The Rom-Commers(43)
“Don’t call him a rodent.”
I frowned. “Isn’t he … a rodent?”
“The point is, he’s going through a rough time right now.”
But maybe Cuthbert was a nice mediator. Writing in the same room at the same time with another person was, for the record, not my normal way of doing things.
Not Charlie’s, either. “I usually do this in complete human isolation,” he said, at one point. “I always think that should be the title of my autobiography: Alone Too Long.”
I nodded, like Nice. Then, wondering if all writers had a throwdown autobiography title, I went ahead and shared: “Mine is Someday You’ll Thank Me.”
Another human in the room. While I tried to write. So weird.
It felt a smidge vulnerable, for example, to pull out my lucky sweatshirt—which had a hood that made your head look like a big strawberry with little green leaves appliquéd at the top. When Charlie first saw it, he said, “That’s—wow. That’s really something.”
“It’s my lucky hoodie,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t point out that it hadn’t brought me much luck. Then, quieter, I added: “My mom gave it to me.”
“No judgment,” Charlie said. “I have a lucky handkerchief myself.”
I looked at his pocket, which was empty.
“For awards shows,” Charlie explained, and touched the spot where I was looking. “My wife gave it to me before my first-ever nomination—and then I won. So I wore it again the next time, and I won again. And now I’m trapped. Every time I wear it, I win. So I have to keep wearing it.”
“That’s a powerful handkerchief,” I said.
“Right?” Charlie agreed. “After she left, I thought I should get a different one—but I don’t want to break my streak.”
Other secret writerly behaviors that got exposed as we worked together: I feathered the corners of pages while reading. Charlie absentmindedly tapped his heel on the floor. Charlie wrote exclusively with Bic ballpoints, chewing on the caps and blowing through them, which—who knew?—makes a whistling noise.
Charlie turned out to be a blue-ink person, while I was exclusively black. FYI for nonwriters: blue versus black ink is an essential identity issue. Much like Coke versus Pepsi, or the Beatles versus the Stones, or college-ruled notebooks versus regular. You can be one kind of person or the other, but not both.
I couldn’t help but judge Charlie a little—and I could feel him judging me right back.
I’ll also add that he was a fine-point-pen person, while I had joined the bold-tip community years ago and never looked back.
One-point-six millimeters or bust, baby.
The idea that we might do all our writing in a sleek, virtual, digital, nonhuman way was not sustainable, looking back. It wasn’t long before the dining table was covered with crumpled paper, marked-up printed scenes, snack wrappers, soda cans, spiral notebooks, water bottles, not one but two staplers, pencil pouches, a box of Kleenex, a printer attached to a long extension cord, various ChapSticks, highlighters, and old coffee cups—both paper and ceramic.
I personally liked it better that way. Visible signs of progress.
I got the feeling Charlie did, too.
And even though we both put headphones on, we pulled them off to talk almost constantly. I got to where I could sense Charlie pulling out his earbuds to ask a question or read a piece of dialogue. And can I just say? He had to really watch his pacing when he read to me out loud, because I’d get so caught up, if he slowed down too much, I’d jump in with what I imagined the next line should be.
And then Charlie would look up, and say, “No. But maybe that’s better.”
And then I’d wonder if I’d fallen asleep at the table or something. Because no writer ever thinks that what somebody else wrote might be better.
Astonishing.
The routine just evolved. We’d work all morning, and then sometime in the early afternoon, when we were both losing steam, I’d walk to the neighborhood coffee shop—just two blocks away, if you knew where to go—for a change of scenery and a little me time, and he’d field meetings and phone calls from a roster of Hollywood people that read like the invite list to the Oscars.
For the most part, we were surprisingly companionable. For a guy who didn’t care at all about the project we were working on, he seemed to be enjoying himself quite well—enough to make me wonder if there might be an overlap in the separate-circle Venn diagram of our lives: the joy of messing around with words.
Maybe the project didn’t matter.
Maybe the act of writing was so fun he couldn’t help but enjoy himself.
I was enjoying myself, too, to be honest.
Being away from home was not as hard as I’d feared.
To no one’s surprise, Salvador never managed to find his own place, and he and Sylvie FaceTimed me in their pajamas first thing every morning with the Dad Report: daily sodium totals, updates on refills, visual proof of color and sticker charts faithfully filled in. Salvador was taking my dad to the gym down the street twice a week for weight training, and he’d perfected a low-sodium artisan bread. Salvador also played the guitar—which delighted my dad—so the three of them were having nightly after-dinner jam sessions with Sylvie on vocals and tambourine.
I was forced to admit, as the days went on and the good reports kept coming, that two people doing all that caretaking was probably better than just one. More fun, too, apparently. The three of them even ventured to the farmers market one Saturday, bought a whole basket of organic veggies, and made pasta primavera from scratch.