Blessedly, kind of, both Julian and Wolf received their public comeuppance eventually. During Susan’s book tour, she nabbed a spot on National Public Radio, and during the course of the interview was asked about periods of difficulty she’d had as an artist prior to her success. She brought up Wolf’s plagiarism, how much it had wounded her, how much she’d felt erased and negated from her own language; she was canny enough to call him out right when there was some momentum behind her, enough momentum for the accusation to be taken seriously. After that, a number of commenters came forward and said that lines from their poems or blogs had been stolen by Wolf, too. Bits and pieces, so there was always plausible deniability, but the small accusations together added up to something real. He became, quickly, the subject of his own Internet shaming campaign, at the end of which his career as a writer was dead in the water. For a minute.
Then he moved to Hollywood.
With Julian, justice took a lot longer, the results were even more gray, and it took a lot more people. Fifty of us in total. Women. We found out about each other one at a time. I talked about Julian’s assault once on my show, just a little, not using his name, it was still really difficult for me to find any words, let alone speak his, and anyway I didn’t want the show to be about me, per se, just starring me. There’s a difference. Afterward, a woman who’d watched the episode emailed us. Turned out she’d been groped by Julian after an event he’d done the last time he was in town for a reading.
Thank you for saying something, she’d written. I tried to convince myself it hadn’t happened, or at least that I was overreacting, that it’d been consensual or something. But it didn’t work, and I’ve been a wreck. Keeping it a secret—I haven’t even told my husband—it’s made me sick. I’ve just felt stuck, you know? Just knowing I’m not alone makes me feel better.
Naturally, I responded right away. This exchange started a whole chain of correspondence, and other women—by the way, this took forever—linked to us one at a time via message boards and discreet social media posts and word of mouth, until we’d amassed enough testimonies that a lawyer, recommended by Ellen, thought we could bring it to a criminal trial. Keep in mind this process would take five years. Keep in mind that although fifty counts of sexual assault were brought against him, he was found guilty of only three. Keep in mind the judge brought his sentence, which could have been decades, down to a two-year parole, in consideration of the length of time these charges had taken to be brought to court and the relative ill health of the defendant, whose wife had finally lost her courageous battle with cancer. Julian’s personal reputation took a serious hit at the time, but his reputation as a writer didn’t. Just a few months before his trial, he was nominated for the Man Booker Prize.
Julian was too good of a storyteller for us to change his own story. But life is long and likely he will die before me, and history will not be kind to him, not if I have anything to say about it. And I have a lot to say about it. So do others. And every day there are more of us, and every day we fear less.
* * *
—
That day—the hundredth episode of A Lady’s guide to Literature—Susan, as I said, was scheduled to appear, but there was also a mystery guest: a guest that not even I knew about, someone who would take the stage for a surprise. Audiences got a real kick out of my outsized reactions; the producers were always throwing stuff like that my way. At Thanksgiving, they’d had me read a children’s book to a live turkey.
“One minute!” Tony said, stepping away from me with one final pouf of foundation to my face. The way the set was designed was very informal, like a girlfriend’s living room, deep-cushioned and brightly decorated, complete with very large bowls of popcorn and very filled glasses of wine for my guests and me, as well as for the studio-audience members, many of whom would be invited on set during the shooting. The thing that made Lady’s Guide different from other shows—and Ellen and I were dead set on this—was its interactive quality. The show was live, and on the wall behind me were three large monitors that automatically updated the show’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts so that viewers could participate. They were also invited to take selfies with the books we discussed and tag them with #Ladysread, and about once a month we chose one of these women to be a guest on the show, or, if they lived far away, to Skype in. One of these women had even gotten a book deal, after spending her segment talking about her childhood spent in the wings of Cirque du Soleil, where both her parents had been performers. It was this sort of incremental individual-and-collective forward movement that made my heart sing.
I smoothed my pencil skirt over my legs—I was a talk show host; I had to dress the part—and crossed my legs to their most flattering angle. We had a full crowd, all ages, mostly women. I waved to them as the lights shifted and set. “WHAT IS UP?” I called out to them.
“WHOOOOOOOO!” they said.
“I’m so happy to see you! Thank you so much for coming!”
They kept whooing and clapping. Yes, it was someone’s job to get them to do that before I came onstage, but I swear, the show had a real festive quality to it, and not only because of the drinking. Probably this had something to do with the fact that I was genuinely thrilled to be there. Something to do with the fact that, for the first time, I was more or less all right with being me. And, for the first time, really participating in the world I lived in, as it was, as it could be, wholeheartedly. Which came first, this participation or the all-rightness, I can’t be sure, but I’m fairly certain they exist symbiotically.
“Thirty seconds!” someone said. I looked down at my index cards of notes about Susan’s book, plus things I just wanted to talk to her about. We were both so busy it was hard for us to find time for each other those days. When I saw her backstage, we’d both squealed so loudly and hugged so hard that the PAs had to pull us apart, worried about our microphones and makeup.
“In five, four, three…” Tony counted down the rest with his fingers until I saw the red lights appear on the cameras.
“Hi!” I heard myself say, as I’d said ninety-nine times before. “I’m Casey Pendergast! And welcome to…” I waited for the synthesized drumroll. “A Lady’s Guide to Literature!”
* * *
—
My God. So loud was the thump of my heart when I saw Ben Dickinson step out from the wings that I thought it would jump right out of my chest and bounce toward him like a basketball. Susan, of course, knew exactly who the mystery guest was—she’d talked to the producers and set the whole thing up herself, though Lindsey might’ve had a hand in it, too. They’d been bugging me for ages now to return his call, but I hadn’t. Couldn’t have borne it then. Still couldn’t bear it. In fact, I still couldn’t bear dating, period.
Sure, occasionally I’d force myself to message someone back on a dating app and go out for a dreadful hour-and-a-half date at a passable bar, but it all seemed like such a waste of time. Which I think was less about the inherent wastefulness of such time and more about the fact that I wasn’t ready. What an impossible task, intimacy, even more so as we get older. Two people with all this baggage, all these wounds to accidentally stick thumbs in, plus biological and gender differences—I believed every step I took toward someone took place on a minefield. Everywhere I looked I saw danger. It seemed easier, safer, to throw myself into work and friendships and my two-hundred-dollar vibrator.
So I did.
The audience had been informed by Susan, who was onstage with me at the time, that Ben and I were old friends, so it was not entirely beyond the realm of anyone’s imagination that I would react as I did to seeing him: standing up, knees wobbling, palms asweat. We hugged in front of everybody. He smelled just as I remembered, but he looked a little older: there were more gray strands in his beard, more lines around his eyes. He was wearing the same midnight-blue velvet blazer he’d worn the first day I’d met him. “Pendergast!” he sai
d, holding me back at arm’s length. “It’s so good to see you!” He kept his hands on my shoulders a little longer than necessary.
“It is?” My face erupted into flame. “I mean, ah, it is! Good to see you too, I mean!”
“Whooooooo!” the audience said.
The chemistry. The audience could tell. No matter how far we’d been from each other, physically and emotionally, no matter the hurt and the harm, the chemistry had not gone away.
Ben was on the show, ostensibly, to discuss his new book, a collection of mostly previously published essays that included a new, and very moving, piece about his mother’s Alzheimer’s. I had been sent an advance copy—by his publisher, I thought, who sent the show books all the time—and read the whole thing despite the ache in my chest every time I cracked the spine. However, we didn’t stay on the subject for too long. After Susan discreetly gave up her chair and disappeared offstage, the two of us, Ben and I, immediately fell back into the easy rapport that had linked us in the first place, and linked us still.
* * *
—
“So you! The show!” he said, picking up a handful of popcorn and tossing the kernels into his mouth. Chewing, he continued. “I’m so happy for you. Seems like a dream come true.”
“It’s pretty dreamy,” I said. “Well, first it was a nightmare, but then things turned around.” I found that I was sliding farther and farther down in my chair. The stage lights were making me very warm. “Which is life, I guess.”
“That’s a good life,” Ben said. He was looking at me in his lasery way. “A pretty great life, in fact.”
“It is,” I said. Small tears pricked my eyes. “I’m lucky.”
“Me, too.” His eyes didn’t leave mine.
The tears threatened to brim and spill. I blinked them back. “Why does it take us so long to figure out we’re lucky?”
The audience was quiet. Or maybe it was that I could not hear anything except the quiet thrum in Ben’s rib cage, the place where his tender heart lay.
“Because we’re not supposed to feel lucky. We’re supposed to want more.”
I brought my ring finger to the corner of my eyes, and dabbed. “What if I feel lucky, and I want more?”
Ben smiled, just a little, that boyish smile I’d fallen in love with. “Welcome back, Casey,” he said.
* * *
—
After the cameras stopped rolling, during the meet and greet I did with guests after every episode, during which they were invited onstage to hang out and take pictures and ask me whatever they wanted, a number of them requested that Ben become a show regular.
“Oh,” I brushed it off as politely as I could. “I don’t know about that.”
“But you two are so wonderful together!” They would say, holding my forearm with their manicured, motherly hands.
“Oh, well!” A banal but essential truth along with do unto others, brush and floss, and sleep eight hours: we don’t really hear things until we’re ready to hear them.
There was a party scheduled for that evening at one of those karaoke bars you can rent the entirety of. My request. Loving the spotlight, and all that. But I’d promised the crew that I wasn’t going to sing. It was their night; I wanted them to have their own turn under the lights; I wanted them to get drunk and silly and eat catered sushi and feel that expansiveness I felt when I got onstage, which I was lucky enough now to do almost every day. Ellen, who was insanely busy filming a new season of Real Housewives, had also sworn she’d cut out early from some shoot she had at a nearby wine bar and stop by, so long as she could rap her favorite song by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. She was also providing a case of her signature-branded vodka, and free shapewear for everybody.
Me, to commemorate the hundredth episode, I’d taken a lesson in editing from a crew member and had subsequently made a very heartfelt photo montage and film for the crew. It was called Memories, and its soundtrack was a compilation of all the best high school graduation songs. I’d put it on fifty flash drives that I’d had specially made for every crew member. They were purple, and on the side they said, Love Casey, which was both a valediction and command.
Anyway, I saw Ben talking to Susan after the meet and greet. Whaddaya know: it turned out that she’d invited him to the after party. Which was funny, because I’d planned on not inviting him to the after party. Susan seemed very pleased about this. Ben looked about as circumspect as I imagined I did.
“We’re going to have such a good time!” Susan laughed, and pushed me a little closer toward him.
* * *
—
Six hours, two drinks, and metric ton of California rolls later, I found myself at a table alone with Ben while a cameraman named Lars stood under a disco ball and sang his heart out to Bruce Springsteen. Susan, I thought, glancing over, was absolutely going to hook up with Lars that night. He was her type, a bearded Viking giant with a heart of gold and giant hands. She was watching him intently and clapping with appreciation at no particular point in the song. The lights were dimmed, with swirling neon colors bouncing off darkened walls. Ben and I were talking, talking, talking, talking. We’d always been able to talk. And have fun, and have sex, and laugh together.
But the rest of it, Jesus, was so goddamn difficult.
“You seeing anyone right now?” Ben said eventually, and, I thought, a little too casually, picking up his beer bottle and swilling the contents.
I shook my head and said, also too casually, “I’ve been busy. You?”
“Nah.” He took a sip. “Busy, too.”
“Mmmhmm.”
“I’ve never minded being alone.”
“Me neither.”
“Though it does get lonely,” he said.
“People make you lonely, too,” I said, and put a strawful of club soda in my mouth. It was not that I’d quit drinking, but for some reason I didn’t want to get drunk around him. It felt—the strange word that came to mind was disrespectful. “By the way, how’s your mom doing?”
“Not all people,” he said at the same time. Then he looked right at me. “Not great. Sometimes I think it’d be a whole lot easier if I just stuck her in one of those memory care facilities, but—I just can’t. She’s my mom, I’m stuck with her.
“And sometimes you want to be stuck with people,” he said after a pause, his gaze never leaving mine. “You know?”
Oh, what was I going to say to that? I’ll tell you what I could have said. I could have said, yes, I do know. Some people make you feel the opposite of lonely; they make you feel not only that you aren’t as awful as you secretly fear you are, but in fact that you are more wonderful, more astonishing, more full of riches and wisdom and beauty than you ever would have thought possible. These people, so few and far between, you belong to them. You belong with them. You wrap your longing around them, they wrap theirs around you. They become your longing. And you become their longing too.
And with this belonging, this be-longing, this yoking, paradoxically, comes freedom. I could have said: I have always felt I belonged with you. I could have said: and the stronger that feeling becomes the more my fear intensifies. I could have said: because I’ve been wounded, and I’ve wounded. I could have said: because I’ve already ruined things with you once and I’m terrified of doing it again.
But I didn’t want to say that. Because what he had asked me for, all that time ago, was a clean slate. And even if I could never give that to him fully, I could at least try to not scribble all over the slate before we started writing something together. Not just my story. The story of us, together.
So what I said instead was, “I know.”
And then I reached across the table and took his hand.
It was as warm as I remembered it.
TO MY NANCYS
FOR BELIEVING IN ME
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
> To my teachers—Charles Baxter, Nicole Grunzke, Jan Jirak, Kate O’Reilly, Julie Schumacher—for being, as Steinbeck said, artists of people.
To my agent, Michelle Brower, for changing my life.
To my editor, Anna Pitoniak, for the reassuring hand at my back, which nudged me further and wider than I ever thought I could go.
To my sister-writers—Lara Avery, Kate Galle, Elizabeth Greenwood, Jackie Olsen, Carrie Schuettpelz, Emma Törzs—for mopping my brow while I gave birth to this thing and for being such geniuses in your own right. Special thanks to Molly Weingart for your singular, tenacious loyalty. Special thanks, too, to Carrie Lorig, for allowing me to lift a line from your poem, “The Pulp v. The Throne” (there is everyone at the lessening of your wounds), which I didn’t believe at first but has proven itself over and over.
To my supporters, cheerleaders, and patrons—Rick Baker, for your generosity of spirit and the peace of Flatrock; Luke Finsaas, for your instrumental brainstorming in the early stages; Nancy Angelo and Nancy McCauley, for the refuge of 18 Plu; Jack Franson, for lots of stuff but especially what you said that night at Marinitas; Studio 2 Café and The Loft Literary Center, for letting me pace around your property like a crazy person; and, of course, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Minnesota State Arts Board, The MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, and the University of Minnesota MFA Program, for the time and space to both goof around and go to the places that scared me.
To everyone at Random House—Gina Centrello, Avideh Bashirrad, Theresa Zoro, Christine Mykityshyn, Leigh Marchant, Andrea DeWerd—for your formidable intelligence and foresight, and for believing in this book. It is an honor to be in the room with you.
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