The Plot by Jean Korelitz (digital book reader txt) 📗

stand to get to know. Maybe when I went to your event in Seattle and I saw you, I thought, That’s a person I wouldn’t be miserable looking at across the breakfast table.”

“Breakfast table!” Jake grinned.

“And maybe when I got in touch with your publicist I wasn’t just thinking how we should be trying to get some real authors on the show. Maybe I was thinking, You know, it wouldn’t actually be horrible if I could get to meet Jake Bonner.”

“Well now. So it comes out.”

Even in the restaurant’s inadequate light he could see she was embarrassed.

“Look, it’s fine. I’m glad you did. I’m incredibly glad.”

Anna nodded, but she wasn’t looking him in the eye.

“And you’re positive this isn’t freaking you out at all. I acted unprofessionally because I had a crush on a famous author.”

He shrugged. “I once contrived to sit next to Peter Carey on the subway, because I had this fantasy that I could strike up a conversation with Australia’s greatest living novelist, and we’d start having weekly Sunday brunches together where we’d discuss the state of fiction, and then he’d give my novel-in-progress to his agent … you get the idea.”

“Well, did you?”

Jake took a sip of his wine. “Did I what?”

“Sit next to him.”

He nodded. “Yeah. But I couldn’t bring myself to say a word. And he got off like two stops later, anyway. No conversation, no brunch, no introduction to his agent. Just another fan on the subway. That could have been us, if you’d been as much of a wuss as I am. But you actually reached out for something you wanted. Just like you picked up that application, off the bench, and filled it out. I admire that.”

Anna said nothing. She seemed overwhelmed.

“Like your old professor said, nobody else gets to own your life, right?”

She laughed. “Nobody else gets to live your life.”

“It sounds like that pabulum we used to serve up in the MFA program. Only you can tell your singular story with your unique voice.”

“And that’s not true?”

“That is absolutely not true. Anyway, if you’re living your life, more power to you. I can’t think of anyone you owe a thing to. Your adoptive mom is gone. Your sister and aunt took themselves out of the equation, for now at least. You deserve every bit of happiness that’s coming to you.”

She reached across the table and took his hand. “I completely agree,” she said.

CRIB

BY JACOB FINCH BONNER

Macmillan, New York, 2017, pages 36–38

Her decision was: she wanted an abortion. It should have been straightforward, given the fact that her parents seemed to want an addition to their family about as little as she did. But there was an unfortunate complication, namely that her mother and father were Christians, and not the Jesus-is-love kind of Christians but the Hell-has-a-special-room-waiting-for-you kind. Also, the laws of the state of New York gave them veto power over Samantha (who was very much not a Christian of either kind, despite her hundreds of Sunday mornings in the pews of the Fellowship Tabernacle of Norwich) and over the blastocyst inches south of her navel. Did they regard said blastocyst as a beloved grandchild, or at least a beloved child of God? Samantha suspected not. She suspected, to the contrary, that the point here was to teach her some kind of “lesson” about the wages of her sin, something along the lines of In pain you shall bring forth children. It would all have been so much simpler if they’d just agreed to drive her to the clinic in Ithaca.

It hadn’t been part of the plan for her to drop out of school as well, but the pregnancy made that decision on its own. Samantha, it turned out, was not one of those girls who could carry on, attend the prom, throw the javelin into the ninth month, and generally power through every single quiz, test, assignment, and term paper, with only the occasional hall pass for the purpose of upchucking in the girls’ bathroom. No, she got diagnosed in month four with upwardly trending blood pressure, was ordered to bed for the sake of her baby’s health, and forced to summarily forfeit her position as a tenth grader without a single complaint from either parent. And not one of her teachers lifted a finger to help her finish out the year, either.

For the five brutal months that remained, she gestated uncomfortably—mainly horizontally in her childhood bed, an old cannonball four-poster that had been her mother’s father’s, or her father’s mother’s—and grudgingly accepted the food that her mother brought up to her room. She read whatever books were in the house—first her own books, then her mother’s from the Christian bookstore outside Oneonta—but already Samantha was noting a disruption in the hardware of her brain: sentences folding in on themselves, meaning draining away by the midpoint of a paragraph, as if even that part of her body had been scrambled by the unasked-for tenant. Both of her parents had given up on trying to ferret out the name of the impregnator; maybe they’d decided Samantha didn’t know. (How many boys did they think she’d slept with? All the boys, probably.) Her father wasn’t talking to her anymore, though it took Samantha some time to figure that out, given that he’d never been all that much of a talker. Her mother was still talking—or, more accurately, screaming—on a daily basis. Samantha wondered how she had the energy.

But at least there was going to be an end point to all of it, because this thing, this ordeal, was going to be finite. As in: it was going to end. And why?

She did not want to be a sixteen-year-old mother any more than she’d wanted to be a fifteen-year-old pregnant person, and here, at least, she dared to believe that her parents felt exactly the same. Therefore, in the fullness of time, the baby would be given up for adoption, and then she, the gestational