23/90, the wives

It wasn’t until last night that I felt like an adult, that my being in love wasn’t just a fun game of house we were playing, that this is the next Life Stage.

When Gertrude Stein had fellow expatriate writers over to her apartment in the 1920s, the wives were segregated. Her “companion” or “friend,” as Hemingway refers to the woman Stein lives with, did needlepoint and maintained a conversation with them separate from the writers’ talk. “The wives… were tolerated,” Hemingway explains in a moveable feast.

While Joe and the other members of his writing group got together to workshop their writing, I realized that I was a “wife.” I was not segregated--I had no work to share and had read no one’s work. There was another “wife” in a similar situation.

We sat together, quickly discovering that we were in remarkably similar situation. We had sifted through long-distance relationships to find nuggets of time to visit the person we loved. We are passionate about nonfiction. We are not writing as much as we should, in the way that we should or about the things that we should. We are getting married. Soon, she sooner than I--May. 

While we talked about the weddings, literary conversation around us hummed and pulled us in. We admitted that we were anxious to get back to writing. We admitted that we felt odd and uncomfortable without something to share--an uncomfortable far worst than that first sting of a workshop.

That was the moment when I realized this was our life. This was not us being students. This was us in the circle of friends we'd been searching for. This was us in a moment that represents what we want for our lives: evenings with writers, sharing and editing and admitting that our plot has started plodding or we have more scene breaks than scene. 

 This will be us, living the dream that Hemingway and Fitzgerald made real for us in so many ways... minus the sexism and alcoholism (on our parts), plus a bit of financial stability and casual drinking games.* I mean, you can only talk about your 30 pages of writing for so long before things digress.

*Note: I did not say more drinking. Ça, c'est impossible.