1
Katrina
The bookstore is nothing like I remember. They’ve remodeled, white paint covering the exposed bricks, light gray wooden shelves where there once were old metal ones. Cute candles for sale and Jane Austen tote bags occupy the front table instead of used books.
I shouldn’t be surprised it looks different. I’ve pretty much given up buying books in public in the past three years, including from Forewords, where I’ve only been once despite the bookstore being fifteen minutes from our house in Los Angeles’s Hancock Park. I don’t like being recognized. But I love books. Doing my book buying online has been torture.
Walking in, I eye the bookseller. She’s in her early twenties, not much younger than me. Her brown hair’s up in a messy bun, her green nose piercing catching the overhead lights. She doesn’t look familiar. When she smiles from the checkout counter, I think I’m in the clear.
I smile back, walking past the bestseller shelf. Only Once sits imposingly right in the middle, its textured blue cover with clean white typography instantly identifiable. I ignore the book while I move deeper into the store.
This visit is something my therapist’s been pushing me to do for months. Exposure therapy, conditioning myself to once more find comfortable the places I used to love. Pausing in the fiction section, I collect myself, remembering I’m doing fine. I’m calm. I’m just me, looking for something to read, with no expectations pressing on my shoulders or stresses jackhammering in my chest.
Covers run past me in rows, each waiting to be picked out. Everything is crisp with the scent of pages. I knew the Los Angeles independent bookstore scene well when Chris proposed we move here from New York for the job he was offered in the book department of one of Hollywood’s biggest talent agencies. Each shop is varied and eccentric, indignant icons of literacy in a city people say never reads.
Which is why I’ve hated avoiding them. The past three years have been a catalogue of changes, facing realities of the life I no longer knew if I wanted and the one I decided I didn’t. I’ve had to remember the quiet joys of my ordinary existence, and in doing so, I’ve had to forget. Forget how my dreams hit me with devastating impact, forget how horrible I felt coming close to what I’d once wanted. Forget Florida.
Everything’s different now. But I pretend it’s not.
The bookstore is part of the pretending. When I lived in New York on my own, before Chris, I would walk to Greenpoint’s independent bookstores in the summer, sweating into the shoulder strap of my bag, and imagine the stories in the spines, wondering if they’d lend me inspiration, fuel for the creative fire I could never douse. Reading wasn’t just enjoyment. It was studying.
I don’t study now. But I never lost the enjoyment. I guess it’s too integral a piece of me. Reading and loving books are the fingerprints of who I am—no matter how much I change, they’ll stay the same, betraying me to myself for the rest of my life. And bringing me into this bookstore, wanting to find something new to read until Chris gets home in the evening.
“Can I help you find anything?”
I hear the bookseller’s voice behind me. Instinctive nerves tighten my posture. I turn, hesitant. While she watches me welcomingly, I wait for the moment I’ve been dreading since I decided earlier today I needed something new to read tonight. Why should I wait for delivery?
The moment doesn’t come. The bookseller’s expression doesn’t change.
“Oh,” I say uncertainly, “I’m not sure. Just browsing.”
The girl grins. “Do you like literary fiction?” she asks eagerly. “Or is there a subgenre you prefer?”
I relax. The relief hits me in a rush. This is great. No, wonderful. She has no idea who I am. It’s not like people overreact in general to seeing celebrities in Los Angeles, where you might run into Chrissy Teigen outside Whole Foods or Seth Rogen in line for ice cream. Not that I’m a celebrity. It’s really just bookstores where the possibilities of prying questions or overeager fans worry me. If this bookseller doesn’t know who I am, I’ve just found my new favorite place. I start imagining my evening in eager detail—curling up with my new purchase on the couch, toes on our white fur rug, gently controlling James Joyce so his paws don’t knock green tea everywhere and stroking him until he purrs.
“Yeah, literary fiction generally. Contemporary fiction more specifically,” I say, excitement in my voice now. I’m going to enjoy telling Chris tonight that I went to Forewords and no one knew who I was. It’ll probably piss him off, but I don’t care. I’ll be reading while he’s working out his frustration on his Peloton bike.
“I have just the thing,” the girl says. She’s clearly delighted to have a customer who wants her recommendation.
When she rushes off, my nerves wind up once more. The horrible thought hits me—what if she returns, excited to pitch me the book she’s chosen, and she’s holding Only Once? I don’t know what I’d say. The couple seconds I have right now aren’t enough for me to come up with even the first draft of how I could extricate myself from the conversation.
Instead, it’s worse.
“Try this.” The clerk thrusts the hardcover she’s chosen toward me. “It came out last week. I read it in, like, two days.”
Under the one-word title, Refraction, imposed over moody black-and-white photography, I read the name. Nathan Van Huysen. I look to where she got the book from, and I don’t know how I didn’t notice when I walked in. The cardboard display near the front of the store holds rows of copies, waiting patiently for customers, which tells me two things: high-publisher expenditure, and it’s not selling.
His name hits me the way it does every time I see it. In New York Times reviews, in the profiles I try to keep out of my browser history—never with much success. The first is wishing those fifteen letters meant nothing to me, weren’t intertwined with my life in ways I’ll never untangle.
Underneath the wishing, I find harder, flintier feelings. Resentment, even hatred. No regret, except regretting ever going to the upstate New York writers’ workshop where I met Nathan Van Huysen.
We were each fresh out of college. When I graduated from the University of Virginia and into the job I’d found fetching coffee and making copies in a publishing house, I felt like my life hadn’t really started. I’d enjoyed college, enjoyed the rush I got learning whatever I found genuinely interesting, no matter the subject—fungal plant structures, behavioral economics, the funeral practices of the Greco-Roman world. I just knew I wouldn’t be who I wanted to be until I wrote and published. Then I went upstate and found Nathan, and he found me.
I remember walking out of the welcome dinner, hugging my coat to my collar in the cold, and finding him waiting for me. We’d met earlier in the day, and his eyes lit up when he caught me leaving the restaurant. We introduced ourselves in more depth. He mentioned he was engaged—I hadn’t asked. I was single—I didn’t volunteer the information. It wasn’t like that between us. While we walked out to Susquehanna River Bridge in the night wind, we ended up exchanging favorite verses of poetry, reading them from online on our phones. We were friends.
For the whole lot of good it did us.
When I take the copy of Refraction, the clerk’s voice drops conspiratorially. “It’s not as good as Only Once. But I love Nathan Van Huysen’s prose.”
I don’t reply, not wanting to say out loud his prose was the first thing I noticed about him. Even at twenty-two, he wrote with influences fused perfectly into his own style, like every English course he’d ever taken—and Nathan had taken quite a few—was flowing out of his fingertips. It made me feel the things writers love to feel. Inspired, and jealous.
In my silence, the clerk’s expression changes. “Wait,” she continues, “you have read Only Once, haven’t you?”
“Um,” I say, struggling with how to reply. Why is conversation way easier on the page?
“If you haven’t”—she starts toward the bestseller shelf to fetch the paperback. I know what’ll happen when she catches sight of the back cover. Under the embarrassingly long list of starred reviews, she’ll see the author photos. Nathan’s blue eyes beneath the immaculate black waves of his hair, the dimple he only trots out for promotional photos and press tours. Then, next to him, she’ll find his coauthor, Katrina Freeling. Young woman, sharp shoulders, round features, full eyebrows she honestly loves. Professionally done makeup, dark brown hair pressed and polished, nothing like it looks when she steps out of the shower or she’s reading on the patio on sweaty summer days.
The differences won’t matter. The bookseller will recognize the woman right in front of her.
My capacity for speech finally returns. “No, I’ve read it,” I manage.
“Of course,” the girl gushes. “Everyone’s read it. Well, Refraction is one of Nathan Van Huysen’s solo books. Like I said, it’s good, but I wish he and Katrina Freeling would go back to writing together. I’ve heard they haven’t spoken in years, though. Freeling doesn’t even write anymore.”
I don’t understand how this girl is interested enough in the writing duo to know the rumors without identifying one of them in her bookstore. It might be because I haven’t done many signings or festivals in the past three years. Following the very minimal promotional schedule for Nathan’s and my debut novel, Connecting Flights, and then the exhausting release tour for our second, Only Once—during which I made my only previous visit here, to Forewords—I more or less withdrew from writerly and promotional events. It was difficult because Chris’s and my social life in New York centered on the writing community, and it’s part of why I like living in LA, where our neighbors are screenwriters and studio executives. In LA, when people learn you’re a novelist, they treat you like a tenured Ivy League professor or a potted plant. Either is preferable to the combination of jealousy and judgment I endured spending time with former friends and competitors in New York.
If you’d told me four years ago I would leave New York for the California coast, I would’ve frowned, or likelier, laughed. New York was the epicenter for dreams like mine, and Nathan’s. But I didn’t know then the publication of Only Once would fracture me and leave me reassembling the pieces of myself into someone new. Someone for whom living in Los Angeles made sense.
While grateful the Forewords bookseller hasn’t identified me—I would’ve had one of those politely excited conversations, signed some copies of Only Once, then left without buying a book—I don’t know how to navigate hearing my own professional life story secondhand. “Oh well,” I fumble. “That’s too bad.” No more browsing for me. I decide I just want out of this conversation.
“I know.” The girl’s grin catches a little mischievousness. “I wonder what happened between them. I mean, why would such a successful partnership just split up right when they were really popular?”
The collar of my coat feels itchy, my pulse beginning to pound. This is my least favorite topic, like, ever. Why did you split up? I’ve heard the rumors. I’ve heard them from graceless interviewers, from comments I’ve happened to notice under online reviews. I’ve heard them from Chris.
If they’re to be believed, we grew jealous of each other, or Nathan thought he was better than me, or I was difficult to work with. Or we had an affair. There’d been speculation before our split. Two young writers, working together on retreats to Florida, Italy, the Hamptons. Photos of us with our arms around each other from the Connecting Flights launch event—the only launch we ever did together. The fact Only Once centered on marital infidelity didn’t help. Nor did the very non-fictional demise of Nathan’s own very non-fictional marriage.
This is why I don’t like being recognized. I like the excited introductions. I love interacting with readers. What I don’t like is the endless repetition of this one question. Why did Katrina Freeling and Nathan Van Huysen quit writing together?
“Who knows?” I say hastily. “Thanks for your recommendation. I’ll . . . take it.” I reach for the copy of Refraction, which the girl hands over, glowing.
Five minutes later, I walk out of the bookstore holding the one book I didn’t want.
Copyright © 2022 by Emily Wibberley. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
