He turned and stalked out of the room, leaving his folksy wicker basket behind him.
Jake listened to the guest (guest-writer!) as he clomped up the stairs, and then to the silence filling the wake of that, and again he wondered what he had done, what terrible thing, to merit the company of people like this, let alone their scorn. All he had ever wanted was to tell—in the best possible words, arranged in the best possible order—the stories inside him. He had been more than willing to do the apprenticeship and the work. He had been humble with his teachers and respectful of his peers. He had acceded to the editorial notes of his agent (when he’d had one) and bowed to the red pencil of his editor (when he’d had one) without complaint. He had supported the other writers he’d known and admired (even the ones he hadn’t particularly admired) by attending their readings and actually purchasing their books (in hardcover! at independent bookstores!) and he had acquitted himself as the best teacher, mentor, cheerleader, and editor that he’d known how to be, despite the (to be frank) utter hopelessness of most of the writing he was given to work with. And where had he arrived, for all of that? He was a deck attendant on the Titanic, moving the chairs around with fifteen ungifted prose writers while somehow persuading them that additional work would help them improve. He was a majordomo at an old hotel in upstate New York, pretending that the “guest-writers” upstairs were no different than the Yaddo fellows an hour to the north. I like the idea of a successful writer greeting the guests. Gives them something real to aspire to.
But no guest-writer had ever acknowledged Jake’s professional achievements, let alone drawn inspiration from his success in the field they supposedly hoped to enter. Not once in three years. He was as invisible to them as he had become to everyone else.
Because he was a failed writer.
Jake gasped when the words came to him. It was, unbelievably, the very first time this truth had ever broken through.
But … but … the words came spinning through his head, unstoppable and absurd: The New York Times New & Noteworthy! “A writer to watch” according to Poets & Writers! The best MFA program in the country! That time he had walked into a Barnes & Noble in Stamford, Connecticut, and seen The Invention of Wonder on the Staff Picks shelf, complete with a little index card handwritten by someone named Daria: One of the most interesting books I’ve read this year! The writing is lyrical and deep.
Lyrical! And deep!
All of it years ago, now.
Anybody could be a writer. Anybody except, apparently, him.
<p>CHAPTER SEVEN</p><p>Tap, Tap</p>Late that night, in his apartment in Cobleskill, he did something he had never done, not once since he’d watched his fortunate student walk into a grove of trees on the Ripley campus.
At his computer, Jake typed in the name “Parker Evan,” and clicked Return.
Parker Evan wasn’t there. Which meant not much: Parker Evan had been his former student’s intended pen name at one point, but that point had been three years earlier. Maybe he’d decided on another name, either because switching his own actual name around was a dumb idea or because he’d opted for even more privacy from the infinity of other possibilities.
Jake went back to the search field and typed: “Parker, novel, thriller.”
Parker, novel, thriller returned pages of references to Donald Westlake’s “Parker” novels, and also another series of mysteries by Robert B. Parker.
So even if Evan Parker had gotten his book all the way to a publisher, the first thing they’d probably have done was instruct him to drop Parker as a pen name.
Jake removed the name from his search field and tried: “thriller, mother, daughter.”
It was an onslaught. Pages and pages of books, by pages and pages of writers, most of whom he’d never heard of. Jake ran his eye down the entries, reading the brief descriptions, but there was nothing that fit the very specific elements of the story his student had told him back in Richard Peng Hall. He clicked on some random author names, not really expecting to find an image of Evan Parker’s only half-remembered face, but there was nothing even remotely like it: old men, fat men, bald men, and plenty of women. He wasn’t here. His book wasn’t here.
