Page 31 of Bad Words

As Kristen retreated into the crowd, I steeled myself, then slipped through the curtains and approached the stage. Selina Chan had vanished. The volunteer spotted me, rushing over with a hand outstretched, her lanyard bouncing against her neon T-shirt. “Parker! You found us. How are you feeling?”

It would have been rude to say anything about throwing up or dying, so I said, “Great! Thank you! Sorry, what’s your name?”

“Natalie.” We shook hands, and she lowered her voice. “Let me know if you need anything, okay? I know it’ll be a little awkward up there, but we don’t want any of you to feel uncomfortable.”

She glanced toward another corner of the curtained area, where the final two panelists stood. I recognized both on sight. One, a white-haired woman in a canvas jumpsuit, was a National Book Award winner named Tessa Hargreaves. The other was a man in his fifties, slender and unsmiling, his hair slicked back from his prominent widow’s peak.

His presence erased any lingering doubts about whether the festival organizers had put this panel together as a publicity stunt. The man was Christian Gatehead, who’d raked Selina over the coals in The New York Times last year.

I was beginning to wonder exactly how much blood would be spilled over the next hour when Natalie clapped her hands together in a kind of prayer gesture. “Look, I know this is … but the moderator’s going to stick to the topic, all right?”

Her anxious expression calmed my ragged nerves where nothing else had. Natalie hadn’t had any say in this deranged decision, and neither had our moderator, or National Book Award winner Tessa Hargreaves. They were depending on me, Selina, and Christian to behave like civilized people.

I would ignore Selina Chan for the entire panel. Couldn’t go wrong with pointed silence.

“Absolutely,” I said. “It’s going to be great. Which seat am I?”

Natalie indicated a chair on the far left, beside the chair where Selina Chan’s purse hung. Of course. I jogged up the steps, cracked open the water bottle by the seat, and drained half of it in one go.

When I surfaced, Christian Gatehead was standing before me, hand outstretched, wearing a grim smile. “Parker Navarro,” he said as I shook. “Nice to meet the only other person in publishing with the balls for some honesty.”

“Hey, thank you,” I said, not completely sold on discussing my balls. That said, I wasn’t sure what else to say to Christian Gatehead, whose books I’d disliked in my teenage years and now hated. He always seemed to be trying to write something spare and incisive, but landed on cold and banal, like Yasunari Kawabata without the grace, or Raymond Carver but pretentious.

Guilt ran through me as I let go of Christian’s hand. He was a more important figure in fiction than I would probably ever be. Before I could conjure up something polite to say, Christian’s eyes strayed to the back of the seating area. He made a disgusted sound, then stalked to his chair.

Selina Chan was sidling in between the blue curtains. She looked just as unconcerned as she had at Cipriani a month ago, eyes downcast at her phone. Fragments of her writing echoed in my mind as she stepped up the aisle.

Thank you for an evening’s unexpected entertainment …

I know what he wants.

At the bottom of the steps, she glanced up and caught my eye. I set my jaw and held her gaze.

She didn’t slow, didn’t falter. She glided up the stairs and into the seat beside me, where she looked out at the crowd with cool disinterest etched into her features. When I inhaled, I caught a faint grapefruit tang on the air. Her shampoo? Perfume? Something she’d massaged into her skin? I looked down at the double knots of her sneakers. She had a scar halfway up one of her shins. The hem of her dress had slipped an inch up her thigh, and her hands were draped over one knee. The gleaming ovals of her nails had been repainted maroon.

I settled back in my seat and forced my eyes away. It was bizarre to be this close to her after the past few weeks. Weeks of holding my phone inches from my face at two in the morning, scrolling through her press, checking her social media as though she were an ongoing breaking news story.

While I stared ahead, her profile picture floated in my mind, the exact angle of her face in the studio light. Now, two feet to my left, she was taking her hair down from that intricate knot and letting it topple over one shoulder, black and smooth like water at night.

The audience filled to capacity, and a tech handed each of us a microphone. Finally, Natalie approached the podium, signaled to the videographer in the back, and said, “I think we’re about ready to start!”

As she welcomed the audience, as she thanked the Wiseman Foundation, as she introduced our moderator, a mustached professor emeritus of English at NYU named Tony Gutierrez, my leg jogged and jogged and jogged. I was unrelentingly aware of Selina Chan’s total stillness to my side, as though she were a photograph of herself rather than the real thing. Everything she said was going to be a work of perfect accuracy, like a punch to the kidney, and I would have to sit here, defenseless, and take it.

Tony Gutierrez took the podium to a round of applause. I brought my hands together a few times as he beamed at the audience. “Good afternoon, everybody! What a pleasure it is to gather on this blustery Saturday to celebrate literature together. It’s an honor to have this distinguished set of writers together on one stage, just a real honor.” He snapped out a page of notes. “Now! I’d love this conversation to flow freely between the four of you as we ask ourselves the question that’s gathered everyone here today: What might the future of the novel look like?”

Eyes tracked from me to Selina to Christian. People in the crowd whispered. I wondered if they were voicing what I was thinking: That’s not what gathered anyone here today. They didn’t want to witness the civilized exchange of ideas. They wanted to see someone’s throat torn out.

But Tony, who with his ponytail and his velour suit jacket looked like the coolest uncle at a wedding, betrayed no unease. He gestured to Tessa and Christian. “Let’s start with this side of the stage. Tessa, you first made waves with your novel White Haven in the early eighties, and Christian, your first book, Arabella, was published in the late nineties. We can’t talk about the future of the novel without talking about the way books have changed in living memory. When you compare your older books to your newest, how would you say your work has reacted to our changing world?”

“Oh, where do I start…” Tessa’s jumpsuit rustled, her free hand leaping emphatically as she spoke. Beside her, Christian was relaxed in an easy slouch, his elbow crooked over the back of his chair. They each spent a few minutes making comparisons between their novels, and Christian even allowed himself a smile when Tessa complimented his second book.

My heart rate slowed. Maybe this panel would just be shoptalk, batting ideas back and forth with Tessa and Christian and Tony and our weird vestigial limb.

This hopeful thought had just clawed its way through the thicket of my nerves when Tony said, “And what would you say is the biggest recent change in the way books are written, read, or discussed?”

“Oh,” Tessa said, “I don’t think books are written so differently now than when I published White Haven. Longhand, typewritten, word-processed, it doesn’t matter. You put one word after the other and you try to choose the right ones. It’s as simple and impossible now as it has been for centuries.”

Christian straightened up from his slump. “Well, I don’t know. When readers change, so do the writers. For instance, if you can’t assume a readership that can identify a work of any real intelligence, what does that do to a writer?”