The Mythmakers

PART I

ONE

I read the story on one of those spring days in New York when the world seems to rise out of hibernation. Music trailed from cars, pop and rap and oldies mingling with the Doppler whoosh of traffic. An early geysering fire hydrant. The chatter of starlings. The pages of the short story were crisp like new bills and my heart sped up when I turned them.

It was Friday, and Hugh—a waft of peppermint as he kissed my temple; the click of the front door—was at work. By the time I got up, sunlight flooded our tidy apartment. While I tend to leave half-finished books butterflied on the couch and deserted sweaters over the backs of chairs, Hugh is so fastidious that a stranger might imagine I lived in the apartment alone. Being there without him, as I often was those days, made the place take on a cinematic quality, as though I actually were that alternate version of myself: single, independent.

It was easy to slip into that fantasy, to trade the comfortable monotony of my relationship with Hugh for the solo artistic pleasures of a fellowship in Tokyo or a retreat on the Spanish coast. In college I used to picture our hypothetical life together with longing: the postcoital breakfasts in bed that have in fact happened; working together late into the night, he on his painting, I on a novel, which has not. Nearly six years out of school and two into cohabitation, I was prone to imagining us apart, so maybe by the time I boarded the Greyhound bus that summer I’d primed my brain for escape, the way tennis players visualize their backhands. I once read that the inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality is a hallmark of psychosis, but I think healthy people trick themselves into believing daydreams all the time.

Our apartment was on a quiet, tree-lined block on the south side of Prospect Park. Hugh paid most of the rent, because he made nearly three times as much as my salary at the magazine. The year before, a clothing conglomerate bought the start-up he worked for, and something blah blah equity, et cetera. When we passed brownstones with FOR SALE signs posted in what passes for a front yard in Brooklyn, he’d started looking up the asking price on his phone.

That past December, amid headlines about our country’s nuclear pissing contest with North Korea and a wave of sexual abuse allegations, my job at the magazine had changed. I was a decently paid staff writer straddling our print edition and the website, but the features director I’d been hired to assist soon after graduation still asked me to make his restaurant reservations, and the website had recently instituted a soul-sucking quota system—these were the primary subjects of what Hugh called my Hamlet lite monologues during which, wineglass in hand, I’d complain about how my job left me no time to work on anything important.

Just quit, Hugh would say, exasperated, but too much of my identity revolved around the title in my email signature, and giving up my paycheck—despite, or maybe especially because of Hugh’s implying he could cover my meager portion of the rent as long as I needed—was untenable. After much hand-wringing, a compromise: the magazine allowed me to trade my health insurance, more than half my salary, and the illusion of job security (Hugh, that January: Does anyone in magazines have job security in 2018?) for a contributing editor position, under contract. I had a reasonable annual word count to hit and the freedom to write whatever I wanted; if the magazine didn’t like the idea, I could take it elsewhere. By spring this arrangement had produced a profile of a mysterious playwright, which I’d put to bed a few weeks earlier. I was proud of the piece, but even I had to admit it wasn’t exactly the kind of ambitious reportage worth quitting a job for.

By the time I found the short story, I had been in search of a truly worthy idea for nearly four months. Embezzling philanthropists, reclusive painters, obsessive collectors; thus far nothing had panned out. I was supposed to be hunting for material that morning in late April, too. But there was a stack of magazines next to the front door, which was Hugh’s tacit threat of impending disposal. I often let them pile up without so much as cracking the covers. (To cancel the subscriptions would be to admit defeat.) Now, with my own work to do, they offered procrastination under the guise of research: reading the good work of others was work for me, too.

I relocated the stack to the coffee table and settled on the couch, where I thumbed through a New Yorker, a Vanity Fair, and then reached for the most recent issue of The Paris Review. Look, I imagined telling Hugh. I’m reading it. I scanned an interview with the novelist Charles Johnson and a few short stories. Words, words, words.

Then my eye hitched on a familiar byline. Martin Scott Keller. I felt a pang of fondness, as though a childhood friend had called my name down a crowded subway car. I met Martin at a book launch soon after moving to the city. I’d been out of place, too young for the party, until he plucked me out of the crowd. I hadn’t thought of him in ages. The story was called Such Are My Stars. I scrunched a pillow behind my neck and lay back to read.

Because the engines of our lives run on a fixed track, his story began, there is no use dwelling in the hypothetical past tense. What might have happened does not matter, and so for the girl and I to meet as we did, when we did, can only be called fate. I skimmed the story, distracted by my phone and the anxious sense that I was wasting time, and then came to this line: I was once again alone in the crowd when I realized I was holding, like a talisman from a dream, the girl’s silver rose.

I sat up and propped the journal on my knees. I had a hiccuping sensation in my throat, the same one I’d get before pitch meetings. What? I whispered, the syllable tapping off my teeth. I leaned down close to the page, as though to climb into it. It was the strangest thing. The story he’d written, this story I was reading, was about me.

To be clear, I don’t mean the story so captured my psyche it was as if it had been written about me, a sensation well known to anyone who loves reading fiction. I mean it was actually based on Martin’s and my evening at the New York Public Library six years earlier. I started again from the beginning.

His narrator is a married writer who meets a colleague’s teenage daughter at a literary salon, hosted by said colleague, and becomes infatuated. He goes home and gets in bed next to his wife, who refused to go to the party because of a petty fight, their backs to each other, a pair of confused parentheses. He considers waiting until the girl’s older, leaving his wife for her, and if the story had ended there it might have been almost hopeful. Instead, in the last paragraphs, the man begins fantasizing about the girl’s life without him in it. He will think of her forever, and she will not think of him at all.

He’d lifted certain details straight from reality. She is my Laura, my Nora, my Dark Lady of the Sonnets, he’d written. We’d talked about muses and their makers, about love preserved by literature. Here was the amused way he’d watched me, as though he knew me. He’d plucked the silver rose barrette quite literally from my own hair. As I read the story again I cycled through confusion, giddy excitement, nausea, pride, and eventually a creeping sense of ownership, though that might have come later. Vladimir Nabokov wrote Véra love poems soon after they met, which he published in a journal he knew she read; here was my own call across time and space. It was true that Martin had shifted our ages—I’d been twenty-one and he was in his seventies when we met that night at the Forty-Second Street branch—but the taboo transposition only added to the frisson. He described the girl as wiser than her age, more comfortable around adults than her peers. He wrote about the ambition that emanated from her. (From me!) It was as though I’d had part of an elusive tune stuck in my head for the last decade, and a car passed by with that very melody floating out through an open window, the radio host’s voice making its way back to me with a name, the answer I hadn’t realized I’d been looking for.

I sat back on the couch. I recalled Martin taught at a college upstate. I would track him down and pull up to his house unannounced, where he’d be sitting on a porch rocking chair with a novel in his hand. He’d glance up and his shoulders would loosen as if in a sigh. Ah. Here she is.

However. But. Alas.

I had not been a careful reader. I’d skipped the story’s introductory lines in favor of jumping into the narrative. It would’ve saved a few minutes of excitement, because when I searched his name two sharp dates appeared, a beginning and an end. He had died in January. The story was posthumous.

SIX YEARS EARLIER, before leaving my apartment for the reading, I nursed a Corona and surveyed myself in my roommate Georgia’s warped mirror. It was the middle of July: she had an air conditioner in her bedroom window, I did not. Georgia had invited me to the reading, but she was coming from her job uptown and so we’d planned to meet at the library. I wore a sleeveless dress I hoped projected an air of sophistication. Getting ready alone, I worried that its length was frumpy rather than refined, and spent half an hour manipulating my hair into slight variations on a dull theme. In the end, I clipped it back with a small, rose-shaped barrette, a long-ago gift from my mother. Georgia and I had only lived in Brooklyn for a month, and the subway remained an unpredictable and confusing experience—I was always working myself up on the platform about whether I’d find a space in front of the map, and once I was in the car I spent the ride craning my neck to check the station names through the window—so I left nearly an hour before I needed to.

The New York Public Library. Stone lions and Doric columns. By the time I met Georgia at the entrance I was more relaxed, having arrived early and killed time at an old boxing bar up the street. Next to Georgia’s bare face and wide-legged trousers, my dress was too considered, but not terrible. You are going to dazzle the literati tonight, she said. Think of this as your grand debut. Georgia, an assistant at Sotheby’s, loved networking and disapproved of how I’d spent our first weeks in the city. Through a friend of my mother’s, I’d gotten a job as an unauthorized Central Park tour guide, a desperate choice I pretended was purposeful—time to write, interesting encounters with strangers—but between my newfound freedom following four years of academia and the tequila-Tecate specials at our neighborhood dive, I hadn’t been getting much writing done. We linked elbows and made our way inside.

Regretfully, my enthusiasm for the event was engendered less by its literary promise and more by the prospect of meeting a future boyfriend. Georgia had started dating an editor almost immediately upon our move to the city, a serious man with a vested interest in his magazine’s softball team who left trimmings from, I hoped, his beard in our bathroom sink. He was the one who’d given her the tickets to the reading. I don’t know where he was that night, but I had the idea there might be others like him in attendance. I imagined falling in love under the iconic reading room ceiling, painted with clouds.

In reality, the event took place in a wood-paneled antechamber off a quiet hallway upstairs. We found two empty seats in the rows of folding chairs. Both the red-haired author who was launching her book and the blonde interviewing her wrote about the banal ebb and flow of life (babies, boyfriends), which they complained landed their novels in the Women’s Fiction section of the bookstore. Stories by men about anxiety and having sex with younger women do not get a special section, the red-haired author pointed out to an appreciative chuckle from the audience, they are called Literary Fiction.

Afterward we filed like schoolchildren into the adjoining room. Plastic party platters covered one table in pale imitation of a Dutch still life: marbled salami wheels and rosebuds of prosciutto, sliced cantaloupe, a few anemic bunches of grapes. At another table, a pair of boys around my age poured wine into rigid cups and ogled my friend.

I was used to Georgia overshadowing me; she is a person to whom eyes are always drawn in a crowded room. Because, for years, men have felt moved to say very stupid things to her, she has adopted a remote air that makes people want to impress her. We met off campus the fall of our freshman year, right after I’d watched her dance barefoot on the hood of a parked pickup truck, all legs; she needed a partner for beer pong. You’re fun, she said when I landed a shot with my eyes closed. Her parents had their names on the walls of two New York museums and an elevator that opened into their apartment. The private girls’ school she’d attended, her summers in Cape Cod, stood in stark contrast to my own childhood in the Colorado mountains, itself an idyll of ponderosa pines, ski lessons, and a main street flanked by pretty red-brick buildings, though I hadn’t yet learned to describe it as such and instead found it embarrassing and provincial. Georgia was the most glamorous person I’d ever met.

While Georgia wasn’t dancing on anything that night in the library, she was involved in a witty repartee with an interested stranger, the adult equivalent. I felt my smile calcifying as they discussed a museum show I hadn’t seen. Waving my empty glass around, I murmured something about getting more wine.

I walked a slow circle of the room before arriving at the drinks table, where a boy refilled my cup, and then I made myself a plate of melon and fat green olives. I was hovering by the table, having realized I couldn’t hold the wine, the plate, and also eat, when a man next to me said, That looks bleak, doesn’t it?

I looked cartoonishly to my right, for whoever it was he was speaking to, but no one was there. The man withdrew the long white finger he’d been pointing toward the prosciutto. Frayed at the edges, as though someone’s nibbled at it, he said, fixing me with a mellow, generous gaze. Who’s your best guess?

Sorry?

The culprit, he said, and as he lowered his voice I, instinctively, leaned in. Who do you think it could be?

Tinted rectangular glasses perched grandfatherly on his nose below a pair of unruly eyebrows, and though his mouth at rest pulled into a serious straight line, he had a mischievous air. I scanned the room. Him, I said, tipping my chin toward a goateed man explaining something to Georgia, blithely oblivious of her efforts to escape.

Indeed, the man said. He’s had his vulpine snout all over this spread. Still, is there anything more pleasurable than prosciutto? He gave the word a hint of a rolled r as he made up his own plate. Even the bad stuff? He folded a cantaloupe square in a tissue-thin slice of the meat and popped it into his mouth. So, he said, chewing. Who are you? Tell me everything about yourself.

Between the wine and the whiskey gingers I’d downed at the bar, the room had started to glimmer with possibility. It wasn’t difficult to seem precocious around much older men, I’d learned from my mom’s parties back in Colorado, her small house full of the wealthy outdoorsy types she often attracted. You only had to ask questions, make direct eye contact, and laugh.

Martin Scott Keller—though I didn’t know his name for much of the night—looked and dressed like so many of the erudite men who populated my postadolescence. They had presided over classes in contemporary literature, postwar politics, the Iliad, the chemistry of water. After graduation, their opinions were the ones I would learn to turn to in the important pages of important magazines when seeking a way to think about the world. A parade of heads like polished oak finials, ad infinitum. They were my men, and my desire to be not just like them but of them was as strong as lust.

Tell me everything about yourself.

There’s not much to tell, I said, trying to hide my delight that someone, anyone, was talking to me. My name’s Sal.

Such a petite name. I could smell his musky cologne, and his shoulders under his sweater and collared shirt looked strong, despite his age. I wanted to lean my body into his. Just Sal?

Salale, actually.

"Sa-la-lay, he said. A little waltz."

My mother had only ever seen it written down and she botched the pronunciation. I think it’s supposed to rhyme with ‘Halal.’

He chewed an olive, contemplative. I know you, don’t I?

I don’t think so.

Not my student?

No, I said, with regret.

She was my student, one of my best. He pointed to the nearby red-haired author, now holding a red-haired baby. She lifted the baby’s hand to wave at him, and he saluted. He turned back to me. So, Salale. What is it you do? Don’t tell me: you’re a writer.

I’m not anything yet. I felt small in comparison to this favorite, whom he’d come to see. I just graduated. I give tours of Central Park to Italian tourists.

He reeled off a few lines: fiori et felici, something about Madonna.

Mm. I didn’t want to explain that I gave tours to Texan and German and Chinese tourists, too, that I didn’t speak Italian. I waited for him to translate the quote, but instead he launched into an anecdote about Laura, Petrarch’s muse, and I batted back something about Dante’s Beatrice, which made him chuckle. It’s the tenor of the conversation rather than the content that stuck with me. My lasting memory is of feeling that, though I had no real idea who this man was, I was exactly where I needed to be. I wished he’d been my teacher, that he would attend one of my own future readings and, from the audience, give me an encouraging wink.

We talked for an hour, maybe longer, as the party orbited our bubble of two. "You are a writer, he said at one point, and at first I laughed, but he looked so serious that I closed my lips over my teeth and felt myself nodding vigorously. You have to reach into yourself and rip it out. Be selfish. Break rules. Choose work above everything."

The red-haired author, sans bébé, stopped by to say that she and her friends were going for drinks. Go, I’m too old for all that. He kissed her cheek before turning to me. Don’t you leave me in my decrepitude.

Never, I said, only half joking.

The author put a hand on his arm and said, "Martin, I meant to tell you, I read Evergreen again. It gets more beautiful every time." Martin, Evergreen, I willed myself to remember.

After she’d gone, he said, My first. Nobody ever tells me they’ve reread my more recent novels.

Instead of pretending that I had read his more recent novels, I was drunk enough to ask, Why do you think that is? while holding an imaginary microphone up to his mouth.

Not many people read them to begin with, he said. "The Executioner’s Song came out the same day as my second book. Blew it out of the water."

This was solid ground. I knew Mailer. I knew Roth. Updike, Nabokov, Cheever. I’d spent the better part of the last four years reading not just their fiction but, with voyeuristic glee, their correspondences and fat biographies.

Kicked off sort of a wild year for Mailer, I said.

The Pulitzer, he agreed. That business with the murderer.

And then he also divorced and married twice.

Ah yes, the six merry wives of Norman Mailer. Just like Henry VIII.

"Not just like him, I said. Henry did have two of his killed."

Was it only the two?

Two’s not enough?

Well, Norm did give it the old college try. He raised his eyebrows and sipped his wine.

Just then someone knocked a bottle off the table behind us and as the dark liquid spilled out over the hardwood, Martin, ever so briefly, put his hand on my back to guide me away from the flow. Flashes: Georgia flitting by to say she was meeting the editor in Chelsea; the boys from the drinks table dumping crumpled napkins and smeared plates into trash bags; Martin standing in an old wooden telephone box in the hallway, pretending to make a call, me pretending to answer on my cell.

And then he and I were out on the sidewalk, a car pulling up in front of us, and he was looking at me with, what, a challenge? An invitation?

So, he said. Where to?

I wiped my hand across my mouth. My upper lip was damp with sweat. I’m heading to Brooklyn.

This train doesn’t go in that direction. He smiled. He reached toward my face. For a bewildering moment, as he cupped my skull in his hand, gazing at me with startling intensity, I was sure he was going to kiss me. The ease between us had come, at least in part, from our age difference; the interaction seemed devoid of any real chance of sex, and I’d been performing more freely than if he’d been a more viable romantic prospect. For the first time since our meeting I was anxious, but then there was a tug at my scalp and the twist of hair I’d pinned back fell down by my cheek. Your clip was loose, he said, holding up the little silver rose. It disappeared into his fist. And now you’ve lost it.

Look at that. Maybe I was wrong to dismiss something more happening between us. Maybe this was the kind of turning point that would define everything that came after. But I waited a beat too long and anything that could have occurred evaporated into the warm air.

Salale, he said, I am sure your life will only become more beautiful than it is now. And then he was in the back of the car, the door closing behind him. The black sedan, or maybe it was a taxi, merged into the rows of other black sedans and yellow cabs and I was alone as bodies passed around me, smelling of liquor and perfume and cigarette smoke, the stoplights lit up with their Christmas tree colors. I bought a hot dog from a cart, and when my front teeth popped through the skin, the juice ran down my wrist and the bun caught in my throat like a pre-tears lump. I hadn’t eaten meat in five years.

While I did consider sending a note to Martin Scott Keller, care of the college, instead I merely looked without success for information about him online and ordered a cheap used copy of Evergreen that, by the time it arrived, I never got around to reading. The night did trigger a certain shift, though. I started applying to writing-adjacent jobs in earnest—entry positions at publishing houses, literary agencies, the Times—and a few months later I became an editorial assistant at a legacy men’s magazine in midtown, where I transcribed interviews for the feature writers and filed expenses for my exacting, British boss.

Martin’s glow dimmed in my memory, but I did think of him. When I published my first piece, a two-hundred-word interview with a minor pop star, I indulged in a brief delusion that Martin would read it, track me down at the office, and offer himself up as my mentor. In other fantasies I made my own pilgrimage out to find him. But I never saw him again.

A LOCAL NEWSPAPER upstate had posted his obituary online a week after his death:

Martin Scott Keller, author of three novels and longtime professor of creative writing at Linden College, died at his home in Linden-on-Hudson, New York, on Sunday, January 7. He was eighty. The cause was complications from heart disease, his wife, Moira Keller, said.

Mr. Keller gained recognition for his debut novel, Evergreen, in 1974. One review of the book, which traces the emotional decay of a young couple, observed, Keller comes across not so much as an explorer of the human psyche as a rambunctious vivisectionist. But what detractors viewed as cruelty, admirers regarded as brave realism, and the first effort was widely lauded as a triumph. That book was nothing like Martin as a person, said Mrs. Keller, a physicist. He wrote it as if possessed, scraping up darkness and churning it into prose.

Mr. Keller was born in Connecticut to German immigrants. As a teenager, he waited tables in Manhattan before joining the staff of Grant Aikens Books, which would go on to publish all three of his novels. His previous marriage ended in divorce. According to his wife, Mr. Keller was writing a fourth novel at the time of his death, an excerpt of which will appear in the forthcoming spring edition of The Paris Review. He is survived by Mrs. Keller, their daughter, Caroline, and their beloved basset hound.

A novel? I thought. There’s more? More of me? I called the Grant Aikens publicity department to ask about the book. The chipper girl on the phone put me on hold and then returned to say that while they’d been interested in the posthumous work, there wasn’t going to be a publication.

Why? I cried.

Um, the girl said thinly. I guess the executor of the estate decided against it? And though I pleaded for more information, for the executor’s contact, to speak to Martin’s former editor (This is so sad, but he died in 2015), anyone, it was no use. I hope I’ve been of some assistance? she said eventually. If there isn’t anything else…

There is something else, I said, trying to keep my voice steady. There is the original thing. But the line was dead.

Either because of Martin’s death or because of the general digitization of archives in the six years since I’d first looked him up, there was more to read about him online: a short profile in GQ from 1974, a glowing New York Times review of Evergreen. A brief report of a launch party given for its release, which took place at the home of Martin’s father-in-law, a literary agent named Emmett Nelson. Almost a decade later, a few tepid words on his sophomore effort, and then nothing for his last book, which came out in the early aughts.

I was suddenly desperate to find my old copy of Evergreen, and located it in a box under the bed. I was reading when Hugh came home. He was acceptably invested as I explained, with backpedaling and breathless tangents, the events of the day, but when I asked him to read the story he said his brain was fried. When I pointedly reopened the book without replying, he said, I’m not saying I don’t want to read it, just that I can’t right now, and pulled my favorite chili jam out of his backpack. Point: Hugh.

I emailed the story link to Georgia, writing: Remember that party at the library, you were dating Bennett (!!) and I talked to that old author? I think… he wrote a story about it? Two hours later, while I washed dinner dishes that Hugh dried, I got her response: Sal! You’re a muse! What does this mean, tell me more? (I think Bennett used to manscape his pubic hair into the sink.)

Over the following weeks I slipped Martin’s name into conversations like a teenager with a crush. One evening, while Hugh was working at his huge desktop computer, he said in a benign monotone that I was being a little obsessive. I thought about how in college he made enormous abstract paintings, explosions of color against multilayered, shiftable grays. He drank too much coffee, worked with devotional mania. Now he spent hours in front of his screen, his face calm, almost beatific, designing marketing materials for a sock disruptor. I stopped talking about Martin, but as Hugh did push-ups in the living room or browsed one of his plant-based cookbooks, I’d lie in bed, my laptop propped on my stomach, and stare at the black-and-white photo of Martin that dwelled ghostlike on the Linden