Whit must have been making a face. He tried to go neutral.
“Don’t you think your books will give me some insight into your psyche? Yourway of being?”
She said the last part with exaggerated air quotes, and Whit laughed.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know what my books say about me. All I meant was that millions of people have read Helen’s books, in so many languages, and that can be weird to witness but never experience yourself. I’m not saying a million people would evenlikemy books, just that the difference in scale is... I don’t know, it’s something.”
“I think I get it,” Merritt said, walking over to the sink to rinse her mug.
“I’ll do that.” She brushed him off.
“There’s a girl from my grad program,” she said, once again looking out the windows as she rinsed, “and I mean that, she’s agirl, and she was churning out these edgy, esoteric short stories for our workshops—really bizarro stuff—and then suddenly she landed a six-figure book deal for one of those sexy romantasy novels before she even graduated. Jessica Brittany.”
“Two first names.”
Merritt nodded. “She made me feel...”
“Small,” Whit said again, filling in her pause.
“No,” she said, surprising him. “It made me hungry, I guess, to writemything. But I think I know what you mean anyway—that kind of success makes you look at your own work differently, when all you should really be doing is thinking about the writing itself, in its own little bubble of creativity.”
Whit nodded, though he was sure he had never once entered into anything remotely resembling a “bubble of creativity.”
“What were we talking about in the first place?” he asked.
“Money. Comparison.”
“Comparison.” He nodded, then put a hand to his chest, miming a blow there. “That’s what we were really talking about. You don’t seem like you compare yourself to people, though.”
“I just told you about Jessica Brittany!”
By now she was finished with the mug, but she still stood looking back at him from the sink. The afternoon sun was turning the trees a goldish color that made Merritt’s hair look like warm brass.
Whit laughed.
“Sure, but do you spend hours thinking about how you’ll never measure up to Jessica Brittany? Is that a pen name, by the way?”
Merritt let a puff of a laugh leave her nose and rolled her eyes.
“It is not, if you can believe it. And no. You’re right. I don’t think abouthervery often.”
She paused, letting her mouth hang open, and Whit could almost swear he saw the words forming there. She didn’t think about this Jessica Brittany, didn’t compare herself to her, but perhaps to a certain celebrated author and creative writing professor...
But then she clapped her hands once. “Okay. Enough of that. Noses to the grindstone?”
Whit’s eyes dropped back to his tea for a moment; then he looked at her framed against that window one more time, longing to ask her why she really dropped out, but not certain why it mattered.
“Back to it,” was all he said, and he let her lead the way back to their warren of papers by the fireplace.
Chapter Ten
Merritt was enjoying her routine. She spent the mornings at work avoiding the gaze of Graydon’s books and speculating with Huong about what kind of life Diana must be living. (“I bet she is really into reformer Pilates,” Huong had suggested. “The fancy kind, with the special rolling bed.” “And complaining about other members of the Junior League” was Merritt’s reply.) One small joy was that Diana had been wrong: despite its popularity elsewhere,Serious Gameswas decidedly not flying off the shelves at Goodenough Books, and not just because Merritt never recommended it. More than once, she watched as patrons picked up the novel, read the inside flap, and set it back on the dais. She loved seeing that, and then she would scold herself for caring, and then she would remind herself that a horrible man had written an almost certainly unflattering book about her and of course she cared.
When she left the bookstore, always mumbling something about her “other gig,” she would drive a circuitous route to Whit’s for lunch, taking care to maintain the secrecy of their arrangement.
After Whit found her a second time in her car eating lunch, a tomato and farro salad, he had essentially dragged her inside by the ear. So now she sat at his table and they talked while she lunched, and he did her the kindness of mostly not watching her in the physical act of chewing and swallowing. Then they would write. The basic outline took a little over a week, which Whit insisted was actually very fast-moving for him; now it was time, they agreed, to have a go at the first chapter.
“We can toss this out if it’s bad,” Whit said when they sat down at the kitchen table to really, finally, start writing. “I think we have more planning to do, if I’m honest, but I always find that writing the first chapter gets my head in the right space. Do you feel that way?”
