Ordinary World (19 page)

            “It’s time to revise your life. Yours and Sam’s.”

            I left Melody’s office and stepped into the breezy spring air. I don’t know what terrified me more—the blank page, or the final draft.

Chapter Twenty-five

A
FEW DAYS AFTER MY SESSION WITH MELODY, I wandered into Sam’s study. As usual, Donny Most napped away, nestled in the corner of the leather sofa, its age and prolonged usage starting to show. I sat at the desk and turned on the computer. I knew Sam’s password and typed it: vandi05. I really wasn’t sure what I was doing, and had a sick feeling inside, like I was invading his privacy. After the computer booted up, I noticed a word file on the desktop that I had never seen before: NOVEL 1. I clicked on it and opened the file.

When Alexander first met Cassandra at the Conference of Rhetoric and Reality in New York City, he knew he wanted to marry her. “Please God. Please let her be single.” He didn’t want to talk to her at first. She was petite with short, dark hair neatly coiffed in the style of the moment, her olive skin straight out of European heritage. He knew he was way out of her league the minute he heard her speak about 20
^th
century rhetoric in a 21
^st
century world. But then he decided such thinking was stupid, and took the plunge.
What was this—a romance novel? 

So when she laughed at his jokes and accepted his invitation for a drink and eventually saw how he color-codes his hangers and watched football with him, only then could he get up the nerve to ask her to marry him.So he did. And she said yes.He loved to read to Cassandra. Loved to see her face light up just like a child listening to Mr. Rogers
.
And he would lose himself in her inner child and wonder, “Man, how could I be so lucky?”
I scrolled down about five pages.

Alexander picked up the letter. It was postmarked twenty years ago. Twenty years! Such a nice, even number—what were the odds? He gingerly slid his fingers under the back flap of the parchment envelope and moved them so as to preserve as much of it as possible. It opened with ease. He removed the thin paper, folded neatly in threes, the creases so tight that they were in danger of ripping the letter, its fountain-pen cursive preserved, like a body inside a sarcophagus. With slow, calculated precision, he opened it and began to read. “Dear Son,”
Who, me?
I scrolled back to the top and read every word from beginning to end. Twice. A man receives a twenty-year-old letter from his long lost father that takes him on a journey to Peru. What if he had received the letter when it was originally sent? Where would he have ended up? As he traces the steps based on clues in the letter, he starts to piece together the synchronicity of his life, and offers a series of stories.

Daring to envision a different life.

Sam was only about thirty-five thousand words in; and yet, I was riveted.
How come he never told me?
I thought in anger.
I wasn’t ready to show you yet,
I could hear him answer. That was like him; he was protective of his first drafts, and clearly this was a first draft. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t like it. Maybe
he
didn’t like it. Maybe he was going to show me the day after our anniversary celebration. Surely he was going to show it to me at some point, wasn’t he?

I called Maggie.

“Listen to this.” I read the first couple of pages to her.

“Sounds good,” she said. “What is it?”

“Sam started writing a novel. I just found it.”

“You’re kidding me!”

“I told you he had been thinking about it, didn’t I?”

“I think you did. So?”

“So what?” I asked.

“So when are you going to finish it?”

I dropped my jaw and held out the phone before putting it back to my ear. “
Me?
”

“Yes.”

“Are you crazy?”

“No—well, yeah, but not about this. Come on, Andi! This is something for you to do! Summer break is almost here. Why not write?”

“For one thing, I’ve never written a novel before. It’s not my genre. I’m a nonfiction prose kind of girl—you know that.”

“What, you can’t write fiction and use what you know? Talk to Nora Ephron. You think it’s a coincidence that all her characters are journalists who live in New York and cook? Heck, talk to
Sam
—twentieth century rhetoric? You think he wasn’t writing about what he knew? Besides, couldn’t you tell that the description of Cassandra was totally you? Even the name:
Cassandra?
Please!”

I hadn’t noticed. Why hadn’t I noticed that?

“C’mon, Mags. I know rhetoric and creative nonfiction. I don’t know fiction.”

“Those were his areas, too, and it wasn’t stopping him, obviously. Besides, fiction isn’t rhetorical?”

“You know what I mean.”

“You’ve never read a novel before?”

“Mags…”

“Andi, you’re a
writer
. When was the last time you wrote something non-academic?”

“Sss—”

“—not including Sam’s eulogy,” she stopped me before I could even say his name.

“Not since the last collection of essays came out—when was that two, three years ago?”

“If you can’t even pin down the date, it was too long ago.”

“You really think I could do it? I mean, this is clearly a first draft, and I don’t know where he wanted this to go or how he wanted it to end. What if I end it in a way that is totally bogus?”

“When you get to heaven, the two of you can argue about it over a slice of cheesecake. Come on, you can do this! It’s not like you don’t know his writing style. Think of it as something the two of you can work on together.”

I thought about this, about what Melody had said about not only re-seeing my life, but his. Ours.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

The next day, I called Devin and met him late in the afternoon at the Starbucks on

Church Street

in

Harvard Square

. I told him about the novel and asked him what he thought.

“I think you should do it,” he said. “I think it would be good to immerse yourself in such a creative project. I’m surprised it’s taken you this long to get back into writing, actually. I thought you would’ve written about the accident and the grieving process.”

“It’s already been done by Joan Dideon. And no one can catch up to Joan Dideon—she’s the creative nonfiction queen.”

“Who said you had to write to sell books? Who said you had to write it for anyone other than yourself? Who said it even had to be
good
?” he asked.

I could hear traces of my voice from our past tutorials echoing in his own. For sure, this guy was my former pupil.

I confessed, “I can’t write anymore.”

“Because of the eulogy? Geez Andi, you’ve got to get past that.”

“It’s not that.  I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t write. I can’t teach. There’s absolutely no desire.”

“You can. You’re just afraid of fucking up, as usual.”

“Geez, Devin, you’re a real ego booster, you know that? Remind me to hire you to get the Patriots revved up at halftime.”

He slammed his fist on the table so hard that everyone got quiet and looked at us. “Dammit!”

Even the cappuccino machine came to a halt. He got up, grabbed his leather jacket, and walked out. Humiliated, I grabbed my own and followed him.

“Don’t you ever embarrass me like that again, you hear me?” I yelled.

“Stop jerking me around, and stop jerking yourself around! I’m tired of it, Andi. I’m tired of your inertia! I’m tired of your refusal to move on with your life. I thought Italy changed that for you. I thought you were ready to take your soul back.”

“Yeah? Well, you thought wrong.”

“What happened to that woman who allowed herself some pleasure, who allowed herself to touch and taste and feel again? Even years ago, when you were so inhibited, you were willing to do something different. You were willing to at least
try
. Now you’re just throwing it away. I can’t bear to stand by any longer while you do that.”

“Are you saying you don’t want to be with me anymore?”

“She’s not even listening to me…” he said, looking to his right as if a third party was part of the discussion.

“What the hell is your problem?” I asked.

“I don’t want to pretend to be Devin anymore! I don’t want to pretend like this is enough! God, Andi, when did you get so
selfish
?”

At that moment, I remembered Maggie blowing up at me and telling me the same thing, telling me how grief is so self-absorbing.

I peered at him, my brows furrowed. “Oh, you have a short memory. For how long did you string me along? ‘You’re my
client
, Andi.’ That was the excuse you gave. And yet, even then the rules didn’t apply to me. No kissing. No touching. Not unless it was part of the lesson. ‘Whoa, that’s far enough there, girl…’ It was all under your control. Talk about
selfish
!”

“You’re right. I was a rat-bastard and by the time I came to my senses and was ready to let you in, I lost you. So let me warn you: you’re losing me. You’re losing me as a lover, and worse still you’re losing me as a friend. Do you really want that?”

I didn’t know what to say. Panic crept in and gripped my whole body. “Devin…”

“Oh, for the love of God—my name is
David!
I’m not the escort anymore. I don’t even wanna
be
that fucking guy.”

“Well, I’m not Andi Cutrone,” I said.

“I never insisted you should be! I’m perfectly okay with you being Andi Vanzant. I’m perfectly okay with you being Sam’s wife. I’m perfectly okay with you being scared out of your mind, or guilty, or whatever it is you’re refusing to let yourself feel. I’m perfectly okay with Sam being a part of whatever it is that we have. In fact, I would
prefer
that he was present. At least then I’d know where I stand. You’re the one who has the problem with it. You’re the one trying to shut him out, and me, too.”

Could this be true? Had I left both of them at the Fontana di Trevi?

We were still standing outside the Starbucks and customers inside gawked at us through the window. I wondered if they could hear us. I glared back at them, and they quickly averted their eyes.

I headed up

Church Street

. David walked with me. We said nothing.

Harvard Square

was alive and in a hurry, oblivious to our fight. Something about it reminded me both of Rome and Manhattan. But whereas New Yorkers didn’t give a crap, the Romans supported us and gave us permission to fight, to be passionate about something, even if we were hating each other’s guts in the moment.

And I didn’t hate him.

We turned a couple of corners and then silently strode all the way down to the bridge that overlooked the Charles River. Once there, we stopped and I leaned against the wall and tried to look over it; it was almost as tall as I was. The day’s weather was more typical for New England at that time of year; brisk and breezy. The wind had kicked up and stung my ears.

“What do we supposedly ‘have’?” I asked.

“I thought we started something in Italy. I thought we could continue it here.”

“What—you mean the sex? Hell, Dev—you can fuck any woman you want and you know it. You’re a fantastic lover.”