Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [59]
Theirs was one of those meeting stories everybody loved. Friends often asked them to repeat it to strangers at parties, or told them it sounded like the plot of a movie. He had lived in her apartment before she did, and months after she moved in, his mail still flooded the box by the door. At that point, she hadn’t published a single story. She kept a small stack of form rejection letters from literary magazines of varying quality, a few with handwritten words of encouragement at the bottom, which thrilled her when she read them, though hours later she’d feel mortified by her excitement over being turned down nicely. Meanwhile, dozens of envelopes from Simon & Schuster arrived at her new place, addressed to Gabe, and she wondered what they might contain—fat advance checks, or royalty statements, or invitations to have his book published in foreign countries around the globe. She never opened any of the letters, which she later reminded him when he accused her of having snooping in her DNA. It wasn’t biological, she insisted. It was situational. A sensible woman could catch a man in only so many lies before she started to hunt for clues of betrayal. Snoop and ye shall find, he’d say dismissively. Well, actually, yes, she’d think. In your case, yes.
Anyway, she found the letters inspiring: Here was a New York writer who had not only secured a publisher, but was so above it all that he could just walk away without even leaving a forwarding address. In her imagination, he was reclusive, brooding, and brilliant. She felt lucky to have taken over his space. The thought of him helped her write, helped her keep going, and she’d joke about it to friends, how the literary power of her neighborhood’s former tenants—Truman Capote, Walt Whitman, Carson McCullers, and Gabe Warner, whose book she could never locate at the library—acted as her muse.
When she sold her collection of short stories, she wanted to dedicate it to her mother, but didn’t want her father to feel bad. She couldn’t very well make it out to both of them. Considering they had not been comfortably in the same room since her fifth grade ballet recital, it seemed cruel to make them live together on the page for all eternity. At the last minute, she decided to dedicate it to him, a perfect stranger: To Gabe Warner, whoever you are. Thanks for making a writer’s life seem possible. Her mother was pissed, but what could you do?
Gabe had heard about it through a friend who had an advance copy, and so he showed up at her book party looking like the stunning, cocky bastard he was, wearing a suede jacket with elbow patches and jeans, coming right up to her and saying in his clipped prep school voice, “Maggie Doyle, I presume.”
It wasn’t until later that night, when they were lying in her bedroom, which had once been his bedroom, that she realized what his book had been: a manual for do-it-yourself naked photos called Tasteful Nudes for the At-Home Pro, with tips on how to hide your belly fat and light a room, how to incorporate props, how to destroy the evidence if your relationship went south or you ever wanted to run for public office. Gabe had been approached to do it by a young editor friend, and he said yes, for a laugh. The book was never published, because naturally he hadn’t ever gotten around to handing in his final draft. The unopened letters from Simon & Schuster, from which she had drawn so much inspiration, were demands to get the book in, or else he’d be sued for his advance money.
Gabe had left the apartment and New York to follow a girlfriend to Boulder. But by the time of Maggie’s book party he was back in the city, newly dumped, living with Cunningham and working as a part-time stringer at the Daily News. During one of their first dates, he told her with pride about a computer file of stock images he kept for the occasions when they’d ask him to go shoot weather.
“You wouldn’t believe how stupid photo editors are,” he said. “I mean, all these requests to capture kids playing soccer on a sunny day, or snow