“Well, I hope you’ll write down some of the foods you’d be happy to see at meals. I wouldn’t count on good avocados up here, not at this time of year, but if there are dishes you like I’ll talk to Patty and Nancy. Unless you want to do that.”
“I want to write my book,” the guy said, so fiercely he might have been uttering a tagline in an adventure movie, something along the lines of You haven’t seen the last of me or Don’t underestimate what I’m capable of. “I came here to get this done, and I don’t want to be thinking about anything else. I don’t want to be listening to those three witches, cackling away all the time on the other side of my wall. I don’t want to have a bathroom with pipes that wake me up in the morning. And what’s with the fireplace in my bedroom I’m not allowed to have a fire in. I distinctly remember a fire in one of the rooms when I looked at your website. What the fuck is that?”
“That was the parlor fire,” Jake said. “We haven’t been cleared for fires in the rooms, unfortunately. But we light the parlor fire every afternoon, and I’d be happy to do it earlier if you’d like to work down there, or read. Everything we do here is to try and support our guest-writers, and see they have what they need to do their work. And of course to support one another, as writers.”
Jake thought, even as he said this, of all the times he had said it in the past, or said something like it, and when he’d said it the people he’d said it to always nodded in agreement, because they, too, were writers, and writers understood the power of their commonalities. That had always been true. Except for right this minute. And, now it dawned on him, one other time.
Then the guy folded his arms tightly across his chest and glared at Jake, and the final part of the connection snapped into place.
Evan Parker. From Ripley. The one with the story.
Now he understood why, throughout this encounter, his brain had felt like it was circling back on itself, why his thoughts had been looping around and around an as yet unspecified thing. No, he had never met this particular asshole until a couple of days ago, but did that mean he wasn’t familiar to Jake? He was familiar. Hugely familiar.
Not that he’d spent the past couple of years ruminating on that asshole, because what writer of any degree of professional success, not just Jake’s own—would want to dwell on a first-time writer who’d somehow managed to pull the lever on the slot machine of spectacular stories at exactly the right moment, with his very first dime, no less, sending an utterly unearned jackpot of success shuddering into his lap? Always, when Evan Parker came drifting through Jake’s thoughts, it was with the usual surge of envy, the usual bitterness at the unfairness of it all, and then the brief observation that the book itself had not yet—to his knowledge, and it would obviously have been to his knowledge—reached actual publication, which might have meant that Jake’s former student had underestimated his own ability to get the thing finished, but he took no great comfort in that. The story, as its author himself had pointed out, was a silver bullet, and whenever the book did emerge it would be successful, and its author also successful beyond his (or, more painfully, Jake’s) wildest dreams.
Now, in his little office at the Adlon Center for the Creative Arts, that person, Evan Parker, once again returned to him, and so sharply it was as if he too had entered the little room and was standing just behind his Californian counterpart.
The guy was still talking—no, raging. He had moved on from his fellow guest-writers, on from the Adlon and the food and the town of Sharon Springs. Now Jake was hearing about an “East Coast agent” who’d actually suggested he pay somebody, out of his own money, to guide additional work on his novel before resubmitting it (Wasn’t that what editors were for? Or agents for that matter?) and the film scout he’d met at a party who’d told him to think about adding a female character to his story (Because men didn’t read books or go to movies?) or the assholes at MacDowell and Yaddo who’d rejected him for residencies (Obviously they favored “artistes” who were hoping to sell ten copies of their book-length poems!) and the losers typing away at every single table in every single coffee shop in Southern California, who thought they were God’s gift, and the world was obviously waiting for their short story collection or their screenplay or their novel …
“Actually,” Jake heard himself say, “I’m the author of two novels myself.”
“Of course you are.” The guy shook his head. “Anybody can be a writer.”
