Sam headed up the library walk, pausing to snap a selfie blowing a kiss to the promotional sign. Most authors said they hated tour. Sam was not among them. She often thought she wrote bookstogo on tour. She loved everything about it: the airport breakfasts consisting of hummus; the room service cheeseburgers she wolfed down after events. She loved the thing every other human was phobic about: public speaking. She loved being hustled through country club and community center kitchens like some sort of superstar—when else didwritersever get to do this? She even loved flying, marveling that she was traveling because people cared what she had to say about, amazingly, her own books.
Most of all, Sam loved the readers. The readers, the readers, the readers. The people who gave up hours of their lives they could have used to indulge in many other pleasant activities, like shopping or sex or watching TV, to read Sam’s novels and then, curiouser and curiouser, come hear her talk about them. Sam spent much of her life in a room by herself, inventing characters and trying to squeeze their stories out of her head; when it turned out, years later, that her words had made a sort of magic bridge, allowing Sam to slide down into strangers’ minds and making them all friends—that was an actual miracle.
Most authors also said they resented tour because it took them away from their real job, writing. Sam was not one of them, either. Once upona time, she had loved it. When she was a kid and writing had all the mystery and magic of getting up early, when nobody else was awake and the world belonged to you alone, a time when anything could happen. When she was in college and grad school, burning with ambition so fierce it felt like, as Orwell said, an illness. When she was writing her first book, before commerce and sales entered the picture. When she’d been living with her ex-husband, Hank, so she knew when the day’s work was done she could open her study door and there’d be somebody to have dinner with.
She did not love it now. She feared it. Most specifically, Sam feared her fifth book,The Gold Digger’s Mistress, for which she was under contract and which was due in five months and of which she had yet to write a single sentence. For which she felt not only apathy but antipathy. She quailed at going home and facing the demonically blinking cursor, the empty screen. She dreaded the deep plunge of being, except for imaginary people, completely and cataclysmically alone. As she hustled up the library walk, she had the strangest, most aberrant thought:
I would give this all up if I had someone to share my life with.
Sam shook her head as if bothered by a horsefly. What the actual? She had been writing since she was four years old. It was all she’d ever done. It was all she’d ever wanted. It was who she was and who she wanted to be.
She saw the librarian waiting for her in the vestibule and waved.
“You found us!” said the librarian, whose name Sam could not remember—she was terrible with names, assigning people the ones she thought they should have as characters instead of using the ones they actually had. Pamela? Erica?
“Here I am,” Sam agreed. “It was touch and go there—my GPS went offline.”
“I should have warned you about that,” said the librarian, whose name, it came to Sam now, was Monica. “But you made it. Do you need the ladies’ room?”
“Perpetually,” said Sam. “This is a beautiful library.”
“Thanks,” said Monica. “We’re proud of it. It used to be a Rockefeller mansion, you know . . . Here you go. I’ll wait here.”
In the bathroom, which had Band-Aid-colored stalls and a vase of plastic flowers Sam found inordinately touching, she struggled out of her jumpsuit, used the facilities, and checked her reflection in the mirror. Her lipstick had not migrated to her teeth, and her strawberry-blond French braid was intact, but she looked tired. Another facet of life on the road. Once Sam had hit forty, flight dehydration and hotel beds created dark circles no concealer could erase. She crossed her eyes at herself and emerged.
“Ready!” she said.
“How’s your tour been?” Monica asked, hustling Sam back through the library, past a fireplace, a grandfather clock, and oil paintings of, incongruously, ships.
“Great,” said Sam. “I love meeting readers.”
“That’s refreshing,” said Monica. “And we’re glad to have you. We’ve had trouble finding authors this year—not that I’m surprised.”
“What do you mean?” said Sam.
“Oh,youknow,” said Monica. “Shifts in the industry. Fewer publishers, fewer books, slashed budgets... it all means fewer authors on tour. It’s a terrible time to be a writer. I’m surprised anyone keeps at it. Grateful, too, of course,” she added hastily.
Sam smiled. She’d heard this all her life. When she was in college, waiting tables to put herself through:Are you crazy? Choose an actual career.When she was in grad school:Get a job to fall back on.When she’d graduated:Nobody wants debut fiction; you can’t get an agent, an editor, a publisher.It was all impossible, and somehow, she had managed it.
“It’s always a terrible time to be a writer,” she said mildly.
“I suppose that’s true,” said Monica. She stopped in front of an oak door that was studded like the entrance to a dungeon and threw it open. “Ladies and gentlemen, our author!”
Heads turned as Sam followed Monica down the aisle to the podium; she did the Queen’s wave, and they laughed. Not as many people as Samhad anticipated when she’d set up this event: The library had promised two hundred, and there was half that, if even. Still, despite some empty chairs, this was a decent turnout for a summer evening, and there was no place Sam would rather be.
“Where are you from, honey?” said a woman in the front row—the whole audience was female, per usual, except one husband who had obviously been dragged there and sat patiently with his arms folded.
“I flew in from Boston,” said Sam, and some of the women clucked their tongues as if she’d saidI came from prison.
“You’re so young to be an author,” said another woman.
“Thank you, I love you,” said Sam, and they laughed. Even the husband smirked.
Monica checked the clock. “Let’s go ahead and get started. Hi, everyone, thanks for joining us for our Summer Author Series. Our special guest tonight is Sam Vetiver...”
Sam stood with her head lowered modestly as Monica read her bio, although she could feel the readers observing her curiously, trying to sync Sam’s career accomplishments with Sam herself. Bestselling author of four novels, one selected for a TV book club by a popular host. National Book Award finalist. Teacher. Speaker. It was always strange for Sam to hear herself introduced; although she was proud of and grateful for everything she’d spent her life hustling to do, there was such a gap between the accolades and what she actually did. What would these nice people with their curious smiles think if they knew what Sam’s life was usually like? At the thought of where she’d be this time tomorrow—home in her empty study—Sam felt fear wash over her again.
I’d give all this up if I had someone to share my life with.
