The Plot полностью

The barbeque was held on the college green, surrounded by the Ripley’s earliest buildings, which—unlike Richard Peng Hall—were reassuringly collegiate and actually very pretty. Jake loaded up a paper plate with chicken and cornbread and reached into one of the coolers to extract a bottle of Heineken, but even as he did a body leaned against him, and a long forearm, thickly covered with blond hair, tipped his own forearm out of its trajectory.

“Sorry, man,” said this unseen person, even as his fingers closed around Jake’s intended beer bottle and pulled it from the water.

“Okay,” Jake said automatically.

Such a pathetically small moment. It made him think of those bodybuilding cartoons in the back of old comic books: bully kicks sand in the face of ninety-eight-pound weakling. What’s he going to do about it? Become a bulked-up bully himself, of course. The guy—he was middling tall, middling blond, thick through the shoulders—had already turned away, and was popping the bottle cap and lifting it to his mouth. Jake couldn’t see the asshole’s face.

“Mr. Bonner.”

Jake straightened up. A woman was standing beside him. It was the newcomer, from the faculty meeting that morning. Alice something. The nervous one.

“Hi. Alice, right?”

“Alice Logan. Yeah. I just wanted to say how much I like your work.”

Jake felt, and noted, the physical sensation that generally accompanied this sentence, which he still did hear from time to time. In this context “work” could only mean The Invention of Wonder, a quiet novel set in his own native Long Island and featuring a young man named Arthur. Arthur, whose fascination with the life and ideas of Isaac Newton provides a through line for the novel and a stay against chaos when his brother dies suddenly, was not, emphatically not, a stand-in for Jake’s own younger self. (Jake had no siblings at all, and he’d had to do extensive research to create a character knowledgeable about the life and ideas of Isaac Newton!) The Invention of Wonder had indeed been read at the time of its publication, and, he supposed, was still read on occasion, by people who cared about fiction and where it might be heading. Never once had anyone used the phrase “I like your work” to refer to Reverberations (a collection of short stories which his first publisher had rejected, and which the Diadem Press of the State University of New York—a highly respected university press!—had recast as “a novel in linked short stories”), despite the fact that innumerable copies had been dutifully sent out for review (resulting in not a single one).

It ought to be nice when it still happened, but somehow it wasn’t. Somehow it made him feel awful. But really, didn’t everything?

They went to one of the picnic tables and sat. Jake had neglected, in the aftermath of that Heineken theft, to grab another drink.

“It was so powerful,” she said, picking up from where she’d left off. “And you were … what, twenty-five when you wrote that?”

“About that, yes.”

“Well, I was blown away.”

“Thank you, that’s so nice of you to say.”

“I was in my MFA program when I read it. I think we were in the same program, actually. Not at the same time.”

“Oh?”