Chapter Twenty-Nine
Kathleen Pryor always made holiday gift bags for her colleagues. They were little cellophane-wrapped bundles of homemade chocolates
and hard candies with miniature mason jars full of butterscotch sauce and ready-made packets of hot chocolate. And to her
daughter’s annual delight, she always made more than enough, so they spent the days leading up to Christmas snacking on leftovers
as well as indulging themselves with the smorgasbord of student gifts: cookies from Italy, boxes of L?derach chocolates and
Vosges truffles, candied nuts, not one but two genuine English fruitcakes, more than one bottle of fine wine, and a batch
of specialty coffee from Yemen. They caught up on reading, completed two jigsaw puzzles, and watched their favorite Christmas
movies—It’s a Wonderful Life, White Christmas, Meet Me in St. Louis, and You’ve Got Mail (it counts!).
It was a pleasant, quiet time, apart from one necessary conversation with Kathleen about the end of her and Whit, and the
end of their cowriting days.
“Well,” Kathleen had said, “I hope he regrets it.”
“Mom, it wasn’t—”
“I hope,” she said, with finality, “he regrets it. And I hope you don’t give up on yourself again.”
That had stung slightly, but it had also been the end of it.
Afterwards, Merritt found that she was able to turn off her brain.
From December 21 to December 24, she did not think of Whit, she did not think of the book, she did not even attempt to write.
It wasn’t until Christmas Eve, during an a capella rendition of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” at the candlelit service at the Episcopal church her mother occasionally attended, that something seemed to bend inside of Merritt, and she thought, I do miss him.
She tried to bury this feeling on the following day, but every Christmas song seemed to make her feel sad, doing the washing
up after a pleasant holiday meal with her mother made her think of Whit, and their blustery post-dessert walk made her long
for the trails behind his house.
She knew what to do. On December 26, she turned her brain back on. In the murky, amorphous stretch between Christmas and New
Year’s, normally reserved for lounging and puttering and dozing, she threw herself back into her writing, knocking out chapter
after chapter. For New Year’s Eve, she humored her mother by going with her to a party of old and retired teachers, but she
slipped out at 9 p.m. and returned home to write, typing as the sounds of fireworks popped overhead, even as someone in the
park beyond her window blasted “Auld Lang Syne” from a speaker.
She wrote and wrote and wrote for days, and then, on January 5, she sent two text messages. One to Willa Barrett-Lind, and
one to Ian Hoult.
Whit had started reading Serious Games because of two contradictory impulses. First and foremost, he was driven by disdain, perversely excited to hate-read something
he felt predestined to find offensive. Excited to hate the man whom Merritt thought so little of. But also—and this impulse
felt complicated, messy, embarrassing—because he missed Merritt. Every idle thought sprinted in her direction, and that hurt.
But still he hoped he might find in these chapters some semblance of the woman whom both he and Graydon Lyons had known.
That first night, on the balcony, he’d started the book by looking at Graydon Lyons’s author photo on the back flap.
The man was, irritatingly, quite handsome.
Salt-and-pepper hair and a sharp jaw, silvery blue eyes that made him seem like a creature from folklore.
He looked like the kind of person you’d find yourself eager to impress.
Well, he thought, we’ll see about that.
Evie was right about the narrator, a stupid man who might have been played by Steve Carrell in an adaptation. But Graydon
knew what he was up to. Allowances had been made for the white, male professor throughout his professional life, and he had
nimbly slipped through the cracks of accountability. He believed himself to be a hack, and yet those around him were continually
impressed by his spare, straightforward writing. He brought nothing to the table, yet he was impossible to hate because he
was funny and hapless and moved through a world that was silly enough to constantly laud him.
And then there was Isabel, the grad student writing heady, stream-of-consciousness prose that captivated her peers and professors
alike. She was silver-tongued and quietly, ferociously ambitious. You knew from their first interaction that the professor
didn’t stand a chance, even if she hadn’t been beautiful, sensual, and attuned to his every desire in a way that appeared
natural to him but read, to the reader, as calculated. The novel seemed to be saying something smart about men’s susceptibility
to flattery, and the ease with which two hacks can dupe an insular community—until the smoke screen of Isabel’s talent disappeared,
provoking her twisted revenge, and leaving the professor more revered than when the novel started.
It was annoyingly good. Whit was so carried along by it that he almost didn’t pick up on the familiar details until they began piling up.
Isabel was from Virginia, her father had died (when she was in high school, but still), and she secretly loved young adult and children’s lit (despite the graphic sex in her own writing).
The presentation of this last trait as a reflection of Isabel’s underlying immaturity, in both character and craft, broke the book’s spell and was also a strangely pleasing reminder for Whit: underneath the book’s layers of camp and irony was a real woman known to both him and Graydon.
An absurdly talented woman who, on the page, was unapologetic about her excellence.
This detail was unfamiliar to Whit, and yet, through this book, he could see the truth of how Merritt once was—and would be again, he hoped.
In fact, the woman in the book, Isabel, had a kind of energy
and sharpness and wit that, in a different kind of story, would have made her an iconic heroine instead of the obvious villain.
Looking at Serious Games with a critical eye, taking a scalpel to it and peeling back the layers of disdain and parody, revealed a vibrant, funny,
beautiful woman. Graydon had seen the same Merritt that Whit saw, had in fact seen a version of her more alive and more attuned
to her own brilliance, and he had tried to squash that. He had made Merritt feel small, and then he had created this caricature
as revenge.
Whit felt awful for Merritt, but he also found himself pitying Graydon, who had missed so much and lost something so dear.
When they landed in Boston, Whit shoved the book into a Dunkin’ Donuts trash can before he and Annie even left the terminal.
Merritt sat at the bistro, waiting. When she had agreed to meet with Ian, her one condition had been that he wait until she
was ready. Graydon’s book was still a New York Times bestseller. The editors at The Atlantic were growing antsy, he’d told her, but the promise of more and juicier information had persuaded them to wait.
Now she was almost ready. But that meeting would come later.
The door opened, and a cold wave of air filled the room. Merritt smiled.
“Hi,” Willa said as she crossed the room after hanging her long puffy coat on the coat rack and stuffing her quilted beanie
into one of its pockets.
“Hi,” Merritt said warmly.
Willa sat down and adjusted the place setting before her. Her hair was in long box braids now, and she wore a flowy white
blouse tucked into an equally flowy maroon skirt, patterned with little paisley shapes. Merritt watched her look around the
room, which was cast in a coppery light in contrast to the dreary day outside. Whelk Harbor was still stuck in the foggy gloom
that had descended just before Christmastime.
Willa seemed happy to see her, but somewhat tentative. Merritt knew she was thinking about Whit and what Merritt might want
from her as it related to him. She was about to put her at ease when Willa spoke first.
“I’m sorry things didn’t work out with Whit.”
Merritt waved her hands before her. She did not want to talk about this.
“It’s okay. This has nothing to do with that. Not really.”
Merritt felt herself make some kind of face, and Willa laughed.
“Well, okay. What are you getting?”
They discussed the menu, small-talked about the holidays, and ordered wine and food.
“Okay,” Merritt said once they were waiting to be served. “I’ve finished the manuscript I started back when I was in an MFA
program.”
Willa’s eyes widened, excited.
“Can I read it?”
“What?”
“Do you need a beta reader?”
“What?” Merritt said again.
“Let me read it, give you some feedback, and then maybe I can connect you to my agent.”
Merritt was floored. She wanted to leap across the table and hug this woman, but she felt frozen, too, overwhelmed by her
generosity.
“I was just going to ask you what you thought I should do next,” she said, stumbling a bit with her words. “You don’t have
to . . . I didn’t mean to—”
“You didn’t. I’m offering. I’m answering your question. What you should do next is let me read it—I’m a really fast reader—”
“It’s kid lit,” Merritt said, as if offering a warning.
Willa shrugged. “Sounds great. I love kids’ books.”
Merritt’s eyes were stinging. Something like joy, or maybe shock, prickled across her skin.
“But,” she said, her voice dropping and her words tripping over themselves again, “but what if it’s bad?”
Willa’s attitude shifted. The exuberance and excitement on her face softened into compassion.
“Oh, Merritt. Do you think Whit didn’t talk about you? Do you think he hasn’t told me all the wonderful things there were
to say about your writing?”
Merritt swallowed, willing the swell of emotion to stay within her rather than pouring forth right here and now.
“Besides,” Willa continued, “I don’t know much about you, but I do know one thing. You’ve got something to say. You need to
believe in yourself enough to say it.”
Merritt thought of the promise she’d been urged to make, about not being surprised by compliments. Well, she was glad she
hadn’t made it. She hoped this feeling never went away.