How to End a Love Story(10)
Grant Shepard in the present seems to be waiting for more and Helen tries to clear the haze of old ghosts long enough to find her place in the conversation again.
“Everything else . . . I guess . . . is fair game if it helps the show,” she says.
Grant lifts a brow. “Everything?”
Helen shrugs. “Sure.”
“Who’d you have a crush on in high school?” he asks, leaning back with a frown.
Helen shakes her head and laughs. “No one in your orbit.”
“You’ll have to do better than that, once we’re in the room,” he says, and she feels like she’s just been judged in a competition she wasn’t aware she’d entered. “Specifics are helpful.”
“I know,” she says, annoyed. “I am a writer.”
The food arrives then (handmade pasta for him, a self-conscious salad for her), and she feels him watching her as the waiter sets down a fresh bread basket on the linen tablecloth between them.
“You don’t think we need a safe word for when we’re talking about high school stuff?” he asks, and she isn’t tricked by his easy tone at all—there’s a tense thread of something careful in his entire posture. “What if my feelings get hurt?”
It’s not his own feelings he’s worried about, she thinks, and stabs a crouton.
“I bet you’re tougher than you think,” she says. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have gotten the job.”
He barks out a laugh and picks up his fork.
“You know, I am good at my job,” he says, taking a bite of pasta. “Some might argue you’re getting me for below market price, at great value.”
“If it were up to me, I wouldn’t have you at all,” Helen reminds him, and wonders how much longer they both have to endure sitting here before they can call the waiter for the check.
If it were up to me, I wouldn’t have you at all.
Grant resists the urge to drag his hand across his face in case it catches and pulls off his mask of pleasant, barely restrained politeness to reveal how he really feels—like a hideous monster, whose own therapist felt the need to remind him, “There are things we can do, but it’s good to ask ourselves if we should do them.”
He knows he should quit. Helen had demanded it so regally of him that first night, he’d briefly imagined himself going down on one knee to kiss the ring and beg forgiveness.
But he’s also pretty sure he can do a good job—a great job, even—and he muses philosophically that while he should have done a lot of things, he’s here now, they’re careening toward inevitability, and wouldn’t it be more of a net positive for everyone involved if he started putting his energy into being helpful?
“Who’s your favorite character?” Grant asks, hoping to put them back in safe territory.
Helen shrugs. “All of them,” she says.
“I like to think I’m a Bellamy, with a Phoebe rising,” Grant quips.
She frowns at him. “You’re not,” she says bluntly.
He’s a little exasperated by this response. We aren’t talking about how you feel about me—we’re talking about the art of adaptation! he wants to say, like the pretentious artist he suspects he secretly is, under the Clark Kent disguise of this Hollywood hack. He has to find a piece of himself in someone else’s work, that’s the entire assignment. He’s developed a talent for it—reading and quickly identifying that part, that’s the shard of glass reflecting back a piece of me. The strangest thing about reading Helen’s book was that he already knew what he was looking for, what he was hoping for, before he ever cracked the spine. But she doesn’t want to talk about that with him.
“The word of god herself.” Grant lifts his water glass, all deference. “Who do you think I am, then?”
“No one,” Helen says, watching him with an unreadable expression. “You were never in the book.”
“I guess I should be grateful for that,” Grant says dryly.
Helen looks back out toward the street, silent.
It was in the early days—when he first started college—that Grant thought about Helen the most. It had been strange to know someone connected to the same tragedy as him was also going through the same off-to-college rituals as him—orientation week and moving into a new dorm and meeting her new roommate and learning her new city. He had wondered how all these experiences looked through her eyes, if she thought about that night as often as he did, or if she could suppress those memories better. Grant had no siblings of his own to fulfill the role of confidant. When he thought of who he’d want to confide in about the aftermath of that night, his thoughts always drifted strangely to Helen Zhang. He remembers one particularly stupid creative writing assignment, for which he had written out all the conversations he wanted to have with her as poems.
Somewhere on an old hard drive, he has shitty poetry about this woman.
Grant studies Helen from across the table now and thinks of how many more mirrored experiences they must have had in the last thirteen years, for them both to end up here. He has the impression that she holds all her real thoughts and feelings behind a shiny, impenetrable wall and it might take all the pickaxes in the world to chip a single hole.
He swings back a mental pickax and tries: “How do you feel about the first day of school on Monday?”