“Yeah, literary fiction generally. Contemporary fiction more specifically,” I say, excitement in my voice now. I’m going to enjoy telling Chris tonight that I went to Forewords and no one knew who I was. It’ll probably piss him off, but I don’t care. I’ll be reading while he’s working out his frustration on his Peloton bike.
“I have just the thing,” the girl says. She’s clearly delighted to have a customer who wants her recommendation.
When she rushes off, my nerves wind up once more. The horrible thought hits me—what if she returns, excited to pitch me the book she’s chosen, and she’s holding Only Once? I don’t know what I’d say. The couple seconds I have right now aren’t enough for me to come up with even the first draft of how I could extricate myself from the conversation.
Instead, it’s worse.
“Try this.” The clerk thrusts the hardcover she’s chosen toward me. “It came out last week. I read it in, like, two days.”
Under the one-word title, Refraction, imposed over moody black-and-white photography, I read the name. Nathan Van Huysen. I look to where she got the book from, and I don’t know how I didn’t notice when I walked in. The cardboard display near the front of the store holds rows of copies, waiting patiently for customers, which tells me two things: high publisher expenditure, and it’s not selling.
His name hits me the way it does every time I see it. In New York Times reviews, in the profiles I try to keep out of my browser history—never with much success. The first is wishing those fifteen letters meant nothing to me, weren’t intertwined with my life in ways I’ll never untangle.
Underneath the wishing, I find harder, flintier feelings. Resentment, even hatred. No regret, except regretting ever going to the upstate New York writers’ workshop where I met Nathan Van Huysen.
I was fresh out of college. When I graduated from the University of Virginia and into the job I’d found fetching coffee and making copies in a publishing house, I felt like my life hadn’t really started. I’d enjoyed college, enjoyed the rush I got learning whatever I found genuinely interesting, no matter the subject—fungal plant structures, behavioral economics, the funeral practices of the Greco-Roman world. I just knew I wouldn’t be who I wanted to be until I wrote and published. Then I went upstate and found Nathan, and he found me.
I remember walking out of the welcome dinner, hugging my coat to my collar in the cold, and finding him waiting for me. We’d met earlier in the day, and his eyes lit up when he caught me leaving the restaurant. We introduced ourselves in more depth. He mentioned he was engaged—I hadn’t asked. I was single—I didn’t volunteer the information. It wasn’t like that between us. While we walked out to Susquehanna River Bridge in the night wind, we ended up exchanging favorite verses of poetry, reading them from online on our phones. We were friends.
For the whole lot of good it did us.
When I take the copy of Refraction, the clerk’s voice drops conspiratorially. “It’s not as good as Only Once. But I love Nathan Van Huysen’s prose.”
I don’t reply, not wanting to say out loud his prose was the first thing I noticed about him. Even at twenty-two, he wrote with influences fused perfectly into his own style, like every English course he’d ever taken—and Nathan had taken quite a few—was flowing out of his fingertips. It made me feel the things writers love to feel. Inspired, and jealous.
In my silence, the clerk’s expression changes. “Wait,” she continues, “you have read Only Once, haven’t you?”
“Um,” I say, struggling with how to reply. Why is conversation way easier on the page?
“If you haven’t”—she starts toward the bestseller shelf to fetch the paperback. I know what’ll happen when she catches sight of the back cover. Under the embarrassingly long list of starred reviews, she’ll see the author photos. Nathan’s blue eyes beneath the immaculate black waves of his hair, the dimple he only trots out for promotional photos and press tours. Then, next to him, she’ll find his coauthor, Katrina Freeling. Young woman, sharp shoulders, round features, full eyebrows she honestly loves. Professionally done makeup, dark brown hair pressed and polished, nothing like it looks when she steps out of the shower or she’s reading on the patio on sweaty summer days.
The differences won’t matter. The bookseller will recognize the woman right in front of her.
My capacity for speech finally returns. “No, I’ve read it,” I manage.