As she walked, indigo coat pulled tight around her, cool wind blowing her hair back, Merritt listened to a woman describe recent depressing arguments before the Supreme Court.
“Nina Totenberg!” Merritt said aloud to herself.
The streetlights were just coming on as the autumn twilight stretched itself thin, and the white wooden buildings on either side of the road glowed like jack-o’-lanterns. Someone somewhere was burning leaves, perfuming the breeze with that familiar toastiness. She definitely did not miss the Texas commute.
The Supreme Court story ended—itwasNina Totenberg—and a new one started, with someone reading what sounded like a piece of fiction. The writing was crisp, somehow both direct and expressive, and its simpleness felt powerfully raw and compelling. It was an uncut diamond of prose, and its description of a woman—a bespectacled graduate student—caused her pulse to quicken.
“Those are the first words spoken by the narrator, known only as ‘the Professor,’ in Graydon Lyons’s highly anticipated new novel,Serious Games.”
Merritt froze. It felt like someone had pulled the emergency brake on her body. The wind was suddenly icy, and a sick feeling leapt from the soles of her feet up to her shoulders. The tips of her fingers buzzed, and her earbuds were megaphones, too loud, too loud, too much pressure in her skull. She wanted to yank them out, and she wanted to throw up, but instead, she listened because she had to listen. There was no other option.
“The campus novel marks a departure for the author and is the first time Lyons, a creative writing professor himself, has waded into a contemporary setting: this time, that of higher education. Its subject matter—an affair gone wrong between a married professor and his student—is raising some eyebrows. But this is no surprise to Lyons.”
And then there it was, crystal clear, his voice in her ears, all the way up here on this New England street.
“Of course, every book I’ve written holds up a mirror to myself. This one is set in a world with which I am intimately familiar, and I always expected that readers would try to draw connections to my personal life. Odd as it may seem, there’s less of myself in this story than in my works of historical fiction. But ambiance and tone, the sense of place—well, it would be impossible to avoid commentary on modern academic life in a story like this one, and I’m not going to shy away from that.”
Merritt realized she was walking again only because she was now stopping, lowering herself to a bench. She yanked the earbuds out and shoved them into her bag, their case forgotten.
Oh my God. Oh my God, oh my God.
Oh my God.
He had actually done it.
Chapter Five
It was a Thursday. Meaning that Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday had all ambled past Whit with nothing to show for themselves. Just a blank Word doc and a blinking cursor and, yet again, the sense that Helen had made a horrible mistake. It wasn’t just that she should have left the completion of her series to another children’s fantasy author; she should have left it to someone who, at the very least,knew how to write a damn book.
The failed giant-baby escapade had been discouraging. It was Whit’s most proactive undertaking in weeks, and it had amounted to nothing beyond proving to him once and for all that he was not cut out for this—not if people like Merritt Pryor had better recall of the minutiae of Helen’s publication history than he could ever dream of having.
And then today had been especially demoralizing. After dropping Annie off at school, he returned home to his little writing room, which just now felt less cozy, more cramped, more farcical. It was like a set piece for a play about a failed writer where you could knock on the bookshelf, the desk, Whit’s cranium, and they would all ring hollow. He had sat in his chair, aimless, for a quarter of an hour; then he had done a truly terrible thing and gotten on YouTube. He felt himself falling deeper and deeper into a hole of Amateur Singers Surprising Competition Show Judges with Their Unexpected Talent videos, but he did not resist.
Anhour and a half later, with a gasp like an unfortunateTitanicpassenger breaching the ocean’s surface, he pulled himself backinto the real world. He did the brave thing then and actually tried handwriting something, anything (his own work, the beginning of Helen’s), and found himself doodling like a bored teenager in chem class. He went for a walk in the woods behind his stonewalled, ivy-covered house.
There was a lot of woods to walk in. The house, along with the family Range Rover, had been bought after the astronomical success of Helen’s first two books. They had drastically remodeled the home’s interior, and when the land bordering the back of their property went on the market, Helen snatched it up, lest it become a shopping center or data farm or something equally depressing. Now there were twenty-five acres of woods and hills to roam in, and Whit paid for a monthly service that maintained miles of trails and mended fence lines. This was one of the perks of being married to a queen of kid lit that Whit particularly enjoyed, especially when he needed a long, long walk. He had felt that need more frequently in the months since Helen’s death—and especially as the burden of the Monumental Task and his potential failure to accomplish it had grown more onerous and frightening.
The long walk—which, he told himself, would “get the juices flowing” and “help the gears start to turn”—had simply made him thirsty, hungry, and listless. Once back, he made tea, then ate a whole sleeve of Milano cookies from the bag while leaning over the sink. He emptied all the trash cans and started a load of laundry. When he was standing at the stove with a stiff brush in hand, ready to tackle a particularly stubborn bit of charred spaghetti sauce, the phone rang.
It was Joan Eaton, Helen’s literary agent, whom he resented a little because he heard from her twice as often as he spoke with the woman who represented his own books. He groaned and stared at the phone and groaned again, and then decided to get the hard part over with now, because at least that was easier than going back to his study.
“Hello.”
“Whit, hi. What are you up to?”
He glanced at the hardened black tomatoey scab. “I’m writing.”
“Ohh, that’s what we like to hear,” Joan said, her voice low and drawn out, like the voice people use to speak to an especially old person or a friend’s nervous pet.
Whit twisted the brush in his hand. “Yup,” he said, trying to rush through the small talk to get to what was surely next: the inevitable flurry of questions, the patronizing encouragements. The word “progress.”
“And how are things? How’s Annie?”
“Oh, she’s good, I think, as far as I can tell. Kids, you know.”
“Yes, yes.”
What were they even saying?Kids, you know? Get on with it.
