Friday's Whims of the Time Traveler 55.0: March 2nd, 2011
The Lost Love Story
by Belinda Roddie
by Belinda Roddie
We stood inches apart, warm breath mingling with warm breath. Our eyes watered from the sting of the sun that lingered just above our heads, while the chorus of footsteps all around us revealed hidden passerby beyond the building that we concealed ourselves behind.
Sally spoke in a whisper, her words drifting in a daring exhalation. “You have no idea,” she said to me, “how much I wish you were a man.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Because I want to do this.”
Then she kissed me, hard, on the mouth. My chest grew tight, the air constricted in my windpipe. I tried to kiss her back, but she was already halfway across the nearest street leading into the trees.
#
That scene ended Chapter 18 of my semi-autobiographical novel. What I didn’t know was that “Sally,” in the same year, would publish a memoir with her own version of the exact same moment from fifteen years before.
Her real name was Sarah Stallworth, though she wrote under the pseudonym “Samantha Sykes.” She had moved miles ahead of me in the literary world, delivering annual bestsellers like welcomed newborns for critics to coo over. They loved her thrillers, her dramas laced with intoxicating romantic undertones, so it came to no surprise that they took a great interest in the little-known writer from Berkeley who had put out a book detailing a story of lust and longing similar to that of their beloved Sykes.
I knew, as soon as I lifted her memoir from the bestseller shelf at the nearest Barnes and Noble, just how strange this new episode of my life was going to be. The fresh, professional binding of the hardcopy book seemed to taunt me, the simple cover of a wilting iris in a glass jar resembling my own expression. I carelessly flipped through the pages and finally put the thing down when I saw the words, “When I first met her in a writing workshop, I was more envious than infatuated…”
That evening, I returned home, switched on the TV, and drank about four pint-sized glasses of hard cider that I kept in a mini-fridge by the sofa. I’d swear off bookstores for good, I told myself, or at least until the hype over this coincidence (or so they first assumed) died down somewhat.
But it had only gotten worse two weeks later. I received countless calls from my literary agent demanding to know just how the Hell I had managed to let this happen, like it was my fault. The critics were frantic, imploring Sarah and me to clear up the whole ordeal. Many accused me of plagiarism. Others questioned how I could have possibly copied her, when we lived on opposites sides of the country and had our books distributed by two very different publishers. One lonely Monday morning, I received an invitation by phone to appear on NPR. Now the media was on this once seemingly insignificant tale.
I refused to go on the radio to tell my side of the story, even though I knew that my book would at least get some more publicity if I talked. In response, NPR invited Sarah on the air, and I heard her voice for the first time in over a decade while driving home from the drugstore.
“Yes, I knew her,” she was saying. The deep, rough timbre of her words crackled over the worn out speakers in my car. “Alice Reddingfield. ‘Abby,’ in my book.”
At the sound of my pseudonym, I gritted my teeth and thought of that hardcopy glaring at me with eyes made of black text as I held it open in my hands. Still, at least it gave the critics the bright idea that I hadn’t plagiarized at all, but rather recounted a true event in my own words in a novel that now sat on the bestseller list just below Sarah’s memoir.
After Sarah’s radio interview, the story became a media hit. Suddenly people who didn’t want to pick up any book other than the latest vampire bastardization now cared about literature, and soon offers to appear on TV came from nearly every daytime talk show in the country. I got calls from the Today Show, Ellen Degeneres, and even Oprah Winfrey, all wishing to “promote” my book and hear all about my side of what was now being called the “lost love story.”
My agent had hyperventilated on the phone when he told me how Oprah had wanted to contact me personally. Deep down, I was glad she hadn’t made the attempt.
“You gotta take it, Alice,” he gasped to me as I sat at my desk with an open bottle of wine beside me. “It’s huge. Everyone’s eating this up. They love the drama.”
Yeah, I thought, a drama that people were meant to have viewed as fiction. To me, this was nothing short of a nightmare. I imagined sitting on that couch in front of a giant screen on set, Oprah’s gentle yet prying eyes attempting to peer directly into my soul. I fictionalized our conversation.
“So you published your book, Daydreaming at Night, as a novel, correct?” she would ask.
“That’s correct. A fictional piece.”
“Why not market it as a memoir?”
“Well, it’s not entirely accurate.” I’d shift in my seat then, the index finger of my right hand pressed to my temples. “I embellished a lot of the events in the book. I wasn’t willing to lie and say it was all true.” Oprah would appreciate that. I still remembered how she ripped apart James Frey for saying A Million Little Piece was purely autobiographical.
“But the story in Chapter 18…the story about ‘Sally’…that did happen?”
“Yes. That did actually happen.”
She wouldn’t blink at this point. All eyes would be on me, an audience of mostly women gawking at the quiet spectacle. “No embellishment there?”
“Except for the name change, that’s actually how it went done.”
We would pause there and wait for the crowd to breathe. The camera would close in on us, invading the confines of my personal bubble. Then Oprah would lean forward in her chair, her pantsuit creasing around her knees and armpits, and speak to me as if consoling a traumatized child.
“So you had no idea that ‘Sally,’ the girl in your story, who we all know by now is Samantha Sykes…you had no idea she was publishing her memoir around the same time your book came out.”
I would laugh then, a shrill, forced sound. I’d do it to diffuse the tension, though I’d only end up making it worse. Then I would shake my head in exaggerated incredulity and say, “No idea. Though you’ll have to forgive me, Oprah, if I refer to her as Sarah. That’s the name I knew her by.”
Then Oprah would smile, pat my leg with a jeweled hand, and murmur to me, “You can call her whatever you like, Alice. Whatever makes you comfortable.”
But I would be far from comfortable, sitting under the heavy lights that hurt my skin in a familiar way. Far, far from comfortable.
#
She had been more curvaceous fifteen years ago, with a fuller face and brighter eyes. Her “About the Author” photo now showed a thinner, paler woman, devoid of color as if it had been drained away. But the Sarah I knew in college had red in her cheeks and hair that shone like molten gold in the right light. She had the most amazing green eyes.
We were twenty-one when we met, sitting on the same side of the table where we presented our writing and got mostly flak for it. Sarah wrote more short stories back then, and I was more inclined to write plays. We took the class for the same reason: We wanted to start working on novels. And that I believe was the first step in the strange relationship that grew between us.
Sarah and I almost had too much in common. We wore similar clothes. We drove the same type of car. We both had a habit of putting garlic into nearly every meal we made. We liked the same movies, the same music and the same books. We fawned over the more somber writers, the tragedies of William Shakespeare, the desperate words of Franz Kafka.
But one thing made us more different than either of us could have imagined, though no one else, not even Sarah, knew my secret: Sarah was straight, and I was gay. It was the 1990s, right when people were just beginning to become aware of AIDS, and I knew that to expose my true sexuality would impose awful implications about my health and my lifestyle. So I kept it to myself, even tried to tell myself that it was just something I had to get over. The getting over part never happened.
Two months into our semester, it got to the point where Sarah and I spent hours together each day, before and after class. Our hang-outs eventually started to concern my other friends and roommates, though I would evade their questions and head out the door every time they tried to talk to me. I heard from one of my acquaintances years later that some friends of mine had actually considered staging an intervention. I found that simultaneously amusing and sad. Still, it didn’t change the fact that the two of us were growing closer by the week, and we began to share thoughts and opinions that we normally would have kept quiet about.
Eventually, Sarah started dating someone from our class, a guy with floppy mouse brown hair and an embarrassingly thin mustache. He liked to write science fiction and began to show up during the times that only she and I were meant to share, talking about George Lucas and Isaac Asimov while nuzzling his head dangerously close to Sarah’s breasts. I tolerated it for a few weeks before deciding to make up various excuses for not hanging out, which usually became more and more extravagant with every phone call. Sarah finally called me out on it when I said I couldn’t go on a coffee outing with her because I needed to take my cat in for surgery.
“You don’t even have a cat,” she objected, and I sighed loudly and bitterly. This was not a confrontation I wanted to have.
“Look, you have a boyfriend. Why don’t you spend time with him?”
“Because I don’t always want to be with him.” The red started to darken on her face as she averted her eyes to the ground. “I want to be with you sometimes.”
That dramatic declaration with her was what spurred me to walk with her and sit behind the science building on campus, where we recollected our thoughts in silence before we began some awkward small talk. Then she stood up, and I followed suit, and we stared at each other for some time. And that was when the moment that had now tethered my writing career to Sarah’s existence finally happened.
#
The hype over Sarah’s and my books lingered in the public eye for another three weeks, and after that my novel dropped to number seven on the bestseller list. Still, while I had been absolutely miserable the whole time people obsessed over the “lost love story,” I had become a recognizable writer. Of course, one could say that I would be forever correlated with Sarah rather than noted as an individual author, but that wasn’t significant to my agent. He was still angry with me for “being such a shut-in.”
I had finally agreed to printed interviews in two magazines, one in People and one in Time. Seeing my thoughts on the matter in that small, compact text was still somewhat daunting, but it beat embarrassing myself on TV and gave me some peace of mind. I had explained my side, I had seen higher profits for my work, and I could now put the whole thing behind me once and for all.
A day after my novel had plummeted to number twenty on the bestseller list, I was in the midst of outlining a new novel when I finally considered it safe enough to go outside again. As I sauntered out into the brisk San Francisco air, I decided to stop by a small store that sold a lot of used books. I figured I could pick up a copy of one of Dostoyevsky’s novels, which I had been interested in some time, but suddenly stopped in my tracks when I saw white-blonde hair flash in the sunlight leaking from behind a bulbous cloud.
It wasn’t her. I had thought it was her, but it wasn’t. I breathed deeply and walked into the bookstore, weaving up and down the aisles before I found the D’s. When I couldn’t find a copy of Crime and Punishment or The Idiot, I moved to the C’s and pulled out a worn out paperback of Don Quixote. I marched up to the counter where a young man looking like he suffered from premature balding charged me five dollars for it.
“You’re that writer, right?” he said as he handed the book back to me in a paper bag. “Alice…Redding, isn’t it?”
“Reddingfield,” I automatically replied.
“Yeah, that’s it. I heard your name on TV a while back.” The cashier paused as if in deep thought. “That woman Sykes was on there. Yeah. She kept talking about you, over and over. She didn’t seem to want to stop…”
I quickly thanked him for his service and fled the store like I had been spooked. As I raced back to my apartment, my head actually hurt from all the thoughts zipping through it, like it was constricting the blood vessels leading to my brain. I fumbled for my keys and stumbled into the living room, collapsing on the sofa with the bag hanging limply from between my fingers.
That was it, I thought to myself. I would no longer leave the house. Hell, maybe I’d start believing I was agoraphobic. Maybe that would shut my agent up. In my muddled mind, I honestly believed that hiding behind walls would be the only solution for this drama I was beginning to wish I had never put down on the page. I went to bed with the resolve to stay hidden still strong.
The next morning, I received a phone call. When I picked it up, the voice on the other end made me stiffen. She had found a way to contact me, and she wanted to see me as soon as possible, while she was on her book tour in the city. As expected now from my consistently dark mood, I felt like withering away like that damn iris on the cover of her book and fading into the carpet while she repeated my name on the other line.
Sally spoke in a whisper, her words drifting in a daring exhalation. “You have no idea,” she said to me, “how much I wish you were a man.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Because I want to do this.”
Then she kissed me, hard, on the mouth. My chest grew tight, the air constricted in my windpipe. I tried to kiss her back, but she was already halfway across the nearest street leading into the trees.
#
That scene ended Chapter 18 of my semi-autobiographical novel. What I didn’t know was that “Sally,” in the same year, would publish a memoir with her own version of the exact same moment from fifteen years before.
Her real name was Sarah Stallworth, though she wrote under the pseudonym “Samantha Sykes.” She had moved miles ahead of me in the literary world, delivering annual bestsellers like welcomed newborns for critics to coo over. They loved her thrillers, her dramas laced with intoxicating romantic undertones, so it came to no surprise that they took a great interest in the little-known writer from Berkeley who had put out a book detailing a story of lust and longing similar to that of their beloved Sykes.
I knew, as soon as I lifted her memoir from the bestseller shelf at the nearest Barnes and Noble, just how strange this new episode of my life was going to be. The fresh, professional binding of the hardcopy book seemed to taunt me, the simple cover of a wilting iris in a glass jar resembling my own expression. I carelessly flipped through the pages and finally put the thing down when I saw the words, “When I first met her in a writing workshop, I was more envious than infatuated…”
That evening, I returned home, switched on the TV, and drank about four pint-sized glasses of hard cider that I kept in a mini-fridge by the sofa. I’d swear off bookstores for good, I told myself, or at least until the hype over this coincidence (or so they first assumed) died down somewhat.
But it had only gotten worse two weeks later. I received countless calls from my literary agent demanding to know just how the Hell I had managed to let this happen, like it was my fault. The critics were frantic, imploring Sarah and me to clear up the whole ordeal. Many accused me of plagiarism. Others questioned how I could have possibly copied her, when we lived on opposites sides of the country and had our books distributed by two very different publishers. One lonely Monday morning, I received an invitation by phone to appear on NPR. Now the media was on this once seemingly insignificant tale.
I refused to go on the radio to tell my side of the story, even though I knew that my book would at least get some more publicity if I talked. In response, NPR invited Sarah on the air, and I heard her voice for the first time in over a decade while driving home from the drugstore.
“Yes, I knew her,” she was saying. The deep, rough timbre of her words crackled over the worn out speakers in my car. “Alice Reddingfield. ‘Abby,’ in my book.”
At the sound of my pseudonym, I gritted my teeth and thought of that hardcopy glaring at me with eyes made of black text as I held it open in my hands. Still, at least it gave the critics the bright idea that I hadn’t plagiarized at all, but rather recounted a true event in my own words in a novel that now sat on the bestseller list just below Sarah’s memoir.
After Sarah’s radio interview, the story became a media hit. Suddenly people who didn’t want to pick up any book other than the latest vampire bastardization now cared about literature, and soon offers to appear on TV came from nearly every daytime talk show in the country. I got calls from the Today Show, Ellen Degeneres, and even Oprah Winfrey, all wishing to “promote” my book and hear all about my side of what was now being called the “lost love story.”
My agent had hyperventilated on the phone when he told me how Oprah had wanted to contact me personally. Deep down, I was glad she hadn’t made the attempt.
“You gotta take it, Alice,” he gasped to me as I sat at my desk with an open bottle of wine beside me. “It’s huge. Everyone’s eating this up. They love the drama.”
Yeah, I thought, a drama that people were meant to have viewed as fiction. To me, this was nothing short of a nightmare. I imagined sitting on that couch in front of a giant screen on set, Oprah’s gentle yet prying eyes attempting to peer directly into my soul. I fictionalized our conversation.
“So you published your book, Daydreaming at Night, as a novel, correct?” she would ask.
“That’s correct. A fictional piece.”
“Why not market it as a memoir?”
“Well, it’s not entirely accurate.” I’d shift in my seat then, the index finger of my right hand pressed to my temples. “I embellished a lot of the events in the book. I wasn’t willing to lie and say it was all true.” Oprah would appreciate that. I still remembered how she ripped apart James Frey for saying A Million Little Piece was purely autobiographical.
“But the story in Chapter 18…the story about ‘Sally’…that did happen?”
“Yes. That did actually happen.”
She wouldn’t blink at this point. All eyes would be on me, an audience of mostly women gawking at the quiet spectacle. “No embellishment there?”
“Except for the name change, that’s actually how it went done.”
We would pause there and wait for the crowd to breathe. The camera would close in on us, invading the confines of my personal bubble. Then Oprah would lean forward in her chair, her pantsuit creasing around her knees and armpits, and speak to me as if consoling a traumatized child.
“So you had no idea that ‘Sally,’ the girl in your story, who we all know by now is Samantha Sykes…you had no idea she was publishing her memoir around the same time your book came out.”
I would laugh then, a shrill, forced sound. I’d do it to diffuse the tension, though I’d only end up making it worse. Then I would shake my head in exaggerated incredulity and say, “No idea. Though you’ll have to forgive me, Oprah, if I refer to her as Sarah. That’s the name I knew her by.”
Then Oprah would smile, pat my leg with a jeweled hand, and murmur to me, “You can call her whatever you like, Alice. Whatever makes you comfortable.”
But I would be far from comfortable, sitting under the heavy lights that hurt my skin in a familiar way. Far, far from comfortable.
#
She had been more curvaceous fifteen years ago, with a fuller face and brighter eyes. Her “About the Author” photo now showed a thinner, paler woman, devoid of color as if it had been drained away. But the Sarah I knew in college had red in her cheeks and hair that shone like molten gold in the right light. She had the most amazing green eyes.
We were twenty-one when we met, sitting on the same side of the table where we presented our writing and got mostly flak for it. Sarah wrote more short stories back then, and I was more inclined to write plays. We took the class for the same reason: We wanted to start working on novels. And that I believe was the first step in the strange relationship that grew between us.
Sarah and I almost had too much in common. We wore similar clothes. We drove the same type of car. We both had a habit of putting garlic into nearly every meal we made. We liked the same movies, the same music and the same books. We fawned over the more somber writers, the tragedies of William Shakespeare, the desperate words of Franz Kafka.
But one thing made us more different than either of us could have imagined, though no one else, not even Sarah, knew my secret: Sarah was straight, and I was gay. It was the 1990s, right when people were just beginning to become aware of AIDS, and I knew that to expose my true sexuality would impose awful implications about my health and my lifestyle. So I kept it to myself, even tried to tell myself that it was just something I had to get over. The getting over part never happened.
Two months into our semester, it got to the point where Sarah and I spent hours together each day, before and after class. Our hang-outs eventually started to concern my other friends and roommates, though I would evade their questions and head out the door every time they tried to talk to me. I heard from one of my acquaintances years later that some friends of mine had actually considered staging an intervention. I found that simultaneously amusing and sad. Still, it didn’t change the fact that the two of us were growing closer by the week, and we began to share thoughts and opinions that we normally would have kept quiet about.
Eventually, Sarah started dating someone from our class, a guy with floppy mouse brown hair and an embarrassingly thin mustache. He liked to write science fiction and began to show up during the times that only she and I were meant to share, talking about George Lucas and Isaac Asimov while nuzzling his head dangerously close to Sarah’s breasts. I tolerated it for a few weeks before deciding to make up various excuses for not hanging out, which usually became more and more extravagant with every phone call. Sarah finally called me out on it when I said I couldn’t go on a coffee outing with her because I needed to take my cat in for surgery.
“You don’t even have a cat,” she objected, and I sighed loudly and bitterly. This was not a confrontation I wanted to have.
“Look, you have a boyfriend. Why don’t you spend time with him?”
“Because I don’t always want to be with him.” The red started to darken on her face as she averted her eyes to the ground. “I want to be with you sometimes.”
That dramatic declaration with her was what spurred me to walk with her and sit behind the science building on campus, where we recollected our thoughts in silence before we began some awkward small talk. Then she stood up, and I followed suit, and we stared at each other for some time. And that was when the moment that had now tethered my writing career to Sarah’s existence finally happened.
#
The hype over Sarah’s and my books lingered in the public eye for another three weeks, and after that my novel dropped to number seven on the bestseller list. Still, while I had been absolutely miserable the whole time people obsessed over the “lost love story,” I had become a recognizable writer. Of course, one could say that I would be forever correlated with Sarah rather than noted as an individual author, but that wasn’t significant to my agent. He was still angry with me for “being such a shut-in.”
I had finally agreed to printed interviews in two magazines, one in People and one in Time. Seeing my thoughts on the matter in that small, compact text was still somewhat daunting, but it beat embarrassing myself on TV and gave me some peace of mind. I had explained my side, I had seen higher profits for my work, and I could now put the whole thing behind me once and for all.
A day after my novel had plummeted to number twenty on the bestseller list, I was in the midst of outlining a new novel when I finally considered it safe enough to go outside again. As I sauntered out into the brisk San Francisco air, I decided to stop by a small store that sold a lot of used books. I figured I could pick up a copy of one of Dostoyevsky’s novels, which I had been interested in some time, but suddenly stopped in my tracks when I saw white-blonde hair flash in the sunlight leaking from behind a bulbous cloud.
It wasn’t her. I had thought it was her, but it wasn’t. I breathed deeply and walked into the bookstore, weaving up and down the aisles before I found the D’s. When I couldn’t find a copy of Crime and Punishment or The Idiot, I moved to the C’s and pulled out a worn out paperback of Don Quixote. I marched up to the counter where a young man looking like he suffered from premature balding charged me five dollars for it.
“You’re that writer, right?” he said as he handed the book back to me in a paper bag. “Alice…Redding, isn’t it?”
“Reddingfield,” I automatically replied.
“Yeah, that’s it. I heard your name on TV a while back.” The cashier paused as if in deep thought. “That woman Sykes was on there. Yeah. She kept talking about you, over and over. She didn’t seem to want to stop…”
I quickly thanked him for his service and fled the store like I had been spooked. As I raced back to my apartment, my head actually hurt from all the thoughts zipping through it, like it was constricting the blood vessels leading to my brain. I fumbled for my keys and stumbled into the living room, collapsing on the sofa with the bag hanging limply from between my fingers.
That was it, I thought to myself. I would no longer leave the house. Hell, maybe I’d start believing I was agoraphobic. Maybe that would shut my agent up. In my muddled mind, I honestly believed that hiding behind walls would be the only solution for this drama I was beginning to wish I had never put down on the page. I went to bed with the resolve to stay hidden still strong.
The next morning, I received a phone call. When I picked it up, the voice on the other end made me stiffen. She had found a way to contact me, and she wanted to see me as soon as possible, while she was on her book tour in the city. As expected now from my consistently dark mood, I felt like withering away like that damn iris on the cover of her book and fading into the carpet while she repeated my name on the other line.
The work you see here has not been edited nor altered since March 2nd, 2011.
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