Chapter 5 The Virtuoso
The Virtuoso
A week later, Sam found herself driving across Boston in a nor’easter to one of her favorite indie booksellers. This wasn’t
something she’d normally do so soon after finishing her tour; Sam loved bookstores, naturally, but having been in so many
the past month, she needed a break. However, she also needed a respite from Ole Nielsen. Sam had tried that damned opening
chapter every way she could think of: first-person, third, omniscient, even from the one-legged prostitute’s POV. She’d started
with Ole’s steerage experience on the emigrant ship. She’d chosen a scene from the novel’s middle. Nothing. It was like taking
a run at a mountain of ice, getting a few feet up, sliding back down every time.
And Sam might have had an ulterior motive for going to the bookstore: curiosity. William Corwyn was in town, reading his latest
instant New York Times #1 bestseller All the Lambent Souls, and Sam needed to know, as William himself had predicted she might ask: Who was this guy? Nobody wrote missives like the one he’d written to her, nobody. Most writers received fan mail; Sam was the grateful
recipient of reader praise about once a week. These messages were a paragraph or two tops. Nothing like the epistle William
had fired across the bow, complete with page-referenced quotations. No writer took valuable time and energy from his own work
for that.
So what did William want? Did he have some ulterior writer motive? Unlikely, since he was in a more powerful publishing position than Sam, but possible.
Was he nuts? Or did he aspire to get into Sam’s pants? Having done some cursory research on William, Sam had to admit she
wasn’t entirely averse to that prospect. William was older than Sam by ten years. He was also unmarried with no kids, a red
flag; if a man was a lifelong bachelor, there was usually a reason. But it certainly was not that William was gay, according
to the Writer’s Digest cover story proclaiming him “The Most Lit Bachelor” and his borderline flirtatious responses to his raving female fans online.
He seemed to be that rarest of all things: a straight, solvent, creative professional man.
Sam was a little worried about how much she wanted him to be real.
She arrived at the bookstore late and dashed through the rain to the vestibule, where she was greeted by William Corwyn—a
life-size cardboard cutout of him, anyway. He was propped in the vestibule, arms crossed, glowering soulfully. Around his
neck he wore a sign that read Mega # 1 New York Times Bestselling Author William Corwyn Here Tonight, 7 PM!!! and was decorated with lipstick kisses. “Well,” said Sam. Their publisher had never made her into a cardboard avatar, though
Sam had once, for a brief and glittering week, been a subway ad.
She went into the bookstore, which was empty—everyone was in the reading room in the back, where Sam’s Sodbuster event had been a month before. Late as she was, Sam detoured to the New Releases table, seeking her novel among its bright and glossy brethren,
shining beneath artfully placed track lighting. She found it with sad placement on a corner. Sam waited until the bookseller
on register was scrolling her phone, then moved Sodbuster to prime position: propped up facing the store entrance, replacing a summer romance whose author, Sam felt, would not miss
a few sales. Sam patted her book and headed into the back room.
Where she ran smack into a human wall. “Okay,” Sam muttered.
Unlike her own recent tour with its half-empty seats, William Corwyn’s attendance was not soft.
There had to be a hundred readers here, squeezed into a space meant for forty.
There was standing room only. Sam pushed her way through as gently as possible, murmuring, “ ’Scuse me, sorry .
. . ,” to a spot against the rear shelves, next to a woman with coils of gray hair who was clutching William Corwyn’s latest novel to her breast as though it were an infant.
Thanks, Sam mouthed. The woman gave her the most cursory of smiles, then returned her attention to the podium. The man of the hour
was speaking.
As she got her bearings, Sam tried to collate her online William Corwyn knowledge with the actual man. There were just so
many ways these days to get to know a person. He was a big guy, tall and solid, like he’d grown up eating only hamburgers—Sam’s
type. She loved men big enough to flip her like a flapjack or toss her up on a countertop. He also still had the hair featured
in his author photo, dark and only slightly receding, with the showy silver streaks at the temples Sam always thought looked
dyed. He also, sadly, had a goatee, which Sam disdained as the facial hair of indecision—either grow a beard or don’t—but
maybe he thought it made him look Shakespearean? His voice was low and sonorous, reminding Sam of an article she’d read about
how women love men with deep voices because it indicated the presence of testosterone. And he had horn-rimmed glasses, over
which he was now glancing meaningfully this way and that as he read. Sam recognized this move, targeting friendly faces in
every quadrant of the audience so no reader felt left out. William Corwyn was the real deal.
Or was he, though? Unlike most male authors Sam knew, who showed up for readings in garage-band wear, William Corwyn was wearing
a seersucker suit. Who wore a seersucker suit on tour?
Then there was what William actually wrote.
The New Yorker had dubbed him The Virtuoso because every one of William’s novels was different.
His debut, The Girl on the Mountain, published when he was still in grad school, had been a Gothic coming-of-age story about a young woman trapped in a family
hell, like Flowers in the Attic set in the New Hampshire Whites.
Some trades had slammed it as melodramatic and derivative, but it had been a Book of the Month selection, and William’s sophomore effort, a contemporary romance called You Never Said Goodbye, stayed on the New York Times Bestsellers list for over a year—in hardcover.
His third novel, The Space Between Worlds, was a sci-fi fantasy about a lost tribe of fierce intergalactic women fighting for a planet to call home, and his fourth,
Medusa, a retelling of the classic myth, was so successful that it inspired a whole line of au naturel hair-care products that Sam remembered seeing at Target, and that was clearly responsible for all the wild manes in the room.
Now he was on tour with his fifth, All the Lambent Souls, a poetic family saga set in the land of Joyce and narrated by the dead matriarch. There was already talk of the Booker Prize.
“Oh, that guy,” Mireille had snorted, when Sam called to debrief and mentioned William’s name. Mireille sounded like a sexy villainess
from a Judith Krantz novel at the best of times, and now she spoke in almost a growl. “He is a virtuoso like I am a trapeze
artist. You know what he really is? A dilettante. He cannot choose one lane and stick to it. And you know what really gets
under my skin,” Mireille continued. “It is this whole woman thing. This privileged white male, this . . . man, he has to write every book from the female point of view? Come on. He is perceived as so sensitive, so evolved, whereas you know what I think it is? I think it is pure commercialism. He knows, this fucking guy, that ninety-nine percent of fiction readers in this country are women. So what does he do? It is not appropriation, exactly, more like . . . faux sycophancy, this ingratiation, as if he is telling us, I understand you. But really he is just printing money. And another thing,” Mireille added, really on a roll now. “Whenever I read his
books, and okay, so I have read only one of his books, that ridiculous what was it, Aphrodite, no, Medusa, I get the feeling that he does not actually like women. Not that he’s gay, it is more like the writing is . . . how do you say, ersatz, like he has a bouquet in one hand and
a hammer behind his back. Do you know what I really think?” Mireille was winding up for the finale. “I think this Monsieur
Corwyn does not like women at all, that Maman Corwyn was very mean to bébé William, and he now spends his entire adult life trying to win positive female attention. Voilà!”
Mireille laughed merrily.
“Now,” she purred, “enough of my half-ass psychology. Let’s get back to YOU. And your new bestseller Gold Digger. When can I see pages?”
As she watched William now, Sam thought it was entirely possible that Mireille was correct, agents being the savvy scholars
of human nature they were. They had to be, not only to negotiate deals but to manage their writers’ significant neuroses.
It was curious that William was so versatile. Most writers, Sam included, wrote variations on a theme. Sam’s books would always
be about love and trauma, no matter what the context. It was a sort of writer DNA forged by personality and circumstance,
as particular as a thumbprint and as impervious to change.
But this was not true, apparently, of William Corwyn.
Sam wondered if perhaps she was a bit jealous. If she could write something entirely different, would she be as successful
as he was? Would her books feel less stale? Would her readership revitalize? And how did one even do this, changing genres with every novel? Again Sam thought: Who was this guy?
As if he’d caught the question, William glanced at Sam. His brows rose over his horn-rims; his face split in a sunshiny grin.
He mouthed something that looked like It’s you! Heads turned. William inclined toward Sam in a way that was not quite a bow, more a sunflower bend toward the light. Then
he resumed reading.
“Thank you,” he said to room-shaking applause when he wrapped up. “You are so kind.”
Laura, the bookstore owner, stepped over with a mic. “That was absolutely riveting, William. Will you take a few questions?”
William inclined his dark head. “My favorite part.”