Page 32 of The Dirty Version
Tash wondered if every venue on Leo’s podcast tour was as gorgeously pretentious as the one she entered the next day—a library inside the Miami Museum of Cartography’s archive, just an intimate two hundred people seated beneath soaring bookshelves and architecturally filtered light.
She told herself not to be nervous. At Biscayne Coastal, she lectured to freshman auditoriums this same size all the time.
She’d addressed even bigger audiences on The Colony ’s press tour—and even if she was a bit out of practice, her recent immersion in the book’s guts with Caleb had situated all the important themes at her front of mind.
The worst, best part of the taping would be seeing Leo, after so many years. Tash resolved to rub her success in his face graciously, while hiding her insecurities. In a pinch, she could always go into a corner and do some of Stacy’s breathing.
An audio tech funneled Tash into a makeshift greenroom off the library’s main hall, where, among clipboards and heavy-duty mic rigs, a man without sideburns sat on a child’s stool. Beside him, an unadorned woman in a slip dress. Together, they were feeding a toddler.
“Tash.” Leo Rousseau glanced up pleasantly, holding a plastic forkful of chicken nugget. “Hello.”
Tash’s thoughts of him, up until that instant, had been primarily conjecture about his estimation of her book: Did Leo think it was brilliant? Was the invitation to the podcast his personal request? Or just the fishing of a producer who needed local talent and happened upon Tash?
Tash did also wonder if Leo still left condom wrappers he’d used with other people for his girlfriends to find, sometimes by their pillows.
Once even on her desk.
“Meet my wife, the conceptual artist Olga Horvat.” Leo flourished the hand unencumbered by baby fork around his cozy circle. “And this is Digby.” Leo indicated the chewing toddler. “Our extremely precocious three-year-old.”
At no point had Tash considered the possibility of a married and fatherly Leo Rousseau—whose smile still oozed elbow-patched charisma, whose body stood to greet her, still lanky and fit.
He half embraced her with one arm, still redolent of chlorine—in New York, he’d been a swimmer, venturing to the school’s pool even on the coldest days.
A sudden memory of balled-up bathing suits left repeatedly on bathroom tile streaked through Tash’s mind.
“I did a double take when I saw your name on our guest list. I didn’t know you were writing.”
And there—not four seconds into their reunion—Leo brandished a move Tash must have willingly blocked out: first a glimpse of appeasing warmth, then a sharp jab to the solar plexus.
I didn’t know you were writing —code for You never had any talent .
Tash’s work would never show up on his intellectual radar. She was insignificant.
The conceptual artist Olga Horvat remained seated, gaze bouncing between them, the three-year-old Digby obediently masticating chicken.
All while Tash attempted to parse and order her reaction—to Leo’s couched insult; to his affected introduction; to the fact he’d incongruously, since she’d last seen him, become a family man.
“Yes.” Tash said the one word, ever articulate. “I wrote a book.” She gestured to the tech who’d escorted her inside, as if for validation.
The greenroom continued to fill, the scent of burnt coffee and stale pastry wafting from a folding-table buffet.
Four tweed wingback chairs paraded by and through a doorway, to be arranged in front of the library’s central glass display case of ancient maps.
A production assistant handed Tash a lanyard, branding her as Guest.
“What is it called?” Olga smoothed her middle-parted, waist-length hair.
Tash stared back at Leo’s wife. “The book? It’s called The Colony . It’s a feminist dystopian novel.”
“I see.” Olga’s face showed no sign of recognition.
Leo smiled down at her beneficently. “We don’t read like we used to.” He smiled at Digby. “What with having so recently procreated.”
In Tash’s head, a celebrity sex designer rolled his eyes and groaned. Caleb had called this correctly—Tash had put a lot of pressure on this podcast appearance, forgetting how exhausting Leo’s pomposity could be. It occurred to her she might want to save her strength for the actual interview.
She spotted the two other Guest lanyard-wearers. With a Nice to have met you wave in Olga and Digby’s direction, Tash initiated a retreat. She’d confirmed Leo Rousseau could still trigger her sense of inadequacy with just a single sentence. How fantastic.
But as Tash reversed, Leo offered Olga further context: “Tash and I dated at the inception of the journal. I behaved badly.” Leo delivered this as if a bit of theater. He turned to Tash. “You were right to move on.”
Olga nodded. “It is terrible to be a young woman.”
Leo nodded back at her, all dramatic solemnity, gazing to his loafers. “It is terrible to be a young man, too.”
Olga rested her cheek against his chinos. She stroked a palm along his outer seam. Digby mewled, and Leo reached down to gravely pat his fluff.
And Tash could have left them to their moment, however ostentatious and false, but she recalled telling Caleb she’d come for a redemption—not to watch Leo let himself off the hook.
“You didn’t ‘behave badly,’ Leo. You gave me chlamydia and slept with my thesis adviser.” Every bit of blood in Tash’s circulatory system rushed to her head. “I didn’t ‘move on’—I dropped out. You made things so bad for me, I had to leave the program.”
Leo’s expression stiffened with something distinctly base. “We both suffered. We were young.”
But Tash refused it, a reckoning hammering behind her rib cage.
“You were almost thirty. It didn’t put a damper on your career at all.
” It was all she could do to keep her voice even; she reminded herself not to let him rob her of her grace.
“You launched a journal with university money. You became celebrated in your field.”
The conceptual artist Olga Horvat stood and interrupted, slotting herself between her husband and Tash. Like a bouncer, assessing Tash: “But you’re a guest on his podcast. People must celebrate you, too.”
“They don’t.” Leo flicked it witheringly, a cigarette butt of critique. “Not in any substantive arena.” He bent haughtily, retrieving Digby from the floor.
Olga laced a Swedish-looking fabric sack between her shoulders. Leo completed the ritual, helping their child scale his mother’s hip curve, lacing him into the backpack. Over his family’s heads, Leo glared at Tash.
He glared as an assistant materialized with a brown corduroy blazer, slipping Leo into his costume, delivering a binder, ostensibly nudging interview information at its host.
Leo glared as he was hustled into his wingback armchair, to one side of the library’s display case, and as Tash and the two other authors were arranged in their arc of equally tweed seating on the other side.
He glared at her through the sound check, four humans with microphone cages angled overhead like personal recording chandeliers.
Leo glared, and it began to fill Tash with foreboding. She should have waited to get combative. She considered leaving before the taping started, while there was still time. She searched the crowd, now fully assembled, anxious to locate Janelle.
When Tash finally caught her eye, Janelle waved her butterfly sleeves overhead. Tash smiled weakly, fighting the urge to hurl. The moment arrived, and Janelle hooted as the library doors sealed closed.
An audio engineer shushed the whole place, gesturing at Leo with green placards.
“Today, the journal finds itself taping live, in the state of Florida.” Leo’s podcast persona embarked.
“The physical, and the metaphysical state of Florida: key lime pie and NASCAR; alligator wrestling and orange groves; theme parks, beaches, and the laxest gun laws in the nation. Florida is where right-wing backlash roams free and shouts loud. It was our country’s last frontier, its inland swamps subdued long after the fabled cowboys and gold rushes of the American West.”
The room had ceased to rustle.
“This state—this metaphysical state—figures in the work of three area artists joining our conversation today.” Leo paused to swing his smile magnanimously from the rows and rows of listeners around to the authors.
“Kris Lemur-Whitting, whose genderqueer memoir of a childhood spent in the Tate’s Hell doomsday cult on the Florida Panhandle won the Seminole Prize. ”
No applause; the audience had already been instructed to refrain for the sake of the audio recording.
“Alette Decuir, whose Creole-inflected poetry of the water margins between Florida and the Caribbean islands received the prestigious Fontaine Award.” Leo paused for a millisecond, flipping the page of his binder.
“And Natasha Grover.” He turned the binder face down. “A Florida native whose small-press debut brought feminist dystopia to a mass-market audience.”
Mass-market —Leo’s favorite slur. Tash knew he meant it vindictively, a spiteful reference to her undiscriminating public. She’d encountered the insult often when they were a couple, especially when she proofread his harshest journal rants.
Tash began to sweat.
He opened the discussion with a question about “cultural memory”—inquiring about the way “the political and emotional terrain of Florida” appeared in each author’s work.
A left-to-right question-and-answer pattern ensued.
Because Tash sat farthest away from him in the guest semicircle, she was the last to answer: