You Are Having a Good Time by Amie Barrodale

Author:Amie Barrodale
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374713294
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Night Report

After they made love he said, “Ema, I’ve been reading a new book. Well, it’s an old book, but no one knows about it anymore. It’s a great book, though writing it ruined the author’s career. She’s a fascinating woman—she was—Sloane Newam, do you know her?”

“I’ve heard the name,” Ema said. “I think I read something by her—she wrote that thing about a television show, didn’t she?”

“Night Report on ABC. But the book is about a whole network!”

“That’s right. Night Report, that thing, bum-BUM-bum.”

“You would like this Sloane Newam. She’s funny. She reminds me of you.”

“What do you mean?”

* * *

At the airport the next day, he gave her a copy of Sloane Newam’s memoir and said, “Read it and you will see.”

She began reading in the line at check-in. Halfway through the novel, flying over Missouri, she came to a fight between Sloane Newam and the head of her network. Mid-sentence, Sloane Newam wrote, “This may be the wrong time to say that I loved him. I did.” Ema pressed the book to her chest.

“Are you all right?” the woman beside her asked.

Ema wiped her cheeks and nodded. She turned away from the woman. She’d drunk several small bottles of scotch. She didn’t want to be rude, so she turned back to face the woman and said, “It’s pretty, huh? Out the window. It’s Missouri. Get it? Mis-uh-ry? Misery. It’s like—I’m so happy, I’m over misery—Missouri. Ha.”

The woman seemed embarrassed and turned away.

* * *

Sloane Newam had written two novels. They were out of print. One was on sale on Amazon for a penny, plus shipping, and the other was priced at $109. Ema ordered both.

They came the day before Christmas. Ema made her champagne sorbet. It was made by pouring two bottles of champagne into a bowl and putting it into the freezer, then stirring every half hour. She ate her champagne sorbet from the bowl, in bed with a spoon, and read Sloane Newam’s novels.

The second was about Sloane Newam’s lifelong affair with a married man. Sloane Newam had captured what Ema could not. She had captured the way loving someone who wasn’t there made the world seem funny and enchanted.

Was the married man trying to tell her this? Ema didn’t think so. She didn’t think the married man had read the novels, and if he had, it was unlikely he would understand them. For him the affair was an escape valve. For her it was poetic. She had once tried to tell him, “You are in the fabric of everything I see. When I see three young men in denim jackets, I am already describing it to you. Before I describe it to myself, I am in a dialogue with you.” He hadn’t been able to make it out to L.A. for a few months after that.

But Sloane Newam expressed it, because she barely talked about her married man at all. Instead, she described scenes from her life. She described being stranded at an airport

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