Dez shook her head as the seats around her started to fill. The audacity of a professor to steal his student’s work and publish it as his own—especially when the book in question had already been published. But audacious wasn’t an adequate word for it—it was mindbogglingly stupid. It was stupid, first and foremost, because Jennifer Morgenstern wasn’t an idiot. The publishing house that Jennifer had sold her book to wasn’t under a Dartmouth professor’s thumb—at least, Dez couldn’t imagine a scenario in which that would be true. And the civil suit had been filed, but, she remembered from her LexisNexis research, it wasn’t Jennifer’s publishing company representing her, it was Jennifer herself named as the plaintiff. That seemed odd, too. And then, after a witness hadn’t shown up, the lawsuit had been pulled, and Exodus Nights had continued to be published.
She flipped around in Murder on a Lifeboat until she came to the acknowledgments page. Jennifer Morgenstern thanked many people, starting with her editor, and a broad brushstroke of “The English and Journalism Department Staffs at Dartmouth University,” and the last paragraph: “And to Aaron, for believing so strongly in me and my work. I love you.”
Aaron.
Dez wondered if that referred to Aaron Hawthorne, the witness who hadn’t shown up. And Dez wondered about what had happened. Right after Jennifer’s boyfriend—the one who had believed so strongly in her—hadn’t shown up to the civil trial, the lawsuit had been pulled. What had Aaron known? Why didn’t he testify?
Dez flipped back to the beginning of the book and looked at the title page. Hancock-Noel Publishing, Boston. Not one of the big names, Dez thought. Not even big enough to have a New York office.
Audrey came over and sat down next to Dez. “You excited?”
“You bet,” Dez said.
Dez craned her neck, looking around the hall at the new faces coming in. She might have missed Frankie, or Frankie might be in some sort of disguise. Dez wondered, briefly, if Frankie had legally changed her name from Jennifer Morgenstern in the last few months, or if she had gotten so wrapped up in the idea of revenge that she only saw herself as Frankie.
Not seeing Frankie in the crowd, Dez told herself that Frankie was probably just trying out an idea on a cute girl she met at a party.
Dez opened Murder on a Lifeboat at random. The book opened at “Chapter Thirteen.” She read the first line on the left-hand page.
James took a long, slow drink of whiskey, looking at Pamela through the bottom of the glass.
She closed the book and pulled Exodus Nights out. She found the start of “Chapter 13” and read the first line.
He took a slow, deliberate sip of coffee, appraising her, her long lashes, her smoldering eyes, over the top of the white porcelain mug.
Dez almost laughed out loud. Yes. This was so obvious, and yet it was unprovable. So many names had changed. So many items were swapped out for other items. So many vampires were now insects and wolves; so many whiskey glasses were now coffee cups.
When Dez worked at the aquarium the previous summer before, she had a co-worker, Marv, who never did his assigned tasks. He spent hours figuring out ways that he could look like he had actually fed the kelpfish or had cleaned the handrails. Marv devised a system of tricking his co-workers into covering for him. But Dez quickly saw that Marv spent more time avoiding work than if he had done the work in the first place. She bit her tongue for two weeks, but finally couldn’t stand it and told him so. He gave her the finger and walked away.
Dez wondered how hard Frank Bethany had to work to make it look like he hadn’t stolen Frankie’s work—or Jennifer Morgenstern’s work, as she corrected herself. She wondered if his other books had been thieved as well, or if he realized that writing his own stuff would actually be less work—and far less risk. She wished she were in front of the LexisNexis computer to figure more of this out.
But she tried to snap herself back to the present. She was with Audrey, a woman who worked hard to give her unique, thoughtful presents. She looked up, and realized Audrey was looking at her.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” Audrey said. “You went somewhere miles away just now.”
“Yeah,” Dez said. “I was just thinking about my birthday gifts. I, uh.” She cleared her throat. “I actually asked about this book because I went on a date with the author.”
Audrey stared at Dez.
“Before I started seeing you,” Dez continued, the words coming out in a rush. “I went on a date with Fr—with Jennifer Morgenstern. Only she told me she wrote all of Frank Bethany’s books.”
Audrey blinked. “What?”
“It was a crazy date. This woman was kind of nuts. She had me convinced that she used Frank Bethany as a pen name.” Dez laughed awkwardly. “She even told me her name was Frankie, not Jennifer Morgenstern.”
Audrey narrowed her eyes. “Is this one of your weird jokes that I don’t get?”
“I have weird jokes you don’t get?”
Audrey nodded. “Is this one of them?”
The lights flickered on and off three times.
“Um, no,” Dez said.
Audrey’s brow furrowed and her voice had an edge. “Why the hell would you tell me about this now? I tried to find that book for three months—and it turns out that you fucked the author?”
“I—I don’t know,” Dez stammered. She hadn’t heard Audrey swear like that before—it was sharp and harsh and caught her off guard. Some people hurried to their seats, others took their time. The lights started to dim.
“I thought we were bonding over Murder on a Lifeboat. And you were only interested in it because you were having sex with the woman who wrote it?”
“You and I were bonding,” Dez whispered as the crowd noise died down.
“But you were still hung up on her.”
“I—I wasn’t hung up on her.”
Dez looked in Audrey’s face in the darkness. Her eyes were wide, then she blinked and crossed her arms. “How long before you and I started dating did you sleep with her?”
Dez winced.
Audrey shook her head and sat back.
There was applause as the curtain opened. Dez sat back and turned her attention to the stage.
Two comfortable-looking brown leather chairs stood on the stage, with a small table off to the side of each, and just as the curtains opened all the way, a woman Dez didn’t recognize came out and the applause gathered steam.
“Good evening, everyone,” she said, and then repeated herself as the applause finally died down. “You know me as Rebecca Fulton from City of Angels Public Radio.” She was thin and had a mass of large, auburn hair. Dressed in a modest, long-sleeved black dress that ended just below her knees, with black ballet flats, she was riding the line between professional and casual.
Dez was wondering if Fulton was going to be interviewing Frank Bethany. First, however, she ran through a litany of housekeeping items, and then a call for pledges to the local public radio stations, trying to guilt the audience into opening their wallets. People were still filtering in, finding their seats with ushers’ flashlights, so Dez supposed it was a decent enough transition into the real meat of the performance. Dez’s attention had started to wander when Fulton finally said, “…so without further ado, here he is, PEN/Faulkner finalist and bestselling author—Frank Bethany!”
The applause was thunderous, like he was a rock star coming out on stage with a guitar thrown carelessly over his shoulder, rather than an author coming out with a smartly appointed tweed sports coat with elbow patches. He grinned sheepishly—and Dez thought, a little falsely modest—before bowing deeply to the audience in front of him, and then turning to both the left and the right and bowing deeply to them as well. Dez looked at Audrey, who was looking at her. The look on Audrey’s face was one of both incredulity and anger, and Dez didn’t blame her. Dez thought that the man they had paid to see was a cheat and a liar and probably a narcissistic jackass, and Dez wondered how different she herself was than him.
She couldn’t believe she’d told Audrey just before the lights went down.
Rebecca Fulton lobbed nothing but softballs at Frank Bethany, from a couple of easy setup questions about his childhood to his career teaching at Dartmouth. His childhood had nothing of substance in it, nothing to suggest that diabolical violence would be a differentiating feature of his work forty years later. His career as a professor started at SUNY Binghamton after he received his Ph.D. in English Literature. That led to a discussion of who Bethany’s favorite writers were. They were all dead white men: Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Joseph Conrad. And William Shakespeare, of course—and Fulton smiled knowingly before comparing Friendly Fire to Hamlet. All the dead white men were staples of literature syllabi across the country, but not an edgy or even a vaguely interesting choice in the bunch. It made Dez wonder if Frank Bethany had had an original thought in his life.
The conversation shifted to Bethany’s new novel, which had been released just two weeks before. When Rebecca Fulton said The Apex and the Mountain Lion had been launched at the end of March, Dez felt Audrey tense up next to her. She wasn’t sure if it was because Audrey realized that Dez hadn’t mentioned Frank Bethany’s new book and therefore might not have been as into Frank Bethany’s novels and she had believed. Dez was sorry both that she hadn’t said anything sooner and that she had said anything at all. She reached over and took Audrey’s hand in hers, in the anonymizing darkness, and gave it a squeeze. Audrey didn’t squeeze back, but didn’t pull her hand away either.
The novel, Bethany said, was about more than just survival, more than just solitude. It was more than just a story about man versus nature, human versus apex predator, human versus apex of the mountain. It was a story that explored the whole of the human condition, explored the mastery of the unconscious, explored how people acted without the trappings of society or interaction with other people to define themselves.
To Dez, it sounded like a story almost completely without dialogue. To be treated like the experimental meanderings of David Foster Wallace—The Broom of the System, perhaps, or even Hemingway’s turd of a novel Across the River and Into the Trees. To the untrained observer—one who hadn’t been the beneficiary of a LexisNexis search—The Apex and the Mountain Lion might sound like a bold experiment, a rock star recording a classical album, a painter making a sculpture, but to Dez, she saw it for what it was: the last gasp of a thief, a hack, a liar, trying to prove he still had something that he had never had.
And so Dez listened to Frank Bethany’s first chapter, about a white man setting out in the Argentine wilderness to ascend Mount Aconcagua, one of the tallest peaks in the world. It wasn’t a mountain Dez had heard of before.
After Bethany’s reading of his opening chapter, he began to talk about the history of the summit, the German explorer who first tried it, and the British mountaineer who succeeded about fifteen years after the first attempt. “But,” he said, “Aconcagua isn’t considered a difficult climb.”
“I’ve read that too,” Rebecca Foster said. “I heard that the northern route doesn’t even require ropes or pins or anything like that.”
“Still,” Bethany said, “the year I climbed it, five climbers died. They underestimate the effects of cold weather, of the high altitude, and of the thin air.”
A half-smile came over Dez’s face. She thought about Frankie deciding to take Bethany on—and Bethany’s publishing company. Frankie saw a well-worn path to proving her intellectual property, but was unprepared for the high altitude of the publishing company’s lawyers and the cold temperatures of her boyfriend abandoning her. She half-wondered if Frankie had perhaps ascended Aconcagua first and had that story stolen from her as well. Or perhaps it was another female student enamored of both mountain climbing and Frank Bethany.
Her mind wandered, and she snapped back to the present when Rebecca Foster said, “…and of course, your most popular book to date, your debut novel, Exodus Nights.”
Bethany smiled broadly to another wave of applause that broke out. “You know, I never thought when I was writing that manuscript that I would never live it down,” he said.
“Live it down?” Rebecca Foster asked.
“Well, of course,” Frank Bethany said. “It’s not like any artist wants to be best-known for the first thing he puts out into the world. Imagine if the Beatles were only known for ‘She Loves You’ and not for ‘Sergeant Pepper’s.’”
Rebecca Foster laughed, and it took a split second for Frank Bethany to join her in her laughter.
“But of course I’ll answer questions,” Bethany said.
“There’s just so much bravery in the book,” Rebecca Foster said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a scene with the people, um, having sexual relations, who turn into wolves and then insects.”
“It was a particularly vivid dream that I had,” Frank Bethany said, flatly, as though he were reciting it from memory at an elementary school play rehearsal. He then went through the details of the dream, discussing a particularly explicit lovemaking bout with his then-wife, making sure to make it sound like he was an excellent, well-endowed lover.
Dez had heard people like Frank Bethany wax poetic about their abilities before, expanding their accomplishments into areas where they hadn’t gone, pushing out the other people who had helped along the way. The longer Frank Bethany talked, the more she felt sorry for Frankie, and then the pity turned into a righteous anger; that Frankie was justified in trying to take his identity, even if she had just done it for a cute girl she was trying to impress.
But as pity and righteous anger warred in her brain, there was thunderous applause and she saw Frank Bethany standing up and bowing again—center, stage left, stage right—and she realized the performance—or whatever this was—was over.
“We’re not finished with our conversation,” Audrey said. Dez realized that she was still holding Audrey’s hand. She was hoping she hadn’t been squeezing it too tight when she was thinking about how righteously angry she was.
“I really did enjoy that,” Dez said.
“I barely even knew who this guy was before I met you,” Audrey said. “I started reading him because of you. He’s really talented. I love the way he writes.”
Dez looked at Audrey. “Even his new book?”
Audrey looked unsure of herself for a second, and then set her jaw. “From the passages he just read? Yes, especially his new book. I like those man-versus-nature stories. I used to love animal stories when I was little. Haunt Fox, Big Red—all the Jim Kjelgaard books. I used to close my eyes and pretend I was a fox running wild in the snow.”
Dez shrugged and nodded. “Okay,” she conceded. “It’s a pretty big departure from Exodus Nights, but I can see how you’d like it if you like those types of novels.”
“Those types of novels?”
“Now, come on, Audrey, don’t be like that. You know what I mean.”
“After telling me that you slept with Jennifer Morgenstern, no, I’m not really sure what you mean.”
Dez was quiet for a moment. “I probably should have told you earlier.”
“You picked the shittiest possible time to tell me.” Audrey stood up. “But I’m not going to let that stop me from buying his new book and getting him to sign it. You coming with me?”
Dez really didn’t want to, but knew that getting their books signed was something Audrey considered more impressive than the tickets themselves. “Sure,” Dez said, smiling. “I’ll get mine signed too. I kind of wish I had a hardcover with me—I’ll feel a little silly with the paperback.”
“We’ve been over this, Dez,” Audrey said, coldly, and then turning, she threaded her way through the crowd and into the large lobby area, where a line was quickly forming in front of a large table. They got in line, with about a hundred and fifty people in front of them.
&n
bsp; They stood next to each other in an uncomfortable silence. Minutes ticked by, and the line crawled.
Dez saw a cashier’s desk near the front and nudged Audrey. “I think you have to buy the book first before you get him to sign it.”
Audrey looked up and saw a short line in front of the cashier’s desk. People walked away with hardbacks of the new book. “Stay here.”
Dez watched her as she got out of line and went to the cashier’s desk. Audrey looked great in the dress, and Dez had found herself enjoying being dressed up with her. She kicked herself for bringing up her one-night stand with Frankie.
Audrey walked back with The Apex and the Mountain Lion tucked under her arm. Her face had softened and her jaw looked more relaxed.
“I’m really sorry,” said Dez.
Audrey sighed. “It’s not that I mind that you slept with someone before me. It’s that I’ve been killing myself to find this book for you, and—well, I wouldn’t have gone through all that trouble if I knew it was your ex.”
“Not even an ex. We went on one date.”
Audrey looked at Dez sideways. “But you slept with her—how long before me? Was it even a week?”
Dez was quiet.
“It’s just—I feel like a fool,” Audrey said, and her voice caught.
“You and I? We have something special,” Dez said, disliking the note of desperation that crept into her voice. “I really like you, Audrey. And I didn’t bring it up to you because, well, it didn’t seem to matter. Not after the first night I spent with you.”
Audrey shook her head, as if trying to clear her mind. “Fine,” she said.
The line continued to move slowly, and they both started to get restless. When they were about five people from the front of the line, Dez looked at her watch. They had been waiting for a little over an hour. A deeply tanned white woman with big, feathered blonde hair about ten years out of style was talking Frank Bethany’s ear off. He was smiling and nodding as best he could to try to close down the conversation and hurry her along, but she was having none of it, blocking the people behind her. Dez noticed that she hadn’t purchased a book but had several dog-eared Frank Bethany novels with her. Dez thought idly that perhaps she had purchased them all at a used bookstore for fifty cents each and was trying desperately to inflate her self-importance. She may have had designs on going back to the same used bookstore to sell the signed copies for a profit.
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