“Ignore him,” Joe said. “He isn’t an artist. He can’t see the water unless it’s right in front of him. You and me, Alice, we see the water that isn’t there. We see it and we bring it to life.”
Alice stared at the debris, the bushes rustling in a gentle breeze. The breeze picked up until it was not a breeze but a current. A single water drop trickled down to the center of the basin. Then another and another until a thin stream flowed. The hair on Alice’s arms stood up as that familiar electricity invaded her body.
“I see it.” She clapped as the water filled the riverbed in a gentle flow. She leaned over the railing. “I see it.”
She glanced at Hank, whose mind drifted elsewhere. She watched him retreat until he sensed her staring at him and smiled.
On her bike ride home Alice crossed an empty creek bed thick with brush. She’d never paid much attention to the dried-up tributaries in her city. As she biked by bed after bed, she imagined them filling with water until they overflowed, making the entire city an extension of the ocean it lived beside. She felt alive with the rush of the water, the current of the muse.
Alice managed to fight the tingling until she got home. Once inside her apartment, she lunged toward her desk and offered herself to the mercy of the writing gods. As with the invisible river flowing through the basin behind Joe and Hank’s house, the words poured out of her once she started writing. When her phone rang, she ignored it. When Agatha rubbed against her leg, she nudged her off until she realized the poor cat must be hungry. She set out enough food to last her the day, then decided she should nourish her own body too if she wanted it to fuel her into the night.
For days her life narrowed to the distances between her kitchen, desk, and bed. Light pestered the curtains, reminding her that time was passing, but she lost track of how many dusks called her to eat, how many dawns beckoned her to the desk again. She was vaguely aware of her phone’s pinging, of her upstairs neighbors trotting off to work in the morning and home again at night. She wrote and wrote until she’d reached the end.
The story was about a man with no descriptors, not a height, a skin color, a weight. A man who could be Hank or Joe or someone else entirely. He had lost his lover, a lover with no descriptors either. The man himself was not the protagonist. His grief was, a grief too big for his neither tall nor short body, too vast for his airy home. Grief arrived at his door and let itself inside, where it pressed down on him, squeezing the water from him in the form of tears. So many tears they filled the house and poured out, flooding the dry river bed behind his home. The man always knew the water would return, he just didn’t think it would come from his own body.
Then, when the current was strong, he wrestled Grief off him and threw it into the water. Grief screamed for help. It flailed as the water carried it away. With Grief gone, Fear knocked at the man’s door. As Fear approached, the man dove into the river to escape for he could not defeat Fear, not in the same way he had tackled Grief. The current took hold of him, the white water like a roller coaster bobbing him up and down. The man loved roller coasters. He loved amusement parks. At heart he was a thrill seeker, he’d just forgotten.
He let his body relax into the current, the water carrying him past neighborhoods and borders, beyond the edge of the land, until he was no longer swimming in a river but in the ocean. Schools of tropical fish circled him. He dove with dolphins. He hunted with sharks. It was a life he’d never imagined. Grief was still everywhere. Here, beneath the surface of the ocean, it was part of a larger ecosystem, a predator that could be avoided. Eventually he learned to love this life as much as the last, not to distinguish between the two lives because his beloved had brought him here to the bottom of this ocean, vast enough for him to live alongside his grief. To live alongside his happiness too.
When Alice typed the last period, something didn’t seem quite right. It was an inexact feeling, vague but potent. She scrolled to the beginning of Joe’s story, trying to pinpoint what was off about it. Only as she read it, it was perfect. The imagery, the language, the message. It had taken shape on the page exactly as her mind had intended. Yet the hesitancy persisted.
She went for a walk to clear her head. The inspiration was gone from her body, and she felt calm. She’d written a story for Joe and it was beautiful, even if something about it still seemed off.
As she wandered beyond her neighborhood to the hillside streets, past large Spanish Revival homes and yards too green for the drought, she could hear Hank arguing that her doubts were good, that the conflict she felt about the story meant that it mattered. And it did matter. Not just to Alice. Not just to Joe. It was as much for Hank as it was for Joe. Like the first tale she’d scribed for him, the one he’d shared at the diner with Joe, this story was for both of them. For it to work, Hank had to read it too. He needed to be present on the page, informing every scene, permeating every word.
At half past five, when Joe and Hank were drinking caipirinhas or Manhattans on their porch, Alice skulked up to their doorstep and left her manuscript, wrapped in brown paper.For HANK,she wrote on the front,(that means NOT YOU, Joe). She liked that she knew their routine. She liked that she knew Joe would want to read it but would never disrespect the request of another artist. She liked that she knew them so well, she knew what their story needed to be. She skipped down the steps with a confidence she hadn’t experienced for months.
Later that night, as Alice was drifting to sleep, her phone buzzed.
The text was from Hank:It’s perfect.
34
The Perfect Story
Hank invited Alice over to celebrate just how perfect her story was.
When he opened the door, the circles around his eyes had darkened or maybe the skin of his cheeks had paled. Along the short walk to the living room couch, Hank walked unsteadily. Pretending not to notice, Alice surveyed Joe’s paintings on the living room walls. The room smelled strongly of fir needles although there was no Christmas tree in the room, no debris left on the floor. For some reason that stung Alice most of all, that another holiday had passed for Hank and Joe, possibly their last.
On the wall, amidst all those familiar abstractions, there was a new painting, a Cubist portrait of two men in black tuxedos, holding hands.
“It was Joe’s Christmas present to me,” Hank panted between words. “He realized that he’d never painted our wedding.”
“It’s stunning.” It was also devastating. Alice’s heart panged in her chest. “Where’s Joe?” The house was quiet in the way only empty houses were.
“I made a playdate for him,” Hank laughed. The laugh was mostly a dry cough with a little uptick at the end. “He hasn’t seen friends in so long, and I wanted some uninterrupted time with you to talk about your story.”
Hank crossed his legs and gestured toward the plate of biscotti resting on the coffee table. They were store-bought. Uniformly sized. Perfect distribution of cherries and flakes of dark chocolate. Alice wasn’t hungry, but she took one anyway, politely nibbling. The manuscript rested on the table, overturned so a blank page stared up at her.
“Alice,” Hank croaked. He reached for the glass of water on the coffee table. “Alice, Alice, Alice. You’ve outdone yourself.”
“Really?” She knew her story was good. Why did it surprise her that he might consider it to be good too?
“Joe’s going to hate you, it’s so perfect. And I know it will bring him the perfect partner.”
“Doesn’t that hurt you, though, thinking of Joe with someone else?”
“What hurts me is the idea of him spending the next twenty years alone and unhappy. Or worse, being one of those partners who dies six months after because they cannot bear to be alive. I just want him to have a chance to love again. And for that, I’m eternally grateful to you.”
