants, and agents. It was for some milestone, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember what. They all blended together after a while, party after party, book launch after book launch, swanky bars after rooftop restaurants after extravagant apartments in Midtown.
I had grabbed Rose by the upper arm and brought her close. “Oh my god, four o’clock. Red Vans. I
told
you I could’ve worn my Converses.”
“But those Louboutins make your ass look amazing,” she replied.
“I can’t feel my feet, Rose,” I complained, envying the guy in the red Vans. Then he turned around and my breath caught in my throat. “Oh.”
“He’d look better in a nice pair of Gucci leather loafers.”
“That sounds so pretentious.”
“Says the girl wearing her best friend’s Louboutins.”
“You
made
me!”
She inclined her head. “And I don’t regret it for a second.”
I did, however, regret it a few hours later when my feet had gone from numb to stabbing pain. The party was in someone’s swanky Midtown apartment, and while most people were in the living room or on the balcony, I had hobbled my way into the library and sank down on the leather high-back chair that probably cost more than my NYU tuition, and taken off those priceless Louboutins, and I never felt more relief in my life. I leaned back in the plush leather chair and closed my eyes, and basked in the quiet.
Rose thrived on parties, on the energy, the loudness, the people. I liked them sometimes—on special occasions, like at concerts or Comic-Cons, but there was nothing quite like the silence of a well-loved library.
“Guess I’m not the only one looking for a little quiet,” came a good-humored voice from the other side of the library.
My eyes flew open and I sat up straight—only to find the man in the red Vans sitting on one of those ridiculous bookshelf ladders, the autobiography of some dead poet in his hands. It was like a scene from one of those cheesy nineties rom-coms—light streaking in between the dark velvet curtains, painting his face in angles of pale moonlight.
I felt myself blushing even before I registered how picturesque he looked. It was his eyes, I think. When he looked at me, the world around us blurred. All I saw was him, and all he saw was me. And he
saw
me. It felt like one of those moments I wrote about in romances, one of those destiny-calling feelings, where like called to like. And I knew—I
knew—
I was the exception to the rule.
He noticed my shoes abandoned by the chair. “Bold of you to take your shoes off in a stranger’s house.”
“These aren’t shoes, they’re torture devices,” I argued, feeling myself go rigid in defense. “And I don’t see it bothering you.”
He studied my shoes. “They do seem to be rather pointy.”
“Great for stabbing men alone in a library.”
“The pretty girl with the blond hair and the Louboutins in the private library?” He grinned. “No one’ll see that coming.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Are we flirting or is this a game of Clue?”
He did that thing—the thing people did sometimes when they ran their tongue over their teeth, just under their lips, to hide a smile. “Which do you want it to—”
“Marlow!” A tall woman with strawberry hair strode into the library, two drinks in her hands, immediately breaking the spell with her soft honey voice. I quickly looked away, down at my bare feet, as he greeted her. “There you are. I thought I left you by the head editor from Elderwood.”
“
You
try holding a conversation with that guy,” the man in the red Vans replied, and accepted one of the drinks the woman handed to him.
“I’ve had to talk to worse.” She then took him by his coat sleeve and tugged. “C’mon, there’s still a lot more people to meet.”
I wondered who she was. His girlfriend, perhaps? Fiancée? She was beautiful, with blunt-cut bangs and a loud yellow jacket, paired with high-waisted tartan-print trousers. I later came to find out that she was his assistant editor before he left Faux, where he had steadily climbed the ladder for years.
If the man in the red Vans had gone with her, things would have been so, so different. But he glanced back at me, a smile tucked into the corner of his mouth, and said, “I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Ugh,
fine
,” she said as someone caught her eye in the crowd in
the living room. “Oh! Ohmygod, that’s him. That’s the author. Mr. Brown!” she called, hurrying back into the fray of people.
And then we were alone again.
He watched her go, setting his drink on the mahogany bookshelf—that should’ve been my first warning sign, a blatant disregard for someone else’s books—and came over to me. I felt my chest constrict; I wasn’t sure if I’d rather be left alone with my painful feet or if I wanted him to stay.
“So,” he asked, “do you have anywhere to be tonight?”
“Here.”
He snorted a laugh. “Anywhere else?”
I inclined my head. “Are you asking?”
“Are you saying yes?” He arched a very pointed eyebrow. It was the kind of arch a feature writer would call
belletristic
when they sat down to pen his profile in
GQ
.
I should’ve told him to leave. I should’ve said I needed to stay and keep an eye on Rose. But I didn’t know, and he looked at me with this genuine sort of curiosity—who could this girl be, in Louboutins and a discount black dress? And he was a mystery, too, in his red Vans and his loose brown suit and his wild blond hair.
He outstretched his hand to me, as if wanting me to take it. “I’m Marlow—Lee Marlow. C’mon, let’s go somewhere shoes aren’t required.”
I smiled at him, and I knew then—I just
knew
—that this was something special. I felt like a star that had come unhinged from the night sky and started to fall, and I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t want to.
This was the moment. The one we’d tell at dinner parties. Of how we met, and fell in love, and knew we’d grow old together, and even when we died it wouldn’t be the end. Because if there was one thing more powerful than death itself, it was true, undeniable love.
I could feel it in my bones.
I just wanted to talk to him, to breathe in his words, to understand what made his brilliant mind tick.
I was, as the French say,
une putain d’idiote.
“Florence Day.” I took his hand.
And that was how I, the girl perpetually used as the backup date, who would rather hide in a burrito of blankets and watch trashy reality TV on a Friday night, began to date one of the hottest men I had ever met in my entire life.
But as I got to know him, as the dates turned into months, turned into anniversaries and sweet kisses, I thought it was the kind of love story worthy of my family’s legacy. A romance novel in the real world. It had the perfect meet-cute, the most charming love interest, and the most beautiful setting—a brownstone in Park Slope with a rooftop garden where I would sneak out and write chapters upon chapters of whimsical words
.
Sometimes he would find me up in the garden and ask in that smooth tenor of his, “What’re you doing up here, bunny?”
And I’d close my laptop or my journal or whatever I was using to write that evening, and smile at him, and say, “Oh, just thinking up stories.”
“What kinds of stories?” He’d sit down on the bench beside me, between a busy azalea and a pot of curling devil’s ivy. “I hope they’re naughty,” he said as he burrowed his face into my hair and kissed the side of my neck at the tenderest spot.
It always made me shiver.
“Very,” I’d laugh.
“I could take a peek. Make them better.”
“Bold of you to assume they aren’t already perfect.”
He laughed into my hair and murmured, “Nothing’s perfect, bunny,” and kissed me so softly, I would’ve called him a liar if my lips
weren’t preoccupied, because this was damn near perfect. The way the evening light crept over the rooftop, orange and golden and dreamy, and how his fingers were gentle as he cupped the sides of my face.
This was perfect.
He
was perfect.
Even so, I kept my ghostwriting secret.
There was never a right time to tell him, I felt, because every time a book he edited hit the list, I had been on there for a few weeks more. It felt like lying, even though I had signed NDAs and bundled myself in cautionary tape.
And so, because of that, I told him everything else. I laid my heart bare to him because I wanted to make up for the one secret in my life I didn’t know how to vocalize. I told him all of my other secrets, and my nightmares, and finally—after a year of kisses and dates and promises we always intended to keep—as we sat on the couch watching
Portals to Hell
, I confessed, “They don’t really like people yelling at them to appear.”
“Hmm?” He looked up from a book he was reading, his glasses perched low on his nose. Years later, I realized he didn’t actually
need
them—a small lie, being built on. “What was that, bunny?”
“The ghosts. They really don’t like it when people yell.” I was half a bottle of pinot grigio into the night, so I was a little braver than usual. I’d never talked about ghosts with anyone other than my father and Rose, and I thought—stupidly—that if I exchanged one for the other, my secret ghostwriting with a story of actual
ghosts
, it would make up for it.
He gave me a strange look over his black-framed glasses. “
Ghosts?
Like the haunting kind?”
I nodded, swirling my wine around in my glass. “Dad and I’ve danced with them in the funeral parlor.”
“Florence,” he chided.
“Most of them just want to talk, you know, to have someone
listen. It’s not as creepy as it looks in the movies. I wasn’t always able to see them, but it started when I was eight? Nine? Somewhere in there.”
He took off his glasses and turned to me on the couch. “You . . . you’re saying you saw ghosts? Like actual spirits. The”—he wiggled his fingers in the air—“
wooooo
kind?”
“I see ghosts. Present tense.”
“Like—right now?”
“No. Not now. Sometimes. I don’t talk to them anymore. I haven’t since I left home—”
He was chewing on the inside of his cheek, as if to keep himself from laughing, and I felt my heart sink then. Some things you just couldn’t tell even the people you loved the most. Some things no one would ever understand.
Could
never understand. And Lee was giving me the look I’d seen every day in high school, that pitying look, verging on curious, wondering if I was crazy.
I grinned then, and kissed him on the mouth. “Ha, what do you think of my story?” I asked, shoving down the part of me that began to fracture. The part I could never—would never—share with anyone again. “It’s a book I’m working on.”
More lies. But close to the truth. Truer than I’d ever been with anyone outside of Mairmont. But somehow, it still made me feel ashamed. And alone. I drained the rest of my glass and started to get off the couch, but he took me by the wrist and pulled me back down onto the cushions again.
“Wait, bunny. It’s really interesting.” And then, very softly, he asked, “Tell me more?”
I paused. “Really?”
“Absolutely. If this story means something to you, I want to listen.”
Always the perfect words at the perfect time. He was good at that. He knew how to make you feel important and cherished.
“But,” he added, “third person, please. The first-person kind of threw me off,” he admitted with a laugh.
So, I took a deep breath and I started. “She knew she would see a ghost when the crows came.”
And that was how I told him about the part of my life I couldn’t.
I told him about the ghosts of my childhood, and how rare they really were—some years without any at all. I’d seen a few in the city, but I never stopped to ask if they wanted anything. I didn’t really have it in me anymore, not after what I went through in Mairmont. I wanted to get away from that life—that part of me. And the best way to do it was to ignore them.
I never should have told him anything. I shouldn’t have even pretended that they were a story.
My younger sister, Alice, always said I was too gullible. Too generous. Too like the tree in that picture book, who kept giving and giving until there was nothing left. She said one day it would come back to bite me in the ass.
Lee Marlow did like to bite, but never my ass, and anyway I loved him, and he loved me, and we had a brownstone in Park Slope and he kissed me with such intensity that any echo of doubt fell silent between our lips. I might have been that weird girl who saw ghosts, but to him I was perfect.
Once he said, while we were out to dinner together and I had just told him about the time I had been woken up by the ghost of the recently deceased mayor, “You should try to publish this story. You might just make millions off it.”
“I tried publishing once. It didn’t work out. And I definitely did
not
make millions.”
He had barked a laugh. “Well, that’s because you wrote a romance.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Oh, bunny, you know you can do better.”
I faltered. “Better . . . ?”
“No one’s remembered for a
romance
, bunny. If you want to be a good writer, you gotta make something that lasts.”
I didn’t know what to say. Honestly, I should’ve said something—anything—to rebuke him, but then if I did, he would ask how I knew, and I’d have to tell him that I ghostwrote for Ann Nichols. By then, we were two years into our relationship, and he knew I was always writing
something
, but I’d been sneaky enough to keep him oblivious. So I pressed on a smile and said, “I don’t know. I kind of like keeping this story to myself.”
“Someone else’ll beat you to that story if you don’t write it.”
Maybe if I’d pressed him, he’d have given up the ghost, too.
For the record, he never told me about the book he was writing. He didn’t tell me until it sold at auction for a million dollars—exactly what he said mine would sell for. It sold to his own publishing house. Where he was a senior editor. And when I read the deal report, I realized it didn’t tell me anything.
Gilligan Straus, at Faux Publishing, has acquired in a twelve-house auction world rights to Faux senior editor Lee Marlow’s untitled debut, and a second novel. William Brooks of AngelFire Lit brokered the deal.
And Lee wouldn’t tell me, either.
“It’s a book, bunny,” he laughed. “Be happy for me!”
“Of course I am,” I replied, because I was silly—so silly. I should’ve been happy for him. Ecstatic. It was a life-changing deal! He could quit his job, write full-time, do all of the things he’d told me he wanted to but couldn’t because work weighed him down.
And now he was successful.
I should’ve been happy—no, I
was
happy.
Genuinely.
Then one night, a few months after the deal, he left his computer open while he went to go pick up his laundry. I’d never snooped before—I never wanted to. I trusted him.
I was a fool.
Because he’d taken what he’d said to me to heart. That if I didn’t write the story that I wove for him, then someone else would.
I just didn’t think . . . I didn’t think it’d be
him
.
Three years and a day after I met Lee Marlow, I realized that I had gotten our story all wrong. I was the main character, but not in my own story.
I was the main character in
his
.
I was sewn into the pages, into every word, laced into every sentence. The book he sold was a book about my family’s funeral home. About the stories I’d told him. The ghosts. The funerals. The graves. The bullies who picked on me and called me Wednesday. Who poured ink on my hair. The memories of my parents dancing in the parlor late at night, when they thought their kids had gone to bed. Of me and my sister fighting over the urn of our grandmother, and the ashes scattering all over the floor. Of the stray cat named Salem who must’ve been hit by a car at least once a year and
never
died—until cancer took him fourteen years later.
It was all there. All of my secrets. All of my stories.
All of
me
.
He used me as inspiration, and then he just used me.
He used the book deal to quit his job, become a full-time writer, and when I confronted him about the story, he said to me—and I’ll remember it until the day I die—“Bunny, you can still write your romance.”
“That’s what you think I’m mad about?”
“
You
weren’t going to write this book.”
“You don’t know that!”
“Bunny, c’mon, aren’t you being a little unfair?” He had tried to soothe me as I elbowed past him on the way down the steps of our brownstone.
His
brownstone.
And maybe, yeah.
Maybe I was, but—
“What happens at the end? To your Florence in your book? Does some guy come in to save her, only to steal the one story that’s hers?”
His demeanor changed then. He was still charming, still looked at me like I was the center of the universe in which everything else orbited, but suddenly I was something that was no longer precious. “I can’t steal a story you’d never write, Florence.”
And that was it. I had been an utter fool. Whatever I felt was nothing, it was imagined.
Then he shut the door on me.
Literally.
He didn’t even try to explain or beg for me to come back. He simply left me on the sidewalk on a cold April evening with my one jumbo suitcase and two pots of devil’s ivy I’d stolen from the rooftop garden.
And all of his stories began to make sense if I thought of them the same way he thought about my stories.
Fictional.
I thought I knew Lee. He had studied at Yale, and left because he wanted to teach French to orphans in Benin. He only came back because his mother died of cancer, and he wanted to help his father grieve. He had a sister in a group home in Texas after she suffered a brain aneurysm on her wedding day, and he always donated to
the ASPCA because he used to volunteer there in high school, and I ate all of it up like candy. I never questioned it.
Why would I? I trusted him.
I began to figure it out, though, after the night he left me in the rain. I put together his lies, piece by piece, until they finally began to add up. I mean, he didn’t even know the
capital
of Benin. (It’s Porto-Novo, by the way.)
Here was the truth: Lee Marlow flunked out of Yale. His parents lived in Florida, and his sister was married to a librarian in Seattle. He never chased a master’s at Oxford. He never interned at the
Wall Street Journal
.
And I was heartbroken.
Standing there on the sidewalk in the April rain, I did the only thing I could think of—I called Rose, and she had a roommate who was moving out. It did cross my mind to go home, of course it did, because with one big hug from my parents I would be okay again, but if I went back home, it meant that everyone who said I wouldn’t make it in New York, who expected me to return so they could whisper behind their hands about the girl who talked to ghosts, would be right. And that was a story I couldn’t face. Not yet.
So, I showed up on Rose’s doorstep that rainy Wednesday evening, and that was that.
I haven’t been able to write a romance since.