A Novel Obsession Read online

  I frequently talk about Noah because his life is objectively interesting, and by association people might assume mine is interesting, too. Everyone wants to be famous, or at least fame adjacent, and so I expected Caleb to ask a few follow-up questions about Noah’s career, but he didn’t. He only widened his eyes expectantly, creating more space for me to speak.

  “It’s obviously way more common to be a child actor than a prodigy novelist,” I continued, “but I still feel an insane amount of pressure pretty much all the time.”

  “You shouldn’t worry so much!” Caleb laughed, not unkindly. “We’re still young, aren’t we? There’s no rush. You’re lucky you found something you’re passionate about.”

  I felt a strong urge to reach across the table and clutch his long warm fingers, but I didn’t. Why had I told him so much so quickly? On first dates I tended to skew toward upbeat, lighthearted, inoffensive.

  Caleb’s eyes, soft and searching, and his sliced-bread smile, so open and bright, made me feel new, feel refreshed.

  “Okay,” I said, sheepish. “I want to hear more about your life now. Sorry for dumping all that on you—”

  “Please don’t apologize,” he said emphatically, and then raised a playful eyebrow. “What else would you like to know?”

  Everything, I almost said aloud. “What kind of catastrophes do you prevent?” I asked instead.

  “Oh, I don’t prevent them; that’s impossible. I model equations to estimate possible loss.”

  “There’s a metaphor in there somewhere,” I said.

  His laugh, when it came again, soothed me. My body loosened as I listened. He went on to describe how his University of St Andrews residential college resembled a castle, and how every Tuesday students attended formal dinners wearing black robes in the grand dining hall. All were required to stand as administrators and faculty processed through the center aisle. Students were not allowed to sit until each member of the procession was seated. I imagined him in his robe, standing very regal.

  We wandered into three different bars during our first night together, a pub crawl of our own making. The air was warm—too warm, perhaps, for early May. Pollen floated by. He sneezed twice, so I blessed him twice. “I appreciate it,” he said, tilting his head back to prepare for a third, “but you don’t need to say it again.”

  On each short walk between bars, I frequently glanced at him strolling beside me, surprised he was still there.

  At our final destination, a dark, subterranean dive, all the barstools were occupied, so we leaned against a pool table no one was using. “So, Naomi,” Caleb said, “my next question might come as no surprise. Where can I read something you’ve written?”

  I was hoping he would ask.

  Later that night—after Caleb pressed me against the wall of a nearby building for a memorable first kiss, unexpectedly passionate and unrestrained for a man whose first impression oozed rare calm and composure—I emailed him the link to a story I’d published the previous year. Vaguely autobiographical, it focuses on a twenty-seven-year-old jazz drummer I met when I was sixteen. I fictionalized our relationship and its eventual end as if it were equally significant for both of us, giving myself closure. I was proud of the story, and proud of my byline at the popular online literary magazine that accepted it, and proud of having received fifty dollars, the price of eight dirty chai lattes, for having published it.

  Days passed without hearing from him, which felt ominous. It was a short story, meant to be consumed in an hour or less! Maybe he’d read it and hated it, maybe he’d gleaned something undesirable about me from its subtext, maybe—

  When Caleb’s email finally arrived in my inbox ten days later, it contained more than I’d hoped for. You perfectly captured the emotional rush that (certainly in my own experience) comes after a breakup, he wrote. There’s a sadness to it, but an optimistic and cleansing feel, too. The praise was gratifying, but I was most excited by the subtle revelations of the life he’d lived before me, all the stories worth excavating. Loving someone, I thought, required learning all their stories—a perpetual excavation.

  Of course, it helped that his word choices—optimistic, cleansing—implied he had moved on, a clean break.

  So, after our next date, I took Caleb home and molded him to me. Skinny but strong in the arms, he lowered me to the mattress and pulled off my shirt and unclasped my bra and helped me wriggle out of my jeans. “Why am I the only naked one?” I said in mock-indignation, gesturing at the heap of my clothes. He laughed and stripped and put his mouth between my legs. For the first time I dared myself to look at him, really look at him, without breaking eye contact as I always had with other men. It invited a rush of feeling I wasn’t prepared for, had never felt, and so I scrambled onto my hands and knees and stared at the wall, waiting.

  My sudden movement appeared to both perplex and amuse him.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Fuck me from behind,” I said, hoping to convey a seductive authority.

  When he snickered, I turned around to look at him, hurt and confused.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Erm, it’s just, I dunno, like you’re doing some kind of routine? I want to look at you.”

  I was shocked into silence. He tickled my ribs and tried to apologize, but I shook my head and said it might be true. None of the men who came before had ever cared enough to notice.

  Naked and propped against my pillows, we talked. He told me he used to panic about forgetting his dreams and so, during college, he got in the morning habit of whispering what he still remembered into a recording device.

  “What did you do with them, did you listen to old dreams, what did they mean for you?” I asked.

  He said he liked the act of verbal recounting. “It woke me up,” he said.

  I told him the stuffed animals in my childhood bedroom seemed to come alive in the darkness and creep closer to me.

  “Spooky,” he said.

  “I liked them,” I said.

  In the morning we tried having sex again, and this time it was better, it was great. I stopped thinking.

  Caleb asked me on another date, and then another and another—until one July morning, after waking up with a sore throat, fever, and chills, a doctor confirmed I had the flu. For six days I could barely get out of bed, which was physically inconvenient at best and romantically catastrophic at worst; because we hadn’t yet discussed exclusivity, I feared Caleb would meet someone new while I was bedridden. Someone he liked better. I feared being out of sight, out of mind.

  If this was an elaborate ruse to get rid of me, sorry, but it hasn’t worked, Caleb texted on the sixth day. I’m good at making soup and tea and reading bedtime stories (I can bring Where the Wild Things Are). Anyway, let me know if my services are requested.

  I reread the text over and over and felt, for the very first time, that I might be capable of falling in love—despite how the icky verb itself, falling, suggested loss of precious control.

  Finally, in late July, after almost three months of dating, we entered into an official relationship. My first ever. Just like that, I was someone’s girlfriend: Caleb’s.

  My mother, after seeing a picture of him, said, Oh, he looks like a model. My father, after learning Caleb was a mathematician, said, Ah, a real smarty-pants. Caleb was an ideal, but also real, and now mine.

  At this point, Rosemary didn’t exist. I spent the whole summer with no knowledge of her. She came in with the cold.

  * * *

  —

  Two weeks ago, in the first days of October, Caleb took me to see a relatively unknown band from Wales perform at a small concert venue on the Lower East Side. “They grew up in the next town over,” he whispered, swelling with secondhand pride. Afterward, as we wandered onto the sidewalk and toward a nearby bar, it began to rain. “This weather feels like home,” Caleb said, and I leaned in the dire
ction of his accent as cold drops slashed through the sky and onto the sidewalk.

  In the bar, as our Pacificos dripped condensation and rain droplets slid down the window, I complained about my fluffy, humidified hair. Caleb wrapped my curls around his index finger and said he liked the way it expanded in the rain, like steam rising. Soon after his declaration, I stopped straightening my hair into submission.

  Eventually he untangled his index finger and put his Pacifico down on the table. “So, I should probably tell you that my ex-girlfriend emailed me a few days ago,” he said. “I haven’t seen her in, I dunno, almost a year—last time she was crying so hard we had to leave the café.”

  My fingers twitched against the glass. “What—what did the email say?”

  “Nothing interesting. She asked how I’ve been and suggested we meet to catch up. I’ll probably write back, say something short. But”—and here he held my gaze, searching, perhaps, for permission, or for gratitude—“I don’t think I’m going to see her.”

  “What do you mean? See her how? Like when you go home over Christmas?”

  He shook his head. “No, she’s here. In New York. An American, like you. She studied abroad at St Andrews, that’s where we met, but she went to NYU.”

  My abandoned drink sweat onto the bar. “We’ve known each other nearly six months and you’re telling me this now?”

  “Well, I thought it was in the past! We weren’t in contact until this email, literally yesterday—”

  “I could’ve passed her on the street and had absolutely no clue!”

  He looked stricken. “I’m sorry! I never meant to hide it or anything.”

  A St Andrews girlfriend was mentioned a handful of times, true—as was, of course, the emotional rush following their breakup—but I’d assumed his ex was safely locked in the past, overseas, with an accent similar to his. A sound he would find ordinary. He never mentioned moving across the ocean to be with her.

  But now I knew. Greedy, I shook him down for more details.

  “She’s actually in publishing,” he said. “A big reader, like you.”

  It was even more likely now that we had been in the same room. “Omigod, what does she do? Where does she work?”

  “You know, shocker of shockers, I’d rather not talk about her anymore,” he said. “We were having such a good night. I don’t want this to ruin it.”

  I allowed his deflection—for the time being—but wondered if neglecting to give his ex a name meant Caleb didn’t trust me enough yet, or meant he wanted to keep this part of his history—her—to himself. Or maybe to show I was real, and she was only a category: as in math, she had joined a set. Ex-life. But I wanted, desperately, to know her name.

  Why, a year after their breakup, did she suddenly have more to say? I wondered how many drafts she wrote and rewrote before sending the email to Caleb. Were her sentences short and staccato, or long, self-justifying, and dreamy? How many times did she use the word we? Did she use exclamation points (dumb) or semicolons (pretentious)?

  “Why’d you break up?” I asked.

  “Pressure, I guess,” he said. “After dating long distance for two years, we always knew one of us would have to move. I was finishing up my master’s in London at the time, so we were choosing between our two cities.”

  “So why didn’t she join you in London?” I would’ve jumped at the chance to start fresh elsewhere, especially with someone I loved. The beginning of a great story.

  “She said she had stronger ties to her home than I had to mine. It might’ve been true, I dunno. Once I got a job and a visa, it happened fast—she worked hard to fit me into her life. I worked hard, too, but I wasn’t happy. I don’t know why, but I wasn’t. And she hated my unhappiness; she couldn’t understand it. We were apart for so many years, and then we were finally together, and we were supposed to be so . . . so happy.”

  He flicked some fuzz off his jeans. “I started feeling like the things I said or did were never what she wanted from me. But I still loved her, and she still loved me, and that was the most confusing part.”

  His use of the word loved felt heavy, like a suitcase dragged behind him. I wondered if, not when, he would be able to open the suitcase again. And if he would want my help.

  “She wants me to do more, be more, than what I am, but I can’t,” he said.

  I felt a twinge below my rib cage as his tense changed from past to present. “You’ve never considered getting back together?”

  Caleb took too long to reply, and in those few endless seconds, I anticipated being told I was only a placeholder, the next-best-thing, a necessary bridge between their past and their future. No one upends their entire life for someone they don’t see a serious future with; there’s no way he’s just going to give up—

  “No, of course not,” said Caleb, intertwining our fingers.

  My heartbeat thumped inside my palms as I realized—with a jolt of nauseous vertigo—that a small or perhaps not so small part of me had wanted to be told, definitively, that I was inadequate, because then it would be okay to put a stop to it, to dial back all the inherent risk involved in loving.

  “I’m invested in us now, Naomi,” Caleb continued to insist. “Don’t you know that?”

  Swallowing thick mucus that had built up in my throat, I nodded.

  Then Caleb pulled my hips toward him, and we kissed for a little while.

  “But it’s funny, though, isn’t it,” I said, pulling away, “how I’m the same type of woman?”

  The grooves above his eyebrows deepened. “Because you’re both, I don’t know, into books?”

  Miraculously, I laughed. “Yeah, silly, we’re both into books.”

  “To be honest,” said Caleb, “you’re not alike at all.”

  Unprepared for this, I immediately began wondering how and why—and if that was good or bad. To confront and then squash my own paranoia, I realized I would need to do some research.

  Later that night, with Caleb asleep in my bed, I sat at the kitchen table and opened my computer. Using the information he’d revealed, I typed a jumble of nouns into Google: “St Andrews, publishing, New York University.” I sifted through names and faces on Facebook until I hit the jackpot: a photo of a woman standing next to Caleb—my Caleb.

  Rosemary Pierce.

  The thickness of our eyebrows, the wavy auburn hair, the pear-shaped hips, the books—but perhaps it was true our similarities ended there. How could a Naomi Ackerman compete with a Rosemary Pierce? Her name felt smooth and tasted sweet. I pursed my lips to utter it. I was so kissable, mouthing her name.

  The publishing house she worked for was listed in her Facebook profile—she was an editor at a major imprint, requiring her to cart stacks of manuscripts home on the subway. The reason for her tote. Meanwhile I sat at a bookstore register most days, selling books with sentences Rosemary might have edited—different links in the same chain. But Rosemary’s link in that chain was unquestionably superior.

  Aside from a few more basic details (including her birthday, May 29, ’91, which made her Caleb’s age, twenty-seven, three years older than me—and a Gemini, which felt significant), her privacy settings were otherwise airtight. I could only access three of her profile pictures. In the current one, Rosemary posed with an older woman—her mother, as revealed by the caption—in front of the Grand Canyon, a place I had never visited. In the second, uploaded around the same time as her breakup, Rosemary was the only flash of auburn in a group of blondes; all had their arms around one another on a rooftop somewhere in Brooklyn, backlit by a sunset (purple) with glasses of white wine aloft. So basic.

  In those two photos, her lips pressed together and curved upward only at the corners—but in the third photo, uploaded a year after she met Caleb, Rosemary stood tucked under his arm in a purple graduation gown, her mouth blurry white as if in the process of showing a rare openmou
thed grin. He wore a charcoal suit, and although his hair was shorter, his face was unmistakable. They stood under the arch in Washington Square Park, bursting with joy and pride as if they alone had built it. He must have flown to New York specifically to celebrate her.

  It hurt to imagine it. I was surprised by how much.

  Next, I managed to find and read the archived Tumblr blog Rosemary kept while abroad. I wanted to know if she boarded her flight to the UK with the same naïve hopes I had when I flew to study abroad in Australia—irrevocable change, upheaval, a story worthy of being told.

  She began her blog writing about the scenery—moors and mist—and about her literature courses before eventually veering into romantic territory by describing a certain Welshman who lived next door in her residential college. From that post on, the blog detailed only the café she and Caleb frequented; the pub they sat in for hours when it rained; the secret, hidden passageways around St Andrews that Caleb shared with her; and the surrounding Fife countryside—Anstruther, Elie, Edinburgh—where they frolicked (Rosemary’s word) on weekends. Her prose, though sharp and clean and rigorous, lacked a certain singularity of voice. This knowledge was a relief. Although she was clearly intelligent and well-read and could string sentences together far better than most humans, she certainly wasn’t a writer, at least not in the way I was; writers have voices.

  I scrolled through the blog for hours. But as Rosemary’s abroad experience stretched on, relationship descriptions got increasingly spare until the day they ran out altogether. Was her daily life simply too good to be captured? What began as a story, worthy of being told, became real. Caleb exceeded the expectations of her fantasies.

  Thrown into crisis mode, I began to mentally restructure. Needing something (or someone) new to write about, I had chosen the newness of love. (I was experienced with and quite good at writing about rejection; the two stories I’d published so far were angsty and depressing—but relatable, too, according to strangers on the Internet.) Since love is supposedly a universal human experience, and writers are often encouraged to write what we know, I hoped to undergo it at least once. When Caleb offered to bring soup to my sickbed back in July, I’d thought, This is it, surely before long I’ll know. I already sensed it growing inside me—looking directly into Caleb’s eyes had begun making me feel like I was about to either laugh or faint, what else could it mean?—but now I was being confronted by a different story, perhaps even a parallel one, that had nothing to do with me at all. What I’d imagined was rare and special—a Welsh mathematician and a bookish New Yorker! with nearly nothing in common! becoming inexplicably drawn to each other!—was actually a pattern of his, and I slotted right in. A duplicate.