“What do you mean?”
“Oh … just that the combination of hair that signifies ‘old’ with a face that isn’t old is confusing to a lot of people. I’ve noticed it can make some people think I’m older than my real age, and others think I’m younger.”
“How old are you?” Jake asked. “Maybe I shouldn’t ask.”
“No, it’s okay. I’ll tell you, but only after you tell me how old you think I am. It’s not a vanity thing. I’m just curious.”
She smiled at Jake, and he took the opportunity to see it all again: the pale oval face, the streaked silver hair down her back, and that girlish hairband with the linen shirt and leggings he’d seen around town, and on her feet tan boots that looked ready to hike off home along a rugged wooded path. She was right, he realized, about her age. Not that he’d never been especially adept at assessing age, but with Anna he couldn’t have said any number between, say, twenty-eight and forty, with any certainty at all. Because he had to say a number, he approximated his own.
“Are you … in your mid-thirties?”
“I am.” She smiled. “Want to try for the bonus round?”
“Well, I’m thirty-seven, myself.”
“Nice. A nice age.”
“And you are … ?”
“Thirty-five. An even nicer age.”
“It is,” Jake said. Outside it had started to rain. “So. Why radio?”
“Oh I know, it’s ridiculous. Radio broadcasting is an insane industry to want to go into in the twenty-first century, but I like my job. Well, not this morning, but most of the time. And I’m going to keep trying to get fiction on the air. Though I doubt many other novelists are going to be as mild-mannered about it as you were.”
Inwardly, Jake winced. “Mild-mannered” had made him think, immediately, of that other version of himself, the Jake who’d once silently endured the diatribe of a narcissistic guest-writer from California: noisy pipes! bad sandwiches! non-working fireplaces! And the never to be forgotten: Anybody can be a writer.
On the other hand, that same diatribe had ultimately brought him here. And here was good. Despite the incandescent events of the past several months—Oprah! Spielberg!—and the ongoing astonishment of his book’s ever-growing readership, he was actually happier right at this moment—with the silver-haired girl in the wood-lined coffee shop—than he’d been in months.
“Most of us,” said Jake, “most fiction writers, I mean, we’re not all that hung up about the sales and the rankings and the Amazon number. I mean, we care, we need to eat like everyone else, but we’re just so glad people are reading our work. Like, anyone’s reading our work. And despite what your boss said on the air this morning, Crib wasn’t my first book. Or even my second. Maybe a couple thousand people read my first novel, even though it had a good publisher and some nice reviews. But even that’s way more than the number of people who read my second book. So you see, it’s never a forgone conclusion that anyone is actually going to see your work, no matter how good it is. And if nobody reads it, it doesn’t exist.”
“Tree falls in the forest,” Anna said.
“A suitable northwest interpretation. But if they do read it, you never get over the thrill of that: a person you don’t even know, paying their hard-earned money so they can read what you wrote? It’s amazing. It’s unbelievable. When I meet people at these events and they bring in some grubby copy they’ve dropped in the bath or spilled coffee on, or folded down the corners of the pages, that’s the best feeling. Even better than someone buying a brand-new copy right in front of me.” He paused. “You know, I have an idea you’re a secret writer, yourself.”
“Oh?” She looked at him. “Why secret?”
“Well, you haven’t mentioned it yet.”
“Maybe it hasn’t come up yet.”
“Okay. So what is it? Fiction? A memoir? Poetry?”
Anna picked up her mug and gazed into it, as if the answer resided within. “Not a poetry person,” she said. “Love reading memoirs, but not interested in digging around in my own dirt so I can share it with the rest of the world. I’ve always liked novels, though.” She looked up at him, suddenly shy.
“Oh? Tell me a few of your favorites.” It occurred to him that she might think he was asking for praise. “Present company excepted,” he added, trying to make a joke of it.
“Well … Dickens, of course. Willa Cather. Fitzgerald. I love Marilynne Robinson. I mean, it would be a dream to write one, but there’s absolutely nothing in my life that suggests I could do it. Where would I get an idea? Where do you get yours?”
He nearly groaned. Back in the cerebral file of acceptable answers he found the most obvious one, the one Stephen King had given them all. “Utica.”
Anna stared. “I’m sorry?”
“Utica. It’s in upstate New York. Someone asked Stephen King where he gets his ideas, and he said Utica. If it’s good enough for Stephen King, it’s certainly good enough for me.”
“Right. That’s funny,” she said, looking as if she thought it was anything but. “Why didn’t you use that line last night?”
For a moment he didn’t reply. “You were there last night.”
She shrugged. “Of course I was there. I’m a fan, obviously.”
And he thought how astonishing it was that this very pretty woman was calling herself his fan. After a moment he heard her ask if he wanted another coffee.
“No, thanks. I’ll need to go soon. Otis was giving me the side eye, back at the radio station. You probably noticed.”
“He doesn’t want you to miss your next gig. Totally understandable.”
“Yes, though I’d love to have a little more time. I wonder … do you ever come east?”
She smiled. She had an odd smile: lips pressed together so hard it looked almost uncomfortable for her to hold the expression.
“I haven’t yet,” she said.
When they went outside he considered, thought better of, then reconsidered a kiss, and while he vacillated she actually reached out for him. Her silver hair was soft against his cheek. Her body was surprisingly warm, or was that his own? He had, in that moment, such a powerful idea of what could come next.
But then, a few minutes later in the car, he found the first of the messages. It had been forwarded from the contact form on his own author website (Thanks for visiting my page! Have a question or a comment about my work? Please use the form!) just around the time as he was about to go on the air with local Seattle institution Randy Johnson, and it had already been sitting there in his own email in-box for about ninety radioactive minutes. Reading it now made every good thing of that morning, not to speak of the last year of Jake’s life, instantly fall from him and land with a brutal, reverberating crack. Its horrifying email address was [email protected], and though the message was brevity itself at a mere four words, it still managed to get its point across.
You are a thief.
CRIB
BY JACOB FINCH BONNER
Macmillan, New York, 2017, pages 3–4
She found out she was pregnant by throwing up on her desk in calculus. Samantha had been finishing up some notes on the problem set, making sure she had the right assignment as everyone left. (She had a theory that Mr. Fortis, who was generally a moron, didn’t actually look through the equations themselves; he just checked to make sure the problems were the ones he’d actually given out.) Then she’d gotten to her feet, swooned like somebody in a soap opera, put out her arms to brace herself above the desk, and hurled all over her own notebook. Her very next cogent thought was: Fuck.
She was fifteen years old and not an idiot, thanks very much. Or maybe she was, but this wasn’t happening because she’d been ignorant or naïve, or because she’d thought nothing bad (this was bad) could ever happen to her. It was because a true bastard had told her an outright lie. And probably more than one.
The vomit was slimy and kind of yellow and the sight of it made her want to throw up again. Her head was aching b
ecause that’s what happened when you threw up, but the main thing concerning her now was the way her skin had kind of jumped to life all over her body in a really unpleasant way. That was probably also a sign of pregnancy, it occurred to her. Or just rage. It was clear to her that she had both.
She picked up her notebook, carried it to the metal trash bin in the corner of the room, and shook the thing over it; a gob of slime slid off, then she dried it the rest of the way with her shirtsleeve, because honestly she was past caring. In the last thirty seconds of her life, years of goals had simply disappeared. She was pregnant. She was pregnant. That complete fuck.
Samantha was not an especially lucky girl, she was well aware. Clueless had played at the movie theater in Norwich the previous summer; she knew there were girls her own age who drove cars around Beverly Hills and put together their outfits on a computer, and that obviously wasn’t her, but at the same time she wasn’t contending with violent child abuse or abject poverty, either. There was food in the house. There was school, which meant books, and they had cable, and her parents had even taken her down to New York City twice, but on both occasions they’d seemed mystified by what they should do once they actually got there: meals in the hotel, a bus that drove around with a guide making jokes she didn’t understand, the Empire State Building (it made sense the first time, but the second time also?) and Rockefeller Center (also twice, and neither trip was around the holidays, so … why?). Not that she was all that knowledgeable, herself, about what the greatest city in the world might have to offer three yokels from the middle of New York state (which might as well have been the middle of Indiana) but she’d only been nine the first time and then twelve the second so it really shouldn’t have been up to her.
The main thing she did have, which most people didn’t, was a future.
Her parents had jobs and her father’s was for the college in Hamilton, where his title was something important-sounding like “plant engineer” but it really meant he was the one who got called when some girl tried to flush a Kotex. Her mother cleaned too, but at the College Inn: her title was the far more honest “housekeeper.” But what her father’s job in particular really signified was something she’d had to explain to him, rather than the other way around: his fourteen years of service to the institution was a leg up when it came time for her to go to college herself, and a significant chunk of change to pay her way. According to her father’s own employment handbook, which he himself had never read but which Samantha had been on intimate terms with for a couple of years, the college gave every consideration to the children of its faculty and staff when it came to admissions, and when it came to financial aid, that was actually spelled out in black and white: 80 percent scholarship, 10 percent student loan, 10 percent on-campus employment. In other words, for a person like Samantha, something along the lines of a golden ticket in a chocolate bar.
Or at least that had been true until today.
Her shitstorm was not to be blamed on substandard sex education at Earlville Middle School, let alone Chenango County (where the locals had done everything possible to prevent its young people from learning how babies were made); Samantha had been fully cognizant of the details since the fifth grade, when her father said something about an especially eventful weekend at one of the fraternities (an incident which had necessitated the presence of the police and resulted in a girl dropping out). She was used to finding things out for herself, especially when those things were cloaked in the distinctive parental silence of stuff-you-weren’t-supposed-to-know-about. Over the following years, her peers caught up to her in basic knowledge (again, no thanks to the official policies of the school district and the state, which had actually declined to mandate sex education) but the knowledge was just that: basic. Two girls in her class of sixty had already moved to “homeschooling” and one had gone to live with a relative in Utica. But those girls were stupid. This was the kind of thing that was supposed to happen to stupid people.
She gathered up the rest of her stuff and left the classroom as a pregnant person. Then she went to her locker as a pregnant person and she joined the others outside and got on her bus, taking her customary seat at the back, but now as a pregnant person, meaning a person who, if she did nothing, was going to eventually produce another person and therefore let go of the reins of her own life, probably forever.
But obviously she wasn’t going to do nothing.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Talented Tom
He told no one. Of course.
He went to San Francisco and the Castro Theatre, and then, the following day, on to Los Angeles where the meetings went about as well as he could have hoped (and the thrill of being in a room with Steven Spielberg numbed his distress for days), but in time he had to return to New York, to the work on his next novel and to the new and sparsely furnished apartment in the West Village. By then, he’d nearly managed to persuade himself that the email had been a kind of phantasm, conjured by his own paranoia, propelled by some random bot under the control of an intentionless algorithm. That didn’t last. Waking up on his unadorned box spring and mattress combo the day after his flight, he reached for his phone and found that a second message had landed in his in-box, again forwarded from the JacobFinchBonner website contact form and featuring the same You are a thief. This time, though, it also said: We both know it.
The website had been converted from his old writing coach site, and now looked like the sites of most successful writers: an About Me page, media and review attention for his individual books, a list of upcoming events, and a contact form that had been in heavy usage since Crib’s publication the previous year. Who was getting in touch? Readers who wanted him to know what was wrong with his book, or that Crib had kept them up all night (in a good way). Librarians hoping he’d come to speak and actors sure they were right for the parts of Samantha or Maria, plus pretty much every single person Jake had ever known and lost touch with: Long Island, Wesleyan, his MFA program, even those fools he’d worked for in Hell’s Kitchen. Every time he saw one of these in his own in-box, with its tantalizing half-line of content (Hi, I don’t know if you remember me but—Jake! I just finished your—Hello, I was at your reading at—) his chest tightened, and it stayed that way until the message turned out to be from a former classmate or a friend of his mother or a person whose book he’d signed at some bookstore in Michigan, or even a random crazy guy who believed an entity from Alpha Centauri had dictated Crib through an orange peel in Jake’s fruit bowl.
And then there were the writers. Writers requesting mentorship. Writers requesting blurbs. Writers requesting an introduction (with endorsement, obviously) to Matilda, his agent, or Wendy, his editor. Writers wanting to know if he’d read their manuscripts and give an opinion as to whether they should let go of their lifelong dream or “hold on.” Writers wanting him to confirm their theories about discrimination in the publishing world—Anti-Semitism! Sexism! Racism! Ageism!—as the sole and true reason their 800-page experimental non-linear punctuation-free neo-novel had been turned down by every publisher in the country.
In the months after his book was sold, Jake had formally (and gratefully) left behind both his MFA and private coaching work, but he fully understood that he now had a special responsibility to not be an asshole to other writers. Writers who were assholes to other writers were asking for it: social media had seen to that, and social media now claimed a significant portion of his mental bandwidth. He’d been a relatively early adopter on Twitter, that playground of word people, though he seldom posted anything, himself. (What was he supposed to tell his 74 “followers”? Hello from upstate New York, where I didn’t write today!) Facebook had seemed harmless until the 2016 election, when it bombarded him with dubious ads and “push” polls about Hillary Clinton’s supposedly nefarious deeds. Instagram mainly seemed to want him to prepare photogenic meals and frolic with adorable pets, neither of which were a part his Cobleskill existence. But after Crib was purchased and he’d begun sitting
down with Macmillan’s publicity and marketing teams, Jake had been prevailed upon to maintain a vigorous presence on these three platforms at least, and given the option of stepping up his activity or handing the task over to a staff member to operate on his behalf. That had been a harder decision than it should have been. He’d certainly seen the appeal of offloading the chore of being tweeted at and DM’d and poked and contacted by every other avenue of connection the internet had dreamed up, but he’d still, in the end, opted to be the one in control, and since the day his book was published he’d been starting his days with a sweep of his social media accounts and a review of the Google alerts he’d set up to trawl the internet—Jacob+ Finch+Bonner, Jake+Bonner, Bonner+Crib, Bonner+Writer, etc. It was time-consuming and irritating drudgery, and crammed with rabbit holes, most of which drilled straight into his personal labyrinth of unhappiness. So why hadn’t he accepted the offer of some Macmillan intern or marketing assistant to do it?
Because of this. Obviously.
You are a thief. We both know it.
And yet, the messenger that was “[email protected]” had not made his move on the open battlefields of Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, or been netted by a Google alert. This guy hadn’t gone public at all; instead, he’d opted for the more private transom provided on Jake’s website. Was there some implicit negotiation here: Deal with me now, by this single vector, or deal with me later, everywhere? Or was it a shot across his private bow, a warning to brace for some imminent Battle of Trafalgar?
Jake had known, from that first moment in the back of the car to the Seattle airport, that this was no random message, and TalentedTom was no jealous novelist or disappointed reader or even troubled advocate of the Alpha Centaura/orange peel (or comparable!) origin story of his famous novel. Many years earlier, the adjective “talented” had been bound in eternal, indelible symbiosis to the name “Tom” by one Patricia Highsmith, forever augmenting its meaning to include a certain form of self-preservation and extreme lack of regard for others. That particular talented Tom had also happened to be a murderer. And what was his surname?
The Plot Page 9
