Chasing a Novel….

OK—I’ve read James Patterson, who tells me that I should lie to myself. I should tell myself that the novel I intend to write in National Novel Writing Month (abbreviated NaNoWriMo) is gonna be great, gonna sell a zillion copies, gonna make the 50 Shades of Grey lady look like a piker. And Patterson should know, because he holds the Guinness Book of Records for the most bestsellers on The New York Times list.

For the stuff that I want to do, I’m fairly disciplined—no surprise there, right? Which means that my house is a mess, but I write each day. So the discipline isn’t the problem—it’s the imagination.

Of which I have none….

Consider it—there is a couple three tables down from me at the café where I write. Shouldn’t I be able to think of a story, shouldn’t I be able to weave a tale, just from the slump of his shoulders, or the fact that she is looking at her phone, not at him.

They argued last night, of course. The same argument they’ve been having for a month: he wants them to have a baby, she doesn’t.

“I had enough SHIT FROM MY MOTHER,” she screamed at him. “I don’t want to do that to anyone. And my therapist says I’m not ready.”

“You’re never ready,” he said, trying to be reasonable. ‘Christ,’ he thought, ‘if only she could hear herself…’

“Maybe in a year,” she said.

“Said that last year…”

“Look, Jim, I just want time for us to be together as a couple. Too many couples have children and then they’re parents, not couples. And then they end up in thirty years not really knowing each other….”

‘She’s so beautiful,’ he thinks, ‘why don’t I believe her?’

‘The problem started after her mother visited,’ he thought. ‘She was so simple, so sweet before her mother came. It’s like all the mistrust and suspicion got dumped onto her. Christ, just because your mother had a rotten divorce, do you have to spoil your own marriage?’ 

He turned over in bed and feigned sleep.

It was his fault—he’d always had this thing for younger women. And now, here he was, in his third marriage to a girl in her early twenties. And he? Forties, still good looking, hair graying at the temples, but look…time runs out for men as well as women. It may be more psychological than biological, as it is for women, but it’s still there. He doesn’t want to be in his fifties with a newborn crying in the middle of the night. But he could handle it now.

Now, he looks at her, absorbed in her phone. He sees the way her earring falls from her earlobe, and remembers the thrill, the first time he had whispered, “I love you,” into that ear.

“Let’s not fight again,” he says. It seems as simple as that.

She tenses, and thinks that the issue will never go away, never get settled. It will end her marriage, as it ended her mother’s. Although that was another woman, not the kid thing. Would Jim stray? Had he already? Or did he have some lined up, someone in the wings?

“It’s not like I want to fight,” she says. Is he putting all this on her, again?

“Then let’s not….”

She gives him a wary smile, and looks back down at her phone.

“Michelle texted me—they’re at the Butterfly People, about to have lunch. You want to join them?”

He doesn’t like either Michelle or her partner, and he hates the pretension of the Butterfly People. But the silence between them? Wouldn’t it be better to have anything else but that?

“Sure,” he says, and tries to look happy about it.

She stands up, reaches for her purse, brushing her husband’s hand in the process; he was about to give it to her. The touch seems as fragile, as fleeting as the relationship itself.

She moves away, ahead of her husband, pushes the door to the café open, and steps into the street. She doesn’t know: in a week she will miss her period, in a month, Jason will be born.

Now then—can we tweet this to Patterson?