Parker My phone buzzed with an alert from Venmo: Selina Chan paid you $5.00. “Your next advance.” I stopped in the middle of the subway platform. Someone knocked into my shoulder, and I hurried into the shadow of an I beam. I knew I’d started this round, baiting her with the tip jar, but it still felt bizarre to see a private message from Selina Chan sitting in my palm. As I jogged up from the platform, filtering between a group of backpacked women speaking French, I pulled her up on social media. @Selina Chan: You can now leave tips on your favorite articles at the @City Magazine website. To clarify, these tips don’t drop into the writers’ pockets, but they’ll contribute to the magazine’s ongoing health. @Selina Chan: @John Dreyfus: Still developing my opinion. @Selina Chan: A list with some interesting choices (#4, #27) and a number of glaring omissions (Bolaño, Ward, Cusk). [LINK: The 50 Best Novels of the 2000 s] I shook my head, hoisting my backpack up on one shoulder as I emerged in the Flatiron District. Had any non-robot in the history of social media ever sounded so aggressively unavailable? Her posts were so removed, so distant, as though even her own feelings were items that she had to reach into a glass case to access. But I knew better. She might have liked to pretend she was above the rest of us mortals, but I’d caught her in the bar, staring into the book she was reading as though it exerted a gravitational pull on her. In that moment she’d been present, immediate, reachable.
An email had arrived while I’d been underground. I paused on Fifth Avenue to read, loitering by the window of a flagship clothing store, where dozens of spidery mannequins were drowning in their expensive coats. To: parkernavarroauthor@gmail. com From: brian. falwell.33@thebaynow. com Subject: Blast from the past Hi Parker, How are you? I’m not sure if you remember me, but we went to Jefferson together. I was pretty good friends with Tyler Pressman, and if I’m remembering right, you and I bumped into each other a few times when he had those astronomy parties senior year, haha. I’m emailing because I’ve joined the editorial team of The Bay Now, a newish arts and culture magazine based in South SF. Obviously, we’ve all been following your feud with Selina Chan, and I watched the livestream of that festival on Saturday. I could just see the story there! I’m champing at the bit here to do a profile. I’m sure you have lots of demands on your time, but it’d be an honor to have you in our pages! Take care, and say hey to Tyler for me, Brian I lowered my phone and watched a passing biker nearly mow down a couple of tourists, who leaped coltishly back onto the sidewalk while he yelled obscenities over his shoulder. None of this really registered with me. I did remember Brian, an easygoing eighteen-year-old with a holographic- stickered longboard and an infectious laugh. In the past couple of weeks, the feud’s exposure had died down, but that petition about the short story was still doing the rounds among Selina Chan’s fan club, and Bill was sending me a digest of media requests every few days. I couldn’t answer everything that came in,
but turning down someone I knew from high school seemed callous. In any case, there was no time to respond now—I’d be late to meet my editor. I starred the email for later and turned from the sunlit avenue onto a narrow street, dim even though it was high noon, with blue shadows strafing down the buildings from the scaffolding. Halfway down the block I shouldered into a Greek restaurant decked with iron café tables, where live vines spiraled around rafters painted sunrise yellow. The stone ceiling was curved, cavelike, and mosaics underfoot surged into curling cobalt waves. “Parker!” I saw a hand waving from the window and hurried over, my mouth immediately dry. I hadn’t seen Lauren since These Extraordinary Times had bombed. She gave the impression of a sculpture someone had built out of wire and silk thread: a delicate, almost fragile person whose fine silver hair formed a thin layer over her skull. She treated me to a brief, incongruously brutal handshake. “You’re early.” “Yes, sorry, hope that’s okay.” “Of course it is. Sit, sit ... I’m happy to see you,” she said to her menu, peering through her reading glasses at the appetizers. “Before we toast to your successes, I do have a question about current events. I assume you’ve been following the petition that’s been circulating online?” “Definitely, yeah. Bill and I are ke eping an eye on it.” “And what do you think?” Lauren’s eyes were still roving over the soups. I realized what her studiously casual attitude meant: Coronation was afraid that I was about to get taken to court. I laughed. “No. It’s—nothing’s going to happen. Selina Chan isn’t going to sue me.” Lauren’s eyes flicked up. “You don’t think she has it in her, hmm?” “That’s not it. Just—” I struggled for words. “It’s not her style. She
already wrote that letter to the editor. She’s not going to do anything else.” I paused. I didn’t know how to explain why, having had exactly two blistering conversations with Selina, I somehow knew that she was about as likely to sue me as she was to make a post saying, Parker Navarro wounded my tender feelings! “Trust me,” I said. “The petition’s dead in the water. She’s not interested.” Lauren seemed satisfied. “Well, the team will be happy to hear it.” With a casual wave of her hand she summoned our waiter, who jotted down Lauren’s lemonade, my coffee, and an olive tapenade. Then she set down her menu and regarded me directly. “Parker, I have to apologize again for what happened at the festival. What an unfortunate blip.” “Right. Um—yeah, it wasn’t ideal.” “We were all relieved to hear that the panel went well, in any case.” Making my napkin into incoherent origami in my lap, I tried to think of a diplomatic answer. Kristen had called the change “last-minute,” but how last-minute could it have been, with Selina’s and Christian’s names printed in the festival programs? Couldn’t my team have sent an email that morning, giving me the opportunity to cancel before I was standing twenty feet from the one person on earth who most despised me? Lauren went on. “I heard there was a line down the aisle for your signing. Isn’t that right?” “I ... Yeah. That was great.” I heard the gentle reminder in her words, that Saturday had been a positive for the book, but the idea only made me unhappier. Just for the purpose of racking up a few more preorders, Coronation had thrown me to the wolves with no pr eparation. I was lucky that the wolf in question hadn’t made a point of ripping me to pieces.
It was de eply d epressing, the idea that Selina Chan had acted more considerately on Saturday than the people who were supposed to be in my corner. I was just mustering up the nerve to say something along these lines when Lauren said, “Parker, I know the past month and a half has been unusual, but your willingness not to back away from the spotlight really has changed the direction for High and Dry. I have some news to that end, actually.” “You do?” I hesitated. “What is it?” “We heard yesterday that Anna Delaney wants High and Dry for her February book club. They’d like you to sign eleven thousand tip-ins for a special edition.” Shock whited out my conflicted feelings. “Oh my God. Eleven thousand—are you serious?” “I am. I hope you don’t mind that we acc epted on your behalf. I’m sure your hand will recover.” I let out a stuttering laugh. “They can pulverize my hand with a hammer if they’re selling eleven thousand copies of the book.” “That’s the spirit. I think.” The waitress returned with our drinks, and Lauren clinked her lemonade against my coffee. “Cheers, Parker. Well deserved.” “Cheers, yeah. I don’t know what to say. This is ... Wow.” “Wow is right. And while we’re talking business—I wanted to discuss something else.” Lauren slid a paperback across the table, an advance copy with cover art of a decaying cottage door. HOUSE HEARTH HOME, read the title, and at the bottom: from the author of Our Gods Our Heavens JULIETTE LIAO
I grabbed up the book. “Wait, thank you. I love Juliette Liao.” She wasn’t the most famous author in the world, but Our Gods Our Heavens had been the best book I’d read in its release year, and I’d eaten up the half dozen books on her backlist with increasing outrage. Why hadn’t this woman been selling millions of copies since the 1990 s? Why weren’t prize committees bowing at her feet? “You’re a fan, then,” said Lauren. “Huge fan.” “I’m glad to hear that, because I wanted to ask a favor. Juliette was supposed to do a launch event with Christian Gatehead just before Christmas, but Christian’s received bad news about his mother’s health. He’s leaving the city and doesn’t expect to return until January.” Lauren folded her arms on the table. “We’d love you to st ep in. I thought this might be a welcome change of pace from the publicity around the City feud.” “Oh, man,” I muttered. If she was trying to bribe me into forgetting any hard feelings over the festival, she was doing a great job. “What date is the event?” “Juliette is very particular about her publicity. The only date she gave us was December twenty-third.” The waitress returned at that moment, giving me time to mull. My siblings and I were supposed to spend Christmas in Daly City with our mother, then New Year’s in Manila with our father and extended family. No matter how much planning we poured into the holiday trips, they always wound up a mess. Christi’s kids complicated every meal, and Kevin always brought along some terrible new girlfriend, and Elena always brought along a more tolerable but weirdly cod ependent new girlfriend, and Justin and his wife inevitably fought on the first day, which irritated everyone else into a spiral.
This was always the time of year I felt happiest to be single. I’d spent two Christmases with my last serious girlfriend, and after the chaos of every event, I’d wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed together in gentle, mutual silence. But Kate—a resident in internal medicine, maybe overused to diagnosis and treatment—had wanted to pry out every discomfort of every day, as though reliving these things in minute detail would improve them. “I understand if you have travel plans,” said Lauren. “I do. I’m supposed to fly to San Francisco on the twenty-first.” “Well, if you were to fly out on the twenty-fourth, Coronation would pick up the flight.” “Right, okay,” I said, not thinking of the financials. I was envisioning the dining room in my mom’s apartment on December 21, crammed with people, and the tempers that might spike without me there, because I had specific methods for defusing Justin’s more tasteless jokes, and Elena opened up to me in ways she didn’t with our siblings, and I was the only one who still listened to Mom’s grievances about Dad without cutting her off midsentence. It felt selfish how badly I wanted to do this event. I imagined sitting at the front of a silent bookstore across from one of my heroes, able to ask her every question I’d ever wanted to ask. I thought, weirdly, of Selina Chan at the convention panel, straight- backed and unmoved. “Yeah,” I said before I could stop myself. “I’ll do it.” That afternoon, energized, I began to write a new novel. With the book club news fizzing like champagne in the back of my mind, it was beginning to feel real: that High and Dry could become an honest-to-God bestseller, that Lauren might buy another book from me after all. I dropped into the seat by my living room window, opened a fresh journal, and began. This was an idea I’d been turning
over for a while, but the specifics had finally snapped into focus. A miniaturist, a woman in her sixties, lives in a remote Canadian village. A young man seeks her out, begging to learn her art. He comes from artistic fame in another country, but not the United States—an Indian actor, maybe? A Brazilian pop singer? But the miniaturist has no interest in his fame and assigns him a series of exasperating, apparently meaningless tasks as training in her art. This psychically disturbs something in him, and he begins to experience visions of his life as a baby while growing into a promising student. Late in the book he spends a full year perfecting a sculpture the size of his thumbnail. But the miniaturist’s health begins to fail. The student takes care of her. In the end, though, he’s the one to die, having tried to cross a forest in winter to get medical help for her. But he has made this one tiny immaculate work of art. I surfaced from the outline and the six pages I’d written in a kind of delicious fever. And? said a low, serious, familiar voice in my mind. What’s the purpose of all this? I shook the thought away, annoyed, and returned to the question of the student’s origins. I liked the idea of the Brazilian pop star—but that meant this would be my third novel that didn’t center on Asian characters. These Extraordinary Times had been about a white suburban family in the 1980 s, though of course that hadn’t saved the book from being declared “woke.” I assumed I would write a project starring Asian characters someday. But it did strike me as funny that, had I decided to write a novel set in the Philippines, I would be taken as some voice of authority on the subject, when I’d spent under three months there, cumulatively. As for writing something centered on a Filipino American, maybe I just didn’t like the idea
that anyone might read one of my characters and picture that person with my face. I moved on to a less fraught subheading, jotting down ideas for the meaningless tasks the student could undertake. He’d sit in silence for days on end. He’d categorize pine needles. The miniaturist would have him assemble, then disassemble, an old wooden puzzle in her attic until he was teetering on the edge of sanity. And the purpose? Selina Chan’s voice insisted. I snapped the notebook shut, feeling disoriented. I’d gone too de ep with this fight, let her cre ep too far into me. I couldn’t let her infect my work. Anyway, the conc ept did have a purpose: to shred the idea that people should seek out lives of consequence and permanence; to show the seductive shape of idolatry, then whack it open like a piñata. And has anything to that end happened in your first six pages? said the voice. With something like dread I flipped open the notebook and reread what I’d written. No, was the answer. In the first six pages, the celebrity had arrived at the miniaturist’s house, and as he’d stood on her doorst ep, I’d delved into recent time, and I’d shown his journey on a series of delayed trains. He’d made observations on those trains: about the scenery, about his fellow passengers, about the tan lines on his wrists. Did I need the trains? My pen hung suspended over the page as frustration built in me, water surging against a dam. Did this change even have anything to do with my own tastes? Was I seriously going to spend my one wild and precious life trying to satisfy an imaginary version of Selina Chan?
Did I want to get this right, or did I just want to es cape criticism? I threw down the pen and scrubbed my hands through my hair. I wished I could dismiss her reviews, the way Arthur and Bill and everybody else in my life had, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t dismiss her. She wasn’t a crank with a cruel streak or a click-mining provocateur. She was something else, something that penetrated, something that saw too much. She isn’t changing me, I told myself. I could e volve artistically on my own. If I made this change, it would be because of something original to me, untouched by her. I tried to believe this. I marked black slashes across four straight pages and slammed the notebook shut.