Whit considered this. Graydon Lyons was a big deal. He had the sort of story people told when Whit was in his own MFA program: Lyons had been mentored by Philip Roth, had a short story explode inThe New Yorker, and burst onto the national scene with his first novel, which imagined what would have happened had Texas not lost the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. His works were lauded for their progressive themes, their complex female characters, and their unflinching critiques of American exceptionalism. Just last year he’d been asked to write the preface to a new edition ofA Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which Whit had read and enjoyed.
“Was she one of his students?” Willa asked.
“I don’t know,” Whit said again.
She raised a single finger. “I think I remember Kathleen mentioning that she was— Oh goodness.”
She placed her hand on the table.
“Merritt wasn’t the one in his new book, was she?”
Whit looked hard at her hazel eyes, searching for meaning. “I don’t know what you’re talking about?”
Willa laughed. “I forgot you live under a rock.”
He bristled but pushed it down.
Willa continued. “Lyons’s new book. It’s ‘new ground’ for him.” She rolled her eyes and did ironic air quotes. “It’s about a grad student in a creative writing program, and everyone is speculating it’s autofiction, or at leastsemi-autofiction.”
“They always say that.”
She shrugged. “Sure, but how often do creative writing professors write about creative writing students who fall in love with creative writing professors?”
Whit shrugged back and looked away, as if suddenly interested in the chalkboard menu across the room.
“Well, I highly doubt it’s about her. Or anyone else for that matter. It’s fiction.”
He cleared his throat.
“Right,” Willa said, nodding. “There are some psychological thriller elements, I think, as the book goes on and the relationship gets more twisted. Probably too crazy to be anythingreal.”
Bad breakup, Merritt had said.
If Merrittwasthe inspiration, then her ex-boyfriend was a prick—and, unfortunately, the kind of prick who ended up on NPR’s “Books We Love” list. Oh, poor Merritt.
Or maybe not poor Merritt. He didn’t know. He supposed he could always ask.
Whit almost laughed out loud. The man could hardly offer Merritt a cup of tea without saying something crushingly stupid. He would not be asking her if her ex-boyfriend had written an unflattering, sure-to-be-critically-acclaimed novel about their life together.
But that didn’t mean he’d stop thinking about it.
New books come out on Tuesdays. This is something all booksellers know, and Merritt was now a bookseller. Her more senior bookseller, Diana of the Sweater Sets, had come in that morning before opening with the sole purpose of telling Merritt which displays should be set up where. She wanted a Halloween table with spooky stories old and new; she wanted a selection of books by writers from New England; there was to be an endcap display of autumnal texts (“thinkbeach readsbut to be perused in a bed of leaves”); and she asked for a small dais at the center of thenew-release table dedicated to Graydon Lyons’s newest book,Serious Games.
“Why?” Merritt had asked, and Diana had looked at her the way George W. Bush looked at that man who threw the shoe.
“Why?” Diana repeated. “Because it’s all the rage. It’s going to fly off the shelves in the cities, and I have a feeling it might not do too badly here, either.”
Now the display was all but finished, and the empty dais stared back at her. It was made to look like a Grecian column that had been sawn down to the size of a serving platter. The crate full of copies ofSerious Gamessat at her feet, and when Merritt finally leaned over to lift it, she felt like she might die. She plopped the box atop the newest Colson Whiteheads and Elizabeth Strouts and slowly reached for the box cutter in her apron pocket. As she clicked the blade up a few notches, she had a vision of herself stabbing the box, using the same the force with which Norman Bates would approach shower curtains.Oops, Diana, she would say,something must have happened in transit.
Instead, Merritt gently pierced the packing tape and slid the knife across the length of the box. When the folds opened, she saw, beneath slips of paper and bubble wrap, a cover of royal blue. It was simple and sleek, unadorned but for the wordsserious gamesin a sensible white font and, only slightly smaller, the wordsgraydon lyonsanda novel. She lifted a copy from the box and cringed. It had that sandpapery texture that made her skin crawl.
She stared for a long time before managing to turn it over. The back was covered with “Advanced Praise” from writers whom she knew to be Graydon’s friends: people she had met at his side while attending parties and readings, and one token woman who had once joined them with her husband for a weekend at Graydon’s lake house. “A stunning, unflinching, often hilarious portrait of modern academic life,” she called the book, and Merritt deeply wished that she had not been so humiliatingly polite to her inall those conversations on the boat dock and around the kitchen island. Merritt had pretended to care about that woman’s bichon frise, enduring dozens of cell-phone photos of the thing with pink bows on its ears, and now that woman was treating this book as if it weren’t a send-up of someone she knew. What horrible things had she read and possibly believed before blurbing this book?
The worst part was that Merritt could find out if she wanted. She could crack the thing open and discover the answer herself, and she wouldn’t even have to worry about padding Graydon’s pockets with her own money, because here she was with the book in hand. She could read it during her breaks. Hell, she could steal a copy if she really wanted to—and she did want to, with the same desire you can have to touch something that might burn you.
Merritt placed the book on the dais, keeping it closed. Then she placed another on top of it, and another on top of that one, until she had succeeded in creating the least appealing display in the store.
She walked back to the cash register. The books watched her from their toddlerish pile.
