Oh.
“—I don’t know, it just sort of won me over. It’s really funny, and the narrator is stupid on purpose. Every character is like the last person you’d ever want to hang out with in real life, but it’s satirical, I think, and it’s really hard to put down.”
“I didn’t think you’d like it so much.”
She shrugged.
“I did. And if I can enjoy it over the sound of Édouard’s retching, it must be pretty good.”
Later that night, on the balcony, Whit kept the overhead light off for Annie’s sake as she slept, but he did pull out his phone flashlight.
He began to read.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Kathleen Pryor always made holiday gift bags for her colleagues. They were little cellophane-wrapped bundles of homemade chocolates and hard candies with miniature mason jars full of butterscotch sauce and ready-made packets of hot chocolate. And to her daughter’s annual delight, she always made more than enough, so they spent the days leading up to Christmas snacking on leftovers as well as indulging themselves with the smorgasbord of student gifts: cookies from Italy, boxes of Läderach chocolates and Vosges truffles, candied nuts, not one but two genuine English fruitcakes, more than one bottle of fine wine, and a batch of specialty coffee from Yemen. They caught up on reading, completed two jigsaw puzzles, and watched their favorite Christmas movies—It’s a Wonderful Life,White Christmas,Meet Me in St.Louis, andYou’ve Got Mail(it counts!).
It was a pleasant, quiet time, apart from one necessary conversation with Kathleen about the end of her and Whit, and the end of their cowriting days.
“Well,” Kathleen had said, “I hope he regrets it.”
“Mom, it wasn’t—”
“Ihope,” she said, with finality, “he regrets it. And I hope you don’t give up on yourself again.”
That had stung slightly, but it had also been the end of it. Afterwards, Merritt found that she was able to turn off her brain. From December 21 to December 24, she did not think of Whit, she did not think of the book, she did not even attempt to write. It wasn’t until Christmas Eve, during an a capella rendition of “O Come,O Come, Emmanuel” at the candlelit service at the Episcopal church her mother occasionally attended, that something seemed to bend inside of Merritt, and she thought,I do miss him.
She tried to bury this feeling on the following day, but every Christmas song seemed to make her feel sad, doing the washing up after a pleasant holiday meal with her mother made her think of Whit, and their blustery post-dessert walk made her long for the trails behind his house.
She knew what to do. On December26, she turned her brain back on. In the murky, amorphous stretch between Christmas and New Year’s, normally reserved for lounging and puttering and dozing, she threw herself back into her writing, knocking out chapter after chapter. For New Year’s Eve, she humored her mother by going with her to a party of old and retired teachers, but she slipped out at 9p.m. and returned home to write, typing as the sounds of fireworks popped overhead, even as someone in the park beyond her window blasted “Auld Lang Syne” from a speaker.
She wrote and wrote and wrote for days, and then, on January5, she sent two text messages. One to Willa Barrett-Lind, and one to Ian Hoult.
Whit had started readingSerious Gamesbecause of two contradictory impulses. First and foremost, he was driven by disdain, perversely excited to hate-read something he felt predestined to find offensive. Excited to hate the man whom Merritt thought so little of. But also—and this impulse felt complicated, messy, embarrassing—because he missed Merritt. Every idle thought sprinted in her direction, and that hurt. But still he hoped he might find in these chapters some semblance of the woman whom both he and Graydon Lyons had known.
That first night, on the balcony, he’d started the book by looking at Graydon Lyons’s author photo on the back flap. The man was, irritatingly, quite handsome. Salt-and-pepper hair and a sharp jaw, silvery blue eyes that made him seem like a creature from folklore. He looked like the kind of person you’d find yourself eager to impress.
Well, he thought,we’ll see about that.
Evie was right about the narrator, a stupid man who might have been played by Steve Carrell in an adaptation. But Graydon knew what he was up to. Allowances had been made for the white, male professor throughout his professional life, and he had nimbly slipped through the cracks of accountability. He believed himself to be a hack, and yet those around him were continually impressed by his spare, straightforward writing. He brought nothing to the table, yet he was impossible to hate because he was funny and hapless and moved through a world that was silly enough to constantly laud him.
And then there was Isabel, the grad student writing heady, stream-of-consciousness prose that captivated her peers and professors alike. She was silver-tongued and quietly, ferociously ambitious. You knew from their first interaction that the professor didn’t stand a chance, even if she hadn’t been beautiful, sensual, and attuned to his every desire in a way that appeared natural to him but read, to the reader, as calculated. The novel seemed to be saying something smart about men’s susceptibility to flattery, and the ease with which two hacks can dupe an insular community—until the smoke screen of Isabel’s talent disappeared, provoking her twisted revenge, and leaving the professor more revered than when the novel started.
It was annoyingly good. Whit was so carried along by it that he almost didn’t pick up on the familiar details until they began piling up. Isabel was from Virginia, her father had died (when she was in high school, but still), and she secretly loved young adultand children’s lit (despite the graphic sex in her own writing). The presentation of this last trait as a reflection of Isabel’s underlying immaturity, in both character and craft, broke the book’s spell and was also a strangely pleasing reminder for Whit: underneath the book’s layers of camp and irony was a real woman known to both him and Graydon. An absurdly talented woman who, on the page, was unapologetic about her excellence. This detail was unfamiliar to Whit, and yet, through this book, he couldseethe truth of how Merritt once was—and would be again, he hoped. In fact, the woman in the book, Isabel, had a kind of energy and sharpness and wit that, in a different kind of story, would have made her an iconic heroine instead of the obvious villain.
Looking atSerious Gameswith a critical eye, taking a scalpel to it and peeling back the layers of disdain and parody, revealed a vibrant, funny, beautiful woman. Graydon had seen the same Merritt that Whit saw, had in fact seen a version of her more alive and more attuned to her own brilliance, and he had tried to squash that. He had made Merritt feel small, and then he had created this caricature as revenge.
Whit felt awful for Merritt, but he also found himself pitying Graydon, who had missed so much and lost something so dear.
When they landed in Boston, Whit shoved the book into a Dunkin’ Donuts trash can before he and Annie even left the terminal.
Merritt sat at the bistro, waiting. When she had agreed to meet with Ian, her one condition had been that he wait until she was ready. Graydon’s book was still aNew York Timesbestseller. The editors atThe Atlanticwere growing antsy, he’d told her, but the promise of more and juicier information had persuaded them to wait.
Now she was almost ready. But that meeting would come later.
The door opened, and a cold wave of air filled the room. Merritt smiled.
“Hi,” Willa said as she crossed the room after hanging her long puffy coat on the coat rack and stuffing her quilted beanie into one of its pockets.
