I was beginning to understand that while I’d been writing, Dan had been doing far more than I had ever imagined.
He texted me a photograph from the Suspension Bridge. The sun was just rising over Bristol, a lurid orange glow splitting the sky at the horizon, silhouetting treetops and rooftops. He wrote:
Isn’t this glorious? Btw I ran into Sasha. She and James say WELCOME (caps intentional by order of Sasha) and are organizing drinks so we can meet the other neighbors. Xxx
It torpedoed my mood. I hated parties. Every aspect of them inflicted psychological torment upon me. I was terrible at small talk and intimidated by big groups of people. I scoffed at the “caps intentional,” considering it proof that Sasha was no more substantial than a social media hysteric. And I wondered where Dan had run into her. At the end of her driveway, I supposed. I knew now that she and her husband had the first house on our lane. Perhaps she had been exercising, too. Probably.
I felt my midriff. The end-of-book muffin top wasn’t going to disappear anytime soon, that was for sure, nor was my exhaustion. I felt heavy-limbed and sluggish. I didn’t reply to Dan but put my phone on the table facedown. Sometimes, the act of prodding at the screen could feel as dumb as a chicken pecking dirt, the gains no more substantial.
The sun still hadn’t reached our garden, though the air was visibly brightening, finally. My eyes roved the shadows and caught something unusual. Down at our perimeter, where the lawn met the woods, I thought I saw the silhouette of a man standing, staring straight at me. I froze. Blinked. Refocused. He was still there. He looked tall and solidly built. He stood facing me with his arms hanging loosely by his sides. The posture of someone who is not threatened but could be threatening. I couldn’t see any more detail than that, though, and a second later I wasn’t even completely sure it was a man and not a shadow, yet I felt the threat viscerally, as a shudder, a premonition of violence, and I couldn’t shift my gaze away.
He didn’t move and neither did I for what felt like the longest time, until I steeled myself to stand up. I took two paces to the side, my eyes still fixed on the shadow, on him, and as I reached to switch on the outside lights all the tender places in my body felt both tense and intensely vulnerable, as if anticipating the slash of a knife. A bright glare washed the terrace outside, and I realized I’d made a mistake because it was impossible for me to see out now, and that was more frightening than seeing. I switched the lights off again and he had gone. The light had changed, the shadows shifted.
I remained in that spot, immobile. My chest was heaving. I gave myself a talking-to, telling myself that I must have imagined what I saw at the edge of the woods, that it was my past playing tricks on me, but fear rooted me there for minutes until the garden and the edge of the woods were soaked with light. Then it felt safe to move again.
I felt bleak and hollow in the aftermath of this little drama.
“Do you think someone was there?” I asked Eliza.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It was hard to tell.”
When Dan got home, I told him what had happened.
“Where was he standing?” Dan looked toward the spot I pointed to. A bead of sweat crept down his forehead. “It must have been a shadow,” he said.
“It didn’t look like a shadow. It was more solid than that.”
“Who’s going to be out at that time in the morning, sneaking around?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think maybe you imagined it. You know what you’re like.”
I certainly did. And I needed help.
I said, “We need to talk.”
10.
“They’ve rejected the book,” I told Dan, and the concerned expression fell from his face and shattered on the floor like a piece of dropped porcelain. I stared at the shards until they disappeared. I was afraid to raise my eyes to his. I kept them fixed on the flooring while I explained what I’d done.
“You spent nine months writing a whole new book without Eliza in it, without telling anybody? You didn’t tell me?”
Dan rarely shouted. Instead, his voice had altered more subtly than that, as if he’d marinated it in disdain overnight.
I snapped back, “You didn’t tell me about the house!”
“I wouldn’t have bought the house if you’d told me what you’d done. What were you thinking?”
“Maybe I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known what you were up to.”
“What makes you think you can just do something like that?”
“Because I’m the bloody writer!”
“You have no idea.” He shook his head, as if I was irredeemably stupid. “No idea how much I prop you up.”
I had an urge to scream at the absolute, total unfairness of that, but instead I said, “Let’s not forget that any propping up you do is funded by me.”
I left the room and he scrambled to follow, catching me easily, grabbing me painfully by the elbow as I reached the hall. It forced me to halt and we stood there, too close, exhaling contempt right into each other’s face, and it felt overwhelming.
I yanked my arm out of his grasp. He surprised me by making a sudden gesture of surrender: hands raised, palms out.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to grab you. You scared me. This is a shock. I’m sorry.”
He made to touch me again but thought better of it when I flinched. Hurt twitched in the backs of his eyes. I still wanted to leave, but I forced myself to absorb his words, his contrite tone, and the way he looked as if he’d shocked himself by grabbing me. My anger shriveled a little and the frisson of fear I’d felt disappeared. I shouldn’t alienate him. I loved him. I would be completely alone, without him.
“It’s just . . .” he said, and his brow crinkled as he sought the right words. “What about your delivery payment?”
“There won’t be one.”
“Fuck.”
“I know.”
“Then how do we fix this? Can you put Eliza back in the book?”
“No.”
“Surely it’s not impossible. What have you written? Could you work her into it or even start from scratch? You wrote the draft of book three in just a few months.”
“What if I’ve written the book I wanted to write?”
Anger flashed in Dan’s eyes. There wasn’t a shred of contrition to be seen in them now, neither was there sympathy. “I thought you said you never wanted to become a diva?” he said.
It felt like a body blow, after all the work I’d done, the times I’d pushed myself to the brink of exhaustion and beyond. I ran upstairs, slamming and locking the bathroom door before he could follow me in there, turning on the taps to drown out the sound of him shouting, then apologizing, then pleading for us to talk about things like adults.
He stopped, after a while. I put the lid down on the loo and sat there thinking of how naïve I’d been when I first got published. How I hadn’t realized what a treadmill I was stepping onto. How the sheer pace of it, and the exhaustion, eroded your confidence and then chipped away at your sanity, how it made you vulnerable because the books crowded every corner of your brain, every minute of every day, until your main character stepped off the page and compromised your real life, which made you feel crazy. How your husband took too much control while you were buried in your fictional world.