Page 18 of The Deepest Lake
“Write it down,” she says.
I obey.
Leave almost everything out.
She’s right, but I love Eva Marshall most for all the parts she leaves in: the things I never would have dared to say out loud, much less write—and not just about sex. She also writes about messy friendships, body insecurity, family problems, the audacity required to become a writer, and the hardest thing of all, how to imagine and construct a life. The one you want, not the one other people want to sell you. But I’m making her sound like a self-help author when she isn’t that at all. She’s a storyteller. And the stories she tells are the ones I need most.
Eva’s cell phone rings. She mouths the words “Trish, Miami” and gestures for me to leave, whispering, “We’re good for now. Go to the kitchen and introduce yourself to Hans, Barbara and Concha.”
And Mauricio, who still doesn’t have a clue that I’ve joined the staff.
I pull closed the French doors between the balcony and her combination bedroom-office, trying not to dawdle in awe. So much luck. So many lessons.
We write to be understood. To tell some form of truth. For the sake of art, we discard nearly everything—just as Eva says.
But then there is the other pile of discards: the things that simply refuse to fit, like what I hear Eva say next.
“Don’t tell her you told me,” she says to her Miami-based assistant, without lowering her voice. “Just avoid replying and see what she does with that. If she wasn’t happy when she was here, she should have told someone on the first day. Anyway, she’s stage four. She won’t keep following up, trust me.”
The comment freezes me in an awkward posture, hands still on the ornate bronze door levers. Stage four. As in, cancer. She’s talking about some former workshop participant on her deathbed, a woman who wants a refund. But Eva won’t give it.
I’m still crouching, absorbing. Maybe the unhappy workshopper was a mean, self-centered pain in the ass. Maybe she has been emailing day after day, driving the entire staff crazy. Just because a stranger has a terminal illness doesn’t mean she has a valid complaint.
I look up, through the glass doors, terrified of Eva’s reaction to my unintentional eavesdropping, but her relaxed expression makes it clear. She looks directly at me, wrinkling her nose and rolling her eyes. Some of these people.
Day one and I’m already an insider. I feel the moment in my body—this feeling of belonging in my blood and bones. I allow myself to imagine what being an insider means.
First, there are all the questions I can ask: about structure, about memory, about voice. About reflection and exposition and description and dialogue and revision and self-doubt and self-criticism and a million other things you wish you could ask a successful author you admire.
Next, there are the connections: People you might get a chance to meet. People who might someday be willing to take a look at your work. People who care about the things you care about, like truth, and story and at the very least, paying attention. Loving the world, and believing that it will love you back.
I’ve spent nearly a year since graduation wondering whether I’m inadequate or was just born into the wrong generation, and things just don’t work the way they used to. Like you can’t simply travel and observe and take risks and write your way into a career. But look at Eva. Decade after decade, she’s done it all, seen it all, and even in her fifties, when people told her not to have a baby, she refused to listen, because she’s still the rebel she was as a runaway teen. Her motto might as well be, “Never too early and never too late.”
I’m vibrating as I leave her bedroom and find my way back downstairs to the kitchen, unable to contain my excitement, hands shaking so much it’s hard to type the text to my mom, telling myself I won’t get irritated if she doesn’t share my excitement. I won’t be disappointed when she starts asking about pay, schedules and all the other parts that don’t matter, because I know she won’t understand. She can’t.
This may be just a gig. But it’s a life-changing gig.
Mom, I just got the most amazing job with the most amazing person.
7
ROSE
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It’s a relief when the driver brakes just outside the Casa Eva gate. He waves to a man raking leaves away from the entrance. They seem to know each other. Everyone in these lakeside villages must know each other.
The gardener points Rose to a yellow door in the gate, painted with a green quetzal bird with a tail many times longer than its body, like it’s pulling long streamers behind it, taunting any creature that might follow. It can’t be evolutionarily smart to have such a long tail. The jungle is full of predators. Beauty, like truth, costs.
As the tuk-tuk motors away, Rose starts down a narrow set of natural stone steps, flanked by thick tropical vegetation. The descending path switchbacks into dark, jungle-like gloom. She doesn’t get far before catching up with the conga line of women writers ahead of her. Many of them have dressed up in heels or slippery-bottomed sandals, so they are going slowly, chattering with nervous excitement. Ahead of them, someone shrieks as an ankle turns. No one expected a hike.
“This is crazy, isn’t it?” says the woman in front of Rose, smiling over her shoulder. “I feel like we’re a long line of sacrificial virgins on our way to a volcano.”
A voice ahead shouts, “No virgins here!”