Day 17, and 30,607 Words

Today I finally forced myself to write real things. It was great! I am enjoying writing less every day since I built up a cushion in the first part of the month, and it makes it a lot easier to think through what I want to happen and not to write a lengthy discussion of flatbreads instead.

I have attached a very long (sorry!) discussion between Nora and Wynn about what happened with Oliver. Part of it came easily, and part of it was hard. I obviously had to address the fact that two characters that were probably assumed to be straight aren't, but I also didn't want to make a big deal of it. I don't emphasize my straight character's experiences of their sexuality, so I tried to make it sound commonplace. I also really appreciated Indigo's comments earlier in the week about Oliver potentially being outed.

Writing people who are different from me is new! I hope I didn't mess it up or reproduce stereotypes, something I was very conscious of.

“So what happened?” Nora pressed, hoping he would continue.

“We started going out a few weeks before he left, and were long distance for a while. I had been in relationships with both men and women before, but Oliver said I was the first man that he had ever dated seriously. Both of us are attracted to men and women, but I think that Oliver had always assumed that he wouldn’t date men.”

Nora felt weird hearing these intimate details about Oliver’s life. If he somehow knew what was being shared with her, he would likely be uncomfortable about it as well.

“I don’t know Oliver that well,” Nora began. “We share an agent, and we have run into each other a bunch of times because of mutual friends, but not much more. Do you think he would be okay with you sharing this with me?”

“As far as I can tell, the people he is close to—friends, family— know that he is bisexual. He doesn’t seem to identify that way publicly, but I’m not sure how people haven’t figured it out. I mean, have they read Portman’s Complaint?”

“I think people like to say they’ve read Portman’s Complaint, but I’m not sure if they actually do.”

“Well, either way, I certainly wouldn’t mind if he told people these things about me. I’m attracted to men and women. I can see myself being in serious relationships with either, although I have tended to date more women than men. It’s not something I’m ashamed of, or feel the need to keep secret.”

Nora nodded supportively. She didn’t want to make a big deal out of a disclosure like this, to make it seem like it was weird or that he shouldn’t share things like this with her. As much as she was prepared to doubt his account of things, she couldn’t question his sincerity about this.

“From what I saw at Jackie’s Place, unless it was a negative reaction to Wands N’ Roses and Broken Aero—as if a negative reaction to those two is even possible—it doesn’t seem as if things ended amicably between the two of you. After all of this time?” Nora asked.

“Perceptive,” Wynn joked. “Was it him storming off that gave you that idea?”

“Well, yes,” Nora said, getting increasingly uncomfortable. “He mentioned to me on that very day, actually, that a person who he had thought was the love of his life had cheated on him while he was doing his MFA. Was that you?”

Wynn was clearly surprised by her question. His eyes opened a little wider, and he physically leaned back as he took in her words.

“He said that?” He asked, clearly hurt and surprised.

“Well, I guess I’m not totally sure that it’s you,” Nora vacillated, “But… was it?”

He sighed.

“I guess that’s how he sees it.”

“Well how do you see it?”

“Things were going really well between us, until they weren’t. We were writing partners and in love and we had tons of things in common. I tried to go to Iowa City as much as I could, and he came back to Toronto from time to time, but he just ended up becoming consumed with his writing. He would write all night long, stumble into class, and then sleep for the rest of the day only to wake up, make some black coffee, and do it all again. He stopped visiting, and when I would visit there wouldn’t be any time where he wasn’t sleeping or writing. We barely talked about anything that wasn’t what he was writing.”

Nora nodded. She could deeply relate to what he was describing.

“Writing is lonely,” Nora responded. “I know that we ask a lot from the people around us, who have listen to us talk about our failed plots and character frustrations. But at the same time, we also have to come away from our books and meet people in their worlds, too. It doesn’t sound like he was willing to do that. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too. Neither of us were mature enough to admit that our relationship was over. I didn’t realize that he felt that way about me—assuming I’m the person that he was talking about. But yes, I did end up cheating on him. It was what told me that things weren’t working. We broke up very soon after.”

Nora wasn’t sure how to receive this. If what he said was true—and of course, that was a big if—she just couldn’t paint him with a single brush. What he said made sense to her. Was it the perfect way to respond to a difficult relationship ending? No, but why was perfection the bar? Was that the standard to which she herself would want to be held?

She would have loved to have been able to get to know Wynn without this history, and especially without the feeling that he was the villain in the story. Even if she generally didn’t believe in villains.

“I know that these details aren’t flattering,” he continued, as if he could read her mind. “And I am being very serious when I say that I am interested in getting to know you better. I had hoped that you might not know me quite so well this early on, obviously. But I also hadn’t counted on running into you, and seeing Oliver for the first time in nine years.”

“That must have been hard,” she said, honestly.

“Clearly for both of us.”

Of all the things that Nora had expected as she walked into this conversation, this certainly wasn’t it. Why was she so foolish to believe that her life would just unfold like a novel? Where Wynn would lie and say that everything was Oliver’s fault, which she would later find out to be the opposite of what had happened? Wynn admitted that he had cheated on Oliver. He painted a complicated picture where the end of their relationship was, admittedly, more Oliver’s fault, but not exclusively so. It was a far cry from Wynn blaming Oliver for every hardship in his life while he was just an innocent aspiring clergyman.

At the same time, she had to remind herself that she had only heard one side of the story. Would Oliver say the same thing if she asked him? And in what world could she ask him? This whole thing had made her feel like an inappropriate voyeur, looking in on other people’s lives—largely without their knowledge—and judging them.

But what he had said made so much sense to her, in so many ways. She had dated some very ‘serious’ authors before—men who thought that their novel about coming of age as a white guy was the most important thing in the world and every sentence that they would say would start with “Today while I was writing…” or “My character is authentic because…” They never asked about her writing, never offered read a draft of her manuscript, and never seemed to introduce her as an author at parties. It always made her feel like she was a supporting character in the novel that he was writing in his own life. The one who provides endless support but doesn’t seem to need much support back, because whatever she is doing with her own life just isn’t in the frame.

Of course, these men tended to not have very many characters in their own writing who were women, and when they did write women, there would be more sentences describing her perfect appearance than things that she herself would say. The world that they lived in was a lot like that, too. Of the top one hundred U.S. films in 2017, women accounted for only 34 percent of all speaking characters and only 24 percent of protagonists. It’s also well known that men speak 70 percent of the time in mixed gender groups, yet are still more likely to believe that women are talking more. Women are rarely viewed as among the most powerful, influential, or relevant speakers. Their introduction of topics, or attempts to shift conversation, are frequently ignored. And their speech is routinely interrupted. This was the culture where the men that she had dated had grown up. As much as each one had liked to think that it didn’t apply to him, it invariably did.

She wondered, though, if she really should apply her own experiences to what Wynn had described. They were two men in a relationship, after all, not men projecting all of their desires and needs onto the women that they were with. Perhaps thoughtlessness can sometimes coincide with routinely ignoring the needs and experiences of women in particular, but sometimes it is also just thoughtlessness. Maybe it was just her own bias that was leading her to see it that way.

Was it weird that Nora pondered so many statistics about sexist bias on a regular basis? “Probably,” she thought. The only thing that she felt she had in common with Elizabeth Bennet at this point was that she was more confused than ever.