And that's all it was. Writing fodder. Writing fodder and a change of pace and a new life philosophy that was not to say no. He wasn't dreading it, but he wasn't looking forward to it either. He felt entirely neutral toward the date, like a quick trip to the grocery store for milk. But then, about an hour before he was going to take a shower and get dressed, sitting in his studio apartment on his sofa reading Dante's Inferno, his heart started racing. He felt his cheeks flush, and he felt his lips go dry and his palms go wet, and he felt this absurd need to try on a few shirts to see which one looked best, and he felt, all of a sudden, nervous, and for the life of him, he could not imagine why. He thought it might be the flu. He actually thought about calling her to cancel in case he was contagious, but the woman worked at a hospital so probably had a germ-avoidance strategy of some sort.
He pulled up in front of her apartment and sat in his car trying to slow his breathing, waiting for his knees to stop shaking, but when it became clear that wasn't going to happen, he gave up and rang her bell. When she opened the door and he saw her, Penn said, “Oh.”
It wasn't that Rosie was so beautiful, though she was, that is, he thought she was, that is, he felt she was. He had to rely on this vague sense of what she looked like because he couldn't see her. It was as if she were backlit, bright sun behind her preventing his eyes from adjusting so he could see her properly. Or it was as if he were fainting, the black bits at the sides folding his vision into smaller and smaller origami boxes. But it was none of those things. It was like when your car spins out on an icy road, and your senses turn up so high that time seems to slow because you notice everything, and you just sit in your spinning car waiting, waiting, to see if you're going to die. He couldn't look at her because every sense and every fraction of a moment and every atom of his body was being in love with her. It was weird.
Penn was getting an MFA, yes, but he was a fiction writer, not a poet, and he did not believe in love at first sight. He had also congratulated himself in the past for loving women for their minds and not their bodies. This woman had not yet spoken a word to him (though he assumed since she was a doctor that she was probably pretty smart), and he couldn't get himself to concentrate on what she looked like, but he seemed to love her anyway. She was wearing—already—a hat, a scarf, and a four-inch-thick down parka that came all the way down to her boots. There was no way to fall in love with a woman just for her body in Wisconsin in January. He reminded himself though, still standing dumb in her doorway, that it wasn't love at first sight. It seemed to have happened quite a bit before that. He seemed to have fallen in love about an hour and a half earlier on his sofa in the middle of “Canto V” before ever laying eyes on Rosie. How his body had known this, foreknown this, he never did figure out, but it was right—it was quite right—and very quickly, he stopped caring.
So at the restaurant, he was a little off his game. For one, he was distracted. For another, he knew. He had already decided. He was in—they could dispense with the small talk. So when Rosie, glowing, luminous, unpeeled from all her layers, lovely underneath, smiling shyly at him Rosie, said she was sorry he was an only child, that's what he said first: it's okay. Then a few seconds later, when his brain caught up, he added, “Wait. No. What? Why are you sorry I'm an only child?”
She blushed. He would have too, but his blood flow must already have been at capacity. “Sorry,” she said. “I always think … My sister, um … Weren't you lonely?”
“Not really.”
“Because you were really close with your parents?”
“Not really that either.”
“Because you're a writer? You like to be alone in the dark brooding by yourself deeply?”
“No!” He laughed. “Well, maybe. I don't know. I don't think I was brooding alone in the dark. But I don't think I was lonely either. How about you? I take it you had brothers and sisters?”
Rosie's glow clouded over, and Penn was immediately sorry all the way down to his toes. “I had one sister. She died when I was twelve and she was ten.”
“Oh Rosie, I'm sorry.” Penn knew he'd said the right thing that time.
She nodded at her roll. “Cancer. It sucks.”
He tried to think what to add, came up with nothing, reached for her hand instead. She grasped him like someone falling off something high. He gasped at the sudden sharp pain of it, but when she tried to ease off, embarrassed, he squeezed back harder. “What was her name?” he asked gently.
“Poppy.” Then she laughed, a little bit embarrassed. “Rosie. Poppy. Get it? My parents were into gardening. She's lucky they didn't name her Gladiola. Gladiola was totally on the table.”
“Is that why you think only-childhood is so sad?” He was glad to see her laughing again, but no one he'd ever met had treated the fact that he lacked siblings as a tragedy. “Because it was for you?”
“I guess.” She shrugged. “Maybe that's why I like you already. We're both only children.”
He tried to stay with her, but all he heard was she liked him already.
Later, much later, she said the same, that it was love pre first sight, that she'd walked around that whole morning and afternoon somehow knowing that this would be the last first date of her life. Whereas this had made him nervous as hell, it had made her calm. Whereas he'd felt impatient with the small talk, she knew they had all the time in the world. To the extent that time was guaranteed in the world. Which it was not.
Later, less later, Penn lay in his own bed, grinning at the ceiling in the dark. He tried to stop himself, he did, and he made fun of himself for doing it, but he couldn't help it. He could not keep down, keep away, keep at bay what felt like a tiny seed of secret, certain knowledge, stable as a noble gas, glowing as gold: Poppy. My daughter will be named Poppy. Not a decision. A realization. Something that had long been true— since Rosie was twelve, half his lifetime ago—except he hadn't known it yet.
Acknowledgments
One of the ways writing a book is better than winning an Academy Award is your thank-yous can go on as long as you like, and no one can play cheesy music to make you stop before you’re ready. My thanks are many and large and from my heart of hearts, so this might take a while.
Thank you to Molly Friedrich, worker of miracles, whose phone call was the best I’ve ever received and whose guidance feels always absolutely right.
Thank you to my editor, Lindsay Sagnette, whose work on behalf of this book has been tremendous and whose enthusiasm for it has rivaled my own mother’s, which is saying something.
Thank you to the lovely Lucy Carson for her guidance and patience and kindness, and to Paul Cirone for all his support and hard work.
Thank you to early readers and cheerleaders Paul Mariz, Susan Frankel, David Frankel, Erin Trendler, Lisa Corr, Sam Chambers, Rebecca Brown, Alicia Goodwin, Jennifer Crouch, Helen Heffer, Paul Capobianco, and especially, Lil Maughan.
Thanks to Barbara Catlin for permission to use her story, to Adrienne Grau-Cooper and Alicia Goodwin for medical advice, and to Mike Everton, with apologies, for the Moby-Dick bit.
Thank you to Daniel for finally coming home.
Thanks to my parents, Susan and David Frankel, whose support of this book started before I could even read books and has never waned. They have been—they have always been—more loving, more warm, more generous, more supportive parents than I can even imagine, and hence Janey’s folks pale in comparison to my own.
About Paul Mariz, I can say only this: 6.8 billion people in the world, and he is the very best one. So much of this book is his—in spirit, in creation, in idea, in will, in love and support, in all the practical ways and all the gushy ones. He read and reread and discussed endlessly, fixed what was broken, cheered up what flagged, and believed from the beginning. I am very very lucky.
And last, I wish there were a way to say thank you to my grandmothers, Doris Hess and Reba Frankel, both of whom are all over this book and both of whom would have been beside themselves with joy to see it in pr
int.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE ATLAS OF LOVE. Copyright 2010 by Laurie Frankel. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
ISBN 978-0-312-59538-8
First Edition: August 2010
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