Silence for a moment.
“I have this familiar conviction,” he said, “that my life is ‘beginning over again with the summer.’?” A pause. “Over.”
I rolled out of bed and tiptoed toward my window—the one that faced the sea, the one that faced the pool. Tyler’s cottage wasaglow. His silhouette, pacing in those late-night half circles he’d been making for as long as I could remember. For as long as he and I had been doing this.
His light flicked out. I bit my bottom lip, then pressed my hand to the glass.
“Good night, Tyler.”
“Good night, Katie,” he said. “Over.”
29
Tyler
When I awoke the next morning, birds were chirping, and the sun was slipping through the slats of the cottage’s shutters in hazy white streaks. I rubbed my eyes and rolled over in bed.
My phone, signal-less but charging on the nightstand, announced the time: 9:07 a.m. Somehow, I’d managed to sleep eight hours straight. I could not remember the last time I’d done that.
Maybe that was because the cottage was infinitely nicer than anywhere I’d ever spent the night. It had a queen-size bed with crisp white sheets, a brick-lined fireplace, and a kettle-topped stove with a few copper pots and pans dangling above it.
I took a quick shower, threw on a pair of jeans, then grabbed my laptop and wandered into the main house. Coffee brewed, and the softness of morning stretched across the great room. I found Meredith in the kitchen, humming to herself and spreading melted butter onto the tops of a dozen unbaked scones.
“Good morning,” she said. “Katie went to print pages. I set my alarm. Wanted to make sure you two were off to a good start.”
I smiled, running my fingers over the marble. My reply, starting off in a stutter. “Thank you. Wow, yeah. This is really great.”
She poured me a cup of coffee and slid it my way. “You’re welcome.”
I took a long sip as Pinot slithered into view. I gave him a cordialnod and set my computer on the breakfast table behind me. Meredith popped the baking sheet into the oven.
“Did Katie show you the library?”
“No, uh, not yet. Just downstairs so far.”
She signaled me out of the kitchen, past a gallery of probably Ansel Adamses, up the stairs, and through an open archway that separated the home’s western and eastern wings. Books were everywhere—shelf after shelf of them, stretching all the way to the ceiling. Their columns and rows, interrupted only by a south-facing wall composed entirely of colonial-paned glass. Through it, the Atlantic glittered, whitecaps on teal sea. Meredith settled into a leather armchair but said nothing.
I ambled toward a wall and traced the spines of a dozen novels. There must have been tens of thousands of books in here. Tons of romance—but everything else too. Plath. Rushdie. Tartt. I pulledSlouching Towards Bethlehemoff the shelf.
Meredith smirked. “They’re not better than I am, you know.”
I put the book down. “Huh?”
“There’s this idea,” she said, rising from her chair. She walked up to the window and pressed her hand to it. She did not turn to look at me. “That art is suffering. That only suffering is art. It’s nonsense.”
I moved to another shelf, running my fingertips across a second slew of stories. “Yeah, but that’s the beauty of it. I mean, for me, when I write, I chase that: humanity. I think it’s what McEwan does, what Steinbeck did. Really gets to know someone. Feels their pain. That bleakness—I’m not sure it’s a choice. It’s just the truth.”
“When I was at Iowa,” she said, “all the other writers felt the exact same way. I remember thinking: How sad. How selfish. To feel all the ugliness on this earth and think,I’ll multiply it.”
I thumbed through another Didion. “I don’t think it works that way. I think it’s amazing to turn darkness into something beautiful. To make pain sound good. That’s art. That’s...” I closed my eyes. Barely twelve hours into my stay, and here I was, doing it again. Exactly what Katie had ruined me for. “I mean, no disrespect, of course. I haven’t sold shit, and you, well...”
Meredith chuckled. “You know what I think, Tyler, when I sit down to write?”
I shook my head.
She turned to face me and said, “Haven’t I suffered enough?”
By eleven, Katie and I had gotten back to our book. Her plan was simple: we’d set up on the terrace with two freshly printed hard copies of our first act and—with no laptops, no plot wall, no distractions—read it from start to finish, searching for the moment our narrative had veered off course. Ninety minutes into our scour, Katie set her manuscript down.
