“You were there. For . . . all of it.”
I’ve known Harriet as long as I’ve known Katrina. The three of us met at the New York Resident Writers’ Program. She’d often join us on writing retreats—we’d find Airbnbs in unusual locales, hole up with days’ worth of wine and frozen food, and attempt to write obscene amounts of words. She moderated our book launch for Connecting Flights, which was unsurprisingly perfect, what with her insight and wry humor. When we wrote Only Once, Katrina and I rented a house in the Florida Keys just fifteen minutes from Harriet’s home, using the money we had from our debut novel. With the wet heat keeping us indoors, we finished Only Once in a matter of months.
My ex-wife had not loved the writing retreats. Nevertheless, Melissa understood. It’s one of her greatest virtues. She understood. We’d fallen in love our senior year of college and moved in together when we graduated from Dartmouth, her into social work, where every day she heard her clients’ struggles with child custody or financial problems, and she understood. It exercises the same muscles writing does, self-imagination and empathy and hypothetical reasoning, and Melissa excelled at it. Excels. She’s working in the same position in Seattle now. She’s dating a radiologist.
When I said I wanted to write Only Once with Katrina in Florida, Melissa resisted, not unreasonably. I was married, proposing living in the same house for a few months with a young woman who was not my wife, working on our next novel. Most of Connecting Flights was written in cafés or our apartments, with one or two weekend or weeklong retreats. What we were proposing with Only Once was different—months, uninterrupted. What’s more, I understood innately there were new pressures involved in asking my wife for allowances on one book as opposed to a potential career of them.
Nevertheless, when I explained the practice of long retreats was not uncommon, and plenty of cowriters married to other people did it for efficiency and the collaborative process, she reluctantly understood. I don’t know, she probably felt like she had no choice. You kind of don’t, in your marriage, in the instances when your partner’s comfortable just saying how it’s going to be—which I’m sure I did too much of.
Melissa would just promise she understood, the way she did with the Only Once retreat. Once she consented, she never fought me on the plan. On the day I flew out of New York for Florida, she smiled from the opposite end of the JFK terminal and waved when I went through security.
I knew what she was ignoring, then and for months before. Pretending she didn’t notice signs other women would have. My distraction, the casual ease I brought to every conversation. I pretended I didn’t notice them, either, even while I felt the pieces of me pulling in different directions and realized Melissa wasn’t the biggest piece. Nevertheless, I tried. I called from Florida often. I made her laugh with inside jokes and made plans for what we would do when I was home. I pretended I was in love with her.
Until our conversation in the kitchen one night, three weeks after I got home from writing Only Once with Katrina.
Then, she understood.
We were divorced within the year.
“Was there a specific question you had for me?” Harriet asks. Over the line, there’s the clatter of a screen door falling shut. I remember the porch in front of Harriet’s house, the ocean in view. She’s probably watching the sunset in a way we don’t see it in Manhattan, or from my condo in Chicago.
“Is this a terrible idea?” I intend the question sarcastically. It comes out searching.
She replies immediately. “Yes.”
I huff a laugh and start to pace my hotel room in my socks. “I don’t have a choice.”
“Okay,” Harriet says. “Then why’d you call me? You want me to lie and tell you you’ll work everything out? That you’ll have the perfect partnership you used to?”
I deflate. Harriet’s always been uncanny when it comes to finding the heart of things. In the weeks of the New York Resident Writers’ Program—dinners of Chinese or pub food in the small neighborhood where we were staying—and on our retreats, she would often rib Katrina and me about having hidden romantic feelings for each other until, one day, she suddenly stopped.
“Are you ready to grovel?” she asks.
“Me?” Groveling to Katrina is the second-most preposterous idea I’ve heard today, and it’s close. “Come on. You know what she did.”
“Then you took your New Yorker interview. The one where you said writing Only Once was the worst time in your life, and you don’t think even Katrina Freeling’s genius is worth the torture.”