Writers & Lovers - Lily King Page 0,24

book is Eva Park. Her short story collection was gorgeous, got a ton of attention last year, and won the PEN/Hemingway. She’s perched uneasily on a short stool listening to two of Muriel’s colleagues explain to her why her book is a masterpiece of contemporary fiction. I met Eva six years ago, when she was working on the collection. They aren’t stories, she told me, they’re hard little polyps I’m trying to remove from my brain. She was sort of ablaze with a lot of nervous energy then. All the stuffing seems to have gone out of her since. She looks embarrassed, sitting on that stool, to be who she is now. She seems pained by all the compliments Muriel’s colleagues are giving her. Success rests more easily on men. Across the room, Jimbo holds up a bottle and hollers that the Grey Goose has flown.

Muriel calls me over and makes me squeeze on the couch between her and her grad school friend George, who turned up unexpectedly that afternoon, which apparently he does from time to time. She’s told me about him. He’s unhappy and lives in North Carolina. We’re pressed together on the couch and have to lean away from each other to be in focus. He has a smooth plump face and gold-rimmed glasses. Big round eyes through the lenses.

Harry is on the other side of Muriel, and they have enhanced the intensity of their conversation to force George and me to talk to each other. I already know part of his story. He and his wife arrived in Ann Arbor together for grad school. He was in the fiction program with Muriel, and his wife was in nonfiction. During their second year there she started getting migraines and was sent to a specialist. At her third appointment, the doctor locked the door and they had sex. On the examining table with the crinkly paper. The doctor remained standing the whole time. I shouldn’t know these details, but I do. They’re all writers in the chain—his wife, George, and Muriel—so the particulars didn’t get lost. Now the wife is migraine-free and living with the doctor, and George is heartbroken and teaching freshman comp at UNC–Greensboro.

‘Muriel says your novel’s about Cuba,’ George says.

It occurs to me that the chain goes both ways, that he may know all about Luke, that those juicy Red Barn tidbits haven’t gotten lost, either.

‘It’s not really about Cuba. It’s just set there.’

‘Why?’

‘My mother lived there when she was a girl. Her parents were American, but after the war her father set up a medical practice in Santiago de Cuba. There was this moment when she was seventeen and had to decide whether to run away with her boyfriend and join the rebels in the mountains, or leave Cuba with her parents. In the book I have her choose love.’

‘And the revolution.’

‘Yeah.’ Love and the revolution. I push some chicken around on my paper plate. I need to change the subject. Talking about my book makes me feel flayed alive. ‘John Updike came into the restaurant where I work a few weeks ago, and while I was putting down his salad the woman next to him told him how much she loved The Centaur, and he shook his head and said he only wrote it because he didn’t have any other ideas at the time. That’s kind of the way I feel.’ Love and the Revolution. I don’t hate it.

‘Did you tell Updike you were a writer?’

‘No.’ I laugh. ‘God no.’ But when that woman who loved The Centaur dropped her fork and I bent down to get it, I touched one of the leather tassels of his loafer, for a bit of luck. ‘What are you working on right now?’

‘Oh.’ He looks down at his fingers, which are wringing the neck of his napkin. ‘I’m a little stuck.’

‘On what?’

‘A story.’

‘What’s it about?’

The question clearly pains him as well. ‘A sort of art heist in the Golden Horde in 1389.’

I want him to be joking, but he is not.

‘Wow. How long have you been working on it?’

‘Three years.’

‘Three years?’ I don’t mean for it to come out like that. ‘It must be more of a novella by now.’

‘It’s eleven and a half pages.’

This is a detail Muriel hasn’t shared, more peculiar and intimate and, to me anyway, more horrendous than his wife’s infidelity. I don’t know what to say.

‘Are you waiting tables tomorrow night?’ he says.

‘Yeah.’

‘The next night?’

‘Yup. Most nights. Why?’

‘I’m trying to ask