Don’t do it. That was the reasonable thing to do, of course. No one could force me to go further, nothing of value depended on the simple binary of do/avoid, on/off, select/move on. I’d spoken to my Berkeley therapist about it over the phone — my new one down here in Santa Monica isn’t fully up to speed on this aspect of the roiling mess of my life — and she’d encouraged me to consider how the choice could, yes, be empowering, but I might not be quite ready to push that far. Think, she’d warned, if you want to let the scabs fall off naturally and not pick-chip-tear at the healing wounds. But those wounds aren’t healing, not really, not as much as I think she believes they may be. I’m exceptionally skilled, I think, at faking progress, at feigning improvement, at aping that all is well, don’t worry about me over here.
Nothing is better and it’s probably worse, so why not do it? Tempting, sometimes, to fall down the rabbit hole and watch the phantasmagoria of my 16th year projected on its walls as I plummeted further, further, faster, faster. It certainly was quite the show when it was happening, full of chills and threats of violence and the deepest of black emotions, a real villain, worse, oh far worse than Julian, a maiden and her maidenhood, and no brave Duke Alexander to save her this time. No, the young Duke Alexander was 5,000 miles away in green and sweet Somerset, confused and fumbling with girls in the photography club darkroom, having his first tender kiss with Charity Ryan under an apple tree one pinky-gold October afternoon, swooning into her touch and letting her guide him gently, gently towards his first moments of delicate, innocent, lace-light passion.
But not for the Princess Melissa, who wasn’t a princess back then. She’d been a goddess, but her plinth was crumbling beneath her. She didn’t know who she was anymore, and that was precisely the way Josh Brookes wanted her.
I haven’t particularly been avoiding Josh’s resurgence in the media recently, at the suggestion of Sophie, my Berkeley therapist. “You are a person who lives in a world where he is going to flutter into public view from time to time,” she explained in our last session before the move south. “When you hide yourself away, all you’re doing is giving him power over you. You told me when First Flush came out, you actively avoided all reference to it. But you allowed yourself to read about the book, about him, about the writing of it. And then you allowed yourself to read the book itself. How did that make you feel?”
“Not as exposed as I thought,” I confided. “I felt safe, or safe enough in the place I was then. Like reading it didn’t mean he could actually touch me anymore, and these were just words on a page, and the words were arranged in a pretty entertaining way. I was there, but I wasn’t there, if you know what I mean.”
She leaned forward in her leather chair, stretched out her long legs and placed her palms on the knees of her jeans. “What do you mean?”
“I mean…” I trailed off, focused on Sophie’s leopard print booties. (Stuart Weitzman, I think.) “I mean, there were parts of me in all of those girls in the book. Like I’d been chopped up and sprinkled across the cast.”
Her eyebrows shot up in alarm. “‘Chopped up.’ That’s an alarming turn of phrase. Why did you choose that?”
I hadn’t even thought of how violent it sounded until it was repeated back to me. “I guess because, because to some extent Josh pulverized who I was back then. It’s like he cut me up into a bunch of pieces and selected the bits he liked to put me back together in the book in ways that he could deal with. He liked that I could write, and that I was pretty and very feminine, superficially, I guess. He liked that I read widely, and was interested in the stuff he gave me to read. He liked that I was curious about sex and eroticism. And he liked that I followed directions and was very, very discreet.”
“And what didn’t he like?” I saw her hand move towards the box of Kleenex — after a year of working together, she’s become quite observant of the first wobble of tears in the corners of my reddening eyes.
“I had my own thoughts.” I pulled a couple of tissues from the proffered box and balled them in my right fist. “I challenged him, didn’t always trust him to know what was right. I didn’t buy into the whole ‘men provide, women care’ dichotomy. I still had my friends, and in particular my friend Sean. And that I didn’t share his fucked up ideas about sex, at least not in the beginning.”
“Melissa?”
“Hm?” My knee was bouncing tik-tik-tik-tik, as if the movement would expel the anxiety creeping along my spine. I’d grabbed the pillow behind my back and was clutching it fast to my chest, resting my chin on the top of its grey canvas edge.
“You look like you’re going to squeeze the stuffing out of that cushion. Let’s go back to what you were saying about feeling safe when you read the book. Why did you feel safe enough to read it?”
Huh. “Because I knew that Josh couldn’t touch me through the page. Because I knew that if he tried to get to me, Julian would protect me. Jules promised me that as long as we were together, he’d never let Josh touch me.”
“Those are two different things, you know. We should think about them separately, okay?” (I nodded curtly, dabbing at the tears I was slowly leaking.) “You knew Josh couldn’t touch you through the page. He’s never tried to get near you since he went on that wild goose chase in London, right? You told me he knew you were still living with your parents after you graduated, and that his publisher knew where to find you in Pasadena, eventually. And now he knows that you’re in Berkeley, and he still hasn’t gotten near you. He could have reached you but he kept his distance.”
I drew my legs beneath me and picked at the red and black buffalo plaid throw on the side of the couch. “Well, yeah. I know. And I thought it was because he knew Julian would protect me. But now I don’t have Julian, and I don’t know how Alex will take any of this, or if he can really shield me like Jules did. I just… I don’t know. I don’t feel safe now. Without Jules.” Wow, that was a terrible indictment of Alex and it just flitted out of my mouth as if it were true. Is it true?
“Melissa.” Sophie’s expression was the same stern one — light brown eyebrows crinkling in towards the bridge of her nose, a slight tilt and inclination of the head, her crimson-glossed lips pursed very slightly — I’ve had every week since I told her I’d yet to tell Alex anything about Josh. I knew what was about to come — her earnest plea for me to bring Alex into my confidence.
I knew, I knew. I knew I was going to have to let Al peer through the keyholes of those nasty little chambers with their scenes of degradation and pitiful humiliation one of these days. I knew this as much as I knew that when he saw even one glimpse, peered upon young Melissa breaking herself for Josh’s pleasure just once, his fury at those visions would be too much for us both. I feared his little grey cloud would whip itself into a silky black funnel and suck him in, before spitting out some man, not him, bloodied, angry, sad. I’d at least had years to process the pain; so had Julian. For Alex, it was another agony, bitter and foul, for him to assume. I didn’t want him to feel it for as long as I could keep it boxed and put away on the uppermost shelf, so high even his long arms could not reach it.
“You’re going to marry him, Melissa. He is going to learn in a way you can’t control unless you take the reins here. Something is happening now with Josh, and he’s going to intrude into your world, even around the edges, even if he never appears at your door.” She passed the Kleenex again. “It doesn’t have to mean anything for you though. Josh doesn’t have any power over you now, and he hasn’t for a very long time. Don’t give him back the power.”
“But –” It was difficult to imagine that I’d ever taken back the power I’d once given to Josh without thinking much of it. Being with Josh sometimes felt like slipping into a glorious bathtub, the water full of rose petals and scented with ylang-ylang. Almost too hot when you dip your toe in but then you drift into it, the sting of the heat making its depths even more intoxicating. In those waters, I hadn’t had to think so much, my worries that I wasn’t ever going to be enough for myself or my parents or the world floated away in the steam. Josh just told me what to do, how to think and approach life and he always sounded so logical. But unlike a bath, his water never got cooler. He slowly, slowly made it hotter and hotter until my skin glowed pink, then red, but I thought the pain was part of the point of it all. He’d warned me it might hurt, but it was all to make my life easier, couldn’t I see? Easier, because he loved me. (He never loved me.)
“He can’t touch you. He doesn’t have permission to touch you, okay? He has to ask permission to touch you, to approach you, to speak your name.” Sophie shot a look at her clock before fixing me again with her light blue gaze. “And you know what? You had that power all along. Has he touched you once, come physically into your space in years? No. And that was you, Melissa. Not Julian. Not Alex. You kept him away, because he is afraid of you. Julian wasn’t protecting you.”
I dismissed her with a soft pffffffft from the corner of my mouth. “Julian took control of things with Josh. I felt safer that way, with all of his money being, like, a buffer between Josh and me. If I’d been on my own, Josh could have… I don’t know. If I’d been alone, I wouldn’t have had all the money to keep me safe.”
With a deft twist, Sophie drew her long, honey brown hair into a knot on top of her head. I knew this move — it usually presaged her displaying the truth for me like a tarot spread, where all the meanings in the symbols on the cards, the truth behind all the cups and swords and hanged men, were manifest even for a casual observer. “It never was the money. And it never was Julian. It was always, always you. Julian might have made you feel like he had your back if something had actually gone wrong, but Josh wasn’t staying away because he thought Julian might… get him in some way. Josh fears you, and what you could say about him. He knows what he did to you was wrong. Poking you in the wrong way — making it more personal than the letters from the publisher every year — could stir up a hornet’s nest he doesn’t want to think about. I’ve read his books. He may be a rapist — Mel, don’t deny it, you know he is — he may be rapist, but he’s not an idiot. He knows what could happen if you spoke up.”
She’d had to stop me, as she often does when he calls him a rapist. Even now, it still doesn’t seem right, not when we’d there had been so much doting affection, so many sweet words and awkward kisses, so many more than the pathetic terrors he’d also visited upon me. “No, Josh stayed away because he was being deferential to Julian. He’s very much of the patriarchy. He wouldn’t want to step on another man’s turf.” Actually, that sounded more ludicrous that what Sophie had just said to me.
“You still believing that? When he talked to you about the ‘natural order of things'” — she made little scare quotes, and I was distracted by the chips in her manicure momentarily — “he was saying that because he was looking to control you, not because he necessarily believes it. To lay out a path for you to follow. You told me that you like having a clear set of instructions, or a guidebook, or a map. You like a plan. Josh figured that out and gave you some very clear instructions on how to behave and think and look, and you liked ceding control for a while. Until you didn’t.”
Whoa. “You mean, he might not be a misogynist?”
“Well,” Sophie cracked her knuckles. “I do think he sounds like a misogynist, honestly. What I mean is that he may not believe that he should show Julian any deference because he’s a man, or because he was your husband. He was showing deference to you. Why? Because you have power — the power of exposure — and he shows deference to power.”
Silence, no, not silence. The pat of rain on the windowpane, the skittery clatter of her tortoiseshell cat tearing through the rest of the house, from kitchen linoleum to the living room’s scuffed oak floors to the green-tiled bathroom and around again, letting off steam. “I had the power all this time. And I’ve kept it.”
Sophie nodded, her smile tripping the dimples in her cheeks. “Yes. You had the power. And he could never touch you. He can only take back the power if you let him. He can only touch you if you give him permission.”
“Okay. Okay. But does that mean that I gave him permission to touch me back then, back when everything was so bad? I mean, we’ve talked about that just because you give consent one time doesn’t mean…” I trailed off. I knew I hadn’t meant to lead Josh on, to let him think that I was happy or satisfied or excited or any, anything positive when he’d lost control and not regained it and still, still I went back for more and more. And more. Until there was nothing left of me. Until Rachel finally stopped it all.
“No. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying now, and for all the years since you told him ‘no,’ he’s kept away. And you have Rachel, someone who can back you up if you ever want to say anything.”
“I don’t ever want to be public about this,” I sputtered. No way I wanted Brookes Babes calling me a fame-grubbing whore on r/joshkbrookes or r/brookesbabesarmy. I didn’t want a meaningful write up about me on Jezebel or an interview in the New Yorker (yes, even the New Yorker).
“You don’t have to be public to keep your power. It’s an option if you want it, but you don’t have to take it. We talked about Christine Blasey Ford, about what she’s been through, and how you didn’t think you had a story as important to tell. That’s fine. It’s your choice. But I want you to focus on how you have power over him, and only you can give it away.”
It took about a week for me to understand that I was a little like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz — I had had the power all along. Once I called time on our relationship, I’d taken every scrap of that power back and it was mine alone. It wasn’t Julian’s, or even Rachel’s, not at all. They were part of my team, to be sure, part of what allowed me to pass from day to day believing that Josh’s touch would never be upon my body again. But I was the one who barred the door, and only I could let him in again. There was no way for him to breach my defenses without risking exposure, and he knew that. He knew!
And much like I’d stumbled into reading that sketch of a review of First Flush when I’d been avoiding all mention of the thing, I found Josh’s podcast quite by accident. I’d already made the decision I wouldn’t be subscribing, or even dipping in once in a while. Sure, I’d heard his voice from time to time when I was least expecting it — chatting with Terry Gross on Fresh Air while I made rosemary chicken in the big Pasadena kitchen on our housekeeper’s night off, or narrating a one-off special on the Food Network about famous writers and their cookery skills. But those I’d switched off fairly quickly, once I recognized who was speaking. Julian saw Josh once on television, an interview with Colbert to plug a new book — I was in the bathroom, peeing on another pregnancy test as part of my useless fertility crusade. From the bed, Jules called out, “Mel, that Josh Brookes is on the telly, smarmy as ever. Shall I turn it off?” (Yes.)
I’d know Josh’s voice anywhere — it still fills my dreams, repeating my name from the end of corridors, slithering in my ear to wend its way through my brain like a loathsome, beautiful serpent, ready to strike. Melisssssssa, Melisssssssssssa. So when it came through the living room speakers a few weeks ago while listening to a podcast on the Black Death (strangely prophetic, in hindsight), I didn’t have to hear more than the first “Hello” before stopping mid-sweep of the floor. (A few minutes before I’d managed to dump half the contents of the Dyson onto the tile in emptying it into the kitchen bin.)
“Hello,” that dark, treacly voice welcomed me. “I’m Joshua K. Brookes, and I have a new podcast, ‘Daily Themes.’ In spite of the title, it’s a weekly podcast about writing. Each episode, I’ll explore a writing prompt with another author, and I hope you’ll join me in writing a response of your own. Here’s the catch: no response can top 300 words. Trust me, it’s not easy. The first three episodes are up now on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and wherever you’re listening to this now.”
That was it, about 30 seconds. 30 seconds where I crouched, frozen with dustpan and broom in either hand. Of course I knew the show was out — I’d known the first episode was dropping on January 31st, and my podcast app regularly recommended the show to me. I saw the names of the authors who’d appeared on the second and third shows, and I was impressed. Writers’ writers, both of them. I knew the conceit of “Daily Themes” and I was intrigued to hear how those who actually know their ways around writing approached the micro-format.
But listening involved also hearing Josh’s voice, and even with my therapist’s insistence that he could not touch me without my permission, what was listening to the podcast but giving him permission — unwittingly, perhaps — to touch me? As the history podcast returned from its promo break, I turned back to my tidying up, putting aside the question of whether I could gain anything from listening for another time. “Maybe when I’ve told Alex,” I said to myself. (I’m alone frequently now, and find I’m speaking to myself. A lot. Ben says it’s a sign we should start up book scouting to get me out of the house, and I agreed until COVID-19 made us all shut-ins.)
Yet like knowing there’s that stash of Girl Scout cookies in the freezer you know you shouldn’t devour at 3am when you wake up feeling a slight curl of hunger, I couldn’t stop thinking about Daily Themes and wanting to consume it. Might be good exercise, I thought — you may have noticed I’ve been writing more slowly recently, which I put down initially to getting settled in our new home, but now I can only ascribe to a surge of laziness.
From reading reviews of the show, I knew the basic premise: Josh publishes five writing prompts each Friday, with the instruction to write 250-300 words in response to at least one of them. “You can try doing all five — that’s what I’ll be doing,” he explained to The Verge, “but I expect many of my listeners have very busy lives. It doesn’t sound like many words, but getting one done is an achievement. Writing well in a very limited space is a particular skill, and it’s the one that made a splash for me in those very first online pieces I published about my fruitless hunt for The Girl. I cringe now at the topic, but I don’t at the style.” (Hey! I thought reading that last part, and then chastised myself for being offended that he now thought his stalking was not something he wanted to revisit.)
Maybe I could just look at the website. In incognito mode, of course. More information is more power after all, Sophie had told me. At her suggestion back in December, it had been the work of a few minutes (and borrowed login details to a property database that I’d nagged from Caitlin) to locate his home. Just to know how far away he really was from me in Berkeley, and where I would be in Santa Monica. He’d bought a pristine Eichler in Granada Hills, a four bed on Nanette Street, back in 2016 for about $800,000. Pretty good value to me, given the condition and the state of the market at that time. I also knew he paid over the asking price — who had fallen in love with it more, his pretty wife or him?
Sometimes when I really want to wallow, I’ll spend a miserable half hour flipping through pictures of the home (so easy to Google anything, really), mentally posing Josh and his family in the rooms and grounds like dolls in a hipster’s perfect mid-century dollhouse. Claudia, the younger girl, mid-gambol down the ten broad concrete steps from the crimson front door to collect the mail from the bright orange mailbox, her long brown braid slapping her back as she skip-hopped to bring the magazines and bills in for Daddy. Violet, now seven, small-boned and red-haired and serious as Josh (from what I’ve seen in nauseating family “candids” on Josh’s website), cross-legged and knobby-kneed in her blue shorts on her pink princess bed, reading Madeline to herself for the 81st time and dreaming of what it would be like to be a French étudiante queuing up in one of two straight lines. In the kitchen is their mother Sara, pulling a sheet of blueberry scones from the vintage range with her needlepoint oven glove, her dark blonde hair caught back in a bun secured by a single silver rod, calling out to her family that lunch is in 30, so be ready!
And oh! Who’s that in the study in the black leather Herman Miller chair, tapping away at the keyboard? Whoever he is, his posture could be better, but much of that comes from being a tallish man who makes his living stringing together words on a screen, forever hunched over his work. I resist the temptation to reach in and straighten his doll’s spine, ziippppppp, between my fingers. Dark hair like Al, but no long curls for me to sproing between my fingers. Heavy-framed tortoiseshell glasses, a dark blue mug of coffee at his left hand. I could pluck him out of his dream home by his aubergine sweater and watch him squirm between my thumb and forefinger, but I don’t. I watch him instead like Jove peering down from Olympus upon the mortals who strive and fail below. I watch and will not touch.
After the initial blast of First Flush-mania, after Josh had appeared in seemingly every magazine that I read online, and on Oprah (he was a Book Club read, naturally) and Ellen and all the late night shows, I continued to monitor what Julian called “the Brookes situation.” When he referred to it at all.
On my lunch breaks at Hughes & Pemberton, the marketing firm I’d returned to after my wedding and brief honeymoon, I filtered through the daily results from my Google alert on Josh. He was writing scabrous and frankly hilarious send-ups of English majors and millennials and hipsters for McSweeney’s (sample from later that year, September 2011: “I May Be a Member of the 99%, But Is It Too Much to Ask for a Copy of Swann’s Way to Pass the Time Here?”). There were weekly posts on his personal site, ruminations on getting (a little) older in New York City, being a man in a City of Women, how internet dating was ruining the thrill of the meet-cute. He told a story of being mistaken on OKCupid by a woman he’d nudged or liked or whatever it was called on that site for another man who had sent her a dick pic some five weeks before. When he protested that he wasn’t, he’d never be so crude, she asked if he’d send her one. (He stressed that he didn’t comply, but I have my doubts.)
Around the same time that Alex and Minty were starting to get a little more serious, maybe July, Josh posted a picture of a young woman in a purple academic gown, grinning for the camera wide enough that I could see one of her bottom incisors was a little wonky. It didn’t take away from her looks, as much as I wished it might. I recognized the gown from Caitlin’s commencement snaps, NYU undergraduate robes. “Met her in a bar…” was the caption, and I read on, like I’d been given a bowl of salted cashews and knew I shouldn’t keep consuming, no matter how more-ish, but kept popping nut after nut mindlessly in my mouth anyway.
“Met her in a bar. Mom always said, ‘Josh, never trust a woman you meet in a bar, a club, or in court, unless you’re an attorney and she’s a judge.’ Mom, you’ve been right about many things, but not this time.
“Met her in a bar. Wasn’t looking to meet anyone that afternoon, as it happens. Sometimes a writer needs a change of locale to unstick the words that clog between brain and fingers, tantalizingly in reach yet caught in some intractable dam. Libraries are good, if the racket of your fingers on your worn-down keyboard doesn’t elicit shhhhhhhhs from others. Outdoors can be tricky — wandering golden retrievers, humidity, the sunlight you yearn for when inside but which renders your screen inscrutable. Coffee shops? All well and good, if every seat isn’t taken up by some other jobbing author laboring under the influence of an Americano and a square of raspberry crumb cake that sits leaden in the gut 20 minutes later.
“Met her in a bar. Not my usual haunt in Williamsburg. Enough of you know which one that is without me repeating it. No, my agent had extended an invitation to my own evisceration, location: Manhattan. Can’t rest on your laurels, Josh. No more interviews until you get me a few chapters, something to show the publisher you’re worth that advance. Celebrity is a fatal disease that consumes your mind, and your mind is what puts words on a page and food on your table. Get serious or get out. I decided to get serious and get out, ears back, tail down, and into a bar a few doors along from her Tribeca duplex.
“Met her in a bar. Puffy’s Tavern, corner of Hudson and Harrison. Do you know it? I’d been once before, stood up on a second date with Renee the ballet dancer a few months after I made it to Brooklyn. The bartender back then told me it was no loss, dancers were real pieces of work. Flighty, he said as he pushed the second pint of Boddington’s along the worn oak bar to me. You’ll be back with your forever girl one of these days. I nodded, mostly to be polite. After all, he’d promised me my third pint would be on the house.
“Met her in a bar. Not at the bar, not this time. At a table, laptop open, like a responsible adult who meets deadlines and pays his goddamn electricity bill. Nobody said a pint of Newcastle was out of bounds, though. Sometimes the careful and judicious application of a decent ale pulls the stopper out of the bottled mind, at least for me. I thought I’d had two chapters of the book wrapped up already, but I’ll admit: dating in New York was siphoning away my enthusiasm for just about everything, my embryonic sophomore novel included. ‘We want First Flush again,’ the agent had told me over babka from Zabar’s and cardamom-scented Turkish coffee, ‘but we don’t want to see it through Wrig’s eyes. You can go back and revisit him in 10 years, see how he’s doing. What if you wrote this one from the viewpoint of one of Wrig’s girls? But not as an undergrad. And it can’t be a coming of age novel. Something more domestic. And not actually one of his girls. So like First Flush but nothing like it, okay, Josh?’
“Met her in a bar. Sounds creepy, but I knew who she was before I saw her. I’d been mostly on my own in the room, not so surprising at 2:30 on a Wednesday. Just me and the weedy guy behind the bar in a navy ‘Support Your Local Bike Shop’ tee. He’d been polishing the same two glasses listlessly for half an hour, after the lunchtime rush had passed. I don’t know how to write a woman’s voice — this perhaps-truth pecked at me, heckled me. I love women but how could I ever speak as one? And then, a voice, a woman’s voice, her voice. ‘A Chimay, Mark.’ I knew her immediately. I knew her immediately, though when I raised my head to see who’d followed the silvery chime of the bell on the bar’s door she was a stranger.
“Met her in a bar. Pretty. What a workaday word, and I chastised myself for its spontaneous expression as my first thought of her. You’re a writer, that’s all you got? Before I could summon at least a fifty-cent word that spoke more eloquently to her mien, she’d grabbed her sweating glass and bottle and was bunching her golden eyebrows close together, inspecting me like I was a puzzling piece of art on a gallery wall. I’ll be honest — I get stared at frequently. All that celebrity my agent had railed against as fatal to a young writer’s career had swept away my anonymity in a choking cloud of dust like an unpounded eraser wiping away an equation on a chalkboard. ‘Weren’t you a TA in Professor Cho’s class on British Romanticism last year? You look really familiar.’
“Met her in a bar. Don’t tell her who you are blazed briefly before me, the iron-heavy letters picked out in smouldering flames. But I knew her, I knew her, and she’d soon know me. I’ve been on TV recently. It’s probably that, I suggested. Before I could stand to greet her, ask her to join me, she’d scraped a banged-up oak chair across the patterned tile floor and seated herself. ‘TV? What for?’ Her accent wasn’t New York — I placed it in what my freshman roommate at Yale termed dismissively ‘Flyoverstan.’ How could I explain what I do without sounding like a prick? I wrote a book. People like it, and they want me to talk about it. I’m sick of talking about it.
“Met her in a bar. Those eyebrows knit again, her rosebud mouth tightened in a tempting ‘O’. I watched as she reached up to the topmost shelves of memory, before her lips slackened into a grin as wide and modestly glorious as the Wisconsin farmland she’d left behind for NYU four years before. ‘First Flush, right? I did all those Buzzfeed quizzes. I’m a Claire, usually. Once I was a Rebecca, but that didn’t make any sense. Sara, sorry. That’s actually my name.’
“Met her in a bar. Sara, that is. I met Sara in a bar four weeks ago and something in me changed. I said that a long time ago to the only other girl I loved. You know, The Girl. Something in you changed. She believed it as much as I did, until she changed again. Puppy love, my older brother consoled me, our voices arcing across the country through the telephone line. You’ll find your woman when you ripen a little. One day she’ll walk in a room and you’ll know, you’ll know and your stomach will clench and you’ll feel every follicle on your head and your body stand to attention like soldiers bristling for a clash.
“So I met her in a bar. This is Sara. She’s 22 and training to be a teacher. And she’s training me to be a better man. I love her and she’s kind enough to love me back, though I hardly deserve it. Sometimes you might find us together at Puffy’s, where the bartender had once told me the future: You’ll be back with your forever girl one of these days. Forever isn’t a sentence, it’s a promise. A promise I intend to keep.”
22? I sneered to myself on that first reading of many. Still likes them young enough to mold. Sara’s golden hair and amber eyes glowed from my laptop screen, the radiance of a young woman yet to undo herself in marrying Josh. That was purely an assumption, of course. All I knew of Sara was what Josh wrote on his blog, or a rare snippet of an interview somewhere like Marie Claire or Cosmo. Both of those were in larger pieces about female writers who had married other writers, about juggling writing with motherhood and being a present spouse. Sara Cosgrove Brookes had been planning to teach English for a few years while working on her poetry, to build a little nest egg and service her student loans, then scramble her way, somehow, to a Master’s program in Britain. “I’d always figured I’d follow the voice singing to me, and that song was coming from somewhere in England.”
She never made it. Never even made it in front of a classroom. Sure, she published that volume of poems she’d been honing throughout college, some of those verses even since high school. They really weren’t that bad, a clutch of dreamy midwestern Georgics. She had more than a raw talent, no matter how much I wished she were a fraud. The praise that little book received when Josh’s publisher pushed it out to surprisingly low fanfare a few months later was deserved.
But Josh didn’t have to wait with Sara the way he had with me — he locked her down, tight, tight, tight, as soon as he could. It was only four months later that my mom was calling me breathlessly from the Burbank Ralphs produce section to let me know she’d run into Josh’s mom as they were both picking over apples for Thanksgiving piemaking. Mrs. Brookes had heard only that morning — a spring wedding in Brooklyn, nothing splashy, but Josh’s publisher was trying to get the New York Times to cover it in their Weddings section, just a little extra push, since his next book was on schedule to be released a few weeks later.
The push was successful; I read all about it in nauseating detail one April Sunday Jules was in Miami for work. Rachel came over and we drank bourbon and mocked Sara’s empire-waisted, red-sashed wedding dress (which looked uncomfortably like the one Josh had once sketched for me, for the wedding I’d never have with him). She egged me on as we excoriated all the fashionably-bearded hipster dudes and doe-eyed editorial assistants in vintage Laura Ashley in attendance.
“Think ’bout it this way, whore,” Rachel had slurred at my breakfast nook, tucking into her third slice of sausage and onion pizza. (Rachel only eats pizza or really many carbs at all when she’s too sloshed to consider that she might bloat from a size 2 to a 4 for a day.) “He’s gonna be way, way, way too busy in Brooklyn keeping whoever that girl is in her place to think ’bout you. ‘S’long as you stay outta his way like you have been, byeeeeeee Josh.”
“I wish she weren’t so gorgeous. And so young,” I sulked, picking at the sausage on my slice.
“The fuck you talking about, loser. How old are you? 26? Fuck off. The most ‘portant thing is it wasn’t you.” Rachel hopped down from her stool, wandering over to the fridge and sticking her bright blonde head in its stainless steel depths. “Sick of booze. Got any edibles?” I did not; Jules did not allow cannabis in any part of his home, though he had no compunction about snorting line after line of high quality cocaine in his study.
No harm had ever come to me from reading Josh’s blog or his books or from peering at his wedding pictures on Facebook (he had them set as visible to friends of friends; improbably, he and Mack remain FB friends in a connection I never really understood). Violet Claire and then Claudia Elizabeth arrived in a one-two punch to my continuing infertility — “Irish twins!” my mother had remarked upon Claudia’s birth, thinking I was still interested, which of course I was. These little girls made me even more resentful of Sara, for being younger and an actual writer and a mother, twice over. And Josh’s Forever Girl. Not that I wanted that for myself, but knowing that my starring role as The Girl had faded first to supporting player and on to “Whatever Happened To?” in the dramatic arc of his life stung, even if I didn’t want it to.
(It’s always all about the Princess Melissa, even when it isn’t, not at all. Miranda’s words once, from a long time ago. She’s probably right.)
No harm at all, so what would come if I listened to that first episode? Nothing, unless I gave him permission to approach, and I did not. And one afternoon a couple of weeks ago, I finally pressed play on Episode One of Daily Themes and waited to feel his fingers tighten around my arm as once they did, waited to feel him trace his name down my spine in a mark of possession.
Nothing. No pressure, no touch, but a voice, his voice. “Hello, I’m Joshua K. Brookes, and welcome to Daily Themes. This is a podcast about writing. About the art and discipline of writing. About writing passionately and with control. And about the doing of writing, every day.
“Being a writer is about the doing of writing, often when we least want to. Getting in the habit of writing every day is one I picked up in college, when I took a class called Daily Themes. Not to brag or anything, since if you’re listening to this you probably know who I am, but Daily Themes was one of the classic Yale courses, one offered to generation after generation of Yalies. My dad took it, my brother Max, too. It retains its luster because at its heart its conceit is simple: write every weekday, no more than 300 words, on a set topic. There was a 5pm deadline for submission, Monday to Friday. My dad told me that when he was an undergrad in the late 60s, you’d see young men — they were all young men back then, no women — sprinting across Old Campus to slide their themes under a heavy oak door at Linsley-Chittenden Hall by the deadline. By the time I got to Yale, we had not only women, but also e-mail. But the 5pm deadline remained, even if technology had eliminated the cardiovascular benefits of a brisk jog.
“The daily themes weren’t random, atomised, unattached: each week had an overarching leitmotif. One week might be memory, another magic. We had an entire week on anticipation — loss of something we almost captured, the moment before a first kiss, the feeling of being physically trapped before release. Five themes a week, snow or sun or mizzling rain, hangover or caffeine high.
“Writing is a discipline, as well as being disciplining to the writer himself. Since that senior spring, I have continued to write every day, at least 300 words, nearly always more. It really isn’t very many. Go ahead, type ‘sample of 300 words’ into Google and see what you get. I’ll wait.”
As I’d usually done when it was Josh giving directions, I followed along dutifully and searched.
“Maybe a verbose paragraph, right? Not a lot, which should encourage you and terrify you in equal measures. Because 300 words is your limit, dear listener. It’s a tight space to work in, and you’ll soon feel your elbows bumping up against the confines of the space, eager to burst out to let in some air.
“But writing is discipline. Writing may be joyful and creative and the ultimate expression of mankind’s beauty, but it is toil and agony just the same. The closest analogy I can think of is working out — when you hit that runner’s high, when your endorphins peak just so that you feel the intimate and exquisite pleasure of being alive alive alive, there is still that pang of pain, of the reminder of being mortal while we peek at the divine within our flesh.”
(You need more discipline, Melissa. No one has ever held you accountable, have they? It really explains everything about you. Don’t be afraid — it isn’t all bad. You’ll see how discipline can free you.)
“The point of ‘writing small’ — that’s how I always think of it — is that you’re forced to make decision after decision about what is truly needed to get your point across. Sometimes you’re focused on mood, sometimes on action, sometimes on character. How do you draw the aperture tight enough but still portray an entire scene? It takes discernment. Patience. Discretion.”
(You need to be more discreet. This is just between you and me. Letting other people in just complicates things.)
“It sounds like a lot, and I won’t lie: it is. But don’t be afraid.”
(Don’t be afraid. I know what I’m doing.)
“I’ll be working alongside you. Starting today — this first episode is dropping January 31st — I’ll post five writing prompts on the podcast website every Friday. Your job is to write no more than 300 words on as many of them as you want, or can. Try to write a little every day, even if your goal is only to write one of them in a week. You’re looking to create a pattern in your life where sitting down and committing words to paper or screen becomes another pleasurable thing you do every day, like sitting down for dinner with your family, or even playing a video game for half an hour. Find a time you can do it, and stick to it. Like any exercise, the more frequently you work the muscles, the more easily the muscles move.”
(Just a little every day, Princess. Tell me a story every day. It’s part of your discipline.)
“And starting next week, I’ll be welcoming another writer to join me here to talk about how he or she approached writing one of the themes. Being a writer can feel terribly solitary at times, especially if you’re embarrassed or sensitive about having others appraise your work. The social aspect of learning writing — because you do have to learn it, and you learn it only by doing — is underappreciated as a tool in improving one’s work. After all, what’s a story if it’s not shared?”
(What’s trapped in that head of yours? What aren’t you telling me?)
“I’m more excited about this than I actually know what I’m doing with the podcast, so please bear with me as I get used to presenting. My daughters seem to think I know what I’m doing most of the time, but their mom has a little more experience with my shortcomings. I beg your indulgence as I get my bearings here.”
(It’s not begging, Princess, if you know I’m going to give it to you. Ask me again, but this time, pretend I won’t let you have what you want.)
“So, yeah! Welcome to Daily Themes. A podcast where less is more.”
That was just over a week ago. At first I listened only, binging all the episodes one Saturday afternoon when Al was en route from London. (No more trips back for Al for the time being — the border is effectively shut to the UK, much to Fenn’s chagrin and worry that her early May show will be postponed until the coronavirus is under control.) Five authors, three men, two women. Writers’ writers, as I mentioned before — two novelists, a poet, a science writer and a political journalist. A deft touch, I thought, to include some non-fiction writers; after all, while all writing is storytelling, not every story told is fiction. And even then, there is often much truth in fiction as well as fabrication in what is supposed to be objective writing.
This week was Josh on his own in his home studio: his guest was a Dutch poet who’d found himself subject to a travel ban and was Skyping in. Coincidentally (maybe), the week’s themes focused on illness. I’d written 287 words myself, just one prompt responded to: Describe your reaction to caring for your beloved, parent, or child on their sickbed, but do not say what they are suffering from. How does your worry for their health manifest in your level of care? Are you compassionate or resentful? In those 287 words, I recalled caring for Alex when he’d twisted his ankle during football practice in San Francisco, just over a year ago. It wasn’t a terribly long recovery, only really the length of a weekend, but I was irritated by the experience. He and his mates had been drinking beer all afternoon, and the alcohol had leant him a level of bravado he doesn’t usually have on the pitch. He went for a tackle he swears he’d normally avoid and went down in a heap, then off the pitch with a limp.
Stupid bloody fool, he’d called himself. I’d wordlessly iced his ankle as he rained down curse upon curse on his lack of judgment, the maintenance of the pitch, even the football boots he’d selected that morning. Still I massaged his hot and swollen ankle, made him a grilled cheese, draped his foul and smelly blanket over him and set him up to play Call of Duty as requested. I’d resented all of this and yet I did it without complaint, hoping my assistance sped his recovery. I did it because I loved Alex completely and unconditionally: it dawned on me that I could dislike his poor judgment while still wanting him to recover quickly. There was no either/or, on/off, love/hate. It was everything at once, and I was at peace with that.
Even though Josh and his guest didn’t select this prompt for discussion, it didn’t feel like wasted effort. It had been some micro-therapy, a tiny processing of a moment that had left me confused — surely if I loved Alex, I wouldn’t feel resentment at nursing him. I’d… what, Melissa? Burst into an orgasmic paroxysm of joy at rubbing his smelly, sweaty foot? Enjoy the whiff of hops on his breath as he asked for a kiss? Please. The revelation had been that I could feel these revulsions and still be a loving, present partner. Good stuff, these Daily Themes.
Then — this is Josh Brookes, Melissa. Don’t forget who he is, what he did, and what he probably did again and again to other women. Don’t let that sticky, lush voice seduce you again, as he claimed you’d once seduced him into losing control. He knows how to make you respond just so, how to lull you into that half-slumber he kept you in, Sleeping Beauty. Don’t give him permission.
“Next week on Daily Themes, a bit of a change in a time of major change. Just as you are — or should be — preparing for the uncertainty of the weeks to come as we face down the coronavirus as a country, as a planet, my family and I will be, too. No guest next week, and perhaps not for the weeks to follow. So much, so much is in flux right now. And what, I think, we need more in this strange, wild time, where the ending is yet to be foreshadowed, let alone written, is more community. More sharing, in a way we can share safely.
“I asked my crack IT team — that’s what I call Sara and her sister Gwen — to set up a forum for you, the listeners and Daily Theme writers, to connect with each other. I’ll still be posting the themes on the show site, but there you’ll also find a link to the new forum. We’ll have sub-forums for each week’s themes, and I hope you’ll post your work, if you feel brave enough, for feedback and support. The rules and terms of service will be there for you to read when you sign up, but remember the best rule of all, for the internet and life in general: don’t be an asshole. Be kind to each other, especially now.
“And just as a heads up, I’ll be reading through your posts, too. If you get an email from someone pretending to be me, it might actually be me. Stranger things have happened, especially in these very, very strange times. I am thinking of you all, as I hope you, too, think of my family. Until next week, keep writing.”
Don’t do it, I thought. You’ll be inviting him in.
It’s an invitation, Jen had said to me years ago of the note Josh had slid under my copy of Coleridge. If I had gotten this note, I absolutely would go find him.
It was another invitation, another note slipped under a book. Something in you changed. If you want to know what, find me. — Joshua K. Brookes
I found you again, Josh. And part of me — against every teaspoon of better judgment I might have ever possessed — hopes you find me again, too. It’s time to end this all, to open all the rooms you lurk in in my dream house.
Dear reader, I posted. Had I ever a choice when it came to Josh?
meandering again 