The Plot
Page 10
Ripley.
As in: Ripley. Where he and Evan Parker had so fatefully crossed paths.
The message was violently clear: whoever TalentedTom was, he knew. And he wanted Jake to know that he knew. And he wanted Jake to know that he meant business.
The person was a single click of the Return button away, but the notion of opening that aperture between the two of them was fraught with danger. Responding meant that Jake was afraid, that he took the accusation seriously, that TalentedTom, whoever he was, deserved the dignity of recognition. And showing even a tiny portion of himself to this malevolent stranger frightened Jake more than the diffuse and horrible notion of what might come next.
So, once again, he did not respond. Instead, he shakily consigned this second communiqué to the same place its predecessor was languishing, a folder on his laptop he’d labeled “Trolls.” (This had in fact been established fully six months earlier, and already housed a few dozen illiterate attacks on Crib, no fewer than three of which accused him of being a member of the “Deep State,” and a handful of emails from someone in Texas that referenced the “blood-brain barrier,” which Jake had evidently crossed, or which had been crossed within him—the messages were, by their very nature, confounding.) But even as he did this he knew it was its own pointless gesture; the TalentedTom communications were different. Whoever he was, this person had managed to become, in the blink of an eye, among the most significant in Jake’s life. And certainly the most terrifying.
Within minutes of receiving this second message Jake had powered off his phone, unplugged his router, and assumed a fetal position on the grubby couch he’d been hauling around since college, and there he remained for the following four days, working his way through a dozen cupcakes from Magnolia on Bleecker Street (some of them, at least, had healthy green icing) and the congratulatory bottle of Jameson that Matilda had sent after the film sale. There were, in these blurry hours, interludes of blissful numbness in which he actually forgot what was happening, but many more of sheer anguish during which he parsed and projected the many ways in which it could all be about to unfold: the various humiliations awaiting him, the revulsion of every single person he’d ever known, envied, felt superior to, had a crush on, or—lately—been in business with. At certain moments, and as if to usher in the inevitable and at least get it over with, he composed his own media campaign of punishing self-accusations, declaiming his crimes to the world. At other points he wrote himself long and rambling speeches of justification, and even longer and more rambling apologies. None of it even made a dent in his whirling, howling terror.
When Jake did, finally, surface, it wasn’t because he’d managed to achieve some perspective or make anything resembling a plan; it was because he’d finished the whiskey and the cupcakes and developed a strong suspicion that the bad new smell he’d lately become aware of was coming from inside the apartment. After he’d opened a window, cleared the dishes away, and hauled himself through the shower, he reconnected his phone and laptop to the world and found a dozen increasingly concerned texts from his parents, a faux-cheerful email from Matilda, inquiring (again!) about the new book, and over two hundred additional messages requiring serious attention, including a third from TalentedTom@gmail.com:
I know you stole your “novel” and I know who you stole it from.
For some reason, that “novel” just put him over the edge.
He added it to the Trolls folder. Then, bowing to the inevitable, he made a new folder, just for the three TalentedTom messages. After a moment, he named it Ripley.
With great effort, he returned to the world beyond his own computer and phone and head, and forced himself to acknowledge some of the other things—some of them very nice things—that were also happening, more or less concurrently. Crib had recaptured the number one slot on the paperback bestseller list, thanks to the broadcast of his book club interview with Oprah Winfrey, and Jake had appeared on the cover of the October Poets & Writers (not exactly a periodical on the order of People or Vanity Fair, okay, but this had been a pipe dream of his all the way back to his Wesleyan days). He’d also received an invitation from Bouchercon to do a keynote speech, and he was being updated about an entire English tour organized around the Hay-on-Wye festival.
All good. All good.
And then there was Anna Williams of Seattle, and that was more than good.
Within days of their meeting, he and Anna had settled into what even Jake could not deny was a warm way of communicating with each other, and with the exception of that four-day sojourn on the couch with the cupcakes and the Jameson they’d been in at least daily contact via text. Jake now knew much more about Anna’s daily life in West Seattle, her challenges (small and not-small) at KBIK, the avocado plant she struggled to keep alive in her kitchen window, her nickname for her boss, Randy Johnson, and the personal mantra she’d received from her favorite communications professor at the University of Washington: Nobody else gets to live your life. He knew that she really wanted to get a cat, but her landlord wouldn’t permit it, and that she ate salmon at least four times a week, and that she secretly preferred what came out of her ancient Mr. Coffee machine to anything she could get in Seattle’s rarefied temples to java. He knew that she seemed to care as much about the Jake Bonner who predated the advent of Crib as she did about his current, weirdly bold-faced existence. That meant everything. That was the game changer.
He cleaned up his apartment. He began rewarding himself with a daily Skype call to Seattle: Anna on her front porch, himself at his living room window overlooking Abingdon Square. She started to read the novels he recommended. He started to try the wines she liked. He went back to work on his new novel and put in a solid month of focused effort, which brought him tantalizingly close to a finished first draft. Good things upon good things.
And then, toward the end of October, another message came through the JacobFinchBonner website:
What will Oprah say when she finds out about you? At least James Frey had the decency to steal from himself.
He opened the new folder on his laptop and added this to the others. A few days later, there was a fifth:
I’m on Twitter now. Thought you’d like to know. @TalentedTom
He went to look, and indeed there was a new account, but no actual tweets yet. It had the generic egg for a profile picture and a grand total of zero followers. Its profile bio consisted of one word: Writer.
He had been letting the clock run out without even attempting to identify his opponent. That had not been a good decision. TalentedTom, he suspected, was preparing to enter a new phase, and Jake had no time left to waste.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I’m Nobody. Who Are You?
Evan Parker was dead: to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that. Jake had seen the death notice three years earlier. He had even perused an online memorial page, which, though not terribly well populated, did contain the reminiscences of a dozen people who’d known Parker, and they, certainly, seemed to be under the impression that he was dead. It was a simple matter to find that page again, and he wasn’t at all surprised to see that there had been no additional entries to the memorial since his last visit:
Evan and I grew up together in Rutland. We did baseball and wrestling together. He was a real natural leader and always kept the teams spirits up. Knew he’d had his struggles in the past, but thought he was doing really well. So sorry to hear about what happened.
Took classes with Evan at RCC. Such a cool dude. Can’t believe this. RIP man.
I grew up in the same town as Evan’s family. These poor people had the worst luck.
I remember Evan when he played baseball for West Rutland. Never knew him personally but a great first baseman. Really sorry he had such demons.
Bye Evan, I’ll miss you. RIP.
Met Evan in our MFA program up in Ripley. Super talented writer, great guy. Shocked that this happened to him.
Please accept my condolences for your loss,
all family and friends of the deceased. May his memory be a blessing.
But there seemed not to be any close friends, and no reference to any spouse or significant other. What could Jake learn from this that he hadn’t already known?
That Evan Parker had played sports in high school. That he’d had “struggles” and “demons”—perhaps they were the same?—at least at one point and then, apparently, again. That something suggestive of “worst luck” attached to him and his family. That at least one Ripley student remembered Evan from the program. How well had this student known him? Well enough to have been told the same extraordinary plot Evan had told Jake? Well enough to now be concerning himself with the “theft” of his classmate’s unwritten novel?
The Ripley student who’d left the tribute had signed his first name only: Martin. That wasn’t particularly helpful as far as Jake’s memory went, but fortunately the 2013 Ripley MFA student roster was still on his computer, and he opened up the old spreadsheet. Ruth Steuben had likely never read a story or a poem in her life, but she’d been a great believer in orderly record keeping, and alongside each student’s address, phone number, and email address a column had been given over to their genre of concentration: either an F for fiction or a P for poetry.
The only Martin was a Martin Purcell of South Burlington, Vermont, and he had an F next to his name. Even after looking up Purcell’s Facebook profile and seeing multiple shots of his smiling face, however, Jake didn’t recognize the guy, which might have meant he’d been assigned to one of the other fiction writers on the faculty, but it might also mean he’d simply been unmemorable, perhaps even to a teacher genuinely interested in knowing his students (which had never been Jake, as he’d recognized about himself even then). Apart from Evan Parker, the only people he remembered from that particular group were the guy who’d wanted to correct Victor Hugo’s “mistakes” in a new version of Les Misérables and the woman who’d conjured the indelible non-word “honeymelons.” The rest, like the faces and names of fiction writers from his third teaching year, and his second, and his first, were gone.
He commenced a deep dive on Martin Purcell, during which he paused only to order and eat some chicken from RedFarm and exchange at least twenty text messages with Anna (mainly about Randy Johnson’s latest antics and a weekend trip she was planning to Port Townsend), and he learned that the guy was a high school teacher who brewed his own beer, supported the Red Sox, and had a pronounced interest in the classic California group, the Eagles. Purcell taught history and was married to a woman named Susie who seemed to be very engaged in local politics. He was a ridiculous over-sharer on Facebook, mostly about his beagle, Josephine, and his kids, but he posted nothing at all about any writing he might currently be doing, and he mentioned no writer friends nor any writers he was reading or had admired in the past. In fact, if it weren’t for the Ripley College reference in his educational background you’d never know from Facebook that Martin Purcell even read fiction, let alone aspired to write it.
Purcell had a heart-sinking 438 Facebook friends. Who among them might be people he’d crossed paths with at the Ripley Symposia’s low-residency Master of Fine Arts Program in 2012 or 2013? Jake went back to Ruth Steuben’s spreadsheet and cross-referenced half a dozen names, then he started down those Ripley rabbit holes. But he had no idea what he was looking for, really.
Julian Zigler, attorney in West Hartford, who mainly did real estate and worked at a firm with sixty grinning attorneys, overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly white. Completely unfamiliar face.
Eric Jin-Jay Chang, resident in hematology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Paul Brubacker, “scribbler” of Billings, Montana. (The Victor Hugo guy!)
Pat d’Arcy, artist from Baltimore, another face Jake could have sworn he’d never seen before. Six weeks ago, Pat d’Arcy had published a very short story on a flash fiction website called Partitions. One of the many conveyances of congratulations was from Martin Purcell:
Pat! Awesome story! I’m so proud of you! Have you posted on the Symposia page?
The Symposia page.
It turned out to be an unofficial alumni page, through which half a dozen years’ worth of low-residency graduates had been sharing work and information and gossip since 2010. Jake flew back and back through the posts: poetry contests, news of an encouraging rejection from the West Texas Literary Review, an announcement of a first novel’s acceptance by a hybrid publisher in Boston, wedding photos, a reunion of 2011 poets in Brattleboro, a reading at an art gallery in Lewiston, Maine. Then, in October of 2013, the name “Evan” began to pop up in the messages.
Only “Evan.” Of course. Jake supposed this was why the alumni page hadn’t appeared in his initial “Evan Parker” searches. Naturally, the Evan in question would only require his first name, at least to anyone and everyone who’d known him. Evan, the triumphant rescuer of the kidnapped bottle opener. Evan, the guy who sat at the seminar table with his arms tightly folded across his chest. Everyone would know an asshole like that.
Guys, I can’t believe this. Evan died last Monday. Really sorry to have to share.
(This, it was hardly surprising, had been posted by Martin Purcell, Ripley 2011–2012.)
Oh my god! What?
Fuck!
Holy shit that’s so awful. What do you know Martin?
We were supposed to meet up at his tavern last Sunday, I was coming down from Burlington. Then he didn’t text me back. I figured he blew me off or forgot or something. Few days later I called him and I got a disconnect notice. I just had a bad feeling. So I Googled and it came right up. I knew he’d had some problems in the past, but Evan had been sober for a while.
Oh man, that poor guy.
That’s my third friend to overdose! I mean, when are they going to call it what it is? AN EPIDEMIC.
Well, thought Jake. This certainly confirmed his assumption about what “unexpectedly,” “struggles,” and “demons” signified.
Jake’s phone buzzed.
Crab Pot Seattle, Anna had written. There was a photo of a tangle of crab legs and cut-up ears of corn. Beyond that: a window, a harbor.
Jake went back to his laptop and googled the words “Evan+Parker+ tavern,” and a story from the Rutland Herald came up: Parker Tavern, a not-too-classy-looking spot on State Street in Rutland, was under new ownership following the death of its longtime owner, Evan Parker of West Rutland. Jake stared at the building, a run-down Victorian, the kind you’d find on most major streets in most New England towns. It had once probably been someone’s lovely home, but now it had a green neon PARKER TAVERN FOOD AND LIQUOR over the front door, and what looked like a hand-painted sign announcing Happy Hour 3–6.
On his phone, the single word: Hello?
Jake wrote back: Yum.
Enough for two, she wrote immediately.
In the Rutland Herald story the new owners, Jerry and Donna Hastings of West Rutland, hoped to preserve the bar’s traditional interior, eclectic draft selection, and, above all, warm and welcoming ambiance as a meeting place for the community and visitors alike. When asked about their decision to retain “Parker Tavern” as the bar’s name, Jerry Hastings answered that it was out of respect: the late owner’s family went back five generations in central Vermont, and before his tragic and untimely death Evan Parker had worked for years to make the tavern the success it was.
Okay then! Anna texted. Obviously not feeling chatty at the moment. No worries! Or maybe you’re communing with your muse.
He picked up his phone again. No such thing as the muse. No such thing as “inspiration.” It’s all deeply unspiritual.
Oh? What happened to “everybody has a unique voice and a story only they can tell”?
It’s gone to live with the Yeti and the Sasquatch and the Loch Ness Monster in Atlantis. But I actually am working right now. Can we talk later? I’ll bring the Merlot.
How will you know which one?
I’ll ask you. Of course.
Hi Martin, this is Jake Bonner, from the Ripley program. Sorry to email you out of the blue, but wondered if I could give you a call about something? Let me know when might be a good time to chat, or feel free to phone me whenever you like. Very best to you, Jake.
And he added his phone number.
The dude called immediately.
“Oh wow,” he said as soon as Jake answered. “I can’t believe you emailed me. This isn’t some kind of Ripley fundraising thing, is it? Because I can’t right now.”
“No, no,” Jake said. “Nothing like that. Look, we’ve probably met, but I don’t have my Ripley files with me so I’m not sure if you were in my class or not.”
“I wish I was in your class. That guy I got assigned to, all he wanted us to do was write about place. Place, place, place. Like, every blade of grass had to have its own backstory. That was his thing.”
He had to be talking about Bruce O’Reilly, the retired Colby professor and profoundly Maine-centric novelist with whom Jake had had an annual beer at The Ripley Inn. Jake hadn’t thought about Bruce O’Reilly in years.
“That’s too bad. It’s better if they move students around. Then everyone gets to work with everyone.”
It had also been years since he’d given any thought at all to the institutionalized teaching of creative writing. He hadn’t missed it.
“I have to tell you, I loved your book. Man, that twist, I was like, holy crap.”
No special significance to “that twist,” Jake noted with intense relief. Certainly no: And I’ve got a pretty good idea where that came from.