A more organized chorus this time. “Yes!”

He began. No introduction, no explanation of inspiration, of process, as it was called in this universe. He read for about twenty-five minutes. As Lucas had promised, the story was a boy’s, told in a voice that combined the boy’s and the grown man’s perspectives, moving easily between the two.

In the section Ian was reading from—the very beginning of the book—the boy explained his father, a patient, disciplined man, the editor of the only newspaper in a town of about five thousand people in Arizona. A man who would listen to you, question you patiently, even when you’d done something foolish or just plain wrong. Who’d want to hear your explanation for your behavior. Who always assumed you would have one. “Nothing made me angrier at him than that quality of my father’s,” Ian read. “His unforgivable readiness to understand me, to see me as a rational human being.”

This first chapter set up the tension and foreshadowed the way the conflict between the two, father and son, would play out. The boy, driven to wilder and wilder misdeeds; the kind, slightly abstracted father willing to find a reason to forgive the son every time; the mental instability of the mother obviously the battlefield on which the conflict would play out. It was quiet, a bit slow, and entirely compelling to Annie.

There was generous applause after Ian closed the book. He took off his glasses and lifted his face to the audience. She remembered again the way it had looked the afternoon they lay down together.

“I’ll take questions,” he said.

There was the usual awkward pause before they began, but finally someone about three rows back raised her hand: How much of what he had read was autobiographical?

“Pure invention, all of it!” he said, smiling. Cue the laughs.

The smile made him more recognizable, the pursing of the lips first, their slight twist sideways. He was an old pro, she thought. And clearly enjoying himself.

Why the silence of so many years?

“You’d have to ask that question of any number of unreasonably picky publishers.”

It was hard for Annie to figure out what to make of this. Some people laughed, but she thought there might be a bitter quality to Ian’s voice.

What were his writing habits? someone else asked, perhaps intending to change the subject.

“Diurnal,” he said, and turned to point to another raised hand.

There was a series of familiar questions then, ones Annie had heard many times at other readings she’d come to—they didn’t seem to change much over the years. How did you get started? When did you know you were a writer? How much does place figure in your work? What kind of research do you do for each novel? Ian’s responses were more interesting than the questions, but they also seemed familiar.

Someone asked once more about his long silence. He paused for a moment, as if making a decision about how to respond. Then he began again, differently this time. While he was speaking, the humor fell away, and she heard clearly the anger he’d masked with his first, joking response—which had been the one he was used to offering, she supposed.

He spoke of his years “out in the cold,” as he put it, starting with his third novel. There’d been a crappy review in the Sunday Times of this book, “possibly my strongest novel to date at that point,” he said. Then they piled on, the reviewers. Some of the later reviews actually echoed the language of the first one. He paused and smiled, a mocking smile. “Apparently a case of monkey see, monkey do,” he said.

He went on. His publishers backed away from him—they dropped him, dropped the book. No ads, no pushing it. Several radio interviews that would have made a big difference were canceled. “Let’s just call it a clusterfuck, pardon my language.” But as a result of all this “bad faith,” he said, the book didn’t sell. “And that follows you around,” he said. “It makes everything harder.

“Plus, it didn’t help to be a white man either at that particular point in time. I actually had someone say to me that if my fourth book—my very unpublished fourth book—had been written by a woman, almost any house would have taken it.”

There was an uncomfortably long wait, and then another hand went up. What effect did all this have on his writing?

“On the writing itself, I don’t know.” Then he shrugged, and his face changed. The charming half smile returned. “But who knows? It might have been useful to me personally, in the end.”

How, useful?

“Well, it brought me to my knees. And that is always useful, for a person like me.”

“What kind of person is that?” someone in back called out.

The audience laughed, a bit uneasily. Was this too intimate a question?

“An arrogant son of a bitch.” He offered the smile again. “Or so I’ve been told.”

There were a few more questions, and then a silence. No hand went up to break it. Stepping back, he nodded his head several times. “Okay,” he said. “I’m here to sign.” As the applause rang around the room, he opened a questioning hand out toward Sid, who had been standing behind him while he read, leaning against a bookcase.

Sid directed him to the table off to the side of the space the podium was set in. Ian sat down, and people began to rise from their seats and move slowly toward the ends of their rows. A line started to form in the aisle, a line that shuffled and shambled and then pulled itself into a kind of disorderly order, winding around the side of the rows of chairs and beginning to move very slowly forward, toward where Ian was seated now.

Annie was standing with the others in her row, waiting to move toward the aisle. She was watching Ian, who was looking out over the room as the line formed, perhaps counting the house. For a moment, their eyes met.

He recognized her. Or at any rate he was trying to place her—she could see that: the frown, the mouth that opened, just slightly. But then he turned away to look at the first person standing by the table, holding out her book to him.

Annie inched forward toward the aisle end of her row, looking over several more times at Ian. He was mostly engaged in conversation or looking down to inscribe a book, but their eyes met again once and he smiled his ironic smile and nodded several times, as if to say yes, he recognized her. Yes, he was waiting for her. She was aware of standing up straighter, of a kind of pleasant breathlessness.

As she reached the aisle and turned toward the table where Ian waited, she saw that Olympia, Sid’s freckled, redheaded wife, was standing at that side of the room, asking for the correct spelling of people’s names and writing this down on Post-its that she handed to them to affix to the front of their books, a time-saving courtesy to the author that Graham had always insisted on too. Olympia looked up and smiled as Annie reached her. “You don’t need to tell me your name,” she said to Annie, and wrote it down. As Olympia handed over the slip of paper, Annie felt someone grip her arm. She turned. It was Bill, skinny, gray-haired, ever the same. He leaned forward and hugged her quickly, shyly. “It’s so good to see you here,” he said. “You should come more often.”

“I know. And maybe I will once the weather makes it a bit easier.”

“Yeah, this is always a tough month,” he said. They talked for a few minutes more, Bill moving forward along with her, and then he said he had to get back to the front desk. Annie reached up to hug him, to kiss his cheek before she stepped away.

She finally reached the table and stood waiting while the couple in front of her finished talking with Ian. As they moved on, Ian looked up and saw Annie. He stood quickly, reaching his hands across the table to take both of hers. Awkwardly, she set the book down to let this happen.

“God, it’s so good—it’s just amazing!—to see you again,” he said. He leaned toward her to touch his cheek momentarily to hers on one side and then the other.

“It is,” she was saying. “It’s wonderful to see you, too.”

He kept standing for a moment, looking at her, grinning. “I recognized you right away,” he said. His mouth twisted slightly. “‘Across a crowded room.’”

He sat down, sliding her book toward him while he looked up at her. “You live near here?”

Yes, she said. A couple of blocks.

He smiled at her for a moment, nodding his head slowly. He said, “It was Yaddo, wasn’t it?”

“Almost Yaddo,” she said, smiling back. “MacDowell.”

“Right. Right. Right.” He nodded several times again. “But I mean, Christ! How many years ago was it?”

“Maybe thirty?” she said. “Shockingly enough. Since we’re both so young.”

He laughed. He shook his head then and said, “It’s just so fucking good to see you, Annie.”