Page 47 of Kill Your Darlings

“It’s so embarrassing. She talks about me like... I mean, read it yourself.”

Wendy went inside to get the piece. Walking back to the front door, she could smell Thom’s cigarette smoke coming through the screen, and as she got closer she heard him talking to somebody. Shestopped just inside the door, listening. He was speaking with Lilith York, who would be out walking her Akita. She heard him say, “It’s calledSpecifics Omitted. We’ll have a huge party when it’s published.” The words made her heart hurt a little.

When it had been quiet for a moment Wendy stepped back out onto the porch.

“Sorry,” Thom said, about the cigarette, flicking it in a high arc so that it landed on the sidewalk, sizzling then dying in a puddle.

“No worries,” she said. “You’re going to need another one after reading this essay.”

“Read it to me.”

“Okay,” she said, and managed to get through reading it aloud without being violently sick. “It’s a lot,” she said, at the end.

“What if she’s right?”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe you’re a major talent—I mean, I know you’re a major talent, but what if the rest of the world is about to find out?”

“First of all, no one will read this book. Elizabeth Grieve is a poet herself, so she knows she has to make it sound like she’s selected the next Anne Sexton in order to make her feel better about her own life choices.”

“About becoming a poet?” Thom said.

“Exactly,” Wendy said, suddenly enjoying herself, even considering smoking one of Thom’s cigarettes.

“Still, she might be right.”

“She’s not. I mean, who knows, maybe I’ll sell a million books, but that wouldn’t change the fact that everything she wrote is total bullshit.”

“Are you sure you’re going into this with the right attitude?”

“I’m loading up on the armor. Trust me, no one will read it.”

“You sticking with the title?”

“Oh, definitely.”

“Okay,” Thom said. He’d been trying to convince her for a while to rename the manuscriptThe Moth Partyafter his favorite poem in the collection.

That night, Thom fell asleep first, a rare event. He would normally toss and turn for at least an hour, while Wendy could recite a few of her favorite poems to herself and be deeply asleep in twenty minutes. But that night she lay there listening to the rotating fan struggling to cool the room. She kept thinking about the words in that citation, and how embarrassed they had made her feel. Why had she wanted to publish her poems in the first place? For fame and money? She didn’t want to be famous, and she had plenty of money. Besides, this was poetry. To advance her career? No. She had never had any real interest in academics. Then why? She racked her brain. She’d called her mother earlier in the day to tell her the news, and her mother had been happy for her but hadn’t asked any follow-up questions. She did say that Wendy’s father would have been proud, and she wondered if that was the case. It probably was. Her father’s flaw, well, one of many, was that he had a desperate need to succeed at something and never managed once to do it. Maybe Wendy had a little bit of that in herself as well, a need to win. In some ways she just wanted to see if she could get a book published, but she hadn’t even considered the possibility that she would be opening herself up to scrutiny. One of Elizabeth Grieve’s lines went through her head:By not naming the dark, darkness imbues every word.Jesus, she thought, what have I done? Something close to panic rose from her stomach through her chest. Was this what Thom felt like when he had his little attacks? She sat up in bed, staring at the glow of city light against the pale curtain.

What finally got her to sleep was a strange little fantasy more amusing than anything real. She imagined Elizabeth Grieve becoming obsessed with her, parsing every word to find out everything shehad done. Wendy would have to travel across the country, hunt her down, silence her. She imagined multiple gruesome possibilities for doing the deed, finally landing on strangulation, using Elizabeth Grieve’s long ponytail as the murder weapon. Wendy began to calm down, just thinking about it. Right before finally falling asleep, she did make a promise to herself: no more poetry.

2000

Wendy was slowly waking up and Thom was watching her while stroking her arm. When her puffy eyes were fully open she smiled up at him, then something changed in her expression, and she said, “Where is he?”

“He’s fine. He’s in the nursery. I can...”

“Oh,” Wendy said. “For a moment, I thought... He’s fine, though?”

“He’s fine. He’s perfect. How are you?”

“Tired. In pain. But happy.”

“I think I’ve never had so many emotions at once,” Thom said. “How is it possible to love someone you’ve just met so intensely, and then to feel this much terror that you are going to screw it up? Also, I’m so fucking tired.”

“You need to sleep.”

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