20.

I wake in the morning, grab my phone from my bedside drawer to check the time, and instead find a message from Lana:

I just want to say that as somebody who cares for you and loves you, it hurts me whenever you make me feel unwanted, like I’m a burden in your life. It feels like I always have to scrap for your time, and when I’m with you, you’re neither verbally or physically affectionate. We’re more like friends to you it seems. I don’t know why or how it became like this but it’s grown progressively worse over the last year. I regularly wonder where I place in your life, like I must be behind your writing and your work, and maybe even your friends, coming in at a distant third or fourth. If there’s nothing there, then please tell me, but otherwise, maybe we can do dinner tonight. Noah’s home, but how about you come over? But if this is it, just tell me.

What I want to tell is that it should be “neither verbally NOR physically affectionate”, rather than “neither verbally or physically affectionate”.

At least that’s the first thing that occurs to me.

But once that whimsy’s done (and I have no control of those things that pop in) I concede, through the guilt, that she’s right. I haven’t been those things, although part of it is due to the purgatory that our relationship’s become – that whenever I start feeling close to her, something comes up (like another argument, or even a disagreement), and I begin feeling distant. It’s become this cycle we’re caught in.

Through my morning stretches, breakfast, Words shot as I brush my teeth (these letter can’t be random), I deliberate what I should do, and decide I don’t know. I don’t have the courage to break up, although I don’t why. And whereas once I was wholly committed to committing, that’s no longer absolute because of all the damage we’ve done to the relationship with our squabbling.

By the time I get to work, I know that the clock’s ticking on a response. Lana will be at her job, growing increasingly impatient (and frustrated), and by noon I know she’ll send me a text saying (rightly, wrongly, or passively aggressively) that I could at least respond to her.

And she’s right.

I give myself half an hour to decide, and use that time to go through Shia’s edit of Melody’s book – I shouldn’t, since I’m no longer responsible, but I do anyway because I want this fucking thing to be good, but Shia’s cleared the bulk of my suggestions, at times when Melody’s written “I don’t agree to this” Shia has responded “I don’t either” (even when I’ve cited things that are grammatically incorrect), and Melody’s written in reams of extra shit amounting mostly to describing the same thing again on top of whatever original description sat there.

If I took this to Autumn, I know she’s likely to talk to Shia about ensuring she’s not capitulating just to be nice, and Autumn’s just as likely to talk to Melody about whether the book’s the best it can be, but Autumn’s powerless in this case. It’s happened before (and has happened increasingly) that the higher-ups want a book out, and are investing more power in some idiot author’s vision, rather than invest any stock in the author’s guidance.

That’s when I think I’d like to talk to somebody about it, to have somebody in my life that I can rattle these things off on a personal level, the way relationships are meant to be a coupling where those things can and should happen, although I don’t know if they do. Lana’s my only serious relationship of any length. Every other relationship has been short and awkward. That’s the why I keep going back, I guess – to have that thing that so many do.

See you tonight, I text her.

I glow sullen at work so workmates avoid me (sadly, they’re used to it), confirm with Autumn to catch up tomorrow, then fly out the door right on 5.00, go home, shower again, procrastinate for twenty minutes in front of the computer (and write for five minutes), then jump in my car to drive to Lana’s.

She paid for a big double-storey house she couldn’t really afford in a suburb (or a pocket of suburbia, as this area’s so tiny) of some affluence, but she’s good at making things happen because she does work hard, even taking on private clients to help her achieve her goals. That’s her strength. She sees something she wants, she pursues it.

When I park in her drive, the first uncertainty arises. This happens so regularly with me: certain from a distance, but uncertain when close-up. My radar is so fucked that I can’t trust its judgement, but I think if something’s scary, it’s potentially good because it represents something new, although there’s a fallacy in that, too, given how often Lana and I have been in this position.

I let myself into her house, and find her in the kitchen in this tight sweater that shows of her cleavage, and a pair of black denim. They’ve been artfully chosen for tonight.

“Hey,” she says. “You’re here.”

“Apparently,” I tell her.

It’s an oddity of our relationship and the way it’s developed over the years that there’s no kiss hello or anything like that. I think I tried to implement it once, but the practice got lost in one of our regular skirmishes.

She’s made veal for dinner, along with a variety of other vegetables, and has a glass of red wine (fuck) on the table, and a glass of beer for me.

“How was work?” she asks.

As I help set the table, I tell her about the Melody situation.

She frowns – she frowns in a way that she might be scowling. “That’s wrong,” she says. “You should be doing that.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re a lot more qualified, a lot more experienced,” Lana says.

“Doesn’t matter.”

“So they’re going to release this book with all these problems?”

“I don’t know what the final product will look like,” I say, sipping from my beer, “but given the way Melody writes and Shia edits, who really knows?”

“What’s Autumn doing?” Now, Lana genuinely scowls.

“She can’t really do much more than she has.”

“That’s fucked.”

You might be thinking that Lana’s saying all the right things to get me back on side, but she’s genuinely passionate about this because she genuinely believes in a hierarchy – I’m the senior editor, Melody’s half my age, so the process should follow the natural order.

“Hey!”

It’s her son Noah, coming into the kitchen – eighteen, tall but thin, he’s the reinvention of his father without his father’s stringency (although, to be fair, his father has always been good with me). He’s dressed in a leather jacket and chinos, like he’s not hanging around.

“You going out?” I ask.

“Yeah – one of my friends wants to go to the movies.”

But he sits with me first, and we make small talk about football and movies that’s likely the equivalent of officechatter, but nowhere near as meaningless. We developed a great relationship when he was growing up, although the way Lana and her family could treat me (as an outsider) meant that instead of graduating into a step-parent, I was more of a glorified nanny.

His phone pings, and he tells us he’s got to leave – shaking my hand, he’s out the door, leaving just me and Lana.

She serves the food, and we sit across one another at the table. We could talk about the relationship now. That’d be expected – to iron out the issues – but either we’re afraid to face those crinkles, or they’ve become fault lines that we dare not antagonise.

“What else you been up to this week?” she asks.

I tell her about my meeting with Regina, the way it feels they’ve uninvested from me as a commodity, and here she shows less interest – I always feel when we talk about my prospective writing career like she sees it all as some obscure, improbable fantasy. She assures me she’s behind me, but we’ve had arguments in the past that’ve qualified her perspective. Writing’s an impossibility, even if some people do make it.

“Maybe you should write something that will sell,” Lana says.

“Like … what?”

Lana shrugs. “What’s selling?”

“It doesn’t matter what’s selling now. Trends change. I could base it on something now, and by the time I finished it’d be something different.”

“There are things that are popular, though.”

“That’s what I thought Wunderland was.”

My novel, Wunderland, is like a suburban domestic noir that explores mental health and deteriorates into a horror – well, of sorts. I don’t think I have it right yet, but the basis of it is strong. It’s just working out the rest. It’s only taken three years.

“I got a rejection for that, too,” I say.

“I thought Leopardus already rejected it.”

“This was somebody else.”

“You know it’s a hard business,” she says.

This is her great advice. It’s not that I need constant assurance (although sometimes I might, just like any other writer who spills themselves onto the page – being rejected is like being rebuked, like a scathing condemnation telling you that you’re not fucking good enough, loser) but she reiterates this simple fact as if I’m unaware of how difficult the industry is, and she has this lofty advice that’s inaccessible to everybody else.

“So if you’re submitting to other publishers,” she says, “are you and Leopardus done?”

“I don’t think their new fiction publisher, Regina, likes me,” I say.

I recount the conversation I had with Regina, but halfway through Lana starts clearing the table. She tells me to keep going, but now I feel like I’m talking to an empty room. The only thing she invests in is me saying Regina would like a female James Bond; on that point, Lana agrees with me. Here’s our common ground. I wish it was an investible commodity.

Rising, I help her clear up, then we sit in front of the TV. She hands me the remote, because choosing movies is my thing, but what I notice is how close she’s sat next to me. Her couch isn’t partitioned with cushions – it’s just one long slab, so there’s no allocation as to who should sit where, but if there was, she’s half in my space.

This is where I grow conflicted: I like her closeness, the warmth of her against me, and the feeling of being a part of somebody else so it’s not me and her, but us, but equally she’s squashed so far into me that the armrest of the chair is digging into my ribs.

We watch Joker – she likes romcoms but I put on Joker because it’s enough of a marquee movie that I think it’ll grab her interest (she says she’s happy to watch anything, but really isn’t), and then after it’s finished, she offers to make us each a cup of tea.

“What’re you up to tomorrow?” she says. “Do you want to do something?”

“I’ve got dinner with the guys,” I say.

“What about during the day?”

Now I tense, because I’m going to have bring up coffee with Autumn. Lana’s always been jealous of the friendship I’ve developed with Autumn, even when there’s been nothing to be jealous about, despite all the times I’ve assured her, or chosen her over Autumn (and, often, unfairly to Autumn), and in spite of the amount of times Lana’s blown up over something nonexistent (and which has later proven to be nonexistent).

“I’m catching up with Autumn,” I say.

“Oh.”

Lana finishes making the teas, and as she brings them over and sets them on the coffee table, I can see the gears in her head ticking, can hear them clicking over, can feel her tenuous resistance to not blow this out of proportion evaporate like … fuck, I don’t know. Something that evaporates easily. My hold on the Melody edit, maybe.

“Don’t you see enough of her at work?” she asks.

“There’re other people at work,” I say.

“So?”

“Well, we can’t talk like we usually would with others around.”

“What do you need to talk about that you can’t talk about in front of others?”

“Just, you know, the way friends talk.”

“You work with this woman every day,” Lana says. “You see her every day. You used to take walks with her? Do you still do that? I bet you do. So why do you need more alone time with her?”

“She’s a friend – that’s all.”

“And what do you need to talk about?”

“Nothing – it’s just a catch-up.”

“I just don’t see why you need to catch up with her on top of the time you spend with her at work.”

“What time?” I ask. “She’s in her office. She’s got meetings. She’s talking to authors and staff.”

“You’re one of her staff.”

Here are the things that go through my mind:

 

• this’ll be a circular argument I can’t win, even if I apply reason.
• while I understand Lana’s insecurity (and jealously) we have done this argument so many times, and so often Lana says she’s fine with my friendship, and sometimes she is … until she isn’t.
• that I could cancel my catch-up with Autumn (as unfair that would be) but that wouldn’t end these hostilities with Lana; it’d be a temporary cease—

 

“How would you feel if I had a male friend I kept catching up with from work?” Lana interrupts my reverie.

“As long as he knows you’re in a relationship, I’d be fine with it,” I say, although I’m not sure I would be, but I know I’d try.

“You’d shriek at me the way you do when you argue,” Lana says.

“I don’t shriek.” I do sometimes, but I’m not shrieking now.

“That’s what you do,” Lana says. “Like you shrieked at your publisher.”

“What? When?”

“This argument you told me about.”

“You weren’t even there,” I say. “How would you know how I responded?”

“Because that’s what you do.”

“I give up,” I say, rising.

I walk out to the landing, Lana following close behind, and continuing to berate me as I shove my feet into my shoes, then charge out.

It’s only a few minutes later, when I’m driving back to my place, that my phone beeps and I see a wordy message pop up on my phone.

At the first red lights that stop me, I pluck my phone out of the change compartment, and delete the message unread. We used to have epic arguments back and forth over text. Conversations didn’t work. And shouting meant we weren’t listening to one another. But I’ve determined not to fall into that trap.

When I get home, I sit in front of the TV, dreading another message, because I really don’t want the assault, and instead take my shots in Words, before throwing something onto Netflix to watch – in this case Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which provides a nice distraction.

The problem is that once I’m in bed, I doubt everything about the situation – not this argument specifically , but Lana’s insecurity over the course of our relationship. She poses how I’d deal with it if the situation was reversed, and I do think that it’s likely I wouldn’t handle it well, but I know that’s not norm with people.

So we’re too much the same.

I don’t know if that should be a good or bad thing.

But knowing me as I do, I can’t imagined it’s good.