“All day long.”
“They should be here.”
“Who?”
“Edward and Elizabeth.” I scan the grass below the bridge, as I did so many times on my Saturday evening jogs. But the couple I’m looking for is nowhere to be seen.
Their names aren’t really Edward and Elizabeth. Or maybe they are—I’ve never actually met them. But I used to see them here each week. For as long as I’ve lived in New York, they have mattered to me.
“The picnickers,” I tell Ryan, hoping he remembers. Early in our relationship, I told him how this couple walks to the same spot in Central Park every Saturday night and feasts on an elegant picnic at the water’s edge, on the north side of the Pond.
“Is that them?” Ryan points at an elderly pair approaching on the path.
I rise on my toes, follow his gaze, optimistic.
“No.” I shake my head. Not even close.
It’s been years since I’ve been in Central Park on a Saturday at dusk. Probably since I started dating Ryan. A cold feeling of futility settles over me as I consider that one or both parties of my couples crush might not still be alive.
Ryan puts his arms around me. I think he can tell I’m disappointed. We’re about to kiss when thunder claps and the sky cracks open with rain. I want to linger, to ignore the storm and our dinner plans, to stay here kissing until Edward and Elizabeth appear. They never let the weather stop them. I’ve seen them picnic with a battery-powered heat lamp in a snowstorm.
But Ryan takes off his coat and drapes it over my head. He tugs on my hand.
“We’d better make a run for it or we’ll never get a cab,” he shouts over the downpour.
He’s right, I know, but leaving like this, before I see Edward and Elizabeth, feels every kind of wrong.
Chapter Six
On my first day at Peony, I walked in on Alix smoking weed behind her desk.
“I am so sorry!” I’d cried, backing away and vowing to knock louder next time, wondering if I should leave the cover materials I’d come to drop off—or abort the mission entirely.
“Come in, come in,” she told me, coughing as she sprayed fig-scented diffuser. “I don’t usually do this, but I have a call with Callaway this morning.”
Noa had just turned in the first draft of her third novel, Fifty Ways to Break Up Mom and Dad. I’d devoured the manuscript—and pored over Alix’s eighteen-page, single-spaced editorial letter like an archeologist examining the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The book centers on a couple in their twenties who plan a romantic getaway to New York . . . only to have it crashed by his mom and her dad. Things get worse when the young couple discovers that not only did their parents used to date, both are single again. Much to their children’s despair, the old flame hasn’t gone out. So the younger couple hatches a plan to turn their parents off each other through a series of schemes masked as vacation adventures. A culinary competition, tickets to Broadway, kayaking on the Hudson, etc. But every moment of the young couple’s trip only brings their parents closer.
The hang-gliding scene in the second half contains a line that’s long stayed with me. Just before they run off the cliff, the main character’s mother says:
“Life’s greatest mystery is whether we shall die bravely.”
I cried the first time I read that scene. Out of all the Noa Callaway aphorisms that have touched me over the years, that was the one I most wished I could have shared with my mom.
I would have loved to know whether she felt brave at the end.
In Alix’s editorial letter, she waged a scorched-earth campaign on the novel’s second act. I agreed with her suggestions, but if I had to account for all those cuts I was asking a bestselling author to make? I’d be getting high behind my desk, too.
“It’s going to be a great book,” I said to Alix.
“It better be, for what we paid for it,” she said, pinching out her joint with her fingers. “This draft is twenty thousand words longer than it needs to be, but if I know Noa, it’s going to be like I’m auctioning off the crown jewels when I suggest we lose one word.”
I couldn’t make out the precise threats and accusations shouted through the walls that morning, but after two hours on the phone with Noa, Alix emerged on her way to a very long lunch. She asked me to email Noa’s assistant to arrange the messenger to deliver the edited manuscript in hard copy.
I wrote to Terry and introduced myself. I cc’ed Alix and Noa as directed, though Alix told me Noa never got involved in logistics. I couldn’t help fangirling a little and mentioning the fact that the love interest’s last name, Drenthe, happened also to be my middle name. How reading this manuscript was the first time that my middle name hadn’t struck me as a punishment. I was not expecting an email back from Noa herself two minutes later.
Dear Drenthe,
Welcome to the hell of working with yours truly!
I should be able to peel myself off the floor long enough to receive your package around one this afternoon.
I have never labored over anything the way I labored over my five-line response to Noa Callaway:
Noa,
The rowboat fight scene is one of my favorites. Not just in this draft. In any novel I’ve ever read. But I agree with Alix that it’s not serving this story. Maybe it’s the opening scene of your next book?
If ever you need someone to grieve the darlings that must be cut, email me. They’ll get a moment of silence over here.
To my unending amazement, throughout the next week, I got an email from Noa every day, with the subject lines: Cut Darling #1, 2, 3, and so on. Each contained a single line, a paragraph, or a plotline on the chopping block.
I called BD and read some of them aloud to her, relaying to Noa all the places where my grandmother had laughed. I climbed out on my fire escape and voice-recorded myself shouting lines of interior monologue into the Second Avenue traffic. I scrawled in Sharpie one extravagantly beautiful description of a woman’s hair on the sole of my Converse, then I walked all over Brooklyn that weekend, taking a picture for Noa of how the line had gotten its day.
You’re making this more fun than it has any right to be, she’d emailed me back at midnight.
Even after the book went to print, even years and several books later, sometimes I’ll still get an email about something Noa hates having to cut: the tiny pink flowers in her basil pot, half an inch of hair, a man in line for a taxi, her mother’s dinner after a fall broke her arm.
The day Fifty Ways to Break Up Mom and Dad was published, a dozen white tulips were delivered to my office in a mason jar, with a note saying These also had to be cut.
We’ve worked together on seven books since then, and our process has been the same: Alix gets the ranting and resistance; I find ways to make Noa’s revision process less painful. I’m like the fun uncle to Alix’s single mom.
Only now . . . Alix is gone, and where does that leave Noa and me?
Yesterday, Terry called to set up a face-to-face meeting with Noa. I was so shocked, I’d agreed to the suggested time immediately, without thinking about my own calendar. Then I had to cancel last minute on Ryan’s senator’s birthday in D.C. He isn’t thrilled, but I’ll figure out a way to make it up to him next week.