He gave me a faint smile. “Great cinema.” It was so obviously a Thank you and a Let’s move on now. As different as I’d thought we were, it felt a little bit like Gus and I were two aliens who’d stumbled into each other on Earth only to discover we shared a native language.
“We should have a film club,” I said. “We’re always on the same page about this stuff.”
He was quiet for a moment, thoughtful. “It really was a beautiful dedication,” he said. “It didn’t feel like a lie. Maybe a complicated truth, but not a lie.”
The warmth filled me up until I felt like a teakettle trying hard not to whistle.
When I got home, I turned on my computer and ordered my own copy of The Revelatories.
AND HERE CAME the true montage.
I did surgery on the book. I ripped it up and stored the pieces in separate files. Ellie became Eleanor. She went from being a down-on-her-luck real estate agent to a down-on-her-luck tightrope walker with a port-wine stain the shape of a butterfly on her cheek, because Absurdly Specific Details. Her father became a sword swallower, her mother a bearded lady.
They moved from the twenty-first century to the early twentieth. They were part of a traveling circus. That was their family: a tight-knit group who ended every night smoking hand-rolled cigarettes around a fire. It was the only world she’d ever known.
They spent every moment with each other, but somehow told each other very little. There wasn’t much time for talking in their line of work.
I renamed the file, from BEACH_BOOK.docx to FAMILY_SECRETS.docx.
I wanted to know whether you could ever fully know someone. If knowing how they were—how they moved and spoke and the faces they made and the things they tried not to look at—amounted to knowing them. Or if knowing things about them—where they’d been born, all the people they’d been, who they’d loved, the worlds they’d come from—added up to anything.
I gave them each a secret. That part was the easiest.
Eleanor’s mother was dying but she didn’t want anyone to know. The clowns everyone believed to be brothers were actually lovers. The sword swallower was still mailing checks to a family back in Oklahoma.
They became less and less like the people I knew, but somehow, their problems and secrets became more personal. I couldn’t put my father or mother down on paper. I could never get that right. But these characters carried the truth of the people I’d loved.
I was particularly fond of writing a mechanic named Nick. I loved knowing that no one except me would ever recognize the skeleton of Augustus Everett I’d built the character around.
Gus and I made a habit of writing at our respective kitchen tables around noon, and most days we took turns holding up notes. They became more and more elaborate. It was obvious that while some were spontaneous, others were planned—written out earlier in the day, or even the night before. Whenever inspiration struck. Those written in the moment especially became nonsensical as writing-madness took us over. Sometimes I would laugh so hard I’d lose muscle control in my hands and be unable to write any more notes. We’d laugh until we both laid our heads down on our tables. He’d snort into his coffee. I’d nearly choke on mine.
It started with platitudes like IT IS BETTER TO HAVE LOVED AND LOST THAN TO HAVE NEVER LOVED AT ALL (me) and THE UNIVERSE SEEMS NEITHER BENIGN NOR HOSTILE, MERELY INDIFFERENT (him) but usually ended with things like FUCK WRITING (me) and SHOULD WE JUST DITCH THIS AND BECOME COAL MINERS? (him).
Once he wrote to tell me that LIFE IS LIKE A BOX OF CHOCOLATES. YOU REALLY DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE EATING AND THE CHOCOLATE MAP IN THE LID IS FUCKING ALWAYS WRONG.
I wrote to tell him that IF YOU’RE A BIRD, I’M A BIRD.
He let me know that IN SPACE, NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM, and I wrote back, NOT ALL WHO WANDER ARE LOST.
Going through Dad’s stuff fell to the back burner, but I didn’t mind procrastinating. For the first time in months, I wasn’t flinching every time my phone or laptop pinged. I was making progress. Of course, a lot of that progress was research, but for every new factoid I gleaned about twentieth-century circus culture, it seemed like a new plot light bulb illuminated over my head.
At night, Gus and I sat on our separate decks, having a drink and watching the sun slide into the lake. Most nights we’d talk from across the gap, mostly about how productive we had or hadn’t been, about the people we could see from our decks and the stories we could imagine for them. We’d talk about the books (and movies) we’d loved (and hated), the people we’d gone to school with (both together at U of M and before that: Sara Tulane, who used to pull my hair in kindergarten; Mariah Sjogren, who broke up with sixteen-year-old Gus—a full three months into their relationship, he was way too proud to tell me—because he smoked a cigarette in the car with her and “kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray”).
We talked about our terrible jobs (my part-time car wash position in high school, where I regularly got sexually harassed by customers and had to scrub down the tunnel before I could go home at night; his call-center job at a uniform manufacturer, where he got yelled at for incorrect embroideries and delayed shipments). We talked about the most embarrassing albums we’d owned and concerts we’d been to (redacted for the sake of dignity).
And other times, we’d sit in silence, not quite together but definitely not alone.
“So what do you think?” I asked him one night. “Are romance and happiness harder than they look?”
After a moment, he said, “I never said that they were easy.”
“You implied it,” I pointed out.
“I implied they were easy for you,” he said. “For me, they’re about as challenging as I’m sure you’re imagining.”
The possibility hung in the air: at any time, one of us could have invited the other over, and either of us would have accepted. But neither of us asked, and so things went on as they’d been.
On Friday, we left for our research excursion a bit earlier than we had the week prior and headed east, inland.
“Who are we meeting this time?” I asked.
Gus answered only, “Dave.”
“Ah, yes, Dave. I’m a big fan of his restaurant, Wendy’s.”
“Believe it or not, different Dave,” Gus said. He was lost in thought, barely playing along with our usual banter.
I waited for him to go on but he didn’t. “Gus?”
His gaze flinched toward me, as if he’d forgotten I was there and my presence had startled him. He scratched at his jaw. His usual five-o’clock shadow had stretched closer toward a seven-o’clock dusk.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
His eyes bounced between me and the road three times before he nodded. I could almost see it—him swallowing down whatever he’d been considering saying. “Dave was part of New Eden,” he said instead. “He was just a kid back then. His mother took him out of there a few months before the fire. His dad stayed behind. He was in too deep.”
“So his father …”
Gus nodded. “Died in the fire.”
We were meeting Dave at an Olive Garden, and on the way in, Gus warned me that Dave was a recovering alcoholic. “Three years sober,” Gus said as we waited at the host stand. “I told him we wouldn’t be drinking anything.”