How to End a Love Story(14)
Finally, the good part, he always finds himself thinking.
It’s the moment when a room full of relative strangers becomes a room full of people who have speed-run through the motions of friendship—they know things about each other that their own partners and parents and friends don’t know, or at least haven’t heard told like this.
And they’ve tricked themselves into thinking it doesn’t really matter, that these are just the stories they tell as writers, to get the job done—but they’ve finally run out of stories that don’t matter, and suddenly they’re sitting in a room full of people who know actually quite a lot about them.
That’s when they’ll usually turn collectively to face the whiteboard, where they’re puzzling over some story detail that just isn’t working, and someone will say something like, “I just don’t think that’s how a person would actually behave, in that situation.”
And they’d open it up to discussion, and someone would call bullshit on someone else’s answer—we all know you fucking love this shit, Shepard—and someone else would bring up something that happened last night at dinner, and they’d tell the story haltingly, without any jokes, frowning as they examined their feelings in every beat of the interaction, while everyone else listening would try to figure out, What would I have done, how would I have felt, in that situation?
It’s not true friendship—he knows he isn’t friends with everyone he’s ever worked with—but he likes knowing things about them. It makes him feel better, hearing the stories that stick in other people’s brains, the interactions that keep them up at night, the things they obsess over and care about against their will. The things that make them feel vulnerable and human too.
He chances another look at Helen from across the table—she’s smiling nervously in a way that doesn’t reach her eyes as she listens to Nicole explain some detail about her dead grandmother’s coroner.
Grant wonders sharply what it would be like to know something about Helen Zhang.
Helen thinks she might be allergic to this room.
By noon her skin is crawling from hours of listening, listening, listening. She thinks with a degree of nostalgic pining for her first job out of college, interning at a small publishing house in the city. How she would leave the building every day to eat lunch in the park across the street—sometimes listening to music, sometimes listening to nothing at all—and always blissfully alone.
Here, the writers’ assistant takes their lunch orders, and about forty minutes later they’re all sitting around the table eating and people are still talking.
“I wanna fire our pool contractor,” Eve says, as she tosses the dressing in her salad bowl lightly. “But it’s Tom’s mom’s friend.”
“That’s the worst,” Suraya agrees. “Have you considered divorce?”
“This conversation is making me feel poor,” Owen says as an aside toward the other end of the table, and Saskia and Nicole laugh.
Helen isn’t sure how they do this—how everyone always seems to know exactly what to say next, striking some perfect alchemy of bitchy and interesting. It’s an exhausting, constant volley of conversation. And she’s bad at it.
They’re so nice and so patient and so deferential, whenever she raises her hand with a self-conscious “Um, can I just—there’s a thing we were talking about, I know we moved on, but . . .”
She feels their eyes on her like floodlights, everyone waiting for her to say something brilliant or at least relevant, and the idea that she might say something obviously stupid to these very smart and much more experienced people becomes a premonition of mind-numbing clarity. Her thoughts stutter and trip over each other on their way from her brain to her mouth, and she’s angry at her words for betraying her in this hour of need.
She feels a stab of weird humiliation at the thought that Grant is witnessing all of this from a front-row seat. He has always been so much better at this than her, convincing a room full of people that his ideas are the best way forward. In high school, they were never group project partners or anything that pitted their ideas in direct competition, nothing so big or dramatic.
Her memories of Grant Shepard in classroom contexts mostly feature her sitting at a cluster of tables with skeptical classmates, then hearing sharp peals of laughter and clapping from across the room, and looking up toward the source to find him, always at the center of it.
She has the fleeting, stupid thought that she would like to show him a screenshot of her bank account balance, like, hey, people actually pay me a lot of money for my brain now!
Near the end of lunch, she catches this brief and potentially nothing of an exchange:
Grant types something in his phone and looks up in Suraya’s direction.
Suraya checks her phone, then gives him a curt nod.
What are they talking about in a private thread without her?
Is it about her?
Helen tries to remind herself that her least favorite thing about herself is how much she cares about what other people think. And that they probably aren’t thinking about her anyway.
Helen tries to believe this, but some warped and stunted little monster of ego in her brain insists, Yes, but you’re actually very good at guessing what other people think of you. You’re usually right, that’s probably why you’re a successful writer.