Whit’s fingers flew to his hair like claws.
“Willa.”
“I know.”
“Willa.”
“Iknow,” she said, throwing her hands up in defeat. “Trust me, I know, but I was at the store yesterday, buyingmultiplecrates of wine, and he was there—”
“Probably because he wants to drink himself into some delusional Hemingwayesque state,” Whit interrupted, before turning to Merritt in anticipation of the pot-calling-kettle-black look she was in fact giving him.Don’t, he mouthed to her, almost laughing in spite of his obvious dismay.
“I don’t know why he was there, Whit, but he saw me, and he said, ‘Looks like you’re getting ready for a party,’ and I said, ‘I am,’ and then he just waited, and suddenly I was explaining myself to him. And before I knew it, I had invited him. I’m sorry for being polite. I never thought he’d actuallycome.”
“Of course he would come,” Whit hissed. “The man loves the sound of his own voice and forcing stories in which he is the hero onto unsuspecting bystanders, and where better to do that than—oh, hi, Ian. I didn’t know you were coming tonight.”
Merritt looked past Willa to see an almost comically frowzy man. Threadbare corduroys, a pilled navy sweater, and a navy duffle coat. He had an unlit pipe in his mouth and an oversized sailor hat on his head. Oh,thatIan. Ian Hoult.
“Call me Ishmael,” he said with both hands against his chest, just enormously self-satisfied.
He looked ready to hug Whit, which apparently drove the latter to offer Merritt as a sacrifice. He grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her in front of him.
“This is Merritt Pryor.”
Ian made a face of unvarnished delight, but it was impossible to tell whether it was directed at just her or at her proximity to Whit. He certainly didn’t recognize her from the time she’d checked him out at the bookstore.
“Do I know you?”
Okay, so she had registered as a person with a pulse, but whatever validation she might have felt was undermined by the man’s flirtatious eyes, as if the two of them had shared a secret. It was the way boys looked at girls in college, when they couldn’t be certain whether they had drunkenly hooked up in the past. Merritt recoiled.
“I don’t think so.”
Whit realized his mistake and spoke again before Ian could.
“How’s theAtlanticpiece going?”
She could hear the pain in his voice at having to ask this and almost laughed. First Carpool Guy, now this. How many more men in this town had earned Whit’s utter disdain?
Ian was evidently thrilled to have the subject raised and launched into a speech about how he couldn’t believeThe Atlanticcontinued to be interested in hearing from him. Whit caught her eye and she had to physically restrain herself from smiling.
“But now,” Ian said eventually, “they want me to write something about this new Graydon Lyons novel.”
Instant lightheadedness. Immediate shortness of breath. The words were a blow.
“I mentioned on a podcast recently that I was planning to teach it in my Life Writing and Autofiction course next semester at Plymouth College—they’re having me back—and I suppose that ruffled some feathers, because, you know, Lyons is going out of his way to say it’s neither of those things. But then, as I’ll explain in the piece, that’swhyI’m teaching it. Beyond the fact that it’s my prerogative as a professor—”
“Visiting professor,” Whit interrupted.
Ian almost scowled but kept his cool.
“Indeed. But when it comes to what counts as autofiction, it’s a game of inferences, and those inferences don’t really include what Graydon Lyons has to say. Once a book is published, I don’t actually care whether an author believes he’s written something personal or not—that’s for us to determine. And I’m fairly certain this thematic departure for Lyons has to do more with his own proclivities than it does with a desire to reinvent himself.”
This second speech was accompanied by more hand flourishes than Merritt thought strictly appropriate for anyone who was not a nineteenth-century British dandy. The half of her brain that was not melting down like a nuclear reactor watched Whit as it was delivered, and her only source of comfort in this wretched moment was the way his eyes turned shark-dead as the skin around his mouth grew more and more taut. He was melting down, too, but while hers was a cold-sweat situation, Whit looked to be experiencing whatever emotions precede aDateline-style crime of passion.
“That’s really interesting, Ian,” he said, in a voice that might have come from a text-to-speech phone app. Ian seemed to have sobered him up.
Sensing that Whit was about to make an excuse to get away from the man, Merritt heard herself asking, against her better judgment, “What makes you so sure it’s autofiction?”
Ian seemed surprised that she was capable of further speech, much less apprised of the definition ofautofiction. He looked at her again in the way you might look at a precocious child, and Merritt clenched her jaw.
