Jake’s program—and, apparently, Alice’s—had not been this newer “low residency” type but the more classic drop-your-life-and-devote-yourself-to-your-art-for-two-straight-years variety, and frankly it was also a far more prestigious program than Ripley’s. Attached to a Midwestern university, the program had long produced poets and novelists of great importance to American letters, and was so hard to get into that it had taken Jake three years to manage it (during which time he had watched certain less talented friends and acquaintances get accepted). He’d spent those years living in a microscopic apartment in Queens and working for a literary agency with a special interest in science fiction and fantasy. Science fiction and fantasy, never genres to which he had personally been drawn, seemed to attract a high quotient of—well, why not be blunt?—crazy in its aspiring author pool, not that Jake had anything to compare that to since every one of the very distinguished literary agencies he’d applied to after graduating from college had declined to make use of his talents. Fantastic Fictions, LLC, a two-man shop in Hell’s Kitchen (actually in the tiny back room of the owners’ railroad flat in Hell’s Kitchen) had a client list of about forty writers, most of whom left for larger agencies the moment they experienced any professional success. Jake’s job had been to sic the attorney on these ungrateful writers, to discourage over-the-transom authors intent on describing their ten-novel series (written or unwritten) with the agents over the phone, and above all to read manuscript after manuscript about dystopian alternate realities on distant planets, dark penal systems far below the surface of the earth, and leagues of post-apocalyptic rebels bent on the overthrow of sadistic warlords.
Once he actually had ferreted out an exciting prospect for his bosses, a novel about a spunky young woman who escapes from a penal colony planet aboard some kind of intergalactic junk ship, and discovers a mutant population among the garbage which she transforms into a vengeful army and ultimately leads into battle. It had definite potential, but the two losers who’d hired him let the manuscript languish on their desk for months, waving off his reminders. Eventually, Jake had given up, and a year later, when he read in Variety about ICM’s sale of the book to Miramax (with Sandra Bullock attached), he’d carefully clipped the story. Six months later, when his golden ticket to the MFA party arrived and he quit his job—O Happy Day!—he’d placed the clipping squarely on his boss’s desk atop the dusty manuscript itself. He’d done what he’d been hired to do. He’d always known a good plot when he saw one.
Unlike many of his fellow MFA students (some of whom entered the program with actual publications, mostly in literary journals but in one case—thankfully that of a poet and not a fiction writer—the effing New Yorker!), Jake had not wasted a moment of those two precious years. He dutifully attended every seminar, lecture, reading, workshop, and informal gathering with visiting editors and agents from New York, and declined in the main to wallow in that (itself fictional) malady, “Writer’s Block.” When he wasn’t in class or auditing lectures at the university he was writing, and in two years he’d banged out an early draft of what would become The Invention of Wonder. This he submitted as his thesis and for every eligible award the program offered. It won one of them. Even more consequentially, it got him an agent.
Alice, it turned out, had arrived at the Midwestern campus only weeks after his own departure. She’d been there the following year when his novel was published, and a copy of its cover pinned to the bulletin board marked ALUMNI PUBLICATIONS.
“I mean, so exciting! Only a year out of the program.”
“Yeah. Heady stuff.”
That sat between them like something dull and unpleasant. Finally he said: “So, you write poetry.”
“Yes. I had my first collection out last fall. University of Alabama.”
“Congratulations. I wish I read more poetry.”
He didn’t, actually, but he wished he wished he read more poetry, which ought to count for something.
“I wish I could write a novel.”
“Well, maybe you can.”
She shook her head. She seemed … it was ridiculous, but was this wan poet actually flirting with him? What on earth for?
“I wouldn’t know how. I mean, I love reading novels, but I’m exhausted just writing a line. I can’t imagine, pages and pages of writing, not to mention characters that have to feel real and a story that needs to surprise you. It’s absurd, that people can actually do that. And more than once! I mean, you wrote a second one, didn’t you?”
And a third and a fourth, he thought. A fifth if you counted the one currently on his laptop, which he’d been too disheartened to even look at for nearly a year. He nodded.
