The Rom-Commers

by Katherine Center

My glorious, brilliant baby sister had graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the highly picturesque Carleton College—which, if you didn’t know, is the Harvard of the Midwest—and

You had to maximize joy when it fluttered into your life. You had to honor it. And savor it. And not stomp it to death by reminding everyone of everything you’d lost.

The more we argued, the more I had to pick a side. And of course, that side was always Sylvie’s. She really was my Sylvie. I’d practically raised her. Between me and Sylvie, I chose Sylvie—every time. That was a given. I didn’t know how to be her sister-slash-surrogate-mom any other way.

The teaching rule I had for myself was to never criticize more than three things about a student’s work at a time. If you hit people too hard with too much too fast, they shut down. They feel attacked instead of advised. It stops helping and starts hurting. Three criticisms at a time was the magic number. But was I going to follow that rule for Charlie Yates? No way in hell. He wasn’t some beginner kid at community college. He was a ridiculously successful titan of the genre. With a mansion. And a “whole drawer” of Oscars. He could handle it. And even if he couldn’t—all writers are mushy goo, deep down—that wasn’t my problem. He was paying me handsomely to share my thoughts, and share them I would. All of them. And if they happened to crush him? That was just a bonus.

“The job of a rom-com,” I said, “is to give you a simulated feeling of falling in love.” Here Charlie blinked, and I found myself wondering if this might be news to him. I went on. “A rom-com should give you a swoony, hopeful, delicious, rising feeling of anticipation as you look forward to the moment when the two leads, who are clearly mad for each other, finally overcome all their obstacles, both internal and external, and get together.”

You know this! All genres have a promise. The Destroyer will save the universe. The soldiers will win the final battle. The sleuth will solve the mystery. The hunted, grieving husband will figure it out just in the nick of time. I can’t believe I have to say this to you, but the same is true for romantic comedies. The two leads will wind up together. That’s what the audience showed up for. The joy of it all. If you don’t give it to them, it’s beyond unsatisfying—it’s a violation of trust. It’s like sex with no orgasm! What was even the point?”

“A great rom-com,” I said, “is just like sex. If you’re surprised by the ending, somebody wasn’t doing their job. We all know where it’s headed. The fun is how we get there.

“This’ll take forever if you keep arguing with me. We’ll be here all night.” Charlie frowned. I was right again. “So,” I went on, “I’m going to need you to just sit quietly and listen while I rip your screenplay to shreds. ’Kay?” And here’s the thing: he did it.

“And it was good,” Charlie said. “What was good?” He couldn’t mean what I so badly wanted him to mean. “Your writing.” Oh, god. He liked my writing. “Really good. I mean, romantic comedies aren’t exactly my favorite genre—” “You’ve made that abundantly clear,” I said. “But it almost made me believe in love. And I don’t believe in anything.”

The mansion, the untouchable coffee maker, the fake project for some weird mistress. It just wasn’t for me. “Look,” I said, hoping this would kill it for Charlie. “I live in a crappy apartment with my half-paralyzed father. I work all the time. I don’t have money, and I don’t have friends, and I haven’t even made eye contact with anyone attractive in over a year. All I’ve got is my writing and my love of rom-coms and my basic human dignity—and I’m not sacrificing any of those things for this weird, sad project. I am needed at home. I was willing to leave for something big and inspiring. But I am not willing to abandon my family for some abomination of a screenplay that doesn’t even matter.” That oughta do it. Right? I turned toward the car, but Charlie grabbed my wrist to spin me back around. “What do I need to do to get you to stay?” And so I looked deep into his eyes and quoted Charlie back to Charlie: “I just need to do something I’m proud of.”

I was not stingy with my crushes. I had a thing for the guy at the meat counter at the grocery store, and the doc who’d stitched my dad up after his last fall, and a cute young maintenance guy who worked at our building. I fell in love all the time. Just … nobody fell in love with me back. Fiction really kind of was all I had in the romance department.

I had a theory that we gravitate toward the stories we need in life. Whatever we’re longing for—adventure, excitement, emotion, connection—we turn to stories that help us find it. Whatever questions we’re struggling with—sometimes questions so deep, we don’t even really know we’re asking them—we look for answers in stories.

“So what you’re telling me is, you can take the imaginative leap to get on board with an alien from another galaxy that somehow managed to evolve a trunk that is functionally and visually identical to the elephants of earth, but you simply cannot fathom two ordinary humans falling in love with each other?”

“The men in these stories?” Charlie went on. “They keep crying.” “Crying?” Logan asked. “They cry a lot. Like, a lot. It’s so weird, right? Men don’t cry.” “I cry sometimes,” Logan said. “Do you?” Charlie said, like he was changing his opinion of Logan. “I can’t stand these guys. I’m like, Pull it together, man. Go chop something with an axe.” “Crying is good for you,” Logan said. “It’s cleansing. There’s even a crying yoga now.” Long silence.

Bearing witness to the suffering of others? I don’t know if there’s anything kinder than that. And kindness is a form of emotional courage. And I’m not sure if this is common knowledge, but emotional courage is its own reward.

More than anything, I remember that feeling I kept carrying like a sunrise in my body that my life was really, genuinely, at last, about to begin.

“Believing in things that aren’t real? Making something out of nothing? Connecting dots that don’t need or want to be connected? That’s what all the best writers do.”

It got me thinking about how nice it was to do an ordinary thing like go to the market with someone and buy food for a meal you were about to eat together. The companionship and pleasant anticipation. The easy camaraderie. The incidental conversations about anything and nothing: songs on the speaker system, or the psychology of wine labels, or the social significance of Twinkies.

In any other situation, it would be a very different situation. And once I’d thought that, I couldn’t unthink it. And if I was reading the room right—Charlie, suddenly, wasn’t not thinking about that, either. Questions started twinkling in my brain like stars. Did the room just go very still? Did my scraped knee just stop stinging? Was having our faces this close together causing some kind of chemical reaction in my body? And, maybe most important: Did Charlie Yates have the thickest, lushest eyelashes I’d ever seen on a man? How had I never noticed those before? Wait— What was I thinking about? Had I really been insisting all this time that there was nothing even remotely romantic about two people randomly falling on top of each other? Because this was working. Had I just proved myself wrong? In front of the Great Charlie Yates? This was not going to end well.

The words were bad, but the tone of voice was worse. So eye-rolly. So devoid of warmth. So authentically dismissive. As if there were truly no topic less interesting and less important than me. There was a good writing lesson in there—that being dismissed is worse than being scorned. In a different frame of mind, I might have paused to think about it: Of course not mattering is worse. It means you didn’t even register. It means you’re not even worth getting mad about. It means you’re literally nobody.

I’m a pessimist, though, so I didn’t trust myself, either. I always start with death in every situation and work my way backward.”

“I won the dad lottery, for sure.” Then I added something that I’d never said out loud before—something that was so scary to verbalize that it made my feelings about the situation we were currently in—teetering above a vast valley below us, held only by a ribbon of guardrail metal—seem almost cute. “The camping trip was my choice,” I confessed to Charlie then. “Everybody else, my mom included, voted to go to the beach.”

“I believe hormones exist,” Charlie said then. “And I believe kindness exists. And affection. And altruism, sometimes. And longing. And I believe that every now and then those things can show up at once and knock you out of your senses for a while. But it’s random. It’s like the weather. It’s not something we all should be aspiring to. Or counting on. It comes and it goes, whether you like it or not. And then one day, you tell your wife the results of your biopsy, and she tells you she wants a divorce.”

“How does life work?” “People love you for a little while—when it’s convenient for them—and then they move on.” “Not everybody’s like that.” “But there are no guarantees.” “There are no guarantees for anything!” I said. “Would you rather cancel hope altogether than risk the possibility of being disappointed?” “The certainty of being disappointed,” Charlie corrected.

I can’t write anything at all.” “That’s your problem, right there.” “Don’t tell me what my problem is.” “Your problem,” I said, “is that you can’t say no to everything,” I went on, “and say yes at the same time. You can’t cancel one emotion without canceling them all. You can’t hate love—not without hating every other feeling, too. Stories exist for the emotions they create—and you can’t write them if you can’t feel them. This screenplay is a chance for you. You can make anything good”—I was almost pleading now—“but you can’t make it good without believing in it. You can’t bring this story to life without coming to life yourself.”

“My opinion of you is plummeting,” Charlie said. “This is your type?” “I have lots of types, thank you. Sexy cowboys. Sexy lumberjacks. Sexy werewolves with tragic pasts. Sexy ghosts.” “Sexy ghosts?” “That’s the only kind of ghost I like.”

Line dancing is not as easy as it looks. I’d always kind of harbored a suspicion that I might be a secret dancing savant. Not line dancing per se, but just—from all the moves I’d busted in the kitchen while cooking over the years—I’d nursed a secret fantasy that maybe, if I ever really tried to dance, I’d astonish us all. Ten minutes into that chance, I stood corrected. I was not secretly awesome. I was terrible. We’d need a more humiliating word for terrible.

I lifted my hand and pressed it against his chest. “Can you feel it now?” “Yes,” Charlie said. “But it’s not glowing.” “What’s it doing?” I asked. Charlie let his eyes drop, like he was really thinking. “You know when birds commit suicide?” I frowned. “I don’t think—that’s a thing?” Charlie regrouped. “You know. When a bird sees its reflection in a window and thinks it’s another bird and so it dive-bombs the window over and over, trying to attack, until it injures itself so badly it dies?” Ah. Huh. “Kind of?” Charlie nodded. “I think my heart is doing that.”

You can get away with anything if everybody has already decided to like you. People love it when you break the rules.”

“I’m not, by the way,” he added. “Not what?” “In love with you.” “Oh,” I said. Then, in case my voice sounded weird, I added, “Of course not!” “I googled it,” Charlie continued, “and I’m not.” “You googled whether or not you’re in love with me?” “I googled how long it takes to fall in love.” “And?” I asked. “How long does it take?” “Eighty-eight days,” Charlie answered, definitively. “And we’ve only known each other for thirty-one. So. Problem solved.”

“This first kiss gives us a sense of what’s possible—but they don’t get their happy ending until they get their happy ending.”

“Look at how he leans in,” I said, as Ji Chang Wook bent his head lower. “Pretty sure that’s the exact geometrical angle of maximum yearning.”

“Of course you can’t write a totally immersive kissing scene! Not if your heart is a suicidal bird.”

If the last person Charlie had kissed was the wife who’d left him when he got cancer, maybe he needed something—anything—else to replace that last association. I was no pinup dream girl, fine. But I had to be better than cancer.

There’s something about a kiss that brings all the opposites together. The wanting and the getting. The longing and the having. All those cacophonous emotions that usually collide against one another teaming up at last into a rare and exquisite harmony.

I will just privately obsess over it, like a normal person.” “Why can’t you just have a conversation? Tell him you like him and see if he likes you?” “Please,” I said. “If human relationships worked like that, I’d be out of a job.”

“Who gets into a bar fight?” I demanded. “That’s a TV thing. That’s not a real thing that real people do.” Charlie shrugged. “Some guy called Jack Stapleton an overpaid hack.” “So you just hit him?” “I meant to verbally spar with him,” Charlie said, “but he wasn’t much of a wordsmith.” “You tried for a battle of wits in a bar.” “It escalated quickly.”

“I think,” he said, surprisingly lucid for a moment, “that you’re my favorite person I’ve ever met.” “Oh,” I said, looking back down. “That’s very nice of you.” “And I’ve met”—and here, less lucid, he made a big, drunk gesture—“everybody. In the world. And you’re my favorite. Out of all seven billion.” What did words like that mean coming from a person in this state? I had no idea. “How crazy is that?” Charlie asked, leaning closer to study my face, like he might find the answer there. “I’ve known you six weeks, and I already can’t imagine my life without you.”

Did I want to storm out of the house and never come back—possibly swiping one of his drawer awards on the way out? I did. But I stayed. For the contract. Going through all this and then forfeiting the money at the end would just be bad to worse. If I had to stay until the end to get paid, then I’d stay till the end to get paid. A display of strength, if nothing else.

How could I think about dialogue and commas and character arcs now? How could anything going on with imaginary people even compare to the humiliation that had suffused my entire emotional landscape like a fog? And how, exactly, was I supposed to craft the last thing on my to-do list for the screenplay: the happy frigging ending? I’m glad you asked, because I googled it, and now I have many tips for how to transition from a soul-crushing rejection right on over to a productive writing day with a coworker: Make eye contact, because that’s what alphas do. Stand up tall, because it summons a sense of pride. Keep your movements simple and direct to show that you aren’t flustered. Lift your eyebrows so you look unconcerned. Take deep breaths because they inflate your chest and hide your collapsing soul. I wrote down a cryptic list to remind myself: Stand up. Lift. Breathe. Inflate. And then, past the crux of it, I gave quiet thanks for how disappointment so easily gives rise to contempt. Really? This guy?

Here’s another tip for being okay when trapped in a small space with the man who rejected you: Play loud music in your earbuds like an angry teenager. Loud, cool music—because you are a cool person and no guy who doesn’t appreciate you can touch that. I had a playlist called “Coolness,” in fact, and I just let it rip. The bands were cool, the songs were cool, I was cool for listening to it—and Charlie Yates could go to hell.

“Classic Emma,” he said. “Everything that you say is not romantic is romantic. You said it’s not romantic for people to fall on each other, but then you fell on me and it was. You said line dancing isn’t romantic, but then we went there and you ogled that Italian guy and I thought I was going to lose my mind. And here you are telling me to strip you down naked with my eyes closed, like if I can’t see you it’ll be PG-13, but instead I’m having to put my hands all over you—and it’s not better, it’s so much worse.”

“I would’ve given anything to go to the beach! But I didn’t! Because I knew that I—I alone—was the only thing standing between the only parent we’ve got left and this exact situation! You knew that, too. You couldn’t have not known. But I must’ve ruined you. I killed myself to give you everything you ever wanted and I guess I taught you that’s how life is. But I was lying the whole time. That’s the opposite of how life is. You don’t get everything you want! You get a few tiny, broken pieces of what you thought you wanted and you tell yourself over and over it’s more than enough!”

Was that what I’d been doing? Trying desperately to predict the unpredictable and avoid the unavoidable? Was that why I’d been so willing—or, if I’m really honest, relieved—to stay home all this time? Had I decided in some place deep below my consciousness that the best way to avoid disaster was to just never do anything? “You can’t live like that, Em,” my dad said.

“But how? How did you hold on?” “I just got up every day, and went to bed every night, and tried to be a good person in between.” “That can’t be all there is to it,” I said. My dad took a slow breath, and then he said, “Somewhere during that time, I got very lucky and I accidentally figured something out.” “What?” “Whatever story you tell yourself about your life, that’s the one that’ll be true.”

And would I give up all this personal growth to see her again for even an hour and just clamp her into my arms? In a second. But that’s not a choice. All we have is what we have.” “I miss her, too,” I whispered. My dad squeezed my hand. “It’s okay,” he said then. “Here’s another thing I accidentally figured out: happiness is always better with a little bit of sadness.”

If you wait for other people to light you up, then I guess you’re at the mercy of darkness.

All I remember for certain was the feeling of my heart unfolding to its full wingspan in my chest, like a bird that had decided to stretch out wide at last and absolutely soar. Was this a happy ending? Of course. And also only a beginning. In the way that beginnings and endings are always kind of the same thing.

Poor happy endings. They’re so aggressively misunderstood. We act like “and they lived happily ever after” is trying to con us into thinking that nothing bad ever happened to anyone ever again. But that’s never the way I read those words. I read them as “and they built a life together, and looked after each other, and made the absolute best of their lives.”

“Choose a good, imperfect person who leaves the cap off the toothpaste, and puts the toilet paper roll on upside down, and loads the dishwasher like a ferret on steroids—and then appreciate the hell out of that person. Train yourself to see their best, most delightful, most charming qualities. Focus on everything they’re getting right. Be grateful—all the time—and laugh the rest off.”