Amateurs (34 page)

“I guess not,” she told Lucas while watching a boy raise his arms in triumph atop the mixing bowl. “It's just, I worry I'll screw it up. I worry this is my last chance to get it right, that doors are closing.” Not ready to lay out the present dilemma, she settled for this reiteration of how she'd felt on and off for years.

“Torschlusspanik?” Lucas said, or a word recognizably close. He finished buttoning his shirt and stood behind her at the window.

“I don't want to be this old and still not know what I want to do with my life.”

“Maybe if you knew what you wanted to do with your life,” he said, rubbing the knobbiest vertebra leading up to her neck, “it wouldn't be your life. You said before how you like uncertainty and all that.” He pushed both palms up the sides of her nape. “Like I've been thinking, all my regrets, all the stuff I wish I'd done differently, it's really just me wishing I'd been someone else.”

“Mmm, a little higher, please.” Massages like this were best because they were always ending; all you could do was concentrate on each last instant of pleasure. During a long, hired massage, she would get caught up in cost-benefit analyses, worrying that she would fall
asleep or that too much time would be given over to chakra rituals or the flipping of pan-flute cassettes.

“But I'm not going to do that anymore.”

“That's smart,” she murmured, not remembering what he was going to stop. Then she thought, Probably Archer would be willing to pay more.

Sara walked down to the bookstore's basement and found a seat in the fourth row. The reading was scheduled to start three minutes ago, and the crowd still wasn't one. It was the book's second and less spectacular New York event; at the first, there were projections of Jessica Kim's photographs as well as alcohol, a pensive rock band, and more attendees, including an honest-to-God movie star. Here she recognized a few seminotables: Archer's agent, a midlist novelist, and the lit blogger and podcaster Joshua Kehr. Gemma turned from the front row to see how things were filling in, waved at Sara, then at someone in the back. Sara waited a few seconds to turn her own head. She groaned internally when she spotted John, unexpected and unwelcome, looking like he'd woken up on the wrong side of the park bench. He didn't seem to take in her fiercest look of admonition. She had told him she was sorry, that their reunion wouldn't extend beyond the wedding party. This past week had provided a respite from his calls and texts, but maybe he'd only wanted to quiet the stage for his entrance as stalker.

A bookseller tapped the microphone, began announcements.

Karyn had made up her mind by the time she and Lucas got to the bookstore twenty-five minutes before the reading. Perhaps she had
made up her mind in Archer's apartment and had just needed an afternoon to reconcile her decision with her ideals. She wanted to whisper her answer in Archer's ear, but she couldn't find him and figured that would be imprudent anyway. She told Lucas she needed to call Maxwell, stepped outside to the narrow sidewalk, and spent a minute or so watching passersby. It was a good spot to feel bad about the decisions you'd made regarding sunglasses. She'd wait till spring to buy a new pair and enjoy for now the fruits of this afternoon's splurge: the unconscionably expensive Jason Wu purse, the dominatrix-like zippered boots she'd kept on that afternoon in the many-mirrored hotel room. Archer answered on the first ring. “Where are you?” he said.

“At the bookstore. Outside it.”

“I'm two blocks away.”

“Have a sec?” she said.

A stretched-out yes.

“I talked to my friend about that painting she wants to sell,” she said. The code had occurred to her only a minute ago; she hadn't quite worked it out. “She really appreciates your advice, but she says that since the painting has, you know, such sentimental value for her, she'd only want to let it go for five up front and another five in the event of an intermediary sale.”

A few heartbeats of silence.

“Archer?” She looked at the phone to see if the call had been dropped. “You still there?”

“. . . could work out,” he was saying. “Maybe if you don't mind carrying on as your friend's representative, we could meet over breakfast tomorrow, hash out a few last things.”

“Sure, that would be—”

He hung up, but only because he was standing next to her. “Nine o'clock at my place too early?”

“No.”

“I'm afraid you'll have to bring Lucas.”

“It'll be early for him,” she said, then felt bad for falling into step with Archer's dismissals.

“Okay, cuz, I'm gonna load up on water and tea.” He raised his hand to his face. “Cottonmouth before readings.”

Throughout the reading John stared at Archer with a knowing, mirror-tested smile—less a smile than a fractional upward curl restricted to the left side of his mouth. After a while it seemed to frazzle Archer; he shifted more, looked up less, and when he pretended to make engaging, Toastmasters eye contact, he was obviously looking over everyone's head. When the floor was opened for questions, John straightened Sara's manuscript by tapping it on his new
Second Stranger
hardcover. He looked around. He didn't want to be the first to speak.

The question-and-answer period opened with a repose during which Karyn was conscious of her own whiffling inhalations. “I could have read longer,” Archer joked. A titter, a cleared throat. Finally an arm near the front rose in an indecisive
L
: a general question about Archer's “process,” fielded warmly. Next a maundering speech whose interrogative component was thrown in at the end like a hungrily mumbled amen. Then a hand went up in the back. “John!” Archer said, and there was that weird, drawly bass—Karyn turned around—of Archer's thickly bearded former roommate.

“I guess I'm curious about process too,” John said, “but more about the editorial process.” It was the sort of voice, Karyn thought, that might have been salable in the era of radio suspense serials. “I
see that you thank a mess of people in the acknowledgments, editors and readers and what all, and I'm wondering how much influence those people wind up havin' on the end product.”

Archer looked at John with what seemed like confusion. “Probably not enough,” he said, gesturing toward humility. “I can be, oh, intractable, you might say. But, that said, I've benefited immeasurably from the sage advice and quiet corrections of all those people thanked in the acknowledgments. And many more who aren't. Thanked, I mean; the list could easily become infinite, influence coming as it will from all corners. I see that Josh Kehr is here—you're all familiar with
Dog-Eared
?” Archer nodded at a man across the aisle from Karyn. “For my money it's the best literary podcast in the English-speaking world. Josh and I were talking on the show about—what?—character and agency, Burke's pentad and all this, and I've no doubt that our talk will affect my writing, however slightly. So it's all, you know.”

“Well, it's interesting,” John said, “because one of the folks thanked in the acknowledgments is a mutual friend of ours, Sara Crennel, who's here tonight, and I recently had a chance to read one of her unpublished early stories—”

Sara, the assistant from the wedding, turned around. “What?”

“And it's kind of crazy how close the story is to a part of
The Second Stranger
,” John continued.

Sara: “How'd you get your hands on—”

“I'd love to just read a chunk of it, and maybe get your take, Archer, on the similarities.”

“No one cares about my juvenilia,” Sara said with an actorly laugh.

Josh Kehr said, “Let's hear it.”

“Those with a copy of the book handy might want to turn to page 112,” John said. He stood up, started to read:

For seven years we lived in a small city in southeastern Idaho. The singer Carole King lived on an estate a few hours from us,
and supposedly there was a white-supremacist compound in the nearby countryside as well. Much later I came to feel restive and unprotected in cars, like a just-bottled grasshopper, so it's hard for me now to see the fun in the Sunday drives we used to take, but I enjoyed them then, despite the backseat clamor, so loud with the windows rolled down that I couldn't hear the AM radio or my parents' conversation. My brother, in the backseat with me, listened to hair metal on his Walkman if he hadn't successfully lobbied—

“I really don't see what this is proving,” Sara said.

“It seems to be proving quite a lot,” said Kehr, holding open Archer's book. Karyn was following along too. The words were nearly identical.

“Yeah, I'm not sure this is really the place for whatever's going on here,” Archer said. “Comp lit.”

John loudly cleared his throat:

—lobbied to stay home.

One windy Sunday morning in midsummer we went looking for King's place, but our directions were speculative, our map illegible from Thermos rings.

In the book, the map was simply “out of date.” Karyn missed a sentence while noting that change and a few others. Sara tried unsuccessfully to interrupt John.

—leaking with now louder tinniness from his earphones, their foam covers mismatched because he'd lost one, stolen mine. I watched my father's face reveal more frustration as he put on a show of hiding it. I don't know how sincere our quest was in the first place—I was only eleven and couldn't always tell when
my parents were joking—but I know we were sincerely lost. We tried to retrace our route but only got farther off course. We pulled over, my brother turned off his music, and my mother joked that, “knowing our luck” (but I've been very lucky), we would fatally drive our rickety imported car and its peeling
NO NUKES
bumper sticker into the white-supremacist compound. But the compound, my gravel-kicking brother pointed out, would have a daunting gate. He was humorless, my brother, and perhaps honestly afraid for his safety (he was adopted and less Aryan than the rest of us). My father tapped the bone behind his ear while my mother and I pinned the map's corners to the car's sloping hood. Without trying to, I got the heel of my palm to indent the hood and make a noise when the indentation popped out. Trying to, I did that two more times. “Stop!” my father said.