The Rom-Commers(52)

It was my first birthday away from home. Charlie had made me doughnuts because he was grateful I was here. He was almost officially cured, and we were covered in whipped cream, and these doughnuts were so much more delicious than anything cooked by a man who thought you opened canned biscuits with a can opener had any right to be. And right there, in a moment of ebullience, with no sense at all that I might ever regret it, I said, “Why don’t we make a whole meal out of it?”

“A whole meal out of what?”

“Your cancer-free-iversary. Why don’t I make a big, fancy dinner to celebrate, and we can eat doughnuts for dessert?”

Charlie picked up his half-eaten doughnut for a toast. “It’s a date,” he said.

So I clinked my half-eaten doughnut to his, and said, “It’s a date.”





Eighteen

AFTER FOUR WEEKS of living with Charlie, day in and day out, I had to make it official: We were good together.

Good at writing together, and good at living together.

Given how everything started, I might’ve expected the whole rewrite process to be endless clashing, and arguing, and insulting each other. Charlie could so easily have chosen to be offended by some nobody from nowhere trying to tell him what to do. He could have dug in his heels and fought me on every single thing.

And yet—he didn’t.

I had armored up for a field of battle—and somehow we wound up in a field of daisies instead. Having a picnic.

I worked out many theories to explain it. Maybe Charlie really did understand that his version of the script was bad. Maybe he truly had liked my honesty when I ripped it to shreds. Maybe he was telling the truth when he said he liked my writing. Maybe his ego wasn’t as immutable as everyone claimed.

Maybe I’d fallen madly in love with his writing for a reason. Maybe we shared some kind of essential linguistic rhythm, or some comic outlook, or some moral framework that made it easier to be friends than enemies.

Or maybe we both just really loved writing—in the exact same way.

Maybe writing was our shared love language.

There’s a joke that writers “don’t like to write—they like having written,” and that must be true of some writers. But it wasn’t true of me or Charlie. We liked the process. We liked the words. We liked playing around and trying things. We liked syllables and consonants and syncopation. We liked deciding between em dashes and commas. We liked figuring out where the story needed to go and then helping it get there.

It wasn’t easy, exactly—but it was fun.

It was work that felt like play.

Which is all to say that one day, when we should have been writing, Charlie wanted to take me to a farmers market off Mulholland Drive instead—and swore that we would definitely get work done by talking about the story nonstop there and back, and I believed it. That was absolutely what we would do.

Except we never made it to the farmers market.

The road was windy and breathtaking—built in the 1920s as a scenic drive and strung with the hidden driveways of world-famous people—and Charlie seemed more than happy to tool along it with the windows down and his shades on and the radio blasting 1970s music.

I, in contrast, was terrified.

I didn’t know who designed this road—but it must have been before the invention of safety. Or road shoulders. This thing slalomed back and forth between a steep valley on one side and a low canyon on the other, and only at the most lethal points were there any guardrails. Over and over, we rounded curves where the edge of the road kissed hundred-foot drop-offs. I started gasping and wincing.

As we weaved along the two skinny lanes, I found myself getting motion sick. The ups, the downs, the side-to-sides. It was a lot for my inner ear to handle. Charlie drove it fearlessly—one hand slouching on the wheel—like he drove it all the time.

Which I guess he did.

When Charlie happened to glance over and see me bracing against the door in fear, he said, “You don’t like the Hollywood Hills?”

“I come from a town that’s elevation zero,” I said.

“Don’t worry. I drive here all the time.”

“Why aren’t there more … guardrails?”

At the question, Charlie scanned the road and noticed its very weak guardrail game for what seemed like the first time.

“People are just careful, I guess,” he said in a tone like Huh.

We’d curve one way and get a glimpse of a deep ravine to the right, then curve the other way and see the LA valley on the left. Through it all, I braced against the dashboard and jammed my foot over and over on a nonexistent brake pedal.

“You’re a terrible passenger,” Charlie said.

“I’m a fine passenger,” I said. “On a normal road.”

“Try to enjoy the view. We just passed Jack Nicholson’s house.”

“I’ll enjoy it later. After we’ve survived.”

“You want to know why you shouldn’t be worried right now?”

“Why?”

“Because the bad thing you’re worried about is never the bad thing that happens.”

I took that in.

“It’s always some other bad thing you’re not expecting. Right? So the fact that you’re worried we’re going to plunge to our deaths off the side of this road means that there’ll definitely be an earthquake instead. Or a drone strike. Or Godzilla.”