Sara Gruen - Ape House

John realized she’d stopped talking. Her eyes bored into his, seeking a reaction.

“You don’t want me to do it,” she finally said.

He struggled to form an answer, trying to give his mind enough lead time to race through the implications. “I didn’t say that. It’s a surprise, that’s all.”

She waited for him to continue.

“What about Recipe for Disaster?”

“I’ve been rejected by a hundred and twenty-nine agents.”

“But that was to letters asking for permission to send the book, right? Nobody’s actually read the thing.”

“It doesn’t matter. No one’s going to. Apparently.”

“Tell me why you want to be involved in this series.”

“I want to write. It’s a way of writing.”

“Books. You want to write books.”

“And I’ve been rejected by every legitimate agent in the business. It’s over.”

He stood abruptly and began pacing. What if she was right? He hated the idea of her giving up, but there was some point at which persistence became masochism.

“Let’s think this through. What would I do in L.A.?” he said. “No newspapers are hiring. I’d never find another job. I’m lucky I still have this one.”

“Well, that’s the thing.” She paused long enough that he knew he wasn’t going to like whatever came next. “You wouldn’t have to right away. You can keep working here. You know, until we know for sure they’re going to continue the series.”

John’s lips moved for a full three seconds before he managed to form words. “You want to move to L.A. without me?”

“No, no,” she said vehemently. “Of course not. We’ll commute on weekends.”

“All the way across the country?”

“We can alternate weekends.”

“How would we afford all that flying? And what about your rent? You’d have to get an apartment. And a car.” John’s voice rose along with the tally.

“We could dip into our savings-”

He shook his head. “No. Absolutely not. And what happens if NBC decides to keep the series going? We continue to live apart?”

“Then you join me out there. If they pick it up, I’ll be making enough that we could get by while you looked.”

“What’s the advance?”

Amanda dropped her gaze.

“There’s no advance?”

“Scripted shows cost so much to produce they just don’t have the funding…”

“Are you kidding me?”

“It’s because of reality TV. It costs almost nothing to produce, compared to almost three million per episode for scripted shows. Networks used to produce a dozen dramas or comedies, hoping one might take. Now they produce a couple and fill up the rest of the time slots with stupid shows about stupid people apparently trying to find true love by having sex in a hot tub with a different person every night while the cameras roll. I know they should pay me. But if I say no to this there are thousands of other writers just dying for a shot at it.”

John threw his hands in the air. They landed with a smack on his thighs. He hoped this was some kind of hallucination, that his wife was not suggesting they live on opposite sides of the country so she could follow a Hollywood chimera that, for all he knew, came attached to a piece of spam-these writers’ boards were filled with desperate people, some of them malicious, and Amanda was particularly vulnerable. He wondered whether she had paid anything to this Sean person. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, about this that smelled right.

John’s cell phone rang, piercing a silence that had long since grown uncomfortable.

Amanda picked it up. “Hello?” After a moment she held it out to John. “It’s your editor.”

John raked a hand down his face and reached for the phone.

“Hey, Elizabeth. No, it’s fine. Yeah, really.” His eyes widened. “What? Are you kidding me? Jesus God. And what about…? Is she going to be okay?… h-huh. Of course. Okay.” He hung up and closed his eyes. Then he turned back to Amanda. “I have to go back to Kansas.”

“What happened?”

“The language lab got bombed.”

She brought a hand to her mouth. “The place from today? With the bonobos?”

“Yes.”

“Oh my God. Who would do such a thing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are the apes okay?”

“I don’t know,” said John. “But the scientist I interviewed was badly hurt.”

Amanda laid a hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry.”

John nodded, hearing her as though from a distance. His brain flashed through images of today’s visit-following Isabel to the observation area, noticing how her hair swung as she walked. Watching, rapt, as the bonobos plucked “surprises” from their backpacks, as eager as children emptying Christmas stockings. Sitting in Isabel’s office, watching her eyes flit nervously between him and the voice recorder, and registering his own physical yearning with a dreadful, guilty pang. Mbongo and his gorilla mask. Bonzi smooching the glass. That sweet infant with the naughty streak and irresistible eyes. Isabel was now in critical condition, and although Elizabeth had no details on the apes, every terrible possibility flashed through John’s head-

“We can’t do this,” he said abruptly. “It’s impossible. Please tell me you realize this is not going to happen.”

Amanda stared at John until he had to look down. Then she walked past him and up the stairs. A few seconds later, their bedroom door clicked shut.

I am a fucking cad , John thought as he sank to the floor by the coffee table. He poked an oyster and watched it quiver in its shell. He stared glumly at the Osetra, which he knew he should put in the refrigerator because he had a general idea of what it had cost. He imagined Amanda, upstairs, climbing into bed and pulling the covers up to her ears, and knew he should go to her. Instead, he took the open bottle by the neck and alternately took swigs and rested it on his thigh, which was soon dotted with wet circles.

The series seemed like too much of a fluke to be real, but what if it were? His own career was a fluke-he had intended to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a lawyer until he got the internship at the New York Gazette . He was twenty-one and found the atmosphere intoxicating-everyone around him was so smart, so sophisticated, and so wholly and unabashedly bizarre that he wanted to remain a part of it. He got to talk to important people and ask any question he wanted and then got paid to write. Paid to write? Growing up that had never even occurred to him. And every day the job changed and he met someone new, heard another story, and got another chance to either entertain people or expose something that needed to be seen. “The business of a newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” was one of the aphorisms his boss liked to quote. Of course, newspapers themselves were now among the afflicted. But who was he to deny someone else’s unexpected opportunity?

It should be easy enough to confirm if the series were real-there would be a letter of offer or a contract-but then what? Everyone knew that long-distance relationships eventually fell apart. John had spent almost half his life with Amanda, and in many ways she defined it. The thought of being without her terrified him. The thought of her being surrounded by predatory males terrified him even more. She was beautiful, and so vulnerable right now, like a nerve scraped raw.

John picked up the little spoon from the plate of caviar and examined it. It was mother-of-pearl. Amanda must have bought it for the occasion. He dug it into the glistening mound of caviar and put some in his mouth. It didn’t seem right to just swallow something so expensive and of which there was so little, so he held it in his mouth for a moment and then popped the eggs between his tongue and palate. The result was so exquisite he realized he must be doing it right. He took another little scoop. And then another.