Page 46 of Bad Words

“I should throw your ass out of here for being rude to him, is what I should do.” Nadia upended a silver cone of lime juice into the shaker and began to pack it with ice. “Just reading tonight, sweetheart? Or are we meeting someone?”

“Reading.” I took the advance copy from my purse and flashed her the cover: Juliette Liao’s newest.

“Never heard of her.”

“She’s a genius.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” Nadia knocked the steel cups together with the heel of her hand and began to shake. “It’s been a while, huh? Since you had anyone in here.”

For some reason, I didn’t mind when Nadia asked me these kinds of questions. Something about the hard boundaries of our relationship relaxed me. We could clock in and out. She could walk away for hours to tend to other people. Everything was warm, and nothing had to be personal. “Maybe I’m taking my dates to another bar,” I said.

“Yeah, right. You’ve got loyalty.”

I smiled. Nadia didn’t push the question, but she was right. It had been years since I’d made any attempt at a relationship, since I’d decided that my romantic life would be best left as an entertaining series of flings. And as the flings had become progressively less entertaining, those had petered out, too. I hadn’t gone on a date in over a year.

I barely missed the experience, the revolving door of hope and discomfort. But sometimes I did feel sad about my own disinterest. Part of me had accepted that what I was looking for didn’t exist: a man who was a reader, who wasn’t put off by my career or my opinions, who read and loved women authors. A man who loved what he did, whether that was ornithology or programming or getting under the hood of beater cars. Someone who didn’t mind disagreement, who actually seemed to have fun engaging with my thoughts. Someone who would ask questions about small things in my life as though they mattered. Someone who seemed to like me.

Nadia set my gimlet on a coaster. “Hey. You okay?”

“Fine. Yes.”

She took my card. “Leave it open?”

“Thanks.” I took a determined drink and settled in to read House Hearth Home. This was the main attraction for me this Christmas. A chance to see Juliette Liao, who hadn’t done an appearance in eight years and who was coming to the city right before the holidays. I’d had the event in my calendar since September.

Granted, she’d be speaking with Christian Gatehead, which in my eyes was like van Gogh discussing art with a chimpanzee that’s learned to paint with its own feces. But I’d put up with seeing Gatehead again if it meant I got to see her, too.

I cracked the book open, and she whisked me away, far from the clinks and chatter of the bar, through centuries, into a cabin in Missouri in the 1810s. I followed her into the switchgrass and up to the edge of the river. I became somebody else. Somebody better. The best books always convinced me of this: that I was in the presence not of greatness but of goodness, something so warm and expansive that it counterbalanced everything else that people were capable of. Nobody wrote that way like Juliette Liao. Nobody made me feel so close to other people, like I could understand everybody, like anyone could understand me.

I paused midpage at the thought. That had come from somewhere. An op-ed, maybe? Something in a journal?

I kept reading, though the thought persisted as I spooned down paragraph after beautiful, delicate paragraph.

A hundred pages in, I remembered.

To get that response … it feels like you’re also separate from other people. Like other people can’t understand you, or maybe you’ll never understand them.

I stirred my gimlet with its straw, listening to the click of the ice, frowning into the glass.

Parker Navarro. What he’d said on that podcast had been percolating in me.

Weeks after the Wiseman Festival, I occasionally caught myself thinking about his comments during our panel, too. The way he’d spoken about fiction not as a calling, not as an art, but as a place that your body enters and exits, a fertile, private place.

Even a stuck clock is right twice a day, I told myself, but as I sipped my drink I thought of him leaning on the seat beside me at the bar that night. The way I could speak and watch the words ripple into him, his reactivity, his expressiveness. The way he’d looked at me not with the resentment I’d come to expect from authors I’d critically brutalized, but with a hard intensity, as though he were waiting for me to say something specific, as though, if we’d frozen time, he would have waited hours to hear the right words.

Chapter ThirteenParker

Elena

Parker no offense but why are you just now telling us you’re not getting in until Christmas Eve?

Parker

I’m sorry, Lena. This event is important to me. I figured you could work around my new dates. We don’t have reservations for anything those first few days, right?

Kevin

Ohhh Mom is going to be pissed