Page 24 of People Skills

I read it when it first came out, so this is a reread. Not a true reread. I am reading with a specific purpose—to build a psychological profile of Xavier. I have a pencil in hand to make notes when I find something revealing about him in the pages.

I find myself drawn in without meaning to be. That’s the appeal of this book, why it’s a bestseller. It pulls you in and suddenly you’ve read eighty-six pages without noticing. It’s a five-hundred-page multigenerational family saga told from the point of view of six different characters, and he throws you into the middle of family chaos and makes you care about all of them so quickly. It’s undeniably impressive. I underline a sentence because I like it. I make a note (v. funny!) and I start to underline passages, draw smiley faces, and write more and more in the margins. This line. This sentence. This is when we start to understand her pov. The shift here is really clever. This could have been cut. I love this line. He could trust the reader more here. This paragraph is doing so much. I love this section of dialogue.

It takes me a while to realise I’m not making notes about Xavier, I’m not really even thinking about him as a person, only as an author. I have slipped back into editor mode like putting on an old pair of shoes, and it feels nice to be analysing a book again, even in a casual way. Like I’m stretching neglected muscles in my brain. They still work, a little. It even feels nice to be holding a pencil in my hand. All this time, I think I have been subconsciously avoiding pencils.

I hear the front door open and close, and Xavier appears.

He walks in, glances at me, starts to say something and stops when he sees what I’m reading. He’s wearing jeans and the grey henley again, and he’s unshaven.

I meet his eyes.

‘Hi,’ I say.

‘Hi,’ he says.

I put his book down on my chest. I can see his eyes on it, on the pencil in my hand, I can see him weighing up whether to say something. Take the bait, take the bait.

‘Have a good night,’ he says, and heads into his room, firmly closing the door.

Damn it. The likelihood of ever getting him to even discuss writing with me is minuscule.

I keep reading his book, hoping he’ll dwell on it, hoping he’ll come back out and ask what I’m doing. Also, because I’m deep in it now, making notes as I go, enjoying myself more than I care to admit. He has a style of writing that makes you work at the same time as it carries you along, literary but deeply readable. He’s sloppy sometimes, you can tell it’s a debut, indulgent occasionally, trying to do too much, leaning into the voice, following tangents, overly descriptive, writing three sentences when it could be one, but that’s part of the charm. It’s full of energy. He writes like he loves it.

I pour another glass of wine, make up a snack plate of popcorn and dark chocolate and almonds, and settle back on the couch, licking the popcorn salt off my fingers before I touch my pencil. There’s a sex scene on page two hundred and one. It’s good. I didn’t remember this, how good he was at writing sex. I find myself underlining sentences. It’s not particularly explicit, but he captures an intimacy, a certain vulnerability, a specific sense of pleasure, that catches in my throat. My cheeks feel suddenly warm, and I am scared he’s going to walk out and find me reading the sex scene, so I start skim-reading, even though I want to linger on the sentences. But he doesn’t appear, and after a while I go to bed, taking the book with me. I read until my eyes are heavy.

I fall asleep, and dream of his book. I dream I am on the couch with Tom, the twenty-something son, and he’s kissing me except he morphs from my imagined vision of Tom-the-character into Xavier-the-author as we kiss, and Xavier’s stubbly face is scratching my cheek and I push my hands into his hair and—

I wake with a start, my heart racing.

God. This is dangerous. That was very close to a sex dream about Xavier. No. No. It must have been the wine. Or the dark chocolate. I do think dark chocolate can give you unwanted sex dreams. And obviously, the book is the main culprit. The book and the chocolate and the wine, the combination, warped my brain. I look at The Bird House, and firmly close it. I need to get his words out of my head. I need to get him out of my head. What am I doing? I have spent so much time thinking about a man who has barely deigned to speak to me, let alone show a speck of interest in my life. I need to get a grip. I need to end this idea of helping him. I will wait another week, and then tell Hillary he’s a hopeless case. Except maybe use a different word—not hopeless, she won’t like that. Chronic. Beyond the scope of what I can help with. I’ll tell her I do think he has been lured into a dark online underworld and I can’t reach him.

And then I will never think about Xavier Hobbs Sullivan’s life again.

I toss and turn, too annoyed with myself to go back to sleep, before giving in and scrolling on my phone.

And then I see it.

Shit. A new newsletter from Lana is sitting in my inbox. An essay titled ‘Heartbreak’.

Does reading a personal essay from his ex-girlfriend classify as thinking about him? Technically yes, but it also falls under the banner of work because Hillary could be mentioned so I really should read it immediately. I skim through the essay, too impatient to read it properly, needing first to look for Xavier’s name, or Hillary’s. Nothing. Okay. So she’s not naming names or pointing fingers. Even though a lot of people know they were together, at least she is preserving some element of anonymity. She’s never used Xavier’s name when writing about him before, always just the cutesy moniker The Man.

The essay is a raw and vulnerable account of Lana’s past two weeks. Her post-breakup heartbreak: sobbing on the floor of the apartment, not sleeping, not eating, feeling too embarrassed to tell anyone, then wanting to tell everyone, to howl at the moon. She goes deep, as she always does. Her Love, Lana brand is all intimacy and honesty. She keeps the best stuff, like today’s essay, for her paying subscribers, of which I am slightly ashamed to say I am one. (I subscribed when I was applying for the job with Hillary, because I thought I might get some insights, but she rarely mentions Hillary.) In this ‘heartbreak’ essay, Lana writes about getting her period and feeling a pang of unhinged disappointment, because if she was pregnant, she would have a reason to talk to her ex again. There is something so relatable, so brutally honest, in this, I can’t help but like her.

But maybe it’s a touch too manipulative. Too many mentions of sobbing on the floor for my liking. Of still loving him. Of looking at pictures of him. She now calls him X, which I guess is anonymous, a fun play on the idea of him being her ex, if you don’t know his name is Xavier. Towards the end of the piece, there is a section about her cat (whom she has always called The Cat). She says she suddenly can’t stand The Cat, she is revolted by his presence, what he is asking of her, that he clearly misses X, that he needs her and she has nothing to give, the cleaning of the litterbox feels overwhelming and all-consuming, she just wants to be left alone. That when she pats him, her hand feels as heavy as lead, and The Cat watches her sobbing with a detachment that spooks her. A dog knows how to give sympathy, a cat sits back and judges. If she died, The Cat would eat her.

Is she writing this as a way of processing her feelings, as she says in the essay, or is it a trap to lure Xavier back? Are these words all for him to read? Or is it some kind of act of revenge, because even though she does not say a single bad thing about him and does not say anything about the actual breakup, the underlying theme is, he has done this to her. He is the cause of this heartbreak. He has destroyed her.

I lie in bed thinking about the essay and what Xavier’s reaction to it might be: if he’ll see it, or if he’s already unsubscribed from her newsletter. Maybe he wasn’t subscribed in the first place, but surely, surely, he must have been, and who would have the mental strength to unsubscribe from their ex’s newsletter knowing, surely, she would write something about the breakup. So far Xavier is not coming across as a man with that power. I lie there thinking about this for so long that I do fall asleep, and then I sleep late, late even for me, and when I wake up and walk out into the lounge room Xavier is gone.

I thought Lana’s essay would have been the thing to break him, that I would find him sobbing on the floor, or lying prone in the kitchen, or curled in a ball in a cupboard (Lana spent a lot of time in her essay describing the ways she was horizontal on the ground). I sort of hoped I would find him looking up at me, tears on his cheek, and he would hold up a wavering hand and say, ‘Please help me.’ And I would place his laptop into his hand and say, ‘Write.’

I do my Saturday-morning routine of cleaning, coffee and run-walk. I like to run along the beach until I reach a certain point and then walk back, because both running and walking do different things for my mental health (running keeps my mind blank, walking gives me time to weigh up everything I was avoiding thinking about while running). I get back to the house hot and sticky and sandy, desperate for water.

I open the door and see Xavier sitting on the couch. Holding a cat.

‘Hi,’ I say.

‘Hello,’ he says.