Page 43 of Bad Words

“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 1980s, 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 deep with this fight, let her creep too far into me. I couldn’t let her infect my work.

Anyway, the concept 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 doorstep, 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 escape 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 evolve 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.

Chapter TwelveSelina

The holiday season dawned, luminescent. Gutters glazed over, white gold with the reflections of elaborate storefront displays, and my eyes passed neutrally over miles of brilliant glass. I’d bought gifts for Jacob, Cassie, and Lyra in August, so as usual, Christmas was largely irrelevant to me. While Kellie and Joyce chatted in the office kitchen about their flights westward and which books they’d ordered for their nieces and nephews, I stood at the window and watched marshmallows dissolve into cocoa.

“What about you, Selina?” said Joyce in her tremulous way. “Heading off anywhere exciting?”

“If she were,” said Kellie, “we’d find out about it four years later through an encoded telegram.”

I smiled and sipped my hot chocolate. Kellie was right: I wasn’t overfond of the expectation of intimacy and disclosure that spread through the office during the holidays. Still, I had a soft spot for the atmosphere. In the City library, we garlanded the bookshelves and dotted the windows with white removable paint, the only trace of snow in a wet, windswept winter. Outside, the temperatures hovered stubbornly above freezing, rain and sleet spat onto the sidewalks, and the subways grew hazy with humidity.