Page 17 of Rivals to Lovers
His adaptation started at the party where Eliza and Clive met but was told from Clive’s perspective. Mo fell into the rhythm of his words easily—too easily for her comfort. She wanted to keep emotional distance, but it was hard not to get lost in the words. His opening chapter was resplendent with 1920s charm. Clive adjusted his spats and ran a hand over the beading of Eliza’s dress as they stood in line for punch at the party. And when he spilled some on himself—sometimes called the twentieth century’s first meet-cute—she took him into the kitchen at the party and tended to him. The moment, recast through Clive’s eyes, probed the tender domesticity of this action from a character who was obviously so independent, and showed why he wanted her so much. In Mo’s readings of the original scene, this desire felt almost predatory—Clive’s eyes on Liza’s as she patted at his jacket with club soda—but Wes took a different tact. He wrote something tender in Clive’s gaze. As someone who had read the whole book so many times, it was hard for Mo to think about the scene differently, but he managed to frame the interaction as fresh. The way the light caught Eliza’s sleek bob, the smell of lilac in the air.
When Wes finished, he took a deep drink of coffee. Mo did the same, realizing it had gotten cold while she listened.He was a good reader, confident and expressive. Maureen wasn’t quite so confident in her speaking voice, but she knew her voice on the page—and of the character—would come through. She waited for Estelle to give some sort of signal that it was her turn. Estelle finally looked up from the notepad on which she had been taking copious notes and smiled. “Go ahead, Maureen.”
After a steadying breath, Mo began. “ ‘Liza didn’t have many friends, but the friends she had were also named a form of Elizabeth—Lizzy, Beth, Ellie—and the many forms an Elizabeth could take made her hopeful that she too could take a new form as easily as adopting a new name. As easy as changing her clothes. As easy as rolling her crop top off in a stranger’s bathroom to put on a new shirt and pretend that this party, this next party, would be the one that would change her life.’ ”
Mo kept reading, steadier with the first paragraph behind her. She’d centered her narrative in the early aughts. The post-9/11, halfway-through-the-endless-war period was defined by McMansions and “We are the 99 percent” rallies on the streets of New York. For Mo, Eliza’s counterculture appeal wasn’t limited to the flapper era. Mo pictured Eliza as a sheltered girl shot-putted into the real world for the first time, struggling.
Once Mo had started reimagining the novel, there were so many threads there to pull on that she’d had to limit herself, and she knew later adaptations would have so much to say. The original text wryly called out the sexism of Eliza’s situation, which was doubly wonderful in retrospect, since it was published without people knowing the author was a woman. Feminism had changed so much since the twenties, though. Something Mo noticed while listening to Wes’s first chapterwas a lingering classism, one of the reasons Mo wanted to retell the novel in an updated context. Here in this hall of money, she thought about this same irony of class barriers. In her book, Clive came from a working-class family but had clawed his way up the Wall Street bro hierarchy with a mix of charisma and smarts. And how much more countercultural could it seem to an independent twentysomething to fall headlong into a serious relationship with him—an elopement and the sudden recentering of the traditional values that she didn’t know were expected of her?
Mo finished reading the chapter. At the end of it, Clive and Liza had made their way into the bathroom at a party after she spilled a drink on him. Instead of merely touching hands, as in Morgan’s novel, the characters kissed. She didn’t like to think of it asmakingthe characters kiss, because it hadn’t felt that way when she was writing. The kiss felt inevitable, necessary. When Mo reached that point while reading, she glanced up at Wes and took in his set expression.
Mo read, “ ‘His hand met mine on his chest, and that press of skin on skin made the next press easier. Our lips met. His tongue explored my mouth and I let it, leaning against the pedestal sink and feeling like I was on a pedestal myself.’ ” She didn’t want to see how Wes took the decision she had made to move their kiss up, and to write it explicitly on the page. Mo wanted to keep many touchstones of the book in place—the drink spill, the wedding, the dinner party, and the argument at the climax of the book. Without them, it wouldn’t be an adaptation. She wanted readers to feel the anchor of Morgan’s novel but still feel a bit adrift, unsure how Mo would twist things. Mo had felt adrift while writing it—it was only fair.
The chapter ended on that kiss, with Mo suddenly feeling as breathless as her character was. When she looked up from the manuscript, Estelle and Gary were both smiling. She smiled in return and glanced at Wes, whose face was less friendly. And why should it be? Just because she had imagined kissing him didn’t mean they were friends. She wondered idly how Wes’s mouth would feel—had felt?—against her own. The shape of that tongue that had helped him speak so well minutes ago and the other tricks it could do.
Deep breath.
With a calm smile, Estelle dismissed them for the morning, explaining that dinner that night would include some company—her two adult children. “We thought a little party would be fun, nothing fancy.”
Wes took this in stride. “Of course,” he said. But internally, Mo panicked. She had already worn one of the two dresses she’d packed for the weekend, and it had arguably been her nicer one for first impressions’ sake.
“I’m afraid I don’t have anything party appropriate,” she said.
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Estelle said, waving a hand. “It’s a family dinner.”
As Mo and Wes left the dining room, he touched Mo’s arm lightly. “If you want to go shopping, we can. If you’re nervous.”
“I’m not nervous,” Mo said, once she knew they were out of earshot. She stepped back to lose the faint touch of his fingers, then immediately missed the warmth. “I’m not nervous or anxious.”
He gave a small shrug. “It’s okay to worry about how you look.”
“I think I look fine.”
“You do,” he said, then blushed. It might have been a blush, or it might have been a trick of the light. Before she could look closer, he had turned away, moving down the hall, and continued the conversation. “How are you this morning?”
She took a hint from his careful tone that he remembered a lot more about last night than she did. “I’m fine. Thank you for … helping me when things went wrong.”
“And how about Gary and Estelle?” he asked. “I … didn’t expect to see him.”
“I thought it was fine,” Mo said, unsure of why he was so thrown off. They had been perfectly polite through both readings. Gary had even nodded during a part she’d rewritten a dozen times, a satisfying sight from an audience member. “I assumed he would be there, to be honest.”
“You did?”
And there it was again, that sense of exclusion, of exclusivity. Gary obviously was “the help” to Wes, and therefore somehow unworthy of what—hearing their drafts? Mo felt her cheeks reddening. “You wouldn’t have been that way if it had been one of her daughters in there, would you?”
He looked shocked. “Of course not! I would have expected it, even. I was surprised, that’s all—”
Mo took a deep breath, scanning his face. It was too easy to get caught in his brown eyes and in the curl of his lips. “I need some fresh air.” Mo knew her voice was cold, but she didn’t care. Let him figure out what an ass he was. He’d had how many years of private school? He could educate himself on this one.
She slipped upstairs to get walking shoes. The day outside looked clear and bright, but by the time she had gotten intothe hallway, Wes was standing, waiting for her. “I thought you might want a ride somewhere,” he said. His tone was careful. “I’m grabbing coffee downtown, if you’d like to get out of here for a while.”
Mo hadn’t had a clear sense of her goal for the morning. She’d optimistically brought her laptop to write, but her nerves had jammed any creativity. Her true goals were to keep it together and not make a fool out of herself, and it seemed easier to do those two things away from the person whose choices controlled her future. At least if Wes was out with her, it wasn’t like she was losing some prime bonding time with Estelle that he was taking advantage of.
She sighed, then nodded. “Okay. Sure. Let me get my non-designer purse and we’ll get out of here.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Wes
