“Writing?” He feigned a look of surprise. “Well, isn’t that the same thing?”
“Fuck you!” She strode back into her office.
Gregg followed her. “What did you say? What did you say?”
They stopped at the threshold to her office and Elizabeth had to refrain with all her might from unleashing her fury at him; she wanted to scream at him, beat him with her fists, but she held back for the sake of her son. “You heard me loud and clear. What part of ‘fuck you’ didn’t you understand?”
“You don’t talk to me that way!” He held out his index finger to her, shaking it in her face. His eyes blazed and she could tell that she had made him angry. “You have no—”
“Oh, I have no right to talk to you that way? What about the way you talk to me? Do you think that—”
“—right to talk to me that way. All I was trying to do was get you to fucking listen to me every once in awhile. I’m downstairs every night and you’re always—”
“ I like hearing you denigrate my career? Do you think I like hearing you belittle me and compare my writing and my accomplishments in publishing to—”
“ upstairs doing your goddamned writing, and you never spend any time with—”
“ playing around? And you goddamn well know what you’re saying is bullshit! Just because you gave up your acting doesn’t mean you have to play the fucking martyr and I am not up here every damn night writing and you fucking know it! “
They stopped when they both realized they had begun shouting. Elizabeth was panting, the anger running hot in her veins. They stood at the threshold to her office, glaring at each other, and Elizabeth’s eyes darted to the closed door to their son’s bedroom. God I hope he didn’t hear any of that, she thought, as tears bit the back of her throat.
“I’m sorry,” she said, biting back the tears, feeling them come now. She turned away. “I didn’t mean to yell like that. I...” She stepped into her office, trying to staunch the sorrow suddenly welling up within her.
Gregg stood in the doorway looking stunned. The sudden about-face of her demeanor confused him. He still looked like he wanted to argue, but he also looked like he realized he had pushed things too far.
Elizabeth couldn’t help it; she buried her face in her hands and burst out sobbing.
Gregg’s voice behind her, softer now. “Elizabeth...”
She waved a hand back at him. Go away. Just go away and leave me alone.
She could sense his hesitation. They’d been through this before. When he got that tone of voice he realized he had crossed the line. He would hover there for a moment, standing awkwardly in the hall, and then he would retreat downstairs with his tail between his legs.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” he said. She felt his fingers touch her shoulder.
She jerked away from his touch. She wanted to whirl around and scream at him to leave her the hell alone but she didn’t want to wake Eric and upset him. Instead, she held back her sobs and nodded. “I’ll be all right,” she said, sniffling back tears.
He hung back in the hallway for a moment, then stepped forward and embraced her. She felt his arms encircle her waist, his chest pressed into her back. He kissed the back of her neck. “I’m sorry,” he whispered again. “I didn’t mean to go off like that, I just—”
You just don’t respect me anymore, she thought. Or did you ever respect my avocation? We both had our dreams and we respected them. I didn’t make you give up acting. I didn’t make you plunge full tilt into a career you knew you would loathe. I would have been perfectly happy if you had taken a less strenuous job so you could keep up with your acting and we talked about that, but you made your decision. What, am I supposed to give up my writing now because you gave up your dream? Is that what you really want? Because despite repeated vocal support of my work in the past, what’s happening now tells me you think otherwise. Or did you ever really respect my writing?
Elizabeth wiped her eyes. “I’ll be fine,” she said. She stepped away from him. “I’m okay.”
“I’m sorry,” Gregg said again, and she could tell from his expression that he was truly sorry for making her cry, for making her sad.
“It’s okay,” she said, straightening herself up. “Go on back downstairs. I’ll be down in a minute.”
“Okay.” He moved away from her, still bearing that same look as if to say I didn’t mean it. Then he went downstairs.
When he was gone, she sank into her chair and the tears threatened to return but she held them back. What happened to us? We used to do everything together. Gregg and I used to share the same tastes in everything from films, to books and music—we still do to a certain point, but everything has changed so much since he gave up acting. He used to be so supportive of my writing. He used to be interested in it. He used to read my stuff. Now he won’t touch it.
She read over what she had written on the computer screen and realized the evening’s work was shot now. She saved the file and prepared to bring down the computer. Gregg had destroyed her enthusiasm for the evening. If anything, she wrote considerably less now than she did twelve years ago when they first got together. Back then she was desperate to get a novel published and she wrote and rewrote her first novel constantly, always refining it, re-polishing it. Gregg had read the manuscript and had some pretty good suggestions for her, which she’d incorporated into the text. He’d been proud of her when the novel wound up not only being published but won a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Horror Fiction. But then something had happened.
She didn’t know what it was, but thinking back now on it Elizabeth realized it was a gradual thing. As the years had passed and they got married, moved into a rented house, got pregnant and had Eric, finally buying and moving into the home they lived in now, Gregg began to pull away more from her writing. First he gave up acting; he’d been involved in it the first three years of their relationship, but when she became pregnant with Eric he had suddenly quit, much to her chagrin. She assured him they’d be okay for a while; he was getting better parts, and if he could stick it out longer he might ease himself into steady work as part of a theatre group or teaching an actor’s workshop. With his theatrical background he could teach at the high school level, maybe even the college level. There were a lot of things an under-employed actor could do in Los Angeles to get by; there were voice-over gigs, commercials, leading workshops, performing in local theatre. The last film he had done before he’d abruptly quit had certainly thrust him to critical attention and might have led to more casting calls for bigger films—in fact, his agent had begged Gregg to reconsider his decision to quit acting; he’d been fielding calls from casting directors ever since the film in question, Voyeur, was shown at Sundance. But Gregg had refused.
She wondered if it was fear that kept Gregg from making that leap. While she'd been confident he would have gotten more acting jobs, she'd sensed Gregg was deeply afraid he wouldn’t get any of them, and all the wasted time spent in auditioning for them could be better spent putting his nose to the grindstone in the socially acceptable way—abandoning his childhood dreams and getting a real job.
The film that had won Gregg such critical accolades was a short independent release. It was about a college girl trying to unravel the mystery of her mother’s brutal murder. Gregg played her boyfriend, and when Elizabeth first saw the film in its initial screening she’d been revolted when she learned Gregg’s character was, in reality, a cunning sociopath. Gregg’s delivery, his pose, his overall performance as a Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde archetype had stunned the audience at Sundance, and despite the fact that his character played only a minor role in the film, Gregg received major write-ups in the trades. For a moment while she was watching it, Elizabeth had really believed her husband, the soon-to-be-father of her child and the man she loved more than anything, was perfectly capable of being a brutal killer, a sociopathic psycho with a blood lust for killing and torturing women as his character had done in the fil
m.
In the years since the film’s release, the actress who had appeared opposite Gregg had gone on to major features, starring in a thriller with Jennifer Lopez and a romantic comedy with Billy Crystal. The director had gone on to a good career directing thrillers and horror films, and the writer was now one of Hollywood’s top screenwriters. Several of the other performers in the film had also gone on to major films, most of them in supporting roles. Elizabeth had no doubt that had Gregg not given up his craft after Voyeur’s release, he would have been firmly entrenched in his chosen vocation.
Instead he’d chosen the path of least resistance, one that had been mapped out for him by his parents years ago.
When she and Gregg first got together he was semi-estranged from his parents. His father wanted Gregg to follow in his footsteps as a computer programmer. “You’ll always be in demand for your skills,” was his reasoning. However, Gregg had other plans. He’d initially resisted his parent’s urgings (shovings, more like it) upon graduating high school to get a job at Free State Insurance, where his parents had worked for more than twenty years, but he’d finally done it. When Gregg took a part time job at the firm to go to college, his father insisted he major in computer science. Gregg chose the major mostly to placate his father, but he kept his feet wet in acting by getting involved in the local community theatre. After graduation, he worked for the same theatre company as a Project Coordinator, which hadn’t made his parents happy. His father was worried Gregg would lose his job. “What kind of future are you going to have being a Project Coordinator for a theater company?” he’d asked, which translated to, That isn’t worthy work. That isn’t real work. Real work is when you have to drag your carcass out of bed by six-thirty and be on the road by seven to make the hour commute in order to be in the office by eight o’clock. Real work is exactly that—real work, where if it’s fun and enjoyable, it isn’t really work. Real work is a place where they give you raises every year, where you get your two weeks vacation, a pension and 401k plan, and you’re happy and lucky to be getting it. Real work is not worrying about whether you’ll be out on the street tomorrow because you’re working for a large corporation that will take care of you because large corporations have stability. That’s how I’ve been doing it the last twenty-five years, and I didn’t like going to work every day either but I had a family to feed, so get used to it.
It was a sense of the Puritan work ethic she hated; that one had to sacrifice their natural talents and interests and follow the money. Elizabeth’s belief was to find a vocation you enjoyed, to use your natural talents and interests and try to make a living using them. If you worked hard, the money would follow. Gregg used to believe that too. But after five years of banging on the doors of Hollywood with nothing to show for it except three minutes of extra shots in over thirty films, a handful of commercials, a dozen roles in major plays, a few walk-ons in some major features, and the role in Voyeur, Gregg’s hard work had barely amounted to a secretary’s yearly salary. It could have mushroomed into something greater if he had only stuck it out longer, but a few months after she announced her pregnancy he left the theatre company and was working at Sun Systems as an analyst. He assured her he would still go after roles he found interesting in the trades, but he hadn’t done so. He had gone from sixty to zero in the space of a few months.
In the meantime, she hadn’t let her pregnancy deter her own dreams. She still wrote; not as much as before, but always managed to get at least three thousand words a week. And as the years passed and Eric grew from babyhood to a toddler, she’d adjusted her writing schedule around the demands of motherhood. Sometimes she didn’t get any writing done for weeks, but she always got back into it when the opportunity arose. Gregg remained supportive of her writing as he had always been, but as the years went on and they moved from Los Angeles to Pennsylvania to be closer to her parents, his enthusiasm for it seemed to wane. Where before he used to eagerly read her work the minute she finished, now he let it sit on his side of the sofa for weeks before he picked it up and gave it a glance. She continued to always make it available for him to read, and she stopped asking him if he wanted to read a work-in-progress when he declined the offers, saying he was just too busy now. She accepted that; after all, he had gotten busy at work and was climbing up the ladder at Anderson pretty rapidly. But then there would come times when he would complain to her that she never showed him her writing anymore so she would start again, only to be rebuffed. He complained her writing was all she ever talked about certainly not true. She talked about her work for the first five years of their relationship and marriage, and when he first brought that complaint he did so with a tone that suggested he was saying, I’m sick of hearing about your writing. Can you just stop?
So she had.
A year or so later, during one of their arguments, about what she couldn’t remember, he’d said, “You don’t even talk to me about your writing anymore. You used to tell me about your work all the time and now you just shut me out of it.”
When he’d said that, she’d wanted to scream.
But she hadn’t; instead she’d bit her tongue and said, Yes, you’re right, I’m sorry, I’ll let you back into my writing life again by talking to you about it, and when a few months later she tried bringing up a writer-topic (involving some anecdote she’d heard at a convention) he’d stopped her with a, “Do we have to talk about your writing friends again?”
Now she refused to discuss her writing with him.
And as the years passed, so did the complaints that she was spending too much time writing. What he used to once support and appreciate he now seemed to regard with disdain.
Well, it does divert my attention away from him, she thought. I think it was Harlan Ellison who once wrote that, to a spouse, your writing will become a secret lover, an affair of sorts. Gregg’s extra-marital lover used to be his acting; now he diverts his attention from me when he watches football or reads Sports Illustrated or goes to a game. I don’t get bent out of shape when he pursues his interests. Why has he suddenly in the past year or so seen my writing career as something so...so unworthy?
Surely it couldn’t be the subject matter of her work. Gregg was an avid horror movie fan and he loved the novels of Stephen King and Bentley Little, two writers he devoured eagerly. And she could tell he had genuinely loved Witch Country, her first novel, as well as her first collection of short stories. But since then she’d published two more novels and he hadn’t read them despite the books being available for months, in some cases years, around the house.
Did he secretly think her work sucked and didn’t want to hurt her feelings? She didn’t think so.
She didn’t know what it was. But whatever the reason for the slow change in behavior and attitude, it was getting worse. She wondered silently to herself if money was a motivating factor; Gregg had become more bottom-line oriented in his thinking in recent years and he knew her writing, on average, brought in less than five thousand dollars a year. It was only in the last three years since her work had been appearing in paperback that she’d been receiving regular royalty checks, which she’d been throwing into her 401k plans. Gregg had barely noticed two years ago when they’d done their taxes that year—she did their taxes, after all. The last two royalty checks had been pretty good, but she hadn’t shown him because by then anything related to writing had started to feel like masturbation—something to be done in private. She sighed, feeling better now. Maybe it was time to show him a royalty check. She owed him at least that. She probably should have clued him in months ago.
She rose and turned off the lamp, then headed out of the office and down the stairs.
Gregg was in the family room watching 20/20. Elizabeth went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. She poured herself a glass of milk, then joined him in the living room, plopping herself down on the sofa. Gregg’s attention was on the TV and he looked at her once when she walked in, and then went back to his show. She could tell he was trying to a
void talking about what had led to their fight, and for a moment Elizabeth felt the anger return. She quickly realized it would be futile to get into it again, but she did want to address the situation again, if briefly, to remind him it was something they needed to talk about if they wanted to get through it. “Gregg,” she said.
“Uh huh.”
“I’m sorry we had a fight.” He looked at her. “I’m sorry I don’t hear you when you called for me, and I’m sorry we fought about it. I’ll try to be more receptive in the evening if you’ll promise me one thing.”
Gregg turned to her, his attention from the television show momentarily diverted. “Okay honey, what?”
“First, a question. And be honest. How much time do you think I spend upstairs in my office writing per week?”
Gregg looked nervous and a little ashamed. He licked his lips. “Um, I don’t know...a few hours a night maybe?”
“Try two hours tops every other night. Does that sound like I’m always up there? Playing, as you say?”
Gregg clearly looked uncomfortable. “No...”
She leaned forward. “I want you to recognize that what I do when I’m in my office is work and to respect it. I want you to realize that what I do isn’t playing around, as you call it; it’s serious. I’m your wife, and I’m Eric’s mother, and I love you both dearly. At work I’m a teacher of high school English and Literature and I love my work. Outside of that, in the publishing field, I am a respected novelist and short story writer. I’ve won awards for my work, and my work has received critical acclaim. I’ve had material reprinted in Year’s Best anthologies. I’ll probably never make a living at my writing, I’ll probably never be a household name like Dean Koontz or Stephen King or Tom Clancy; I’ll probably never achieve the kind of academic acclaim that John Steinbeck or Ernest Hemingway ever did, but what I have written and published will outlive both of us. And in fifty years, after you and I are dead and gone and buried and some movie producer contacts Eric about acquiring film rights for a story or novel I wrote and they want to pay him a goodly amount of money for those rights, he’ll be able to do that because my work is my property and I will be passing it on to him in the same way you and I will be passing on our other property to him when we become old and it becomes time for us to do that kind of thing. He and his children will be able to derive an income, however small or large, off my work. My work may not be raking in big bucks now and maybe it never will, but it has the possibility of being a gold mine. So please, respect that, will you?”
The Beloved Page 9