“That was the parlor fire,” Jake said. “We haven’t been cleared for fires in the rooms, unfortunately. But we light the parlor fire every afternoon, and I’d be happy to do it earlier if you’d like to work down there, or read. Everything we do here is to try and support our guest-writers, and see they have what they need to do their work. And of course to support one another, as writers.”
Jake thought, even as he said this, of all the times he had said it in the past, or said something like it, and when he’d said it the people he’d said it to always nodded in agreement, because they, too, were writers, and writers understood the power of their commonalities. That had always been true. Except for right this minute. And, now it dawned on him, one other time.
Then the guy folded his arms tightly across his chest and glared at Jake, and the final part of the connection snapped into place.
Evan Parker. From Ripley. The one with the story.
Now he understood why, throughout this encounter, his brain had felt like it was circling back on itself, why his thoughts had been looping around and around an as yet unspecified thing. No, he had never met this particular asshole until a couple of days ago, but did that mean he wasn’t familiar to Jake? He was familiar. Hugely familiar.
Not that he’d spent the past couple of years ruminating on that asshole, because what writer of any degree of professional success, not just Jake’s own—would want to dwell on a first-time writer who’d somehow managed to pull the lever on the slot machine of spectacular stories at exactly the right moment, with his very first dime, no less, sending an utterly unearned jackpot of success shuddering into his lap? Always, when Evan Parker came drifting through Jake’s thoughts, it was with the usual surge of envy, the usual bitterness at the unfairness of it all, and then the brief observation that the book itself had not yet—to his knowledge, and it would obviously have been to his knowledge—reached actual publication, which might have meant that Jake’s former student had underestimated his own ability to get the thing finished, but he took no great comfort in that. The story, as its author himself had pointed out, was a silver bullet, and whenever the book did emerge it would be successful, and its author also successful beyond his (or, more painfully, Jake’s) wildest dreams.
Now, in his little office at the Adlon Center for the Creative Arts, that person, Evan Parker, once again returned to him, and so sharply it was as if he too had entered the little room and was standing just behind his Californian counterpart.
The guy was still talking—no, raging. He had moved on from his fellow guest-writers, on from the Adlon and the food and the town of Sharon Springs. Now Jake was hearing about an “East Coast agent” who’d actually suggested he pay somebody, out of his own money, to guide additional work on his novel before resubmitting it (Wasn’t that what editors were for? Or agents for that matter?) and the film scout he’d met at a party who’d told him to think about adding a female character to his story (Because men didn’t read books or go to movies?) or the assholes at MacDowell and Yaddo who’d rejected him for residencies (Obviously they favored “artistes” who were hoping to sell ten copies of their book-length poems!) and the losers typing away at every single table in every single coffee shop in Southern California, who thought they were God’s gift, and the world was obviously waiting for their short story collection or their screenplay or their novel …
“Actually,” Jake heard himself say, “I’m the author of two novels myself.”
“Of course you are.” The guy shook his head. “Anybody can be a writer.”
He turned and stalked out of the room, leaving his folksy wicker basket behind him.
Jake listened to the guest (guest-writer!) as he clomped up the stairs, and then to the silence filling the wake of that, and again he wondered what he had done, what terrible thing, to merit the company of people like this, let alone their scorn. All he had ever wanted was to tell—in the best possible words, arranged in the best possible order—the stories inside him. He had been more than willing to do the apprenticeship and the work. He had been humble with his teachers and respectful of his peers. He had acceded to the editorial notes of his agent (when he’d had one) and bowed to the red pencil of his editor (when he’d had one) without complaint. He had supported the other writers he’d known and admired (even the ones he hadn’t particularly admired) by attending their readings and actually purchasing their books (in hardcover! at independent bookstores!) and he had acquitted himself as the best teacher, mentor, cheerleader, and editor that he’d known how to be, despite the (to be frank) utter hopelessness of most of the writing he was given to work with. And where had he arrived, for all of that? He was a deck attendant on the Titanic, moving the chairs around with fifteen ungifted prose writers while somehow persuading them that additional work would help them improve. He was a majordomo at an old hotel in upstate New York, pretending that the “guest-writers” upstairs were no different than the Yaddo fellows an hour to the north. I like the idea of a successful writer greeting the guests. Gives them something real to aspire to.
But no guest-writer had ever acknowledged Jake’s professional achievements, let alone drawn inspiration from his success in the field they supposedly hoped to enter. Not once in three years. He was as invisible to them as he had become to everyone else.
Because he was a failed writer.
Jake gasped when the words came to him. It was, unbelievably, the very first time this truth had ever broken through.
But … but … the words came spinning through his head, unstoppable and absurd: The New York Times New & Noteworthy! “A writer to watch” according to Poets & Writers! The best MFA program in the country! That time he had walked into a Barnes & Noble in Stamford, Connecticut, and seen The Invention of Wonder on the Staff Picks shelf, complete with a little index card handwritten by someone named Daria: One of the most interesting books I’ve read this year! The writing is lyrical and deep.
Lyrical! And deep!
All of it years ago, now.
Anybody could be a writer. Anybody except, apparently, him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Tap, Tap
Late that night, in his apartment in Cobleskill, he did something he had never done, not once since he’d watched his fortunate student walk into a grove of trees on the Ripley campus.
At his computer, Jake typed in the name “Parker Evan,” and clicked Return.
Parker Evan wasn’t there. Which meant not much: Parker Evan had been his former student’s intended pen name at one point, but that point had been three years earlier. Maybe he’d decided on another name, either because switching his own actual name around was a dumb idea or because he’d opted for even more privacy from the infinity of other possibilities.
Jake went back to the search field and typed: “Parker, novel, thriller.”
Parker, novel, thriller returned pages of references to Donald Westlake’s “Parker” novels, and also another series of mysteries by Robert B. Parker.
So even if Evan Parker had gotten his book all the way to a publisher, the first thing they’d probably have done was instruct him to drop Parker as a pen name.
Jake removed the name from his search field and tried: “thriller, mother, daughter.”
It was an onslaught. Pages and pages of books, by pages and pages of writers, most of whom he’d never heard of. Jake ran his eye down the entries, reading the brief descriptions, but there was nothing that fit the very specific elements of the story his student had told him back in Richard Peng Hall. He clicked on some random author names, not really expecting to find an image of Evan Parker’s only half-remembered face, but there was nothing even remotely like it: old men, fat men, bald men, and plenty of women. He wasn’t here. His book wasn’t here.
Could Evan Parker have been wrong? Could he, Jake, have also been wrong, all this time? Could that plot possibly have disappeared into the sea of stories, novels, thrillers, and mysteries published each year, and sunk into silence? Jake thought not.
It seemed more likely that, despite his boundless faith in himself, Parker had somehow not managed to finish his book at all. Maybe the book wasn’t here on his computer, comfortably ensconced in the first page of each and every one of his search results, because it wasn’t anywhere. It wasn’t in the world at all. But why?
Jake typed the name, the real name, “Evan Parker” into the search field.
More than a few Facebook Evan Parkers appeared in the search results. Jake clicked over to Facebook and ran his eye down the list. He saw more men—bigger, slighter, balder, darker—and even a few women, but no one remotely like his former student. Maybe Evan wasn’t on Facebook. (Jake himself wasn’t on Facebook; he’d quit when it became too demoralizing to see his “friends” posting news about their forthcoming books.) He returned to the search results and clicked the “Images” tab, and scanned the page and then the next page. So many Evan Parkers, none of them his. He clicked back to the “All Results” page. There were Evan Parkers who were high school soccer players, ballet dancers, career diplomats currently stationed in Chad, racehorses, and engaged couples (“The future Evan-Parkers welcome you to our wedding site!”). There was no male human even vaguely his former student’s age who looked anything like the Evan Parker Jake had known at Ripley.
Then he saw, at the bottom of the page: “Searches related to ‘evan parker.’”
And below that the words: “evan parker obituary.”
Even before his cursor found the link he knew what he would see.
Evan Luke Parker of West Rutland, VT (38) had died unexpectedly on the evening of October 4, 2013. Evan Luke Parker had been a 1995 graduate of West Rutland High School and had attended classes at Rutland Community College and was a lifelong resident of central Vermont. Predeceased by both parents and a sister, he was survived by a niece. Memorial services were to be announced at a future time. Burial would be private.
Jake read it through twice. There wasn’t much to it, really, but it refused to punch its way through, even so.
He was dead? He was dead. And … Jake looked now at the date. This had not happened recently, either. This had happened … incredibly, it had happened only a couple of months after their own doomed attempt at a teacher-student relationship. Jake hadn’t even realized that Evan was a Vermonter, or that his parents and sister were already dead, which was very tragic in light of the fact that he was fairly young, himself. Not one of these things had ever come up in conversation between them, of course. They’d had no conversation, really, about anything else but Evan Parker’s remarkable novel in progress. And even that, not much. For the rest of the Ripley session, in fact, his student had been downright reticent in workshop, and he had declined or not turned up for the remaining one-on-one conferences. Jake had even wondered if Parker regretted sharing his extraordinary novel idea with his teacher, or if he’d at least thought better of sharing it with his peers in the workshop, but he himself never let on that he had been told anything about what Parker was working on, or that he thought it was at all out of the ordinary. When the session ended, this pompous, withholding, and profoundly irritating person had simply gone away, presumably to do what he needed to do in order to bring his book to the light. But actually, just to die. Now he was gone and his book, in all likelihood, unwritten.
Later, of course, Jake would go back to this moment. Later, he would recognize it for the crossroads it was, but already he was wrapping this stark, years-after-the-fact set of circumstances in the first of what would be many layers of rationalization. Those layers had not much at all to do with the fact that Jake was a moral human being with, presumably, a code of ethical conduct. Mainly they had to do with the fact that he was a writer, and being a writer meant another allegiance, to something of even higher value.
Which was the story itself.
Jake didn’t believe in much. He didn’t believe that any god had made the universe, let alone that said god was still watching the goings-on and keeping track of every human act, all for the purpose of assigning a few millennia of Homo sapiens to a pleasant or an unpleasant afterlife. He didn’t believe in an afterlife. He didn’t believe in destiny, fate, luck, or the power of positive thinking. He didn’t believe that we get what we deserve, or that everything happens for a reason (what reason would that be?), or that supernatural forces impacted anything in a human life. What was left after all of that nonsense? The sheer randomness of the circumstances we are born into, the genes we’ve been dealt, our varying degrees of willingness to work our asses off, and the wit we may or may not possess to recognize an opportunity. Should it arise.
But there was one thing he actually did believe in that bordered on the magical, or at least the beyond-pedestrian, and that was the duty a writer owed to a story.
Stories, of course, are common as dirt. Everyone has one, if not an infinity of them, and they surround us at all times whether we acknowledge them or not. Stories are the wells we dip into to be reminded of who we are, and the ways we reassure ourselves that, however obscure we may appear to others, we are actually important, even crucial, to the ongoing drama of survival: personal, societal, and even as a species.
But stories, despite all that, are also maddeningly elusive. There is no deep mine of them to blast around in, or big-box store with wide aisles of unused, undreamed-of, and thrillingly new narratives for a writer to push a big, empty shopping cart through, waiting for something to catch their eye. Those seven story lines Jake had once measured against Evan Parker’s not very exciting mother and daughter in an old house—Overcoming the Monster? Rags to Riches? Journey and Return?—they were the same seven story lines writers and other storytellers had been rummaging around in forever. And yet …
And yet.
Every now and then, some magical little spark flew up out of nowhere and landed (yes, landed) in the consciousness of a person capable of bringing it to life. This was occasionally called “inspiration,” though “inspiration” was not a word writers themselves tended to use.
Those magical little sparks tended not to waste time in declaring themselves. They woke you up in the mornings with an annoying tap, tap and a sense of unfolding urgency, and they hounded you through the days that followed: the idea, the characters, the problem, the setting, lines of dialogue, descriptive phrases, an opening sentence.
To Jake, the word that comprised the relationship between a writer and their spark was “responsibility.” Once you were in possession of an actual idea, you owed it a debt for having chosen you, and not some other writer, and you paid that debt by getting down to work, not just as a journeyman fabricator of sentences but as an unshrinking artist ready to make painful, time-consuming, even self-flagellating mistakes. Rising to this responsibility was a matter of facing your blank page (or screen) and muzzling the critics inside your head, at least long enough for you to get some work done, all of which was profoundly difficult and none of which was optional. What’s more, you stepped away from it at your peril, because if you failed in this grave responsibility you might well find, after some period of distraction, or even less than fully committed work, that your precious spark had … left you.
Gone, in other words, as suddenly and unexpectedly as it had appeared, and your novel along with it, though you might spin your wheels for a few months or a few years or the rest of your life, hopelessly throwing words onto the page (or screen) in a stubborn refusal to face what had happened.
And there was something else: an extra, dark superstition for any writer hubristic enough to ignore the spark of a great idea, even if that writer was not of a religious bent, even if he did not believe that “everything happens for a reason,” even if, indeed, he resisted magical thinking of every other conceivable kind. The superstition held that if you did not do right by the magnificent idea that had chosen you, among all possible writers, to bring it to life, that great idea didn’t just leave you to spin your stupid and ineffectual wheels. It actually went to somebody else. A great story, in other words, wanted to be
told. And if you weren’t going to tell it, it was out of here, it was going to find another writer who would, and you would be reduced to watching somebody else write and publish your book.
Intolerable.
Jake remembered the day a certain key moment in The Invention of Wonder had suddenly been there with him, in the world—no preamble, no warning—and despite the fact that this had never happened to him before, his very first thought in the instant that followed its appearance had been:
Grab it.
And he had. And he had done right by that spark, and written the best novel he could around it, the New & Noteworthy first book that had turned—so fleetingly—the attention of the literary world in his direction.
He’d lacked even a pallid little frisson of an idea with Reverberations (his “novel in linked short stories,” which had really only ever been … short stories), though obviously he had finished that book, limping along to some point at which he was permitted to type the words “The End.” It had been the end, all right, to his period of “promise” as “a young writer to watch,” and it might have been wiser not to publish it at all, but Jake had been terrified to lose the validation of The Invention of Wonder. After each and every one of the legacy publishers, and then an entire tranche of the university presses, had rejected the manuscript, the importance of publishing his second book had swelled until his entire being seemed to be on the line. If he could only get this one out of his way, he’d told himself at the time, maybe the next idea, the next spark, would come.
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