I’D READ SOMEWHERE that it took 10,000 hours to be an expert at something. Writing was different, too vague a “something” for 10,000 hours to add up to much. Maybe 10,000 hours of lying in an empty bathtub brainstorming added up to being an expert on brainstorming in an empty bathtub. Maybe 10,000 hours of walking your neighbor’s dog, working out a plot problem under your breath, would turn you into a pro at puzzling through plot tangles.
But those things were parts of a whole.
I’d probably spent more than 10,000 hours typing novels (those published as well as those cast aside), and I still wasn’t an expert at typing, let alone an expert on writing books. Because even when you’d spent 10,000 hours writing feel-good fiction and another 10,000 reading it, it didn’t make you an expert at writing any other kind of book.
I didn’t know what I was doing. I couldn’t be sure I was doing anything. There was a decent chance I’d send this draft to Anya and get an email back like, Why did you just send me the menu for Red Lobster?
But whether or not I was actually succeeding at this book, I was writing it. It came in painful ebbs and desperate flows, as if timed to the waves crashing somewhere behind that wall of fog.
It wasn’t my life, but it was close. The conversation between the three women—Ellie, her mother, and Sonya’s stand-in, Lucy—might’ve been word for word, although I knew not to trust memory quite so much these days.
If memory were accurate, then Dad couldn’t have been here, in this house, when Mom’s cancer came back. He couldn’t have been because, until he died, I had memories of them dancing barefoot in the kitchen, of him smoothing her hair and kissing her head, driving her to the hospital with me in the back seat and the playlist he’d enlisted me to help him piece together playing on the car stereo.
Willie Nelson’s “Always on My Mind.”
Mom and Dad’s hands clasped tightly on the center console.
Of course I remembered the “business trips” too. But that was the point. I remembered things as I’d thought they’d been, and then the truth, That Truth, had ripped the memories in half as easily as if they had been images on printer paper.
The next three days were a fervor of writing, cleaning, and little else. Aside from a box of wrapping paper, a handful of board games, and a great deal of towels and spare bedding, there was nothing remotely personal in the upstairs guest bedroom. It could’ve been any vacation home in America, or maybe a model home, a half-assed promise that your life too could be this kind of generically pretty.
I liked the upstairs decor significantly less than the warm boho vibe downstairs. I couldn’t decide whether I felt relieved or cheated by that.
If there had been more of him, or of her, here, she’d already done the heavy lifting of scrubbing it clear.
On Wednesday, I photographed the furniture and posted it on craigslist. On Thursday, I packed the extra bedding, board games, and wrapping paper into boxes for Goodwill. On Friday, I stripped all the bedding and the towels from the racks in the second upstairs bathroom and carried them down to the laundry closet on the first floor, dumping them into the washer before sitting down to write.
The mist had finally burned off and the house was hot and sticky once again, so I’d opened the windows and doors and turned on all the fans.
I’d gotten glimpses of Gus over the last three days, but they’d been few. As far as I could tell, he moved around while drafting. If he was working at the kitchen table in the morning, he was never there by the time I poured my second cup of coffee. If he was nowhere to be seen all day, he’d appear
suddenly on the deck at night, writing with only the light of his laptop and the swarm of moths batting around it.
Whenever I spotted him, I instantly lost focus. It was too fun imagining what he could be writing, brainstorming the possibilities. I was praying for vampires.
On Friday afternoon, we lined up for the first time, sitting at our tables in front of our matching windows.
He sat at his kitchen table, facing my house.
I sat at my kitchen table, facing his.
When we realized this, he lifted his bottle of beer the same way he’d mock-toasted with his coffee mug. I lifted my water glass
Both windows were open. We could’ve talked but we would have had to scream.
Instead Gus smiled and picked up the highlighter and notebook beside him. He scribbled on it for a second, then held the notebook up so I could read it:
LIFE IS MEANINGLESS, JANUARY. GAZE INTO THE ABYSS.
I suppressed a laugh, then fished a Sharpie out of my backpack, dragged my own notebook toward me, and flipped to a blank page. In large, square letters, I wrote:
THIS REMINDS ME OF THAT TAYLOR SWIFT VIDEO.
His smile leapt up his face. He shook his head, then went back to writing. Neither of us said another word, and neither of us relocated either. Not until he knocked on my front door for our first research outing, a steel travel mug in each hand.
He gave my dress—the same itchy black thing I’d worn to book club—and boots one slow up-and-down, then shook his head. “That … will not work.”
“I look great,” I fired back.
“Agreed. If we were going to see the American Ballet Theatre, you’d be perfect. But I’m telling you, January, that will not work for tonight.”
“IT’S GOING TO be a late night,” Gus warned. We were in his car, heading north along thelake, the sun slung low in the sky, its last feverish rays painting everything to look like backlit cotton candy. When I’d demanded he pick out my new outfit and save me the trouble, I’d expected him to be uncomfortable. Instead he followed me into the downstairs guest room, looked at the handful of things hanging in the closet, and picked out the same denim shorts I’d worn to Pete’s bookstore and my Carly Simon T-shirt and with that we’d set off.
“As long as you don’t make me listen to you sing ‘Everybody Hurts’ twice in a row,” I said, “I think I can deal with a late night.”
His smile was faint. It made his eyelids sink heavily. “Don’t worry. That was a special occasion I let a friend talk me into. Won’t happen again.”
He was tapping restlessly against the steering wheel as we pulled up to a red light, and my eyes slid down the veins in his forearms, up along the back of his bicep to where it met his sleeve. Jacques had been handsome like an underwear model, perfectly toned with a winning smile and golden-brown hair that fell the same exact way every day. But it was all of Gus’s minor imperfections—his scars and ridges, crooked lines and sharp edges—and how they added up that had always made it hard for me to stop looking at him, and made me want to see more.
He leaned forward to mess with the temperature controls, his eyes flicking toward me. I jerked my gaze out the window, trying to clear my mind before he could read it.
“Do you want to be surprised?” he said.
My heart seemed to trip over its next beat. “What?”
“About where we’re going.”
I relaxed. “Hm. Surprised by something disturbing enough that you think it belongs in a book. No thanks.”
“Probably wise,” he agreed. “We’re going to interview a woman whose sister was in a suicide cult.”
“You’re kidding.”
He shook his head.
“Oh my God,” I said through a shock of laughter. All at once, the tension I’d imagined dissipated. “Gus, are you writing a rom-com about a suicide cult?”
He rolled his eyes. “I scheduled this interview before our bet. Besides, the point of this outing is helping you learn to write literary fiction.”
“Well, either way, you weren’t kidding about staring into the abyss,” I said. “So the point of this lesson is basically Everything sucks, now get to work writing about it?”
Gus smirked. “No, smart-ass. The points of this lesson are character and detail.”
I faux-gasped. “You’re never going to believe this crazy coincidence, but we have those in women’s fiction too!”
“You know, you’re the one who initiated this whole lesson-plan element of the deal,” Gus said. “If you’re going to make fun of me the whole time, I’m happy to drop you off at the nearest suburban comedy club open mic and pick you up on the way back.”
“Okay, okay.” I waved him on. “Character and detail. You were saying …”
Gus shrugged. “I like writing about outlandish scenarios. Characters and events that seem too absurd to be real, but still work. Having specificity helps make the unbelievable believable. So I do a lot of interviews. It’s interesting what people remember about a situation. Like if I’m going to write a cult-leading zealot who believes he’s an alien consciousness reincarnated as every great world leader for centuries, I also need to know what kind of shoes he wears, and what he eats for breakfast.”
“But do you really?” I teased. “Are the readers honestly begging for that?”
He laughed. “You know, maybe the reason you haven’t been able to finish your book is that you keep asking what someone else wants to read instead of what you want to write.”
I crossed my arms, bristling. “So tell me, Gus. How are you going to put a romantic spin on your suicide-cult book?”
His head tilted against the headrest, his knife-edged cheekbones casting shadows down his face. He scratched his jaw. “First of all, when did I say this interview was for my rom-com? I could just as easily set aside all my notes from this until I win our bet, then get back to work on my next official novel.”
“And is that what you’re doing?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet,” he admitted. “Trying to figure out if I can combine the .”
“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. “Tell me the specifics. I’ll see if I can help.”
“Okay. So.” He adjusted his grip on the steering wheel. “The original premise was basically that this journalist finds out his high school sweetheart, a former drug addict, has joined a cult, so he decides to infiltrate it and take it down.