Meets Girl: A Novel

by Entrekin, Will

  I chuckled. I’d just given myself the big brother speech, and I’d gotten off easily compared to some of the ones I’d delivered. One of my sister’s potential suitors met my brother, a born-again Christian, before he met me. When I met the young man in question, he mentioned that; I told him, “Oh, good. Just remember, my brother might pray for your immortal soul, but I’ll just kill you.” I was joking, of course. Mostly. He understood that. “Fair enough,” I told Tom.

  Veronica returned, then, wearing loose pajama pants and an old tee shirt and carrying two glasses of wine.

  Tom stood. “Hey, sis.”

  “Hey big brother. What’s going on?”

  “Just having a man-to-man with my best friend here.”

  “Sorry to interrupt.”

  “Oh no,” Tom said. “We were finished. But speaking of my best friend here, I’m happy for you guys, but you remember I found him before you did. You break his heart, you’ve got me to answer to.”

  Veronica laughed. “Understood.”

  “Right then. I’m going to leave you two kids alone,” he said, picking up his guitar and heading down the hallway.

  Veronica handed me a wine glass and resumed her spot on the couch next to me, and we started another movie I can’t tell you the title of because we never really got around to watching it. Which is how we spent most of the weekend.

  ***

  All that could have been covered by the first verse of whatever pop song our imaginary movie played during our fantasy montage, while the bridge would sync to my opening my apartment door for Veronica and the first chorus might be Valentine’s day: candlelight and chocolate-dipped strawberries and a fine pinot grigio that made us tipsy enough to eschew our dinner reservations in favor of the kind of evening in bed that might make Hallmark finally admit its fraud, because it might sell cards about love and romance but dammitall had absolutely nothing on Veronica and me.

  I wouldn’t mind montaging February, of which I have a phobia. Not in the sense I fear February like someone with agoraphobia avoids crowds, but rather in that a phobia is an intense and irrational aversion and I’ve always been intensely and irrationally averse to February, because man, the second month of the year is a doozy. It doesn’t have the initial bounce of January, ringing in a brand new year, the hope of resolutions and change; by the beginning of February, most resolutions are either broken or on the verge of breaking, and most people are resigned to the fact that any change they hope for isn’t coming this year. Neither does it have the hope for warmth and summer that March starts to suggest.

  No, it’s cold and dreary and everything is still frozen and wet like a hard grey shell over the whole world. The world feels saturated with it, hopeless down to the bone.

  That month, however, was terrific. Looking back on that time, that first blush of an actual romance . . . what could be more perfect? It was brand new but lacked any of the uncertainty that usually comes during with such brand-new-ness; I never wondered if she wanted me to call. I never analyzed her text messages. It was like holding hands with her; that first time holding hands with someone is a combination of hope and possibility and not a little bit of uncertainty, a hesitant dance of fingertips and an eager turn of the wrist, neither hand sure of holding the other until they come together, but when Veronica and I held hands, it was comfortable.

  She felt like home. Being with her was like letting go. Like acceptance.

  Being with her was good. So good.

  Life was good, in fact. I was in a relationship with a girl I’d been in love with for always, I was working for a company I actually liked, I had a primo apartment in a hip spot just outside an amazing City . . . I couldn’t imagine it getting better, until

  ***

  The final Friday of February.

  My supervisor, a striking woman named Claire who signed my timesheets with a half-swoop like a Nike swish, called me into her office. She told me to close the door behind me, which is generally a bad sign. Closed doors in the workplace? Might as well play a Bach fugue. I wondered if I was getting let go on a Friday afternoon.

  “You like it here,” she said, her voice not rising enough, there at the end, to make it a question.

  “I love it here.”

  “We’re glad to have you on our team.”

  “I’m glad to be on it,” I said, but I was wondering by then if she’d asked me to close her door so that we could have some smalltalk. I had expected more.

  Which she then hit me with: “We’d like to offer you a more permanent position on it.”

  “You mean—?”

  “The position would only come with a slight raise, but you’d get full benefits. You’d continue at your current position—your principals love working with you, particularly Roseanne and Eric. And you’d get a little more responsibility. It might mean a little more time, some hours here and there. But the important thing is there’s room for growth—.”

  “Totally. I’ll take it.”

  She smiled. “We’d hoped you would. We have to work it through payroll and HR to make the offer completely official, but I wanted to tell you now. We can finalize it on Monday?”

  “Yeah we can,” I told her.

  “Terrific. Well, why don’t you get an early jump on the weekend? We can’t retroact your pay, but we can give you the afternoon off.”

  Which was cool by me. It might have been the final weekend of February, but there was a hint of promise in the air, bright sunlight over an otherwise cold afternoon, like the world was trying on spring and seeing how it looked, how it walked, before it committed to laying down the plastic and the variable interest to come. Which is very much what spring is, really, the most bipolar of all seasons in the places that have them, sunny and warm to start a week that brings snow by the end.

  Still, I was buoyant on the promise of work I enjoyed, not to mention that Veronica and I had made plans for the weekend. She had midterms coming up, just before spring break, and so she was bringing a few books and her thesis with her to visit me for a weekend we planned to spend mostly inside. I had told her that every study session required multiple breaks and that shagging could be precisely the right sort of cleanse for the mental palate, and she’d laughed half-giddily as she’d bought the train tickets to New York.

  We had planned that I would meet her at the station, but I called her to find out if she could make her way to my apartment on her own.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Way better than that. I’ll tell you all about it when you get here. I thought I might cook.”

  “You cook?”

  “I can. And I would like to.”

  “That sounds fine to me. I think I remember how to get there. I’ll call you if I ever find myself unsure.”

  I hung up. I made my way north to Christopher Street, stopping on my way at a small, organic market. I picked up some chicken breasts and some pasta, some marsala wine and some mushrooms. Fresh-baked baguette, and a couple of bottles of wine, figuring that we had all weekend to finish them. Everything fit in a big, canvas bag I shuffled home, glad to have an early-afternoon commute mostly to myself if only because it meant there were fewer people to jostle and crowd. I even found a seat.

  I smiled. I was elated to work with the Weinstein company and anxious to see Veronica. It seemed like a terrific day. I couldn’t imagine how it might get better.

  And I was right. It didn’t.

  Chapter Seventeen, in which it doesn’t

  It started even before I walked into my apartment

  It wasn’t sudden or terrible or dramatic. Life, real life, so rarely is, which is why those moments of high drama become, ultimately, the stories you tell years later all over again. No, when life starts to unravel, when great things start to go bad, it happens in small measures, tiny details. It’s like losing hair or putting on weight: the loss of a strand here or the gain of a pound there. Nobody goes bald or fat overnight, and it often happens so slowly, so gradually, and over a long enough time
that we don’t realize it as it’s occurring. It’s only when we see our pate or our jeans don’t fit one day that we finally realize it has already happened, that the process began a while before and we simply didn’t notice.

  Maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’m just the unobservant one. Maybe you’re all masters of self-introspection and keep a constant catalogue of strengths and weaknesses you can see objectively. If so, that’s very nice for you. I’m not so lucky.

  It began with a letter.

  I opened the outer door of my apartment building to find on the immediate vestibule floor a quick-band of a stack of mail for me and my roommates, and I picked them up as I executed the semi-complicated dance of unlocking and relocking doors that was entering my pad. I strode into an apartment quiet with the peculiar stillness that occurs in the early afternoon when the rest of the world is still working, interrupted here and there by the quiet growl of car engines and industry sounds, set the bag on the counter, and then started thumbing through the mail.

  Much of it was junk. A packet of coupons for local eateries and small grocery stores my roommates and I might pass a hundred times but never once enter. The sort of local weekly shopper guide that crosses a newspaper with ads so that you’re never certain where articles end and selling begins, if indeed either occurs. A utilities bill and a Comcast offer, and then—

  The sight of the envelope, the sight of my address in my own writing, stopped me. It always does. Those letters bypass reason and mailboxes and seem to be delivered straight to your psyche; just receiving one, you can’t help, for just a moment, opening yourself to possibility.

  Most times, anyway. The only reason I’m not going to tell you my hands were detached when I opened it is that doing so makes it sound like I was in morbid need of emergency surgery. Instead, I’ll just tell they didn’t shake as I tore up the flap and slipped the letter out, unfolding it.

  It was addressed, specifically, to me. Not to an author, not to silly maybe-future-writer-wannabe-guy, which is how getting letters addressed to author has always made me feel. It addressed me by name and referred to my novel by its then-soap opera-esque tentative title, before—

  Thank you for writing. So nice to encounter a young writer inspired by a client.

  Thank you, too, for allowing me to read your sample. You are a good writer, and it is a good idea, but I’m afraid I must decline representation at this time. I have to be selective about choosing to represent only those about whom I am most enthusiastic, and while you are talented, the market for time travel is notoriously difficult.

  Please keep in mind that this is only one opinion, and other agents may not feel the same. I wish you all the best luck in your future career.—

  it very politely, very professionally, very personally rejected my novel. Not me, but my novel. Not my writing; that was good. Just the novel, the market for which—

  If you build it, they will come.—

  was apparently not just difficult but rather even notoriously so. Which I think surprised me in a way, at least given that I had grown up on time travel, Quantum Leap and Superman, for two, nevermind that one of the Harry Potter novels—was it the third?—used time travel as a plot device. Nevermind Dean Koontz and Michael Crichton.

  I admit now, I was trying unsuccessfully not to be bitter. I was trying to silence the thoughts of vampire-series clones and all the sad young literary novels I had ever read ten pages of only to close them again in boredom, tucking a stack into my backpack to sell to the Strand for lunch money. I was trying not to go to the artistic versus commercial argument, trying not to let the thought that marketing and the ability to easily sell something could be such a determinant to literary success as to irritate the living Hell out of me.

  I was, quite obviously, unsuccessful in those attempts.

  I crumpled the letter in my hand and let it drop unceremoniously to the table. I turned my back on it and began to unpack the food and prepare to cook, and all the while I considered how badly I really wanted it. Did I really want to base my life, or even build it, around a career that didn’t just desire the validation of other people but in fact required it?

  I said I’ve gotten hundreds of those letters. Some more consolatory than others, but what they all had in common was:

  no.

  What they all come down to was a single negative. No matter how they phrased it, no matter the words they used, no matter delicate and gratuitous lengths to which so many went to pretend otherwise, they all said precisely the same simple thing:

  No.

  The only word in the entire English language I dislike more than “no” is “can’t,” because at least “no” isn’t a coward about it. When people say they “can’t” do something, they generally just mean they won’t; when people say “no,” it can mean nothing more.

  And where had all those “no”s, all those rejections, gotten me? I stood there in my kitchen, cutting up mushrooms and preparing for some sauté magic, and all I could think was that everything good in my life, right then, at that moment, had precisely nothing to do with writing. All I could think was how much I was looking forward to seeing Veronica, and how much I was looking forward to work on Monday morning. All I could think was that I didn’t much care about the letter, because I had enough other things going well in my life that it didn’t really matter so much.

  I tried like Hell to be scared of that line of thinking but found I couldn’t be bothered. I found I couldn’t think of a single wonderful thing writing had brought me. I was in my mid-twenties and had, up to that point, earned a couple of degrees and worked a temporary job that had basically boiled down to organizing my supervisor’s rolodex, but things in the past few weeks had taken a solid turn for the better, and all that better had come during weeks when I really hadn’t been writing much at all. I had been reading during my commutes to work, scribbling stray ideas in a notebook I keep in my back pocket, but had, overall, become intent enough on Veronica and the Weinstein company that, I realized right then, I really hadn’t written anything since the day I’d revised my novel to send it out the month before.

  I thought of my job, of working for the Weinsteins. Of how much I enjoyed it, of Claire and Ben, of the posters on the brick walls and the flat-panel monitors on the desks. Of steady work at a place I enjoyed.

  I continued to think of those things as I cooked, but there was little in the way of sadness about the letter. My thoughts instead focused almost entirely on how good my life was, which, I regretfully admit right now, is not something I often either realize or appreciate. Life was good, and I had nothing to complain about. Some agent hadn’t wanted my novel? It wasn’t like my happiness depended on it.

  My cell phone went off in my pocket, but my fingers were filmed with raw chicken juice. I tried to wash them quickly so that I could still catch the call, but by the time I had dried my hands and pulled the phone from my pocket, I’d long missed it. The ID showed Veronica’s number, and so I dialed her straightaway.

  “I’m just walking down your street. If you open your door right now, I’ll be there by the time you do.”

  So I crossed my apartment and unlocked those few doors and then she was in my arms, smelling like citrus and summer, lips like vanilla and body like a dream come true. Cliché, perhaps, but that is, after all, why they were invented.

  “How was your trip? Found it okay on your own?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I? I did get propositioned by a hooker near the bus station—.”

  “You didn’t bring her back?”

  “She’s waiting outside. I told her I had to run it by you.”

  “Come here,” I told her, peeling her jacket down her arms and setting it on the couch as I led her to the kitchen.

  “Smells good.”

  “Told you I can cook. Why don’t you crack the wine?”

  “Don’t you have an opener?”

  “Smart ass.”

  “Maybe. But awesome.”

  “No arguments here,”
I told her, handing her the opener I’d fished out of our utensil drawer.

  “So, good day?” she asked as she twisted the opener down and pulled the cork.

  “Mostly, yeah. In fact, it was mostly better than good. So I’m sitting at my desk, right? And my supervisor, I’ve told you about Claire, calls me into her office. She asks me to close the door behind her—.”

  “I’m hoping this doesn’t go where I think it might,” she said, pouring two generous glasses of wine.

  “That’s what I thought! I mean, closed door, Friday afternoon? That’s a clean-out-your-desk meeting. But it totally wasn’t. They offered me a full-time spot. There’s a really slight raise, but full benefits, and I get to be a full-time employee of the Weinstein Company. Room for growth.”

  “So here’s to that, then,” she offered me one of the glasses, which I accepted and clinked to hers before I took a sip. I’d chosen a dry white. “Oh, that’s pretty terrific.”

  “Very. So why is that only mostly good? Did you have to sell your soul for the job?”

  I chuckled, pulling from the table the still-crumpled letter and handing it to her.

  “What’s this?”

  “Just read it,” I said, turning back to stir the chicken. Which didn’t really need it.

  “Thank you . . . you’re a good writer . . . time travel’s hard . . . oh, damn. I’m sorry. I really thought you might get it. But hey, like we said in the car that day, you keep going, right?”

  I thought back to that conversation. “We said a lot of things in the car that day.”

  She smiled. “I remember. That was when you told me you loved me.”

  “And I do. Because you’re awesome.”

  “So what now, then?”

  “The chicken’s almost done. The pasta—.”

  “I meant with the writing.”

  “Oh,” I said. I turned back to the stove. Since the chicken hadn’t needed stirring, it was probably okay to move to the back, so I could start the pasta, and if you’re wondering why I’m going on about the chicken and the pasta, that’s totally the point. The whole time I had prepared the meal, I’d been pushing from my mind the idea of writing because I was scared of what addressing the issue might bring.