Chapter Five #3
cloudy Venetian mirrors, and she had been his date at dinners with other professors and at book launches with bigwig publishing
people in New York and LA and, once, London.
The next summer she had joined him at his lake house, where he’d joked with her, saying that she’d be a compelling main character
in a book, if he wrote that sort of thing. He was always saying things like that, as if he’d been studying her, trying unsuccessfully
to figure her out but enjoying himself nonetheless.
“You wouldn’t actually, though, right?” she’d said back. “Put me in a book? I’m too complex to be contained on the page anyway.”
He had smiled and said, no, of course he wouldn’t.
Lying next to him on the swinging porch bed—an absolute luxury to her mind—she had said, “Promise?” And he had actually crossed his heart with a finger; they had interlocked their pinkies, laughing at the silly solemnity of the act.
Then they had kissed and drunk the best wine of her life and spent the evening watching the rain fall around them, the watery smell blanketing the house, until the lightning came, and the thunder rumbled so loudly that it shook the porch, and they ran inside giggling like teenagers.
Thinking of it now, she felt something flicker and crackle beneath her skin. It had been cute—the finger-over-heart pantomime—and
unusually sweet. Then they had broken up, and he had broken his little promise. Worse, she realized now, he had probably started
writing before their relationship had even ended, if the book was already out in the world. And here she was, in front of
this fire, feeling like a deflated pool float. She hadn’t been able to stay at the program after she and Graydon ended things.
It hadn’t helped that he’d moved on, quite quickly. Or rather, he had moved backward, since he had gone back to seeing his
ex-wife, a professor of religious studies who specialized in American fundamentalisms. It was only then that Merritt had learned
this was something of a pattern between them: they would break up, they would date other people (he skewed younger, she skewed
older), and then they would reunite, until they broke up again.
This revelation made her feel cheap and stupid, but it hadn’t been enough to make her leave school. She left because she realized
that Graydon had changed her, and she hated that. She hated that she had let herself get caught up in the headiness of who
he was and that she had taken the reflected glory of a writer like him and let it do something to her. Before Graydon, when she was surrounded by people like herself, for whom writing was compulsive, a necessity,
she had been, if not happy, at least certain.
It was the closest thing to team sports she’d ever experienced.
It was like summer camp all the time, and she knew, at the molecular level, that she was where she should be, doing what she should be doing.
More than that, she was, well, in her element.
No one else in the program was receiving the same kind of consistently positive feedback, from students and professors both.
And no one wrote as much or as quickly as Merritt.
Within months, she knew she was the envy of every first-year student.
And then came Graydon and the whirlwind of his glamour and intellect.
She would think to herself things like, I am sleeping in Graydon Lyons’s bed, and, Graydon Lyons is holding my hand on the way to the National Book Critics Circle Awards.
Worse, she would think, without having yet proven herself in any meaningful way, I deserve to be here.
She had cheated herself, she realized in hindsight, because maybe she did deserve to be there, or would in time, but Graydon
had offered her a shortcut and she’d taken it. She believed that a man like him would only be with a person like her, a real
writer, but who knew what that actually meant? What kind of writer was she? What kind of person was she?
And then things were over with Graydon, and the white-hot fire that had fueled her belief in herself and her work for as long
as she could remember sputtered, snuffed out in what felt like an instant. Her writing suffered. Her professors had granted
her leeway when her excuse for missed work or a skipped workshop was “I was a plus-one at the Kirkus Prize awards”; they were
less lenient when she stopped being able to explain herself. By April in her second year, two months after the breakup, she
knew she couldn’t possibly catch up on all she’d missed, forgotten, or simply ignored, and when her director suggested she
take an incomplete, she politely declined. She didn’t have the money to stick around in Texas and do an extra year of the
program, and worse, she didn’t know if she had the ability.
She dropped out. What had felt like an early leg up the ladder with Graydon had actually been a self-betrayal, and now that spark, that thing, the stupid fucking Muse, whatever you called it, was lost. There was the hope that she could find it again, but for now she was wandering through the woods alone, with only a nub of a candle and a room at her mom’s house and a job selling books.
The job part, at least, was good. It was a welcome distraction.
The bell tinkled, and she nodded to herself. Yes. A welcome distraction.
She placed her mug on a side table, allowed herself one deep, centering breath, and stood, turning around as she did.
“How can I— Oh, it’s you.”
Whit stood in the doorway, his hair and beard wet from the misty afternoon. His flannel work shirt looked like it was made
for woodsmen, not writers, and that almost made her laugh. Except he kind of did look like a woodsman. The flannel was unbuttoned,
and his heather gray T-shirt beneath clung, slightly damp, to his chest. The dew that made his hair hang in his eyes could
have very well been the sweat from a hard day leveling trees, and if she had to, she’d guess that this man had chopped his
fair share of firewood—
Stop it, Merritt.
“It’s me,” he said. He bit one half of his lower lip and waited there at the front of the store, almost like a child afraid
to ask his parents for some vital thing.
“Are you okay?” she asked, surprised by the question and the fact that she meant it.
“Yes,” he said, nodding deliberately, as if deciding in the moment that he was in fact okay. “But I do think I need your help.”
“Okay,” she said slowly, placing a steadying hand on the back of the chair.
He watched her for a moment longer, then shrugged before asking the last question she’d expected to hear.
“Have you ever wanted,” he said, “to write a book?”