Page 3
Story: The Page Turner
Chapter Three
“I finally found a bottle of Veuve.”
I turn. Marcus Flare is walking toward me. I am standing on the edge of the lake, feet in the sand.
“I think your parents were hiding it,” he continues. “Sneaky little bastards. I knew they had some taste.”
“Did you microchip me?” I ask. “I will scream.”
He raises his hands, still walking, holding two plastic flutes and a bottle of champagne.
“Truce,” he says. “I’m just here to apologize and listen. I can come off as a bit brusque sometimes.”
“A bit?”
“You’re certainly no shrinking violet,” he says. Marcus notices the flower in my hair. “More like a perfect peony.”
Has he microchipped me?
“I think maybe I just need to shut up sometimes and hear the words of a younger reader,” he continues. “Mine are certainly dying off in droves these days.”
I don’t say a word. He hands me the two glasses and holds up the bottle.
“Trick of the trade—you never twist the cork. You simply hold it tight and slowly turn the bottle.”
Marcus pops the cork effortlessly. The champagne doesn’t explode from the bottle, there is only a happy pop and a trail of steam, a small cloud that matches the one on the horizon.
“That plume of smoke from popping a champagne bottle is a kind of visible shock wave typically seen in supersonic exhaust streams from jets and rockets,” Marcus explains, pouring the bubbly into the two plastic flutes. “These shock waves appear when the pressure of the exhaust outflow is more than about five times as high as the surrounding air. It’s called a Mach disk.” He takes a glass from me. “Research always makes a writer sound smarter than he actually is.”
“Fancy,” I remark. “And to think I was doing a keg stand just a few weeks ago.”
“You’re very clever, Emma.”
I don’t respond. I let the sounds of a clarinet and trumpet from the jazz band on the deck drift through the night air.
“Tell me about this place,” Marcus says suddenly. “Michigan.”
“Now you’re interested? I thought you’d be back in Chicago tonight, on a red-eye out of this flyover state.”
“Did you speak to your professors this way?” he asks, bending down to nestle the champagne bottle in the sand.
“Sometimes,” I say.
“Feral,” he whispers to the water.
My mind somersaults back to college, to the passage about women he wrote that incensed me.
Marcus scans the lake.
“Looks like the ocean,” he says, inhaling deeply. “It’s quite charming, as is your family cottage.”
I glance at him. I don’t know this man, but I know I don’t trust him. I have that ability to suss out someone’s essence.
I take a sip of the contraband Veuve and watch the water lap lazily at my feet.
I turn toward Eyebrow Cottage.
The small arched windows in the roof wink at me.
I wait for him to speak. He doesn’t. The silence and his presence begin to unnerve me.
“My grandparents purchased Eyebrow Cottage decades go. GiGi—my grandmother—named it that because of the two dormer windows… See?”
Marcus nods.
“…which look exactly like two eyebrows that sit in the roofline. You probably know this already from research, but the windows are popular in shingled beach cottages like this, adding a curved facade that mimics the waves of a lake or ocean. But they are functional, too. They provide light and ventilation to a top-floor space.” I point. “Those windows were where my grandmother’s private office used to be. GiGi spent an inordinate amount of time in there, door locked. Eyebrow Cottage used to be a boardinghouse when my father was a boy.”
“Do tell,” Marcus says, interest piqued.
“I once heard my father say, after a few glasses of wine, how much he hated growing up with strangers in the house. He’s always wanted to get away from this place I think.”
I take another sip of champagne, mentally kicking myself for revealing too much information. Two drinks, and I’m an open safe. My parents would die.
“Go on,” he prompts.
I consider what to say next.
I cannot tell him that GiGi had a lot of money, most of which she made all on her own.
I will not tell him that she used the money she earned from boarders over the years to invest in the stock market in the 1970s and 1980s, buying shares of unknown companies like Walmart or Apple for a few bucks. Over time, she used those dividends to buy undeveloped land on the lake, a parcel here, a tract there. Like those stocks, she bought land for a pittance, sold it for a mountain of gold, knowing she was sitting along the edge of heaven and people would want that paradise one day and pay a pretty penny to get it.
“You have to be in control of your story,” she used to tell me. “No one else can write your happy ending.”
I stare into the eyes of her office.
No one was ever allowed entrance into her private retreat. On occasion, I’d get a glimpse inside. A few times I was playing with my sister, chasing one another up and down the giant staircase, and GiGi opened the office door as I was racing by.
Inside was a big wooden desk—as big as a ship to me as a girl—a lone typewriter sitting in the middle of it. The desk was covered with pens, lined notebooks and color-coded folders. File cabinets stood like sentinels below the sloping ceiling.
“Go!” GiGi would yell at us, and we’d scamper away, hearts in our throats.
She had a skeleton key to her office, which she wore around her neck like jewelry, and she never took it off, even when she swam in the lake.
That office was the one place—in a cottage filled with people—where she could finally be alone, pay bills, track her stocks and read.
A sacred spot.
I still can’t get into that office. It’s been locked since the day GiGi died. When I asked my parents once about the key, my mother said, “Your grandmother wished to be buried with it.”
I never believed my mother. I don’t believe most of what she tells me because the words she utters are only meant to improve her own standing. They are not used to aid or comfort another. She is a writer after all.
I watch people dancing on the deck before an orange sherbet sunset.
Jazz echoes along the shore.
“This all feels very Gatsby, doesn’t it?” I finally say.
I see my father spin my mother.
The Great Gatsby is, of course, my mother’s favorite book.
“Your GiGi sounds like quite a character,” Marcus says with a wink. “Perfect for one of my novels.”
“She’s too good for one of your novels!” I snap. I know I sound like a child, but I can’t stop. My mouth is a runaway train. “She was too smart. She was too independent. She didn’t need a man after her husband died. She did it all on her own. You write books for women, but they center on men.”
Marcus doesn’t say a word for a moment.
“And we’re back to square one,” he finally says with a sigh. “We were making such good progress.”
Marcus sips his champagne and looks for far too long into my eyes.
“You realize you cannot walk through this world blurting out anything that crosses your mind, especially in publishing. It’s a small world. Word gets around. You have a wonderful life ahead of you, Emma. Don’t spoil it by acting so… spoiled .”
“Why are you here?” I ask. “Not just at this party, but here on the beach? Why did you seek me out?”
“I’m here because your parents invited me,” Marcus says. “And I’m here because you are unlike any woman I’ve ever met. Most women would put on an act and be nice to me for the sake of their parents. Too many women your age don’t even know how to talk much less speak their minds. Their entire worth is summed up by the number of likes on an Instagram post. I also can tell you don’t like me, and I don’t actually meet too many people these days who are this…”
He laughs and waves his hands, searching for the right word.
“…I was going to say openly hostile toward me, but I’ll choose the word honest instead.”
“You do realize that you are a romance writer?”
“But I’m not.”
“But you are.”
His chest inflates. I continue.
“I think you’re just too much of a macho, pompous ass to admit it. You should be a proponent for romance, rom-coms, women’s fiction—whatever it’s called—and not a late-to-the-game, oops-now-that-I’m-successful-I’ll-reject-it apologist. You should champion other writers. I mean, you’re not Shakespeare. And you couldn’t even stand in Emily Giffin’s heels.” I pause. “Which, by the way, are way cuter than your shoes.”
“Are you done?”
“No. You asked why I don’t like you, and I’m telling you. Your verbal sludge is the crap female authors—really, any author who writes books with strong female characters who just happen to want unconditional love and a life of their own choosing—fight against.”
Marcus stands straight as a board. I think he is going to turn and walk away, but he stares me down until I stand straight as well.
“Oh, my God! I’ve already figured it out!” he says. “You’re a wannabe writer, aren’t you?”
He spits his words.
“Those quick comebacks and the snappy dialogue. The heroine who has it all but is so self-aware that she doesn’t want to be a nepo baby and wants to make it on her own. The protagonist whose grandmother instilled in her the value of hard work although she was rich. The author who wants to write a novel that her parents would never publish just to prove a point. Please! Your character arc is just as clichéd as you are, Emma Page. You’re already your own down-on-her-luck, angry-at-the-world character. Your family did everything wrong by giving you everything. You’ve never had any real struggles, so you create your own. Am I getting warm?”
I feel as if I’ve been slapped in the face.
“No!” I shake my head at him. “Because I know people. I know you want something. Or my parents do. I just know it. And I will find out and put an end to it.”
“Oh, you will?” he asks, again mocking me. “Our little literary Hannah Montana is all grown-up and a big girl writer cum detective?” Marcus laughs. “I’m actually one of the world’s most successful writers, Emma, so I’m a few chapters—and a few million dollars—ahead of you already.” He stops, retrieves the bottle from the sand and refills his champagne glass. He again studies me closely. “Shall I go on since you’ve psychoanalyzed me already and made your own snap judgment?”
I lodge my feet into the sand.
“You started writing a novel in college,” he continues, “because you were better than any ol’ Hemingway and Steinbeck. You were so much more woke than stupid ol’ Marcus Flare. You wanted to be Emily Giffin! Jen Weiner! Ann Patchett! So you pulled out your laptop, which was covered with stickers of classic book covers from Little Women to Pride and Prejudice , and you wrote and wrote your little book while wearing your favorite Taylor Swift T-shirt. Am I getting warmer?”
I have to hold myself from pushing him into the lake, but dammit, if he isn’t as good at pushing every one of my buttons as my family is.
But I am pretty good at that, too. I was taught by the best.
“You want to know why I write, Mr. Flare? It’s because I don’t see myself represented in your love stories. I don’t see strong women, like me or my grandmother. I don’t see real women. I see a man’s idea of what a woman should be, someone who needs a man’s love to save her rather than a woman who only wants to be loved as equally as she loves herself. Even your sex scenes are horrible. No woman wants her private parts described as ‘pleasure caves,’ or a man’s described as a ‘hungry boa constrictor.’ Not all women want to be thrown down on a bed, we don’t like to be passive while you amaze us with your prowess. We are equals, in sex and love. And someone needs to write about that!”
Marcus Flare applauds.
“So you have read and remembered me it seems,” he says. “You are such an idealist. Lord knows I love a young dreamer, but most dreamers never actually do much to make those dreams come true. It’s all just talk.”
“Why are you really here?” I ask. “Just tell me.”
“Let’s just say it’s an opportunity to build my legacy and improve my literary credibility, especially with readers like you,” he says. “Oh, who am I kidding? It’s a way for Marcus Flare to get even richer.”
He clinks my glass.
“And it’s a way for Marcus Flare to get even,” he continues. “With the publishing industry, that is. You know, you’re not the only one who has lost someone you love, Emma.”
From out of nowhere, a curious gull lands on the beach, tilting its head this way and that, scanning for a piece of food we may have dropped.
Marcus shoos it away.
“Nasty birds,” he says.
My mind flies to a moment not so long ago in this exact same spot.
* * *
GiGi got married on her eightieth birthday.
She threw a simple wedding for one—herself—at sunset on the beach in front of Eyebrow Cottage. She didn’t wear a wedding gown, or shoes, only shorts and a T-shirt with a Nora Ephron quote: Be the heroine of your life, not the victim .
An electric blue hydrangea was pinned into the bun of her long, silver hair, and she sported the veil she wore when she married my grandfather. She carried a bouquet of her own peonies.
Only a few people attended. There were more curious onlookers strolling the beach who stopped to watch than those who were actually invited.
Such is the result of a long, quirky life.
My parents and sister didn’t attend, much less RSVP.
I always thought my mom and dad believed GiGi had early dementia. Jess thought old age had exaggerated all of GiGi’s eccentricities into “old coot kookiness.” Mostly, they were just embarrassed.
But they weren’t there to see the incredible love on display.
I served as minister. I wasn’t ordained, but that didn’t matter to GiGi.
I could read the vows she had written, and that was enough.
“Do you, Pauline ‘GiGi’ Haskins Page, take yourself to love, honor, comfort, and keep in sickness and health, forsaking all others, for as long you shall live?”
“I do.”
The moment she took herself in marriage, the wind off Lake Michigan blew the veil off her face. She shut her eyes and let the lake breeze kiss her lips.
I wept.
And then I read a passage from Jonathan Livingston Seagull .
GiGi had wanted my father to read it for some reason, and I think she still believed her son might show up at the last minute to do so. In the days leading up to the ceremony, GiGi would hurry into the entryway every time the screened door creaked in the wind, or banged shut when I’d head outside.
“‘Instead of being enfeebled by age,’” I read, “‘the Elder had been empowered by it. He could outfly any gull in the Flock, and he had learned skills that the others were only gradually coming to know.’”
I looked up. GiGi smiled.
* * *
“‘Jonathan’s one sorrow was not solitude, it was that the other gulls refused to believe the glory of flight that awaited them; they refused to open their eyes and see.’”
When the ceremony was over, we danced on the beach to “Single Ladies” and the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer.”
“Listen to the lyrics, Emma,” GiGi said. “An entire story in just a few lines.”
After it was all over, GiGi and I walked the shoreline together.
Not far from the lighthouse, we stopped to watch the sun slink and bid farewell to another day.
“I found the love of my life with your grandfather,” GiGi said, her voice soft. “But I’ve spent the majority of my life alone, and I’ve had to learn to love just me to survive this long. That’s not an easy thing to do, Emma. We’re taught to hide our dreams, polish the edges off our uniqueness until our square peg becomes round. We’re told to fit in, be like everyone else, but that just robs the world of our power. You must love yourself unconditionally and completely or you cannot truly love another in the same way. You will not ever be able to become who you were meant to be. But when you do, when you take your own hand in life, you can change the world. Some will admire you for that, others’ hate will be just as strong.”
GiGi took my hand and shook it hard.
“The greatest romance you will ever experience is a love of self, and the greatest love story takes place right here.”
She touched my heart.
“Look!” GiGi said, nodding at the sunset. “The final wink!”
Just as she said that, a white gull took flight from the beach and soared over the lake until it melted into the orange sunset.
* * *
“‘Jonathan’s one sorrow was not solitude, it was that the other gulls refused to believe the glory of flight that awaited them; they refused to open their eyes and see.’”
“Excuse me?” Marcus asks, confused.
“Emma?” Jess’s call pierces the air.
“I’m going to get into trouble for disappearing,” I say, now wanting only to extricate myself from Marcus. “My family hates it when I go all Houdini on them during a literary event.”
I begin to turn away but stare into the horizon one last time.
“Emma,” Marcus says. “I hope we can put this behind us. We’re going to need to get along in the future.”
His words make my heart race anew. Why?
I stare at him and then toward the approaching sunset to calm me.
“That’s the future calling,” Marcus continues.
“No, that is the final wink,” I say.
“The what?” he asks.
“That’s what my grandma called it,” I say, pointing to the horizon, half of the sun still peeking over the lake. “It’s the time when the most magical moments occur.” I gaze upon the sunset and the day’s final light. “You just have to be present to witness them.”
The sun disappears.
“Here’s to a lifetime of magical moments,” Marcus says. “Truce.”
I turn.
“Scout’s honor,” he continues, holding up his fingers.
I stare at him unconvinced.
GiGi once told me that when people said “Scout’s honor” to convince you they are telling the truth, they are most likely lying. It’s the equivalent of someone looking away when you ask for the truth.
Play nice, Emma. My gut is telling me that I need him to like me right now.
He refills my champagne glass.
“Truce,” I say.
“Marcus?”
My mother’s voice. I turn. She folds her arms.
“Can you come say a word or two?” she calls. “Please! For me!”
“Now I’m in trouble,” he says. “Canoodling with the hosts’ daughter.” He winks. “The final wink.”
Ugh. Truce already over.
I watch Marcus head back to the party as my mother watches me on the beach.
She shakes her head at me, a silent, long-distance retribution.
No, I’m the one in trouble. I’m always in trouble.
Another figure moves toward the railing. Jess, watching. She sees me, turns and walks away. I track her silhouette heading up the stairs.