by Grant Ginder
Now, he tried to change the subject. He loosened the kombucha cap, then tightened it again. He said, “You told me you wanted to use your Spanish minor and start a literary nonprofit. You wanted to teach kids in the Tijuana slums to read.”
Rajiv finished his sno-cone. His lips were now a mash-up of blue, purple, and a sickly sort of orange—the color, Will imagined, of a slug’s innards just as they touched the air.
He said, “As it turns out, you were right: naming chips is more lucrative than helping orphans.”
A week later, Will rode his bike home to his parents’ house on Forest Avenue. His senior thesis—twenty-five pages of quality fiction—was due to the university’s English Department in less than a week, and since the breakup he had been unable to write a single word. He needed a change of scenery, he figured. He needed to work.
“‘Perhaps some day I’ll crawl back home, beaten, defeated,’” his father, Dean, said when he greeted him at the front door. “‘But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak.’”
“Hi, Dad.”
“Sylvia Plath said that.”
“Good for her.”
Shaking water from his curls, Will slipped out of his coat. Dean took it from him and gave him a light check on his shoulder.
“Your mom told me what happened. Sorry to hear about the breakup, kiddo.”
“The timing is not exactly ideal.” He felt his throat tighten and an unbearable pressure build behind his eyes. Looking away, he kicked his shoes into a pile of slippers next to the front door. He said, “I haven’t even started writing this thing.”
“Do what Miss Plath did. Turn that pain into genius.”
“With all due respect to Miss Plath, she also put her head in an oven.”
Dean feigned a scowl, then smiled. “Don’t sweat it. All the greats wait till the last minute. Did I ever tell you about the time I turned in a novel a year late?”
“You did,” Will said.
“Did I?”
“Just last night, actually.”
“Oh.” He ran a hand over his bald spot. “So, I guess you know how the story ends?”
“You wrote an international bestseller that was translated into fifteen different languages.”
“Sixteen, actually.” Dean shrugged and opened his palms. “The Czechs finally came through.”
“Really?” Will asked, mustering a smile. “That’s awesome, Dad. Congrats.”
Dean tousled his hair. “My point is there’s always a silver lining.”
“If that’s true, I wish it would hurry up and show itself already.”
“Hey, I already told you that I’d be happy to talk to Chip about getting you an extension.” It was the third time Dean had made the offer. He still taught one fiction workshop a semester at the university and was close with the English Department’s chair, Chip Fieldworth. It wouldn’t be hard for him to make a phone call and wrangle a few extra weeks for Will to work.
“The offer still stands,” he added now, leaning against the front door. “Just give it some thought.”
“I appreciate the help,” Will said, “but I think I can handle it.”
He knew what people said about him: that while he had a lot of friends and was generally an upstanding guy, when it came to writing, he just wasn’t very good. Yes, he was his father’s son in some ways (blue eyes, too many freckles, acid reflux linked exclusively to white wine and kimchi), but he had nonetheless failed to inherit Dean’s talent for prose. He was made aware of this during his first fiction workshop, a 100-level seminar taught by a graduate student who described things as either jarring or problematic. During that painful semester, when his classmates weren’t calling his work solipsistic or reductive, they were criticizing him for lifting the easiest, most recognizable elements of Dean’s aesthetic.
“It’s time to kill your gods. Or, in this case, your father,” he remembered the graduate student saying to him, after handing him back a draft of a story on which she hadn’t bothered to make a single mark. “He sired you, now slay him dead.”
Since that first class things had improved, though only marginally. With practice, he began to recognize a style that was vaguely his own and a voice that sounded, at least sometimes, like him. Still, he worried that whatever crumbs of encouragement he did receive were somehow offered as a sort of sacrifice to the department’s worship of his father. His professors just wanted a blurb from Dean Wright for their next books, he figured, or they wanted him to put in a good word with his agent. Any way he cut it, there was no praise that Will could receive that seemed wholly his own.
It was for this reason that the job at Fama had been so attractive to him: finally, here was something he was good at, a success based on nothing but his merit. He hadn’t told his parents about it—a decision for which now, after not being hired, he was profoundly thankful. While he was confident that his mother would have been proud of him, Dean, he knew, would have scoffed. Earlier, when Will had floated the idea of applying for a job at an ad agency in the city, his father had dismissed him. He told him that advertising copy was what real writers wrote when they were too bored to jerk off—and now, here Will was, about to shill for something as inconsequential as potato chips. Still, though, it was his—or, it would have been his, if things hadn’t turned out like they had. He tried not to get too discouraged and poured his energy into looking for other jobs. With graduation approaching, he made appointments at the university’s career center; he sent out cover letters and résumés blindly, feverishly. He scored interviews to answer phones at a nonprofit, to be a development assistant at the Pacific Pinball Museum, and, most recently, to read the newspaper to a rich blind woman in Pacific Heights. None of them, so far, had panned out. The nonprofit decided to hire an intern, and the pinball museum said—perhaps unsurprisingly—that it didn’t have the funding to take on anyone new. When he left the blind woman’s house, she told him she was sorry, but he just didn’t have a reader’s voice.
“It’s a little too, well, homosexual,” she said, grasping for the door handle. “I’m looking for the Marlboro Man, not Truman Capote.”
He waited for her to say she was joking, and when she didn’t, he bit his tongue. He told her that he understood and wondered if she could sense his scowl.
“Don’t worry—you’ll find something.” She winked one of her sightless eyes. “People like you always do.”
But that was only half the problem. The other half was Rajiv. A week after he dumped Will, Will’s friend Cassie reported that Rajiv had started dating a sophomore named Logan from Laguna Beach. Will didn’t believe it—he called Cassie a liar—but forty-eight hours later, an alarming number of pictures of Logan and Rajiv began appearing on Instagram. Now, every time Will glanced down at his phone he was assaulted by filtered and glossy shots of Rajiv and Logan kissing on Baker Beach, and along the Embarcadero, and outside SFMOMA, all of which were paired with horrific captions like #loveislove and #globalcitizens. They were, Will noted, the sort of flagrant displays of narcissism Rajiv had openly mocked while he was dating Will—displays in which he now (evidently) felt liberated enough to partake.
He successfully unfollowed Rajiv’s feed a few days later. At the urging of one of his housemates, he managed to wipe his ex from his virtual life and focused ostensibly on more important things, like his senior thesis. The next day, though, after drinking too many beers and losing at Pub Quiz at the Albatross, he found himself huddled in the bar’s bathroom, re-adding Rajiv on Instagram and Facebook. Twelve hours later, hungover and embarrassed, he discovered that any momentum he had developed toward his thesis had stopped dead; now, anything he wrote seemed trivial, or too small for his feelings. The only thing he could focus on was how Rajiv, in so many ways and in so many pixels, had broken his heart.
At his parents’ house, he went to the kitchen and brewed a pot of coffee. Waiting for the percolator to warm up, he stared out the room’s three bay windows where, a half mile ahead of him, San Fran
cisco abutted the Pacific. The house itself was an old Craftsman—three stories of creaky floorboards and exposed wooden beams that Dean had bought in 1978. Will had been born and raised here, and while he knew both his parents had led lives before moving in, he had a difficult time imagining what form they took, so integrated and essential the place seemed to their beings. In each room were strewn bits of them—books they had written, research they had amassed, potted succulents they had abandoned, their once-pulpy stalks now mottled, decayed. Last year, when his mother forced Dean to move out for six weeks—when Will’s parents’ divorce seemed inevitable and imminent—he often found himself wondering what would happen to the house. Whether they would decide to sell it, or if one of them would stay, freeing the other from their messy domesticity.
Will lugged his backpack over his shoulder and made his way down the hall to his father’s study, where he had taken to working whenever he came home. Once inside, he shut the door and collapsed into the chair behind Dean’s desk. In front of him were stacked eight copies of The Light of Our Shadows, his father’s latest opus, which, since its publication last fall, had sold over half a million copies, and which, according to Dean, would soon be available in Prague. It had been rereleased with a fresh cover design for its eighth printing—though Will was having a tough time distinguishing between this, the new book, and the other iterations of it he had already seen. He picked up one of the copies and inspected it more closely: same bloodred background, same pair of broken reading glasses. The only difference he could detect was that the title was now in a font two sizes smaller than his father’s name.
He hadn’t read it yet—he still hasn’t read it. When Will was younger, his father’s ability to write was a source of fascination for him. Sitting on the floor of his office, he would listen as Dean pounded away on the keyboard of his old iMac, pausing every ten minutes or so to crack his knuckles. None of those early works experienced as much success as The Light of Our Shadows; their sales were middling, and boxes of unsold copies were pulped. None of this mattered to Will. He tore through Dean’s books; he reread them. He wanted to know what other stories lay bubbling inside his father—and, by extension, himself. Lately, though, as he confronted the limits of his own talent, that fascination had shifted to something else—fear, maybe, the crippling realization that he had no stories to tell, or that if he did, he’d never be good enough to tell them. And now he can’t bring himself to read Dean’s latest novel. He worries that doing so would be akin to staring into a fun-house mirror—one where instead of tiny arms or oversize legs, he’s made up of a collection of stretched, bloated inadequacies.
Slumped in his father’s chair, he let the book fall to the ground. Reaching into his shirt pocket, he fished around for the joint he’d brought with him but stopped himself just short of lighting it. No, he thought. Not until you’ve got a thousand words.
And then—well, and then.
It happened like this: In need of inspiration, he turned to his father’s computer. Maybe Dean had a list of starters or something, Will thought. Some exercise that he used in class to jolt his students’ imaginations. Or, at least that’s what he told himself. Whatever the truth of his motivations were, the fact remains that he stumbled on the folder—the one marked (clearly! mockingly!) unpublished stories—by chance, hardly with an eye toward plagiarism. In fact, even as he started retyping the first five lines of the story he had selected onto a new page, he convinced himself that he would eventually change them and just use his father’s prose to get the ball rolling.
But that’s not what happened. Will kept going: word followed measly word and sentence followed measly sentence until, after an hour, he had transcribed the entire thing.
He didn’t know if it was any good. From what he could tell, the plot concerned itself with a teenage boy lusting after the owner of a Laundromat, a forty-something woman called Mo. The style was a little different than the other stuff of his father’s that Will had read: there were longer sentences, a freer use of punctuation and figurative language. Honestly, there were a few passages that he found a little clunky, or at least not to the level of writing that made Dean’s other work such a hit. But this—all this—was a good thing. While there was zero probability that Dean would read the submission (only tenured faculty reviewed theses), Will still considered it more ethical to turn in something that was more in line with his own mediocre abilities, rather than something his father could have conceivably produced.
Before he could think—before he could let his conscience get the better of him—he opened a new email to his adviser and sent the file. Then he cracked the window behind the desk. He balanced the joint between his lips and, upon lighting it, took a deep, not entirely cleansing breath.
* * *
The flight attendant clears her throat and hands Will two small bottles of chardonnay.
She says, “Your wine, sir,” in a voice of utter and absolute death.
Unscrewing one of them, he chugs half the bottle. They’re starting to descend—he can feel his ears battling the pressure, the faint sinking as the plane dips beneath the clouds.
He thinks back to yesterday, once he was seated and waiting for the plane to take off. Using his iPhone, he had logged on to CalCentral, Berkeley’s student portal—he wanted to check his grades before the flight attendant told him he had to shut off his phone. He didn’t consider himself an obsessive person, though this—stalking the registrar—had become a compulsion ever since he submitted his thesis two weeks ago. There were countless 3 A.M. moments where he had woken with a jolt and reached for his phone. Countless nights out at a bar where the only way to stop himself from confessing his crime was to squint one eye and drunkenly pull up his transcript. Each time, he was looking for the same thing: if his grade for his senior thesis was still marked as pending, or whether it had been changed to you’re fucked. He knew it was a worthless exercise—he had about as much power over when the grade was posted as he did over whether this plane plunged into the Mediterranean—but the act of checking provided him the illusion of control. Yes, he was strapped into the electric chair, but at least he got to decide when to throw the switch.
Now, though, as passengers hauled their bags into overhead compartments before takeoff, he saw that something on CalCentral had changed—notably, a number of his classes were graded. Holding his breath, he enlarged the screen and scrolled down. Then, sandwiched between Buddhist Economics and Special Topics in Folklore, he saw it: a line that read senior thesis, next to which was a clear-as-day A minus. Will stared at the letter, then refreshed the screen a few times. He wanted to see if the mark would vanish or change. It didn’t, though; instead, it just stared back at him. Will Wright had, it seemed, actually gotten away with it.
The first thing he wanted to do was laugh, which was, admittedly, his go-to response in any morally dubious situation. Seeing someone skid on his ass down a flight of stairs, watching a friend step in dog shit—he couldn’t help it, his body always convulsed in nervous giggles. It wasn’t a lack of conscience that caused it so much as a recognition of conscience: he knew he should feel rotten, but mostly he was relieved. He suspected that in the future this might change, and remorse would catch up to him. For the time being, though, he was twenty-two. And, as a twenty-two-year-old, he was smart enough to know that feeling a little bit of guilt was better than dealing with actual consequences. He was smart enough to know that the important thing was not getting caught.
He took a deep breath to calm his giggles. Then he buckled his safety belt and sank his head against the back of the seat: he decided he could finally relax. In fourteen hours—in the time it would take him to watch seven movies—he would be in Greece. And while he had promised himself he would continue his search for a future during his time abroad (he had brought his laptop and a stack of semihelpful pamphlets from Career Services), he was also ready for a vacation. A break from the Bay Area’s ceaseless summer fog and its job-nabbing boyfriends. A chance to tra
de in worries about what he was going to do with the rest of his life for a few weeks of feta, pita, and guys with good tans.
The flight crew announced that it was shutting the cabin door, and as they did so, his phone buzzed once against his lap—he had forgotten to switch it off after checking his grades. Picking it up, he glanced at the screen and saw that he had a new email. It was, he learned upon clicking it, a note from Ginny Polonsky, a rising senior at Berkeley and the new editor in chief of The Berkeley Review, the university’s undergraduate literary journal. Reading further, his heart sank and then ricocheted to his throat: his story—his thesis—had been selected to be the featured piece of fiction in the Review’s fall issue. His adviser, Claudia Min, had been so taken with his work, Ginny wrote, that she had passed it along to the journal’s fiction editors, who, in turn, passed it along to her. In addition to offering Will her sincerest congratulations, Ginny had a few questions (“as a new fan!”). Like, for starters, she wrote, what inspired you? Have you ever even been to a Laundromat? Because you seriously describe it exactly as I’ve always imagined one. Also, on a more personal level, what convinced you to finally take a stance against your father with a story that’s messier in its aesthetic, but also so clearly paying tribute to Dean’s legacy? What’s it feel like to come into your own? Oh, and finally, and this is sort of just for my own interest: how did you manage to capture the thoughts of a young member of the hetero-patriarchy when you’re, well, just so gay?
His palms sweating, Will tapped open a new email and began typing a response. Look, Ginny, he began again. I’m flattered, but I’d like to talk to you about the story. I’m not sure if it’s—
“Sir, you need to shut your phone off and stow it for takeoff.”
He looked up and saw a blond flight attendant staring down at him.
“Give me one second,” Will said, returning to his screen.
“Sir, we’ve closed the cabin doors. If you don’t shut your phone off, I’m going to have to ask the captain to come back here.”