The Plot полностью

Anna shook her head. They had reached the Ninth Avenue entrance to Chelsea Market, and people were streaming out. “But why can’t you just call this guy? Why do you actually need to fly down there?”

“I think I’ll have a better chance of getting in to see him if I just turn up. That seemed to work in Vermont. You can come with me, you know.”

But she couldn’t. She needed to go back to Seattle to finish dealing with her stuff in storage and take care of some final business with KBIK. Already she’d put that off a couple of times, and now her boss at the podcast studio had asked Anna not to travel later in June (when he was getting married and going to China on a honeymoon) or July (when he’d be attending a podcasting conference in Orlando). Anna had been planning her trip for next week, and Jake couldn’t persuade her to change her plans, so he gave up trying, and there remained a palpable tension between them. He booked his flight to Atlanta for the following Monday, and then he spent the intervening days finishing his revisions for Wendy. He sent off the manuscript late on Sunday night and when he turned his phone on after the plane landed in Atlanta the following afternoon, there was an email letting him know the book had been put into production. So that particular weight, at least, fell away.

Atlanta was a city he had passed through a couple of times on his book tours but never really visited. He picked up a car at the airport and headed northeast to Athens, passing through Decatur, where many months earlier, as Crib first surged into the national consciousness, he’d attended a book festival and experienced his first “entrance applause.” He remembered that day—only two years ago—and the strange, disembodied feeling of being known by someone (in this case, by many someones) he himself did not know, and the sense of wonder that he had actually written a book strangers had paid money to buy, and spent time to read, and liked enough to have filed into the DeKalb County Courthouse just to see him and hear him say, presumably, something of interest. How far from that heady moment to this, Jake thought, passing the exit signs for Decatur on 285. He wondered if he would be permitted to feel pride in his new book when it came out, or whether he’d ever be able to write anything else after this ordeal, even if he did, somehow, manage to bring it to a peaceful conclusion. And if he didn’t, if this woman succeeded in bringing him to his knees, shaming him before his peers and his readers and everyone else who’d placed their own professional reputation in support of his, Jake wondered how he could continue to hold up his head in the world, not just as a writer but as a person.

All the more reason to get the answers he’d come for.

By the time he reached Athens it was too late to do anything but eat, so he checked into his hotel and went out for barbeque, marking up a map of the locations he needed to visit as he sat waiting for his ribs and beer. He was surrounded by blond young women dressed in red UGA shirts. They had musical, inebriated voices and were celebrating some plainly nonacademic triumph together, and he thought how unlike these admittedly pretty young people his own wife was, and how fortunate he felt to be married to Anna, even if Anna was plainly distressed about the choices he’d been making and upset with him in general. He thought of how, each morning after his wife left for work, he found a nest of her long gray hairs coiled in the drain of the shower, the extraction of which gave him a powerful, if admittedly odd, satisfaction. He thought of how their home was warm, colorful, and comfortable—not one facet of which was a thing he’d been able to achieve on his own—and how the refrigerator and freezer were full of her delicious food: homemade soups and stews and even bread. He thought of the cat, Whidbey, and the particular satisfaction of cohabiting with an animal (his first actual pet since a woefully short-lived hamster when he was a boy), and the ways in which the animal occasionally deigned to express gratitude for his extremely pleasant life. He thought of the gradual addition of new and agreeable people to their life as a couple—some from the world of writers (whom he could enjoy as people now that he had no reason to envy them) and some from the new media spheres Anna was beginning to move in. All of it underscored the powerful sense that he had embarked upon the best period of his life.