The Plot

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  The wages of her sin, it turned out, had a shelf life of forever.

  Wait a minute! she yelled at them. I don’t want this baby and you don’t want this baby. Let’s let somebody who does want it have it. What’s the problem with that?

  The problem, apparently, was that God wanted it this way. He’d tested her, she’d failed, and thus, this was what was supposed to happen.

  It was maddening, infuriating. Worse: illogical.

  But she was fifteen. So that’s what was going to happen.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Why Would She Change Her Mind?

  The Twitter account had been mercifully dormant since its inception, but suddenly, in mid-December, the tweets began—not with a bang but with a whimper into the void:

  @JacobFinchBonner is a not the author of #Crib.

  There was no engagement at all, Jake was relieved to see, probably because there was no one to engage with. In its six weeks on the site, the Twitter user known as @TalentedTom was still depicted as an egg with no biography and from an undeclared location. He had managed to attract only two followers, both likely bots from points far east, but the lack of an audience did not seem to deter him at all. For the next few weeks there was a steady drip, drip of caustic little declarations:

  @JacobFinchBonner is a thief.

  @JacobFinchBonner is a plagiarist.

  Anna went back to Seattle to settle some things. When she returned, Jake drove her out to Long Island for the traditional Bonner Hanukkah with his father’s siblings and their children. He had never before brought a guest to this event, and there was a certain amount of derisory attention from his cousins, but the plank-roasted salmon Anna contributed to the meal was met with stunned gratitude.

  Technically, she still hadn’t entirely taken leave of her prior life—the apartment in West Seattle had been sublet and her furniture moved to a storage facility—but she straightaway found a job at a podcasting studio in Midtown and another as a producer on a Sirius show covering the tech industry. In spite of the fact that she’d grown up in a small Idaho town, it took her no time at all to ramp up to the speed with which every other New Yorker raced down the streets, and within days of her return to the city she seemed to become yet another overworked Gothamite, perpetually rushing and with a baseline level of ambient stress that would probably have alarmed anyone outside the five boroughs. But she was happy. Seriously happy, expressively happy. She began every day by wrapping herself around him and kissing his neck. She learned what he liked to eat and seamlessly took over the task of feeding them both (a great relief, as Jake never had learned to properly feed himself). She dove into the cultural life of the city and brought Jake along with her, and soon it was a rare night they were home and not at a play or a concert, or poking around Flushing in search of some dumpling stall she’d read about.

  @JacobFinchBonner’s publisher had better get ready to issue a refund for every copy of #Crib.

  Somebody needs to tell @Oprah she has another fake author on her hands.

  Anna wanted a cat. She had wanted a cat for years, apparently. They went to the pound and adopted a nonchalant fellow, all black but for a single white foot, who did a quick circuit of the apartment, staked out a chair Jake had once liked to read in, and settled in for the long haul. (He was to be known as Whidbey, after the island.) She wanted to see a Broadway show—a real one, this time. He got them Hamilton tickets through a client of Matilda’s who was connected, and a Roundabout subscription. She wanted to go on food tours of the Lower East Side, guided history walks in Tribeca, gospel brunches in Harlem, all of those things native (or at least “established”) New Yorkers tended to turn up their noses at, preferring to maintain a smug ignorance about their city. She started to accompany him, as her own work allowed, when he gave readings or talks—Boston, Montclair, Vassar College—and once they stayed on in Florida for a couple of days, following his appearance at the Miami Book Fair.

  He began to notice a basic difference between them, which was that she perceived the approach of a stranger with open curiosity and he with dread (this predated his becoming a “famous writer”—an oxymoron if there ever was one, or so he was in the habit of saying to interviewers as a means of conveying modesty—and had been true even when he’d carried a ring of personal failure around himself like a radioactive Hula-Hoop.) New people began to enter their lives, and for the first time in years Jake was having conversations with people who were not writers or in publishing, or even avid readers of fiction, and those conversations went so far beyond whose book had been bought by whom and for how much, whose second novel was a sales disappointment, which editor was out after overspending on an overrated novelist, and which bloggers had taken which sides in an accusation of “unwanted overtures” at a summer writer’s conference. There was, it turned out, a stunning variety of stuff to discuss beyond the writing world: politics, things to eat, interesting people and what they’d done in the world, and the golden ages of comedy, television, food trucks, and activism that were currently underway, all around him, and which he’d been only peripherally aware of till now.

  He noticed, as his own writer friends began to meet her for a second or third time, that they greeted her with warmth, sometimes reaching for her with a kiss or a hug even before they turned to him. Anna remembered their names, their partners’ names, their pets’ names (and species), their jobs and their complaints about their jobs, and she asked about everything, even as Jake looked on, smiling tightly, wondering how she’d managed to find out so much about them in so short a time.

  Because she’d asked, it only belatedly occurred to him.

  With his mother and father they established a monthly brunch in the city, following an Adam Platt review to a dim sum restaurant nestled beneath the Manhattan Bridge which then became their regular destination. He was seeing more of his parents now, with Anna, than he had when he’d been single and theoretically unencumbered by another person’s schedule and commitments. As the winter months passed, he watched her forge a deep familiarity with the two of them, his mother’s work at the high school, his father’s travails with a partner in his firm, the sad saga of the neighbors two houses down on the other side of the street, whose teenage twins were both in freefall and taking the rest of the family down with them. Anna wanted to go yard sale shopping with Jake’s mother (an activity he himself had taken pains to avoid since he was a child) when the weather got warmer, and she shared his father’s long-held penchant for Emmylou Harris (before his very eyes the two of them looked up Harris’s tour schedule and made plans to see her that summer at the Nassau Coliseum). In Anna’s presence his parents talked more about themselves, their health, and even their feelings about Jake’s success, than they ever had when he’d been alone with them, which unsettled him even as he understood that this was good, a good thing for them all. He had always accepted the bald fact that they loved him, but it was more of a default position than an expression of organic preference. He was their child, ergo, and later, when he gave them such unmistakable reasons to be proud, that position was understandably substantiated. But Anna, who was not their child, and who was not a bestselling author of worldwide stature, they liked—no, loved—for herself.

  One Sunday at the end of January, after their regular dim sum feast, his father pulled him aside on Mott Street and asked what his intentions were.

  “Isn’t it the girl’s father who’s supposed to ask that?”

  “Well, maybe I’m asking on behalf of Anna’s father.”

  “Oh. That’s funny. Well, what should they be?”

  His father shook his head. “Are you serious? This girl is fantastic. She’s beautiful and kind and she’s crazy about you. If I was her dad I’d give you a kick in the pants.”

  “You mean, grab her before she changes her mind.”

  “Well, no,” his father said. “More like, what are you waiting for? Why would she change her mind?”

  Jake couldn’t say why, not out loud, obvious
ly not to his father, but he was thinking about it every single day as @TalentedTom continued to hurl contempt into the void. Jake spent each morning toggling through his Google alerts and torturing himself with new word combinations to cast over the internet: “Evan+Parker+writer,” “Evan+Parker+Bonner,” “Crib+Bonner+thief,” “Parker+Bonner+plagiarize.” He was like an obsessive-compulsive at the mercy of his cleaning rituals, or unable to leave his apartment until he had checked the stove exactly twenty-one times, and it took longer and longer each day to feel safe enough, and then calm enough, to work on the new novel.

  Who thinks it’s okay for @JacobFinchBonner to steal another writer’s book?

  Why is @MacmillanBooks still selling #Crib, a novel its author lifted from another writer?

  Why would she change her mind?

  Because of this. Obviously.

  Since that day in Seattle and especially since Anna had crossed the country to join him in New York, Jake had been bracing himself for the day his girlfriend finally mentioned the Twitter posts, perhaps with an entirely understandable demand to know why he hadn’t already told her about them. Anna was no Luddite, obviously—she worked in media!—but having established her Facebook and Instagram outposts as a way for her missing sister and aunt to reach her, those two accounts had pretty much ossified from lack of use. The Facebook profile listed about twenty friends, a link to Anna’s University of Washington class page, and a pinned endorsement for Rick Larson’s 2016 congressional run. The Instagram account’s first and only post dated to 2015 and featured—ah, the cliché of it—a latte art pine tree. One of her jobs at the podcast studio was to manage its own Instagram account, posting photographs of the various hosts and guests using the facility, but she apparently had no wish to chase personal likes, shares, retweets, or followers, and she certainly wasn’t monitoring the peaks and valleys of his online reputation. Anna, it was obvious, preferred the real world, and the real-life face-to-face interactions that took place in it: eating good food, drinking good wine, sweating on a yoga mat in a room crowded with physical bodies.

  Still, there was always the uncomfortable possibility that someone, knowing she lived with the author of Crib, might mention an accusation or an attack they’d seen floating by on their own feed, or politely ask how Jake was holding up given, you know, that thing that was happening. Every day might be a day the infection of @TalentedTom crossed the membrane into his actual life and his actual relationship. Every night might be a night she suddenly said: “Oh hey, somebody sent me this weird tweet about you.” So far it hadn’t happened. When Anna came home from work, or met him for dinner after yoga, or spent the day with him wandering the city, their talk was about anything and everything but the most consequential thing in Jake’s life. Apart from her, of course.

  Each morning after she left for work he sat paralyzed at his desk clicking back and forth from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram, Googling himself every hour or so to see if anything had broken through, taking the temperature of his own alarm to see whether he was afraid, or merely afraid of being afraid. Each chime announcing a new email in his in-box made him jump, as did each beep of his Twitter alert and the bell Instagram rang when someone tagged him.

  I know I’m the last person on the planet to read #Crib @Jacob-FinchBonner, but I wanna thank everyone for NOT TELLING ME WHAT HAPPENS COS I WAS LIKE WHAAAAAA????!

  Recommended by Sammy’s mom: #Pachenko (sp?), #TheOrphan-Train, #Crib. Which do I read first?

  Finished crib by @jacobfinchbonner. It wuz eh. Next: #thegoldfinch (man its loooooong)

  He thought more than once of hiring a professional (or maybe just somebody’s teenage kid) to try to figure out who owned the Twitter account, or TalentedTom@gmail.com, or at least what general part of the world these messages were coming from, but the idea of bringing another person into his personal hell felt impossible. He thought of filing some kind of complaint with Twitter, but Twitter had allowed a president to suggest female senators were giving him blowjobs in exchange for his support—did he really think the platform would lift a finger to help him? At the end of the day he couldn’t bring himself to do anything at all: direct, indirect, or even just evasive. Instead, he retreated again and again into a baseless idea that if he continued to ignore this ordeal it would one day, somehow, cease to be real, and when that came to pass he would seamlessly return to a version of his life in which no one—not his parents, or his agent, or his publishers, or his thousands upon thousands of readers, or Anna—had any reason to suspect what he’d done. Each morning he woke into some utterly irrational notion that it might all just … stop, but then a new speck of darkness would emerge from his computer screen and he would find himself crouching before some terrible approaching wave, waiting to drown.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Only the Most Successful Writers

  Then, in February, Jake noticed that the Twitter bio included a new link to Facebook. With a now familiar surge of dread, he clicked on the link:

  Name: Tom Talent

  Works at: The Restoration of Justice in Fiction

  Studied at: Ripley College

  Lives In: Anytown, USA

  From: Rutland, VT

  Friends: 0

  His maiden post was short, definitely not sweet, and thoroughly to the point:

  Blindsided by that big twist in Crib? Here’s another one: Jacob Finch Bonner stole his novel from another writer.

  And for some reason Jake would never understand, this was the post that began, at last, to metastasize.

  At first, the responses were muted, dismissive, even scolding:

  WTF?

  Dude, I thought it was overrated, but you shouldn’t accuse somebody like that.

  Wow, jealous much, loser?

  But then, a couple of days later, Jake’s Twitter alert picked up a repost on the account of a minor book blogger, who added a question of her own:

  Anybody know what this is about?

  Eighteen people responded. None of them did. And for a couple of days he was able to maintain a desperate hope that this, too, would pass. Then, the following Monday, his agent called to ask if he was free later in the week for a meeting with the team at Macmillan, and there was something in her voice that told him this would not be about the second round of the paperback tour or even the new novel, which had now been scheduled for the following autumn. “What’s up?” he said, already knowing the answer.

  Matilda had a very distinctive way of delivering terrible news as if it were an interesting insight that had just occurred to her. She said: “Oh, you know what? Wendy mentioned that reader services got a weirdo message from somebody who says you’re not the author of Crib. Which means you’ve really made it now. Only the most successful writers get these wackos.”

  Jake couldn’t make a sound. He looked at the phone; it was in front of him, on the coffee table, with the speaker on. Finally, he managed a strangled: “What?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it. Everybody who accomplishes anything gets this. Stephen King? J. K. Rowling? Even Ian McEwan! Some crazy guy once accused Joyce Carol Oates of flying a zeppelin over his house so she could photograph what he was writing on his computer.”

  “That’s insane.” He took a breath. “But … what did the message say?”

  “Oh, something really specific like your story doesn’t belong to you. They just wanted to bring Legal in to have a little chat about it. Get us all on the same page.”

  Jake nodded again. “Okay, great.”

  “Ten tomorrow okay with you?”

  “Okay.”

  It took every fiber of his will not to immediately replicate his self-quarantine of the previous fall: unplugged phone, fetal position, cupcakes, Jameson. But this time he knew he’d shortly have to present himself in some quasi-responsible condition, and that impeded freefall, or at least irreversible freefall. When he met Matilda in the lobby of his venerable publisher the following morning he still felt impaired: woozy and malodorous, in spite of
the fact that he’d forced himself into the shower only an hour earlier. The two of them went up in the elevator together to the fourteenth floor, and Jake, as he followed his editor’s assistant down the corridor, couldn’t help thinking about his previous visits to these offices: for a celebration in the aftermath of the auction, for the intense (but still thrilling!) editorial sessions, for the mind-blowing first meeting with the PR and marketing teams, at which he’d first understood that Crib was going to be given every speck of the magic publishing fairy dust his earlier books had been denied. Later visits here had been for the observation of other astonishing benchmarks: the first hundred thousand sold, the first week on the New York Times bestseller list, the Oprah selection. All good. Sometimes only reassuringly good, other times life-changingly good, but always good. Until today.

  Today was not good.

  In one of the conference rooms they sat down with Jake’s editor and publicist, and with the in-house attorney, a man named Alessandro who announced that he had just come from the gym, something Jake absurdly took to be a hopeful sign. Alessandro was completely bald and the overhead fluorescents made the top of his head shine. Unless—Jake peered—was that sweat? It wasn’t sweat. Jake was the only one sweating.

  “So, honey,” Matilda began, “like I told you, and I mean this, it’s not uncommon at all to be accused of something nasty by a troll. You know, even Stephen King’s been accused of plagiarism.”

  And J. K. Rowling. And Joyce Carol Oates. He knew.

  “And you’ll notice this guy’s anonymous.”

  “I haven’t noticed,” Jake lied, “because I’ve been trying not to think about it.”