The Twitter account had been mercifully dormant since its inception, but suddenly, in mid-December, the tweets began—not with a bang but with a whimper into the void:
@JacobFinchBonner is a not the author of #Crib.
There was no engagement at all, Jake was relieved to see, probably because there was no one to engage with. In its six weeks on the site, the Twitter user known as @TalentedTom was still depicted as an egg with no biography and from an undeclared location. He had managed to attract only two followers, both likely bots from points far east, but the lack of an audience did not seem to deter him at all. For the next few weeks there was a steady drip, drip of caustic little declarations:
@JacobFinchBonner is a thief.
@JacobFinchBonner is a plagiarist.
Anna went back to Seattle to settle some things. When she returned, Jake drove her out to Long Island for the traditional Bonner Hanukkah with his father’s siblings and their children. He had never before brought a guest to this event, and there was a certain amount of derisory attention from his cousins, but the plank-roasted salmon Anna contributed to the meal was met with stunned gratitude.
Technically, she still hadn’t entirely taken leave of her prior life—the apartment in West Seattle had been sublet and her furniture moved to a storage facility—but she straightaway found a job at a podcasting studio in Midtown and another as a producer on a Sirius show covering the tech industry. In spite of the fact that she’d grown up in a small Idaho town, it took her no time at all to ramp up to the speed with which every other New Yorker raced down the streets, and within days of her return to the city she seemed to become yet another overworked Gothamite, perpetually rushing and with a baseline level of ambient stress that would probably have alarmed anyone outside the five boroughs. But she was happy. Seriously happy, expressively happy. She began every day by wrapping herself around him and kissing his neck. She learned what he liked to eat and seamlessly took over the task of feeding them both (a great relief, as Jake never had learned to properly feed himself). She dove into the cultural life of the city and brought Jake along with her, and soon it was a rare night they were home and not at a play or a concert, or poking around Flushing in search of some dumpling stall she’d read about.
@JacobFinchBonner’s publisher had better get ready to issue a refund for every copy of #Crib.
Somebody needs to tell @Oprah she has another fake author on her hands.
Anna wanted a cat. She had wanted a cat for years, apparently. They went to the pound and adopted a nonchalant fellow, all black but for a single white foot, who did a quick circuit of the apartment, staked out a chair Jake had once liked to read in, and settled in for the long haul. (He was to be known as Whidbey, after the island.) She wanted to see a Broadway show—a real one, this time. He got them
He began to notice a basic difference between them, which was that she perceived the approach of a stranger with open curiosity and he with dread (this predated his becoming a “famous writer”—an oxymoron if there ever was one, or so he was in the habit of saying to interviewers as a means of conveying modesty—and had been true even when he’d carried a ring of personal failure around himself like a radioactive Hula-Hoop.) New people began to enter their lives, and for the first time in years Jake was having conversations with people who were not writers or in publishing, or even avid readers of fiction, and those conversations went so far beyond whose book had been bought by whom and for how much, whose second novel was a sales disappointment, which editor was out after overspending on an overrated novelist, and which bloggers had taken which sides in an accusation of “unwanted overtures” at a summer writer’s conference. There was, it turned out, a stunning variety of stuff to discuss beyond the writing world: politics, things to eat, interesting people and what they’d done in the world, and the golden ages of comedy, television, food trucks, and activism that were currently underway, all around him, and which he’d been only peripherally aware of till now.
