Merritt might have bought it, too, except that last March, Bebe, her closest friend from the MFA program, had told her over drinks that Graydon had shared something in a class workshop that sounded a lot like Merritt. He was writing about a character, an ambitious young woman named Isabel Abbott, interested in writing children’s literature, who had caught the eye of her professor—or, in his version, wheedled her way into the professor’s orbit. Everyone in the class, Bebe said, had looked uncomfortable, all of them being aware, in a small program, of Graydon and Merritt’s recent breakup. All of them were also smart enough to make the jump from “Pryor” to “Prior” to “Abbott.” Apparently, the class’s response to the character had been awkward and tepid, and surely, Merritt had told herself, Graydon was just getting something out of his system. Surely he wouldn’t actuallydoanything with the character. Since then, in an act of self-preservation, Merritt had blocked the memory of this conversation with Bebe from her mind.
Her hopes had been foolish. This book, too, focused on an ambitious young woman named Isabel, and the critics praised Graydon’s “nuanced” and “complicated” treatment of her (The New Republic). She was the story’s focus, while the narrator-professor was intentionally obscured, little more than a lens through which to observe this star on the rise. According to critics, Graydon, who was known for his alternative histories, was “doing something new and vital and compelling here” (The New York Review of Books). He was commenting on the campus novel trope—younger student meets older professor—with “reënergizing force” (The New Yorker). The one exception to all this praise came from a woman writing in theLos Angeles Review of Books, who called the book “at turns dull for the sake of dullness and crass for the sake of crassness”; Merritt immediately followed her online in solidarity. The horrible thing, though, was that the majority of these reviewers were probably right. Graydon’s writing was always surprising and hard to put down. He insisted that his students subvert expectations. “If the signs point right, don’t even think about going right. And for God’s sake, don’t go left, either. Go up, go down, go backwards. Just don’t be boring.” He had said this, proclaimed it, really, in a class she audited early on, and Merritt had dutifully written down this advice, captivated by Graydon’s vitality and self-assurance.
But now here was his book. Younger student meets older professor, and whatever he wrote in that story, and however well he did it, Merritt knew that Graydon hadlivedthat trope more than once. Was it really that inventive when you and your ex-girlfriend were the source text for your novel?
The reviews described the character Isabel (almost certainly named in an ironic nod to the Henry James heroine) as a pastiche of competing feminist archetypes: driven and rebellious and calculating. As the novel progresses, through a series of deft twists and reveals, she becomes a sort of empress-with-a-knife-but-no-clothes—someone who perfunctorily checks the boxes when it comes to intelligence and scholarship and self-actualization but hides dark secrets and even darker urges.
“Darker urges”?Whatever, Merritt thought. That was patently fictional. But the other things. The ambition that falters and deflates; the emptiness beneath Isabel’s skill. It made her sick to think about. That must be what Graydon thought of her; now he had turned that version of her into something to be observed—and because of who he was, people would be clamoring to do just that. People would read this book and discuss it over coffee and at dinner parties like the one where she’d first met Graydon. Academics would smash this character between two glass slides and shove her beneath their microscopes in order to expose all her ghastly defects, cobbling them together in order to say somethingesoteric about post-postmodernism or neoliberalism, or, if they really figured things out, autofiction, God help her. Overnight, actual graduate students who studied Don DeLillo, Ben Lerner, and Rachel Cusk would be addingSerious Gamesto their exams lists, digging through Merritt’s insides and splashing her guts across the pages of their dissertations, all in hopes of landing tenure-track jobs like the one occupied by Graydon Lyons, PhD.
Merritt took a sip of her now-cold tea and thought about when she first met the man who would eventually do this to her. Graydon was a professor in the creative writing program. Not her professor, but he was a known and treasured presence in the department, just like the other novelists, poets, and memoirists whose books either sold well or garnered positive reviews. As a writer whose works did both, Graydon was revered by every category of person associated with the school.
Twenty years older than her, he had crossed the room at a party to speak to her. It was a dinner thing at the bungalow of another professor to honor a Pulitzer Prize winner who’d come to give a talk. Graydon knew the woman—knew her well in fact, and had blurbed her books and appeared alongside her in anthologies and essay collections—but he had looked across the room, set his wineglass down on a credenza, and walked. Away from the Pulitzer Prize winner and over to Merritt.
She had been talking to Bebe about something stupid—food Instagram accounts they both followed, probably—and then Bebe had squeezed her arm as if to keep her from falling overboard. She looked meaningfully over Merritt’s shoulder, and when Merritt turned, she saw him, first just looking at her, and then, out of nowhere, moving her way.
“You’re Merritt Pryor,” he said, and his voice was smooth and refined, like a well-tuned viola. He had carefully sculpted salt-and-pepper hair that was mostly pepper, and a jawline like an action figure. His eyes were that same otherworldly blue seen insled dogs. But first and foremost, he had done what she longed to do more than anything: he was a writer and a damn good one.
And he knew her name?
“Mary Anne showed me your story about the school play gone wrong. I liked it very much.”
She hadn’t realized professors were passing students’ work around. The school play piece was one of the first things she turned in that first semester. Merritt had wanted to write about the kids themselves, but her inner critic led her to tell the story from the music teacher’s perspective instead.
“Thank you,” she said, hoping he’d attribute her reddening face to the wine.
She was wearing a short black dress, had worn it on purpose because it looked quite good on her, and he was in a blue suit with a white shirt, no tie, and he had crossed a room to speak with her about her work.
“I’d love to talk to you about it. I’m going outside for a smoke.”
“I don’t smoke,” she said as Bebe disappeared somewhere.
He smirked. “It’s never too late to start.”
“I feel like anytime after the 1960s might have been too late to start.”
The words slipped out of her, as jokes often did when she was sparring with an equal or, in this case, a superior.
Graydon covered his heart. “Are you calling me old?”
She could remember everything about this moment so clearly. Thisexactmoment in the space between his question and her answer. Music was playing—some obscure soul singer from the seventies—the walls were wine red, and people were talking in the elevated, academic language of these parties. She remembered thinking that, because it was the fall and the windows were open, this was the rare event where she wasn’t sweating her brains out, and then, in this moment, a breeze blew through the room and the tenor of the evening seemed to shift in one greatswing. She had felt like she was standing on the deck of a boat as it crested a wave.
“I think I’m just expressing concern for you, for your lungs,” she said, feeling like the answer was a subpar parry, beneath the standards of whatever this was that they were doing.
Graydon raised his thick eyebrows and twisted his mouth, like someone using their tongue to push something from one cheek to the other. To her relief, it was a look of amusement.
“Oh, I think the old boys are doing just fine.” He rapped at his chest with the knuckles of one hand. “But I’m sure my undergrads are praying I get emphysema after I made them listen to me read aloud from Pynchon.”
“Well,” she said, smiling now herself, “it would be wrong to disappoint your students.”
She had joined him for a cigarette and then joined him at his loft and then joined him on trips to art exhibits and to conferences where he was the plenary speaker. They had gone together on long drives in the country to search for antique end tables and cloudy Venetian mirrors, and she had been his date at dinners with other professors and at book launches with bigwig publishing people in New York and LA and, once, London.
The next summer she had joined him at his lake house, where he’d joked with her, saying that she’d be a compelling main character in a book, if he wrote that sort of thing. He was always saying things like that, as if he’d been studying her, trying unsuccessfully to figure her out but enjoying himself nonetheless.
“You wouldn’t actually, though, right?” she’d said back. “Put me in a book? I’m too complex to be contained on the page anyway.”
He had smiled and said, no, of course he wouldn’t. Lying next to him on the swinging porch bed—an absolute luxury to her mind—she had said, “Promise?” And he had actually crossed his heart with a finger; they had interlocked their pinkies, laughingat the silly solemnity of the act. Then they had kissed and drunk the best wine of her life and spent the evening watching the rain fall around them, the watery smell blanketing the house, until the lightning came, and the thunder rumbled so loudly that it shook the porch, and they ran inside giggling like teenagers.
Thinking of it now, she felt something flicker and crackle beneath her skin. It had been cute—the finger-over-heart pantomime—and unusually sweet. Then they had broken up, and he had broken his little promise. Worse, she realized now, he had probably started writing before their relationship had even ended, if the book was already out in the world. And here she was, in front of this fire, feeling like a deflated pool float. She hadn’t been able to stay at the program after she and Graydon ended things. It hadn’t helped that he’d moved on, quite quickly. Or rather, he had moved backward, since he had gone back to seeing his ex-wife, a professor of religious studies who specialized in American fundamentalisms. It was only then that Merritt had learned this was something of a pattern between them: they would break up, they would date other people (he skewed younger, she skewed older), and then they would reunite, until they broke up again.
