The Opposite of Drowning

by Erin McRae

Harry straightened up and put his hands in his pockets. “What are you working on then?” he asked.

  “I do have other authors I work with. Most of whom are perfectly pleasant and obliging individuals who do not want food trucks and road trips and book tours.”

  “I think that’s the first time anyone has ever used ‘pleasant,’ ‘obliging,’ and ‘authors’ in the same sentence,” Harry said. “And if you’re really here at eight in the evening doing actual work for this company, I’m going to doubt whether you’re human.”

  “Maybe I’m not,” Eliza said, falling into the same charged banter that had come so easily with him from the beginning.

  “Maybe you’re not, at that.” Harry looked at her face square on, his eyes meeting hers and holding her gaze for far longer than was polite.

  Eliza felt her cheeks go warm, not because she was embarrassed but because his face – his look – was just so much. There was an energy to him, a fire, that radiated beyond the confines of his body. He was an attractive man, that was undeniable, but whatever made Eliza feel that something in her soul was calling to something in his was beyond his looks.

  She judged herself for the absurd thought. “I’m trying to write,” she blurted, needing to break the silence and whatever force kept her eyes locked to Harry’s.

  “Ah.” Harry also seemed to struggle to snap out of the strange trance that had ensnared them both. He shook himself like a man emerging from the water and resumed the tone of their earlier repartee. “Oh, God, don’t do that. Hasn’t publishing taught you anything?”

  Eliza frowned. “I write, you know. I just do this too. I don’t judge you, so don’t judge me.”

  “You absolutely judge me.” His laugh was warm, like chocolate, but without any sugar in it.

  “Fair.” She smiled and glanced down for a moment at her keyboard. “But am I wrong?”

  “No, you’re not. Fair indeed.” Harry echoed.

  Eliza sighed, but not really with annoyance. Maybe with relief? Her concentration had been broken anyway, and now that Harry was here she had to admit to herself she didn’t mind his conversation. “If you’re going to stay there bothering me, you might as well sit down,” she said.

  “No, you’re working, I’ve taken up enough of your time. I can go –” Harry gestured over his shoulder.

  He really would, Eliza thought. He, unlike so many people, really did seem to value her time as much as his own.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “I could use a break.”

  Harry sat down in the chair across from her desk. “Why I came in here – I’m sorry I threw Philippe at you. He’s the right choice for your project by all objective standards and as far as your job goes too. But still, I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you,” Eliza said, surprised. She’d expected neither the apology nor the grace with which it was offered.

  “If you want my advice about dealing with him....” His voice trailed off. “Do you want my advice?”

  “If I said no would it stop you?”

  Harry considered. “Yes,” he said.

  “Let’s hear your wisdom then.”

  “Don’t flatter him. It puffs him up too much. I know it seems the easiest way to get him to like you and be agreeable, but most people, I suspect, just want to be seen. Ask him how he is and then, no matter how much it pains you, listen to his answer. If he starts nattering about sauces and books and business, stop him until he gives you an answer that seems to reasonably belong to a person who isn’t a C-list celebrity. It’s kind enough. And he’ll deflate a little.”

  “And is that successful? When you do it?”

  “When I can manage it. But I’m not patient. Or –” he gestured to her.

  “A woman?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. It’s all horrible isn’t it?”

  Eliza shrugged. There was little point in discussing it. “This is hardly my first job, Harry.”

  “Yes. Of course. You said you could use a break.” Harry crossed his legs. “What are you writing?”

  Eliza hesitated. With many people – even, and maybe especially, with many people who worked in publishing – she wouldn’t have answered. She got so much flak for writing what she did that it often wasn’t worth it to let someone new in. But if she trusted anyone to be kind about this, it was, somehow, Harry.

  “An essay,” she admitted.

  “Personal?”

  Eliza nodded. “That dread domain of women.”

  Harry scoffed. “About what?”

  “My family’s beach house.” She paused to give Harry one last chance to betray boredom or judgment. But he merely sat there, his head tilted ever so slightly to the side, his eyes fixed on her. Listening.

  “I mean, not the house itself,” she went on. “My grandparents owned it – my parents do now. We spent all our summers there when I was growing up. And it’s just, it’s the worst of everything I hate about New England. The money and the property and the performance of it all. Dinner parties my sister and I weren’t allowed to attend until we weren’t children anymore. Still in the school room.... It sounds silly, but sometimes my childhood feels like it happened in another century.”

  Harry chuckled, but it wasn’t cruel. “Like Pride & Prejudice with different dresses?”

  “Yes, yes! Exactly like that. But it was also...it is also....” Eliza glanced down at her laptop screen; it had gone black while she’d been talking and she absently tapped the trackpad to wake it back up. “It’s very beautiful. And very beautiful things are dangerous. You can’t trust them. It’s where I learned to swim.”

  “It’s on the Cape?” Harry guessed.

  Eliza nodded.

  “Beautiful and dangerous, indeed then. You must be a strong swimmer, if that’s where you learned. The riptides are notorious.”

  He wasn’t wrong, but Eliza shook her head. “The water is the only place I’ve ever been able to be something other than what’s expected of me, and I’ve never known how to reconcile the wildness of that place – of that ocean – with the cloistered cruelty of the world that gave it to me.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” Harry said.

  “Do you?”

  “It was like that where I grew up too. Look, are you planning on staying much longer?”

  “Why?” Eliza was flustered by his change in tack.

  “Because I’m starved and was going to order Chinese. You want in?”

  Harry

  “DESPAIR DOESN’T SUIT you, Harry,” Meryl said.

  The day after he and Eliza had eaten takeout together in his office, Harry and Meryl were sitting in Harry’s living room, not entirely comfortably. They so rarely saw each other in their respective homes, and when they did Harry never felt like he even knew how to arrange his limbs.

  He shifted irritably in his Eames chair and tried to figure out what to say. He hated sharing a house with anyone else, and a guest who could wind up in his bed was particularly awkward, no matter how close he and Meryl were and no matter how clear their understandings. Meryl was across from him, her cane resting against the arm of the settee on which she sat.

  Harry was all for shared experience – food, travel, music. After all, that was how he, Meryl, Steven, and Dennis had bonded in college. But shared domesticity, even the threat of it, made his skin itch. There were too many expectations in it that he didn’t have the interest to deliver on. Luckily for their friendship Meryl was much the same. But that did little to diminish this current awkwardness. Perhaps it was just Steven’s circumstances, but Meryl’s presence in his city was sudden enough that Harry was waiting for her to announce bad news of her own.

  “I’m not in despair,” Harry protested when he could no longer get away with staring at the framed mid-century prints that littered his walls. But his words were in vain, and he knew Meryl knew it.

  She held out her empty glass. Harry took it, glad for the excuse to busy himself at his sideboard refreshing their drinks. “I have work to do,” he continued as he
poured her another two fingers of scotch over a single perfect ice cube. “Actual, productive work that doesn’t involve my incessant navel-gazing. But I have to go back to Vienna if I’m to have any hope of fixing this book.”

  “So go to Vienna.” Meryl was often a comfort to Harry, but she rarely had any time for his whining. Not that he had any intention of letting that stop him.

  Harry handed Meryl her glass back, but didn’t sit down again. He felt too restless. “I have finite vacation time, I don’t want to go, and all I can think is that Steven will never travel outside the continent again,” he said.

  “Don’t be morbid.”

  “I’m being truthful. And since when do you want me to be gentle?”

  “I always, always want you to be gentle with me,” Meryl teased. “I just think you should be a little less gentle with the world. You could do so much more.”

  “Yes, and everything I’m doing already irritates me. Why add to it?”

  “I don’t irritate you,” Meryl said.

  “No, you don’t,” he admitted. “Although I’m fairly sure you irritate nearly everyone else.”

  Meryl laughed. “Just because I accidentally complained about Mallory in an email to Mallory before I realized Stephen was going to marry her is no reason to hold a grudge. If I had wanted to offend her, I would have done it much better. And I’ve been very nice since!”

  “You’re still proud of that,” Harry needled her. Meryl was an imp.

  “I can be proud of it, or I can confront the possibility I am too old to use email properly. I’ll take the first, thanks.”

  “Why are you here?” Harry asked, thinking the better of it even as the words left his mouth. “I’m sorry. That was rude. You know I’m always glad to see you.”

  “No you’re not. Not here, at least.”

  Harry finally sat down again. “Meryl.”

  “We’re much better far from anywhere either of us call home,” she said with a smile.

  “That’s true. You also broke up with me in Brittany.”

  “That was part of us being better.”

  “And that’s very true.” Oh, but Harry did love her. There was just no in about it. No matter how old they got, they would always be feral teenagers together.

  “So,” she said, suddenly studying her fingernails. “About that.”

  “Mmmm?” Harry said with some trepidation.

  “How would you feel if home was the same place for both of us?”

  Harry tried not to choke on his scotch. “Come again?”

  “Columbia wants me.”

  Harry took a deep sip of his drink, but said nothing. He didn’t know how he felt, and he didn’t trust his voice.

  “It means relocating here, Harry.”

  “Obviously,” he said to stall for time. He sat up a little straighter, blinked, and then wondered if he was holding himself too still. Did he seem nervous? Worried?

  “Is that going to be a problem?” she asked, slowly, as if she was already judging him for any number of things.

  “Why would that be a problem?” Harry attempted casualness; Harry failed.

  “Familiarity breeds contempt?”

  “Meryl.”

  “Fine. Your frightened eyes.”

  “My life works very well the way it is,” Harry said. But the truth was his life was changing, and right now it didn’t seem to be working at all. Steven was leaving this world faster than anyone wanted. His literary career was, if not at a crossroads, at least at a slightly peculiar juncture. And his work life, never before a source of surprise, involved a woman he couldn’t stop thinking about. “If you’re closer, do we work better or worse?” Harry asked.

  “We’ll have to find a bar we like,” Meryl said, as if to acknowledge the awkwardness of the evening without naming it.

  “And Italy?” Harry asked. Every winter the Miscreants spent the holidays there. And Harry and Meryl spent every such holiday sleeping together. Their time together there – in bed and out of it – was oddly and desperately important to him. Not because of any wish for things to be different between them, but because of the ritual of it and the refuge, always waiting there for them in the dark end of the year.

  Meryl waved a hand as if to say he was silly to worry. “I love you too, you insufferable idiot. There’s a reason I only fuck you when we’re both on holiday.”

  “Really, and what’s that?”

  “If I move here, you think the question is about the utility for you of my being closer. But I think, that if I move here, the question is about what the inherent nature of our interactions is. Regardless of where I’m based.”

  “The what’s-it-all-for question,” Harry said warily. Perhaps, just as he and Steven had needed to discuss awkward things, so too did he and Meryl.

  He was saved by having to go through with any such act by his cell phone ringing. It was on an end table halfway across the room, and he muttered his thanks as Meryl reached for it and handed it to him.

  He was nonplussed to see that it was Philippe. That he had Harry’s personal mobile number was a testament to his sales figures and persistence, but Harry still let the call go to voicemail. Meryl, who knew his habits of avoidance both professional and personal, raised an eyebrow at him over the rim of her glass.

  “Business or pleasure?” she asked.

  He let out an annoyed breath. “Certainly not the second.”

  Once the voicemail icon appeared on his phone he put it on speaker and played the message back so Meryl could share in his misery. It was more or less exactly what he’d expected: Confusion over various deadlines for his next three releases, misunderstandings of instructions, and several less-than flattering mentions of Eliza.

  “He sounds lovely,” Meryl observed.

  Harry scooped up the phone and composed a text, not to Philippe, but to Eliza.

  I’ve just had a call from your favorite test case. Is there something we need to talk about?

  He didn’t expect an answer right away, but his phone chimed almost immediately. He nearly fumbled it out of his hands in surprise.

  I tried your advice. It didn’t work.

  Despite himself, Harry chuckled. Meryl watched him keenly. “The maligned Eliza?” she guessed. “Is that the girl you emailed us about from Frankfurt?

  “Mm.” Harry typed back, What happened?

  There was a long pause as Eliza typed. Harry didn’t dare look up at Meryl, but he was keenly aware of her gaze on him as he waited. Finally, the message appeared.

  I proposed a food-truck-themed cooking game app. Philippe was not impressed. I pointed out that I’ve seen his royalty statements, we’re not his only income stream, and that while I personally hadn’t priced out food trucks, if he wants one so badly he can probably get one on his own. And now he’s mad that no one priced out food trucks before we told him no.

  How does he know no one priced out food trucks? Harry texted back.

  Come now, Harry. Eliza’s reply came almost immediately. FOOD TRUCKS. I love them too, but really.

  Harry had to swallow back a bark of laughter. Eliza really was too wonderful. And Philippe was too terrible. Though someone – Harry, really – should probably have run the numbers on Philippe’s proposed adventure, if only to cover this eventuality.

  Meryl spoke as he considered his reply. “Should I infer anything from the fact you’re texting her after hours when I know for a fact you avoid work like the plague any time you’re not in the office?”

  “You should also know that we ordered food in at the office last night and spent three hours sitting and talking. And eating too, I suppose.” Harry looked up at his friend. “She’s one of the very few people I’ve never wanted to avoid. I feel like I’ve known her forever, but that’s simply not possible, and I can’t stop thinking about her.”

  “And what on earth am I supposed to infer from that?” Meryl asked, sounding somewhere between shocked and amused. “Harry Sargent, sounding like a schoolboy with a crush.�
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  “Whatever it is,” Harry said without thinking, “it’s not just a crush.”

  Eliza

  OVER THE COURSE OF the next few days Eliza only saw Harry in passing, in the hallways or in the little kitchenette when they happened to be refueling on caffeine at the same time. Whenever they did run into each other, Harry nodded and smiled and asked politely how she was. There was a caution about him that hadn’t been there before, as if he’d been as unsettled by the ease of their late-night dinner and conversation as she had been.

  Eliza felt like she should be glad for that; Harry seemed to understand her too well for her own comfort. She didn’t make friends easily, in large part because she struggled to find things she held in common with other people.

  Except with Harry.

  The next time she saw him for an extended period was in the next weekly staff meeting. He seemed to be in a better mood this time, making jokes and sarcastic asides which were received with varying degrees of amusement and exasperation by everyone else around the table.

  Which made her feel safe to open an email and send him a message while they were listening to Ioanna, their boss’s executive assistant, give them updates on her behalf

  This is the second week Ioanna’s run this show. Does our boss even exist? And does she ever come to these meetings?

  A few minutes passed before Harry noticed the email, but when he did Eliza saw the corner of his mouth quirk up before he tapped something out on his keyboard. A new message appeared in her inbox.

  Oh, no. She never comes to anything at all. Most of the staff is convinced she doesn’t actually exist.

  Have you ever met her? Eliza replied.

  Once. I think? It was a long time ago. I’m not convinced it was really her, perhaps she hired a body double.

  Eliza glanced across the conference table at Harry. He was sitting with his hands folded in front of him, watching a department head drone on about with a look of polite concentration and an air of extreme innocence. Eliza bit her lip to hide her smile.

  And her name is *Charley?*

  Eliza ignored whoever was talking now in favor of watching Harry glance at his laptop screen, flex his fingers, and start typing.