So Much For My Happy Ending
I can tell by the look on her face that she hates it already.
“Look, I didn’t really have time to work out the—“
She holds up a finger in my direction without even turning my way. She flips to the next page and returns her finger to its perch on her lower lip. I go back into the kitchen to tend to my scones so that I don’t have to watch the mixed reactions on her face. Chara is one of my most trusted friends and critics, and she’s gotten first crack at most of the manuscripts I’ve produced since college. She used to love my stuff, give rave reviews and a good ego stroking to every piece of writing I handed over. But the last few things I’ve given her haven’t gone over so well.
“Where’s the happy ending?” She appears in my kitchen doorway a few minutes later.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you set me up for a happy ending, finally, and then you give me this.” She holds up the last chapter of the manuscript, which up to this point has been dangling dejectedly at her side and points to a paragraph violently circled and question marked in red china marker.
“Well, it’s not like it’s a sad ending, per se—“
“Bullshit. ‘Mike stopped the car, and there was a too-long pause. Dylan had never known a pause so long to be indicative of anything good about to come. “Dylan, you’ve been my best friend for so long, and I don’t know if that can change.” He took Dylan’s hand in both of his, and tried to get a hold of his gaze, but Mike was already too hurt to look back.’ That isn’t a sad ending?”
“No, not at all,” I insist, taking the tray of scones from the oven. “After that, Dylan realizes that what Mike is saying is true. They’re friends, and what they have is better than anything that could come out of a relationship.”
“You really think that?”
“It’s what I wrote.”
“That’s funny, because it seems to me that Dylan just convinces himself of that so as not to suffer the embarrassment of telling Mike that he disagrees, and that he wants to be more than friends.”
“Where do you come up with that?”
“From the two hundred some-odd pages of material you printed out prior to this, espousing all of the reasons that Dylan was in love with his best friend. His attraction verges on obsession, he attains his obsession, his obsession seemingly lives up to the hype, and then his obsession just out of nowhere drops him in one paragraph. Can you give me one good reason why it works out that way?”
“I think Mike is better off for it. Those happy endings can sound so cliché, but this way, it really forces you to consider his situation, and deal with his rejection.” I look over towards my pan of hot scones, hoping that maybe they can help me out with this argument. “And anyway, sometimes things just don’t work out.”
“Try ‘things never work out’ in your world. You know, the deus ex machina usually comes in to resolve the plot, not tear apart the logical resolution. It’s one thing to object to happy endings, but it’s an entirely different thing to disregard logical endings just because they’re happy.”
“I guess I just felt like in real life, Mike and Dylan wouldn’t end up together.”
“You know, Will, I would never consider you a pessimist by any means, but I’ve read a whole lot of your stuff, and it never has a happy ending. The love interests never end up together, anyone that’s sick never pulls through, and arguments remain unresolved or, at best, mildly discomforting. What exactly do you have against happy endings?”
