by Hope Tarr
Scott.
And finally—at the end of March, we met in person! He got off the elevator in my apartment building, dragging his enormous black “pelican” suitcase. I stood in the open doorway, not wanting to wait a moment longer to see his face, to finally hold him in my arms. Our first kiss lasted forty-five minutes. The nickel tour of my apartment began in the bedroom.
And he was just as handsome and winning and kind in the flesh.
But then came a bombshell I had never anticipated.
Scott’s teenage son also had to meet me. His son had not gotten along with his ex-stepmother. Much as he loved me and wanted to marry me, Scott didn’t want his kid to endure another uncomfortable domestic situation.
I felt as though I had been sucker punched. Blindsided. I couldn’t imagine our future being in the hands of a third party who was not going to live under our roof anyway. Of course I wanted a positive and healthy relationship with his son. But I didn’t want to be judged.
Happily, for all of us, Scott’s son and I got along terrifically. A few days later, Scott’s overseas deployment resumed. Every time he had to leave the base, my heart was in my mouth. Now, my future husband was out there putting his life on the line for our country, braving enemy fire.
On the evening of June 7, less than four months from our first online exchange, Scott returned to the States. The following day he got on bended knees, both of them, at The Players club and proposed to me. The engagement ring was no surprise. At his behest, I had chosen it myself from a SoHo jeweler while he was still overseas. It took all of nine seconds to select my wedding gown at Macy’s, having already decided on the style from all those visits to The Knot.
We were married at The Players on May 19, 2007. The image on our homemade wedding invitations was Sarah Bernhardt as La Princesse Lointaine. One of the original posters from her production hangs on our wall. It was a foregone conclusion that our wedding recessional would be the traditional march from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not only because it’s gorgeous and uplifting, but also because I am a descendant of the composer. And, with a grin on my face, I had walked—no, nearly danced—down the aisle toward my groom, to the accompaniment of a rather untraditional selection: Bonnie Tyler belting out Jim Steinman and Dean Pitchford’s kick-ass anthem from the 1980s, “Holding Out for a Hero.”
Leslie Carroll is the author of several works of historical nonfiction and women’s fiction, and, under the pen names Juliet Grey and Amanda Elyot, is a multipublished author of historical fiction. She is also a classically trained professional actress and an award-winning audio book narrator. A frequent commentator on royal romances and relationships, Leslie has been interviewed by numerous broadcast, online, and print media, and appears on the Canadian History Channel series “The Secret Life Of …” Leslie and her husband, Scott, divide their time between New York City and Washington, DC. Visit Leslie online at www.lesliecarroll.com.
Part III: How We Love
Pasta for Dinner
By Suzan Colón
“I’m thinking of writing a book.”
In order to tell the story of my own romance, I have to tell the story of how I became a romance writer, and for that I need to point out when I said this to my husband. Fall 2008. Venerable financial institutions were collapsing. Banks were cutting off credit; people were rushing to withdraw money and hide it under their mattresses. Publishing houses were freezing book submissions because they couldn’t pay advances.
Perhaps not the best time for me, a recently laid-off magazine writer, to announce that my backup plan in this economic maelstrom was to become an author.
I braced myself for Nathan’s reaction and mentally called up my bullet-pointed list of reasons that now was the time for me to write a book at long last. I had trouble getting past the first and only point: There were no job or freelance prospects. There was nothing to do but try the riskiest proposition of all.
I didn’t have to worry about the points and their high-feebleness factor. Nathan, being the logical person who I sometimes lovingly call Spock, asked me what kind of book. A memoir, I said, sounding crazy even to myself. A book about finding my grandmother’s recipes and making them with my mother as she told me the stories of how our family got through hard times. As hard as this recession and worse.
And in this time of dramatic and drastic uncertainty, when we, too, had taken money out of the bank to hide it in case of further economic collapse, at a time when our income had been slashed in half with the loss of my job, Nathan said something that carried me that day and since. It’s a sentence that has come to rival I love you and Will you marry me? in spoken proof of love. He said, “Go for it. I know you can do this.”
Most people think the challenge in writing a book is actually sitting down and writing it. That’s never been my case. I’ve been in love with writing since the day I stayed home from Miss Maggenheim’s fourth-grade class with a cold and tried to write a short story about a goldfish and a teddy bear trading places. I never got to the predictable moral of this little fable because I was thwarted by the mechanics of Mom’s typewriter (in that sense, the hardest part was actually sitting down and writing the story). But writing would be my first exposure to passion, and eventually heartbreak, but always love.
I didn’t realize what a natural outgrowth writing was from my voracious reading habit. Childhood tales of teddy bears grew into teenage curiosity about love, and I discovered romance novels. Ooooh. They had the slightly forbidden sheen of adult reading due to the sexy parts, but they promised and delivered princes falling in love with flawed girls who then became princesses. (Being a tall, bucktoothed, Coke-bottle-glasses-wearing teenager, the draw was obvious.)
Seeing how much I liked these novels and hoping I might one day gravitate toward some sort of career choice, my mother bought me a book about how to write romances. “You could do this,” she said. My small world, which consisted of reading love stories and mooning over Scottish pop stars The Bay City Rollers, burst open. I could write about love? I could write, period? At the time I didn’t even know writing was an actual vocation. I don’t know what I thought, but my mother had possibilities dancing in her eyes.
I did become a writer, though I took a path that requires less faith and more fortitude, and occasionally more wine. I became a rock journalist.
Again, I didn’t know this was an actual vocation. At the time I was a naïve young woman who’d been enrolled in business school by an exasperated mother whose kid just wouldn’t latch on to anything other than reading music magazines.
I resented the hell out of business school and its dress code of skirts Monday to Thursday and, oh joy, dress slacks on Friday. TGIPF, Thank God It’s Pants Friday. But I learned how to type eighty-five words a minute, which got my foot and fast hands in the door of a music magazine that needed an intern. Two months later, I was hired as an assistant editor, for an annual salary of fifteen thousand dollars. My job was to interview rock stars for a living and write about it. That I would be paid on top of that? I thought the world had gone mad in my favor. I was rich.
If this were a movie instead of an essay, cue the whirlwind montage: our heroine interviewing rock stars backstage and on the tour bus. Janet Jackson, Aerosmith, Duran Duran. Then she’s laid off and migrates to a teen magazine. Christian Slater and…well, stars whose names I can’t even remember now because they’ve been crowded out by the names of my fictional romance heroes. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The montage continues with two common themes: writing for magazines and getting laid off in recessions.
It’s an equation well known to anyone who works in this area of the publishing business. In times of economic trouble, people cut back, and small luxuries are the first to go. Mani-pedis, pricey coffees and magazines. Sales go down and so does the head count. Over my twenty-four-year career in magazines, I went through three recessions and was laid off, along with many others, each time.
Something in me had gotten brittle,
so when bent just a tad too far, there was a small splintering noise audible only to me. I refused to be laid off again. I was now in business for myself.
This decision might not have had the ring of a declaration if I hadn’t been married at the time.
I say that not from the more financially secure position of having a second income in the house. By the time I’d met Nathan at a yoga retreat in Costa Rica, I’d gone rogue many times and always managed to make ends meet. In the career stability sense, he and I were opposites. He’d been a mechanical contractor for the same company for over twenty years. I was on a cycle of working at a magazine for a few years and going freelance for a few years, usually after I was laid off. Like now.
The last time I lost my job we had pasta for dinner. It’s one of those details you latch on to in order to keep your hands from shaking. The recession, the loss of my job, the bleakness of the future, all of it was making me sip the air like a drowning woman. Ravioli, I thought. We’re having cheese ravioli, I’m forty-five years old and magazines are going to hell in a handbasket and I’m never going to get hired again and I can’t do this anymore and what will Nathan say and I think I’ll just heat up the sauce now.
Over this dinner, I told Nathan I’d been laid off. I also told him I was going into business for myself, freelancing where and when I could. And he said, “That’s probably a good idea, with jobs being so scarce. You’ll find work.” Never have I sighed so gratefully. Never has overcooked pasta seemed such a banquet.
Months later, when that work hadn’t materialized, I went to the edge of the diving board again and put forth my plan to write a book. At the time it was a bit like saying I was going to jump off that diving board and hope there was water, or anything, waiting for me below.
My husband asked me the questions that showed he was listening, and that he cared, and that demonstrated the truth of the idea that couples are made of puzzle pieces that fit together. He’s practical, and I leap off diving boards.
An integral part of any leap is faith. On that night, as he has on a few nights since, Nathan looked at me and said, “I know you can do this.”
There’s an old philosophical question: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Authors ask themselves a variation on that theme. What if I write a book and no one reads it?
Absent a legion of devoted fans and a publisher enthusiastically asking about the next book, a writer lives on faith. This can be a thin meal. I work alone, as most writers do. Now that I write romantic fiction, I spend large amounts of time in a world inside my head. After a while, the weeds of doubt spring up in the garden. Can I do this? Will it be successful? The struggles of romance heroines often bring tears to a reader’s eyes because they’re so true to life. My guess is that authors weave their own feelings, including fears, into material that becomes the flesh of their characters.
My own faith gets words onto a page. Before a single word is written, though, sometimes I look down from my diving board. My aspirations may be so high I get dizzy.
But if I look carefully, I’ll see a handsome man with black hair and cool eyeglasses. Knowing him, he’s got a tape measure and something to gauge wind velocity and the depth of the water I’m about to dive into.
Then he looks up at me. And he smiles.
Suzan Colón is the author of the novel Beach Glass and the memoir Cherries in Winter: My Family’s Recipe for Hope in Hard Times. She has also written three young adult novels. Suzan lives with her husband, Nathan, and two demanding cats in New Jersey. Visit her at www.suzancolon.net.
Catch Me When I Fall
By Sara Jane Stone
The first time, I was getting off the subway in Midtown Manhattan. I remember the exhaustion. I was so tired. But I only had to climb one set of stairs to reach the busy city street. I made it to the top, and my water broke.
Fear pushed me into denial. This wasn’t happening. Not yet. My due date was a month away. I went to the nearest Starbucks, locked myself in the bathroom and called my husband.
White knights come in many guises. Mine arrived in a yellow cab and delivered me safely to the hospital. He stayed with me through the first night, easing my fears. After a week on hospital bed rest, I went into active labor, and my son arrived. Five pounds, twelve ounces, he was perfect for a few blissful moments. And then he couldn’t breathe.
The doctors rushed my newborn into surgery, repairing his collapsed lung. The next time I saw him, a machine was helping him breathe. Still dizzy from giving birth, I sat by his incubator and wept. My husband was at my side. He’d been there the entire time, only leaving to check with doctors and secure a room for me.
“Sing to him,” he said. “He’ll recognize your voice.”
I opened the door to the incubator and sang “You Are My Sunshine.” My husband held my hand. Knowing I was terrified, he helped me find my way through my fear. He must have been scared, too, but he stayed strong, so amazingly strong in a way that had nothing to do with muscles. In that sad, scary moment, singing to my baby who couldn’t breathe, I knew I was loved.
Five days later, I turned thirty and brought my son home from the hospital. Weeks turned into months, and my son grew, healthy and strong. I adjusted to life as a stay-at-home mom. My husband, my white knight in a yellow cab, was by my side where he has been for the last eleven years. I called him when I needed help or had a bad day. Just as I had in the days before and after our son’s birth, I gave him all of my emotions—the pain, the frustration, the fear—and he handed me back love, every day without fail.
The second time, nineteen months after my son arrived, I was sitting on the couch watching television with my husband. I was seven months pregnant. And my water broke.
This time I did not have to call. He was right there. But the fear—it was so much greater. I wept. I told him over and over, “I don’t want to lose this baby.”
At the same time, I didn’t want to leave my son. He was still a baby in so many ways. And I wasn’t ready to leave for the hospital. Not yet. The holidays were approaching. We didn’t have our tree yet. Decorating it as a family—that was important to me. Seeing my son’s face on Christmas morning, I didn’t want to miss that lying in a hospital bed. As my fear rose, all of these seemingly trivial details grew until they left me paralyzed.
My husband took charge, calling my midwife and our neighbor to come watch my son. He drove me from our home in Brooklyn to the hospital in Manhattan. He took care of me. He pushed me past the fear.
Days later, while I was lying in my hospital bed on the high-risk maternity ward, my husband went out and bought the most beautiful tree I’d ever seen. When my nineteen-month-old son woke up the following morning, he shouted with joy, “Tree! Tree!” My husband recorded the moment and sent me the video. The tree stood in our apartment, undecorated, a visible sign that our holiday plans had taken a detour but were not forgotten.
I used my time in the hospital to finish the manuscript that would eventually, after many rounds of revisions, become my first published book, Command Performance. I sent it off to my agent on December 12, in the afternoon. Hours later, I gave birth to my baby girl. She was tiny, only three pounds, thirteen ounces. But she could breathe. She was healthy and beautiful.
I was discharged the next day, returning home to my son, my husband, and our bare tree. Over the next few weeks, we juggled trips to the NICU to visit our daughter, still too small to come home; holiday plans; and our son, whose world had changed overnight. We decorated the tree. Together.
We took shifts at the hospital. I would leave in the morning to hold and nurse our little girl, while my husband stayed home. The subway ride was a nightmare. I was in limbo between the child I felt needed me at home and the one waiting for me in the incubator. I cried from the minute I stepped onto the train until I walked through the doors to the hospital. My hormones, still in turmoil from the birth, did not help. I probably looked like a crazy person, with the hospital bands stil
l on my arms, wearing my maternity clothes even though I’d had the baby (nothing else fit, so I had no choice) and my face streaming with tears.
After a week, I couldn’t bear it anymore. I picked up a romance novel and, for the forty-five-minute ride between my two children, I lost myself in the story. The characters in the books loved deeply and openly, their emotions often running the gamut from head-over-heels to heartbreak at that black moment when they thought all was lost. Long after we brought my daughter home, I continued to read. I carried my e-reader while I walked in circles around my bedroom for hours each night, hoping my little girl would finally stop crying and fall asleep, losing myself in the magic of first love.
There is something enchanting about falling in love. Everything is fresh and new. It’s this magic that draws readers to romance novels—that, and the fact that the sex is amazing, if not the first time, then by the end of the book. The heroes, nine times out of ten—at least in most of the stories I read and write—have jaw-dropping muscles. There are obstacles, sure. Some seem insurmountable. But in the end, love triumphs. Always.
But in real life, the happy ending does not stop there. The obstacles continue, changing over time, even when the muscles fade. But I’ve found that love grows. And it changes. No longer new and shiny, it becomes dependable.