Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 106001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)
A surreal painting of a lonely typewriter hangs next to an image of a James Joyce love letter.
Harlow reads it quietly aloud. “You have me completely in your power. I know and feel that if I am to write anything fine or noble in the future I shall do so only by listening at the doors of your heart…I would like to go through life side by side with you, telling you more and more until we grew to be one being together until the hour should come for us to die…”
She side-eyes me. “Dramatic much?”
I laugh. This is a new side of her. Irreverent, poking fun at art, the thing she loves.
I hold up a thumb and forefinger. “A little bit.”
“But I love the typewriter. I keep looking for one outside on the streets. I have this wild dream that someday I’ll spot a typewriter as I wander the city.”
“Why do you want to find a typewriter?”
“It has to have a story, right? Or many stories, if you think about it. I’d love to find one somewhere on a stoop, like that rotary phone. And I imagine the typewriter would whisper all the things it’s recorded. In the dark, as the curtains close and the lights go down,” she says, then sighs contentedly, painting a vivid image.
“We’ll find that typewriter someday,” I say, and our typewriter hunt feels like a promise I can keep, though I know I can’t and we won’t.
But tonight, everything feels a little possible.
Especially as we walk unknown amongst the crowds. I feel like we’re in a foreign country, slipping past locals, no one spotting the tourists who are checking out the alleys and quiet side streets. That’s us, visiting this land of love letters and paintings, unnoticed.
No one stops to gladhand. No one asks me to read a script. Not a soul asks how her dad is.
Instead, Harlow moves freely and fluidly, stopping in front of a painting of a vintage rolltop desk done in broad, mirage-like strokes. A woman stands in front of the desk, holding a pen poised above a piece of paper but she’s written nothing. Instead, she’s staring out the window at the river. Maybe even the Seine. It’s lined with trees. A couple walks along the water, wrapped up together.
Everything is a little silvery, a little like a memory.
“That’s a Zara Clementine,” she tells me. “She’s a little melancholy, but she understands longing so well.”
I don’t have to ask Harlow if she loves the painting. I can tell in her eyes, enrapt. In her lips, slightly parted. And her expression. A little lost and found at the same time.
Harlow points to the tag and snaps her fingers, aw shucks style. “It’s sold. Too bad.”
I laugh. The price is many, many zeroes.
We move on, and as we go, I return to the mission of the night. “I think our hero had a long-distance love affair. Maybe with a woman who wrote him letters from a vintage desk,” I suggest.
“Yes! That’s why he won’t give in to love. He hasn’t made peace with the past. There’s someone he left behind.”
“Someone he misses too,” I say.
We write a new backstory for our guy and it’s the best time in public I’ve ever had. We’re swimming in a crowd, but I don’t feel that familiar tightness in my chest, that usual sense that I don’t belong.
I don’t want to push my luck though. It’s nearly nine, and I do want some time alone with her, so I steal a chance, lean in close. “Want to get out of here? I have my car.”
Her breath catches. Her eyes say yes. But before she can answer with words, a voice, strong and confident and all too familiar from more than five seasons on TV, hits my ears.
“Bridger!”
Like glass shattering, the moment splinters into a thousand pieces. I turn to face the actor from our show.
Dominic Rivera is here, and he’s looking curiously from Harlow to me.
28
BROWN PAPER, THAT’S ALL
Harlow
Thank you, Dad.
For teaching me to think on my feet.
“Hey, you!” I say brightly to the man I ran into mere hours ago on the set. “When I saw you earlier, I was going to ask if you were coming tonight.”
Dominic’s rich brown eyes spark with questions. “You were?”
“I didn’t want to interrupt your call though. But when we met at MoMA last winter, didn’t you talk about how much you adored the nineties school?” I ask, bullshitting, utterly bullshitting about the nineties school of painting that Zara Clementine typifies.
Dominic said nothing of the sort, but I’ve learned a thing or two about art collectors. They love to show off their knowledge. And I’ve learned a thing or two about Dominic. He’s picked up most of his art knowledge from his character on Sweet Nothings.
Guess who helped Dad with Dominic’s art?