The Plot

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “Well, that’s kind of you to say. But the reason I got in touch, I just heard that a student of mine passed away. And I saw your post on that Ripley Facebook page. So I thought—”

  “Evan, you’re talking about. Right?” said Martin Purcell.

  “Yes. Evan Parker. He was my student.”

  “Oh, I know.” All the way up in northern Vermont Jake could hear Martin Purcell chuckle. “I’m sorry to say, not your fan, though. But I wouldn’t take that too personally. Evan didn’t think anyone at Ripley was good enough to be his teacher.”

  Jake took a moment to run through this sentence slowly. “I see,” he said.

  “I could tell within an hour or two, just that first night of the residency, Evan wasn’t going to get much out of the program. If you’re going to learn something, you need to have curiosity about it. He didn’t have that. But he was still a cool guy to hang around with. Lot of charm. Lot of fun.”

  “And you kept in touch with him, obviously.”

  “Oh yeah. Sometimes he came up to Burlington, for a concert or something. We went to the Eagles together. I think he came up for Foo Fighters, too. And sometimes I drove down. He had a tavern down in Rutland, you know.”

  “Well, I don’t really know. Would you mind telling me a little bit more? I just feel so badly I’m only hearing about this now. I would have written to his family when it happened.”

  “Hey, would you give me a second?” said Martin Purcell. “Let me just tell my wife I’m on a call. I’ll be right back.”

  Jake waited. “I hope I’m not taking you away from anything important,” he said, when Purcell returned.

  “Not at all. I said I’ve got a famous novelist on the phone. That kind of trumps talking to our fifteen-year-old about the party we don’t want her going to.” He stopped to laugh at his own wit. Jake forced himself to join in.

  “So, do you know anything about Evan’s family? I suppose it’s too late for a condolence note.”

  “Well, even if it’s not, I don’t know who you’d send it to. His parents died a long time ago. He had a sister who also passed, before he did.” He paused. “Hey, I’m sorry if this sounds rude, but I never got the impression you two had much of a … rapport. I’m a teacher, myself, so I’m sympathetic to anyone who has to deal with a difficult student. I wouldn’t have wanted to be Evan’s teacher. Every class has that person who slouches in his chair and just glares at you, like, Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  “And What makes you think you have a damn thing you can teach me?”

  “Exactly.”

  Jake had been jotting down notes: parents, sister—deceased.

  He knew all that from the obituary.

  “Yeah, that was definitely Evan in that particular class. But I was used to having an Evan. My first year of teaching, my answer to ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ would have been ‘I’m nobody. Who are you?’”

  He could hear Martin laugh. “Dickinson.”

  “Yeah. And I’d have been out of the room.”

  “Crying in the bathroom.”

  “Well.” Jake frowned.

  “I meant me. Crying in the bathroom. First year as a student teacher. You have to toughen up. But most of those kids, they’re just marsh-mallows, really. And seriously miserable, in their own lives. Sometimes they’re the ones you worry about most of all, because they have no sense of themselves, no confidence at all. But that wasn’t Evan. I’ve seen plenty of false bravado—that wasn’t Evan either. He had absolute faith in his ability to write a great book. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say he thought writing a great book wasn’t all that hard, and why shouldn’t he be able to do it? Most of us weren’t like that.”

  Here Jake noted a cue—endemic among writers—to ask about Martin’s own work.

  “I haven’t made much progress since finishing the program, to be honest.”

  “Yes. Every day’s a challenge.”

  “You seem to be doing okay,” Martin said. There was an edge to that.

  “Not with my book in progress.”

  He was surprised to hear himself say it. He was surprised that he’d given Martin Purcell of Burlington, Vermont, a complete stranger, more of a suggestion of his vulnerability than he’d given his own editor or agent.

  “Well, sorry to hear that.”

  “No it’s okay, just need to push through. Hey, do you know where Evan was with his own book? Did he get much done after the residency? He was just at the start, I think. At least the pages I saw.”

  Martin said nothing, for the longest seconds of Jake’s life. Finally, he apologized. “I’m just trying to remember if he ever talked about that. I don’t think he ever told me how it was going. But if he was using again, and it looks like he was, I really doubt he was sitting down at his desk and turning out pages.”

  “Well, how many pages do you think he had?”

  Again, that uncomfortable pause.

  “Were you thinking of doing something for him? I mean, for his work? Because that’s incredibly kind of you. Especially since he wasn’t exactly a fawning acolyte, if you know what I mean.”

  Jake took a breath. He was not, of course, entitled to the approbation, but he supposed he’d better go with it.

  “I just thought, you know, maybe there’s a completed story I could send somewhere. You don’t have any pages, yourself, I suppose.”

  “No. But you know, I wouldn’t say we’re talking about Nabokov, here, leaving behind an unfinished novel. I think you can consign the unwritten fiction of Evan Parker to history without too much guilt.”

  “I’m sorry?” Jake gasped.

  “As his teacher.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “Because I remember thinking—and I liked the guy—that he had to be pretty far off base the way he talked about this book. Like it was The Shining and The Grapes Of Wrath and Moby-Dick, all rolled into one, and what a huge success it was going to be. He did show me a couple of pages about this girl who hated her mother, or maybe it was the mother who hated her, and they were okay, but, you know, it wasn’t exactly Gone Girl. I just kind of looked at him, like, Yeah, dude, whatever. I don’t know, I just thought he was kind of ridiculously full of himself. But you’ve probably come across a lot of people like that. Man,” said Martin Purcell, “I sound like an asshole. And I liked the guy. It’s really decent of you to want to help him.”

  “I just wanted to do something good,” Jake said, deflecting as best he could. “And since there isn’t any family …”

  “Well, maybe a niece. I think I read about her in the obituary.”

  Me, too, Jake didn’t say. In fact, he hadn’t learned a single thing from Martin Purcell that hadn’t been in that bare-bones obituary.

  “Okay,” Jake said. “Look, thanks for talking to me.”

  “Hey! Thanks for calling. And …”

  “What?” said Jake.

  “Well, I’m going to kick myself in exactly five minutes if I don’t ask you this, but …”

  “What is it?” said Jake, who knew perfectly well.

  “I was wondering, I know you’re busy. But would you be willing to look at some of my stuff? I’d love to have your honest opinion. It would mean so much to me.”

  Jake closed his eyes. “Of course,” he said.

  CRIB

  BY JACOB FINCH BONNER

  Macmillan, New York, 2017, pages 23–25

  They wanted to know Who was it? of course. Apparently even more than What the fuck did she think she was doing? and obviously far more than How had they failed her as parents? Whatever the details, this clearly was not their fault, and it wasn’t going to be their problem. But who it was wasn’t information Samantha felt like parting with, so her choices were, one, to withhold or, two, to lie outright. Lying, as a general principle, didn’t matter to her one way or the other, but the issue with lying, at least about this particular thing, was that there were tests—you’d have to never have watched Jerry Springer not to know about
the tests—and anyone she named (that is, anyone else she named) could eventually be shown not to be the person, which would in turn have revealed the lie and initiated the whole sequence again: Who was it?

  So she went with the withholding.

  “Look, it’s not important.”

  “Our fifteen-year-old daughter’s pregnant and it’s not important who got her that way.”

  Pretty much, Samantha thought.

  “Like you said, it’s my problem.”

  “Yeah, it is,” said her father. He didn’t seem as angry as her mother. He was more his customary shut down.

  “So what’s the plan?” said her mother. “They been telling us for years how smart you are. And you go and do this.”

  She couldn’t look at their blasted faces, so she went upstairs and slammed her bedroom door behind her, throwing her book bag on the floor next to the old desk. Her room was in the back, overlooking the slope down to Porter Creek, which was narrow and rocky through this patch of the woods and wide and rocky to the north and the south. The house was old, more than a hundred years. It had been the house of her father and his parents, and before that, the house of her great-grandparents. She guessed that meant it was supposed to be hers one day, but that had never mattered to her before and it didn’t matter now, since she wasn’t going to live here a minute longer than necessary. That—in point of fact—had always been the plan and it was still the plan. Just as soon as she sorted out her problem, finished up her credits, and got her scholarship to college.

  Who it was was a person named Daniel Weybridge, who was also none other than her mother’s boss at the College Inn and in fact the proprietor of the College Inn, like his father before him, because the place was Family run for three generations!—it said so on the inn’s sign, its stationery, even on the paper coasters left in every room. Daniel Weybridge was married and the father of three bouncing boys, who would certainly be the next proprietors of the College Inn. He’d also had a vasectomy, or so he’d promised, the lying shit. No, she hadn’t told him she was pregnant, and she wasn’t going to. He didn’t deserve to know.

  The story with Daniel Weybridge was that he’d been after her for at least a year to her knowledge, and probably longer than that, since before she’d been paying attention. Any number of times she’d skittered past him in a corridor of the inn, or in one of the hallways at the high school when he turned up to watch one of the three precious sons play whatever sport they were playing, and she’d felt the heat of him as they passed each other, and sensed the fixing of his attention on her fifteen-year-old self as they crossed paths. Of course he had been far too stealthy to make an outright grab. He led with attention, then moved on to compliments and little hints of genuine grown-up admiration: Samantha had skipped a grade—wasn’t that remarkable! Samantha had won some prize, he’d heard—what a smart girl, destined to go far! It pained her to admit that these had not been ineffective tactics. Daniel Weybridge, after all, was what passed for a sophisticate in her world. For one thing, he’d gone to the hotel school at Cornell, which was an Ivy League, and he read the newspapers from the city, not just the Utica Observer-Dispatch. Once, in the hotel lobby as she was waiting for her mother to finish up, the two of them had a surprisingly nuanced conversation about The Scarlet Letter, which Samantha was reading for eighth-grade English, and Daniel Weybridge had made a point that actually found its way into her paper. A paper for which, fittingly, she had received an A.

  So when it dawned on her, as it eventually did, that there was a longer game being played here, and her mother’s boss was the one playing it, Samantha was a little more surprised than she should have been. Then she took a fresh look at things herself.

  By then she was a tenth grader, though a full year younger than the next youngest in her grade. Most of her classmates—all of the boys, if you believed them, except maybe the shyest and most backward—were busy deflowering most of the girls, and if you didn’t count the trashed reputations of those two young ladies who’d already left school, nobody seemed especially exercised about it. Moments like these had a way of bringing the age difference into sharper focus, and though Samantha had been more than happy to skip that grade back in sixth she didn’t especially enjoy the feeling of being younger than everyone else. Besides, there was nothing especially meaningful—let alone romantic—about the act in question, just as there was nothing especially obscure about what Daniel Weybridge wanted or how he was trying to get it.

  Still, it had all been her decision. The stakes didn’t seem all that high. If she did nothing, Daniel Weybridge would probably continue flattering and flirting with her until the day she left home, and when that day came he’d simply shrug and turn his attention to the next daughter of the next housekeeper, or the housekeeper herself. But the more she thought about it the more she liked the idea. From a practical standpoint, she was repelled by every boy she went to school with, and Daniel Weybridge wasn’t unattractive. Also, he was a grown-up and a father several times over, which meant he’d obviously know what he was doing when it came to the act itself. Also, unlike the boys in her grade who were congenitally incapable of keeping their mouths shut, it went without saying that Daniel Weybridge wasn’t going to tell a soul. And finally, when she let him take her to the Fennimore Suite (not an hour after her own mother cleaned it), he made a point of telling her that he’d had a vasectomy after bouncing baby boy number three. Which sealed the deal, basically.

  So maybe she really wasn’t as smart as everyone had always thought she was, let alone as smart as she’d always thought she was. She had no idea how to go about getting rid of her problem. She didn’t even know how much time she had left to figure something out. But she knew it wouldn’t be enough.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Hurl Away

  “So, you know me, I don’t like to be that pushy agent, but …”

  Matilda, in fact, was in every molecule of her being that pushy agent, which was the exact reason Jake had daydreamed, for years, about her being his agent. When he’d finished Crib after the most frenzied period of writing he’d ever experienced, it had been to Matilda Salter, and Matilda Salter alone, that he had reached out, in the most carefully written cover letter of his life:

  Although I did have representation for The Invention of Wonder, and will always be proud that the novel was a “New & Noteworthy” in The New York Times Book Review, I’m coming back now with a very different kind of book: plot driven, suspenseful, and twisty with a strong and complex female protagonist. I would like to start fresh with an agent who understands exactly how far a book like this can go, and who will be able to handle attention from foreign markets and film interests.

  Matilda—or more likely her assistant—had responded with an invitation to send the manuscript, and things had moved with gratifying speed after that. For Jake it had all been deeply redemptive, not to say thrilling; Matilda’s authors were an all-star roster of Pulitzer and National Book Award winners, permanent occupants of the better airport bookstores (and also all the other airport bookstores), literary darlings of the cognoscenti and stars of yesteryear who never needed to write another word.

  “But?” he said now.

  “But I had a call from Wendy. She and the gang at Macmillan are wondering if you’re going to make the deadline for the new book. They don’t want to pressure you. It’s more important to get it right than to get it fast. But right and fast would be best of all.”

  “Yeah,” Jake said miserably.

  “Because, you know, honey, right now it seems like it can never happen, but it has to, at some point. Maybe only because there’ll be no one left in the country who hasn’t read Crib. But there’s going to come a moment when all those people will want to read another book. We just want that book to be by you.”

  He nodded, as if she could see him. “I know. I’m working, don’t worry.”

  “Oh, I’m not worried. Just inquiring. Did you see we’re going back for another printing?”

>   “Uh … yeah. That’s good.”

  “It’s better than good.” She paused. Jake heard her break away to say something to her assistant. Then she was back. “Okay, hon. I have to take this. Not everyone’s as happy with their publisher as you are.”

  He thanked her and they hung up. And then, for another twenty minutes, he remained where he was on the old couch: eyes shut, dread coursing through him like a reverse meditation designed to eradicate serenity. Then he got up and went into the kitchen.

  The former owner of his new apartment had done a sterile upgrade, with gray granite countertops and a gleaming steel stove suitable for someone about five levels above Jake’s own cooking abilities. So far, in fact, he hadn’t cooked a thing (unless you counted reheating as cooking) and his fridge contained only an assortment of takeout clamshell containers, some of them empty. His efforts to furnish the apartment had withered soon after bringing in what he already owned, and whatever intentions he’d had to address a few of the more obvious needs—a headboard for the bed, a new couch, a set of curtains for the bedroom window—had further departed in the wake of TalentedTom’s arrival in his life.

  Unable to remember what had brought him into his own kitchen, he poured himself a glass of water and went back to his couch. In the brief time he’d been away, Anna had texted twice.

  Hi you.

  Then, a few minutes later:

  Are you there?

  Hi! he typed back. Sorry. Was on the phone. What are you up to?

  Looking at Expedia, she wrote. Flights to NYC surprisingly cheap.

  Good to know. I’ve been thinking of going there. They say the neon lights are bright.

  For a moment nothing. Then: I would love to see a Broadway show.

  Jake smiled. They actually don’t let you leave the city without seeing one. I’m afraid you’ll have no choice.

  She had some vacation days, apparently. She could take them any time.