Chapter Ten
Merritt was enjoying her routine. She spent the mornings at work avoiding the gaze of Graydon’s books and speculating with
Huong about what kind of life Diana must be living. (“I bet she is really into reformer Pilates,” Huong had suggested. “The
fancy kind, with the special rolling bed.” “And complaining about other members of the Junior League” was Merritt’s reply.)
One small joy was that Diana had been wrong: despite its popularity elsewhere, Serious Games was decidedly not flying off the shelves at Goodenough Books, and not just because Merritt never recommended it. More than
once, she watched as patrons picked up the novel, read the inside flap, and set it back on the dais. She loved seeing that,
and then she would scold herself for caring, and then she would remind herself that a horrible man had written an almost certainly
unflattering book about her and of course she cared.
When she left the bookstore, always mumbling something about her “other gig,” she would drive a circuitous route to Whit’s
for lunch, taking care to maintain the secrecy of their arrangement.
After Whit found her a second time in her car eating lunch, a tomato and farro salad, he had essentially dragged her inside
by the ear. So now she sat at his table and they talked while she lunched, and he did her the kindness of mostly not watching
her in the physical act of chewing and swallowing. Then they would write. The basic outline took a little over a week, which
Whit insisted was actually very fast-moving for him; now it was time, they agreed, to have a go at the first chapter.
“We can toss this out if it’s bad,” Whit said when they sat down at the kitchen table to really, finally, start writing. “I think we have more planning to do, if I’m honest, but I always find that writing the first chapter gets my head in the right space. Do you feel that way?”
Merritt considered lying, but she was not a liar.
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I’ve only written one book, and I didn’t finish it. And it might be terrible.”
“I’m sure it’s not terrible.”
She shrugged and pulled her laptop closer, watching Whit’s cursor move across their shared document to type the words “Chapter
One.”
“It might be,” she said again, filling the silence.
Whit stopped typing and looked at her over the top of his laptop. “Why don’t I read it?”
“What? No.”
The words somersaulted out of Merritt, which was sort of surprising. A black hole seemed to have opened in her chest, out
of which nothing, not even words, should have been allowed to escape.
“Sure, why not? Let me read it, and I’ll tell you, honestly, if it’s terrible.”
“I can’t let you do that,” Merritt managed to say. It was at that moment she realized she was sweating. Clad in a dove gray
sweater that had suddenly decided to go full tilt into its job description, her skin was getting itchy and she was desperate
to strip down to her T-shirt and step outside so the cool air could cover her.
“Of course you can let me read it,” Whit said.
“Of course I cannot. You are an actual, real novelist—”
“So were your professors at your MFA, right?”
Graydon was not her professor, but his face flashed across her mind.
“They were,” she admitted flatly. “And also, they were paid to read my stuff. And also I dropped out. So.”
“So, you’ve had a novelist read your work before. How about one who’s also a friend?”
He seemed to put all his weight into the cheesiness of that sentence, but she was not swayed.
“That’s even worse!” Merritt insisted. She closed her laptop and looked at Whit, willing him to understand.
“I don’t understand,” he said, reading her thoughts. “You want to write, don’t you?”
“I think so. Yes. And speaking of, we should really get to it with—”
“No,” Whit said, holding up a hand in a gesture that would have been condescending coming from someone else—coming from Graydon,
if she were being honest—but Whit filled it with surprising gentleness. “You want to write, I know you do. And part of writing
is being read. I would never make anyone share their work before they were ready, but the offer stands. I’d love to read it
one day, once you get there.”
He held her gaze with his dark blue eyes, and Merritt tried to look as though that word—love—hadn’t set her whole brain spinning like a gyroscope. Would he really love to read it? Or was that just something people said?
“What’s it about, by the way?”
“No,” Merritt said with an unexpected laugh.
He furrowed his eyebrows at her in a mock threat. “Come on. You can at least tell me that.”
Merritt gripped the seat of the kitchen chair and tried to decide whether the gurgling in her stomach was something excited or just pre-vomitous.
This was a not-unfamiliar feeling, in two senses.
First, of course she had done all this before: talked about her work, read her work aloud, had her work mercilessly critiqued with a metaphorical comb that was less fine-toothed, more Bond-villain instrument of torture.
But second, she had felt this same way for the last several days.
Being with Whit, doing the job of an author with someone who had done it all before, had been quietly electrifying.
She was doing something, really doing it, and she was being useful and creative, and Whit kept looking at her like she was well and truly saving his life one Greenwood Castle fact at a time.
She loved every part of it: the outlining, the brainstorming, the breaks for tea.
It felt more real than anything she’d done since leaving grad school, and possibly even before, and now here was this man, whom she only barely knew, asking her about a silly little story she had made up in her head and then had the audacity to try putting down on paper.
“Fine,” she said, exhaling. “It’s a take on the Narnia books, and books like them. But no one does those anymore—portal stories,
about kids slipping into little pre–Modern European worlds, and this isn’t that, either. It’s about what it would be like
to live in Narnia, or wherever, when these outsider kids stumble in like little accidental colonizers and suddenly they’re
the kings and queens. What would that feel like to the Narnians, and so on.”
Whit’s eyebrows stretched upward. “So it’s an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist children’s novel?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Can you do that?”
Merritt laughed. “Children’s lit isn’t what it was when we were growing up.”
“Sure,” Whit said, joining in the laugh. “Do you know, I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with Annie, and there’s a whole weird white savior thing with Willy Wonka and the Oompa Loompas. I did a lot of impromptu
editing.”
Merritt nodded. “Makes sense. It’s everywhere. The Babar books are about an elephant going to Europe and then coming back
to Africa ‘civilized.’ Then there’s the sexist stuff—don’t get me started on The Giving Tree.”
“The Giving Tree?” Whit said, looking genuinely distraught. “But that book’s so sweet.”
“Oh, Whit,” Merritt said, putting her hand on the table like she was about to deliver bad news. “When was the last time you read it?”
“I don’t know. We didn’t read it to Annie when she was little. Must have been when I was a kid.”
“Mm-hmm,” Merritt said, feigning solemnity.
“What? What?”
“The book is about a tree that gives herself away until she’s nothing but a stump.” Merritt raised her hands slightly, as
if to say, Can’t you see? “And it’s all to support an ungrateful little boy and his big dreams, and that makes her happy—giving herself away. Being
the giving tree. And the boy grows up and he’s wretched, he’s this greedy old man and he’s never fulfilled by any of it, but
the tree, which again, is now a stump, is happy. Happy to be a stump! What a joke.”
Whit scratched the side of his head. “And that’s sexist.”
It wasn’t a question, but it wasn’t not a question.
“Whit,” Merritt said flatly. “Yes.”
“But she’s a tree.”
Merritt pulled her head back. “I thought you were a writer. She’s not just a tree, obviously, and Shel Silverstein goes out
of his way to make her a female tree, whatever that means, and it’s just . . . I really can’t believe you can’t see how gross that is?”
Whit’s face was still somewhere between distraught and confused. “Isn’t it possible she—the tree—is just being, like, a really
good mother? Don’t you think all women, I mean mothers, should be—”
Suddenly, his face cracked into the beginnings of a grin, and he stifled a laugh.
“What?” Merritt asked, something hot flashing across her shoulders. “What? Are you messing with me? You’re messing with me,
aren’t you?”
“I am messing with you,” Whit said, the grin now complete and very puckish. He had good teeth. “I never read that book growing up, but Helen banned it from the house. Someone gave it to us at a baby shower, and she threw it away. Wouldn’t even donate it to a Little Free Library.”
The heat in Merritt’s torso had moved to her face, but it began to subside as Whit spoke. “I knew I liked her,” she said,
now able to smile, if just softly.
Whit gave a half-shrug, dropping his eyes slightly. “I did, too.”
Merritt felt the familiar pang of regret, having somehow forced Whit into facing his wife’s death yet again, but she decided
that Whit wasn’t allowed to make her feel that way, not even unintentionally, after tricking her into delivering what might
uncharitably be called a rant. Well, some things were worth ranting about, and exploitative anti-mother propaganda for children
was one of them.
“Don’t mess with me like that,” she said after a moment, her tone that of a woman occupying the high ground. “I won’t apologize
for being right about a bad book.”
Whit nodded, smiling with his eyes. “You shouldn’t. I’m very sorry for tricking you into demonstrating your obviously good
and noble qualities.”
Why, why did her face go hot again at that?
“Whatever,” she said, feeling like a teenager in a ’90s movie. “We really should start this chapter.”
She felt him watching her as she opened her laptop again.
“You’re right,” he said. “That would make me, like the tree . . . happy.”
“Oh, shut up,” Merritt said, staring once again at the shared document. She bit her cheek to keep from giving him the satisfaction
of a smile.