A work of fiction that explores the pros and cons of writing what you know…
by: T.E. Cowell
An established press accepted a novel I’d written. When I was done celebrating, which took days if not weeks of irresponsible drinking, I received an email from none other than my ex, who’d gone incognito after becoming my ex. But as a hopeless romantic I’d hoped to keep up a friendship with my ex. I even established negative feelings toward her as the weeks, months, and years started to pass without hearing a peep from her. “I hope we can still be friends,” I distinctly remember her saying as the breakup was commencing, both of us sitting on a couch in a house we’d been renting, my girlfriend of seven years crying and trying to control her emotions as I steeled my jaw and tried to control mine, feeling awful inside but at the same time free. I didn’t know then that three years later I’d still be free, which is to say single, which is to say sex-starved, masturbating to porn like an acne-riddled teenager (I have no game, is the problem). I didn’t know then that I’d long for my ex and dream about her regularly, dreams in which we never had sex, dreams where she was always distant or elusive, annoyed or upset with me even though the breakup had been more or less mutual. I wished we were still friends (if I haven’t made that clear by now), by which I mean, of course, friends with benefits.
But back to the email. The email was a relief, to put it mildly, that is until I read it. Wow, I thought to myself prior to reading it, she’s finally come around. Maybe she misses having sex with me as well? Maybe she realizes I was a catch and that she’d like to try again, go for a walk, perhaps, or grab a coffee or drinks? We both still lived in the same city, I was pretty sure (she’d always talked the city up when we’d been together, so much so that it got on my nerves).
I read the email off my phone while at work. I work at a hotel as a valet driver, don’t ask me why. I was waiting for another Porsche or BMW or Tesla to draw to a halt in front of me, but after reading what my ex had to say I said to my coworker, “Hey Angel, I need a five-minute break, nature calls,” whereupon good old Angel looked at me like he hated me but he kept his thick lips closed all the same. I rushed into the hotel, caught Joey’s attention behind the bar, making enough of a sly, albeit sloppy hand gesture that he met me in the bathroom a minute later.
The bathroom, thankfully, was empty as Joey walked in, ridiculous tight vest on (not black, but a deep purple), brown hair gelled back to maximize the circumference of his gothically-white forehead.
“Luke, what the hell do you want? I need to get back to the bar. I take enough bathroom breaks as it is. Craig’s this close to reporting me.” He showed me how close with his thumb and index finger. Craig was an older bartender, nice enough I suppose, but painfully strict the way a lot of old people who hate their lives seem to be.
“A drink,” I said. “Joey, I just got the worst email of my life, from my ex of all people. Remember how I was on top of the world after my novel was accepted?”
“How could I forget?” Joey said, his brow hardening along with his gin-bottle blue eyes. “I had to drive you to your apartment for a week straight you were so plastered. You wouldn’t shut up about the damn novel.” It was true, to the best of my recollection, which isn’t saying much. I stopped valeting at seven, then would head to the bar to bug Joey and whoever else happened to be within earshot. Joey sometimes gave me free drinks, I think because I knew how he sometimes gave himself free drinks and was afraid I’d rat him out (like I would).
“Point taken,” I said. “Just pour me a healthy dose of vodka with water if you would. Leave it on the end of the bar and I’ll grab it in a minute, cool?”
“And what’re you gonna do with it, Einstein? Drink it at the bar like you’re not a valet driver?”
“Take it into one of these stalls.”
Joey shook his head, and sighing, walked out of the bathroom while I splashed warm water on my face, as if warm water on my face helped things.
But again, back to the email, to the heart of it. My ex, while she’d been my girlfriend (and apparently still three years later), had gotten by as a freelance editor, editing books for different publishers, mostly grammatical errors but sometimes editing of a more developmental nature as well. Anyways, to make a long story short, she’d been tasked, as she explained in the email, to edit my novel, the publisher sent her my words in document form to comb over for grammar. The one nice thing she said in the email was that she’d found very little that needed changing, though I don’t think it was meant as nice, at any rate the rest of what she had to say made it pale in comparison. Sitting on the toilet in the bathroom stall, stiff drink in one hand thanks to Joey and phone in the other, I reread the email, and as I did I felt somewhat better, thanks in large part to the drink, which I was putting back like a seasoned pro, but also partly due to the sting of the initial shock of the email being lessened by a second reading, allowing me to dissect my ex’s words and even to disassociate myself to some degree from them. For example, when I read the words: You always wrote very close to home when we’d been dating, making me assume, though of course I never mentioned it then, that your imaginative skills were lacking, it didn’t hit me with the same force as it had minutes earlier. It was true, I thought, taking another sip of my water and Grey Goose blend, I was lacking in imagination, which is why the next sentence of the email was also a duller version of itself, even though it was sufficiently meatier. And because you wrote so close to home when I knew you, in a sort of rambling metafictional manner, I can’t help but imagine that this novel of yours is actually more of a memoir disguised as a novel, rooted in experience over intellect. The last part of that sentence was the kicker, she hadn’t had to use a word like intellect, had she? It would’ve seemed she was simply trying to spite me for no good reason if it weren’t for the following sentences, which I needed yet another hearty sip of drink to find the courage to reread. I also can’t help but imagine that what happens to your novel’s protagonist also happened to you when you were in Amsterdam with Dave. Did you cheat on me with a prostitute there? Did you actually cheat on me mere months after we started dating? I want to puke just thinking about it, all the years we’d been together, it’s absolutely sickening. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt that you were actually able to write in such a detailed way concerning sleeping with a prostitute, that you did some research on the topic, but my gut tells me you didn’t, that you wrote from experience as usual. For the record I didn’t plan to email you, or at least not something this lengthy, but my psychologist recommended I get it off my chest. You don’t have to write back and answer my question, in fact I’d rather you didn’t. Whether you cheated on me or not is irrelevant now. On a final note, congrats on finally getting something published somewhere legit, I know you’ve spent a great, almost absurd amount of time toying with the written word over the years.
I stood, pulled my pants up, and with my empty glass emerged from the stall. Turning on the sink, I filled the glass with water, drank it down, filled it again and drank it down. I felt a bit dizzy, a bit drunk. Had there been any water with that vodka? Suddenly I wasn’t sure.
Leaving the bathroom, I walked with glass in hand and set it as casually as possible on the end of the bar. Joey had his back to me, dealing with customers that’d come in. I headed for the hotel’s exit, down the wide marble-tiled entrance way, trying to walk like someone who hadn’t just downed a commendable amount of vodka in a crunch. Perhaps Joey was trying to get me fired. In a way it made perfect sense.
Angel was nowhere to be seen, at first. Then I saw him, running toward me, sweat dripping down his face, his eyes angry slits.
“Where’ve you’ve been? I’ve been busting my ass.”
“It got busy?”
“Yeah it got busy. I parked six cars while you were gone.”
“Shit, sorry man. I had the runs.”
“What do you mean you had the runs? I was the one running.”
“Diarrhea,” I said.
Angel wanted to kill me, I could see it in his dark Puerto Rican eyes.
“Whatever man,” he said, “now I need a break.” He walked into the hotel without another word.
An Audi pulled up. I smiled at the tall well-dressed silver-haired man who got out and tossed me the keys, then glanced at his wife, girlfriend or hooker-for-hire, a good twenty years younger than the guy, before settling down in the driver’s seat.
At least my novel’s still being published, I thought while stopped at a red light. Even if it is rooted more in experience than otherwise.
T.E. Cowell has been traveling around Asia for the past year and is an editorial assistant at Eckleburg.
