“My only complaint is that there don’t seem to be any embarrassing baby photos?”
“There are. I just buried them deep in the basement.” I took a calming sip of my beer. Then we sat on opposing ends of the couch, as far apart as possible.
He took another long swig from his can. “So fill me in.”
I launched into the summary of what I’d experienced so far. I didn’t embellish (I had no need for bullshit this time), and he watched me with his eyes growing increasingly wider, occasionally shaking his head in disbelief, or scorn at their elitism, or admiration at their inventiveness.
“What about Nicole Woo-Martin?” he asked at one point.
“I haven’t gotten anything solid on that yet, just a few veiled comments. They’re not going to talk about it with a nonmember, but that in itself says something.”
“And I tried getting in touch with her staffer,” Miles said. “But that seems to be a dead end—he’s not responding.”
I didn’t tell Miles everything. I glossed over the specifics of the tarot reading, leaving out the talk about Margot’s sex life and her strange comment of how she made men sorry. When I described the woman following me into the bathroom this morning, he blinked.
“Wait, this is insane. They’re actually following you?”
“Um, yeah,” I said. “I didn’t just make that up for attention. I would’ve loved to come to the office.”
“Ah, I thought . . .” He shook his head.
“What did you think?” I asked, and we looked at each other, not saying anything for a moment. He swallowed.
Then, a key turned in the door and the yuppie couple who’d bought the place—Sara and Rob—barged in, all sunshine and rainbows and privilege.
“Jillian, hi!” Sara trilled. “Hope we’re not bothering!”
“We sent a text, but you didn’t respond,” Rob said.
They introduced themselves to Miles, before Sara continued, holding up a measuring tape, “We just wanted to come take another look at the downstairs.”
“You did, you mean,” Rob said to Sara, putting his arm around her. He rolled his eyes at us affectionately. “She’s so excited to get started on this renovation. It’s all she talks about.”
“Stop, you’re the exact same way!” She gazed into his eyes, swoony, practically ready to mount him right then and there so they could christen their new home.
“Sure, yeah,” I said as pleasantly as I could manage, hoping they weren’t getting too antsy. I did not have the bandwidth to think about moving right now. “We can get out of your way.” I turned to Miles. “So I guess we should go to my, um, upstairs.”
“Yeah,” he said, and then to Sara and Rob, “Have fun.”
As I led him up the stairs, he whispered, “Well, they are annoyingly chipper.”
I forced a laugh. Up here, we had two choices. My mother’s room or mine. I wasn’t about to take him into my mother’s—that space still somehow belonged to her, even though I’d emptied out everything but the closet—so I opened my own door. I hadn’t bothered to tidy up, maybe because I didn’t think he’d be coming upstairs, or maybe because I hadn’t wanted to be tempted to invite him in. A self-discipline measure, like wearing dirty underwear to meet up with an ex you know you shouldn’t fall back into bed with. Stacks of notebooks and magazines tilted precariously on various surfaces. I tended to shed like a dog, and strands of my hair wound along the floor. The room was close quarters, the perfect size for a kid, not so much for a grown-up woman. Still, when I’d moved back home, I’d exchanged my old twin for a full-size bed (currently unmade), and had managed to shove in a small, wobbly desk and rolling chair too.
I fantasized about someday having a Desk with a capital D, some mahogany behemoth that would transmit creativity to me as soon as I placed my hands on its polished surface. Sitting at that desk, words would race out of my brain and onto the page like track and field stars. I didn’t believe any of the woo-woo, witchy stuff that some of the Nevertheless women seemed so into, but I reserved the right to make one exception: a certain kind of magic when it came to writing. There had been moments in my life when it didn’t feel like I was doing the work at all. My fingers were enchanted, moving of their own accord, and I was channeling something larger than myself, grabbing that larger thing from some hazy ether and pulling it to the Earth, where other people could touch it, and be touched by it.
I hadn’t had that feeling since my mom had gotten sick, and I couldn’t help imagining that the right kind of desk would help me regain it. I knew rationally that desks didn’t matter, and that real writers just sat down and forced themselves to be creative anywhere, those fuckers. But I liked my fantasies.
My desk chair was piled with clothes that weren’t dirty enough for my laundry hamper, but not clean enough to put back in my drawer. Shorts I’d gone on a strenuous walk in. A sleep shirt I’d worn a few times. A black bra. Miles glanced at it and then glanced away.
“Here, you should take my laundry chair and I’ll sit on the bed,” I said, gathering up all the clothes in my arms and dumping them on the floor of my closet. My palms had grown damp. “Sorry, not the most professional meeting place.”
He turned in a circle, taking everything in. “Hey, it’s always an interesting exercise to find out more about a person by seeing their room, especially when they don’t like to talk much about their personal life.”
“Right,” I said. “You’re doing research. Preparing yourself for when I become famous, and you have to write a profile of me.”
“‘To understand the genius of Jillian Beckley,’” he said, “‘you don’t need to walk a mile in her shoes. You
