She started a new book as soon as she moved into the apartment, but Rose sent her invitations to gallery openings and other events she thought Alex would like, where she might meet people. Alex was painfully shy at first and left several art openings half an hour after she got there. She had no friends in the city and no one to go with, other than Rose, who usually sent her the invitations and didn’t go herself.
She was standing alone at a gallery opening in SoHo one night, feeling foolish, when a young man in his early thirties walked over and started talking to her. They chatted for almost an hour. He had just moved to New York too, from San Francisco, and said he was raising funds for a high-tech start-up. His name was Tim Richards, and she told him she was a freelance writer, which was her latest explanation for what she did as work. And he asked to see her again as they left. She gave him her number, and didn’t know if he’d call her, but she’d had a nice time with him at the art show. They both liked contemporary art. He called her the next day and invited her to lunch at the Museum of Modern Art on Saturday to see a new Jackson Pollock exhibit. It sounded appealing, and she decided to take a few hours off from her latest book and agreed to go. She didn’t expect anything to come of it, but thought it might be interesting to get to know him as a friend, and she had hit a dead spot in her new book. She had talked to Bert about it, and he suggested she take a break.
It was a warm spring day on Saturday, and Alex decided to walk uptown from the West Village for the exercise, and enjoyed it. She looked relaxed and casual when she saw Tim waiting for her in the lobby of the museum. He was happy to see her, they had lunch in the cafeteria before visiting the exhibit, which had been beautifully curated, and showed an impressive amount of the artist’s work, from private collections as well.
“It always amazes me how people can spend that kind of money on art and keep it in their homes,” he commented on the work that had been lent to the museum by private collectors. She couldn’t help thinking it was an odd thing to focus on. She had just enjoyed seeing the paintings, and hadn’t thought about how much they cost. They walked to Central Park after they left the museum.
“Where did you grow up?” Tim asked her.
“In Boston.” She didn’t mention the convent or her parents dying when she was young, which seemed like too much information for a first date. He said he’d worked on Wall Street for two years, had gone to San Francisco for a year to join the start-up, and they’d sent him back to New York. He said the job was challenging, but he liked it.
“Raising funds has been hard to get off the ground,” he admitted, but the idea seemed like a good one, when he described it, although a little technical for her. And somehow they got onto the subject of books and he mentioned Alexander Green. “He’s my favorite author,” he explained. “He’s written some incredible books. You probably haven’t read any. They are really shockingly brutal, but always surprising,” he volunteered, and she couldn’t resist the temptation, and surprised him by saying she had read one or two.
“They’re pretty good.”
“You read crime thrillers?” She nodded, as they reached the park.
“My father got me started on them when I was a kid.”
“Green writes some very complicated, edgy stuff. What I love about them is that I can never figure them out. He gets me every time.” She wanted to thank him when he said it, but she didn’t. “They’re very tight.”
“He surprised me too,” she said, and changed the subject, not wanting to give anything away, but it was beginning to bother her that she was never honest. She could never tell anyone “I wrote that!” She had taken on a false identity six years before, and it was a heavy burden at times. She couldn’t even say truthfully what she did for a living. But at least Tim wasn’t a writer in any form, so he wouldn’t be jealous of that, or want to compete with her. But she felt like such a fraud at times and a liar. She told him about London then and how much she’d liked living there for almost two years.
“What did you do there?”
“I was an intern at a British publisher, but really more like a file clerk.” She grinned. It was one job she could talk about, although she’d only worked there for a few months, and spent the rest of the time writing her own books.
They chatted about college and traveling in Europe. He had gone to Stanford, and had a WASPy, conservative look to him, as though he might come from money, but she didn’t care. He walked her along the park to the subway to go back downtown, and told her how much he’d enjoyed spending time with her and hoped to see her again. And she said she would like that too. She had assumed that he lived in her area, because she’d met him in Soho, but he didn’t. He told her he lived uptown, and left her at the subway entrance with a promise to call her soon.
And as she rode downtown, she thought of all the things she couldn’t tell him, like working on her movie in L.A. for the past six months. She was like someone who’d been to prison. There were large gaps of time in her life she was unable to account for, unless she told the truth, which was taboo.
He called her again a week later, and she was back at work on the book, and didn’t want to take time away from it, so she told him she was busy when he invited her to dinner. He sounded disappointed, but said he’d call her again, which he did two weeks later. She had just finished a difficult chapter, and was in a great mood. He asked her out for a movie and pizza, and she accepted. They had dinner at a little Italian restaurant in her neighborhood, and he told her he had just read that they were making a movie of Alexander Green’s book Darkness and he wanted to see it with her when it came out, since she’d read some of the books too.
“Movies are never as good as the books, so we might be disappointed,” he warned her.
“No, it’s pretty true to the book. I hear he consulted on it, and had an assistant on the set the whole time,” she blurted out and then wanted to cut her tongue out as soon as she said it. She knew too much about it.
“How do you know that?” He was surprised.
“I read about it somewhere. I think he keeps very close tabs on his work.” Tim nodded. And they both liked the movie they saw that night, and talked about it as he walked her home afterward. She thought about inviting him upstairs for a drink, but didn’t know him well enough, so she didn’t, and her manuscript was all over the dining table and she didn’t want him to see it. She thanked him outside her building instead. He kissed her on the cheek, and hailed a cab to go back uptown.
They had dinner two more times in the next few weeks, and he was always polite and pleasant. She asked him how his fundraising for the start-up was going and he said he was having a hard time getting investors for it, but he wasn’t ready to give up yet. He looked so determined that she felt sorry for him, and he asked her what she was doing that summer.
“Working. I don’t have any plans. What about you?”
“I’m sharing a house in the Hamptons with ten friends. It’s a fairly big old house. We each get two weekends a month.” He smiled at her, faintly embarrassed. He was thirty-two years old and obviously struggling financially, and had hinted that he was worried about his future at the start-up, if he was unsuccessful bringing in investors for it.
“That sounds like fun,” she said about the Hamptons.
“Maybe you’d come with me sometime,” he said cautiously, and she nodded, thinking about it. She wasn’t sure if she was ready for that. She liked him, but not being honest with him was hampering them both. He asked her about it the next time they had dinner, on a warm May night, when they ate at a sidewalk café under a full moon. It was a Thursday night, and Brigid had had her baby, so Alex was going home to Boston to see her the next day. She had turned down his invitation for dinner Saturday night, and he suggested Thursday instead.
“Alex, are you seeing someone else?” he asked her hesitantly. She was surprised by the question and shook her head.
“No, I’m not.”
“I don’t know why, but I always get the fee
ling that there’s a lot you’re not telling me, and you’re busy so much of the time.” It was true and hard to explain. Her books always came first, and her assignments from Bert. She liked doing the editing as soon as possible when she got it back from him, and it was fresh in her head.
“I get too involved in my work sometimes. When I get freelance assignments, they have tight deadlines usually.” He nodded and didn’t seem convinced, and she felt guilty for lying to him. She was beginning to wonder if she would ever have a normal relationship with the life she led, but there was something about him that always stopped her from telling him more of the truth than she did. Maybe the fact that he was struggling and she wasn’t. She felt awkward about it, and she knew he could tell just from the building where she lived. She hadn’t invited him to her apartment yet either. Some strange instinct stopped her every time. But she didn’t want to live in a walk-up in a bad neighborhood just to make the men she met comfortable either. She worked hard, did well, and had a nice life. But it was definitely creating distance between them.
“You’ve never shown me anything you’ve written,” he mentioned. “Where do your articles get published?”
“In women’s magazines mostly. You wouldn’t have seen them. They’re not written for men.” He laughed when she said it.
“You know your audience at least. I guess that’s why I like Alexander Green’s books so much. You can tell they were written by a man. No woman could write that.” She almost groaned when he said it. He had just proven her father right, and had the same prejudice he had about women writers.
“You never know. Some women authors might surprise you. There are some very good female crime writers around.”
“Like Agatha Christie?” He laughed again.
“No, tougher than that. Patricia Cornwell or Karin Slaughter…” She would have liked to add herself to the list but couldn’t. And feeling rude for not having done it sooner, she invited him upstairs for a drink when he took her home that night. As soon as they walked in, she knew she had done the wrong thing. It put an immediate chill on the evening. He looked tense when he sat down, and she poured him a glass of wine.
“This is quite a place,” he said, as he glanced around. The loft-style living room was huge, and clearly a very expensive co-op, which impressed Tim, more than she’d expected it to.
“I’m actually apartment sitting for a friend,” she said, when she saw the expression on his face. She was lying to him again.
“Or you have a rich father,” he said with a snide tone. His earlier pleasantness had faded rapidly.
“My father died eleven years ago,” she said quietly, sitting across from him in a vintage leather chair.
“And left you a big trust fund. How nice of him.” There was something in his eyes she hadn’t seen before. He had been easygoing till then. And now there was an edge to every word. It came out of nowhere.
“He left me something, but not a trust fund, and it wasn’t that much. I’ve been working hard since I left college,” Alex said calmly. Not that she owed him an explanation, but she suddenly felt as though she did.
“So have I,” Tim said, sounding almost nasty, which shocked her. “I live in a studio the size of a closet. It’s a walk-up. The Upper East Side address sounds good, but the building is falling apart and smells of cat piss. I don’t have a doorman, and I don’t live in an apartment like this. And while you’re dabbling with writing recipes or whatever it is for women’s magazines that keeps you so busy, I’m working my goddamn ass off trying to raise funds for a business that no one wants to invest in, and I’ll probably end up getting fired!” Suddenly his pleasant, well-educated, upper-middle-class WASPy mask had slipped and he was turning out to be a very bitter, angry guy. “And my father would have left me a trust fund too, except he was a drunk and blew all our money before he blew his brains out, when I was sixteen. I’ve been working ever since, and put myself through Stanford with scholarships and student loans, so I don’t feel sorry for you in your fancy apartment with your freelance work.” He stood up and looked down at her with ill-concealed rage, and the expression on his face terrified her, he seemed like he wanted to kill her for a minute. She felt like she was living in one of her own books. Her gut was telling her to get him out before something happened, but he was already walking toward the door.
“Sorry if this wasn’t quite the right fit. At least you don’t need a rich husband, or would you like to invest in the firm I work for? I guess I don’t know how to play the game, or I’d have stuck around and charmed you, but you’re a little too fancy for me. I guess you figured that out for yourself,” he said, walking out and slamming the door behind him, and Alex didn’t say a word before he left. She just wanted him to get out before he strangled her. She locked the door behind him, went to sit on the couch, and she was shaking. He had really frightened her, and it had been so unexpected. He had been so mild mannered till then. He’d obviously had a hard life, and had some bad things happen to him. But so had she. She’d been an orphan at fourteen, and abandoned by her mother at seven, but she’d had a good father, and the nuns had been loving and kind to her after that, and she had been immensely lucky with her books and she knew it, and didn’t take it for granted. But she had never seen hatred like that in anyone’s eyes, and she wondered if everyone was going to be jealous of her and hate her for her success for the rest of her life. The thought of it depressed her profoundly, and she was still upset about it when she took the train to Boston the next day. She went to see Bert at his apartment. He was the only man she knew and could talk to, and the only father figure she had.
She told him what had happened and he wasn’t surprised.
“I told you a long time ago when you started writing that there were going to be a lot of jealous men in your life. You didn’t believe me, or you didn’t want to.”
“But it happens to me every time. All the way back to that shit TA at BC, who was jealous of my writing and gave me rotten grades while the professor was away, and he hated me when she came back and changed them to what I deserved. Then the guy I worked with in London who hated me for writing and wanted to write a book himself but was too lazy to do it, and he cheated on me on top of it. The one in New York just now thinks I write recipes for women’s magazines, he doesn’t even know I’m a writer, and he loathes me because I live in a nice apartment and he thinks I have too much money and he hates me for that. And the screenwriter I worked with on the movie in L.A. thinks women are only worth going out with if they’ve got a name and he can use them to make connections or get in the press with them. He sees them as some kind of ticket to stardom by association. And I’m always lying to everyone about who I am, and what I do, pretending I write romance novels, or freelance for women’s magazines, or ghostwriting or editing. Nobody knows what I do except you, Rose, and the sisters, and even not knowing who I am, these men are jealous of me.”
She ran out of steam then and he looked at her seriously with an honest question.
“Do you want to come out in the open? Are you ready for that and what comes with it? You may lose some of your readership if you do, if they’re pissed at you for lying to them about who you are. But if you can’t live with the myth you’ve created, you can step forward and tell them you write the books that you do. But whatever you do, there are a lot of jealous people in the world—not just men who feel inadequate next to you, but women too. They don’t feel good when other people are successful. They don’t feel good about themselves. So they want to hurt you, and pull you down to their level and punish you. You’re a very, very big success, Alex. Professionally you’re huge. Few men are secure enough to have a woman like you in their life. I told you six years ago when we talked about it, the right man will come along at the right time, and you’ll know exactly who he is when you see him, and you won’t scare him. But there are a lot of shitheads out there, and you’re going to meet a lot of them, even more if you come out about the Green books. Your light is so bright it
blinds people. It blinds me sometimes, but I love you for it. I’m so damn proud of you I could burst. That light will attract people to you, and it will burn the bad ones and hurt their eyes, and they’re going to try and hurt you for it. You need to watch out for them, learn to recognize them, and stay away from them. And you need to be patient while you wait for the right one. You don’t need to look for him—he’ll find you. There is nothing you can do about that light of yours. You shine like a beacon. You can’t turn it down or off and you shouldn’t. And that right guy is going to see the beacon, and turn up on your doorstep one of these days. In the meantime, kick the bad ones out, write your books, and stop complaining. Now go get me another bottle of wine,” he said, pointing at the kitchen, and she grinned and stood up and kissed him on the cheek.
“Thank you,” she said quietly, and went out to the kitchen for a bottle of wine for him. He was right. He had warned her about how jealous men would be of her. She had been just nineteen then. Now she was twenty-five. Tim had shocked her with his vicious diatribe and the rage in his eyes the night before. She hadn’t seen it coming. Maybe she didn’t want to. He was angry and he didn’t even know how successful she was. And she didn’t want to give up the secrecy surrounding her books, or her pseudonym. So she’d just have to live with it, and hope Bert was right, and the right one would come along at the right time. And she was fine alone in the meantime. Sometimes she even preferred it, so she could write.
She sat with Bert for a while longer, and then she went to see Brigid and her new baby. She was already at home, and little Steven was careening around the house. He had just learned to walk. Brigid was in bed, perched on an inflatable inner tube because she couldn’t sit down yet so soon after the delivery, and the new baby was asleep in her arms. They had named her Camilla, and she was a beautiful baby and had weighed nine pounds, fourteen ounces, another big one. Brigid was made to breed, as her mother-in-law said, and she was happy with her babies and her husband. He cooked dinner for all of them and tried to keep an eye on Steven, while friends and relatives dropped by to see them. It was like visiting a firehouse after the alarm had gone off for a ten-alarm fire.
The Right Time Page 22