I’m Nobody. Who Are You?
Evan Parker was dead: to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that. Jake had seen the death notice three years earlier. He had even perused an online memorial page, which, though not terribly well populated, did contain the reminiscences of a dozen people who’d known Parker, and they, certainly, seemed to be under the impression that he was dead. It was a simple matter to find that page again, and he wasn’t at all surprised to see that there had been no additional entries to the memorial since his last visit:
Evan and I grew up together in Rutland. We did baseball and wrestling together. He was a real natural leader and always kept the teams spirits up. Knew he’d had his struggles in the past, but thought he was doing really well. So sorry to hear about what happened.
Took classes with Evan at RCC. Such a cool dude. Can’t believe this. RIP man.
I grew up in the same town as Evan’s family. These poor people had the worst luck.
I remember Evan when he played baseball for West Rutland. Never knew him personally but a great first baseman. Really sorry he had such demons.
Bye Evan, I’ll miss you. RIP.
Met Evan in our MFA program up in Ripley. Super talented writer, great guy. Shocked that this happened to him.
Please accept my condolences for your loss, all family and friends of the deceased. May his memory be a blessing.
But there seemed not to be any close friends, and no reference to any spouse or significant other. What could Jake learn from this that he hadn’t already known?
That Evan Parker had played sports in high school. That he’d had “struggles” and “demons”—perhaps they were the same?—at least at one point and then, apparently, again. That something suggestive of “worst luck” attached to him and his family. That at least one Ripley student remembered Evan from the program. How well had this student known him? Well enough to have been told the same extraordinary plot Evan had told Jake? Well enough to now be concerning himself with the “theft” of his classmate’s unwritten novel?
The Ripley student who’d left the tribute had signed his first name only: Martin. That wasn’t particularly helpful as far as Jake’s memory went, but fortunately the 2013 Ripley MFA student roster was still on his computer, and he opened up the old spreadsheet. Ruth Steuben had likely never read a story or a poem in her life, but she’d been a great believer in orderly record keeping, and alongside each student’s address, phone number, and email address a column had been given over to their genre of concentration: either an F for fiction or a P for poetry.
The only Martin was a Martin Purcell of South Burlington, Vermont, and he had an F next to his name. Even after looking up Purcell’s Facebook profile and seeing multiple shots of his smiling face, however, Jake didn’t recognize the guy, which might have meant he’d been assigned to one of the other fiction writers on the faculty, but it might also mean he’d simply been unmemorable, perhaps even to a teacher genuinely interested in knowing his students (which had never been Jake, as he’d recognized about himself even then). Apart from Evan Parker, the only people he remembered from that particular group were the guy who’d wanted to correct Victor Hugo’s “mistakes” in a new version of Les Misérables and the woman who’d conjured the indelible non-word “honeymelons.” The rest, like the faces and names of fiction writers from his third teaching year, and his second, and his first, were gone.
He commenced a deep dive on Martin Purcell, during which he paused only to order and eat some chicken from RedFarm and exchange at least twenty text messages with Anna (mainly about Randy Johnson’s latest antics and a weekend trip she was planning to Port Townsend), and he learned that the guy was a high school teacher who brewed his own beer, supported the Red Sox, and had a pronounced interest in the classic California group, the Eagles. Purcell taught history and was married to a woman named Susie who seemed to be very engaged in local politics. He was a ridiculous over-sharer on Facebook, mostly about his beagle, Josephine, and his kids, but he posted nothing at all about any writing he might currently be doing, and he mentioned no writer friends nor any writers he was reading or had admired in the past. In fact, if it weren’t for the Ripley College reference in his educational background you’d never know from Facebook that Martin Purcell even read fiction, let alone aspired to write it.
Purcell had a heart-sinking 438 Facebook friends. Who among them might be people he’d crossed paths with at the Ripley Symposia’s low-residency Master of Fine Arts Program in 2012 or 2013? Jake went back to Ruth Steuben’s spreadsheet and cross-referenced half a dozen names, then he started down those Ripley rabbit holes. But he had no idea what he was looking for, really.
Julian Zigler, attorney in West Hartford, who mainly did real estate and worked at a firm with sixty grinning attorneys, overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly white. Completely unfamiliar face.
Eric Jin-Jay Chang, resident in hematology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Paul Brubacker, “scribbler” of Billings, Montana. (The Victor Hugo guy!)
Pat d’Arcy, artist from Baltimore, another face Jake could have sworn he’d never seen before. Six weeks ago, Pat d’Arcy had published a very short story on a flash fiction website called Partitions. One of the many conveyances of congratulations was from Martin Purcell:
Pat! Awesome story! I’m so proud of you! Have you posted on the Symposia page?
The Symposia page.
It turned out to be an unofficial alumni page, through which half a dozen years’ worth of low-residency graduates had been sharing work and information and gossip since 2010. Jake flew back and back through the posts: poetry contests, news of an encouraging rejection from the West Texas Literary Review, an announcement of a first novel’s acceptance by a hybrid publisher in Boston, wedding photos, a reunion of 2011 poets in Brattleboro, a reading at an art gallery in Lewiston, Maine. Then, in October of 2013, the name “Evan” began to pop up in the messages.
Only “Evan.” Of course. Jake supposed this was why the alumni page hadn’t appeared in his initial “Evan Parker” searches. Naturally, the Evan in question would only require his first name, at least to anyone and everyone who’d known him. Evan, the triumphant rescuer of the kidnapped bottle opener. Evan, the guy who sat at the seminar table with his arms tightly folded across his chest. Everyone would know an asshole like that.
Guys, I can’t believe this. Evan died last Monday. Really sorry to have to share.
(This, it was hardly surprising, had been posted by Martin Purcell, Ripley 2011–2012.)
Oh my god! What?
Fuck!
Holy shit that’s so awful. What do you know Martin?
We were supposed to meet up at his tavern last Sunday, I was coming down from Burlington. Then he didn’t text me back. I figured he blew me off or forgot or something. Few days later I called him and I got a disconnect notice. I just had a bad feeling. So I Googled and it came right up. I knew he’d had some problems in the past, but Evan had been sober for a while.
Oh man, that poor guy.
That’s my third friend to overdose! I mean, when are they going to call it what it is? AN EPIDEMIC.
Well, thought Jake. This certainly confirmed his assumption about what “unexpectedly,” “struggles,” and “demons” signified.
Jake’s phone buzzed.
Crab Pot Seattle, Anna had written. There was a photo of a tangle of crab legs and cut-up ears of corn. Beyond that: a window, a harbor.
Jake went back to his laptop and googled the words “Evan+Parker+tavern,” and a story from the Rutland Herald came up: Parker Tavern, a not-too-classy-looking spot on State Street in Rutland, was under new ownership following the death of its longtime owner, Evan Parker of West Rutland. Jake stared at the building, a run-down Victorian, the kind you’d find on most major streets in most New England towns. It had once probably been someone’s lovely home, but now it had a green neon PARKER TAVERN FOOD AND LIQUOR over the front door, and what looked like a hand-painted sign announcing Happy Hour 3–6.
On his phone, the single word: Hello?
Jake wrote back: Yum.
Enough for two, she wrote immediately.
In the Rutland Herald story the new owners, Jerry and Donna Hastings of West Rutland, hoped to preserve the bar’s traditional interior, eclectic draft selection, and, above all, warm and welcoming ambiance as a meeting place for the community and visitors alike. When asked about their decision to retain “Parker Tavern” as the bar’s name, Jerry Hastings answered that it was out of respect: the late owner’s family went back five generations in central Vermont, and before his tragic and untimely death Evan Parker had worked for years to make the tavern the success it was.
Okay then! Anna texted. Obviously not feeling chatty at the moment. No worries! Or maybe you’re communing with your muse.
He picked up his phone again. No such thing as the muse. No such thing as “inspiration.” It’s all deeply unspiritual.
Oh? What happened to “everybody has a unique voice and a story only they can tell”?
It’s gone to live with the Yeti and the Sasquatch and the Loch Ness Monster in Atlantis. But I actually am working right now. Can we talk later? I’ll bring the Merlot.
How will you know which one?
I’ll ask you. Of course.
He went back to Ruth Steuben’s spreadsheet for Martin Purcell’s email address, opened up Gmail, and wrote:
Hi Martin, this is Jake Bonner, from the Ripley program. Sorry to email you out of the blue, but wondered if I could give you a call about something? Let me know when might be a good time to chat, or feel free to phone me whenever you like. Very best to you, Jake.
And he added his phone number.
The dude called immediately.
“Oh wow,” he said as soon as Jake answered. “I can’t believe you emailed me. This isn’t some kind of Ripley fundraising thing, is it? Because I can’t right now.”
“No, no,” Jake said. “Nothing like that. Look, we’ve probably met, but I don’t have my Ripley files with me so I’m not sure if you were in my class or not.”
“I wish I was in your class. That guy I got assigned to, all he wanted us to do was write about place. Place, place, place. Like, every blade of grass had to have its own backstory. That was his thing.”
He had to be talking about Bruce O’Reilly, the retired Colby professor and profoundly Maine-centric novelist with whom Jake had had an annual beer at The Ripley Inn. Jake hadn’t thought about Bruce O’Reilly in years.
“That’s too bad. It’s better if they move students around. Then everyone gets to work with everyone.”
It had also been years since he’d given any thought at all to the institutionalized teaching of creative writing. He hadn’t missed it.
“I have to tell you, I loved your book. Man, that twist, I was like, holy crap.”
No special significance to “that twist,” Jake noted with intense relief. Certainly no: And I’ve got a pretty good idea where that came from.
“Well, that’s kind of you to say. But the reason I got in touch, I just heard that a student of mine passed away. And I saw your post on that Ripley Facebook page. So I thought—”
“Evan, you’re talking about. Right?” said Martin Purcell.
“Yes. Evan Parker. He was my student.”
“Oh, I know.” All the way up in northern Vermont Jake could hear Martin Purcell chuckle. “I’m sorry to say, not your fan, though. But I wouldn’t take that too personally. Evan didn’t think anyone at Ripley was good enough to be his teacher.”
Jake took a moment to run through this sentence slowly. “I see,” he said.
“I could tell within an hour or two, just that first night of the residency, Evan wasn’t going to get much out of the program. If you’re going to learn something, you need to have curiosity about it. He didn’t have that. But he was still a cool guy to hang around with. Lot of charm. Lot of fun.”
“And you kept in touch with him, obviously.”
“Oh yeah. Sometimes he came up to Burlington, for a concert or something. We went to the Eagles together. I think he came up for Foo Fighters, too. And sometimes I drove down. He had a tavern down in Rutland, you know.”
“Well, I don’t really know. Would you mind telling me a little bit more? I just feel so badly I’m only hearing about this now. I would have written to his family when it happened.”
“Hey, would you give me a second?” said Martin Purcell. “Let me just tell my wife I’m on a call. I’ll be right back.”
Jake waited. “I hope I’m not taking you away from anything important,” he said, when Purcell returned.
“Not at all. I said I’ve got a famous novelist on the phone. That kind of trumps talking to our fifteen-year-old about the party we don’t want her going to.” He stopped to laugh at his own wit. Jake forced himself to join in.
“So, do you know anything about Evan’s family? I suppose it’s too late for a condolence note.”
“Well, even if it’s not, I don’t know who you’d send it to. His parents died a long time ago. He had a sister who also passed, before he did.” He paused. “Hey, I’m sorry if this sounds rude, but I never got the impression you two had much of a … rapport. I’m a teacher, myself, so I’m sympathetic to anyone who has to deal with a difficult student. I wouldn’t have wanted to be Evan’s teacher. Every class has that person who slouches in his chair and just glares at you, like, Who the fuck do you think you are?”
“And What makes you think you have a damn thing you can teach me?”
“Exactly.”
Jake had been jotting down notes: parents, sister—deceased.
He knew all that from the obituary.
“Yeah, that was definitely Evan in that particular class. But I was used to having an Evan. My first year of teaching, my answer to ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ would have been ‘I’m nobody. Who are you?’”
He could hear Martin laugh. “Dickinson.”
“Yeah. And I’d have been out of the room.”
“Crying in the bathroom.”
“Well.” Jake frowned.
“I meant me. Crying in the bathroom. First year as a student teacher. You have to toughen up. But most of those kids, they’re just marshmallows, really. And seriously miserable, in their own lives. Sometimes they’re the ones you worry about most of all, because they have no sense of themselves, no confidence at all. But that wasn’t Evan. I’ve seen plenty of false bravado—that wasn’t Evan either. He had absolute faith in his ability to write a great book. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say he thought writing a great book wasn’t all that hard, and why shouldn’t he be able to do it? Most of us weren’t like that.”
Here Jake noted a cue—endemic among writers—to ask about Martin’s own work.
“I haven’t made much progress since finishing the program, to be honest.”
“Yes. Every day’s a challenge.”
“You seem to be doing okay,” Martin said. There was an edge to that.
“Not with my book in progress.”
He was surprised to hear himself say it. He was surprised that he’d given Martin Purcell of Burlington, Vermont, a complete stranger, more of a suggestion of his vulnerability than he’d given his own editor or agent.
“Well, sorry to hear that.”
“No it’s okay, just need to push through. Hey, do you know where Evan was with his own book? Did he get much done after the residency? He was just at the start, I think. At least the pages I saw.”
Martin said nothing, for the longest seconds of Jake’s life. Finally, he apologized. “I’m just trying to remember if he ever talked about that. I don’t think he ever told me how it was going. But if he was using again, and it looks like he was, I really doubt he was sitting down at his desk and turning out pages.”
“Well, how many pages do you think he had?”
Again, that uncomfortable pause.
“Were you thinking of doing something for him? I mean, for his work? Because that’s incredibly kind of you. Especially since he wasn’t exactly a fawning acolyte, if you know what I mean.”
Jake took a breath. He was not, of course, entitled to the approbation, but he supposed he’d better go with it.
“I just thought, you know, maybe there’s a completed story I could send somewhere. You don’t have any pages, yourself, I suppose.”
“No. But you know, I wouldn’t say we’re talking about Nabokov, here, leaving behind an unfinished novel. I think you can consign the unwritten fiction of Evan Parker to history without too much guilt.”
“I’m sorry?” Jake gasped.
“As his teacher.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“Because I remember thinking—and I liked the guy—that he had to be pretty far off base the way he talked about this book. Like it was The Shining and The Grapes Of Wrath and Moby-Dick, all rolled into one, and what a huge success it was going to be. He did show me a couple of pages about this girl who hated her mother, or maybe it was the mother who hated her, and they were okay, but, you know, it wasn’t exactly Gone Girl. I just kind of looked at him, like, Yeah, dude, whatever. I don’t know, I just thought he was kind of ridiculously full of himself. But you’ve probably come across a lot of people like that. Man,” said Martin Purcell, “I sound like an asshole. And I liked the guy. It’s really decent of you to want to help him.”
“I just wanted to do something good,” Jake said, deflecting as best he could. “And since there isn’t any family…”
“Well, maybe a niece. I think I read about her in the obituary.”
Me, too, Jake didn’t say. In fact, he hadn’t learned a single thing from Martin Purcell that hadn’t been in that bare-bones obituary.
“Okay,” Jake said. “Look, thanks for talking to me.”
“Hey! Thanks for calling. And…”
“What?” said Jake.
“Well, I’m going to kick myself in exactly five minutes if I don’t ask you this, but…”
“What is it?” said Jake, who knew perfectly well.
“I was wondering, I know you’re busy. But would you be willing to look at some of my stuff? I’d love to have your honest opinion. It would mean so much to me.”
Jake closed his eyes. “Of course,” he said.
CRIB
Macmillan, New York, 2017, pages 23–25
They wanted to know Who was it? of course. Apparently even more than What the fuck did she think she was doing? and obviously far more than How had they failed her as parents? Whatever the details, this clearly was not their fault, and it wasn’t going to be their problem. But who it was wasn’t information Samantha felt like parting with, so her choices were, one, to withhold or, two, to lie outright. Lying, as a general principle, didn’t matter to her one way or the other, but the issue with lying, at least about this particular thing, was that there were tests—you’d have to never have watched Jerry Springer not to know about the tests—and anyone she named (that is, anyone else she named) could eventually be shown not to be the person, which would in turn have revealed the lie and initiated the whole sequence again: Who was it?
So she went with the withholding.
“Look, it’s not important.”
“Our fifteen-year-old daughter’s pregnant and it’s not important who got her that way.”
Pretty much, Samantha thought.
“Like you said, it’s my problem.”
“Yeah, it is,” said her father. He didn’t seem as angry as her mother. He was more his customary shut down.
“So what’s the plan?” said her mother. “They been telling us for years how smart you are. And you go and do this.”
She couldn’t look at their blasted faces, so she went upstairs and slammed her bedroom door behind her, throwing her book bag on the floor next to the old desk. Her room was in the back, overlooking the slope down to Porter Creek, which was narrow and rocky through this patch of the woods and wide and rocky to the north and the south. The house was old, more than a hundred years. It had been the house of her father and his parents, and before that, the house of her great-grandparents. She guessed that meant it was supposed to be hers one day, but that had never mattered to her before and it didn’t matter now, since she wasn’t going to live here a minute longer than necessary. That—in point of fact—had always been the plan and it was still the plan. Just as soon as she sorted out her problem, finished up her credits, and got her scholarship to college.
Who it was was a person named Daniel Weybridge, who was also none other than her mother’s boss at the College Inn and in fact the proprietor of the College Inn, like his father before him, because the place was Family run for three generations!—it said so on the inn’s sign, its stationery, even on the paper coasters left in every room. Daniel Weybridge was married and the father of three bouncing boys, who would certainly be the next proprietors of the College Inn. He’d also had a vasectomy, or so he’d promised, the lying shit. No, she hadn’t told him she was pregnant, and she wasn’t going to. He didn’t deserve to know.
The story with Daniel Weybridge was that he’d been after her for at least a year to her knowledge, and probably longer than that, since before she’d been paying attention. Any number of times she’d skittered past him in a corridor of the inn, or in one of the hallways at the high school when he turned up to watch one of the three precious sons play whatever sport they were playing, and she’d felt the heat of him as they passed each other, and sensed the fixing of his attention on her fifteen-year-old self as they crossed paths. Of course he had been far too stealthy to make an outright grab. He led with attention, then moved on to compliments and little hints of genuine grown-up admiration: Samantha had skipped a grade—wasn’t that remarkable! Samantha had won some prize, he’d heard—what a smart girl, destined to go far! It pained her to admit that these had not been ineffective tactics. Daniel Weybridge, after all, was what passed for a sophisticate in her world. For one thing, he’d gone to the hotel school at Cornell, which was an Ivy League, and he read the newspapers from the city, not just the Utica Observer-Dispatch. Once, in the hotel lobby as she was waiting for her mother to finish up, the two of them had a surprisingly nuanced conversation about The Scarlet Letter, which Samantha was reading for eighth-grade English, and Daniel Weybridge had made a point that actually found its way into her paper. A paper for which, fittingly, she had received an A.
So when it dawned on her, as it eventually did, that there was a longer game being played here, and her mother’s boss was the one playing it, Samantha was a little more surprised than she should have been. Then she took a fresh look at things herself.
By then she was a tenth grader, though a full year younger than the next youngest in her grade. Most of her classmates—all of the boys, if you believed them, except maybe the shyest and most backward—were busy deflowering most of the girls, and if you didn’t count the trashed reputations of those two young ladies who’d already left school, nobody seemed especially exercised about it. Moments like these had a way of bringing the age difference into sharper focus, and though Samantha had been more than happy to skip that grade back in sixth she didn’t especially enjoy the feeling of being younger than everyone else. Besides, there was nothing especially meaningful—let alone romantic—about the act in question, just as there was nothing especially obscure about what Daniel Weybridge wanted or how he was trying to get it.
Still, it had all been her decision. The stakes didn’t seem all that high. If she did nothing, Daniel Weybridge would probably continue flattering and flirting with her until the day she left home, and when that day came he’d simply shrug and turn his attention to the next daughter of the next housekeeper, or the housekeeper herself. But the more she thought about it the more she liked the idea. From a practical standpoint, she was repelled by every boy she went to school with, and Daniel Weybridge wasn’t unattractive. Also, he was a grown-up and a father several times over, which meant he’d obviously know what he was doing when it came to the act itself. Also, unlike the boys in her grade who were congenitally incapable of keeping their mouths shut, it went without saying that Daniel Weybridge wasn’t going to tell a soul. And finally, when she let him take her to the Fennimore Suite (not an hour after her own mother cleaned it), he made a point of telling her that he’d had a vasectomy after bouncing baby boy number three. Which sealed the deal, basically.
So maybe she really wasn’t as smart as everyone had always thought she was, let alone as smart as she’d always thought she was. She had no idea how to go about getting rid of her problem. She didn’t even know how much time she had left to figure something out. But she knew it wouldn’t be enough.