Chapter Nine #2
Still, when he’d felt his mouth turned up in that unrelenting grin, guilt had shot through him, intermixed with worry.
Would Helen have hated this? Would she have hated to see Whit giving away even a piece of her book to another person, a fan whom he’d hardly known at first?
Inviting her into their home, sharing their thoughts and theories? Sharing the load?
Helen had been a writer. That was a dumb thing to think, because of course she had been a writer. What he meant, as he riffled
through the cabinet for a tea option he wasn’t bored with, was that surely Helen would get it. Writing was so difficult at
times, and if he’d asked Helen to produce one of the Sister Marguerite mysteries for him, he was sure that she, too, would
have needed help.
That was one of the things about being with another writer. They got it. Most of the time.
When Merritt came in, the kettle was boiling, and he was still thinking about writers being with writers. Whit was fairly
certain that Merritt had some experience in this. This was the moment he could ask her about Graydon Lyons and the book and
the real reason she’d left grad school.
He had seriously considered it when he was talking to Willa in the coffee shop. I’ll just ask her, he had thought, because it seemed the respectful thing to do, rather than nursing this possibly false idea of Merritt, which
felt strangely sexist (“the scorned ex”) as well as oddly voyeuristic.
But glancing at her now as she looked through the windows over the sink, taking in the little meadow with the firepit and
the rows of hydrangeas and the tree line beyond, he realized he’d been wrong. How would he even begin? So, have any critically acclaimed books of literary fiction been written about you lately?
“It’s beautiful out there,” she said, shooting him a smile before returning her eyes to the window. “How long have you lived
here?”
“A little over eight years. We bought it with the advance of the second book.”
Whit had not grown up around rich people.
His parents’ divorce was partially prompted by a series of bad investments on his father’s part, and he’d grown up with a mother who worked for the local botanical garden.
He always felt a little embarrassed driving the Range Rover around town or accidentally letting a comment slip about “having land.” The parents at Annie’s school talked constantly about remodels and second homes, and Whit and Helen had pledged, early on, to never become like that.
Still, the house existed. It had been remodeled.
Before Helen’s sickness, they’d talked about a lake house and a New York apartment.
But living that way was not his norm, and for some reason he wanted Merritt to know that.
“It was kind of weird honestly. All this.”
He pointed around vaguely.
She leaned against the counter while she sipped her tea. “What do you mean?”
Whit thought for a moment. “Neither of us came from money. She had a rich great-aunt, but that was it. Our parents were middle-class
and making it, and I’d say mine were just making it. And then she got a lot of cash all at once, more than I ever will, which is itself weird . . .”
“Because she’s a woman and you’re a man?”
Whit rolled his eyes. “No. I don’t care about that.”
“Really?” she said, more curious than skeptical. “You never cared she was making more money than you?”
“Fine, I cared, but not because she was a woman, and not because she was my wife. It was because it made my own writing feel . . .
sort of small. Insignificant by comparison.”
Whit had never said that out loud before. He looked at his tea.
“But that’s not true,” Merritt said, using her mug to point at him in a way that drew his eyes back up. “Lots of people read
your books.”
“Do you?”
He meant it as a joke, but it felt like a cheap shot as it left his mouth.
Except Merritt didn’t seem all that vulnerable to cheap shots.
“No,” she said immediately, unapologetically, “but I’ve been seriously considering it. I think it might help me understand
you better, write with you better. What?”
Whit must have been making a face. He tried to go neutral.
“Don’t you think your books will give me some insight into your psyche? Your way of being?”
She said the last part with exaggerated air quotes, and Whit laughed.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know what my books say about me. All I meant was that millions of people have read
Helen’s books, in so many languages, and that can be weird to witness but never experience yourself. I’m not saying a million
people would even like my books, just that the difference in scale is . . . I don’t know, it’s something.”
“I think I get it,” Merritt said, walking over to the sink to rinse her mug.
“I’ll do that.” She brushed him off.
“There’s a girl from my grad program,” she said, once again looking out the windows as she rinsed, “and I mean that, she’s
a girl, and she was churning out these edgy, esoteric short stories for our workshops—really bizarro stuff—and then suddenly she
landed a six-figure book deal for one of those sexy romantasy novels before she even graduated. Jessica Brittany.”
“Two first names.”
Merritt nodded. “She made me feel . . .”
“Small,” Whit said again, filling in her pause.
“No,” she said, surprising him. “It made me hungry, I guess, to write my thing. But I think I know what you mean anyway—that kind of success makes you look at your own work differently, when all
you should really be doing is thinking about the writing itself, in its own little bubble of creativity.”
Whit nodded, though he was sure he had never once entered into anything remotely resembling a “bubble of creativity.”
“What were we talking about in the first place?” he asked.
“Money. Comparison.”
“Comparison.” He nodded, then put a hand to his chest, miming a blow there. “That’s what we were really talking about. You
don’t seem like you compare yourself to people, though.”
“I just told you about Jessica Brittany!”
By now she was finished with the mug, but she still stood looking back at him from the sink. The afternoon sun was turning
the trees a goldish color that made Merritt’s hair look like warm brass.
Whit laughed.
“Sure, but do you spend hours thinking about how you’ll never measure up to Jessica Brittany? Is that a pen name, by the way?”
Merritt let a puff of a laugh leave her nose and rolled her eyes.
“It is not, if you can believe it. And no. You’re right. I don’t think about her very often.”
She paused, letting her mouth hang open, and Whit could almost swear he saw the words forming there. She didn’t think about
this Jessica Brittany, didn’t compare herself to her, but perhaps to a certain celebrated author and creative writing professor . . .
But then she clapped her hands once. “Okay. Enough of that. Noses to the grindstone?”
Whit’s eyes dropped back to his tea for a moment; then he looked at her framed against that window one more time, longing
to ask her why she really dropped out, but not certain why it mattered.
“Back to it,” was all he said, and he let her lead the way back to their warren of papers by the fireplace.