After Hana chugged off in her battered Subaru, I walked up a flight of moss-covered stone stairs to Objects of Art, a cramped and cluttered workshop run by master jeweler Les Riddell. A month ago, I had ventured into the shop and inspected the samples in his anteroom and was deeply moved by his one-of-a-kind jewelry creations. I struck up a conversation with him, told him how much I admired his work and that I needed an engagement ring, but I didn’t want it to be a crass, prosaic diamond, but perhaps something indigenous to these schist soils my Pinot vines were struggling to gain a foothold in. Les had a brainstorm about creating a ring in a rare quartz. But things had changed. An about-face of epic proportions had occurred. Ella had dumped me. The surprise was now tainted.
“It’s good to see you, Miles,” Les said. He was a dapper Canadian in his fifties, fit, and often sartorially attired in suits and loud, colorfully illustrated ties. Today he was sporting a burgundy vest over a long-sleeve black shirt accessorized with a red tie dotted by white spots.
“You’re looking sporty, Les,” I said. “You know, I’ve only worn a tie once in my life.”
“When was that?”
“My wedding,” I said, smiling wryly at the fossilized memory. I settled onto a stool. Les had spun his away from his workbench and faced me, champagne flute in one hand, an uncorked bottle of champagne on the bench.
“Can I offer you a glass?”
I shook my head no. “Too early in the day for me.”
“Your ring is done. Do you want to see it?”
I closed my eyes and audibly sighed. “No, that’s okay, Les.”
“What’s wrong, Miles?”
I ran a tongue over my upper teeth. “A confluence of unforeseen circumstances has left me a little poleaxed.” I looked up at him. “I don’t think the proposal is going to happen.” He stared at me fixedly. I kept nodding up and down, wondering what to divulge to Les, one of my few friends in Cromwell—we had golfed when the weather cooperated. “I might have to fly back to California. And because I’ve overstayed my visa, my chances of returning are going to be fraught, if not nonexistent.”
“Not if you marry her.”
“I wouldn’t want that to be a condition of my proposal. It makes it seem . . . transactional.”
Les shrugged. “I did it. And it wasn’t transactional. It was practical. And we’re still together, going on two decades.”
“That’s nice to hear, Les. Where I come from, two years is verging on a record.”
“I can sell the ring . . .” he started.
“No, it’s okay. I ordered it. I’m going to pay for it, take it, hold on to it, see if things change.” I raised my eyes. “Is there any way you can add a chain so I can wear it around my neck and maybe rub it now and then for good luck?”
“Of course, Miles, whatever you want.”
Les rose from his stool, crossed the room, removed the finished ring from a box lined with black velvet, and handed it to me. It was a light-pinkish quartz stone mounted on a sterling silver band. I stared into its scintillant eye. Ella’s face materialized in it out of the wingbeat of my imagination. And then it just as quickly evanesced. I nodded introspectively, still wounded by her impulsive, explosive—but justifiable—breakup with me. The thought of losing her devastated me.
“It’s beautiful, Les. Stunning.”
He retrieved a sterling silver necklace from a nearby workstation, threaded it through the ring, then deftly looped it around my neck and clasped it closed. “In case you change your mind, you’ll always have your proposal close to your heart. These things go in cycles, Miles.”
I nodded, reluctant to encourage conversation. I was still trying to grapple with the news: the imminent book tour; my young Māori publicist, Hana; the Tough Guy Book Club in Oamaru; Jack deciding to jet over for a reprise of our ill-fated bachelor trip to a little-known California wine region back in the day. “Storm clouds are converging on me from all sides. I knew New Zealand was too good to be true,” I muttered. I fingered the ring now dangling on my sternum and stared into its microcosmic universe, the one I had fucked up. Was it sentimentality that I wanted to wear it around my neck or a good luck charm ensuring I would make it back to where the quartz was quarried: an abandoned mine above my beloved Miles’s Lot?
With a heavy heart, I drove along Lake Dunstan back to Prophet’s Rock, the engagement ring bobbing sneeringly on my chest. Untrammeled vistas were suddenly unsettling.
Max greeted me with incessant meowing when I came inside. Having missed me, he rubbed his whiskers against my pant leg. I prepared his dinner, which he attacked with alacrity. Shortly afterward he disappeared into the spare bedroom where his litterbox and toys resided. I followed him in and watched him, hunched over with arched back, defecate. This didn’t bother me. In fact, it was as much of a relief for me as for him because, in the early days of his disability, he had trouble going. But now I viewed it in a different light: How would he do this in a Stagecoach bus? Would I leave him in the bus when Jack and I checked in to our hotel rooms, or would I sneak him into the hotel room with me? And where would I leave Max when I was hosting my events? Having never had children nor cared for a pet since I was a kid, I was woefully at a loss in these caregiving matters. And there was no Ella, who had fostered many ferals, to consult.
I stacked split logs in the fireplace and managed to kindle the beginnings of a warming fire. Max padded back into the living room on wobbly legs. Instead of retreating to his bed, he climbed his cat stairs to the couch and curled up next to me. I rubbed his whiskers and let my thoughts run. Max rested his head on my thigh, dreaming away the moment as I catastrophically envisaged the future. I glanced down at A Year of Pure Feeling resting on the glass-top coffee table. It wasn’t the bawdy, comic novel my fan base was no doubt clamoring for. It was a sardonically bleak vision of the future enveloped in a love story that was now, it appeared, more fiction than reality. Ella had read it and claimed to have loved it, but you never know with those close to you what their true feelings are. It was our story, and it truly had been a year of pure feeling. Now it wasn’t our story because of one email flung from halfway across the world, over an equator and nineteen fucking time zones. If there hadn’t existed an internet, my life would be different. Milena, the woman from my past, would never have been able to track me down. Fate is different now, I thought, as I continued to stroke a contentedly purring Max.
My cell rang. Hughie Martin’s face blossomed on the screen. He was a bespectacled man with a head of thinning hair, a lover of life, a believer—unlike me—in life, and an ardent fan of books, especially the one that had brought me a modicum of fame, if not fortune.
“Hi, Hughie,” I said as soon as I tapped the green button.
“How’s it going, mate? Heard you met Hana today.”
“Yeah. Smart, upbeat woman. You’ve got good taste in both literature and employees, Hughie.”
Hughie chuckled. “How did you get on?”
“Cracking,” I said in imitation Kiwi parlance. “She walked me through the opening day.”
“I heard about your bringing Jack along. That’s brilliant. Jack’s going to bring another level of excitement, Miles. Washed-Up Celebrities was a big hit here and across the Tasman in Aussie land.”
“I heard. I don’t know what that says about Kiwis or Aussies, given it was canceled after one season in the US, but I’m glad you approve. Not that I’m dancing in the aisles about the cross-promotional association.”
“Hey, it’ll be two guys on the road, just like before.” Like Hana, like Jack, Hughie preferred to view everything through a lens of positivity.
“I’m not sure what it’ll be, Hughie. If nothing else, Hana’s idea about book clubs instead of boring readings at indie bookstores is inspired. The book looks nice.”
“Thank you,” Hughie said. “David did a bang-up job.” David was David Hedley, an erudite, refined bookseller in Masterton.
“I hope we sell a lot.”
“I’m sure we’ll be into the fifth printing by the end of the tour.”
“What was Hedley’s initial print run?”
“Two thousand,” he said, as if I would be impressed. “At nearly five dollars a copy, I’m out ten thousand.”
I wasn’t interested in his complaining about money.
Hughie sensed it and got off the subject. “You’re in capable hands with Hana.”
“I have a good feeling about her. She seems like somebody you wouldn’t want to betray or fuck with.”
Hughie laughed.
Two years ago, when I was struggling, Hughie Martin, a successful businessman, had wanted to find fulfillment in life, so he naturally turned to the arts and founded a publishing company. A fan of my legacy work, he contacted me out of the blue and wondered if I had another book in me. One that might be set in New Zealand. I did, sure. Who wouldn’t want to jet to New Zealand and write a book? I told him. I fielded these emails all the time, and usually they turned out to be charlatans wasting my time trying to hustle me to write a sequel to my now-iconic-first-novel-turned-into-movie fame. But Hughie hung in there, got me the fellowship and the visiting professorship, and soon I had reinvented myself in New Zealand, looking for a way to morph my rejected pitch for A Year of Pure Feeling so that it would bring New Zealand into play. It was when I met Ella and landed at Prophet’s Rock that it all dovetailed. That novel, the one gleaming on my coffee table, had been written in a true cataract of creativity. I figured a New Zealand publisher, even if fledgling, coming out with my book would galvanize international sales, the US now being international—me, Miles, now officially an expat.
“I’ll be dipping in and out to see how you’re doing, Miles,” he said in his rat-a-tat-tat manner of speaking. It still felt weird that all this time, with all that had gone on, we had never met in person. As I traipsed his country in search of a book, he stayed headquartered in Wellington.
“Okay, Hughie,” I said. “Thanks for everything. I appreciate all you’ve done. I look forward to finally meeting you when I cross Cook Strait.” I didn’t have the heart to disclose I might have to fly back to California and wouldn’t be able to return for the broader tour he was brainstorming that included Australia. I needed the second payment, due upon completion of the tour, a tour I had my doubts about, given that such book tours had been scuttled a long time ago by budget-minded US publishers. And who came to book signings anymore unless you were a famous celebrity TV chef or some scumbag high up in scandalous politics or an actor penning an autohagiography letting the world know what a genius you were? But New Zealand boasted a high literacy rate, independent bookstores were prospering, book clubs and wine were all the rage, so what did I know? With Hana’s creative book club itinerary, maybe my cynicism would be upended. Maybe books had a future, and content consumption wasn’t all social media and superhero films and video games and MMA. We used to massage and grow our brains with words; now we clobber them with violence.
Max purred as I roared in my head.