I ate mostly takeout for the next three months. I was too embarrassed to be seen in the produce section of Stop & Shop, where I assumed everyone was undoubtedly referring to me as Applesauce Landing or some other equally hideous nickname.
“Are you still there? Gracie?”
I cough.
“Gracie. Lindsay Ellerton is my ex-wife.”
I hear the words. I know they’re bad. Time stands perfectly still, frozen in the white noise of emptiness.
And then the apples come.
“Are youkiddingme? You and yourfuckingnicknames! Why couldn’t you just call herLindsay?”
“Whoa! I’m sorry! I didn’tknowshe was youragent!”
“You told me your ex was an agent, but I never heard of an agent namedElle Yarmouth! And the publishing world is so small, Colin! I just assumed she was in nonfiction or kid lit or something unrelated to my work!”
“I didn’t think it was a big deal because I didn’t think she wasyouragent. I knew all of the names on her client roster.”
A carefully assembled bunch of Granny Smiths barrel down onto me.
“My pen name is Karlie London,” I say on a whisper of breath.
A sack of Honeycrisps pile right on top, threatening to bury me.
“Fuck,” he mumbles. Then, silence permeates the line. Finally, he says, “Well, how was I supposed to know that?” He’s getting worked up. “And why’d you need a pen name, anyway?”
A single Red Delicious is pitched like a fastball straight to my face.
“Becauseyoucalled meElvisin high school!” I scream. My voice is so loud that several of the fishermen on the footbridge turn and look over at me. “Because you called me Elvis in high school,” I repeat again, quietly.
“Gracie,” he says softly.
An apple is lodged in my throat, like a pig on a spit.
As I roast in the fire, there is nothing left to do but cry.
Colin
I should have asked her sooner.
Iknewit was weird that I couldn’t find her books online.
Now, Karlie London—that’sa name I would have remembered.
When Elle and I first started dating, she was a literary assistant at Vision Board Creative Group. She spent her days poring over query letters from would-be authors, reading sample pages, requesting partial or full manuscripts if she thought someone might have potential. It was a thankless job, seeing as how even if she did find a diamond in the rough, there was no percentage cut for a paltryassistant, no thank-you gift withhername on it FedExed to the office, no listing on the acknowledgements page of the author’s debut novel.
It was grunt work. She knew it and I knew it. I likened it to my time working at Brophy’s Hardware Store. “It’s an apprenticeship,” I explained. “No one ever got hired by Mr. Brophy as anything more than a stock boy. Once you mastered that, you could learn the register. After register, you could learn how to deal with the vendors. Everyone got to learn from either Brophy or one of his sons.” It was the same thing at Vision Board. Elle worked directly for the agency’s founders, Sean and Kathleen Jamison, a power couple who had both started off at other agencies and decided to launch their own company once they gotmarried. She scheduled appointments for both of them and answered their phone lines, but Kathleen represented mostly women’s fiction and romance, so Elle handled most of her queries.
I am a firm believer that hard work pays off, so I tried to quietly encourage her. I brought home food almost every night because she didn’t like to cook, and I kept the apartment—myapartment—quiet for her in the evenings so that she could focus on reading manuscripts.
Every now and again, she’d ask to read me something, to get my two cents on whether or not it would sell. Not entire manuscripts, of course. Just a paragraph or two to get a sense of the narrator’s voice. Sometimes, she’d read me lines that she thought were funny or awful. She valued my opinion. Or, at least, Iusedto think that, before the whole threesome-STD-birthday episode.
One night, I got home from work and found her curled up on the couch with a pencil in her mouth, a common position for me to find her in back in those early days.
“You havegotto hear this!” she exclaimed as I closed the apartment door.
“What’s up?”
