The Man I Will Never Get Over

I have a lot of bad habits (ignoring dishes, not filing important papers, losing my mind when boys mimic me in those high-pitched screechy voices they always do when imitating women), but another is this: I have a bad habit of falling in love with some (a lot) of the male characters I write.

This isn't love in that creepy I've-lost-sense-of-reality kind of way where I carry on conversations with the characters in my head, where I think they're somehow going to materialize in my living room and say, "Come on, Jess, we're going out for a nice steak dinner." I have a grip. I have control. I also have my sanity. My love for these characters is hypothetical. It's a love that says, If these characters were real men in your life, you wouldn't stand a chance. Not a single chance.

This weekend I started writing a new story with a whole new boy that I first thought was going to be one way--disgusting, foul, and shady--but turned out much different than all that. Suddenly there was a scene that showed him as vulnerable, damaged, and even noble. The whole story changed. The whole story got better. And I was in love.

I think that's how I like my men: with bite and bent and attitude. I like my men to come from bad places so they appreciate what they have, so they will fight if anyone ever tries to take it away from them. And so that's who often shows up--whether I want them to or not--in stories I write.

But no one ever showed up more than Oliver Covet. I will never be able to stop thinking about Oliver Covet: tall, blond, perfect hair, worked-in jeans, a hammer in his hand.

Ollie came around when I was twelve years old. He just showed up because I had started writing a story about the girl I always wanted to be: the daughter of a racing tycoon. My childhood had been soaked in the boozy-smokey world of auto racing. My mother owned a NASCAR memorabilia store, my father took me to the local track on Saturday nights, and my best friend's father had a race team of his own. I once stood in their garage and helped to rub the lettering of the driver's name on the car's roof. I wished and wished and wished that the name could be my name on my own car that I would get into on Saturday, a car I would drive hard and bang up and win with.

I never would get it, and I knew it, so I wrote about it instead. I created my perfect world. I created a prissy mother who was depressed her daughter was a tomboy, a father who was pleased about it, and a raggedy crew of attractive boys who fixed the car. I created a better version of me. I created Jessie Roberts: smartassed, tough, sarcastic, beautiful, worshipped, uncontainable. Then I created the world's best man to head up the crew of attractive boys. I created Ollie: tall, with long blond hair and blue eyes, the only boy who knew how to reign in Jessie Roberts, the only boy who ever saw her cry.

I could go on about Ollie Covet for hours, days, weeks, months. It's a strange combination: I feel proud because he's mine, I created him, and I put him together with my own two hands; I also feel like I wish he would materialize out of the thin air and tell me we're going out for a nice steak dinner, then we're going shopping for wedding rings. I'd marry Ollie Covet in a New York minute. In a hot, hot second.

I thought about Ollie Covet a lot over the last few days. For one thing, I spent half my day on Sunday in front of the television, watching the Daytona 500. For another thing, Diana sent me an e-mail this morning about the newest onslaught of Harlequin books--they'll feature racing themes and "appearances" from real-life drivers. It made me angry to think of that. I wanted to yell at the authors of those books, to tell them they couldn't possibly be accurately portraying what it's like to love the institution of auto racing, to love its roots and legacy, to love the boys who slip themselves into those tenuous sheet metal shells week after week. The Harlequin stories, I was sure, would be goofy and gross. They would feature silly, giggly, wormy girls who would know nothing about racing yet they would end up bagging the hottest racer around. They would say, "I just don't get what you do! Will you explain it to me again?" Jessie Roberts would never be a silly, giggly, wormy girl. She wouldn't stand for anything like that. Her story would be so much more compelling, so much more real.

Both of those things worked me into an Ollie overload, but one more thing threw me right over the edge. This weekend Amy and I, in our quest to see as many Oscar-nominated films and performances as possible before the ceremony--watched Half Nelson. In it, Ryan Gosling is scruffy and lost and vulnerable. He is beautiful, one of the world's most beautiful boys. And that's when I realized it. He could be Ollie. He could be Ollie with no problem, with very little effort. I'd never been able to pin that down before. I'd never been able to say, "Oh, in a perfect world where they turned this story into a movie, so-and-so would play Ollie." I thought a younger Matthew McConaughey might've been able to pull it off, but that line of thinking was never quite right. Ollie would be a little grittier, a little tougher, a little less perfect.

So this weekend when I looked at the screen I saw, for the first time ever, Ollie Covet looking back at me. And I thought Oh God and Wouldn't it be nice and Jesus. I thought it was perfect, that Ryan Gosling's body and face could be Ollie's body and face, and if we could just scoop up all the words and details and images I'd ever written about Ollie Covet then somehow pour them into Ryan Gosling--well, that would be it for me. That would be my man, my love, the one thing I would never quite stop thinking about.