• • •
Lauren went downstairs to say her good-byes, pack her bags, and get her kids and her wife into their minivan. Suddenly I was alone with my hangover.
I took a deep breath and checked my e-mail. My hands flew to my face Macaulay Culkin–style. There it was, the first message in my in-box: a confirmation for a one-way ticket to Bangkok leaving on Tuesday at 9:00 p.m.
What the hell was I thinking?
I wasn’t. That was the point. I hadn’t been thinking. The drug had loosened something in me and allowed me to lose my mind. It had been so glorious, it was almost worth the worst hangover I’d ever experienced. But it was also stupid. I’d need to cancel the ticket and probably wouldn’t be able to get my money back. I couldn’t go to Thailand.
At the same time, there was no way I was getting on that plane back to New York today. The idea of a break, now that it was lodged in my mind, was too tempting. I could take Lauren up on her offer and stay here in California a couple of days. I’d sleep. I’d recover. Who knows, maybe I would write.
When I called Karl to tell him the plan, his phone went straight to voice mail, which meant he was taking a run. His forty-five minutes of daily exercise was the only time he ever turned his phone off. It was just past three in New York on a Sunday afternoon and he would reliably be halfway around the reservoir. I went downstairs and foraged for food, but the kitchen was pretty bare.
I wandered down the lawn and out to the edge of the cliff to try Karl again.
“How was the wedding?” He sounded distracted and out of breath when he finally picked up. I could picture him checking his Fitbit as he cooled down. “When are you driving to the airport?”
I paused, unsure how to put this. “I thought maybe I’d stay an extra day or two. I might try to . . . to relax a little. Fly back on the red-eye Tuesday instead of tonight.” In those few sentences, I wanted Karl to hear everything I wasn’t telling him. I wanted him to hear how much I needed a break, how exhausted I’d become, how I needed some time to figure out what the hell I wanted to do with my life now that both of the girls were in school during the day. But I didn’t say any of those things.
“We have that fund-raiser for Room to Read tomorrow night. We bought a table,” Karl said briskly.
I didn’t want to hear that he wanted me to come home for some benefit. If he were going to tell me to come home why couldn’t it be because he’d miss me.
“You’ll be fine without me. That event runs like clockwork. Donna wrote you an incredible speech for it. I looked it over before I left. You don’t need me.”
“I know it’ll be fine. I’m just telling you that you’ll miss it.” His tone softened. “Don’t worry about it. You deserve a break. We’ll see you later this week.”
“Will the girls be OK?” I hated that I would miss bedtime with them for another three nights. Bedtime was always our time. Even when Karl and I had obligations at night I tried to work them around the girls getting into their pajamas, choosing a book to read, and then piling on top of me in one of their beds, their minty breath on my arms, neck, and hands.
“Marley’s here. They’ll be fine.”
“I miss you guys.”
“The girls miss you too.” But do you miss me? I thought.
“I wish you’d come this weekend.” I regretted saying the words the moment they came out of my mouth. I didn’t want to pick a fight, not then.
“You know I couldn’t. I had to deal with this. In fact, I’m still dealing with it. I’m going to meet Annabel in an hour to try to talk her off yet another ledge. We need her finished manuscript. We needed it weeks ago if we wanted to publish it on the spring list.”
“I understand,” I said, even though I didn’t.
• • •
After sleeping for fifteen hours straight, I woke up on Monday morning with no one to answer to but me. This is how Nina feels every day of her life. I stretched my arms over my head, opened my eyes, and then closed them again for as long as I wanted. I didn’t need to make breakfasts or pack lunches or find my husband a matching sock. For just one day I wasn’t anyone’s wife, anyone’s mother.
After I got off the phone with Karl yesterday afternoon, I had wrapped a scratchy Pendleton blanket around my shoulders and pulled a chair onto the balcony. The notebook dared me to open it. The pages had yellowed some with age. Some sentences perfectly matched the parameters of the Moleskine’s parallel lines while others passed diagonally across an entire page. The letters were neat and close together, the script strong and confident. I began to read the story of the truck driver.
Every time that song, their song, came on the radio he looked over at the passenger seat and was surprised all over again to realize she was no longer sitting there next to him . . .
Even with my gruesome hangover, something had shaken loose inside of me, and I began writing, as if in a fever dream, all day—taking only a quick break to scrounge in the kitchen for wedding leftovers—and then writing a few more hours until I’d collapsed into an exhausted sleep at 9:00 p.m.
I reached for the notebook again before getting out of bed and quickly skimmed what I had written. It was solid, if uneven in places. I didn’t mind trashing some of it. There was something so gratifying in destroying something I’d created, knowing I’d have the time and space to create something new later that day.
I threw on jeans and a T-shirt, grabbed a banana, and strolled the palatial grounds for a bit, soaking in the solitude. Then I took the rickety steps two by two back down to the sea, letting my mind empty as the waves rolled over my feet, no longer afraid that they would rush in and engulf me. In the distance dolphins shimmied on the horizon, their sleek backs rising and falling in symmetry with the swells. For the first time in a long time I felt like I was on the cusp of something new.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. It was a text from Lauren.
I love that you’re still there. Self-care FTW. You need to drive out to Henry Miller Library and hit up Esalen at 2 am (if you can stomach the naked old men . . . so much flabby dick). Treat yo self mama. You deserve it.
Visiting the clothing-optional hot springs of Esalen in the dead of night was definitely more than I could handle with the lingering remnants of my hangover, but a library dedicated to one of my favorite writers was simple and the perfect short drive from the house. Suddenly eager to get off the property, I turned around and climbed the steps two by two back to the house to grab my bag and head out.
Somehow I’d always thought of Big Sur as a town, an idyllic little village south of San Francisco. I had no idea there was no town at all, rather an eighty-mile stretch of coastal road dotted every so often by hiking trails, hobbit-style houses, campsites, and small businesses, half of which appeared to be shuttered, perhaps forever, or maybe just for the afternoon.
Midafternoon traffic on Highway One was light enough that I could drive my rental car at a leisurely pace but never sit in traffic. It was a perfect fall day, crisp and cool and punctuated by bright sun, an ideal day for a road trip. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d taken a road trip. Once upon a time getting behind the wheel and driving for hours with no set destination, driving just to drive, radio blasting, wind in my hair, had been one of my favorite things to do.
Now, as I cruised down one of the most scenic roads in the country, I tried to savor it. I pulled off on the side of the road to take in the stunning vistas of coast and took selfies for the girls. I’d forgotten what it felt like to drive in a car without my children, to be able to listen to whatever I wanted on the radio, to be able to roll down all of the windows without worrying about blowing wind or dirt in their faces, to be able to empty my mind of everything but the yellow lines in front of me on the asphalt.
I drove past the unassuming entrance to the library twice. It was easy to miss the simple sign painted in yellow on a few planks of wood that promised three things—BOOKS MUSIC ART. I’d been expecting a grand structure, not dissimilar from the home I was st
aying in. I was unprepared for a slightly spooky cabin in the woods.
But the inside of the library quietly fulfilled Lauren’s promise that it was something special. Though I always associated Henry Miller with New York and Paris, the evidence of his life here, from 1944 to 1962, was all over the rough-hewn wooden walls. I particularly enjoyed a letter from Miller to a friend as he was on the cusp of writing Tropic of Cancer.
I start tomorrow on the Paris book: First person, uncensored, formless—fuck everything!
“Fuck everything,” I whispered to myself. “Fuck everything.” I repeated it like a mantra.
According to a small flyer posted on a table in the back of the main room, the library never belonged to Miller. It was the home of his friend the painter Emil White. Miller also never knew of the existence of the library and memorial. They were created by White and an eclectic group of Miller enthusiasts the year after he died. It wasn’t a library as much as a shrine to the writer, with his books and paraphernalia for sale. I felt a twinge of jealousy for a man who inspired such loyalty and fanaticism after his death. This quickly slid into a morbid train of thought about how if I died, my legacy and memorial would consist entirely of a few notes I’d penned to my children’s teachers and a copy of my husband’s calendar.
An enterprising entrepreneur with a literary spirit had emblazoned hand-crafted ceramic mugs with some of Miller’s more famous quotes. I rattled the mugs around on the table, hoping to find one with the quote I’d written on the first page of every notebook I bought during my twenties: “One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.” I couldn’t find it and felt too embarrassed to ask. Instead I picked up a mug for Karl that read we live on the edge of the miraculous. Henry Miller was a seminal part of the discussion Karl and I had over oysters on our first date. That night, Karl had told me that he wanted to follow Miller’s example of championing writers who had been disregarded and cast aside. He wanted to publish the kinds of literature that would challenge and trouble the elite of our day. Karl was so optimistic back then, and it turned me on more than I’d ever been turned on in my entire life. We talked for hours about literature and life and art and sex and by the time we left the restaurant we nearly finished one another’s sentences.
I bought the mug and a new notebook and wandered to the back of the cabin where there was a table with coffee and muffins and a tin box with a sign instructing visitors to pay what they wished, with the knowledge that the organic muffins were handmade with love by a local writer using local ingredients. I slipped a twenty into the box, picked up the plumpest muffin, and poured a cup of coffee to enjoy on the cabin’s porch. Once I sat down, I pulled the notebook from its paper sack and lost myself writing for the better part of an hour before I heard someone clear his throat above me. I shaded my eyes with my hand and looked up to see a store clerk with a precarious man bun bobbling like an uncircumcised penis on top of his head. He held the pot of coffee in his hand and lifted it a few inches to offer me a refill.
“Free refills for writers.” He smiled so earnestly that I felt a flush of embarrassment.
“Thanks,” I said shyly. “This coffee’s really good.”
“Folgers.” He grinned back. “I should tell you it’s some of that fancy shit they roast up in San Fran, but since the mudslides took out parts of the road down here it’s easier for us to just get the corporate standbys.”
“It is the best part of waking up,” I agreed.
“Do you want another muffin?” he asked. He was too young to get the joke. He’d probably never watched television with commercials. “On the house. We like to feed writers when they’re working here. We actually have a lot of events for local and visiting writers. We’re a small community, but we bring in a sizable crowd.”
I blinked a couple of times. “Oh. I’m not a writer.”
He cocked his head and cast his kind brown eyes at my notebook. “You’re writing, aren’t you? Sure looks like it to me.”
“This is just . . . I’m just trying something new.”
“Aren’t we all?” He turned on his heel and headed for the door, his hair jiggling in time with his hips. “I’m going to get you a muffin.”
I felt an intense urge to leave before he returned. Our brief conversation made me feel like a sham. What was I playing at? I was a wife and a mom, just a wife and mom from the Upper East Side, a place that felt like another country compared to this bohemian enclave.
I was already at the end of the gravel driveway when I saw the clerk balancing a plate with a muffin in my rearview mirror.
• • •
I was living in Paris when I first met Karl, who was living in New York. Back then, the two of us would have marathon phone calls that lasted until dawn. Listening to his voice in my ear as the sun came up in my little studio apartment in the Marais were some of the best moments in my entire life. Even better were the nights where we would fall asleep with the other person breathing on the line, as if we were next to each other. And even better than that were the nights where the calls devolved into steamy conversations about various things we planned to do to one another just as soon as we were together again.
I missed that early version of Kate and Karl so much. I thought about them as I called him later that night. Perhaps we couldn’t talk until the sun came up, but maybe we could talk tonight, really talk. Maybe I’d say something about Paris, or that night in the water in Greece. Maybe he’d get out of bed, cross our bedroom, and lock our door and reach beneath the covers . . .
“Kate?” Karl answered on the second ring, his voice groggy. I’d forgotten about the time difference.
“Were you asleep?”
“It’s after midnight. Yeah, I am.”
I’d heated myself up a small dinner of pasta and a beet salad I purchased at the market down the road and poured myself the remainder of the wedding wine.
“Have you ever been to the Henry Miller Library?”
“Is everything OK?”
“I’m great,” I said with too much enthusiasm. “Have you ever been to the Henry Miller Library?” I repeated. I needed to tell him everything about my day. I couldn’t wait to tell him how, from the moment I walked into that library, I knew it was the kind of place he would have loved once upon a time. I needed to tell him how it smelled like old books, a scent we once agreed was our favorite smell in the entire world. I wanted to tell him about the story I’d finished the day before and then the one I started today.
“Kate, I don’t know what you’re talking about. A library?”
“Did you know Henry Miller lived in Big Sur?”
I could hear my husband sit up in bed and flick on the bedside lamp. His voice was a little more clear.
“I did. That’s where he wrote Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch.”
“I bought a copy of that today.” My voice rose with excitement.
“You bought a book at a library? Aren’t you supposed to borrow books from a library?”
I began to ramble about the library that wasn’t really a library and the memorial and how he would have loved it.
I started telling him about the wedding and how I thought about him when I was on the dance floor, how I imagined him wrapping his arms around me and touching me.
Then I heard Karl yawn. Loudly.
There would be none of that kind of talk tonight.
“Are you drunk? It’s late. Do you need Sara to arrange a car for you from the airport Wednesday morning? We have Alexander Brozny coming for cocktails at seven with his agent on Thursday night.”
Alexander Brozny was a transgender Ukrainian novelist who had written a beautiful memoir connecting his harassment and intimidation from the antigay government with his half-Jewish grandmother’s persecution and imprisonment during the Second World War. He intertwined their two stories seamlessly, and the result was a gorgeous meditation on love and identity, cruelty and kindness. I’d adored his book and devoured the galleys
in just two nights. I’d been excited to host him in our home, but now the cocktail party had lost its sheen. It would be just another night where I became a fly on the wall observing someone else fulfilling their dream.
“Kate, are you there? Do you need a car?”
How did I get to a place where the thought of going home filled with me a cold sense of dread?
“I can get an Uber,” I said flatly. I couldn’t believe how quickly my mood changed, my earlier buoyancy now dissolved. I felt like my epic hangover had returned, and a dull ache took up residence at the base of my skull.
“OK. Sara will e-mail you the guest list tomorrow morning. She has a question about the menu. Oh, and the bartender canceled. Can you call those bartenders we used for that party with Dan Brown last month?”
His shift to logistics crushed me. “Sure.”
I heard him yawn again and I wanted to yell at him: Am I boring? Do I bore you? But I said nothing.
“Thanks,” he said, filling the silence. “I need to get back to sleep. Love you.”
Moments earlier I’d been starving for conversation and now I was desperate to stop speaking to my husband. The only way to respond was with a phrase that had begun to lose its meaning.
“I love you too.”
I’d later think of that phone call as a turning point, a pivotal moment shaping everything that would come after.
When I hung up the phone I stood dumbly in the middle of the room, staring out the window at the inky-black expanse of sky and ocean. I knew that as soon as I boarded the plane back to New York my life would return to normal. I’d arrange cleaners and bartenders and make sparkling conversation about someone else’s great accomplishments. These expectations weren’t unreasonable. This was the person I’d become in the past ten years. I couldn’t even tell if Karl actually liked me any longer, or if I was just another person who helped make his life and his business run smoothly. The more I thought about it the angrier I became. The clerk at the library mistook me for a writer. My old friends from school mistook me for a writer. My husband had forgotten I was a writer. He knew who I was when he married me, and yet he let that part of me slip away. In the early days of our relationship we’d promised to help the other one realize our dreams. It was part of what bound us together in the first place. I’d kept my end of the bargain. Why did he break his promise?
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