Simone is quiet for a few seconds longer, then sits up. Her face is serious in the moonglow, her unplaited hair a curtain. During the times I’m not with her, I have begun finding strands of it everywhere, on my clothes, in my car, like some magical traveling cobweb.
“Thank you for telling me,” she says. “That’s horrendous. I’m so sorry that happened to you. Although I’m not sorry you became a writer. The world has greatly benefited from that. But... your heart now? It’s still affected?”
“Negligibly,” I say. “The walls are thinner than they should be, that’s all. Sometimes I have some defibrillation. Don’t worry, Simone,” I add, because her face is now a tragedy mask. “It’s not going to kill me. Unless you fuck me to death.”
She doesn’t laugh. Her mouth wrenches to one side, and she looks away. “It’s not funny.”
I reach up and thumb away a tear that is tracking alongside her nose. “A poor joke. Apologies, sweetheart. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“I just can’t lose any more people I love,” she says. “So keep taking your medicine, okay?”
“Yes’m,” I say. “I promise.” This statement is certainly true.
She slaps my chest lightly as if I’ve disagreed, then lies down again. I pull her in closer.
“How about you,” I say, “when did you become a writer?”
“I’ve always been a writer,” she says. “My dad was a writer. My very first memory is of sitting under his desk while he wrote. I felt so safe.”
“And what is it he wrote? Anything I might have read?”
“No, he wrote for children’s TV.” She names the show, a broadcastpopulated by puppets, so iconic that even I, sans offspring, am aware of it. “Every so often they’d need a kid for a segment and I’d get hauled into the studio for the day.” She laughs. “It was amazing, now that I think about it, but at the time it was just strange. The greasy pancake makeup, and the costume changes, and the hot lights. They were the first ones to put my hair in a side braid, and it became mylewk. And to see my dad there, in a skyscraper in New York, was surreal. I was so proud of him.”
“I’m sure he’s more proud of you.”
“He would be,” Simone agrees. “But he died when I was six. He was going to a broadcasters’ convention in Chicago, but he never made it. Car crash on the way to LaGuardia. My mom never admitted it, but I know it was intentional. I saw the death certificate, and I remember looking upsuicidein Webster’s.”
Ah, there’s the rub, I think. All of my women have something sad about them—as who doesn’t, but they have some special thorn of pain they carry in their core, no matter how bright their smiles. I don’t know why I’m drawn to damaged birds, but I have accepted it’s my DNA. Concealed by her brave red clothes and authorial bravado, this must be Simone’s wound.
“I’m sorry, Simone,” I say. “Do you want to tell me more about it?”
“Not really,” she says. “But thank you.”
She sounds dreamy, which means it is the perfect time to ask the question I have been waiting to introduce all night. “Then tell me, how is it going with our pal the rumrunner?”
There is a pause, and I wonder if Simone has fallen asleep and whether I should joggle my shoulder to rouse her when she says, “Actually, I’ve been working on something a little different.”
I feel a dash of alarm. “What do you mean?” I ask.
That is when Simone tells me—I can barely believe it!—that although our publisher is generously footing the bill for the Canyon Ranch for writers so she can produce an historical novel, and although I have contributed my own time, energy, and creative largesse by coaching Simoneat lengthabout our rumrunner’s story—hours upon hours listeningto her develop that idea; sayingMmmhmmmandHome run!andNow you’re cookingas she babbles on about dual storylines; nodding attentively as she breaks the one-page synopsis into parts and chapters; holding an expression of deep focus as she saysBut what if? But what if? But what if?... despite all of this, Simone is disobediently, stubbornly, willfully writingsomething else. Something she has been keeping from me, despite my having sacrificed my own firepower to developourhistorical novel about the rumrunner.
Now, with the temerity to actually look proud of herself, Simone opens her phone to read to me the proposal for the atrocity she is contemplating writing, afamiliaratrocity entitledThe Darling Factor. Which features a graduate program like mine, with a cohort like mine, with a woman who commits suicide as my original darling, my fiancée, Becky, did... Except in Simone’s perverse, twisted,derivative“thriller,” it’s possible the woman did not take her own life but was murdered.
“This may go nowhere,” Simone adds. “And I’m sorry about the rumrunner—it’s a great concept, and I might return to him for the next book. But—and I was kind of afraid to tell you this—for whatever reason, I didn’t feel quite right about it. Maybe it’s too close, or not baked yet, or—I was supposed to be doing something different. And then, after my poor novelist Amelie committed suicide, this came to me like a thunderbolt. You know how that is. So rare. I’ve started working on it, and for the first time in a long time I actually feel plugged in. So... that’s what I’m doing this week at the retreat. Walking out over the abyss. Ta-da!” She flourishes her arms, then sets her phone on the nightstand and snuggles back into my armpit. “William? Are you asleep?”
I am not asleep.
“We have a problem, Simone,” I say.
“What?”
“Appropriation.”
“What?”
I shift my shoulder from beneath Simone, so her head thumps ontoher own pillow. She heard me. She knows what it means. Everyone in publishing knows what appropriation means. It’s our industry’s hottest buzzword—and greatest fear. Once upon a time, it was considered perfectly, well, appropriate to write about somebody else’s life, another person’s experience. We called that act of imaginative empathyfiction. Now, however, an author has to be very careful that he—especially if he is a he, and especially if he is a white he of a certain age—does not trespass on another writer’s story. If he attempts to picture life, anecdotes, moments, from outside his own culture or gender, it can choke the oxygen from the writer who is rightfully entitled to it from birth, from having lived those experiences.
It’s true that we white male writers have enjoyed the home court advantage in the literary world, for several centuries, in fact. I acknowledge the importance—the necessity—of making space for others to tell their stories. I’ve also thought the concept of appropriation was complete horseshit: If we wrote only what happened to us, wouldn’t that be autobiography? What would happen to fiction? What about the noble attempt to get out of one’s skin and into another, attempting to understand what it’s like to be human from another person’s point of view, gender, ethnicity? And thereby building understanding and commonality among us? Why else would I write from the female point of view but to show my great love for women? About appropriation, if it wouldn’t end my career, I would have said:Bah humbug.
