I sit on the ottoman, pulling off my flats. I don’t exactly get lonely while Chris is in the office—I enjoy the freedom to organize my own days—but I do miss my fiancé. The chance to talk to him isn’t one I’ll pass up. “Was it for the Vincent Blake book?”
He grimaces. “He turned me down. Signed with someone else.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, meaning it. I respect Chris’s drive, despite how his work life occupies his entire life. I shrug my jacket off, moving to sit next to Chris on the couch. When I entwine my arm with his, he looks down and unlinks our elbows. While he doesn’t move away from me, I’m pretty sure he’s leaning imperceptibly in the opposite direction. It dims my enthusiasm.
“He’ll regret it,” Chris intones.
James Joyce darts out of the hallway, finding my feet immediately. Well, someone’s glad to see me. I stroke his head, his ears flicking while I do. “Yes, I’m sure he will,” I say.
Chris scoffs. It’s pointed, purposeful. Not just from professional dejection.
I furrow my brow. “What’s that for?”
“You make it sound like you respect me.”
His words hit me like a slap. Chris and I fight every now and then. Unremarkable fights—whether I’m “meddling” when I urge him to network less, if I’m pushing him too hard to set the date for our wedding, whose family we’re visiting for the holidays. It’s never about whether I respect him. I’m reeling slightly from this jab out of nowhere.
“Of course I respect you,” I say. “Why would you think otherwise?” We’ve been engaged for two years. He was Nathan’s and my agent for the three years before that. I respect him professionally and personally, though it’s not why I fell in love with him.
When I was a kid, I would go hiking in the hills outside our house. South Dakota is humid in the summers and hilly twelve months out of the year. My mom would serve us vanilla ice cream when we got home, hot and exhausted. It was from the rectangular Dreyer’s container, the cheapest from the grocery store, I guess, and with four kids in the house, vanilla was a safe choice everyone would enjoy. I remember the way the perfect, cold sweet would melt in my mouth while sweat stuck my hair to my forehead. In those moments, vanilla ice cream was the greatest ice cream flavor—the greatest food in the whole world. When people asked me what my favorite ice cream flavor was, I would say vanilla without considering the question.
Chris was vanilla ice cream.
The hiking days were the pre-publication fervor of Only Once. Nathan and I were no longer speaking. We’d finished rounds of developmental and copyedits and were in the crush of publicity and meetings for other opportunities, which we did over the phone whenever possible. Every day, instead of writing or reading or just enjoying my downtime, I was watching what was only a Word document on my computer grow into this monster of epic promotional proportions.
I wasn’t well. I woke up with cold in my fingers and my feet and went to bed exhausted from worrying and inexpressibly grateful for the reprieve of sleep. I googled “post-success depression” from my phone under the covers. I sought out my therapist in New York, who I still call, though less often now. Interviews were grueling—I, who once wrote hundreds of words per hour, struggled to push single sentences past the cage of insecurity and uncertainty in which I lived.
I’m under no illusion that what stressed me out was watching the success of Only Once. It wasn’t humility. It was fear. I hadn’t felt this way with Connecting Flights, with its modest deal, its respectful but ordinary reviews. But with Only Once, I was close to having what I wanted, and if I had what I wanted, I could lose it. The possibility felt like radioactive material, and I was certain it would chew up my insides or make me lose my hair or whatever holding onto plutonium would do. I hated it.
The fear was what caught me in the women’s restroom of one of LA’s film and TV agencies, where I was pitching Only Once for development. It was an important meeting, hence my flying out, and on the same day as one of Nathan’s divorce mediations, hence his not. The restroom was entirely white stone, like a spaceship or something. The lights were iridescent. When I stopped in front of the sink, feeling the sweat sliding down my sleeves, the idea of charmingly reproducing our pitch points overwhelmed me. I worked to even my breathing, and I . . . couldn’t. Then I was crying, hiccupping, gripping the sink like the seat of a crashing plane.
I called Chris. Not out of some instinct for his comfort or whatever. We weren’t dating, wouldn’t be for several months. I just wanted to cancel the meeting. Pretend I had the flu, or wasn’t stomaching the sushi from the reception dinner with Hollywood agents the night before. I didn’t care. I guess he heard the waver in my voice or the sob waiting in my throat because he spoke calmly instead of wondering why I wanted to cancel. He said, Today isn’t your entire life. Today is one day of your job. Do your job the best you can, then do the next thing. Okay?
In short, it worked. I did what he said. I did the meeting. I called my Uber. In my hotel I wrote four interview question responses I hadn’t finished. I had a sandwich. I read Celeste Ng’s new book and focused on her use of prepositional phrases. When I got in bed, I felt calmer, more cohesive. The next day, I did the same thing.
Chris made me feel like I could be okay. I wanted very much to return to being okay and with him, I could. In the years that followed of his encouragement, patience, and support, I was, or close.
I wondered if Nathan would’ve done the same. I’ll never know.
I love vanilla ice cream. I do.
Right now, however, my fiancé is watching me with impassive, resentful eyes. “Why would I think you respect me, Katrina?” It is pointedly rhetorical. “You won’t let me sell books for you,” he continues.
The realization dawns on me where this conversation’s headed. “Chris, I don’t have books for you to sell. If I did, believe me, you’d be my pick. You’re always my pick,” I say delicately, struggling to keep my voice in a reasonable register. He only rolls his eyes. It’s what pushes me over the edge. I stand up, yanking my jacket from the couch cushions. “My decision to stop writing has nothing to do with you. You know that.” Irritation wraps around my words. His audacity, that he would make this about himself, is unnerving.
“You have ideas, though,” he says as I walk over to the hall closet and shove my jacket inside. The hangers rattle, and I still them with my free hand.
“Nothing I want to write,” I say, holding in my indignation. It’s not untrue, though I know I’m hiding the nuances of the problem. I’ve had concepts for new novels, characters I’ve daydreamed of. I just don’t know if I want them published.
While I’m more confident I could face the fear I felt when Only Once was coming out, I’m not certain I want to. Not certain it’s worth it. I enjoy my life. I enjoy perusing wedding venue possibilities and presenting the occasional writing workshop for an MFA program or high school class. I enjoy the freedom I have to read, even to outline in my head or draft pages nobody’ll ever read. I don’t know if I want to catapult myself once more into the heights of publishing, only to wrack myself with the fear of falling.