Being a Novelist Only Costs Romantic Compromises and Debilitating Debt

An excerpt from Famous Men by Julie Buntin

At the Selden Awards, you’re Nathaniel’s guest, with your own seat at the best table. Two years and change, you say to the woman who asks how long you’ve been in New York. People are starting to know you now, at least by sight: Nathaniel’s assistant, his special girl. He is giving a speech about what it feels like to be emerging, and how it never really stops. Wilhelmina Miles. Your name sounds like a stranger’s when Nathaniel thanks you onstage. Someone interesting, important. That very morning, you caught Nathaniel reading your new pages before you even asked.

After the event, you walk through the frigid December night to one of the writer bars. You admit to Samson, who has already found four reasons to mention how surprised he was that Nathaniel nominated him, that you’re writing a book. Good for you, he says. I liked yours, you offer, and this relaxes him. You did look at it for a long time, imagining what it would feel like to have Nathaniel say, in print, magnificent, about you. About you, or about your work? It will be years before these memories make you cringe, though, in the very back of your mind, that trapdoor behind which people like your mother live, isn’t it there already? Your awareness that this isn’t exactly right, your place here, and how you’ve gotten it? That you’ve made a bargain, without knowing how you’re paying?

There’s Nathaniel, by the door, talking to a guy you vaguely recognize; Lili, sitting on a barstool with that impenetrable ring of space around her, even as three separate people try to get her attention; Reg, listening to the Hindenburg with his eyes on you, then Lili, then you again. Samson tells you it’s impossible to write a book. That he couldn’t give you a piece of good advice if he tried. It needs to burn itself out of your guts, he says, tongue darting toward a speck of foam on his lip, and then you must be strong enough to wrestle it into shape. The way he says must and wrestle and guts, looking at your waist, then your hair, then your breasts, you know he doesn’t think you’re writing anything at all, that if you have managed a sentence, two, they’re slush, about dolls or blood or other girls, about your silly little self. You’re Nathaniel’s assistant, Samson tells you. Good man. I should see if he needs a drink, you say, thinking, go ahead, dismiss me. Burn itself out of your guts. Your brain gives his words Nathaniel’s red slash.

A couple of months later, another reading, another bar just a few blocks away from the last one. In line for the bathroom, Reg kisses you, tasting of gin, and then you’re in a cab going over the Manhattan Bridge, your hand on his zipper. Nathaniel, Reg, Nathaniel, Reg. Then it’s summer, and you’re crashing at Nathaniel’s place, the sculptor, surprise!, is back in town for three weeks. At a book party Nathaniel ducks out early, my head, he says, and whispers in your ear: See you tomorrow. He’s no longer dating Sarah, but there’s someone, his shower drain was clogged with long brown hair. It doesn’t matter. Really, it doesn’t. What’s between you is secret and lawless and yours. His key in your purse, credit card in your wallet, the spearmint taste of his Italian toothpaste in the back of your throat. You sleep together, nights you’re at his apartment, Thursdays, always, because you clean on Fridays, and any time you stay for dinner, and whenever you’re uptown, but you can’t remember the last time you had sex. Is this weird? You like his hand around your waist, his clean sheets you washed, he likes your eggs in the morning, to give you his thoughts over coffee, how you fold the towels, one of your Rosendale tricks. Sex, he says, does it ever make you weary? All that wet and slap. Your legs are in his lap. He puts one finger at a time between your toes. Sometimes I think my panting years are over. You try to remember what it felt like to want him like that. The memory slithers away. But you still make sure you smell clean and sweet, vanilla sugar scrub, something that tastes good to bite. You would let him. You both know that. But more and more you talk like this, about sex, about his women. Once, he even takes you out to lunch with Vilma. When he’s in the bathroom you ask her if she was ever afraid they weren’t important, literary enough, her stories about women and all the things they think and feel. Jesus, she says. I thought your generation would be braver. Actually, you’re worse.

You even talk about Reg, who kisses you and then disappears, who’s in Vienna, sending you letters, or France, sending you silence, or in Brooklyn, texting you to come over, please, I can’t stop thinking about that space where your collarbone divots, if it still tastes like snow. Nathaniel says, well, little Wilhelmet, you’re not exactly available either, are you? That’s probably why he keeps coming back.

Nathaniel says, he’s a poet, what do you expect?

Your mother finally comes to New York, a three-day visit, after she gets a Xanax prescription for the plane. The days before she arrives you yearn for her, a desperation returned from childhood, those afternoons you couldn’t wait for her to come home and begin chopping onions for dinner. You put her up with Nathaniel’s card in a Holiday Inn in the Garment District, an anonymous location walking distance to many chain restaurants with food you know she’ll eat. You don’t show her Barth, or the sculptor’s studio, or any of the bookstores or bars where you spend your non-Nathaniel hours reading, reading, reading, sometimes putting the book down for coffee or wine with Lili or Dev. Your mother walks with her arm looped tightly through yours, an intimacy she only allows herself because her fear of the city is greater than all the unspoken bitterness between you. On the subway, she clutches her things. She doesn’t ask you anything, and because that hurts your feelings, you ask her nothing in return, as punishment. After her first twenty-four hours you count the minutes until you can leave her at LaGuardia, and then, even as your heart aches, you’re waving goodbye as she rises on the escalator beside her hulking suitcase, bought for the sole purpose of visiting you.

Every emergency room in the city is the same, and the adenosine is the same, too: doom, then exhausted relief, the bruise in the crook of your arm where the drip went in, the flutter of your heart before it pumps once, starts again. The bills vary, even though they’re always for the same thing. You’ve long stopped keeping track of how much you owe. At Maimonides they give you Xanax when you arrive, Xanax when you leave, as if this faulty mechanism is something your mind should be able to control. Is it? At Mount Sinai, they test every time for drugs. Vilma publishes a strange, slim novel about marriage, darker than her other books, you read it in a hospital bed, waiting for discharge papers, Nathaniel barraging you with texts. In the book, the wife eats her husband. She doesn’t cook him; she eats him raw, but with a fork and knife sharpened using a special device she built herself. It’s described graphically and for many pages, but before the cannibalism, the book read like a domestic drama. You can’t put it down, and when it’s over you don’t know how to feel. The book, you realize, doesn’t care. Vilma wins a prize in the UK that Nathaniel has never even been nominated for. He repeats that fact over and over. He takes Vilma to dinner to celebrate, and for weeks afterward he’s gloomy and cold.

Don’t you ever want to do something else with your time, he snaps, coming home to find you pruning expired food from his pantry. Buzz buzz buzz, you’re just here. Your chest empties, fills with ice. As quiet as you can, you close the pantry door, pick up the trash bag, and leave. You stop using his card, eat peanut butter toast and cheese cubes from party trays for a scarily long amount of time, weeks, so long you think maybe the whole thing is over, start wondering if he’s going to cancel the electric for the sculptor’s studio, applying for executive assistant jobs that never reach out for an interview. You have no degree, no work experience except for whatever you’re doing with Nathaniel. One night you google cleaning services, the phrase “maid for hire,” consider applying for a position that clearly involves sex work. When Nathaniel asks you to come back, you cry with relief. When’s the last time you truly cried? Still, you make him ask three times before you agree to meet to talk.

That night, after two bottles of wine at dinner, after Nathaniel’s apology, after he tells you he needs you, after kissing sloppily in the elevator, you have sex. It’s been a long time, so many nights with Reg in between, a couple of strangers, too, but you feel tenderness for Nathaniel when he bends to retrieve his T-shirt from where it’s fallen off the couch, the freckled curve of his shoulder, his baby powdery smell, the way it takes his penis three tries to get hard and stay that way. You expect something when he leaves to catch a flight, a kiss on the mouth, some return to how it was in the beginning between you, but having sex only rewinds you part of the way, back to where you’d been before your break, companions, sexless husband and wife. He ruffles your hair, tells you to order a takeout, stay at his while he’s gone, reminds you to type up his old notebooks so they’re easier for him to read. It almost makes you sad. Nathaniel’s lukewarm desire seems to have less to do with you, my God, Wilhelmet, he’d said, when he unzipped your dress, you’re in full bloom, than with the way he has begun to drop his sentences right in the middle, repeat the same story twice.

Your phone rings. You don’t answer. Some days the calls come every few minutes. On the other end of the line, there’s a person whose job it is to call only you, that’s how much money you owe. Do they strategize the pacing, four calls in a row with an hour break, or what area code to use, the most sensitive time of day to deploy the one from where you grew up? Will they get a reward if you finally pay? You wonder how much they make, what their health insurance is like. Would they garnish your wages if you had a W-2? That happened to Tray once; you remember your mother telling you. You learn to keep your phone on silent. Popular, Reg says, watching it light up on the bar. And then months with no calls at all, so long you start to believe maybe the hospitals just gave up. But they always, always start again.

It happens overnight. Oh, everyone says, with the exact same note of awestruck heartbreak, how is it fall already? You meet Lili at a speakeasy near Belvedere’s offices in Dumbo to toast to her promotion. She dresses all in black now, most days, or big oversized button-down shirts over skin-tight jeans, her vintage dresses and hats pushed way back in her closet. To the associate editor, you say, watching the olives jounce as your martinis collide. Nathaniel buys you a new scarf, cashmere, the color of the frost on the Great Lawn of Central Park.

Your book is sixty pages, then zero, then eighty-two, one hundred, a single radiant chapter, halfway done, almost finished, roughly twelve pages, eighty thousand words. No, you don’t have an agent, you say, when people ask you at readings, at parties, but you do have Nathaniel, Nathaniel who reads every version, Nathaniel who tells you, when you really think you’re truly done, to set it aside, to write it again, like a real writer. You’ve completed the practice rounds, he says. But, Will, this is real work! I am so proud of you. You bury your head in his chest when he says this, so he can’t see your face, how happy it makes you. When you start again, you write slowly, you aim for poetry in every line. Purple, Nathaniel writes in the margins. Breathe. You’re in a rush, but you’re also not. You’re only twenty-what, five or six, still Nathaniel’s assistant, his very best girl.

No, you don’t have an agent, but you do have Nathaniel, Nathaniel who reads every version, Nathaniel who tells you, when you really think you’re truly done, to set it aside, to write it again, like a real writer.

Your job has swelled and swelled. Do you ever feel, you ask Lili, like something odd is happening with time? Now you manage Nathaniel’s life, you make it bigger, busier. You’re working with his agent on a new selected, prose this time. And he’s got so many meetings, Hollywood things you schedule that never seem to pan out, he likes for you to send gifts after, cocktail shakers, personal notes. You write recommendation letters for his former students, blurbs, spend a week researching mattresses for lower back pain and coordinate the replacing of his bed, the installation of blackout shades, the doctor’s appointments, the insurance claims, the copies for his classes, groceries, dinner, shoes to the cobbler, the first draft of the book review, the speech, the questions for the interview at the 92nd Street Y. Sometimes you pick out his clothes. He likes to keep baby wipes on the toilet tank, just in case. He wants you to record him talking about screenwriting, for a craft book. He wasn’t trained, you know, he learned it all himself. Why is he always out of bananas? He doesn’t trust transcription services, wants you to do it by hand. He never asks you about health insurance, even when he collects you from the hospital, even though he knows about your heart, the urgent care visits you sometimes pay for with his card. You’ll be done with the book when Nathaniel tells you you are.

Best of the New, same as every year, Nathaniel’s students switched out. You sit in the front row. Tilda nods hello, but at some point, it’s like you never knew her at all. When you pick up your plastic cup of wine, she doesn’t even nod, doesn’t try to meet your eyes.

In the winter, the best part of the bar after the reading is the second bar after the reading, the group whittled to an unlikely handful shuffling through the snow, you and Reg coming up behind, slipping away to smoke and make out in the cartoonish whirl of flakes, wait. Pause here. This time was different, wasn’t it.

Reg stops. You look at each other, eye to eye. He kisses you again, both of your eyelashes full of snow, the kiss you dreamed of as a girl, or would have, if you hadn’t been thinking so much about poetry. It’s been six months, more, since you last touched. Reg, who’d started doing things like taking reporting trips, had been on one of those, or Nathaniel was being extra needy, or Reg had a girlfriend, or you were dating Nathaniel’s agent’s forgettable assistant, oh, who knows. “Come with me,” Reg says, and he hails a cab crawling slowly through the sheets of snow, the only car in sight. When it stops, you’re not at his place in Greenpoint, you’re at Prospect Park, the grand entrance near the library. You stumble through the snow, it’s coming down too hard and fast for the plows to keep up, and anyway, why would they bother, when you and Reg are the only two people in the whole city. Snow is in your boots, melting down your back, it’s in your bra, your ears, in the crevices where your fingers and Reg’s fingers meet. Everything glows. In the circles of light cast by streetlamps, the flakes are sparks, so bright they hurt your eyes.

“Where are we going?” you ask, and he tells you he doesn’t know, that he wanted to be somewhere outside of the city with you, and this was the best he could think of.

“I thought you were made of snow, Michigan girl,” he says when you stop to brush a thick layer off your hair. And you’re annoyed, just a flicker, because he’s wearing one of those expensive puffer coats with cuffs that extend to the knuckles, a wool hat pulled below his eyebrows, waterproof Chelsea boots. You’re in one of Lili’s old coats, wine red and fuzzy, with torn silk lining and plastic buttons shaped like daisies. Tights, faux leather cowboy boots a quarter of an inch taller than the snow you’re walking through. He pulls you with him toward a break in the trees, and Long Meadow opens out before you. No one. Just a plain of empty, alien white, as if you’ve traveled somewhere impossible, like Greening, or the surface of the moon. You don’t even see the tracks of a squirrel, or a rat.

“There,” Reg said. “We made it.” See how he looks at you. “Remember your first Christmas here, when I tried to walk you home?” Feel the wobble in his hands as he turns yours over, unfurls your fingers from your palm. He kisses your forehead, then puts his hat on your head until it covers the place his mouth touched. Neither of you are drunk anymore. In the story you’ve told yourself, Reg was the one with the crush, who, as soon as you showed interest, couldn’t commit. Reg was the one deciding where and when and how, but here he is, looking at you like he’s been waiting outside your door for years. “Will,” he says, “I really like you. I like you so much. I’ve been an idiot. I wasn’t ready. But I think I could be now. I got stuck on you a long time ago and it just doesn’t go away.”

You try to think of one thing you’ve ever asked of him, and you come up with nothing. Wasn’t that Nathaniel’s advice? Let him come to you? It occurs to you only there, snow in your mouth, that’s exactly what you didn’t do with Nathaniel. It’s taking you too long to respond. You both feel it. “Took you long enough” is what you finally say. What you mean is, why didn’t you tell me before it was too late? (Later, when it really is, you’ll see that, of course, it wasn’t too late at all.) And then, because you want it to be true, because you’ve slipped out of time together, onto this blank page with no record of your mistakes, you say: “I could be ready, too.”

In Reg’s bathroom mirror, you look older than you do in Nathaniel’s. At Nathaniel’s, you’re always a girl of twenty-two, begging the great writer to take you seriously, because that’s what he needs you to be. Here, you’re someone else. Who? Back in Reg’s bed, he tells you, haltingly, as he fiddles with a hank of your hair, that your job with Nathaniel makes him uncomfortable. That he knows what Nathaniel is like, and even though, “Even though what?” you say. Reg stops, tries again.

“You’ve been his assistant forever, as long as I’ve known you. Don’t you want to do something else?”

What Nathaniel is like. The worst part of that line, and you’ve heard it so much, is what it assumes about you: that you’re either delusional, a sweet little girl who tripped and fell sideways into a trap, or something even more pathetic, a woman who takes any crumb she can get. “I want to write. That’s it. Who else will give me my mornings free? All those days off every month when he travels?” It’s too hard to explain. It’s not something Reg would ever understand. Maybe you had other ways of getting here, but would they have worked? You also don’t say the next thing you think: that Reg only knows you because of Nathaniel.

You’re either delusional, a sweet little girl who tripped and fell sideways into a trap, or something even more pathetic, a woman who takes any crumb she can get.

“I know,” he says. “And I’m not one of those crazy jealous people. I just don’t like how much he, it’s like you’re his pet or something, or he sees you like that, like he can just . . .”

It’s almost possible. You could tell Reg about the Visa, your debt, how you’re nine credits shy of a bachelor’s degree. You could tell Reg about your mother, about Tray, about your dreams of Rosendale, how they come to you still, as if part of you is already banished there, hands dishwater raw, bleach in your hair. As if part of you never left. How Tray never touched you, but how he made you think about what he imagined, how you still feel him outside every window. How in your book, Nathaniel says you need to write it plain, but you still haven’t figured out what that means. How he feels, even with Reg right there beside you, like the most solid thing you have.

In the morning, Reg kisses you before either of you has brushed your teeth, like Nathaniel never would. It feels different, this time, like Reg is trying to tell you something he doesn’t know how to say. Sweat pools in his lower back, the curve of his neck, and when it’s over, both of you are damp, breathing hard. He has to go to the office to file a piece. He says he’ll see you after work. He whispers something into your hair, that word again, and you reach for him, confirming. But when he calls, you’re at Nathaniel’s, putting the salmon in the broiler.

You text back, sorry Reg, I can’t now. Talk later?

Samson is, somehow, always there, at the reading, at the bar after the reading, at the second bar, the diner after the nightcap at the editorial assistant’s shockingly well-appointed apartment, the used bookshop on Twelfth Street in the middle of the afternoon, when everyone else is at their normal job. One night you kiss him back half-heartedly after Reg shows up at the Housing Works holiday party with a date, a bony butterfly of a girl who works in marketing for Time Out. Samson hasn’t written another book, no, that’s not right, he’s still writing it, he had that story, Nathaniel took him out for a beer, it’s been a struggle. He gets some help from his parents, but just a little, really, he hardly gets by. Most of the time he says nothing to you, either that or you wind up gossiping furiously in some dark corner after you’ve both had too much to drink. At some point you realize you’re not so far apart in age, you and Samson, him perpetually at work on book number two, you promoted to typing up Nathaniel’s archives, the stacks of impenetrable legal pads from the past he thinks might hold a kernel that can become a new novel. Sometimes, when it’s late, his handwriting very messy, you let yourself write, a little, in his voice. When you show him the pages, you wait for him to notice where you took over, but he never does.

Are you different? You’re twenty-seven. There was something you were supposed to do by now, what was it? You measure your face in Nathaniel’s mirror. Nathaniel says hair is youth; you let your eyebrows creep toward each other. You cut your hair, let it grow back out. Your mother gets sick, but she doesn’t tell you until after she’s better, stage 2 breast cancer, nothing chemo couldn’t fix. For a while, you call more frequently, but the long silences, how neither of you can ever seem to find a way to ask a question of the other that elicits more than a single-word response, it’s too much for you to bear, and you’re both comforted, you tell yourself, when you slide back into the rhythm of talking once a month, less, on holidays only.

Nathaniel’s taking his new Lili out for dinner. She’s Chinese, he tells you this over and over, and writes like her head is on fire. What would he say about how you write? A year later it’s a different girl, a blonde with crooked teeth and a Southern accent. He reads you one of her poems out loud. For two months, he’s out almost every night with a brassy girl from Queens, tiny with humongous breasts; the next semester, you hear through the grapevine, she drops out of the program. Sometimes the Lilis make you jealous, but there’s never another Will. You read every single draft. You let yourself into his apartment on a Saturday morning, so you can be there to show the super the noise the toilet makes when you flush it, and find a young woman, no more than twenty if you had to guess, eating a bowl of Kix at the kitchen island. Just his assistant, you say, and scoop up his laundry, throw in a load of wash while you’re waiting. The girl is gone before the super arrives, and you never see her again. It takes you a few days to realize, you never asked her name. Whenever you find women’s clothes mixed in with his, you fold them carefully, leave them on the foot of his bed. Once, you steal a pink cashmere sweater, hip length and so soft; when the radiator breaks at the sculptor’s studio, you sleep in it.

Reg and Lili, even Nathaniel, they transform, transform again. But you, it’s as if the monumental effort of finding your way to him, of turning yourself into the person Nathaniel needed you to be, blasted your power source, got you stuck in this endless loop forever, pairing his clean socks, fucking him a couple of times a year, as if performing routine maintenance on an antique car. Writing and rewriting the same book, publishing your secret poems here and there, for usually zero, sometimes fifty dollars apiece, hitting ignore when your phone rings. But you have an apartment, a job, Nathaniel’s notes in the margins. This is the story you tell yourself: There is no life in the city without him, not for you. Isn’t that why you dodged Reg for months after that night in the snow, let your relationship slide back into an uneasy friendship, why you never let him talk like that again?

Reg writes a piece about ghosting that goes viral, starts getting bigger and bigger assignments. He goes to Flint to report on lead in the water, texts you a selfie from the Detroit airport. In your home state, he writes, and you don’t bother trying to explain that Detroit is as much of a different universe from where you grew up as New York, that you’ve never even been there. Lili becomes the managing editor at Belvedere, starts dating with great seriousness one of the hedge fund guys from the board. It seems like you only hang out with him three or four times before she’s engaged, before you’re at her wedding, telling people over and over, no, you don’t know Lili from college, you met through poetry. Her husband, Jake, is forty-one, a tasteful age gap, with a dimpled chin and earnest political opinions, eager for children. He’s never once made you laugh. He seems double Lili’s height. Sometimes he picks her up and cradles her in his arms like a baby. Maybe that’s his appeal. Lili, who stopped writing after her second promotion, wins the Selden the year of her wedding, for a chapbook she published two years prior. You know Nathaniel nominated her. You want to ask her what she’s doing with the money, where thirty thousand dollars goes when your husband is a hedge fund manager. You’re supposed to attend the ceremony as Nathaniel’s plus one but you tell him you have the stomach flu, and then you lie to Lili, too, pretend you were so sad to miss it when she shows you a photo later. But you’re also happy for her, truly, you hope it will make her write again. You miss her poems; you never feel closer to her than you do when you are reading them. The exact opposite of how you feel about Nathaniel’s work, which you still value unthinkingly, even when it bores you, makes you squirm.

After the election, everyone is shocked. You are, too. But when you press against the feeling, are you, really? You know, without ever asking, that your mother and Tray probably didn’t vote at all, but if they did, it was for the man. On the subway the next morning, the atmosphere is funereal; an elderly lady sitting across from you openly sobs. You go to the Women’s March with Reg and feel inspired, yes, but mutely so. What has to happen in a life to make a person believe that if they say no loud enough, the bad thing will stop? That rescue will come. Was it something someone was supposed to teach you? Where was that teacher? Was it protest, what you did, leaving Greening and refusing even to visit? Taping the bag over your window?

Then, a miracle. Nathaniel tells you the book is done. You’re in Paris, just the two of you. He’s there for a festival and he brought you along. I can’t believe this is my life, you think, as you follow him around the city. You watched him read your latest draft on the plane. It’s the shortest version, barely one hundred and fifty pages. No fat, all scene, a numb third person, lots of white space. You had a feeling he liked it because of how he was breathing, his irritation when the flight attendant interrupted to ask what he wanted to drink. When he tells you, you’re at a café in the 11th arrondissement, hallucinatory with jetlag, sharing a plate of cheese so pungent that forever after, whenever you see your book’s title, you smell mold. Even after Nathaniel passes the book to his friend, the publisher of a prestigious small press you’ve read for years, after he calls to offer you three thousand dollars and a contract, tells you during your first meeting how the book reminds him of The Sun Also Rises but with a distinctly female point of view, you smell mold, mold, mold, as if the cheese were still melting on your tongue.

You and Nathaniel eat it all. On bread, it is delicious, veined with blue, crumbling at the edges. You press it against the sponge of yeast until your fingers stink. The two of you stop at a tabac for a Kir Royale, and then another, for another. You attempt sex in the creaky bed near the window, which looks like a doorway, opening outward. It doesn’t work. You tell Nathaniel you’re tired, you want to stop. “I’m sorry,” he says, and you almost laugh. Is it possible he thinks this was ever what you really wanted from him? The next morning, standing by the steps to the pop-up stage, you help him adjust his clip-on mic. He stops your hands before you switch it on, puts his palms on your cheeks, says, “You are very dear to me, Wilhelmet.”

“I know,” you tell him back. And you do.

How will you account for all these years? You’re nobody’s poor little fiddlestick anymore. When your book comes in the mail, in a cardboard box, like it could be toilet paper, a sheath of lightbulbs, a replacement filter for Nathaniel’s air cleaner, the first thing you can’t believe is your name, in silver foil, slick against the matte cover. Wilhelmina Miles, almost as large as the title, as if the publisher wants you to be the thing the reader remembers. You pick it up, there’s that taste again, fecund and earthy, and flip to the first chapter, the fourth, the very last page. You swallow, trying to clear the taste from your mouth. The endpapers look expensive, too, especially for a small press, and when you crack the binding for a flash of a second, you’re in Nathaniel’s office again, begging him to let you in, you’re widening the hole in the neckline of Reg’s black T-shirt, you’re listening to the shrieking EKG, you’re at Rosendale, trying to outrun Tray. Turn back to the first page. There you are, just behind the text. Alone in the sculptor’s studio, writing down a word that becomes a sentence that becomes a story.

For so long, you’ve been watching yourself try to figure out how to live. Is it writing that does that, skips a person a little off the track of their own existence, or something broken in you? You pick up another copy. Wilhelmina Miles. You wouldn’t take any of it back, even if you knew what came next. Look, you say out loud, though there’s nobody in the sculptor’s apartment to hear.

Look how far I’ve come. Look at what I did.

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