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CHAPTER 1
Evan Cameron is sitting in row E at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center watching the New York City Ballet's Romeo and Juliet the night before Thanksgiving. That's a promising start, although it is obvious the man is miserable, cramped, bored, and no doubt wondering how he got stuck doing precisely what he likes to do least: watching other people move while he sits still.
He's wearing jeans, a white shirt, a black fleece jacket. He is a book editor — well-known for his carefully selected anthologies of writers' works. On his lap is a manila envelope he is rarely without, notes scrawled all over the front and back. His tie, a boring red paisley, looks like a leftover business gift from years before, but in truth he bought it that afternoon at a tiny British haberdashery on Madison Avenue just for this occasion. He looks like dozens of other modern men who make the transition from day to evening without changing clothes. A closer look reveals a speck of black under one fingernail, residue of grease from his beloved vintage Porsche under which he was tinkering just a few days ago. He notices the grease and, removing his handkerchief from his pocket, works at it surreptitiously for several moments until his nails are clean as a marine's. He tucks his handkerchief back in his pocket, behind a copy of Outside magazine.
The invitation to the ballet came from Claire Barrett, who now sits next to him and, unlike him, is enraptured by the dancers onstage. Claire is the best friend of Ruth, Evan's former girlfriend, who broke up with him a year ago. Claire is also one of the few mortals capable of sympathizing with both members of a doomed affair and remaining close to each. Perhaps she'll be another of my subjects someday — if I survive — for she is unmarried still and, on quick evaluation, capable of deep love. But not now. I've got to succeed with Evan first, for his is the name that went into Jove's in-box, and I'm getting nervous.
* * *
Evan is worlds away from the dancing. Usually when he's bored he reflects on his beloved car engine, its power and precision, but at the moment, he's thinking about the power and precision of words. As an editor, he is enamored of them. But he's one of those men who, as expressive as the next man in everyday interactions, cannot find words when they're needed most. In matters of the heart, he is as articulate as a steering wheel. So it's strange that his head is now teeming with words — passionate words foreign to him but abounding in that great treasure trove he has been assigned to work on: the love letters of the poets, novelists, statesmen, and monarchs whose outpourings of ardor have been preserved through the centuries.
He's worried about a future for letter writers. The early part of the century produced a rich lode of such letters, but in the last decade or so they've dried up. Cast into cyberspace. Emails and tweets, he believes, are dangerous not merely because of their obvious availability, nor because of the dirty tricks they can play, but because the feelings expressed are so haphazard, hastily written, and temporary. A permanent record of fleeting moods. It's as though people today feel that their rages and outbursts have no consequences. He prefers a letter to be a thoughtful record of abiding, not just momentary, emotions — a considered expression that the writer won't regret having dumped on the recipient later. That would be ... a letter.
Evan writes his own letters, business and personal, in a neat longhand with one of his beloved Watermans, on the eggshell-colored, deckle-edged stationery he received as a gift from Ruth years ago. His mother, an English teacher, taught him that a few handwritten words carried more weight than any tome printed out. She would have been mortified to see any deep feeling emailed, texted, or, God help us, sexted.
He's pleased to find himself steeped in these early, heroic letters. Just two weeks ago, after his usual breakfast of grapefruit, cereal, and coffee, and his customary daily run back and forth — from his ground-floor San Francisco apartment on Chestnut and Leavenworth to Fisherman's Wharf — he found, deposited at his door, a huge Federal Express box from his boss. He unearthed a messy, sprawling file dotted with pink Post-it notes, lavender margin notes, and colorful paper clips. Underneath was a sixteen-hundred-page manuscript entitled Be My Good Angel: The Greatest Love Letters of All Time, edited by Lorelei Layton.
The obvious delivery error amused him. He scooped up the sloppy bundle, put it back in the FedEx box, and called his publisher in New York to find out where to reroute it. "Wrong guy, John. How did I get these mash notes?" he said when he got him on the phone.
"Do you have a minute to talk?" his boss whispered.
"Sure."
"Lorelei Layton died yesterday."
"Oh, I'm sorry." Evan knew the famous anthologist by reputation but had never met her.
"That unpublishable mess you see there? That morass only she could have comprehended? It's her new book, and it's already way overdue." At that, John Scroopman sighed. "'Eminent Author, eighty-six, Suffers Fatal Heart Attack,'" he recited with a deep moan, as though he himself were about to suffer a similar fate. "So says the obit from the Times."
"That's too bad, but what's it got to do with me?"
"Just listen," his boss barked. "'The celebrated octogenarian love-letter anthologist was the immensely popular and famously eccentric mainstay of W.W. Norton and Company, bringing in substantial profits to the company with her books, according to Norton's publisher, John Scroopman. Ms. Layton, whose own love affairs were well publicized internationally, was perfectly healthy, her daughter alleges, until just weeks ago, when her lover, half her age at forty-three, left her.'"
"Sounds like she died of a broken heart," Evan said.
"Not as heartbroken as I'll be if we don't get this book onto the presses by New Year's," John groaned. "I know you're going to say it's not right for you ..."
"It's not right for me."
"But that you'll do it anyway."
"Me? Do what?"
"You know what. The running notes. The remaining permissions. The cover design. Fix her preface. Write an introduction. Get the book out, that's what."
"Out of the question. May I remind you that I have a contract to do my vintage car book — you're its publisher, remember?"
"How could I forget?"
"I've already gone through the first part of my advance, and I need to get it in for more money. You remember that, don't you, John? Authors get paid? Anyway, as you well know, I do anthologies about concrete things. Baseball. Antiques. Flags. Love letters? I couldn't even tell my sainted mother I loved her! Besides, what do I know about permissions?"
More emotional expression than he'd uttered in months. Years, maybe.
Scroopman spoke calmly. "The entire research department is at your disposal. You'll be given an office here, a hotel to stay in. Look, I'll be frank. We went down our list of anthologists and you're the only one who knows how to write."
"Good to know," Evan said.
"This introduction has to be more than just a preface. It has to sum up Layton's whole career — explore her life, her appeal, her unique point of view." His subdued tone became agitated. "You're perfect, Evan: an anthologist is an anthologist no matter what the anthology. Come to New York next week for four or five days ..."
"What in my 'no' do you not understand? I want to do my car book. After which I plan to climb a very tall mountain somewhere far away."
Scroopman was pleading now. "We'll give you first-class plane tickets — for this book and for wherever the hell you go when you do the damn car book."
Evan hesitated just long enough to consider the food in first class. Overseas? He was thinking of his trip to Germany for the Porsche chapter.
"And a top-notch hotel." Scroopman's voice became a rasp. "And a sizable bonus."
Evan accepted.
* * *
Waiting now for the act to end, Evan clutches his manila envelope, filled with Lorelei Layton's correspondence, and recalls the precise moment this project went from a nightmarish time-waster into consuming passion. It was eleven days ago. He'd been reading the correspondence between Layton and the estate of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The estate had finally consented to allow the publisher to use the poet's words. "I'm grateful to you for allowing me to publish these important letters," Ms. Layton had written back by hand, no doubt in the rose-colored ink that had become her trademark (the file held only the copy). Then she'd launched into her usual spirited diatribe.
What a difference between the precise, intimate, sealed, handwritten letter from a lover, and the impulsive email written by an exhibitionist opening his emotions to an internet chat room.
A switch flipped on in Evan when he read her words. He began to feel a deep kinship with the lady of pink ink. He got it, her outrage over matchmaking by computer. ("Relationships are not mergers!" she'd written and then underlined twice.) From that moment on, Evan took to the project with unexpected pleasure, as if his soul were thirsting for the experience, hungering as she had for loving words written in longhand. Then, when he read what Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to the young, sickly Sophia Peabody, the woman who would become his wife, he thought, Could any other means of communication have possibly conveyed ... Well, just read it:
Dearest,
I wish I had the gift of making rhymes, for methinks there is poetry in my head and heart since I have been in love with you. You are a Poem. Of what sort, then? Epic? Mercy on me, no! A sonnet? No; for that is too labored and artificial. You are a sort of sweet, simple, gay, pathetic ballad, which Nature is singing, sometimes with tears, sometimes with smiles, and sometimes with intermingled smiles and tears.
And he was awed by Keats's heartfelt reassurance to his beloved Fanny Brawne:
Sweetest Fanny,
You fear, sometimes, I do not love you so much as you wish? My dear Girl. I love you ever and ever and without reserve. The more I have known you the more have I lov'd. In every way — even my jealousies have been agonies of Love, in the hottest fit I ever had I would have died for you ...
The task before him now has become more a privilege than a burden. The introduction will be the most challenging part, he knows, since not a word of it has yet been written — nor even conceived. It will be difficult to get into her head, to discern the deceased author's intentions and then articulate them. He wishes Ms. Layton were available for consultation. Still, he finds himself hoping these astonishing letters will be an inspiration and a reproach to his skittish contemporaries — and to himself. Maybe they'll come to realize, as he has, how great a tool letters can be for introspection as well as expression. Maybe they'll understand that words set down on paper are not ephemeral but eternal, meant to resonate forever in the souls of both the receiver and the sender. Maybe they'll understand what Plato meant when he said that a man without love is like a creature without limbs.
Plato aside, he himself has forsworn his chances of great love, transcendent love, suspecting he hasn't the capacity for it or is just unlucky. Evan is somewhat of a loner, and he accepts this self-definition as his destiny, since it is the pleasure of doing things by himself that takes him higher than love ever has. He looks back on his doomed relationship with Ruth Gottman and wonders how it lasted as long as it did, given her anger at the end. He'd told her upfront about his suspected deficiencies, even his hunch that he might never marry. She seemed to ignore this and to adore him and, perhaps taking his words as a challenge, pushed, cajoled, and persuaded him that he was otherwise — until, convinced, he finally let her move in with him. He loved her as much for loving him as for her determination to turn him around.
And to that end, she seemed inexhaustible. "You're becoming more relational," she'd say occasionally, beaming like a proud mom.
She worked on herself as well. She gave him his freedom, she told him often, to fuss with his cars, go through his silences, smoke his weed, watch his sports, go on his hikes. "I want you to be yourself," she'd said, and so he was, albeit with some guilt. But he felt he was there when she needed him, and all she had to do to get his attention was ask.
The latitude she provided turned out to be a kind of control, though. In retrospect, he'd felt queasy enjoying his freedoms, feeling her moral, observing eyes upon him even when camped alone deep in the Sierras with meals prepared by her. It turned out that she was all along steaming over his taking her at her word. He saw that his guilt was at least partially a product of her feigned generosity, and her heralded acceptance of his nature a form of subtle emotional blackmail.
Then one day, Ruth burst, turning on him with a rage he'd never witnessed in her or in anyone else.
"You're not just remote," she shouted, hurling her clothes into suitcases and boxes lined up on the bed. "You're terminally detached. Inarticulate? Don't flatter yourself. That's the least of it. You're unavailable. Once in a while, when it dawned on you that I might have needs, you found a way not to attend to them. I watched you do it time after time. And I'm ... done."
Each word hit Evan like a poisoned dart.
"Done?" he asked earnestly. "What do you mean?" But as his childlike questions made their way from the fog of his brain — Needs? Done? — into the toxic air around them, Ruth batted them away. She'd long felt abandoned, she began again. "And it was willful, intentional!" Once more he tried to transform his panic into a semblance of a sentence. No luck: she was infuriated anew by his seeming paralysis.
"Look at you. Even now feigning surprise."
If ever he was without words, it was then, stunned by the venom with which she leveled him, overwhelmed by his itemized deficiencies and the unjustness of her accusations.
Ruth snapped her cases shut and carried them out to her shiny red Volkswagen, black hair tucked into her signature red beret. "And another thing," she said, her face red now, too. "You feel more passion for your car than you ever did for me."
"Where are you going?" he managed.
"I'm leaving you."
And she peeled out onto the street as ferociously as she'd entered his life three years before.
For weeks after she left, even as the resonance of her hurtful departing words festered, he'd conjured up his initial image of her in that beret. She reminded him of those toy-sized dogs, no bigger than a man's foot, barking their minuscule heads off at Lab retrievers twenty times their size. She was always bravely hurling herself at him, talking a mile a minute, insisting he love her. And he had needed that prodding, depended on it, never thinking of the cost to her of such relentless effort. He actually thought it had brought her pleasure, this endless persuading, cajoling, begging — her Herculean effort to move him. But she wasn't Hercules, it turned out. More like Sisyphus, pushing him only to find herself at the bottom of the hill again.
Evan tried to hold on to his own anger, but it paled next to his guilt, his shame. He had not only let her down, he'd done it so blithely, unconsciously, believing it was all okay with her. He talked to his friends about men accused of similar emotional crimes by women — those egotists women talk about, those narcissists, men he never identified with. And when they were left, he discovered that these too claimed not to have had a clue.
But Evan hadn't felt clueless. He believed he'd been devoted to her, knew that he loved her in return. His genuine encouragement in everything she wanted to do, his acceptance of her eagerness, her pluck — wasn't that evidence of his love?
Nice enough, he was learning, but intimacy it wasn't.
An interior designer, Ruth had redecorated everything — first his home, in the bright primary colors she loved, then by putting leather bindings on his favorite books and fine silver fountain pens in lovely cases on his office desk, till his already organized work life took on the patina of comfortable finality. But her aesthetic vision, fine as it might be, was not his own.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "How to Fall in Love"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Dalma Heyn and Richard Marek.
Excerpted by permission of Studio Digital CT, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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