Talent. Juliet Lapidos

      

      

       Copyright

      The Borough Press

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

      Copyright © Juilet Lapidos 2019

      ‘My Child Is Phlegmatic . . .’ Anxious Parent: Copyright © 1931 by Ogden Nash

      Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. All rights reserved.

      Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

      Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

      Juilet Lapidos asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008281205

      Ebook Edition © FEBURARY 2019 ISBN: 9780008281229

      Version: 2018-11-26

       Dedication

       For Barry, the guardian of my solitude

       Epigraph

       We see each other in glances.

      —FREDERICK LANGLEY

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Dedication

      Epigraph

      Happy Holidays

      Other People’s Perspiration

      The Notebook

Freddy Remembered

A Cliché

       The Notebook

       Life-Hacking

       A Level of Incompetence

       The Notebook

       Writer’s Block

       Fieldwork

       The Notebook

       Cemetery Picnic

       Dreamwork

       The Notebook

       If a Scholar’s a Parasite

       He Owed Her

       The Notebook

       Like a Mute Animal on an Operating Table

       The Notebook

       Ura Joke

       The Yellow Legal Pad

       His True Intentions

       007: Golden Sorrow

       Julia Maria Lustgarten

       A Soft Target

       Idiocy and Confusion

       Pure Pointlessness

       A Letter of Explanation

       Of Course

       Anna Remembered

       Footnotes

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

       About the Publisher

       Happy Holidays

      We met at the supermarket. I was waiting in line to buy the usual nutrient-free snacks — crackers, cookies, Pop-Tarts. She pulled up behind me with a cart full of staples — milk, eggs, canned tomatoes. As we neared the register, she unbuttoned her bright orange trench coat and searched its inside pocket. Whatever she expected to find there was missing. She frisked herself, patting her hips and torso with great urgency until, extreme measures deemed necessary, she removed her coat and shook it upside down. Nothing came out.

      “Just my luck,” she muttered.

      “Everything all right?” I felt obligated to ask.

      Smiling apologetically, the woman said she had lost her wallet. Whether she had only herself to blame or a wily pickpocket in the crowded dairy aisle, she couldn’t say. Her voice quivered. Her eyes welled with tears. Would I loan her fifty dollars? She’d send me a check that very afternoon. Refusal would have made me seem hard-hearted in the minds of our fellow shoppers who had, I thought, overheard her little performance.

      Each morning thereafter I opened my mailbox, anticipating her promised repayment. Each morning thereafter I closed it in a huff. No one wants to feel cheated. I suppose that’s why, on a cold winter day roughly two weeks after the incident at the supermarket, I followed my debtor home.

      New Harbor felt like a ghost town. The museums were closed. So were the banks on Main Street. Even the Dunkin’ Donuts, which was always open, was shuttered. Only the Korean grocery had its lights on. The young woman who sold me a cup of coffee scowled at me when I requested cream and sugar.

      I wandered down to the train station and past the large parking lot on Grand Army Avenue. Past the police headquarters, a monstrosity from the brutalist period with no windows at eye level, just yawning ribbed concrete. Past the Elm Street Connector, an abbreviated bit of highway that spat cars from the interstate directly into downtown and in the process bisected the city, a giant gash across its torso.

      Rising beyond the connector was the New Harbor Coliseum, a 1970s arena that hosted second-rate hockey teams