Page 49 of Total Dreamboat

Hope

I know that I’m getting fired when Stacy, our firm’s founder and CEO, calls me into their office the second I walk into work on Monday.

I’ve been braced for this and try hard not to panic. You can get a new job , I reassure myself. You can apply for unemployment. It’s for the best.

Stacy is in their late forties, rail thin with a platinum pixie cut and arms always clinking in hammered silver bracelets.

They’re a consummate gaming nerd with a popular Slack channel, and the single most powerful publicist in this sector of tech.

I haven’t worked with them closely, since they’re Magda’s boss, but I respect them immensely.

Even though this job was not a good fit, I regret they’ll remember me as a fuck-up.

Stacy is all business as they invite me to sit down.

“Hope,” they say, “I’ll get right to the point. While you were away, Magda was terminated for cause.”

It seems I’m not the only person who has noticed that Magda is inconsistent, disrespectful to her employees, and delegates literally all her work to other people.

Stacy explains that the Conifer press release that went out late had actually been Magda’s deliverable—Stacy had reassigned oversight of the whole project to her weeks ago when I got my approval to go on vacation.

So when it wasn’t sent out on time, it was Magda who had to account for why—and me being unreachable on vacation was not an acceptable answer.

“It’s become evident you’ve been picking up a lot of slack for her, Hope,” Stacy says.

“And I regret that I didn’t notice the problem sooner.

I’m impressed by how you’ve handled your workload while covering so much of hers.

Your writing is fabulous, you have great contacts, you’ve been securing awesome coverage, and the clients at Conifer love you.

So I’m wondering if you’d like the opportunity to step into Magda’s role. ”

They explain it would be on an interim basis, as they are required to open the job to outside candidates. “But I see great potential in you, and I’d strongly encourage you to throw your hat in the ring for the permanent position.”

The interim role will come with an increase in responsibilities, but since I was already doing a huge percentage of Magda’s work, it won’t cut into my time that dramatically. And it comes with a substantial bump in pay.

Enough that I could afford to quit tutoring.

It is not, by any means, my dream job.

But it’s a chance to carve out time for myself.

It’s a chance to use my evenings to write.

I accept.

At first, I attempt to refine my short stories. Gabe, after all, convinced me they were my path to literary glory, and for all his faults, he’s a card-carrying member of the publishing elite.

But when I reread them, they’re unconvincing and pretentious, with an affected point of view emblematic of a person I was trying to be, not the person I actually am.

I’m determined to do better.

It’s not easy.

I flounder for weeks, spending my nights coming up with bad ideas, stopping and starting, losing confidence and then reconvincing myself the effort will be worth the frustration.

That this—writing fiction—has always been the thing in the world that I’m best at.

That I owe it to myself to try.

And then, late one night, a tiny glimmer comes to me.

I open my laptop and type three words in bold twenty-four-point Times New Roman font: Doomed Bourgeois Marriage.

It’s not a plot. It’s not even a full idea. But the title gives me a little shiver every time I reread it.

I know there’s something there.

On the third chilly fall night I spend staring at it, the story finally comes to me: a professor of nineteenth-century British literature has spent her life studying the canon of her field in hopes of pushing scholarship around the marriage plot infinitesimally forward.

But she’s disillusioned with her dwindling humanities class sizes in the age of STEM, a body of work that increasingly feels like pedantry, and cutthroat palace intrigue among her university colleagues, who circle like sharks around an ever-shrinking number of tenured jobs.

She decides to put herself at the center of a one-woman ethnographic study.

She’ll marry someone solely for money, and examine the subtle tortures of the heroines she has studied from the inside of the story, rather than from the pages of a book.

The results, she hopes, will form the substance of a memoir that will bridge scholarship with lived experience, and transform her from an obscure academic to a literary star.

But when the book doesn’t sell, she must grapple with the fact that she’s done what so many doomed heroines have done before her: attempted to use a relationship as a means of escaping the disenchanting confines of her life, and ruined what happiness she had in the process.

It’s inspired by what might have become of me had I stayed with Gabe—a hard-won theme about which I have something vital to say.

I paste the synopsis into an email to my old agent. I don’t know if she’ll even reply, it’s been so long since I’ve been in touch. But she writes back the next morning: Very compelling . Send me pages when you have them.

It’s the boost of confidence I need. The words begin to flow.

Despite not being a morning person, or even a midmorning person, I drag myself out of bed every day at five a.m. to write for an hour. Every evening, when I have more time, I reread what I’ve written, edit it, and jot down notes about what to write the next day.

That’s all the time I can afford. With work, I barely have a minute to think. And that’s good for me, because if I had any slack in my day, I would spend it ruminating about Felix.

Three weeks ago, a huge box arrived in the mail. It was so heavy I had to ask my super to help me carry it into my apartment. Inside was every single product made by Maquille. Moisturizers, serums, tonics, sunscreen, masks, even four different flavors of lip balm.

It came with a note.

HI HOPE!

SENDING ALONG OUR NEW PRODUCT LINE, AS WELL AS THE CLASSICS. THE VITAMIN C SERUM IS ESPECIALLY brILLIANT. THANK YOU FOR TAKING CARE OF MY DEAR brOTHER IN THE BAHAMAS. DO DROP A LINE IF YOU MAKE YOUR WAY TO LONDON! WE’D ALL LOVE TO SEE YOU! PEAR XX

The skincare products are lovely, as is the gesture. But what floored me is that they arrived at all. Because she had to have gotten my address from Felix. And if she was feeling friendly enough to send them just because she knows I like the brand, she must not know what happened between us.

It’s such a scant thread, but I feel connected to him, knowing he must know about this, and did nothing to stop his sister from getting in touch. I examine her last line— we’d all love to see you —and wonder if that’s a hint.

I know this is my pattern. I brood over people I cared about, even when they’ve hurt me. It’s like my heart can’t catch up to my head.

But also, my anger has mellowed. You see, I think Felix was a little bit right about me.

I did need to throw myself into a book rather than a relationship.

I do need to find myself.

“You need to let him go, sugar,” Lauren tells me when I confess I’ve been thinking about Felix on our daily FaceTime.

She’s still shooting in Australia. Her television work has given her a lot of new content to pivot to, which is convenient, as she’s now dating Colin and moving away from her sugar baby brand.

“He knows where to find you if he wants to say he’s sorry,” she says.

“I know,” I say. “I’m not going to contact him.”

But that doesn’t stop me from tracking down Pear’s email address from her company website and writing her a note.

Hey Pear! Thank you so much for the box of goodies. I feel radiant just looking at them. No plans to cross the pond soon, but get in touch if you’re coming to NYC. All the best to you and your family.—Hope

She writes back within minutes:

Will do, darling. By the way, you didn’t hear it from me but Felix is hopeless without you. xx

My stomach flips so violently I feel like I’m back on the cruise ship.

I can’t come up with a reply. If I let myself dwell on what it means I’ll obsess.

So instead, I bury myself in my story.

Months go by and the manuscript slowly expands into three chapters, then five, then eight.

The words not only flow, they overflow far beyond the amount of time I can devote to capturing them.

I’m living for Christmas break, when our office closes for two weeks and I can go home to Vermont and use every spare hour not spent with my parents to write.

I’m already stressed that I can’t just hunker down in one place—that I’ll have to spend my time going back and forth between their two couches, navigating the tension between them as the only child of their divorce.

I leave for the airport straight from work and arrive at Burlington International just after seven. As I step onto the jet bridge, my bones immediately snap into the understanding that we are now in Vermont in winter. Brutal, but nostalgic. The feeling of home.

My dad is picking me up, so I text him to let him know I’ve landed. He says he’s parking and he’ll meet me at baggage claim. But when I get there, the first person I see is my mom.

My tired eyes cross at the cognitive dissonance, and I wonder if this is a coincidence—if she’s here to collect some other relative.

But then my father walks up beside her.

They smile and wave, looking both happy and sheepish.

“Hey,” I say, walking up to them, unsure who I should be hugging first. I haven’t seen them together since they told me they were separating.

Mom makes the decision for me, pulling me in for a hug.

And then the damnedest thing happens: my father wraps his arms around both of us. It’s the hug of my childhood. I’d get this same hug—her around me, him around her—every night before I went to bed, every morning before I left for school, every time I was sad or happy or needed comfort.

I never thought I would experience it again.