Джули Салливан - Friends and Strangers

His friends Joel and Ethan nodded.

“That’s fucking brilliant,” Joel said.

Ethan narrowed his eyes, deep in thought. “I like it.”

“We should do it,” Andrew said.

The others agreed. Elisabeth wondered if their enthusiasm was genuine. People did barbecue on rainy days, didn’t they? And wasn’t that charcoal taste the whole point of grilling?

She decided it didn’t matter. They were all bombed by that point.

The next morning, lying in the hotel bed, heavy curtains pulled closed, Andrew whispered, “I was up all night thinking about the grill.”

It took her a moment to figure out what he meant.

“Do you not think it’s a good idea?” he said.

“It’s interesting,” she said.

“I mean, Joel said it’s brilliant.”

Joel is a personal injury attorney, she wanted to say, but did not.

Elisabeth was trying to assess whether her hangover was moderate or severe. She needed coffee.

Andrew’s intensity for the grill lasted as long as the weekend away. He didn’t mention it again for months, until a dinner party at Nomi’s, when a colleague of hers claimed his father invented superglue but had never secured a patent, and so got screwed out of millions. Everyone told the story of something they’d thought of. Nomi’s husband, Brian, swore he invented TiVo back when he was in middle school.

“He brings it up every time I want to record something,” Nomi said.

Andrew explained the grill, going so far as to sketch it out on a napkin—it would resemble a papasan chair, covered in reflective panels that used the heat of the sun to cook food. The food would be placed in a pan that sat on a tripod in the middle of the contraption.

Elisabeth tried to picture a suburban family in a backyard, standing around the thing, drinking beers, waiting for their burgers to be done.

“I need to find an engineer to help me figure out the best curvature for the panels,” Andrew said. “That’s the key.”

“Damn, Andrew,” Nomi teased. “You’re not messing around.”

Elisabeth didn’t know until then that he’d thought it through. She was certain she registered disappointment on Andrew’s face when no one jumped to declare his idea the best one of all.

That napkin sketch ended up on their refrigerator in Brooklyn. Every time it caught her eye, Elisabeth wondered if Andrew pictured it hanging in a frame behind his desk one day, after he’d made it big.

The grill came up again here and there over the years, half joke, half something else. A stack of books appeared on his side of the bed: The Solar Electricity Handbook. And Off the Grid: Solar at Home. And Photovoltaic Design and Installation for Dummies, which seemed like an oxymoron. Elisabeth never saw Andrew read any of them. At some point, she noticed they were gone.

Five years ago, Andrew left a job at a big consulting firm and took a slight pay cut to go work at a midlevel firm that focused on restaurants. Elisabeth hoped it would make him happier, having a hand in that world. But in a way, it was worse than before. He was close to the people who were doing what he wanted to do, but he wasn’t one of them.

He kept the job for three years. They were trying for a baby. That had become their focus. Hers, at least.

Then one night in bed, Andrew said he couldn’t breathe.

It scared her. It wasn’t like him.

“What’s going on?” she said.

Andrew said he was worried he was going to be stuck in a job he loathed for the rest of his life.

“I feel like I’m dying every morning on the way to work,” he said. “I wish I was brave enough to take a risk.”

“Maybe you should,” she said. “Life’s too short to have a job you hate.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I should do it.”

“Do what?”

“The grill. I mentioned the idea in this meeting last week with the owners of a restaurant group, a potential new client. One of the guys got it, you know? I could tell. I think I could get him on board as an early investor, maybe. He said he’d love to see a prototype once I have it.”

Elisabeth realized then that she hadn’t meant what she said. Having a job you hated was at least half of what it was to be an adult. Andrew was usually practical and reliable and steady. She loved that about him, depended on it.

“This is my dream,” he said. “I’d be an inventor in the food space. I’m sure I could come up with more ideas if I had the time. Do you know about the guy who invented the Clog-B-Gone? It’s just a piece of plastic that pulls out all the hair that’s stuck in a drain. He made twenty-five million in the first year. Imagine if the grill did half that. We’d be set. My parents would be set.”

He looked at her with the most hopeful eyes.

“But what would we do about money in the meantime?” she said.

“I have it figured out. I’ll stay on at work on a contract basis for the next six months. I’ll use that time to get started on developing the grill and to apply for grants and financing for the following year. And not that I’m anticipating it, but we have that money in savings if we ever really need it, right?”

She paused. “Right.”

They hadn’t merged their finances when they married, only came up with a loose arrangement—he would pay for the day-to-day, and, with her advances, the royalties, and the sale of movie rights from her first book, she would build their savings. For their future child, for college and retirement.

“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” he said. “I know it sounds crazy. But I have a feeling now’s the time.”

That was the moment to voice her reservations, to tell him the truth. But Elisabeth couldn’t do it. He had never discouraged her as long as she’d known him.

When George’s business imploded, Andrew said he never would have left his job had he known his parents were about to be so strapped. He said he wanted more than anything to help them. Elisabeth assumed he was thinking about the savings account, that he wanted her to offer it up.

“Maybe I’m being overly simplistic,” he said when she didn’t. “They’d probably resent that. They might never be able to pay us back.”

She wanted to say that of course they should offer Faye and George the money. But she couldn’t. The money was gone.

Andrew’s fellowship had been the deciding factor in them leaving Brooklyn. He wanted to be closer to his parents so he could at least help them around the house, spend time with them, take George fishing. He applied, and Elisabeth agreed that if he got the fellowship, they could go. She never thought it would happen.

Despite her doubts, she was proud of him for making it this far. Amazed, actually. But then again, anyone with a truly great idea would have taken it to Stanford, or Harvard, or someplace. She could only imagine what the competition had been at the hippie college, where they called the engineering department Greengineering.

The department had a modest fund devoted to innovation, given each year to a promising amateur inventor working on some aspect of eco-friendly technology. The winner got a team of student workers and an adviser. Andrew had a year to make a prototype and get someone to license it. He had no plan for what would happen after that.

As with all her other shortcomings, Elisabeth blamed her inability to believe in him on her mother. She had had no model of what a devoted wife was supposed to look like.

Down through history there were stories of women who stood by men with ventures. These women were ultimately rewarded for their faith, for their willingness to live without vacations or home renovations or date nights, all in the service of the Great Idea. The wife who believed ended up rich beyond her dreams, with hobby pursuits like running an eponymous charity or buying the local bookstore in her favorite resort town.