The Plot

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “Probably KAZK,” said Anna.

  “Yeah, maybe. Anyway, he hit on the both of us, one after the other. On the air! We were sixteen!”

  “Well-known lech,” Anna observed.

  “My dad was right there in the studio!” She held up her beautifully manicured hands in shock. She had buttery blond hair, expensively tended, and looked every inch the busy, accomplished, and well-compensated Manhattan woman she was. Beside her, Anna, with her silver braid, unpainted nails, and casual work sweater, seemed notably younger and immeasurably less sophisticated.

  “He wouldn’t do it today, probably,” Anna was saying. “He’d wait till the dad was in the bathroom.”

  “Like, how has this guy not been Me Too’d out of his misery yet?”

  “Well, I think it’s come up. I know it has, actually. Even while I was there, there was some issue with an intern. But she denied it and he kind of slithered through. And anyway, he’s an institution. Sorry, Jake. You have to forgive us, cackling away.”

  “I just met your wife,” said Matilda, “and I want to cackle away with her in perpetuity.”

  “That’s so kind,” said Anna. “And I’ve always been told you’re a no-nonsense kind of person.”

  “Oh, I am!” Matilda said, as Jake asked the waiter for whatever they were having. “But only in the office. That’s my secret. They’d call me the Jackal, but the nickname’s already taken. It’s not that I love to fight, per se; I just love to fight for my clients. Because I love my clients. And in this case, I’m happy to say, I also love their brand-new spouses.” She lifted her glass to the two of them. “I am so delighted, Anna. I don’t know where you came from, but I’m glad you’re here.”

  The two of them clinked. Jake lifted his water to join them.

  “She comes from Idaho,” he said helpfully. “A small town—”

  “Yeah, very boring,” said Anna, touching his leg under the table. “I wish I’d grown up in Seattle, like you. The minute I got there, for college, I was just so … Yes. All that tech stuff coming in, and the energy with it.”

  “And the food.”

  “And the coffee.”

  “Not to mention the music, if you were into that,” Matilda said. “Which I wasn’t. I could never rock a flannel shirt. But there was real excitement around it.”

  “And the water. And the ferries. And the sunsets over the harbor.”

  The two of them looked at each other, evidently sharing a single rapturous moment.

  “Tell me about you, Anna,” Jake’s agent said, and for most of the evening they talked about her years on Whidbey, and then at the radio station, where she’d made it her mission to get some cultural content—literature, performing arts, ideas—into Randy Johnson’s malodorous studio. They talked about the books Anna liked to read and the wines she preferred, and what she had already accomplished in her first months in New York. Matilda, Jake was not at all surprised to discover, followed at least two of the podcasts Anna was helping to produce, and he watched his wife take out her phone to record the names of several others she should be listening to, as well as the contact information for another of Matilda’s clients who’d been making noises about a podcast of his own, and who was going to need a very smart, very strong-willed producer to help him.

  “I’ll get in touch with him tomorrow,” Anna confirmed. “I’ve been reading his books since college. This is a thrill.”

  “He’d be unbelievably lucky to get you. And you won’t put up with his mansplaining.”

  Anna grinned. “Thanks to Randy Johnson, king of mansplainers, I will not.”

  It was not unpleasant, listening to the two of them, but it was also novel. This dinner was the first time since he’d met Matilda, three years earlier, that the sole or at least disproportionately dominant topic of their conversation wasn’t Jacob Finch Bonner. Only when it was time for dessert did Matilda appear to remember he was there, and she marked this recognition by asking when revisions on the new novel would be done.

  “Soon,” said Jake, immediately wishing they could go back to talking about Seattle.

  “He’s working his tail off,” Anna said. “I can tell, every day when I get home. He’s so stressed out.”

  “Well, given everything, I’m not surprised,” said Matilda.

  Anna turned to him with a quizzical expression.

  “Second novels,” he said shortly. “I mean, fourth novels, technically, but since no one ever heard of me before Crib, it’s sort of my second act. It’s terrifying.”

  “No, no,” Matilda said, wordlessly accepting her coffee from the waiter. “Don’t think about that. If I could only get my clients to stop worrying about their careers they’d write twice as many books and be a lot happier in general. You wouldn’t believe how much therapy there is in these relationships,” she said, directing this to Anna as if Jake—the subject of the theoretical therapy—were not right there at the table with them. “I’m not licensed! I took Intro Psych at Princeton, and I kid you not, that was the extent of my training. But the fragile egos I’m apparently responsible for! I mean, not your husband, but some of them … if they send me something to read and I don’t get back to them for a few days because it’s five hundred pages long or it’s the weekend or I happen to have other clients who are in the middle of auctions or winning the National Book Award or leaving their spouses and running off with their research assistants, God forbid! They’re on the phone to me with a knife at the wrist. Of course,” she said, perhaps hearing herself, “I adore my clients. Every one of them, even the tough ones, but some people make things so hard for themselves. Why?”

  Anna nodded sagely. “I know how tough it must have been in the beginning, for Jake. Before you were involved and Crib became such a success. It takes courage to keep going. I’m so proud of him.”

  “Thanks, honey,” said Jake. He felt as if he was interrupting them.

  “I’m proud of him too. Especially these last months.”

  Again, Anna turned to him with a confused look.

  “Oh, it’s all fine,” he heard himself say. “It’ll pass.”

  “I told you so,” Matilda said.

  “I’ll get the book done. And then I’ll write another book.”

  “And another!” she declared.

  “Because that’s what writers do, right?”

  “That’s what you do. And thank god for it!”

  He noticed, when they left the restaurant, that she gave Anna an even longer hug than the one she gave him, but he was so relieved that he’d managed to block TalentedTom from invading their dinner that it was impossible to see the evening as anything but a win. His agent, it was obvious, really liked his new wife, and in this she had a lot of company.

  In practical terms, Jake’s post-marriage life didn’t change all that much. Anna had opted for a modified modification, officially becoming Anna Williams-Bonner after filling out the required twenty or thirty forms and waiting on various lines at various agencies to acquire a new driver’s license and passport. They merged bank accounts and credit cards and health insurance policies and saw an attorney about their wills. Anna dispatched the last of Jake’s collegiate and post-collegiate furnishings—a reclining chair of faux leather, a framed Phish poster, a shag rug from Bed Bath & Beyond, circa 2002—to their just rewards, and repainted the living room. They went for an abbreviated honeymoon to New Orleans, where they gorged themselves on oysters and listened to jazz (which Anna liked) and blues (which Jake liked) and zydeco (which neither of them liked) at night.

  On the night they returned to the city, Anna went to deliver a box of pralines to a neighbor who’d fed the cat while they were gone, and Jake let himself into the apartment, dropping an armload of mail onto the kitchen counter. His eye found it right away: an unremarkable envelope slipping out onto the granite countertop between Anna’s copy of Real Simple and his own Poets & Writers, which, nonetheless, gave him the deepest chill of his life.

  Front and center, his addres
s. More accurately, their address.

  And in the upper left-hand corner, the name Talented Tom.

  He looked at it for a long, terrible moment.

  Then he snatched it up and rushed with it into the bathroom, turning on the water in the sink and locking the door behind him. He slit open the envelope and extracted the single sheet of paper inside with shaking hands.

  You know what you did. I know what you did. Are you ready for everyone to know what you did? I hope so, because I’m getting ready to tell the world. Have fun with your career after that.

  So this, he thought, listening to the din of his own breath over the running water, was what worse felt like. This person had come through the screen into the actual, tactile world, and now Jake was holding in his hands an object TalentedTom, too, had held. There was a new and sharp horror in that, as if the paper itself held all of the malevolence, all of the outrage Jake did not deserve. The cumulative weight of it took his breath away and rendered him incapable of movement, and he stayed where he was for so long that Anna came to the bathroom door and asked if he was feeling all right.

  He was not feeling all right.

  Eventually, he crammed the piece of paper into a pocket of his Dopp kit, took off his clothes, and got into the shower. He was trying to think it through with whatever of his cognitive abilities remained at his disposal, but this proved impossible even after half an hour under the hottest water he could stand. Nor was it possible in the days that followed, as he added the furtive collection of the mail to his already obsessive monitoring of the internet. He simply could not think of how to go forward, and that, ironically, was what made him realize the only place left to go was back.

  Ripley was what he knew. Ripley was all he could be sure of. Something relevant to his present crisis had taken place at Ripley, that was obvious, and it was understandable; the heightened camaraderie of the MFA program—even (perhaps especially?) the low-residency MFA program!—acted powerfully upon people who couldn’t be “out” as writers in their ordinary, daily lives, perhaps not even to their own friends and families. Gathering on an otherwise empty college campus they were, perhaps for the first time, suddenly enfolded by their tribe and able to talk story! plot! character! with people they’d only just met and would know for only a brief, intense period. Evan Parker might have declined to share his infallible plot with the other students in the much touted “safety” of Jake’s formal workshop, but it was entirely possible that somebody in the program had managed to connect with him, maybe during drinks at the Ripley Inn, maybe lingering after a meal in the cafeteria. Or maybe afterward, at Evan Parker’s house or the other person’s house, or over email, with pages of actual manuscript sent back and forth for “critique.”

  Whoever TalentedTom was, his obvious (if faulty!) grasp of what had transpired between Jake and his former student meant that he, too, was connected to that community, or at least had crossed paths with someone who was. And yet, Jake had allowed his own investigation to lapse with Martin Purcell of Burlington, Vermont. Now this asshole had contacted him at home, not through some social media platform, not even through his own website or publisher, but at his actual, physical place of residence. Which he shared with his wife. This was painfully, powerfully close. This signaled an unprecedented intensification of @TalentedTom’s campaign. This was unacceptable.

  Defense, never the best strategy, was obviously no longer an option, not after this. He had to return to what he knew for sure—Ripley—and start again, from there.

  He hadn’t bothered to open the large envelope containing Martin Purcell’s manuscript pages when it arrived back in the fall. Since then it had been gathering dust in a box under his bed, mixed in among other manuscripts (sent by actual friends, looking for his “thoughts”) and advance galleys (sent by publishers, looking for blurbs). Now Jake pulled the box out and went digging through it. When he found Purcell’s mailer he slit open the end and extracted the cover letter:

  Dear Jake (if I may),

  I am so incredibly grateful to you for agreeing to look at these stories! Thank you so much! I’d be delighted to discuss if you ever have time. No comment too small … or too big! I’ve been thinking of this as a novel made up of short stories, but maybe that is because the idea of writing a “novel” is so huge and terrifying. I don’t know how you novelists do it!

  Anyway, feel free to email or give me a call when you’re finished, and thanks again.

  Martin Purcell

  MPurcell@SBurlHS.edu

  There had to be sixty pages in there, Jake thought. He supposed he would actually have to read them. He returned to the living room, sat down on the kilim-covered couch, and opened his laptop. The cat, Whidbey, followed him, uncoiled along Jake’s left thigh, and began to purr.

  Hi Martin! I’ve been reading your stuff. Wow—excellent work. Lots to discuss.

  Within a couple of minutes, Purcell wrote back:

  Fantastic! Just say when!

  It was late afternoon and the sun had swung around Greenwich Avenue on its way west. He was supposed to leave here soon, to meet Anna at a Japanese place they liked, near her studio.

  He wrote:

  I’m actually heading to Vermont in a couple of days. Why don’t we meet there? Maybe easier to go over the pages in person.

  You’re kidding! What are you in Vermont for?

  To find out more from you, duh. (Jake didn’t write.)

  A reading. But I was thinking of staying for a day or two. Need to get some work done. And I miss Vermont!

  He so did not miss Vermont.

  Where’s the reading? I’ll come!

  Ugh, he would, wouldn’t he? Where was the fictional reading?

  It’s actually a private event, in someone’s house. In Dorset.

  Dorset was one of the swankier towns in the state. Just the kind of place somebody might import a famous writer for a private event.

  Oh. That’s too bad.

  But why don’t we meet in Rutland? That is, if it’s not too far for you to travel.

  He knew it wouldn’t be. Even without the prospect of a free private manuscript consultation with a bestselling author, Jake had long observed that Vermonters seemed willing to drive all over their state at the drop of a hat.

  Not at all. Straight down 7.

  They arranged to meet on Thursday evening, at the Birdseye Diner.

  This was so good of him, wrote Martin, and Jake said no, it wasn’t, and that was no lie, not even an exaggeration. Martin Purcell was his best way into the place that had somehow produced TalentedTom: end of story.

  Also, it was time to take a closer look at the town that had produced Evan Parker. Long past time, actually.

  CRIB

  BY JACOB FINCH BONNER

  Macmillan, New York, 2017, page 98

  Samantha’s mother didn’t trust doctors, so she figured one of them would try to persuade her the growing lump in her right breast was cancer. By the time Samantha saw the lump herself it was actually protruding over her mother’s bra strap and things had gone, of course, too far. Maria, ten by then and in fifth grade, tried to persuade her grandmother to accept the scorched earth radiation-plus-chemo the oncologist at Community Memorial in Hamilton was suggesting, but Samantha’s mother found the chemo unpleasant, and after the second cycle she announced that she’d take her chances with God. God gave her another four months, and Samantha hoped she was satisfied.

  A week after the funeral she moved into her parents’ old bedroom, the nicest one, and put Maria into the room she herself was vacating, the room with the cannon ball bed in which she had dreamed of escape and sulked through pregnancy, all the way at the other end of the hall. That pretty much set the tone for their remaining years together. Samantha had a part-time job by then, processing bills for a branch of the Bassett Healthcare Network, and after a training course on a company computer she set up in a little room off the kitchen, she was able to work from home. Maria, since the age of six, had been getting her
self up in the morning, and from the time she was eight she was feeding herself cereal and packing her own lunches. By nine she was pulling together her own dinners, maintaining the shopping list, and reminding Samantha to pay her taxes. At eleven her teachers called Samantha in for a conference because they wanted to skip Maria ahead a grade. She told them absolutely not. She wouldn’t give any of those people the satisfaction.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Nobody Comes to Rutland

  Opting for double duty from a single falsehood, he told Anna that he was going to Vermont for a few days to do a private event and finish the revisions Wendy wanted. Naturally enough, she wanted to go with him.

  “I’d love to see Vermont!” she said. “I’ve never been to New England.”

  For a moment he actually considered letting her come, but of course that was a terrible idea.

  “I think if I hole up somewhere I can kind of power through what I need to do. If you’re there with me, I’m going to want to spend time with you. And I just … I want to do that after I get something to Wendy. So I can enjoy it, and not feel I should be doing something else.”

  She nodded. She seemed to understand. He hoped she understood.

  Jake drove up through western Connecticut on Route 7, stopping for lunch in Manchester and arriving at his inn in Rutland around five. There, in his rock-hard four-poster, he finally acquainted himself with Martin Purcell’s stories, which were flaccid and pointless, populated by forgettable characters. Purcell had a particular interest in young people as they faltered between adolescence and adulthood—not surprising, perhaps, given his work as a high school teacher—but he seemed incapable of looking beyond the superficial. One character had an injury that prevented him from finishing a promising track season. Another failed a test, putting her college scholarship in jeopardy. A seemingly devoted young couple—devoted for teenagers, at least—became pregnant and the boy, instantly, abandoned his girlfriend. (Jake wondered at Purcell’s claim that this was, or was meant to be, a “novel in stories”—the same conceit he himself had used with his second book, Reverberations. Jake hadn’t fooled anyone then, and Purcell wasn’t fooling anyone now.) In the end he came up with a few points to make and a fairly obvious suggestion of how to move forward—focus on the young couple, let the characters in the other stories move into the background—and then he went to meet Martin Purcell at the diner.