Rae answered without thinking, and that’s how she knew it was the truth. “Yeah, I do.” She wondered, very briefly and very rashly, if maybe what she craved most wasn’t happiness but wholeness. Stu knew all the different parts of her, but they were only that—parts.He never looked at her and made her feel like he was holding her entire soul and all its ugly overflow in the orbs of his own two eyes.
But that wasn’t a fair bar to judge love by, Rae reasoned. She couldn’t expect one person to fill all her needs and wants. She could join a book club or a writing group or watch old romantic movies to touch those deeper parts of her. For a life partner, she was prioritizing traits of a good husband and a good dad, and Stu was off the charts in both. He’d never cheat or leave her like her dad had, and he’d never stop finding little ways to make her smile. He’d be the kind of husband whose friends made fun of him for how much he bragged about his wife, and the kind of dad who left work early to coach his kids’ soccer teams.
Rae tried to picture herself writing in the blare of toddler sirens. She suspected, shamefully, that she’d be the type of mom to neglect her kid’s diaper to finish a stanza.
Stu seemed to sense her fear, and Rae read it as a sign that he was more in touch with her emotions than she gave him credit for. “We’d build a separate writing workshop for you,” he said, pointing to a clearing in the trees. “So you can have all the peace and quiet you need to keep churning out love poems for me.”
Rae had gotten two more poems published in theIndyStarin the past month—“Gravel Road Romance” and “Bull Frog Prince,” both of which Stu had interpreted to be about him. In reality, they’d been about fifty percent about him, twenty-five percent about no one in particular, and twenty-five percent about everyone in particular, but she hadn’t corrected him. She liked the feeling of making him smile like that.
Rae took a sip of iced tea, and the lump in her throat floated away with the flavor. Maybe it was the way the sun was drizzling a tangy orange glaze over the mirror-clear water, or maybe it was how Stu was reaching into the cooler to fetch her a fresh iced tea before she’d even noticed her can was empty. Whatever the reason, Rae began to see it too, Stu’s ten-year forecast unfolding before them.
She saw the oak-leaf-lined aisle where they’d get married in a small, no-suits-allowed ceremony. She saw the wood-shingled house with its yellow front door and elegant porch and garage attached to the house so they wouldn’t have to walk outside in the winter. She saw the dock where they’d watch the stars at night, and in the daytime, where the dogs—a golden retriever and two rescue mutts—would try to prove who was bravest in the water. She saw the lake-facing bay window, lined with healthy plants that weren’t philodendrons. And she saw the kitchen table, set for more than two, with triangular paper napkins asymmetrically folded by small fingers.
It was everything she wanted to want. The only thing standing in her way was herself, overanalyzing everything until there was nothing left to dissect. But she wasn’t going to indulge those tendencies tonight. She had agency over her own destiny.
A sleepy kind of relief seeped into Rae’s bones. Here it was, her end goal materializing right before her eyes. She’d gotten her life back on track, letting go of the city that was sucking her life, letting go of the guy that was sucking her love, and now she was with someone who gave so much more than he took, someone who was the steady shore to all her waves.
She reached for Stu’s hand and held it extra tightly, almost like she was trying to help herself hold on to him. “Could the workshop have a roof deck?” she asked, as the first of the crickets began to sing.
“Absolutely,” Stu said. “And a full-sized fridge.”
“Stocked with whipped cream?”
“Is that even a question? I plan to interrupt your creative flow with a helluva lot of dessert coffee deliveries.”
“You’re officially the perfect man,” Rae said, chastising herself for sayingthe, notmy, but not wanting to mar the moment with a minor revision.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
VOLATILITY RETURNS
“TheNew York Times!” Ellen yelped through the phone one Friday in January. “You’re in the fuckingNew York Times! I’ve already taped five copies of the poem to the bathroom stalls at work.”
“Everyone’s just going to flush it down the toilet,” Rae said. “Or use it as toilet paper.” Rather than being locked in a bathroom banker bunker, she was taking the call from her new private office, the size of her Perry Street bedroom, with a floor-to-ceiling glass wall.
To make up for that fact he couldn’t give Rae a salary raise due to “senior leadership’s concerns about a vulnerable macro outlook,” her boss had given her an office, the most conspicuous symbol to date that she was rising in the world. She paced the perimeter now, liking how the carpet muffled her heels, occasionally glancing at her reflection in the glare of the glass. Her skin was fair and freckleless from winter, but her face was bright and spotted with life.
“Stop that,” Ellen said. “It’s the best piece of social commentary of the century, and the fuckingNew York Timesagrees.”
Rae had written a poem published this morning, titled “Presence,” about a Wall Street woman denied a promotion because ofsystemic sexism. She’d tried to make it rhyme, but the words had clawed their way out of couplet cages.
The poem had been rejected by theIndyStar. From her online stalking of the editorial team, Rae had found that old white men were calling the shots. This had spurred her to submit it to theNew York Timesand a few other liberal publications. Months later, long after Rae had assumed it had been rejected or, more likely, lost, she’d gotten an email saying theTimeswanted to print it.
“I’m still mad you didn’t give me a heads-up this was happening,” Ellen said. “I know we’re in a long-distance friendship, but don’t I deserve to know when you’re about to get famous?”
“I didn’t tell anyone,” Rae said. “Even Stu or my mom. Didn’t want to jinx it.”
It had been more than that, too. She’d liked the notion that a stranger somewhere, likely in the relative stillness of Manhattan’s predawn yawn, would be the first to stumble across the poem while flipping through the paper over green tea or a sugary cappuccino, and form their own opinion before the universe had been biased by anyone else’s input.
“You’re annoyingly nonchalant about the whole thing,” Ellen said. “I’m physically bouncing on the toilet.” Ellen had her own office now, too, but still took their calls from the bathroom.
“I’m still processing it, I guess.”
“Well, process faster. How should we celebrate? Couples’ retreat in the Bahamas?”
Rae looked at a framed photo beside her computer, of her sitting on Stu’s lap on Christmas morning at her mom’s house. Her grandpa had insisted on taking the picture, and it was endearingly off-center. The photo made her feel safe but in a constrictive sort of way.
“Stu doesn’t like the poem,” she told Ellen. “He thinks it’s a disrespectful exposé.”
